He returns to London and May goes with him. It is an opportunity for her to renew her acquaintance with this city and visit friends there. Most of all, she is determined to remain close to Magnus, anxious to know how things will go when he gets back to the uncle and aunt he now knows not to be his relatives, what explanations they will give, and finally what he will decide to do after this encounter. She has suggested he come and live in San Francisco, but without daring to be too insistent.
The evening of his return to the Schmalkers, Magnus questions Lothar.
‘Why did you convince me I was your nephew, and so the son of those people who inflicted themselves on me? Why keep me deceived? Why lie to me all that time?’
Lothar could deny everything. He could feign incomprehension in the face of the accusatory questions of the young man who insists on being called Magnus from now on. He could hide behind the fact he had broken off all contact with his sister at the time the child must have been born, that he was living in exile when she adopted him, if indeed this were the case. He could pretend to know nothing, or put his accuser in the dock instead, by asking him where he gets this sudden conviction he is not the son of Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal? Who has told him this alleged secret? What proof does he have? But Lothar does not do this. He does not want to. The moment he had been expecting, but was constantly putting off as he so dreaded it, all of a sudden has arrived. The moment to admit finally to a lie perpetuated by inordinate discretion.
Yes, he knew. He had known for a long time his sister was barren, and no fertility treatment had been able to reverse this. Her younger brothers had taken the place of sons. It was after their death that the idea of adopting a child had developed, become an obsession with her. When the opportunity presented itself she seized it, for the first time ever defying her husband, who had no desire whatsoever to take in any foundling, and felt all the more reluctant to do so having just fathered a son, illegitimate admittedly but nonetheless his. To what extent Thea was aware of Clemens’ infidelity, Lothar could not tell. She had always expended so much energy in denying anything that might upset her, interfere with her exalted vision of the world, she might have deliberately closed her eyes to that as well.
But the story of this adoption, explains Lothar, he only heard about later when his sister after some fifteen years’ silence wrote asking him to come to Friedrichshafen. She knew she had not much longer to live, and she was concerned about her son. For despite everything, she thought of him as her son and she had loved him. But she had no one to whom she could entrust this child; her close family were dead, her friends had gone their separate ways, and she had managed to isolate herself completely. Then she remembered her elder brother, the brother she had insulted when he opposed the regime, whom she had despised when he married a young woman of Jewish origin, then regarded as a traitor when he emigrated to an enemy country. But it was not only because she had no one else to turn to that she appealed to him, but because she had no doubt he would respond to her appeal. That he would respond immediately, and would undertake without fail the mission she wanted him to accomplish. Her animosity towards Lothar notwithstanding, her trust in him remained intact, and as death neared, it came to the fore again. Whether or not the child should be told the truth, she left it up to Lothar to decide. Even this lie, which after all she had meticulously and doggedly constructed, a lie she had jealously protected, was something she no longer cared about. She no longer cared about anything, had lost the will to fight, the desire to live, the strength to love or hate. She had no expectations, of either forgiveness or pity from anyone, no hopes whatsoever, she believed in nothing. She had plumbed the depths of despair and was preparing to die in a state of total indifference towards herself. Passing into nothingness, that was all. Only the future of this adoptive son, of whose origins she knew nothing except that he had survived the bombing of a city, still mattered to her, and only the brother she had violently rejected seemed worthy of trust. Thea had lived her life from beginning to end ruled by a mixture of paradoxes and convictions as unshakeable as they were arbitrary, without ever questioning her position.
So Lothar was free to tell the child the truth, yet he had not done so, having never considered the time was right. And not a word of this truth — in any case an incomplete truth since no one knew the child’s real identity — had he breathed to anybody, not even his wife Hannelore or his daughters, for fear of adding to the deceit by sharing it with others without the knowledge of the person concerned. And indeed, he asks the young man how he discovered this secret. Who could possibly have told him? What happened in Mexico? But Magnus is unable to offer any explanation. How can he say, without being taken for a lunatic, ‘It was the earth that told me. The earth, the insects, the sun’? He says simply, ‘I just know, that’s all.’
And indeed that is all he knows. The disclosure imparted to him remains incomplete, only the lie about his childhood illness and his falsified parentage has been brought out into the open and confirmed, but he is still in the dark, even more than before, about who he is and where he comes from. He retrieves from the cupboard the teddy bear he had wrapped up and put away. He unwraps it and places it on his lap. He notices the handkerchief he had tied over the diamond eyes is wet through. He unties the handkerchief and discovers the diamonds have lost all their brilliance; they are covered with a rough greyish frosting. This frosting is seeping dampness, like a patch of saltpetre that forms on the wall of a cave. He pulls off the eyes clouded with this film of grey tears, stuffs them into his pocket, and replaces them with the little buttercups that he sews back on. The teddy bear is restored to the way it used to look, with its expression of mild bewilderment. But it has no new revelation to offer the person it once protected and for so long accompanied, still providing only the name it wore tied round its neck, the cotton-thread letters now bleached of colour through exposure to the acidity of the diamond tears.
Magnus is twenty years old (but when exactly was he born, and where?) and a quarter of his life is lost in oblivion, all the rest tainted by a long-lasting fraud.
He is twenty years old, and he is a stranger to himself, an anonymous young man overburdened with memory, lacking however in the essentiaclass="underline" his ancestry. A young man crazed with memory and forgetting, who juggles with his uncertainties in various languages, none of which, perhaps, is his mother tongue.
He informs Lothar and Hannelore of his decision to leave England and to go and live in the United States. On the eve of his departure he walks along the banks of the Thames and throws the unseeing diamonds into the water. The handkerchief he has washed. It is now no more than a square of cotton thinner than a sheet of paper, translucid, of a yellowed white. He has tied it round the bear’s neck again.
Echo