In the Schmalkers’ house, time seems to have slipped by, slowly, delicately. The same tidiness, the same spotless cleanliness, and the same deep calm prevail — everything that Magnus, when he still lived here under the name of Adam, found oppressive and was eager to escape. Now he appreciates the quiet and peaceful atmosphere of a house of study, where life itself, events taking place in the world, newspapers and books, the thoughts and feelings of the people who live here are daily topics of reflection, of a sustained effort of comprehension.
Time has not slipped by Lothar, but steadily, in depth, penetrated his body, which beneath its slightly coarsened and wrinkled skin has lost its vigour and is becoming stooped. His hair has turned white, his voice is a little husky — it purls over a vast underlayer of silence. Time has in particular polished his eyes, which gleam with the brightness of very pale blue-grey quartz in which drops of light appear to be mounted. And when he rests his gaze on the person he is speaking to, that person is embraced within the orb of its brightness.
Lothar puts to Magnus the question he has been deferring since the start of their conversation. He asks him if he believes in God.
‘I find it difficult enough to believe in myself and others.’
This oblique response is met with a smile, and Lothar says that belief in God is dependent on the same bold and often demanding act of faith as belief in man. With no certainty, no security, and no rest in this act of heart and mind that every day has to be renewed.
He sees Else again, who comes to visit her father. She is just as vivacious as when she was a young girl. While they talk in the drawing room Magnus is reminded of Peggy Bell, with whom he fell hopelessly in love after stealing a kiss from her in this very room, and he asks after her.
‘Ah, Peggy …’ says Else, sounding suddenly upset. ‘I only rarely see her now. She’s so changed since Tim died…’
‘Tim? Who’s Tim?’
‘Timothy, her husband. He died last year. He fell off the edge of a cliff while out walking, in Kent, where they were on holiday. Peggy wasn’t with him at the time of the accident, and she didn’t see him fall. She only found out what had happened several hours later, when Tim’s body was found on the rocks.’
‘And since then?’
‘It’s difficult to know what she’s up to. She’s unpredictable in her behaviour. She disappears for weeks on end, turns up again without warning, and when you finally manage to get in touch with her she’s evasive, very uncommunicative, almost mute. And she used to be so warm and talkative! All I know is, she wants to leave England. She says she can’t stand living here any more, as if Tim’s ghost haunted the whole country, and only in a different place could she begin to forget. I don’t really understand her any more…’
Speaking of the misfortune that has put Peggy to flight suddenly revives Magnus’s own distress in confronting his past, and his grief over May’s death, crises that also made him unsettled and elusive. And he realizes that at heart he does not want to move back to London; he has returned only temporarily, even if he does not yet know when he is going to depart again or what his destination will be. He is incapable of the quiet and settled life of someone like Lothar, but the world too can be made a house of study, however erratic and fragmentary this study might be.
Resonances
‘Am I pretty?’ Peggy Bell had asked.
She had the prettiness of a seventeen-year-old, with a dimple in her left cheek, a freckled complexion and the merest hint of a cast in her lime-green eyes that gave her a sometimes dreamy, sometimes mutinous look.
And red-gold hair.
She had the innocence and anxieties of a seventeenyear-old, a mixture of ingenuousness and guile, and a mad impatience to be independent.
A taste of fruit on her lips, and hair the colour of oranges.
‘Am I pretty?’
One boy kissed her, another married her.
You hear … laughter. Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing…
One boy married her — did he die of that love?
‘Peggy, pretty Peggy Bell, what’s become of her? Did she remain in Comala?’
Black milk of first light…
We dig in the air a grave…
Fragment 18
Magnus leads the same kind of existence in London as he did in San Francisco after May’s death. He frequents libraries and works on translations. He also give private lessons in Spanish. The Schmalkers offered to put him up — Hannelore displays much more warmth towards him than in the past when she thought he was the Dunkeltal’s son — but he prefers to visit them often rather than stay with them. He has rented a studio in an area to the north of the city.
There is no house he has ever become attached to, that he might regard as home. He has always left the places where he lived in a hurry. He feels no nostalgia even for the house on the moor where as a small boy he thought he was happy, and from which he had to flee in panic. Especially not for that one, standing there like a mirage of peace and affection on the brink of one of the mouths of hell. The memory of the wretched lodgings where he subsequently lived in Friedrichshafen inspire him with less disgust, for at least that place had not been an unspeakable sham. It was in keeping with the ambient squalor, whose extent became every day more apparent. Vainglorious Thea had slowly shrivelled there, then burnt out like an acrid fire. The Schmalkers’ house was a kind of safety chamber between two contrasting environments, two countries, two worlds, a rather uncomfortable and gloomy halfway house but turning out to be very secure as he approached adulthood. With May he led such a nomadic existence that in essence she was his only landmark and place of anchorage. May, his ever-drifting mistress-island.
But what lies beyond all these places of transit? What comes before the cellar in Hamburg, the night of Gomorrah? Sometimes he thinks he has a fleeting memory of a room bathed in milky light. He sees this light spilling over the pale wooden blocks of a parquet floor, shimmering on the walls, and an impression of delightful tranquillity emanates from this image as subdued in colour as a faded print, illuminated with emptiness and silence; a very uncluttered image that quivers slightly in its fixity.
It is a long time since flash floods of crude blinding colour entered under his eyelids, sending stridencies no less disturbing than voluptuous coursing through his body. Now, only this opal-hued vision steals unexpectedly into his eyes, leaving in its wake a poignant sense of peace — a peace beyond compare, enjoyed by his entire being in days long gone by, days still not resigned to their passing.
Some mornings, when first light filters through the window blind in his bedroom, he experiences the fleeting and benevolent caress of this sense of peace, and feels on his eyelids the luminous shadow of a face bent towards his own, a breath that gaily sings words in an undertone. A dawn mirage, a mirage of drowsiness, which dissipates as soon as Magnus wakens and regains consciousness. Then he recalls that evening at the restaurant in San Francisco, when Terence and May thought they recognized the language in which he had uttered a few phrases in his delirium at the hospital in Veracruz. But weary of investigating his lost past, wanting to put behind him his harrowing amnesia, he had refused to follow up this lead. May’s death brought with it the collapse of the defences he had erected against the haunting lacunae in his powers of recollection, and once again from his desolate memory rises an urgent call, like a siren song. It is possible, he now says to himself, that these ripples of silky light stealing over his skin as he emerges from sleep derive from reverberations of his childhood — his childhood somewhere in Iceland. However, while he does finally entertain this possibility, he leaves it in abeyance, fearful of destroying the sweetness of his dream by launching himself into an investigation he would not even know how to conduct.