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sunny glimmer in his kind eyes”, as he envisaged the moment of release, which had come by means of brandy, whisky, pernod and red wine as the beating of the war-drums sounded loud all over Europe.
    The Magician had once stood at his bedroom window in the house in Poschingerstrasse and called out to Klaus about to board a taxi that would take him to the station and then… where? He couldn’t remember, but the Magician’s words still sounded in his mind: “Come home, son, whenever you are miserable and forlorn.” But there was no home to return to, and the Magician was living on the other side of the Atlantic, with the two people who had given Klaus unconditional love: Erika and Mielein.
    In Paris there was his second father, Gide. (Or perhaps his third, for wasn’t his uncle Heinrich, who had always encouraged him, the second?) If he took the train and presented himself in the apartment in the rue Vanneau, wouldn’t Gide, so clear-sighted, sceptical and yet moral, so immediately responsive to all around him, offer the reinvigoration he needed?
    He remembered a lunch with him on the terrace of a restaurant near the Luxembourg Gardens. Gide had talked mostly of German literature, of the sanity of Goethe who nevertheless understood evil. “Curious that,” he said, “Prodigious really.”
    Then a boy, a street urchin with an ugly sallow face and dark dancing eyes, had come by, trying to sell flowers – lilac, Klaus recalled, a bit withered, well past its best. Gide had refused the flowers but given the child money just the same, and Klaus realised that in some way the boy was hurt, even affronted, by the exchange. So, of course, did Gide: “Did you see how he looked at me?” he said. “He was glad of the money but nevertheless felt insulted. Did you ever pay a prostitute but spurn her services? She’ll give you just that look. Interesting, yes? The truth is that boy would far rather have picked my pocket than accepted charity. Curious that, prodigious really…”
    But he couldn’t run to Gide as if he himself was a little boy who has fallen over and scarted his knees and trots to Daddy for comfort. Yet the thought of Paris was comfort itself. It might be raining there too, it probably was, for it rains often in Paris, a city that is as much at one with melancholy weather as with summer sunshine. It was the city where he had been happiest, and he thought of the friendly shabbiness of Montmartre with nostalgia and of afternoons in those same Luxembourg Gardens: that one, for instance, when he sat on a bench gazing on the beautiful statue of the “Marchand des Masques” and was joined by a young sailor who nodded appreciatively and then said, “All the same, flesh and blood is better, isn’t it,” and accompanied Klaus back to his room in the Hôtel d’Alsace, two doors along from the one where Oscar Wilde had died.
    He remembered how in New York, June 14 1940, he had written in his journal: “The Nazis in Paris, it’s unimaginable. Boulevard St-Germain… Place de la Concorde. The stamp of murderers’ feet. The stuff of nightmare…”
    And a couple of weeks later, 26 June… “France is dead… One still can’t believe it. It’s like the death of someone very close to you. What is most frightful is not the defeat, but the treachery, the betrayal…” As in those dark days of 1940 he worried about his friends, he recalled with horror and disgust being told a few days previously that Gide’s name was on a list prepared by the State Department of French men and women who would be refused entry to the USA, as being “too radical”, even though it was years since Gide, after his visit to the USSR, had recanted his expression of approval of Communism, to the fury and indignation of the Party faithful. So, from then on, he was attacked from both Left and Right, which put him, Klaus thought, in the place of honour. But of course he had come through, scepticism unimpaired. He was the most honest man Klaus