My mother … my mother’s dead … her voice … so weak … had to travel a great distance … distance … distance…
Now I understand … And when …? when …? when …? did that happen, that she died …? she died …? she died…?
Fragment 14
Here begins the story of Magnus. Here, somewhere between San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, and many other cities besides. May Gleanerstones is a dedicated theatre-goer. She works as a drama critic for several magazines and newspapers, and is always ready to travel thousands of kilometres to seek out new works. Magnus often accompanies her on these trips. Terence is an art dealer and also travels frequently.
Together with Scott, they form a family of four, bound by unconventional ties that interweave without tangling, in which love is declined in the mood of desire and friendship.
Magnus soon adapts to this new way of life of being continually on the move. May is the figurehead of a free ship that sets sail whenever the fancy takes it and adapts easily to prevailing conditions. Thanks to her he finally shrugs off his ghosts, leaves his past behind. The horizon now opens before him, no longer gaping behind him like a black hole. But as much averse as May is to being in any way dependent, especially financially, he takes up translation, translating articles for art magazines, technical publications, essays. His work is irregular, but it suits him because it allows him great freedom of movement.
On three occasions, however, those ghosts reintrude on his life: the first time shortly after moving to San Francisco, at dinner in a restaurant one evening with the Gleanerstones and Scott, when Terence suddenly interrupts the conversation and says to May and Magnus in a low voice, ‘Listen to the people at the table behind us. Listen carefully …’ They pay attention, Scott too. The guests at the table behind them are speaking in a harsh-sounding language. Magnus shrugs his shoulders slightly as a sign of incomprehension. May frowns, concentrating hard. ‘It reminds me of something, but what?’
Terence helps her out by suggesting, ‘Comala?’
May immediately concurs. ‘Comala! You’re right!’
Then, turning to Magnus, she says, ‘It sounds like the language you spoke at times in your delirium at the hospital in Veracruz … those words that weren’t German, that no one could identify…’
Magnus has no recollection of these words he apparently uttered, only the vision of that fateful night in Hamburg has engraved itself on his memory — an explosive image that has cast a new light on his life, but also a blinding image, an obstacle blocking off all his most distant past.
Scott, who feels left out of this memory game, finds a way of joining in: he gets up and goes and asks the tourists what country they are from. He returns to the table, sits downs, and turns it into a guessing game. None of the guesses his friends make is correct, so he finally tells them the answer: ‘Iceland. Magnus must be a clandestine Icelander!’ he announces, and proud of the word he has just elicited from the Icelanders, he raises his glass to Magnus, addressing him with a deep-toned ‘Skal!’
But to the surprise of the Gleanerstones and of Scott, Magnus displays no emotion or curiosity in the face of this revelation he regards as fanciful, and he is eager to change the topic of conversation. For the time being he has no desire to look back, to start rummaging through the rubble once more, to wear himself out ferreting around in obscure labyrinths. He is happy where he is and now wants to live only in the present.
On the subsequent occasions, his ghosts return by less fortuitous routes, evoked by current events: these occur in quick succession, in 1961 with the opening in Jerusalem of the trial of Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann, which gets extensive world-wide coverage, then with the construction of the wall dividing Berlin in two.
A report on the trial of the Nazi criminal, written by the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the New Yorker weekly magazine, causes a sensation. She is criticized for her tone, felt to be casual, arrogant, and above all for her analysis and judgment. Magnus reads the indicted report and far from taking exception to it embraces the idea of the ‘banality of evil’. For him, it is no ill-considered concept but rather a finger placed unerringly on a wound so ugly and shameful everyone would rather not see it. Reading Hannah Arendt’s text, he cannot help hearing in the background the voices of those other perpetrators of death and destruction he knew, with whom he came into close contact: the resounding laughter of the humorist Julius Schlack, the perfect elocution of that fine connoisseur of poetry Horst Witzel, and the deep baritone of Clemens Dunkeltal. Voices that would surely have responded, like Eichmann, in a curt monotone devoid of any remorse, ‘Not guilty’ to each charge made against them by a tribunal, had they been captured and brought to trial.
As for Berlin, he tries to recall the memories he has of the rare visits he made to that city when he was about seven, and he can only recollect a visit to the zoo, where Clemens took him one day. It was so unusual for his so-called father to spend time with him, that day left a deep impression on him, especially as his joy at finding himself alone at last with his ‘master of the night’ was immediately trampled over. At the foot of a huge statue of an iguanadon standing near the entrance to the zoo there was a young woman waiting, with a little boy of about three at her side. This visitor and his father had feigned surprise on seeing each other, as if their meeting was entirely due to chance. And this chance encounter so greatly pleased them they remained together for the rest of the outing. However, it was not the unwelcome presence of this talkative woman that spoilt his childish joy, but that of the youngster, a chubby-cheeked kid named Klaus, for whom the ‘master of the night’ showed a lot more concern and affection than he had ever shown for his own son.
He can visualize the enormous dinosaur rearing up on its hind legs, its head turned towards the branches of the trees, and beyond the foliage a flag flying from the front of a building, displaying in a vastly larger format the same black cross with bent arms as the one that adorned Dr Dunkeltal’s uniform.
He sees the odious cherub perched on his father’s shoulders or seated on his lap, and he himself is ignored yet again. He sees the giraffes, bears, elephants and bisons, the trees, rocks and large aviaries. He sees the kangaroos casually lying on their sides, some propped up on their forelegs like red hairy humans resting on their elbows. He sees a black rhinoceros with tiny staring eyes, standing motionless on a rise, apparently only its ears capable of movement, and a lion ceaselessly pacing its jail. He sees sparrows everywhere, inviting themselves with graceful insolence into the enclosures of the captive beasts, and a little mouse that scuttled across a path, instilling panic in some elegant women passing by, including his father’s friend — not at all frightened, incidentally, by the sight of wild beasts. But all these images come back to him in the blur of those tears of resentment and anger that clouded his eyes at the time.
What he sees very clearly, on the other hand, is a baby hippopotamus whose massive yawn greatly amused the woman and Clemens, and the name of that fat-faced hippopotamus cub with the gaping mouth also comes back to him: Knautschke. He remembers because he combined the name of the brat cosseted by his father with that of the young animal sprawled against the formless belly of its mother: he turned Klaus into Klautschke.
A few weeks after this visit Berlin was flattened, and nearly all the animals in the zoo were killed in the bombings. Had Klaustchke and his mother suffered the same fate as the caged beasts?