Klaus Read Free Page A

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