At last Terence emerges from the bedroom. He does not say a word, his face conveys nothing in particular. He slowly approaches Magnus and takes his face in his hands, just as he held May’s face. Magnus closes his eyes, he lets May tell him of her death through this physical contact, and say goodbye to him with the lightest of touches. He feels in the palms of her messenger the warmth that has left her. He recognizes in this touch the texture of May’s skin. Terence’s hands are imbued with May’s breath and smile. He then places the messenger’s hands over his ears, and he hears the sound of his lover’s heart beating the way he used to hear it beat after making love, when he would fall asleep with his head resting on her breast or on her belly.
May is cremated and her ashes scattered in the wind, according to her wishes. For this ceremony of sowing the open sky with her remains, Terence hires a hot-air balloon to carry Magnus, Scott and a few of the couple’s close friends. They all wear clothes of every shade of purple and green, May’s favourite colours. Terence opens a bottle of barackpalinka, the Hungarian apricot brandy that was her favourite drink, and pours everyone a small glassful. They all drain their glasses to her memory as her ashes escape from the urn and disperse in empty space. A fleeting silver-grey cloud floats in the air that soon regains its transparency.
So this is what it comes down to: a life, a body once so intensely active, bubbling with words, laughter and cries, animated with countless projects, insatiable desires, reduced to a handful of pale ashes that dissolve in the wind.
May has chosen the wind and empty space for a tomb, and this empty space opens up around Magnus. The present is swallowed up in the abyss of a blue-white sky of a tranquillity to make you weep. Standing there in the slowly drifting gondola, Magnus has the impression of being an ungainly bird caught in the breeze, not knowing where it comes from or more importantly where it is going. She who opened up his horizons and set him back on the path leading towards the future is gone, and suddenly he feels a great coldness, a burning — the sensations are confused. A chill blaze ignites in his heart’s core, pours into his limbs, flows through his spinal column, and silently explodes in his head, just as on that summer night in Hamburg, when the hour of Gomorrah struck, when the woman he believes was his mother suddenly let go of his hand to dance with death. He has the same taste of nothingness in his mouth, he feels the formation in his flesh of the same precipitate of amazement and loneliness. He is not widowed but orphaned by the loss of his companion, his lover. Terence is the one who is widowed.
The chill blaze licks at his brain, and his thoughts become a yawning chasm. Appalled by his own question he wonders, ‘Did May love me? And did I love her? Have I ever really loved anyone? Or was it all nothing but illusion?’ He does not know, knows nothing any more, doubts everything, doubts himself. In the end he feels not so much orphaned by the loss of May as bereft of the new identity he had forged through being with her. Yes, just as when the hour of Gomorrah struck, he is going to have to start again from zero. But a zero charged with very intense memories this time, not gutted by oblivion.
Sequence
A star looks down at me,
And says: ‘Here I and you
Stand, each in our degree:
What do you mean to do, –
Mean to do?’
I say: ‘For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Till my change come.’ — ‘Just so,’
The star says: ‘So mean I: –
So mean I.’
Thomas Hardy, ‘Waiting Both’
Fragment 16
What May has never done during her lifetime, never tried to do, quite the contrary — come between Terence and the person he was in love with — she provokes by her death. Shortly after the scattering of the ashes ceremony Scott leaves Terence. All desire for his lover has suddenly slumped, turned to impotence. Terence’s body seems untouchable, unapproachable even, as if May by dying in his arms had left something of her death on his skin and ingrained in the depths of his eyes the reflection of her face reeling into darkness, into silence. The smell of his body has changed, says Scott, the texture of his skin, and above all his gaze. He has an aura of intense, overpowering fustiness. The intolerable fustiness of death, which is so insidiously contagious.
Terence does not try to prevent Scott from leaving, he quietly surrenders to that very state of abandonment in which May left him. He becomes strangely indifferent, to everything, to everyone, to himself, while at the same time displaying great courtesy in his detachment, perhaps to temper its excess, not to give way to it too soon. He is as discreet in his self-effacement as he had previously been in charming people.
He eventually disappears completely, without telling anyone where his place of retreat is.
And loneliness closes in on Magnus, or rather opens up and deepens around him. She who had the gift of propelling dreams into reality and making the days magical is gone, taking with her all dreams, all desires, and the days have no sparkle or zest any more. He ceases to travel, to have any enthusiasm for going to plays, concerts, exhibitions. His interests as a translator shift, turning away from art and to history. This is a vast area of study, but Magnus slowly comes back to the very thing he had tried to escape by leaving Europe, and soon he is wrapped up in it: the recent past, still very much alive, of Europe and its wars, the last one especially.
It is as if the old demons of his childhood and adolescence had stealthily followed him across the Atlantic and gone into hibernation during the long decade he has been living in this continent on the far side of the globe, indulging to excess a thirst for wandering, trying to anaesthetize himself with new experiences, with freedom; as if they had bided their time for the moment to awaken and surreptitiously resume their attack.
He transfers the energy he had expended in discovering museums and art galleries, theatres, cabarets, and underground art venues across America, and now devotes it to searching through archives and documents in the silence of libraries, and attempting to establish a dialogue with the many testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of the enormous barbarities of his century, in particular that which originated in the country of his early childhood. The translator becomes himself a historian, or rather an amateur detective accountable solely to his conscience, still tormented with questions.
But the detective becomes lost in the labyrinths of human madness so easily allied with wickedness, he teeters on the brink of the abyss of human folly and its capacity for confusing good and evil, evil and duty, and then carrying out the most shameful deeds with meekness and diligence, untroubled, in all good conscience.
Slowly the memory of his years in London resurface in his mind. He had set aside this painful memory all the time his relationship with May and his friendship with Terence and Scott had lasted. With the Gleanerstones he had learned to relish life, something he never experienced in the Schmalkers’ austere house, where he felt like an intruder. But his relish has suddenly faded, or rather life has acquired an extremely acid flavour, and he senses he will have to live for a long time with this sharp taste of grief that erodes all desire and turns all joy to sourness. And he also senses this bitterness will be all the more enduring because he will have to keep chewing on it in isolation and silence. This is why his thoughts revert to Lothar and Hannelore, who after all gave him the first chance of a new life after his fradulent parents came to grief, fleeing their crimes in ignominious deaths.