Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  They returned to their rooms with eleven minutes to spare before bed check. In the hansom ride back, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe could not put into words what the evening had meant to him. It had been similar to how he’d imagined storms in the tropics progressed: from exhaustion and terror to exhilaration and exaltation. The whole way back they barely spoke. Occasionally Hans smiled to himself, and when they arrived, he refused to let Wilhelm pay the fare.

  A week later Wilhelm was again pitched into a hansom, and this time taken to the Ehrenbaum-Degele home in the Grunewald for Sunday dinner.

  The house was five stories high. The bottom floor was faced with antique fitted stone, the next two stories with granite, and the top two with Tudor paneling. In the center of the second story, the family initials were worked in iron and followed by an exclamation point. On one side, a dormer with two small attic windows and a large, arched window below created the effect of a house gaping at its approaching visitors. On the other, a stand of hundred-year-old pines extended into the forest. As they walked down the drive, Wilhelm felt unreasonable joy at the wealth of others.

  They entered through a garden drowsy with sunlight. Wicker armchairs were arranged at intervals. A gardener dozed in a caved-in chair.

  The house’s sunroom was decorated with bowls of primroses and asters. The window frames were bright green. His host handed him a magazine, then went off to round up his father and mother. In the four corners were sprays of a dark red flower he could not identify. The Fallen Warrior from the Glyptothek confronted a Praxiteles Hermes on the mantel. Some contemporary paintings were lined up in box frames over the buffet table. Underneath, a dog, an Alsatian, lay asleep. Each paw constricted alternately, as if it were playing the piano.

  The Ehrenbaum-Degeles made their entrance. Hans’s father was the portrait of the prosperous Jewish banker. He had the expression of someone who, having discovered some minor embezzling, had decided to overlook it. When introduced, he transformed that into a warm smile and a searching look. He shook his guest’s hand once, firmly, and introduced himself as Herr Ehrenbaum.

  The mother introduced herself as Mary Degele, and insisted on “Mary.” She was two inches taller than her husband, with her son’s large-boned features and the sort of hair one saw in Biedermeier prints. From her first glance at Hans it was clear that her devotion was for her an unshakeable source of satisfaction.

  Both parents were pleased to hear that their guest had admired Mary onstage, as Lucia. She engaged Wilhelm immediately with questions about school, and they all arranged themselves on some Swedish chairs. He answered the questions as best he could. He found he could not move his eyes from her.

  She had a genius for making herself comfortable. She seemed to have developed a quietly sexual relationship with her divan. Servants came and went with trays, but amid whatever flurry and agitation, her face was a calm sea. Her expression, when she listened, suggested infinite patience. The lines of her throat were very beautiful. Wilhelm made a note to remark to Hans later that the pictures of Winterhalter were very much like her.

  The cook escorted Hans’s grandmother, who seemed no more frail than Bismarck, out to the group. She said her hellos and settled beside her grandson on an ottoman. He kissed her cheek and said, “Why don’t you tell Wilhelm about your Parisian artist? Only don’t say a word about the Prussian whorehouse; you’ll ruin the family reputation.”

  The grandmother turned to Wilhelm and said placidly, “He teases me.”

  Hans lowered his head to her breast like a horse and she ruffled his hair. Taking his ease, he seemed to Wilhelm the epitome of all those welcomed and sheltered by their families.

  They talked away the afternoon. Mary Degele led them through an appreciation of Furtwängler and the Philharmonic. (The family had just been to see the Glorious Seventh, and some Brahms.) Had Wilhelm ever had the opportunity to hear Furtwängler’s Seventh? No, he had not. She handled his chagrin graciously, explaining the maestro’s greatness with wry and demystifying anecdotes, and then, with the artlessness of someone asking him to appreciate a beautiful day, invited him to be their guest in the future.

  The cook came back out and lit the lamps. The family heard the story of how the boys had met. On the subject of their aspirations, Wilhelm held forth in a way that was inconceivable in his own home. In this house, apparently, he had courage. He argued for the sublimity of the theater: for the deeper pleasure of moving people directly, in person, and seeing the emotions of one’s own soul entering theirs. Hans argued for the supremacy of the written word and for the writer’s pleasure of moving others across time and space. When in support of that notion he recited from Rilke, Wilhelm was entranced by the quality of the family’s attention.

  Herr Ehrenbaum took part in the discussion, encouraged his son in whatever point he was making, and took evident pleasure in what his wife was about to contribute.

  Hans’s grandmother announced that she had run out of energy, and Wilhelm wondered if it was time to go. In lieu of asking, he admired aloud a print of the Belvedere by Winckelmann. Mary Degele discussed its acquisition, and remarked on the sensuality of the south, in contrast to the prudishness of the north. Wilhelm felt himself blushing in response, despite all furious attempts to stop.

  Once again the boys got back to school just in time to dash through their toilet prior to bed check. That night, listening to the snores and whimpers of his fellow neophytes, Wilhelm remembered her hair and her manner and thought, That’s my real university. That’s where I’ll learn everything I need to know.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe had been raised in silence and routine in a cool blue nursery at the beginning of a comfortable era in his family’s fortunes. Who understood him? His mother; his brothers. Then, not even them. His early childhood had been Westphalian, meaning that blank pastureland on which enormous, coarse-boned farmers raised ponderous draft horses, and the Plumpes had lived in a town so quiet that when Wilhelm looked out a window and finally did see a passerby, it was as if a tapestry had moved.

  When he was five, they moved to Kassel, which his father saw as a fitting residence for the well-to-do man of independent means. Earlier his father had taken over an uncle’s textile firm, and then sold it at an obvious profit. Wilhelm had been born in the Three Emperor Year of 1888, a few months after the coronation of Wilhelm II. Two years later, the Kaiser had designated Kassel as his summer residence. Wilhelm’s father had immediately settled them in the vicinity of the palace, in the villa colony of Mulang.

  There Herr Plumpe searched for his entry into society. The neighboring families were all nouveau-riche. There were mutual invitations to garden parties and Italianate evenings with lights and fireworks. Hosts were expected to provide fresh surprises for each gathering. But established society insulated itself against intrusions from below. This wounded Herr Plumpe profoundly. He withdrew to his study to plan newer and more efficient siege-towers.

  In his view, the children’s part of the house was an appendix, necessary during domestic crises that could not be settled without his intervention, but otherwise a desert to be crossed in great strides. Moreover, Wilhelm embodied for him his family’s failure to fit in. His frailest son, useless in rough games, was a boy who, when banished to a field because the day was so glorious, would sit across from romping playmates on a portable folding chair, reading and not allowing himself to be distracted by the shouting.

  Both father and son possessed an ocean of words, and in each other’s presence became mute. In his father’s view, words served as a confirmation of things, a sign of possession. To Wilhelm, they were foretastes of excitements barely glimpsed.

  His father understood him to be like those boys who developed passions for trifles in order to persuade themselves that they were living poetically. His father’s hope was to attend decisively to his still-unformed character. For stretches he could forgive his son. A member of the oldest family in town might single the boy out in public with an award for recitation, and Herr Pl
umpe’s pride would allow him a respite. But then, when the expected invitation to that home failed to materialize, he again would be oppressed by the realization that his plans were precarious or collapsing, and once more the fury would be upon him. They were never Prussian enough. His wife finally found the courage to point out to him that the reason why was no mystery, since they weren’t Prussian at all.

  But Wilhelm was the least Prussian of them. On that, at least, everyone could agree.

  So the angular and gawky Wilhelm ran errands as a pretext for getting out of the house. Sometimes he pretended to have forgotten something so he could go out again. In the tradition of boys in this position, he devoured adventure stories, particularly those set in the tropics. No illustration was too crudely colored, no story too absurd for his guilty appetite. When he ran out of books, he visited the galleries in town, assembled over the previous century by the Hessian Dukes. He haunted the Court Theater, absorbing its classical repertoire. He wandered the house mangling snippets of Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, and Grillparzer. On weekends he was allowed to attend performances that ended near midnight. (A boy in attendance alone was no cause for concern, since the theater’s explicit purpose was moral uplift.)

  What a privilege theatergoing seemed to be! To be left alone in the dark, no one asking him questions, the king of his seat, content to let everything pass before him. There he felt the return of that part of himself that had to slink away each day so that another part could remain behind to enjoy his family.

  At the dinner table his father might fulminate every so often at yet another day his son had wasted. While he did so, his wife gazed on the passing storm in her usual meditative and not unpleasant trance. But Wilhelm’s privileges, as his brothers bitterly noted, remained unrevoked. The Would-be Artist, they complained, expected and received from all others, but especially from their mother, preferential treatment because of his Temperament. Nerves, his brother Bernhard sourly called it. So that even before Wilhelm separated himself from that world—even before he rid himself of what he felt to be the oafishness of “Plumpe” and thus made a visible, official break with that past—he had begun to draw back from it, and it had continued its process of drawing away from him.

  And what did he retain of philology? Of those sleepy mornings and afternoons in ruined old classrooms, with the brocades and wainscoting disintegrating in the damp? That everything seemed prefatory to outings with Hans.

  Wilhelm traded one authority disappointed in him for others, from his father to Dr. Krefeld—whose every sentence began “Well, so …”—to Dr. Widmann, who drifted desk to desk only to pivot suddenly on one foot to launch a question in an unexpected direction.

  For the most part, he sat through all of it dull, moony, and silent, interested only in their rhetorical exercises, in which those called upon could be Frederick, or Vercingetorix, or Caesar. Performing these roles, he felt Protean; he entered the thoughts of other men, and understood that each made decisions according to his own laws.

  What he loved most were the exercise-walks, he and Hans taking their places behind the others and chattering like birds. Here they embroidered upon the theme of what they’d accomplish once they left school. To begin with, they would go on a long voyage. The thought of that sustained them through all sorts of unpleasantness. Usually they reprised the group walk on their own later in the day. They’d walk for miles. A feeling of suffocation would overcome them, and they’d lie dazed on their backs in a field. Then they’d return and again climb the stairs to their rooms, feeling as sad as if they’d indulged in a wild debauchery. One of their professors maintained that they overexcited each other.

  In the evenings they worked together, their studies interrupted by remarks, jokes, confidences, and half-serious arguments. If one of them napped, the other resumed his studies. They composed pantheons and contradicted themselves regularly, their prejudices in a highly confused state. They were jealous of mutual friends. They were each other’s ideal audience. “We saw you two on the street this morning,” classmates told them. “What on earth was the joke?”

  One twilight they sat through a downpour at an outdoor café, covering their coffees with their palms, soaked to the skin. After the rain had stopped, a sinister young waiter murmured, “Plenty of young ladies around this evening, gentlemen.”

  At times, Hans was so relaxed in his presence that he fell asleep on streetcars. His kindness was so disarming that Wilhelm planned his gifts weeks in advance.

  Before meeting Wilhelm, he had strived to model himself on the calm good sense and honesty of Xenophon. He’d cried upon first reading the passage in the Anabasis when the vanguard of the column reached the summit and finally caught sight of the sea. He left notes on Wilhelm’s bed: Thought more about your remarks re Langbehn. Felt I gave them short shrift. More to come. H. His presence educated even when he was silent.

  Goethe claimed that there were two ways in which a man might dare to be himself: prayer and song. Wilhelm had always assumed he had the capacity for neither, and that his most intense and important affections would go through life with their eyes turned away. For him, Hans became a third option. But even if their time together seemed a journal of obstructed fortune and unfulfilled wishes, he believed the icy surface of his own priggishness was beginning to darken, crack, and give way to the fluid cold layers beneath.

  At that point, as was customary with overheated boys at a certain level of higher learning, Goethe prevailed. The two had spent an entire month trailing Dr. Widmann through the trackless moors of Faust. The poem had seized their imagination to such an extent that they began to term their walks Faust-walks.

  The Faust-walks led to new possibilities for the covert discussion of unapproachable subjects. They might remark upon Faust’s life as a story of the protracted and perverse disregard for the obvious, or note that his longing for escape mirrored the wish to break free of the isolation of being himself. This sort of talk so excited them that finally they planned a day-trip to the mountains. The preceding week they saw little of each other, as if husbanding nervous energy. Who knew what could happen on such an outing?

  They took the train as far as Zwickau. There, high on the slopes, far from even the hiking-tracks, they surrounded themselves with fire lilies, purple gentians, and alpine columbines. They had vistas at their feet. Their talk was full of sobriety and foolishness. In the original Faust, they agreed, there were two peaks of emotion: his turning from God to the Devil, and his last hours awaiting damnation. Yet Goethe had added a third peak, in the center, with the kiss that sealed Faust’s love for Gretchen—her story integral to the theme of damnation because Faust’s claim of freedom from moral restrictions had the potential for tragic guilt. In support of that interpretation, Hans reminded Wilhelm that Goethe himself had brutally terminated his first affair, with Friederike Brion.

  When they unpacked their lunch, Hans’s cucumber sandwich had spoiled. During the intervals of silence, they blushed. The game-playing exacerbated their prickliness and desire. Movement off in the flowers made them jump.

  Faust was stubborn, they decided, unwilling to lose any part of himself. He did not know how to renounce. Goethe’s greatest verses concerned the abyss between the desires of which he felt himself composed and the world in which those desires needed to be realized. Lying shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the hot wind sweeping up from the valley, they nearly levitated from tension. A warbler landed nearby and moved forward hop by cautious hop, its sharp round eye holding them in view.

  The intensity of Faust’s desire for Gretchen, up to that point imprisoned in the iron bands of his heart, had overwhelmed the simple and well-tried vices offered by Mephistopheles. In her face Faust had seen innocence, and the possibility of goodness within “the constricted life.” The supreme moment of his life on earth, which had passed away as it came into being, had been when Gretchen had returned his kiss and made her own declaration, addressing him as du rather than Sie.

 
The sun heated the grasses around them. Their agitation alternated with intoxication. A fly drew figure-eights over Hans’s face, and Wilhelm shooed it away. Hans’s skin shared the bitter freshness of the columbines. The silence was jostled by the browsings of a cow whose role it was to appear and disappear from sight.

  Even when sharing confidences, they came upon cliffs which brought them to a halt. They weren’t sure they’d be understood. It was difficult to express anything with the required precision.

  An hour later, they hiked down the mountain, still talking like pedants. They settled for the cold comfort of double meanings. Faust’s insight into intimacy came as a result of his congress with infernal powers: the lover was inseparable from the pact-maker with the Devil. Hence the reaction of a social order as merciless as Mephistopheles himself. Hence the remorseless approach of public shame. Hence her final words to him: Mute lies the world, like the grave!

  On the train back to Charlottenburg they rode third class. A few seats down, a girl sat perfectly composed, a hand on each thigh. The boy beside her looked out the window. “Watch,” Hans remarked quietly, with no preface. “They don’t even glance at one other. They continue touching, as if by accident. Watch how alert they are. How excited.”

  “They’re already in each other’s arms, in bed,” he added. Across from them, an elderly woman cleared her throat.

  That night Wilhelm made both sides of the pillow hot. He dressed and took a long walk, encountering other headache experts on their wanderings.

  He decided on a plan of action that would bury him in his studies.

  A week later, he and Hans stayed out all night in the city. At dawn they found themselves in a dismal precinct, in a wilderness of railway lines. Chimneys and warehouses took on distinct outlines in the distance. They climbed a tall, rusty trestle. Sounds from a nearby market lifted up to them. A milk bottle on stone, the crank of an awning, a cart wheeled slowly across cobblestone. Beneath them, out for their own walk, a man and a woman picked their way over the railroad ties. They talked in hushed tones and shared a cigarette. And Hans put his full lips on Wilhelm’s mouth, kissed him, and turned away.