Magnus has the proof he was looking for. He slips away and hurries back to rejoin Peggy in the taxi, returning the pen he had stuffed into his pocket. He is careful to direct the driver to a neighbourhood far from where they live, explaining to Peggy that he wants to take a ride round the centre of town.
He says nothing of what has just happened, he is too staggered — at having seen not a ghost but a scum-bag, very much alive and well, a solid lump of flesh owing its self-preservation to the inexhaustible greed and cynicism of the timeserver. A scum-bag, but no less a member of the ordinary human race. He does not yet know what he is going to do, his mind dwelling on the words he hastily scribbled on that piece of paper, trying to work out what he meant by the vague threat he had formulated.
Throughout the journey he squeezes Peggy’s hand in his, to keep in contact with that aspect of the human race that is light and beauty.
Notes
1 Evening veils meadow and grove/ with fair intimate dusk
2 The trees whisper evensong/the meadow grass gently sways…
3 The spirit of love acts zealously…
4 A loving glance from the beloved casts/heavenly light on this earthly world.
Note
‘For a man who has been dead for more than thirty years you still sing very well, Dr Clemens Dunkeltal. It’s true, you’ve had several changes of voice: the voices of Otto Keller, Helmut Schwalbenkopf, Felipe Gomez Herrara. And perhaps a few others besides. Not to mention, of course, the voices stolen from your thousands of “patients” at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Bergen-Belsen.
All those voices, Dr Clemens Dunkeltal, would have a lot to say about your “spirit of love”. Rest assured, they will have their say. Very soon.
For it would be a pity if a talent as great as yours were to remain unknown. Don’t you agree?
Until we meet again, then, in the very near future.’
Fragment 24
Clemens Dunkeltal has vowed that the author of the message delivered to him, which he immediately reduced to a little ball of paper, will be made to swallow it. And, not knowing the name of this author, he wastes no time in finding out. He does not reveal to his table companions the contents of the note, which he passes off as a disparaging comment from a fellow diner obviously allergic to his singing, but he makes enquiries of the waiter, who does not understand what has happened.
‘But it was the same man who requested ‘Geist der Liebe’ to please his wife,’ he says, ‘and he seemed very happy about it…’
Then a young girl sitting at the end of the table intervenes. ‘The wife — wasn’t she the red-head in a blue and black polka dot dress, sitting over there?’
The waiter nodded.
‘I know her,’ the young girl continues. ‘She’s an English teacher, I was in her class two years ago.’
And the young girl gaily babbles on in English, diverting attention from the incident, in the end of no great interest. But Dunkeltal junior, who has guessed that the incident was of some importance, asks for the name of this charming English teacher with the moody husband. Margaret MacLane. No sooner has he been given the name than he offers to take his father home, pleading tiredness.
A taxi drops off a couple in a little street close to the Oberlaa baths, and drives away. The street is deserted at this late hour, the air has just begun to cool. Magnus halts for a moment on the edge of the pavement, searching his pocket for his keys. He has his back turned to the road, while Peggy stands beside him, facing it. It is then that she sees a car that was lying in wait nearby come hurtling towards them. She cries out and gives Magnus, still rummaging in his pockets, such a hefty shove that he is pushed aside just far enough so that the oncoming vehicle only strikes his hip. He falls backwards into the dust-bins lined up there. As he falls he hears a dual sound, a thud and a shriek of equal intensity — the sound of a body run over and thrown into the air, the shrill cry emanating from that body. Lying on his back, stunned by the impact, he beholds a bewildering, absurd image: Peggy falling from the sky and hitting the asphalt three metres away from him. The car does not stop, does not even slow down. But a dustbin has rolled into the road. The car swerves. One of its wheels bumps against the edge of the pavement. It drives on regardless. It is going so fast the driver loses control just as it turns the corner of the street. And that is where it skids and goes crashing into a lamp post.
Magnus wants to get up, but is unable to. He feels pinned to the ground by a burning pain in his hip. He calls out to Peggy, lying curled up in the gutter. He drags himself over to her. People emerge from the building and come running over to them. All he can see around him are feet. There is the sound of a police siren in the distance, or of an ambulance. He reaches his hand out towards Peggy, touches her hair. It feels wet and reddens his fingertips. There are voices talking above him, but he does not understand what they are saying. He is listening only to Peggy’s laboured breathing. Their faces are right up close to each other. He can see Peggy’s lips moving feebly. ‘Tim?’ she murmurs. Her voice sounds both plaintive and questioning.
Two men are pulled out of the car that smashed into the lamp post. The driver is dead, killed instantaneously, his chest staved in by the steering wheel, his face lacerated by the shattered windscreen. His passenger is seriously injured. In the hollow of one of his hands, now limp and inert, a ball of paper is found. No one gives it any attention. The crumpled note falls among the shattered glass, metal, pools of blood.
Peggy MacLane and Klaus Döhrlich are buried the same day, in two different cemeteries in town. Neither Magnus nor old Döhrlich attend their burials, both are in hospital. Magnus has a fractured hip and femur, the other a shattered spine.
In the apartment left unoccupied, near the Oberlaa baths, dust gathers on the packing-cases, unwashed glasses and damask tablecloth. The Schneewittchen stem stands stark in the emptiness, its dried leaves and petals forming a delicate scree on top of Magnus the teddy bear’s head and round the champagne cork lying between his paws.
Resonances
‘Magnus? Who is Magnus?’ May had asked.
Magnus is a teddy bear with worn fur, covered with dry shrivelled rose petals. A stale smell of dust emanates from him. Schneewittchen, the rose was called.
Magnus is a man of about forty, broad-shouldered, with an angular face. He walks with a limp. He gives an impression of solidity and despondency, of extreme solitude. Iceberg is the other name for that rose.
Loneliness whose big heart is clogged with ice…
‘Have you ever experienced the slow distortion of love?’ Peggy asked him in a letter.
No, not the distortion. All Magnus knows of love is the crazed waiting, doubts and anguish, and the bliss. A great deal of bliss. And the chasm of grief, the devastation of loss, twice over. But the second time, it was he who opened up the chasm.
‘I hope it’s something you’ve never had to live through, and never will,’ she added.
He has done something worse than let love turn to revulsion — he has offered it up, live, for slaughter, by mistake, and through anger, in the name of a cold hatred suddenly turned furious, incandescent. A hatred stronger than his love.
My wits begin to turn.