With the passage of time he can understand better Hannelore’s distant attitude towards him, and above all he finally understands the reasons for Lothar’s long-lasting lie, and appreciates how much it must have cost him to remain silent, to tell no one what he knew, about the child who had survived Gomorrah and was then seized on and manipulated by his sister. Lothar had fought his battle of conscience alone. Alone before the God who was at the centre of his life. God: like a silent abyss, though one from which a wind blew, causing flurries of words, unheard-of and inaudible, to sigh in an undertone.
With May he had never broached the question of God. On this subject there was no question in her mind, only a negation, the bald fact of Nothingness. In her eyes any religion was no more than frills and furbelows, of greater or lesser crudeness or sophistication, arranged round this vacuum to conceal the sickening enormity of it. The earth, the universe, human life were simply the results of a bizarre accident. Results as pernicious as they were glorious. And the only ‘divine voice’ she recognized was the muffled heartbeat of the living when it becomes fabulously resonant in the joyful hours of existence, the nocturnal hours of distress, and the sun-bright moments of sensual pleasure.
Was it in order to leave Magnus with only the memory of these sun-bright moments that she expelled him from her bedroom as death neared? Or was it because Terence’s love was more intimate, more precious to her than any other? The doubt that arose in him on that day of farewell, up there in the cold blueness of the sky, continues to nag at him. Was their relationship as strong, as free and bright as he thought? Was he able to love her well enough to meet her expectations? Was he able to love anybody in fact? And supposing that in the ravishment of his childhood, on the night of Gomorrah, he had also lost all capacity for love? Supposing he was left with only a heart half-charred in the flames that had enveloped his mother, crystallized in the salt of his amazement, tears and terror? Doubt gathers, spreads through his entire being, gnaws away at him.
But would he be so susceptible to doubt, he wonders when his perplexity reaches a peak of intensity, if a second ravishment had not taken place in the wake of the first, not violent this time but soothing, effected day after day, painstakingly, by Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal, the mad woman and the assassin? How could you not suspect everything, even yourself, when so many lies have been distilled inside you?
So his old demons beset him again. They become ever more pressing as the months go by and in the end so thoroughly regain possession of him that he decides to return to Europe after a dozen years’ absence if not abjuration.
Resonances
‘Magnus? Who is Magnus?’ May had asked.
Magnus is an average-sized teddy bear with a very worn light-brown coat, slightly orange-coloured in places. A faint smell of scorching and of tears emanates from him.
His eyes are peculiar, of the same shape and golden yellow — slightly faded — as a buttercup, which gives him a gentle gaze, clouded with amazement.
Magnus is a man of about thirty years of age, of average build, with broad shoulders, a rough-hewn face. An impression of strength and lassitude emanates from him.
His eyes, of brown with bronze reflections sometimes turning to yellow amber, are deep-set, which gives him a peculiar gaze — that of a watchful dreamer.
Here I and you
Stand each in our degree:
What do you mean to do, —
Mean to do?
‘And what’s become of May? Did she stay behind in Comala?’
Black milk of first light…
We dig in the air a grave…
Fragment 17
‘I was sure you would come back one day, and in just this way, without warning, like the prodigal son,’ says Lothar. ‘All these years, without any news of you at all … I imagined various lives you might be leading, I hoped you’d found peace. And forgiveness.’ Lothar speaks in German, and this language which Magnus has not spoken for years sounds strange to his ears. The words reach him from a distance, as though fogged and frosted, embedded in a rough matrix, and suddenly he remembers the diamonds with which Thea had tricked out his teddy bear, diamonds encrusted with grey tears.
The words of the language that used to be his begin to stir at the back of his throat, quiet faltering words, but they gather in a lump. A coagulation of speech sounds whose beauty is clouded, crackled. He cannot dissolve it to free the words; his throat is sore, his mouth dry. He responds to Lothar in English, but his reply is evasive for it was not so much peace he found over there, far away from Europe, as fresh and intense joy, a joy all of a sudden reduced to dust, leaving him bereft, inwardly adrift, ringing hollow. As for forgiveness, while he can envisage perhaps one day being capable of it with regard to the damage done to his childhood by Thea’s stealing and deception, he does not in the slightest extend this possibility to Clemens Dunkeltal for whose crimes there can be no excuse, no indulgence. And besides, he adds, not having been the victim of the crimes perpetrated in the camps where the exterminating doctor held sway, he has no right to forgive on behalf of those martyred.
Lothar is at home by himself. Hannelore has gone to Liverpool, where Erika and her husband live, to help her daughter who has just given birth to her fifth child, a little boy after all this time, the first in the family, named Jonas. Else lives in London with her husband and their twin daughters, Doris and Clara. Portraits of Erika and Else taken on their wedding day hang on a dining-room wall; there is also a recent photograph of Hannelore and Lothar’s six grand-daughters, ranging in age from three to about fifteen. All of them are plump, blonde and laughing, except one, Myriam, a slim dark-haired adolescent who stands stiffly, her arms held tensed on either side of her body and her fists clenched. She is Erika’s oldest child, the one he knew in the cradle. She was the first new-born baby he had ever seen at close quarters, and he had been deeply disturbed by her at the time. He remembers her tiny fists already then tightly closed, her frog-like grimaces, her resemblance to a very old sage to whom he attributed a knowledge as far-reaching as it was vague, a knowledge of the mystery of life, and he remembers how in the presence of this little baby girl he dreamed of his own early childhood that was lost in oblivion.
Certainly traces of a maternal love — of smiles, melodious words, caresses and radiant looks — still lie dormant in the depths of his being, but they do not derive from Thea. And these traces buried beneath the rubble of Gomorrah torment him anew, like a name you know that stubbornly remains on the tip of your tongue when you try to recall it, a familiar tune that plays somewhere inside your head without allowing you to catch a single audible note.
Lothar mentions that Myriam is very gifted at drawing and sculpture, but that she devotes all her energy to this artistic passion to the detriment of her studies, and she is often in conflict with her parents. He shows Magnus two statuettes she has recently modelled: one of a young siren, her upper body held erect, arms raised above her head, hands buried in hair that looks like a tangle of seaweed; the other of a spindle-thin man, with a wader’s beak, and bird’s feet instead of human hands and feet, jumping over an invisible obstacle. Obviously, there is a lot of talent in Myriam’s fingers, and above all an accumulated strength and anger enclosed in her fists.