He shouts sweeten your playing of death, death is a master from Germany
he shouts darken your strings then as smoke in the air you’ll rise
a grave in the clouds you’ll have a grave not cramped to lie in…
death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
Paul Celan, ‘Todesfuge’
Fragment 9
Adam has pieced together one part of the family jigsaw puzzle that is much more like a painting by Otto Dix, George Grosz or Edward Munch than the romantic picture his mother presented to him. But this puzzle still remains very incomplete. There is a gap surrounding his early childhood and Lothar is unable to help him fill it since his uncle left Germany the year he was born.
He learns English quickly, but without experiencing the same emotion that Spanish affords him. He pursues the study of both languages simultaneously, one out of practical necessity, the other because of an inner need. He has set up Spanish as an absurd talismanic goaclass="underline" he is determined to gain a perfect command of the language of the fraudulent Felipe Gomez Herrara in order to gain ascendancy over the ghost of that assassin whose crimes remain for ever unpunished, and over the loathsome charm to which he, the deceived abandoned son, above all the son unbearably tainted by this kinship, is still susceptible. It is no longer a tomb for the suicide’s body that he wishes to build with this language but a fortress in which his father will be eternally confined. In fact he wishes he could dissolve his father in the words he aggressively masters, as though in acid.
As for his mother, he is unable to locate her precisely in the irregular geographies of his heart. He thinks of her in a turmoil of tenderness, resentment, anger and pity. He thinks of her often, so often he cannot accept the idea he will never see her again.
She had indeed cleaned up his scruffy teddy bear before stuffing him into the suitcase, just as she told him on the eve of their parting, but this cleaning-up turned out to be more a curious kind of mending. Magnus’s golden-yellow buttercup eyes that gleamed with gentleness have been transplanted to the soles of his feet and fixed in their place are two colourless but very sparkling little crystal roses. After a moment’s surprise, then uncertainty, Adam recognized these roses of glittering transparency: they were the diamond earrings Thea used to wear in the days of those splendid dinner parties and musical evenings in the house on the moors. The little boy he once was would marvel at their brilliance, like gleams of moonlight in his mother’s ears, suffusing her face and blonde hair with astral brightness. She brought them with her when they fled, along with all her other jewellery, to raise cash if need be. Since they were forever in need she must have sold off all her bits of treasure but these two perfect diamonds she had kept. Now they shone in Magnus’s face, two faceted beads, devoid of colour and above all of reverie. The eyes of a monstrous fly, blind and blinding.
Adam had a sudden impulse to tear off those obscene diamonds disfiguring his bear, but just as he was about to act on it his hands dropped: it was if he were about to do violence to his mother, to remove her eyeballs. He contented himself with removing from the bear’s neck the kerchief embroidered with the name Magnus, to blindfold him with it. On examining the buttercups ridiculously pinned to Magnus’s feet, he finally realized they too were a pair of earrings; much more modest pieces of jewellery, of a gold and copper alloy. Did his mother wear these when she was a young girl, before she married Clemens and appropriated jewellery stolen from the women assassinated by her husband in the camps?
He wrapped Magnus up in a cloth and hid him at the back of the wardrobe in his bedroom.
As soon as his level of English was sufficient to attend normal classes, his uncle enrolled him in a school as a boarder. So he spent most of the time away from the Schmalker family and his relationship with his two cousins, Erika and Else, five and three years older than him, remained distant. He preferred the younger, a small brunette of mischievous charm with already a lot of admirers. Erika by contrast inspired in him mixed, indeed rather painful, feelings so much did she resemble Thea — the aunt having circumvented the mother to pass on to Erika her fair hair, sharp features, and even the inflections of her voice. But the young girl inherited from Hannelore her taciturn character, solemn gaze, and reserve. This web of similarities even extends to her choice of fiancé: a young man from the emigrant German community in London who is intending to take up the same pastoral duties as his future father-in-law, just as the medical student Clemens Dunkeltal formerly followed in the footsteps of Professor Schmalker, very soon to branch off in a completely different direction, it is true, going so far astray he became totally mired.
Among Else’s girlfriends, who all excite his curiosity, one in particular captures his attention, a very curly redhead called Peggy Bell. What attracts him about this mercurial young lady are the little physical oddities of which she feels ashamed and that he finds enchanting, such as the sprinkling of freckles on her cheekbones and upturned nose, the dimple that appears in her left cheek whenever she smiles, the slight cast that imparts a look of perpetual surprise to her lime-green eyes, and her hands and feet, as small and plump as those of a little girl.
But this little girl is seventeen, and she is impudent. One summer afternoon when visiting the Schmalkers, finding herself momentarily alone with Adam in the drawing room, she leaps up from the chair in which she was sitting, and comes and stands right in front of him, an adolescent boy of nearly fifteen and all the more gauche for being in a confusion of desire, and asks him point blank, ‘Am I pretty? Tell me honestly, do you think I’m pretty or not?’ He is left speechless. She pretends to be offended, and he, incapable of responding with a compliment, of uttering the slightest word, or of smiling, grabs her in his arms and kisses her on the mouth. At the touch of her warm lips, her soft breasts against his chest, her body, all curves and youthfulness, he suddenly feels welling up inside him a rush as powerful as that he experienced with euphoria and amazement one day already long ago on the banks of Lake Constance, at the sight of the dual conflagration of sky and water during a storm. His kiss and his embrace are as fleeting as the gigantic flash of lightning was that day, and their effect just as intense. Then with the same abruptness with which he drew her close to him, he pushes her away and flees the room, red with shame, leaving Peggy dumbfounded.
This stolen kiss is to release in him over the coming months a succession of dreams that sometimes waken him with a start in the middle of the night, his belly wet with a milky whiteness. In each of his dreams he sees Peggy Bell coming towards him, sometimes laughing, sometimes looking cross, playing with her skirt, whose folds swing, dip and twirl, then drop down, all starched and well-behaved, only to start up again, twirling round. This game goes on for some time until Peggy catches her skirt by the hem and all of a sudden lifts it up. Lifts it up very high, baring her knees, thighs, belly. She is not wearing any knickers, she has just a little russet sun whose rays ripple over her extremely white skin. Sometimes the sun revolves, sometimes it turns into an orange-coloured thistle, or a chestnut-burr. But what exactly is inside the burr?
Erika gets married, and the following year it is Else’s turn, then Peggy Bell’s. So someone other than Adam has assumed the right to penetrate the secret of Peggy’s body, a certain Timothy McLane. Someone else, and not he, is going lay hold of her belly and her breasts, the little russet sun blazing between her thighs. Another. An interloper. Not he.