Klaus by Allan Massie Read Free Book Online Page B

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