Klaus Read online

  He sat at a café table, ordered a whisky-soda, took out a notebook, and glanced through it. Jottings for an article on “The Ordeal of the Post-War Intellectual”. Oh là là.

  III

  He was melancholy by nature, had always been, despite moments of gaiety, depressive. The drugs of course, but which came first? Cause and effect, effect and cause? Without them, and alcohol, so often life would have been impossible. He understood his own condition, but understanding pointed to no cure.

  Of course there had been times of happiness, ecstatic, excited happiness. Hamburg, for example. There were four of them: Erika naturally, Pamela, Gustaf and himself. They were so very young, though Gustaf was half a dozen years older; nevertheless in his single-minded ambition, innocent in those days, often seemed the child among them. A controlling and brilliant child, unspeakably precocious – and ignorant at the same time. A bizarre and irresistible combination. They were all in love with each other, though later it seemed Gustaf had really been in love with himself alone. Love-hate, for he was burnt up by bitterness and resentment, and all because he had been deprived by birth and upbringing of the world that belonged to the other three by inheritance. Klaus could never forget his first appearance – his irruption into their hotel room like a neurotic messenger of the gods, dressed in flapping leather overcoat, sandals on his feet, a monocle in his eye, his voice rising and soaring like birdsong.

  “Your play,” he shrieked, “marvellous, or will be when I have taken it in hand. I insist I must produce it, with all four of us in the cast…”

  They were overwhelmed. Klaus, utterly dazzled, fell in love with him on the spot. He wasn’t beautiful, except when he chose to be, as Hamlet for instance or a young man in a Wilde comedy. Other times ugly, in Strindberg wickedly ugly. Indeed he could be whatever he wanted. He was all talent, no substance. Klaus adored him for weeks, even months.

  He called to the waiter for another whisky-soda and lit a cigarette, Lucky Strike, because the name had always appealed to his sense of irony…

  Anja and Esther, a play about – what else? – a group of young people in love with each other and in the manner of the post-war generation despairing of their parents, against whom their rebellion was – he now admitted – a thing only of words and gestures. For of course, in the case of Klaus and Erika, there was in truth little to rebel against. The Magician and Mielein let them go their own way, the one with a tolerant and superior irony – but irony is always superior, isn’t it? – the other with unquestioning love. And Pamela, in thrall to her dead father, the famous playwright and at ease with her soft and comfortable mother, Tilly, had no cause for revolt either. And yet they felt rebellious. The spirit of the age, or at least the decade. Was it merely an expression of this need that made Erika and Pamela lovers, and had nevertheless led Klaus to engage himself to Pamela? Though they had never slept together; he had never slept with a woman. To do so would have been a betrayal of Erika…

  As for Gustaf, the glittering and shabby prince of the theatre, who on stage could be whatever he chose, and always convincingly, he adored his mother, married to a failed shopkeeper who had taken to drink, and was also ashamed of her. What embarrassment her expressions of love, faith and confidence in his genius caused him! And how he needed them too!

  In bed Gustaf was now dominant, now abject. “How you must despise me, Klaus!” he moaned. “How I despise myself!” Then, at another moment, he was all ferocity, wrestling with Klaus, forcing himself upon him, commanding him to submit. Or suddenly tender, “oh, my Klauschen, you are my salvation. Never have I loved anyone as I love you, for you alone understand me…” And he would let his hands, with their reddish hair like pig’s bristles, wander over Klaus’s willing body. There were moments too when Klaus found him repulsive, for, while Gustaf could make himself elegant on stage, in the bedroom, naked, you couldn’t deny that his thighs were flabby and his bottom too big. Yet for weeks none of this mattered, though now the memory was disgusting. That, however, was on account of what happened some time later.

  Not certainly the fact that suddenly he proposed to Erika, she accepted him, and they were married. That was bizarre, even if for her it was in part an experiment and in part a means of belonging even more completely to Klaus. To marry his lover, just as her lover had become her brother’s fiancée… It made perfect sense, to the quartet, if not to the world. Or perhaps not. He couldn’t be sure, even now, what made sense to Gustaf.

  As for the parents, well, they behaved, as always, in character. The Magician smiled and bestowed his blessing. The marriage was absurd, certainly, but the absurd must be accepted. When he wrote to Erika on her honeymoon he sent his warmest wishes to her dear friend, Pamela, not her husband. Mielein merely offered the sensible judgement that she had never considered her eldest daughter to be “the marrying kind”.

  And the wedding itself was a comedy of manners, not least because the bride’s uncle, Mielein’s brother, the older, original Klauschen, couldn’t refrain from flirting with the groom, who, to mark the occasion, had made himself handsome, the way a Wagnerian tenor should be handsome.

  It couldn’t last, if only because there was when you came to think about it no good reason for the marriage to have taken place, since it wasn’t to the taste of either of the “happy couple”. But what sealed its fate, and at the same time separated Gustaf from the trio, was that newspaper photograph with the caption: “Children of Famous Poets staging a big show in Hamburg”. It should have been all right, even pleasing, for the original photograph featured the four of them, but a Berlin paper, whose picture editor concluded that no one in the capital had ever heard of Gustaf Gründgens, which was then admittedly the case, cut him out, leaving Klaus there framed by Erika and Pamela.

  When he discovered the embarrassment, which to his tender self-esteem was a cruel insult, he sat silent, lips closed, but an expression of agonised anger and resentment on his face. And Klaus made the mistake, the cruel mistake, of trying to turn it into a joke, inviting laughter rather than expressing sympathy or, better, indignation on behalf of his insulted lover. Later he concluded that Gustaf had never forgiven him for this.

  In those days Gustaf proclaimed himself a Communist, though he had never read any Marxist literature, and talked of launching a “Revolutionary Theatre” in Hamburg. He inveighed against the rich and the bourgeoisie, even at the family dinner table in Munich.

  “But it is natural you should feel like that, my dear son-in-law,” the Magician said, and Gustaf, whose antennae were so acute, read contempt in the apparently friendly words. That was the trouble. He quivered with sensitivity, but like many who are abnormally thin-skinned, alert to any appearance of a slight, would speak harshly and cruelly in complete disregard of his listeners’ feelings. The world existed for him and him alone; the globe spun round him.

  Another whisky? Why not? If he got a little drunk, he might not need another dose of the drug that evening.

  “Hey there, Klaus,” a voice called, and, looking up, he saw Miki, the boy from the Zanzi Bar, with his arm round his girl. He leaned over and kissed Klaus, and insisted his girl did so too.

  “This is Annie,” he said. “Annie, meet my mate Klaus.”

  Annie was pretty with dyed blonde hair. She looked about sixteen.

  “Buy us a drink, Klaus. I’ve had a hard day. Annie, you won’t believe how much this guy knows, it’s sensational. Have you been writing, Klaus? If it’s a story, tell it us, Annie loves stories.”

  “I’m sorry,” Klaus said, “it’s only an essay. Very boring.”

  “We’re going to the boxing. Why not come with us? It’s an amateur show. One of my mates is fighting and, believe me, he’ll need all the support he can get.”

  The waiter brought them drinks: another whisky for Klaus, a pastis for Miki and a lemonade for Annie, who put her arm round her boy and whispered in his ear.

  “That’s all right,” Miki said, “Klaus is a good guy, I tell you.”

  Wha
t had she said? What doubts or disagreement aired?

  Miki laughed and hugged her. Klaus, warmed by his presence, envying, however absurdly, Annie, thought, the boxing. Why not? It would fill an hour or two.

  “Let’s go then,” Miki said.

  IV

  Sleep evading him, he turned as so often to that afternoon in the Carlton Tea Rooms in Munich, springtime 1932. He had gone there only because the Café Luitpold across the street, which he preferred, was full of SA men, and so it was surprising to find Hitler in the tea room with some of his – what could you call them? – not colleagues, surely – henchmen, disciples? Strange to find that the Nazi leader had seemingly chosen not to be surrounded by his Brownshirt thugs.

  For a moment Klaus had come close to walking out. Then he thought: no, this is interesting, a chance to observe the man from close quarters.

  The Führer was eating strawberry tarts, stuffing them into his mouth one after the other. (Klaus too was fond of these tarts – the pastries at the Carlton were exceptionally good – but it would be years before he could enjoy one again.)

  What struck him was not only Hitler’s greed, but his insignificance. He was right about the greed – the man looked, as he later wrote, like “a gluttonous rat” – and that greed would be satisfied by nothing – it was all-consuming. But as for the insignificance which led Klaus to write that this flabby and foul little man with no marks of greatness would never come to power, well, that alas was a different story… “You’re a failure”, he had thought, “a grubby little failure…”

  He was close enough to overhear some of the conversation, which to his surprise was about the theatre and the actress Therese Giehse, who was a friend of both Klaus and Erika, but especially Erika.

  “She’s very talented,” someone said, “but you must know that she is Jewish, Not altogether Jewish, I admit, but there’s a bit of the Jew in her…”

  “That’s absurd,” Hitler said, “just nasty gossip. Do you suppose I can’t tell the difference between a filthy Jewish clown and a great German artist.”

  Well, you’re a fool then, Klaus thought happily, a pretentious and absurd idiot, for Therese would have laughed to hear him. She was proud to be purely Jewish.

  Yes, he could still laugh at Hitler then. He could even decide that Hitler looked just like a notorious serial killer called Haarmann who invited a succession of street-boys to his apartment in Hanover from which they never emerged alive. It was a good private joke to compare Hitler to Haarmann, but now he thought: I got that right anyway, serial killer par excellence, even if his own nasty little paws were never soiled with his victims’ blood. Millions of victims and the dictator’s paws smelling only of eau de cologne!

  And the Germans, his own people as he had reluctantly to acknowledge, were they accomplices or, as many of them believed in the desolation of the war-ruined Reich, Hitler’s first victims? They were both, of course, and many of them willing victims of his lies as well as eager accomplices in the horrors he decreed. You couldn’t get away from that. Klaus – and Erika – had dreamed and written of “the Other Germany”, their Germany, a land of artists and intellectuals, of professors and lawyers, engineers and honest businessmen, decent workers and peasants, a civilised country, which may never have existed, or if it had – and surely they weren’t entirely wrong? – had surrendered its judgement, its intellect, its soul, to a raving monster preaching hate and destruction.

  He had never understood how this could be, but he knew that he had both overestimated and underestimated the people from whom he sprang.

  And some who should have belonged to “the Other Germany” had been among the first to betray it.

  He thought for instance of his friend, the novelist W. E. Suskind, a charming man who was in the habit of writing delightful stories about the girls he fell in love with. Suskind had stayed in Germany, even written to Klaus in his first or second year of exile entreating him to return. Have you gone off your head? Suskind had asked, become some sort of republican fanatic? Why don’t you look at what is actually happening here in Germany rather than listening to our enemies’ propaganda? Life under Hitler is enchanting and exciting. Do you think that I would still be here if it was dishonourable to remain in Germany? Can’t you trust me and trust my judgement?

  Trust him? He felt sorry for him when he learned that he had agreed to become editor of a literary magazine, sponsored and financed by Dr Goebbels…

  Or there was Willi. He turned over in bed as he thought of Willi, whom he had picked up one afternoon in the Tiergarten: a blond open-faced boy with a slightly snub nose, well-muscled, “swimmer’s build” as they said in advertisements. His father had been killed at Verdun and Willi was an only child. He did some casual labouring and was happy to rent himself out. “My mother’s got this cough,” he would say, “I think it’s consumption…” It always worked. He grinned when he said that. On the other hand it happened to be true. They had good times together, not only in bed where Willi was eager and uncomplicated, romping like a puppy. They were fond of each other and Willi never minded Klaus’s teasing which was, as a matter of fact, rather cruel, playing on the boy’s ignorance. “So what?” Willi would say when Klaus told him some monstrously fanciful false fact. “Doesn’t matter to me.” He liked Klaus enough to introduce him to his mother, who also took to him. “You’ve got a good friend there, Willi,” she said. “See you don’t lose him with your nonsense.” Klaus liked her too, had no illusions she didn’t understand the relationship between him and her adored but irritating son, didn’t know very well what they got up to together. Klaus took him on trips, to the seaside for instance and not only because Willi looked marvellously sexy in his bathing-costume. As Klaus lay back, head on a rolled towel, and watched his boy stride up the beach, he thought of the Magician’s old Aschenbach and the Polish lad in Venice and knew he had the better of it. Once when he was in Paris, Willi, on a whim, only minutes after receiving a postcard from him, took the night-train, sitting up in third class, burst into his hotel room, flung himself on him, and covered his face with kisses. Klaus felt his sex stir at the memory, so many years old.

  Willi had possessed, despite the life he led, the freshness of innocence. Klaus thought him safe from the vile intoxicating rhetoric that poisoned the air of Germany. Then one day, when he had returned to Berlin after a few weeks or months away, he encountered him in the Alexanderplatz wearing the black uniform of the SS.

  “What’s come over you?” he said, “why are you wearing these monkey clothes?”

  He was shocked and partly, he had to confess, because in that uniform Willi looked more beautiful, more attractive, more enticingly sexy than ever.

  For a moment a shadow of what might have been embarrassment crossed the boy’s face.

  “So what?” he said. “So what? It’s not for the fun of it, but a guy has to live…”

  “But not like that,” Klaus said. “You know I’m always…”

  “Ready to rent me?”

  “That’s not what I meant. You know that.”

  “OK, I know that. But so what? You’re not going to be about for ever, are you, and besides what’s good enough for millions of Germans is good enough for me. We’re going to be the bosses, Klaus.”

  “You, Willi, a boss? I don’t think so. Do you believe in all that nonsense the Nazis spout? Do you really believe it?”

  Willi smiled, the same sweet smile he had always smiled.

  “So what if I don’t believe it?” he said. “Who does, anyway? I don’t give a damn. Who cares what I believe or don’t believe? It doesn’t matter, Klaus. You’re clever, you should know that. But they’re going to be the bosses, and that’s all there is to it. You’re either for them or they’re against you. Besides, it’s not what you think. There are lots of chaps like me in the SS, good guys, fun. You don’t understand, Klaus, clever as you are. I’m a German and this is what Germany is going to be. Isn’t that clear enough?”

  “Oh yes,” Klaus
had said, “it’s clear, horribly clear.”

  He was about to turn away, when Willi touched him on the arm and said, “Don’t be mad at me, we’ve had good times together, and I’m still fond of you. Look after yourself, and if you ever find you need a friend in the Party, well, you know where to reach me…”

  Where to reach him…

  Where indeed? In a mass grave at Stalingrad perhaps? And what crimes would that once happy and innocent boy have committed, even willingly? And if by chance he had survived, what memories would assail him?

  Klaus got out of bed, poured two inches of whisky into a smeared glass, took a sleeping pill, and, waiting for it to work, sat by the window looking out on the wet street and a weeping sky.

  V

  He had always been happier in France than anywhere, which was why he was now in Cannes, where however he was miserable and knew that the tether which held him to life was fraying. He borrowed an umbrella from the hotel proprietor and with the rain splashing the bottom of his trousers made his way to the station to enquire about trains to Paris. For Paris, throughout his wandering years, was the city to which he always returned: Hôtel Jacob, Hôtel Le Royal, Hôtel des Saints-Pères, Hôtel Chambord, Hôtel Madison, Hôtel St-André, Hôtel Pont-Royal, Hôtel Recamier, Hôtel d’Alsace, Hôtel je-ne-sais-quoi…

  But he did no more than enquire. His Paris was pre-war. Now, on his last visit, he had been conscious of a sourness in the air. Hard to account for. Those who had been in the real Resistance were disappointed. There had been no renewal. The Fourth Republic was turning out to be as petty and corrupt as the Third. Then there were the ghosts of Vichy, some of whom had been his friends, anti-Fascists in the last years of what had passed for peace, who had nevertheless accepted the reality of the debacle of 1940 and turned to the aged Marshal, whom Klaus had thought “as hideous as Hindenburg”, perhaps even more dangerous, and the promise of a National Revolution, turned in a mixture of nervous fear and wary hope. Which was of course disappointed. And there were others, among them also men and women he had liked, who had collaborated with the occupying power from apprehension or indifference. They too now lived in shame. Klaus could feel for them, as he always felt for the weak and the defeated, but he couldn’t endure their company. The thought that they had attended parties at the German embassy and fawned on the men in uniform they met there disgusted him.