He wouldn’t drug tonight. He could do without. It was ten days since he had left the clinic where he had endured what he called ‘a clear-out’ and he had only flirted with H since then. No need tonight. Three fingers of whisky and a couple of Luminal would see him through. Good, better… but best? Best was far away.
Best was in the past, when they were young and the drugs were no more than naughtiness, to give them a lift. They had all played with them, Gustaf too, despite his inherent timidity, fear that he might surrender something of himself. They called heroin “H” or “tuna”, the fish that swims in the body. Erika had turned away from it. She was always the strong one. One of her letters from a long time back ran through his memory. “Don’t take anymore – if you promise, I’ll give it up too. It’s unhealthy! It’s expensive – and you can’t afford it! It’s dangerous, a killer – don’t you realise that, my love? I embrace you from across mountains. We are too far apart from each other.”
That letter gave him courage, or at least resolution. He would take a cure. He went to see Dr Katzenstein in Zurich, who frowned as he prodded him, and sighed, as if to say “Why are you young people so bent on self-destruction. Look outside, at the blue sky and the mountains. Isn’t life beautiful? Isn’t it good?” Perhaps he actually spoke these words, didn’t merely look them. Klaus couldn’t remember if he himself had put them in the mouth of the good doctor who, however, recommended that he go to a sanatorium in Hungary, in a town called – delicious irony – Siesta.
Klaus assented. The truth was that for the first time in his life he was frightened, really afraid. This was absurd. After all, didn’t he often dream of death, and wasn’t he, by agreeing to go to the sanatorium, running away from what he deep down most desired? Yet there was sufficient reason. It was 1937, and to will death now would be a sort of desertion. Two things gave meaning to his life: writing and the struggle against the Brown Plague, a struggle which, admittedly, he carried on only in words. So, yes, he would check in (as the Americans said) to the sanatorium and force himself to go on living.
But first he had gone to Prague because the Czech President Benes had had the courage to defy the Nazis and offer passports to the entire Mann family, stateless since their German ones had been withdrawn. (Well, not to Erika, who was in no need of one, on account of her mariage blanc to Wystan Auden which made her British. Klaus had first proposed on her behalf to Chris, but he had said no because he saw marriage as a prop of what he called “the heterosexual dictatorship” and in any case his boy-friend Heinz would be hurt and wouldn’t understand. So he “passed the buck” to Wystan who, like the English gentleman he was, consented, even though, unlike Chris, he had never met Erika. Years later, in America, someone asked the Magician who Chris was. “Family pimp,” he replied).
It was in recognition of the Magician’s status that the Czech offer was made. Well, this was one time when Klaus wasn’t in the least reluctant to cling to his father’s coat-tails! He went to Prague and had an interview with the President himself, whom he found to be lively, intelligent and professorial. Their conversation had been almost entirely political, and therefore bleak. They both knew that while times were bad, worse lay ahead.
He had to wait in Budapest, where he stayed in a palace owned by a friend, the Baron Lazi von Hatvany, twice exiled from his own country for his liberal views, first by Reds, then by the quasi-Fascist dictatorship of Admiral Horthy. Now Lazi, permitted to return, didn’t know how long his reprieve would last. Klaus had interviews with doctors, one of whom, Klopstock, had been a close friend of Kafka and had indeed held him in his arms as he died. Klopstock liked to speak about literature, but then, after giving Klaus a physical examination, asked him: “So why do you drug?”
“Because I wanted to die. I am attracted to death.”
“You said ‘wanted’ – past tense. So you no longer want to die and are ready to undergo the cure – disintoxication. It’s painful, you know.”
“What isn’t?” Klaus might have said, but he only nodded his head.
“You have a reason to live now?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
But in truth there was another reason, beside the political struggle to which he was committed, though he did not dare express it. Did not dare because he couldn’t yet believe in it.
At a restaurant, the Hungaria, with Lazi Hatvany and his wife, Jolan, and son Klari, he was introduced to a young American. No, that wasn’t right. It was a pick-up, though later they argued as to which of them had made the approach. Not that it mattered. The boy was blond, green-eyed, smooth sunburnt face. In his journal that night Klaus wrote, cagily, of “the little Curtis, pretty kid, a bit affected, pleased with himself.” And why not? He had a lot to be pleased with, and even the first exchange of glances showed him willing. He set out to impress. “I’ve just come from the Soviet Union where I was studying under Eisenstein.” Message: I’m not one of your café boys, I’m an artist too.
The next day, or the one after, they made an excursion together to a ruined castle which had belonged to the Kings of Hungary before the Ottoman invasion. Klaus had no thought for its history, only for Curtis whom, as tribute to his Russian connection, he called Tomski. Love, he thought, true love, for the first time in years: happiness and mystery. They went to a hotel: his nervousness, his sadness, his intelligence, his tenderness, his sensuality, his laughter, his sighs, his lips, his eyes, his body, his strong well-shaped legs, his smooth arms, his voice with the intoxicating drawl of the American South.
Klaus stretched out on his bed and recalled those first hours: perfection, sought so long, fleetingly caught.
“But you must,” Tomski said, “go through with this cure. I’ve heard what drugs can do. You must go through with it for our future.”
Our future? When had anyone last spoken of that to him, in those soft and certain tones?
Would he have done it if Tomski hadn’t urged him?
He would never know. It was the sort of question that was by its nature unanswerable. When you came to the crossroads and followed one arm of the signpost, the alternative route, the one not taken, was wiped out. He had known that for years. Yet he also knew that if Tomski had laughed and said, “Don’t bother. Come away with me tomorrow,” he would have abandoned the sanatorium and left with the boy.
They put him in a room with barred windows. He made it his by laying out the photographs of family, friends, lovers he carried with him on his wanderings. Visitors forbidden. Tomski was allowed ten minutes to say goodbye. They kissed and it was like being left on an empty platform watching the train pull away. No visitors, the injunction was repeated. “We can never be certain,” the nurse said, “that out of mistaken kindness they won’t smuggle in drugs.” All the same that first night they gave him a little heroin, the smallest shot, along with pills, to allow him to sleep.
He did so, for a few hours, and woke tired, weak, nervous and afraid. But it could be endured…
Months later in his novel Der Vulkan, he relived the ordeal through his hero, Martin: “All around him, twitching feet and hands jerked themselves into spasms. He threw his tormented head about. He would never have thought he could be simultaneously so exhausted and so tremblingly alive. He was too weak to get out of bed, but his wet, quivering body couldn’t bear to be in the same position for thirty seconds. He had been ill often, as a child especially, but nothing like this. In comparison fever and bodily pain were positive feelings. This was a huge embarrassment. ‘It’s how a fish must feel, when it’s been thrown on land,’ Martin thought. ‘With the hook still in its mouth. I’m wriggling like a fish on dry land. My God, my God, what have I done that I must flap about like a wretched little fish…’ ”
Der Vulkan… His best novel? Perhaps. His most ambitious? Certainly. It sold only three hundred copies.
He gave himself another whisky. Why not? An old friend that kept the temptation of H at arm’s length.
Never mind. That novel brought him something worth more than sales: the Magician’s approval. He had never believed that his father did more than glance through his books – and that only because Mielein insisted he should read them. But this time the Magician wrote: “Well then: fully and thoroughly read it and it touched me and made me laugh. I enjoyed it and was really satisfied and more than once I was really moved. For a long time now people didn’t take you seriously – they saw you as the ‘sonof’ (T. Mann’s little boy), a spoiled brat. I couldn’t change that. But now it’s not to be denied that you are capable of more, more than most – therefore my satisfaction on reading and my other emotions rightfully stem from that too. In a word, I congratulate you sincerely and with fatherly pride…”
And, further on, reflecting on the passage in which Klaus recounted his hero’s cure in the sanatorium, the Magician wrote that he found it “so extraordinary a piece of narrative that I stopped thinking about Germany and morality, politics and struggle, and just read on because I had never read anything like it before.”
For a long time he carried that letter wherever he went, as you might wear a badge of honour. He had never had such praise from the Magician before, for even Mephisto had been met with a bland approval betraying a lack of real interest. In truth he hadn’t realised how much he needed his father’s praise, which in his reply he described as “a beautiful, comforting, and fortifying gift…”
But the cure itself – terrible, as he had written. Nights of agitation, brief sleep, disturbed by horrible and frightening dreams. When he woke sobbing, a nurse came and sat by him and spoke of her broken marriage. There’s misery everywhere, he thought. Later he spent two whole days asleep (with the help of pills), but when he woke, found himself not rested, but exhausted, hardly able to walk. Cries of anguish came from the neighbouring rooms. Did it help that others were suffering as he was?
At last letters arrived, from Erika, promising to be with him in person as she was in spirit, from Mielein, to whom he had confessed all in a letter written the day before he began the cure. Hers was full of sympathy, understanding and love. It made him weep. But tears came very easily in the room with barred windows. There were more when Tomski was at last permitted to visit and brought him roses and kisses. Left alone, night drawing on, he had moments of rebellion. “Je m’en fous,” he wrote in his journal. “My head is strangely empty of everything.”
He was ready to leave, but the doctors said no. A few days yet. You must be stronger, the poison completely eliminated. Tomski sat by the bed and held his hand or smoothed his brow. Gave him lemonade to drink. The boy himself veered between joy and despair. Like René, he thought, like René and Rikki.
When at last he was released after a month in the sanatorium, Klopstock and another doctor came to the station to see him off. “Don’t come back, Klaus,” they said. “You’ve given yourself another chance. Don’t come back.” In the train Tomski smiled and said, “Now we are truly together.” They spent that night in the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, in each other’s arms. Klaus wept, but they were tears of happiness.
He sat by the window, with his glass of whisky and the bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table by his side. No, he wouldn’t drug tonight. It was strangely peaceful watching the rain still falling. There had been good times with Tomski often, and over a number of years, but never as good as those first weeks together, when he asked himself time and again, can I love him enough? Of course he couldn’t. That was, as the English said, “the fact of the matter”. He couldn’t love anyone enough. His own need was too great.
Guy Probyn had set out to rile him, no question of that. Why? Not just to defend Gustaf, but also because there was something in Klaus himself which invited attack. Or was Probyn, with his attraction to soft boys whom he could dominate, merely malicious, full of the resentment of the man who would have been an artist and was now a manager? Klaus took hold of the bottle and smiled. Was it possible that Probyn was jealous of him? Ridiculous thought. He poured another whisky, but didn’t immediately drink it. Sufficient comfort to know it was there waiting, ready when his need became urgent.
There was a knock at the door. He didn’t answer at once. He hesitated because for a moment he had been close to happiness in his solitude and didn’t want it to be interrupted. But the knock was repeated and this time he called, “Come in.” It was Miki.
“I got held up on the boat,” he said. “The boss had insisted we put to sea.”
He came up behind Klaus, laid his hands on his shoulders and leant over him. He smelled of the rain and there was again aniseed on his breath.
“You OK, Klaus? They told me you’d been at the Zanzi. So I came on the chance. Are you pleased?”
Klaus emptied his glass, got up, turned round, ran his hands up the boy’s body under his shirt.
“I’m pleased,” he said, and kissed him on the mouth. Rainwater dripped down his neck from Miki’s hair.
“It’s good to see you,” Klaus said. “I was sad when I gave you up.”