Sylvie Germain - Magnus

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.

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.

‘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…

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.