Note
Magnus is a medium-sized teddy bear with a rather worn coat of light-brown fur turned slightly orange in places. A faint smell of scorching emanates from him.
His ears are made of two large circles cut out of a piece of soft leather. They have the reddish-brown colour and smooth shiny appearance of chestnuts. One is intact, the other half burned away. An oval cut out of the same piece of leather trims the end of each of his paws. His nose consists of strands of black wool closely stitched in the shape of a ball.
His eyes are unusual, with the same shape and of the same gleaming gold as the buttercup flower, giving him an expression of gentleness and amazement.
He wears a square of cotton rolled up round his neck, embroidered with his name in large multi-coloured letters. Crimson M, pink A, violet G, orange N, midnight-blue U, saffron-yellow S. But these letters have lost their brilliance, the threads are grubby and the cotton has yellowed.
Fragment 3
He spends most of his time observing his surroundings. They say he is too dreamy, inactive. But no, it is very serious work he is doing, studying at length the landscape, the sky, objects, animals and people, striving to engrave it all on his memory. A memory that has been as amorphous and unstable as sand. He is now endeavouring to give it a mineral-like solidity.
He likes the land that extends round his village, the pink mist of gorse, the ponds and juniper copses, and above all the forests of silky-white birch trees, gleaming in the twilight when the blue of the sky darkens. The contrasts of colours and of luminosity fascinate him. In skies heavy with dark clouds he seeks for the breaches of sunlight, the glimpses of periwinkle blue, and on the greenish water of the marshes, for patches of brilliance, on mossy rocks, the fleeting glint of the stone’s texture, like a flash of silver ore. But he is afraid of the dark, which swallows up shapes and colours, and casts him into a state of anguish. It is then that he hugs Magnus to his breast, like some ridiculous cloth shield, and whispers fragments of incoherent stories into his ear, preferably the left ear, the one that has been injured and therefore needs special care. Just as his mother cajoles him by lulling him with stories, he comforts Magnus by caressing him with words. In words there are so much power and gentleness combined.
Adults disconcert him. He does not understand their anxieties or their pleasures, and still less the bizarre things they sometimes say. There are times when they bray with joy or anger. When he hears this too loud, crude laughter, or these angry cries, he retreats into himself. He is overly sensitive to voices, to their texture, pitch, volume. His own voice sometimes sounds strange, as if his throat were left raw by the wheezing and tears that racked him when too severely afflicted by the fever during his illness.
He loves his parents with all his heart but he observes them too with perplexity from his deep loneliness as an only child, especially his father, who intimidates him and of whom he never dares ask any question.
Clemens Dunkeltal is a doctor but he has no private patients, nor does he work in a hospital. The place where he practises his profession is not far from their village though Franz-Georg has never been there. Judging by his majestic demeanour, his air of gravity, Dr Dunkeltal must be an important man — a health wizard. He receives patients by the thousand in his vast country asylum, and all undoubtedly suffer from contagious diseases since they are not allowed out. Franz-Georg wonders where these hordes of sick people can possibly come from. From all over Europe, his mother told him one day with a faint pout of mingled pride and disgust. The child looked in an atlas and was left speechless: Europe is so vast, its peoples so numerous.
His father is often away, and when at home pays but little attention to his son. He never plays with him or tells him stories, and when he does deign to show any interest in him, it is only in order to criticize him for his passivity. Franz-Georg can find neither the boldness nor the words to explain that observation is not at all laziness but a patient exercise in training his memory. He swallows back tears of impotence at not being able to express what he thinks and feels, and most of all tears of sadness at failing to please his father.
But there are those magical evening when Clemens turns into a bountiful king, when accompanied at the piano by his wife or one of the friends they have invited to dinner, he takes up a position in the middle of the drawing room, standing very erect in the pale somewhat acid light cast by the chandelier, and in his bass baritone voice gifted with amazing plasticity he sings songs by Bach, Schütz, Buxtehude or Schubert. His mouth opens wide, like a dark abyss where a storm-beset sun trembles and rumbles. The light plays on the metal frame of his spectacles and his eyes disappear, as though they had become one with the glass discs. Then his clean-shaven face, with receding hairline and aquiline nose, looks as if it too is cast in some white metal, or kneaded out of dough. A stark shiny mask, as worn by the chorus in Greek drama. And he sketches in the air the slow movements of a seed thrower. He has beefy hands but his fingernails are perfectly manicured, and they gleam under the ceiling light.
The child listens, holding his breath to allow more room for his father’s, in all its powerfulness and agility. The voice of a master of darkness whose menacing forces he overcomes just as he managed to defeat the fever-foe. For Franz-Georg is convinced it is by singing in this way that his father must have helped him to get better, and surely this is how he treats the countless patients who have come flocking to him from all over Europe. And the child enfolds himself in this vocal chrysalis, denser and more voluptuous than the drawing room curtain of purple velvet in which he sometimes likes to hide.
It is for this voice, the voice of enchanted evenings, that Franz-Georg loves his father and has boundless admiration for him. Never mind if his father shows little affection, even though this is hurtful. His singing is enough to console him for this distress, or at least transform it into contented melancholy. His father is distant but his singing is a haven, a pleasure. He harbours a nocturnal sun within his breast.
Sequence
Night Song in the Forest
Hail to you always, O Night!
But twice hail to you here in the forest,
where your eye has a more secret smile
where your footstep falls yet more softly!
Yours is a language of whispering breezes,
Your paths, interwoven shafts of light,
Whatever your mouth but quiets with a kiss
Grows heavy-eyed and sinks into a slumber!
And as we cry out in song:
‘Night is at home in the forest!’
So the lingering echo replies:
‘She is at home in the forest!’
So twice hail to you here in the forest,
O gracious Night,
Where all the beauty of your array
Appears yet more beautiful.
Nachtgesang im Walde
a choral work by Franz Schubert
based on a poem by Johann Gabriel Seidl
Fragment 4
The father has seemed preoccupied for some time, holding long discussions with the mother, or with some of their friends who seem just as vexed. The child is kept isolated from these conversations, of which he nevertheless catches fragments. Among the words that often recur in these discussions there is one that intrigues and disturbs him: typhus. The patients in Dr Dunkeltal’s care are succumbing to this infection in their thousands. Franz-Georg has tried to find out more but it is harder to find out the meaning of a word in a dictionary than the whereabouts and size of a continent in an atlas, for he cannot yet read very well. But since he hears the words ‘war, enemy, defeat’ spoken more often, he again identifies them with the word ‘illness’, and therefore ‘typhus’.