Klaus by Allan Massie Page B

was torn from her? He didn’t know. Nevertheless he was certain and the thought shamed him. But you can live with shame, he told himself, indeed you may have to. That’s inescapable until you break through the veil yourself. His thoughts were muddled, he knew that. Indeed to anyone else, should he ever utter them, they would make no sense. They would be the ramblings of a madman. How can you believe in her constancy, and admire it, people might say, and yet long for death yourself? It’s pitiful, ridiculous. You should be ashamed of yourself. And indeed he was ashamed, ashamed because he had never been what he intended to be, perhaps what he was even intended to be. It was failure he couldn’t live with, his own failure and that of the society in which he was condemned to live where everything good and noble was being tossed aside, discarded like garbage, as things that were no longer of use. So it was precisely because everything that didn’t horrify him now seemed ridiculous that he was eager to be off. He wasn’t proud of this feeling. It would be absurd to be proud of it. But there it was. That’s how it was, how matters stood.”
    Klaus put his notebook down and emptied his glass. I’m obliged perhaps to go on till I can release Julian. But then there’s Albert to think of too and deal with. His struggle against temptation is even more acute, more terrible, because he still seeks to believe, longs to believe, believes, despite all the evidence that is so remorselessly stacking up, in belief itself.
    He looked up. To his surprise it was now day. They had got through another night.

XIV
    He had slept for a bit, without dreams, and when he woke, the rain had cleared, the sky was cornflowerblue, and the sun lay on his work-table. It’s possible to go on, he thought, what I wrote last night was perhaps not so bad. If I can work, really and truly work, then I can continue.
    Gide had shown him two years ago a letter from an unknown young man who thanked him for having “liberated him from his upbringing in a home full of bourgeois material comfort.” But he had then found himself posing the question, which he called frightening, “Free for what?” He had, as he put it, then detached himself from Gide, but had found no new masters and trembled in uncertainty. “The terrifying absurdity,” he wrote, “of the Sartres and the Camuses has solved nothing and merely opens horizons of suicide…”
    Immediately Klaus had wanted to meet this young man and speak with him and find a brother in him.
    On the second page of the letter the young man spoke of “the confusion of all our youth” and begged for Gide to offer him “a glimmer which might indicate the direction to take… If there is a direction…”
    If indeed!
    “Did you reply?”
    “Naturally I did. But what could I say except to urge him to submit to no creed or master, and, I said, ‘Be yourself’. I haven’t heard from him again. Doubtless he was disappointed by my message. After all, it’s not easy to be yourself and go your own way. It’s a lonely path, as you well know, Klaus. But what other is worth taking?”
    Gide understood him – there was comfort there. And yet Klaus knew that Gide could never inhabit him, for he was quite certain that the old man had never wrestled with the temptation to end it all. His curiosity was insatiable. “Prodigious, really.” All the same, Gide had never let him down. He was an anchor, even if the anchor’s hold was loosening.
    Perhaps even Julian and Albert might yet be brought to life. He wasn’t finished, he told himself, drinking a café crème sitting outside a bar. He could do it because he was both of them. It was, sadly, a long time since he had been able to make other people seem real enough to matter. He no longer experienced the urgent need to know what others were knowing, to see, hear, feel what for a brief moment they saw, heard and felt. Time had sated his curiosity about others. Still, if he