Magnus (12 page)

Peggy listens. She is no longer smiling. Her face has lost the flush and radiance the wine had given it. Even her lips are white.

He sees her sitting there in front of him, very stiff, as though nailed to her chair, with a chalky complexion, her hands clenched on the tablecloth. Far from being moved by the violent distress he has produced in her, he continues his indictment.

‘And let me tell you, you’re not honouring the memory of your husband by refusing to mention him, never uttering his name, not even here, this evening, in this house that was also his, where you lived together, and which you’ve just sold off like some unwanted piece of old furniture.’

He hears the quickened breathing of the young woman, paler than her dress the colour of a sad dawn that hangs loose on her paralysed body, and he hears his own voice whose inflections and quality are bizarrely unrecognizable to him, and he does not know where the harsh words he utters in this aggressive tone come from. ‘I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you, and I never will …’ With calm cruelty a voice that is not his own delivers words full of hostility, bitterness. Words that are no longer his, have nothing to do with him, appal him. But they issue from him, like the moans or confused words that issue from a sleeping man. ‘There’s nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant to me …’

Then a curious transfer or, rather, displacement occurs: Peggy slowly gets to her feet and takes over the acrimonious monologue in a subdued whispering voice: ‘Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’

With these words she falls silent, standing behind her chair, her hands resting on the back of it. She stands there very erect, with a fixed stony gaze, lost in a vision that envelops her in a bluish light – the scene brought to life by the declaration of non-love their two crazed voices delivered a moment ago is suffused with the same light as on the day it actually took place, out on the cliff-tops.

On the towering chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel, white rock and grey waters with reflections of steel blue, purple and silvery green, up there, where the view is so extensive, where you can breath a sense of unlimited space. Some evenings, when the weather is clear, you can see France on the other side of the Channel. Up there, where the wind blows free, carrying sea, sky and forest smells, gulls nest on the crags, black-headed sheep graze level with the sky.

Up there, a couple went walking one spring morning. It is this couple that Peggy can see, that she watches, unblinking, so intensely that Magnus too can see the scene in that steady gaze.

And the past invites itself into the dining room, and takes its place at the table between the two who are dining together.

Two figures walk with slow measured steps. They seem to glide through the grass rippling in the wind. Sometimes one of them stops, and the other turns to face the one who has stopped, then the couple resume their progress.

A man and a woman, they walk side by side but do not take each other’s arm or hold hands. They brush shoulders, and yet there is a sense of insuperable distance between them. Their mere presence on the cliff-top is enough to harden the morning light, erode the peacefulness of the place, circumscribe the immensity of space and reduce it to a stage set.

They have reached the edge of the cliff. They face each other, less than a metre apart. The sun is still weak, the sky a milky blue, the sea a pinkish grey, darkening on the horizon. The woman speaks without raising her voice, but the wind that steals everything – pollen, dust, sand and leaves, smells and sounds – snatches her words and carries them off in its invisible folds to sow them in another place, at another time.

Standing there stiffly, with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her raincoat, the woman says, ‘I’m bored with you, bored to death. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you and never will. There is nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’

The man says nothing. He is dazed by these words that require no answer, that nullify anything he might say. He recoils a few steps under this verbal assault.

He is standing on the very edge of the cliff, and the void to which he has his back turned stealthily wraps itself round his heels, creeps up his legs, swirls in his knees and surges up to the back of his neck in an icy rush. He has no need to see the void, his whole body can sense it, as it would sense the presence of a wild animal crouched at his heels. He is seized with terror and cannot move. He casts an imploring glance at the woman, not for her to say some tender words at last – he is at that moment well beyond, or well short of, any hope of love. He is incapable of any sentiment, utterly overcome with vertigo, with pure, thoroughly physical panic. All he expects is a gesture, an extended hand to wrest him from the pull of the void. But the woman remains impassive, with her hands in her pockets, and the look she darts at him has the brutality of a slap in the face. Nevertheless he clings to that look, spiteful as it is, it is his only lifeline, helping him to keep his precarious balance.

Has she understood his plea? She turns her head away, lets her gaze wander elsewhere, indifferent. Oh, look, the sea over there has turned a shade of turquoise, and there’s a seagull flying beneath the clouds, screaming its hunger, and there’s a ferry sailing by, a fast-moving little black speck, like a scuttling beetle. She smiles and her smile is carried away by the wind.

She hears a slight sound. She turns round. There is no one there. The man has disappeared. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? A few seconds go by, longer than a lifetime, and another sound can be heard, a distant thud, ghastly in its brevity and flatness.

She walks off, quickening her step so much she is almost running. She is not thinking at all, she refuses to think. She is a rolling stone, and there was another stone that fell, that dropped into the water with a horrible dull sound. Why would she be thinking, or how? She has just shed her humanity.

A heath.

KENT
: Who’s there, besides foul weather?

GENTALMAN
: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

KENT
: I know you. Where’s the king?

GENTALMAN
: Contending with the fretful elements;

Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,

Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main,

That things might change or cease…

LEAR
: My wits begin to turn.

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself…

FOOL
: He that has and a little tiny wit

With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain –

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

Though the rain it raineth every day.

William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act III, scenes (ii) and (iii)

Magnus has told no one of what happened at Peggy’s, and before that on the cliffs of Dover. To Peggy herself he said nothing at the end of that dinner to which Timothy invited himself, like some freakish prompter hidden in his prompt-box supplying the text of a completely different play from the one being staged. When she had finished her impromptu reenactment of the scene forced on her, Peggy sat down and slowly drained her glass. Her features were drawn, there were yellow-tinged rings round her eyes. Then she rose again and began to clear the table. She went to fetch a large plastic bin bag from the kitchen, and threw into it the remains of the meal, the paper plates and crystal glasses. She bundled up the damask cloth and stuffed that into the rubbish bin as well. She seemed to have forgotten her guest, carrying on with tidying the dining room as if she were alone. Magnus dismantled the trestle table and returned the two chairs to the small garden on the other side of the bay window. A very fine rain fell silently, barely wetting the leaves of the bushes. From one of the neighbouring gardens came the plaintive and monotonous hooting of an owl.

When everything was in order, Peggy lit a cigarette which she smoked pacing the empty room. She continued to ignore Magnus’s presence. Then he asked her where she planned to sleep; she couldn’t spend the night in that empty house. She shrugged her shoulders by way of response. As he persisted in staying on she said, ‘Go away now. I don’t need you. I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Everything’s ready.’ He left but remained for a long time standing in the street, opposite her house. He saw her come out, put the rubbish bin on the doorstep, lock the door, then walk away. He followed her without her noticing. She walked to a main road, where she hailed a taxi. And she disappeared.

He returned to the house, opened the bin and removed the damask tablecloth stained with wine and sauce. He folded it up and took it away, along with one of the two glasses, the one that was just barely chipped, the other having shattered.

She has been gone five months now. She sent Magnus a postcard with seasonal greetings at the end of the year but giving no details at all of her life in Vienna. Else does not hear much more from her.

The Schmalkers’ house has a new resident, Myriam. She has come to live with her grandparents so she can attend a course at an art school in London, and more importantly to escape the family home where she refuses to take on the role of big sister responsible for helping mother with the younger ones. She gets on better with Hannelore and Lothar than with her parents. They treat her like an only daughter and not as the eldest of a large family. She has moved into the bedroom that used to be Magnus’s, and has fixed up a studio in the basement.

Myriam does not talk much, especially in the presence of strangers. At her first meeting with Magnus she says very little, but she scrutinizes him with an intense gaze. The gaze of a small wild animal, direct and fierce, and at the same time that of some startled creature, keyed with mistrust. Hannelore says of her granddaughter that she is like a ray of sunshine in their house, but a capricious sun that sometimes throws pellets of cold, dark light when her work does not meet with her satisfaction, when it falls short of what she wanted to achieve; then she destroys the work judged to be too feeble, unworthy of the dream that inspired it.

The light of day, meanwhile, is slowly fading from Lothar’s eyes. For some time he has been suffering spells of dizziness, deteriorating eyesight, easily induced breathlessness in his voice. Magnus offers to read to him when he visits. ‘Now,’ says Lothar, ‘I can’t engage with the author of a book by myself, I always need a reader, so there are three of us. The vocal inflections of the intermediary between the author and me reverberate on the text, and then I hear nuances I might not have discerned reading alone in silence. This sometimes produces unusual surprises…’

In order to be surprised better still, he sometimes asks each of his intermediaries to read him the same pages of a book – pages he ends up knowing by heart but in a polyphonic way, and this knowing ‘by heart’ thereby becomes tremulous, swells and fills with unexpected echos, questions, murmurs. He applies this procedure to biblical texts as well as literary texts, to poems and daily newspaper articles, and depending on whether the voice is that of Hannelore, Myriam, Magnus, or some other person, the words resonate differently. Hannelore’s voice almost imperceptibly slows and softens when a passage stirs doubts and anxieties in her. That of Myriam suddenly hammers out abruptly the words of sentences that evidently annoy her, against which she rebels. Magnus’s voice punctuates with infinitesimal pauses the sentences that disturb him, or whose meaning thwarts him, as if he were trying to tame them.

For a while Lothar keeps coming back to the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in St Matthew’s gospel, and to the many commentaries on it, including that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book
The Cost of Discipleship
, published in Germany shortly before the Schmalkers were forced into exile and ended up in London. When Magnus reads out pages written by this author he knows Lothar is listening not merely to a text but to the words of a man he knew, respected and admired, a living being who paid with his life the non-negotiable price of ‘costly grace’. In his prime, at the peak of his intellectual powers, in the full vigour of love, he paid the uncompromising price of that grace with his life, on the end of a rope, on a gallows erected at dawn in a concentration camp, by order of the Führer holed up in the bunker where he was to kill himself three weeks later. Magnus imposes a neutral tone on his voice, effacing himself before the voice of the deceased writer, allowing Lothar to engage in a dialogue with his friend and master. And while concentrating on his reading, Magnus listens to the old man’s breathing, whose sound gradually alters in the course of listening, is punctuated with discreet sighs, revealing not so much an emotion, agreement or disagreement, as a mind keeping pace with that of the other, from time to time halting on the fringe of a word, an idea, a desire, an illumination. Or a dizzying insight, such as Bonhoeffer’s comment echoing the call not to set oneself up as judge: ‘If, in judging, what truly mattered to me were the destruction of evil, I would seek evil where it truly threatens me: within myself.’

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  Born 4/2/1906 in Breslau. Sixth child (one of eight siblings) of Karl Bonhoeffer, professor of psychiatry and neurology, and of Paula, née von Hase.

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  1923–27: theological studies at Tubingen, then in Berlin.

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  1927: presents his doctoral thesis in Berlin, entitled
Sanctorum Communio: A dogmatic investigation into the sociology of the Church
.

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  1928–29: curate in Barcelona of the German-speaking Protestant community.