Klaus (6 page)

Yes, indeed, these had been Klaus’s own feelings, which he now lent to Albert, when he had attended that Congress and been, for a few days, enraptured, delighted too by the reverence with which all present, it seemed, regarded Maxim Gorki, and the affection, love really, they extended to the old doyen of Russian and Soviet literature. And Klaus had met other Soviet writers there like the delicate and thoughtful poet Boris Pasternak, who had charmed him. At first, that year – it was 1934 – the atmosphere, so different from that in Germany, being full of hope not hatred – had seemed intoxicating.

Intoxicating – that was actually the right word – for even before he left Moscow Klaus was experiencing the lucid revulsion of hangover. There had been an air of make-believe. People smiled to conceal their fear. There was, he realised, the same will to power there, and the OGPU was in reality no different from the Gestapo. It had been a relief to him when, a couple of years later, Gide had retracted his approval of the Stalinist regime.

And then in ’38 Klaus and Erika had gone to Spain to report from the Loyalist side in the Civil War. Should he send Albert there? No, that wouldn’t do, because it would have been impossible for an honest man, such as he was determined Albert should be, to have spent time in Spain without realising how viciously and unscrupulously the Communists, instructed by Moscow, had set out to destroy the democratic parties of the Republic. Why should this have surprised Klaus? It was natural it should horrify him, certainly, but why the surprise? Hadn’t the Communists in Germany also obeyed orders to attack the Social Democrats and undermine support for them – because Stalin believed that they, rather than the Nazis, were the chief obstacles to revolution? Stalin had underestimated Hitler and the Nazis. Klaus couldn’t forgive him, even though he admitted that he had made the same mistake himself. “That afternoon in the Carlton tea room,” he scribbled in the margin. “What a blind fool I was!”

One of the Germans at the nearby table was speaking more loudly now.

“Of course,” he said, “I experienced difficulties. It seems absurd now, but I was actually hauled before one of these courts, required to prove that I had never been a member of the Party. It was because I had served in the SS, but the Waffen SS, the fighting troops, not Heinrich’s boys, you understand. I enlisted because I was a German and a patriot, even though I never thought the ideology anything but rubbish. All that True Aryan stuff – it was nonsense, I always knew that. But I showed them my wound – this I got at Stalingrad, I said, fighting for Germany, not for the Nazis. Naturally they believed me, I come from a good family after all. And so I’ve remade my life, in our family business, which is a reputable one, believe me, and now I can say confidently that we are making a success of it. No surprise there: we Germans are after all the most efficient race in the world. Believe me, my friend, in the new Europe that must some day be constructed, we shall take the lead, even if we have for a time to disguise our mastery…”

Klaus turned to look at him. A perfectly ordinary man, a bit fleshy, but with a frank open face, well dressed, nothing repulsive about him, giving the impression of contentment, as if the twelve years of the Reich had been no more than a regrettable experience, something to be put behind him, like a bad dream the memory of which you shake off as soon as you’ve had your breakfast coffee. No doubt he thought that no one on the terrace understood German. Or perhaps he didn’t care. Why should he? He had come through. The war was behind him and there was business to be done.

Not for the first time Klaus reproached himself for his own failure fully to comprehend the depth of the national psychosis. The truth was that he had been too bound up in his own life, which was certainly interesting enough, to bother to do so. He had been bored and disgusted by the savage boasts, but not sufficiently frightened. He hadn’t grasped the brutality that went hand in hand with resentment and an inferiority complex. Instead he had travelled giving lectures on European culture and amusing himself – and his audiences – with flippant dismissal of the brown-shirted barbarians. Extraordinary though it was, he couldn’t acquit himself of complacency. But then, he thought, what could he acquit himself of?

To be fair to himself, something he had always found difficult, he had learned at last. It was the young actor who taught him the lesson, the young actor to whom in
Mephisto
he gave the name of Hans Miklas. He had known him in Hamburg where he was a junior member of the company, an angry and resentful one, with his poverty, his undernourished physique, his hollow cheeks and his too-red lips. Klaus had been immediately attracted to him – the boy was so evidently unhappy. Even his ferocious jealousy of Gustaf had been appealing. At first, anyway. But the attraction was quickly replaced by disgust, for young Hans – which wasn’t his real name but for a moment Klaus couldn’t remember what that had been – was, he learned, a Nazi, had indeed joined the Party’s Youth Movement as soon as he was able to, had done so originally to spite his father, an elementary schoolteacher and a Social Democrat. In the theatre canteen, after a single glass of beer, he would hold forth against Jews and plutocrats and the degenerates who were destroying Germany and corrupting German youth. Klaus soon understood that he was included among them. And yet, mingled with his disgust, there was pity. The boy was so horribly sincere and also idealistic; he really believed that, when Hitler had made, as he put it, “a clean sweep of that mob”, a new purer Germany would be born. “Yes,” he said, “whatever you think, the future belongs to us, and it will be a new world, one that is clean and honest and noble.”

What a fool! But there was nothing to be done about it. You couldn’t possibly rescue him. There were moments when Klaus would have liked to take him in his arms and cover his face with kisses and speak soothingly to him. Impossible of course – the boy would have hit him, spat in his face. Gustaf loathed him, and took pleasure in humiliating him at rehearsal. “Not like that, you dolt. Are you a clodhopping peasant? Like this, with an airy elegance, that’s what your part demands. Of course, if you’re not up to it, you can go back on the streets and caterwaul with your Nazis. You’re a joke, but I’m not going to allow you to destroy my production. Now do it again, if you can…” That sort of thing. And the poor boy, now blushing, now pale and quivering as if he had just been told his mother was dead, repeated the required movements again and again, until at last Gustaf said, “I can teach you, but can you learn, that’s the question. Well, we’ll find out the answer at to-morrow’s rehearsal…”

Yes, Klaus thought, it was the young Hans – no, Malte, that was his real name – he’d called him Hans because it seemed to fit his so ordinary resentful sense of being underprivileged – well, then, it was Malte who spouted the Nazi slogans – and really believed in them, he must allow him that – but it was Gustaf with his bullying and the relish he took in it who was, fundamentally, the real Nazi. With his solipsism too, his conviction that nothing mattered in the world but himself and the achievement of his goal, which was fame. Klaus wished he had spoken to Guy Probyn of Gustaf’s treatment of young Malte who had incidentally been hopelessly in love with the young actress Ulrika, who had eyes only for Gustaf; it might have opened the Englishman’s eyes to Gustaf’s true nature.

Klaus had treated the boy well in the novel. He had allowed him to be disillusioned early, to see that he’d been betrayed, that his once-beloved Führer had wanted power and nothing else. He’d had him speak out, utter his disappointment and distress, and he’d had the Nazi thugs bump him off because he was proving an embarrassment.

In reality he had no idea what had become of Malte, had never seen him after those Hamburg days and didn’t know if he had indeed lost his faith. Quite probably he hadn’t. But it was artistically right that the character Hans should have done so, and it was also an act of generosity on Klaus’s part to have written that end for him. It was an expression of the strange tenderness he had felt for this boy whose repulsive ideas seemed at odds with what Klaus sensed was his true nature. Because this was the truly horrible thing, which he had taken so long to understand: that an unhappy idealistic boy like Malte could respond not only sincerely to the siren call of Hitler, but in a sense generously, since he truly believed or had persuaded himself that a Nazi revolution would open the window on a better world. And it wasn’t as if he had been the fool Gustaf called him. On the contrary, there had been moments when he seemed really intelligent to Klaus. He wondered now what had become of him. He was probably dead. Or was he like the man at the next table, prospering and assuring the world that he had nothing to be ashamed of?

Klaus signalled to the waiter, paid his bill and set off for his hotel. The air was soft now, but thinking of the boy Malte had set his nerves on edge. Back in his room, he took out the syringe and gave himself a shot. Just a small one, to settle himself, only a small one, not enough to count as a relapse…

It was raining again on a scudding wind. Klaus scribbled in his diary, “I feel bad, bad, bad. When I read over the novel I find it bad also, terribly bad, dead, rotten as last year’s fruit. I must begin again. But have I the courage?” It was all he could do to hold the pen. The writing was scarcely legible. No matter; it was for himself alone. His nerves were a-jangle. Suddenly he found himself laughing. It was too ridiculous, the thought of that bland confident German businessman at the café last night, a loser who had prospered, whereas he who had entered Germany in the triumphant American army… It didn’t bear thinking on.

He must get out, rain or not. He dressed hurriedly. Impossible to tie shoelaces. He slipped his feet into espadrilles, though they would be wet through as soon as he stepped into the street. It didn’t signify. Escape was imperative. A voice sounded in his head: “At this moment Klaus Mann knew that turningpoint was breaking-point.” He couldn’t silence the voice, rid himself of the words.

The hotel proprietor was behind the desk. Klaus attempted a casual “bonjour”.

“Monsieur Mann, excuse me. Your bill. When will you be in a position to settle it?”

“Soon, soon.”

“You will understand I can’t let it run further. You will understand that, I’m sure.”

“Quite, quite, I’m waiting for money that’s overdue myself… I’m on my way to the post office even now.”

Where Mielein’s monthly money-order might have arrived, or not.

As he hurried to the door, he knocked against a little table and caught his reflection in the glass above it. He looked like a madman.

The rain was almost a relief, but he hadn’t gone a hundred metres before his thin suit was soaked and he was shivering. He turned into a bar, ordered a hot grog, and pressed himself against the wall. When the waiter brought his drink, he found he required both hands to lift it to his mouth. It couldn’t go on, he didn’t want it to go on, and yet…

A tall boy wearing a yellow shirt and washed-out blue shorts came into the bar and shook the water from his blond hair. He laughed and the dark room was brightened. He ordered a beer, and leant against the bar, his left leg straight, the other bent. They were what the Magician would have called “Hermes legs” and in these sexy eye-holding shorts… He turned into profile, looked about him and came over to Klaus’s table.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Do you object if I join you? Is it permitted?”

He spoke with an accent, Swedish perhaps. Getting neither assent nor refusal, he pulled out a chair and sat down. Blond hairs lay flat on his damp thigh.

“I didn’t think France would be like this. I didn’t think it would be wet on the Riviera.”

He couldn’t pronounce the “th” sound.

Klaus smiled.

“It’s a terrible season,” he said.

The boy had a snub nose and wide mouth. There were pale freckles on the lines of his cheek-bones. He looked like Willi and Klaus felt a surge of tenderness.

The boy began to speak. He had no French, he explained, and hadn’t had anyone to talk to for days. He was travelling, but it got lonesome without a companion. All the same it was great to see the world. He went on in this vein. Klaus didn’t listen to the words, but only to the lilting music of the voice.

“I’m not incommoding you, am I?” the boy said, flushing.

It was a word from a dictionary, incommoding.

“Not at all.”

“I was with my girl, you see, but we quarrelled and she walked out on me. Too bad. Actually I’d had enough of her, we’d had enough of each other, do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Are you American?” the boy said. “You look American.”

There was eagerness in his voice.

“I don’t know,” Klaus said. “I’m an American citizen, but before that I was German. I think you’re Swedish perhaps.”

“Yes indeed, that’s smart of you, I am Swedish. My father admired the Germans, even the Nazis, he hoped we would enter the war on their side. Crazy, yes? But me, I prefer Americans. I really want to go to New York. And California. Do you know California?”

“A bit.”

The boy ran his wet finger round the rim of his glass which emitted a little squeak, like a mouse caught by its paw in a trap.

“The thing is,” the boy said, “she went off with most of our money. I’m not complaining, it was mostly hers to begin with. Her father’s a big industrialist, mine’s only a policeman. But,” he hesitated and his knee jumped up and down in a little tremor, “it’s left me in a fix. Is that right? In a fix, meaning difficulties?”

He pulled out a handful of crumpled franc notes.

“That’s all I’m left with,” he said. “I shouldn’t really have bought this beer. I don’t suppose you…”

Klaus wasn’t surprised. He had seen it coming. Again the boy reminded him of Willi but Willi had offered himself in exchange. There would be no such offering here, he was sure of that, but the mere presence of the boy offered relief from solitude, from he wouldn’t say what. He didn’t know if he believed his story – it was probably false and he might be a routine chiseller, that open beautiful cat’s face an asset – nevertheless…

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Actually I’m in the same position as you, but I was on my way to the post office to see if any money has arrived for me. Here,” he took a crumpled note from his breast pocket, “buy us another drink and then we’ll see. Mine was a grog but I’ll switch to whisky…”

“That’s great.”

The boy’s face opened like a burst of sunshine. “My name’s Stefan by the way.”

“Klaus.”

With the drinks the boy expanded, flourished as if Klaus had indeed made him a promise which would free him from his difficulties. In a rush of words he recounted his travels – how they took the train from Paris to Orange and woke to the smell of the South, melons and open drains and new-baked bread and Gauloise cigarettes, and then made their way down the Rhône. It was here in Cannes that the quarrel had broken out, though to his mind it hadn’t really been about anything.

“But that’s girls,” he said. “I expect you know. My mother’s the same. When a woman wants a quarrel she’ll always find some excuse. Least, that’s what my father says. Can we go to the post office now, it’s really good of you to accommodate me” (another dictionary expression). “I really appreciate it. Are you married, Klaus? No? Maybe it’s better that way. Women tie you down, least, that’s my opinion.”

At the post office Klaus produced his passport. Mielein’s money-order was there, sent by Western Union. Two hundred dollars. He got the equivalent in francs at what might have been a good exchange rate. The boy hovered behind him. There was also a letter from Erika. He put that in his pocket, against his heart. They stepped out into the square where the rain had stopped and a timid sun was emerging from the clouds. In a gesture too often made, he handed over a sheaf of notes without counting them. The boy had the good manners not to do so either, though Klaus was sure he was eager to. Instead he stuffed them into his pocket and rewarded him with a radiant smile. He couldn’t have expected it would be so easy. That was Klaus’s first sour thought, quickly amended. This was a boy for whom for a few years anyway it would always be easy.

Klaus sensed he wanted to be off. And why not? He’d got what he was after. But Klaus thought he deserved some return, even if he couldn’t have the one he desired. So he said he would buy him lunch.

“When did you last have a good meal?” The boy hesitated, then smiled again.

“That would be grand.”

It was indeed as if he had natural good manners, and this was pleasing.

They walked towards the port, Klaus refraining from taking the boy by the arm. He wondered how much of his story was true, whether, as was possible, or probable, his girl was even now waiting somewhere to learn if he had been successful in his fishing expedition.

“Have you ever eaten bouillabaisse?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

“Well, you should learn. You can’t come to the south of France and go away without having tasted it.”

Klaus picked at his. All the more for Stefan who ate as if his story of hunger might have been true. Klaus lit a cigarette and watched him. A little dribble of the soup escaped the left corner of his mouth and glistened gold on the soft skin. Klaus ordered a second bottle of Tavel.

“That was quite something,” the boy said, laying his spoon down. “I haven’t eaten like that since I don’t know when. For ages. Were you in the war, Klaus?”

“Yes, I was in the American army.”

How casually he managed to say that! How humiliating his efforts to enlist had been!

“But you were German. You said you were German.”

“Yes,” Klaus said. “For my sins.”

The boy crumbled bread into little pellets and flicked them to the pavement where pigeons hopped sharp-eyed on them.

“Did you see much fighting?”

“No, I was in intelligence and then propaganda.”

“But would you have shot at a German, your own countryman?”

“I don’t know but I was never required to.”

“My mother’s a pacifist,” the boy said, “except in the home. She says war’s not only wrong but unnecessary.”

“This one was necessary.”

He took hold of the bottle and poured them each another glass.

“I’m sometimes ashamed that Sweden was neutral.”

“You’ve no reason to be. You’re how old?”

“Nineteen.”

“So you were only a child.”

“Yes, I was only a child.”

Silence stretched between them, like a frontier protected with barbed wire. They had nothing more to say because what Klaus wanted to say couldn’t be said to this boy, and the boy himself was peering at a territory so foreign that it left him without words. Besides he was keen to be off – to count the notes he had thrust into his pocket, to act on his good fortune and resume his freedom. Klaus paid the bill. They stood up. The boy held out his hand. Klaus took it and leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek – more daring than the Magician with his Klaus, but as self-denying.

“Look after yourself,” he said, having no doubt that the boy would. “Where will you go now?”

“Where my feet take me. And thank you. Thank you so much…”

Tank you so much. Klaus watched him loosely walk away. When he was perhaps twenty metres distant he turned and raised a hand in salute. Klaus made a small gesture in response. He imagined the boy meeting his girl at their appointed rendezvous and saying, “I’ve struck lucky. There was this sad old queer, see, I felt him watching me and so… No, of course I didn’t.”

Well, it might not be like that. He might even have been telling the truth about their quarrel. Didn’t matter either way. Klaus was grateful to him for helping him through a few hours. And now he had Erika’s letter waiting for him. But first he would find a dark and quiet bar…

Erika wrote:

Klauschen darling,

You think I’ve deserted you and complain that we are not as one with each other as we were. But you are always in my heart. Believe that, please. You must. If you lose trust in our love, and in the love that Mielein and the Magician have for you, then what is there to stop you from surrendering to despair? We are no longer bound together by the political struggle, but we are still what we always were to each other. As for the political struggle, I know that with victory something has been taken away from you. That struggle seemed your self-justification. You were able to say that whatever else went wrong in your life, it gave you a purpose.

And now you feel lost because we came through victorious and what you called correctly “the Brown Plague” has been vanquished. Utterly, so that it may seem almost as if it never was.

I understand the feeling, for success has its own emptiness. All the same, my dear, you must also see that it’s absurd to feel bereft because you no longer have the Nazis to fight against.

It is time to move on.

And then you say that you can no longer work as you used to, and this terrifies you. You are afraid that your talent is dead. But I tell you it is only sleeping. And if it is damaged it is because of the reasons which you know and these reasons offer you a new battle: to come through, to defeat your addiction.

I don’t want to say much about your, to me, so sad illness – for that is what it is – an illness, a disease. Only that I pray to all available gods, whatever or whoever they may be, for you to stop this cruel game you play with yourself, which is so damaging, and to be stable. You are afraid you can’t write and you behave in such a way as to make it difficult – I won’t say impossible – to do so.

So your novel is stuck. You say it’s moribund. But why is that? It’s not that you are not capable of writing as well as you used to, but that you make it so difficult.

Oh probably you have been taking tuna or those beastly sleeping-pills, chewing them up without interruption and in desperation, and they fuddle your brain… They reduce you and leave you sulky, even sullen, and then, because the writing is not popping out, like a bullet from a pistol, you tell yourself it’s not working and will never work again, and this reduces you ever so much more.

Oh if only I couldn’t picture this exactly!

But if you can’t write as you wish to, it’s because by your own actions you make it impossible to do so.

Don’t think I don’t understand the temptation to despair. I have never been there myself, but since I am so close to you, part of you really, as you know I have always been, I understand it precisely.

We fly to Sweden tomorrow where the Magician is to lecture, and then we go to the Netherlands where I shall see your publisher and urge him to do as you wish. And then I shall be with you. So hold on, my dear.

Despair is unworthy of you. There: I’ve said it.

I send you all my love,

Erika, as ever.

The letter made him weep. There was so much truth in it, and it came so near to understanding him, and yet even Erika could not do that now. Could not, in part, because the words at the end were false. He no longer had all her love; she had transferred that to the Magician, to whom despair had always been foreign.

He dried his eyes, gestured to the waiter and asked for another whisky.