Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  That was what it all came to, then: this wall, which the others doubted, or condemned, or assailed.

  When at last he stepped into the light, they stood up with a formal cordiality, and he shook hands with each man, one by one. He was wearing his freshly brushed suit-coat, though the molten August heat was so intimately invasive that it crept into the ears and along the necks of the company: they had all torn open their collars, where the sweat pooled in the hollows of their clavicles. From the constraint of these unraveled visitors it seemed improbable, at first, that Mitwisser had met any of them in some former circumstance; or yet again perhaps he had, distantly, at one of those international congresses frequented by seminarians, or even on his home ground, at sessions of the Religionswissenschaftliche Vereinigung, in Berlin or Frankfurt or Heidelberg, before world-upheaval had thrust him into this unlikely place. Or he may have confronted them only through some cautious yet abrasive correspondence. It was anyhow clear that he was familiar with their views and positions, whatever they were, as they were familiar with his. A dangerous awareness glowed between Mitwisser and the visitors: it was his imperial force that had compelled them to await him in the steaming heaviness of this equatorial room, where damp elbow pressed against damp elbow and the tea misted their eyeglasses with its own hot breath, and a secret savagery, like an ember rekindling, longed to break out. The man in the skullcap, it developed, was a refugee Viennese. A white-nosed fellow with a deformed left hand was revealed to be a specialist on tenth-century Egypt; with his good hand he quietly plucked a cigar out of his moist shirt pocket and sucked at it with so much diligence that he soon had the ceiling befogged. This encouraged the cigarette smokers, and since there were no ashtrays to be had (these were as foreign to the house as electric fans), I ran around the table dealing out extra saucers to catch the burnt-out stubs.

  The bearded Viennese had started off, diffidently enough, in German; Mitwisser nearly flogged him into English. It was a surly moment: a ukase. I have disposed of that tongue, it said, and so must you. In all that smoke and swelter I saw how this aroused them, though I could detect no plausible link between the ordinary plainness of these men (except for the yarmulke and the bad hand, it was pointless to try to distinguish one from the other) and the turbulence that was beginning to spiral out of their suddenly violent mouths. These mouths, which had seemed so flat and contained, like the mouths of shrewdly affable grocers, were now wildly twisting and spewing, a gathering tornado of virulence. Or they were like the mouths of those sideshow magicians who draw out strings of colored cloth flags from their throats, an infinitude of flags, endlessly, endlessly. But these were not innocent flags; they were brutally pelting philosophies.

  They were fighting him. They had come to fight him. They had come because he had summoned them to fight, and they felt the old vestigial power of his call; or because they were led by the dark curiosity that trawls minds to the grotesque, or the superseded, or the discarded, or the openly perverse; or because he was in merciless and deadly eclipse; or because it was they—their side of it, the party of victory—who had tossed him into eclipse; or because of their own volcanic anger. They raged against his will, his obsession, his desire—his thought. He was a violator (but he believed himself violated by world-upheaval, by their accusations, by their doubting enmity); his purpose, they said, was to subvert, to overthrow. He had deserted the green and fertile furrow, he had turned passionate, he had left disinterestedness behind, he had ruptured the Olympian surface of the scholar's detachment, he had submerged the distinction between the investigator and the investigated, the hunter and the hunted, he was no longer a historian after quarry, he had become the quarry, he had flung himself into the hearts of his prey. He had broken through the wall, the wall he had professed—the wall between belief and the examination of belief. A false profession. He had the smell of a renegade.

  The white-nosed man with the bad hand dropped his cigar. A cry—high-pitched and sharp, a treble upstairs shock—was shooting through the smoke.

  "Waltraut," Anneliese whispered, "all this noise, it woke her—"

  But I kept my place under the dining room lintel. "Leave her be, she'll fall back—"

  "Go and see!" Anneliese commanded.

  I kept my place. It was Mitwisser I wanted to see. He stood—he had never taken a chair—under the spell of a resignation concentrated and embattled but strangely tranquil: a ship captain who is unsurprised by a squall. He looked satisfied; I thought he was satisfied. If you court the sea there will likely be a storm, and he had courted the sea, he had brought the sea into his own house, he had made the storm, he was the god of the storm, he was satisfied!

  Again that cry: now it was descending the stair, now it had thinned to tiny breathless phantom moans enveloping a barefoot figure. Like a bird in a rush of wind, Mrs. Mitwisser flew into the room.

  "Gentlemen, it's no good, it's no use"—she pulled and pulled at the torn breast of her nightgown—"no good at all—"

  The visitors fell into a motionless silence.

  "My dear Elsa," Mitwisser said.

  "No good at all," she chanted, "no use, no good—"

  "Mama," Anneliese pleaded.

  "What is broken, gentlemen, you cannot put it again back, nicht wahr?"

  The visitors rose in a body and mutely trickled out the door; only the man in the skullcap hesitated before Mrs. Mitwisser. "Guten Abend," he said.

  "Guten Abend," she replied: a chatelaine presiding over farewells after an evening of delicacies and wine.

  Anneliese took her mother's hand and began to lead her away. Mitwisser's enameled blue eye trailed after them; his face blazed. "Quite right," he said. I hardly knew what he meant by this; I was thinking what an oddity it was that he had ever lain beside the woman in the torn nightgown. He turned back to me with a little shrug of surprise, as if he had just discovered me there: "You see how it is," he said. "I have no peers in this matter. What lies beyond the usual is dismissed, it is regarded as wasteful and perverse. They judge it—my work—to be pointless. What was once valued there is not valued here. Here they lack the European mind, they are small."

  "But isn't one of them from Vienna—"

  "That one is no one at all. I will return now to my study. Please to shut off all these lights." He gestured toward the kitchen, where the kettle still steamed, and reached out himself to the dining room switch.

  He left me in the dark, among empty cups and littered plates.

  13

  THE VISITORS never came again. The house resumed its isolation. The drawn-out heat wave ebbed. Mrs. Mitwisser no longer asked my forgiveness. Her playing cards remained under her pillow; a new pursuit lured her. She sat on the edge of her bed, with a little low chest drawn up beside it, sorting out the curlicued colored shapes of a vast jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the box was of a forest scene: masses of leaves, the trunks of trees casting dark columns of shadows, a foxtail glimpsed in a clump of bush—a confusion of chiaroscuro. I watched her assess the jumble of pieces, and saw how shrewdly she judged and matched and fitted together; she considered before she experimented. She was a scientist in a laboratory. If the experiment turned out to be successful, it was because she had considered. A square of noon sunlight fired the wild wisps of her hair; she yawned; then she continued the hunt, bathing her fingers in the mixed-up cardboard froth of yellow and orange and brown.

  "There will after this be two more boxes," she informed me. She was prepared for a season of puzzles. This one belonged to Willi; he didn't care for such things. Neither did Gert or Heinz, who had given up their own boxes. The boys, all three of them, had no interest in puzzles or cards (they hated cards) or even books. They fled the house the instant they woke. They were bored with water and marsh, and nowadays were out exploring the neighborhood, where they happened on a meadow ideal for kite-flying. It lay behind a soldiers' monument—a tall cenotaph topped by a winged bronze Victory and dedicated to the fallen of the Great War. Every morning they ran to the
meadow to fly their kites. Then they would lie on their backs in the grass, manufacturing whistles out of moist green blades and staring up at the sun-gilded angel. And afterward they would jump up to run with the kites again, in a flagging wind, so that the kites would swoop down and suddenly lift and finally crash, like fallen soldiers.

  "He gives presents," Mrs. Mitwisser said. "Many presents. Immer, immer! Puzzles, kites. This James!" It came out "Chames," bitterly, in her resisting and clotted accent. With a wandering hand she sculpted an apparition out of the air: a puzzle-piece in the form of an invisible man, whose presence hung over the house.

  I said, "He's kind to the boys then—"

  "To my husband he is kind. So kind we become Parasiten." Her attention flitted away. With quick precision she locked a scalloped bulge into its small harbor. A flowering twig materialized under her palm. "And you, Rüslein, they don't pay you, hah?" Her tongue felt along her lower lip, navigating, as though she might find a word cruising on its surface. Then she found it: "Confess!"

  "They don't pay me, no. I mean they haven't yet."

  "They cannot pay until he permits. There is no money until he permits. He permits the puzzles and the kites. He permits the new shelves for my husband's books. He permits the pretty little cakes. He permits the flat in the city, and when that is not useful he permits this house. He does not permit you because he does not know you are here." Mrs. Mitwisser laughed. It was a laugh of perfect sanity. "We have no money because we are Parasiten. When he comes he will see you and they will tell him and he will know."

  "When will that happen?"

  "When he wishes, then he will come."

  She held up a pair of unlikely shapes—each one a circle of fangs—and snapped them together, efficiently, like the jaws of a crocodile. Or like a navigator squeezing the legs of a caliper in order to shrink the world.

  14

  THE KARAITES.

  I begin to see them, dimly, dimly, passing shadows, remote echoes, grayly trudging on the farthest rim of history, the other side of history, the underside. They are inked letters seeping through the backs of the pages of old chronicles: faint glyphs glimmering, just visible, an inside-out alphabet.

  They come to me piecemeal, little by little, at Professor Mitwisser's whim. Or else he discharges them in a great cannon-blast of erudition, a whole colony shot out all at once in a single obscuring cloud.

  They are dissidents; therefore they are haters. But they are also lovers, and what they love is purity, and what they hate is impurity. And what they consider to be impurity is the intellect's explorations; and yet they are themselves known for intellect.

  Intellect engenders meaning: interpretation; commentary; parable; illumination; insight; dialogue; argument; corroboration; demurral; debate; irony; anecdote; analysis; analogy; classification; clarification. All these the Karaites repudiate as embroidery and fraudulence in the hands of their enemies (though not in their own hands). And all these are Talmud, the first layer of which is Mishna, containing commentary on Scripture, and the second layer of which is Gemara, containing commentary on Mishna. The exegetical voices calling to one another across the centuries grow more and more populous, denser and denser. A third-century sage will contradict a first-century sage; a fourth-century sage will disagree, and take the side of the first-century sage. A fifth-century sage will hold to a new idea altogether. If you were to stand on a mountain—Mount Tabor, say, or even Olympus—and turn your ear downward toward where the minds of the philosophers reside, you would hear the roar of impassioned colloquy below, like a wakening polyphonic thunder. And this would be Talmud, the fuguelike music of the rabbis conferring over the sense of a syllable out of Genesis.

  All this the Karaites refuse and deny. In the ninth century they become the rabbis' foes. Scripture! they cry, Scripture alone! They will not tolerate rabbinic interpretation. They will not allow rabbinic commentary. They scorn metaphor and the poetry of inference. Only the utterance of Scripture itself is the heritage divine!

  The rabbis (whom the Karaites call the Rabbanites, or the school of thought that clings to the rabbis) reject the Karaites as literalists. The Karaites, they say, see only the letters; they do not see the halo of meaning that glows around the letters.

  The Karaites ridicule the Rabbanites. They ridicule them because the Rabbanites declare that the Talmud, which they name the Oral Torah, was received on Sinai by Moses together with Scripture, the Written Torah. The Rabbanites claim that the sacredness of the Oral Torah is equal to the sacredness of the Written Torah.

  Literalists! retort the Rabbanites. Narrow hearts! At Sinai the minds of men were given the power to read the mind of God. Otherwise how would men know how to be civilized? How would we know how to understand a sentence—or a story—in Scripture?

  You understand it twenty different ways! scoff the Karaites. One says one thing, another says another thing. And this clamor of contradiction you call equal to the Torah itself!

  It is equal, the Rabbanites respond, because the radiance of Torah directs men's thoughts. Out of the soil of strenuous cogitation, which is the engine of holy inspiration, and which you Karaites demean as mere contradiction, burst the sweet buds of Conduct and Conscience. The Rational Mind is the Inspired Mind.

  The Rational Mind, argue the Karaites (but they do not notice that they are arguing Talmudically, since Talmudic argument is what they disdain)—the Rational Mind will not accept that the so-called Oral Torah, codified by human hands recording human opinions, is equal to the Written Torah given by God to Moses at Sinai! You Rabbanites indulge yourselves in delusion. There is in you no law of logic. Hence we depart from you, we reject all ordinances and adornments, inferences and digressions, alleviations and mildnesses, that are not in the Written Torah. We sweep away your late-grown lyrics that have crept into your prayerbooks. Our liturgy draws purely from Scripture, not a jot or tittle of it man-made! Away with your late-grown poets, away with your late-grown jurists! Moses alone stood on Sinai!

  Thus spake the Karaites. But the Jews until this day embrace the Rabbanites and their ocean of exegesis and disputation, of lore and parable, as fertile and limitless as the cosmos itself—while the Karaites are a speck, a dot, a desiccated rumor, on the underside of history. Sa'adia Gaon, in the tenth century, in his famous polemic against the Karaites, blew them with a puff of his lips into the darkness of schism.

  This was how, dimly, dimly, and little by little, I derived the nature of the Karaites at my typewriter at night, to the chanting of Mitwisser's esoteric recitations.

  And dimly, dimly, and little by little, like ink bleeding through paper, I came to believe that of all the creatures on earth, it was only Mitwisser, Mitwisser alone, who thought to resurrect these ancient dots and faded specks. Their living remnants might languish still, across from the Baltic Sea, or close to the Black and Caspian Seas, sequestered in queer European pockets; but they were shriveled, hidden, lost. Mitwisser's illuminations scarcely followed them there. Isfahan, Baghdad, Byzantium had seized his brain and driven it back, back—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen centuries back, into the muffled quarrels of sect after sect, doctrine upon doctrine. The Karaite laws of consanguinity and incest were more urgent to Mitwisser's gaze than the streets he walked on. These fevered and forgotten heretics and schismatics—their creeds and codes and calendars, their migrations and mutations, the long generations of their thinkers—these were his own.

  Only his children mattered as much.

  15

  328 St. Peter's Street

  The Bronx, Nevv York

  September 5, 1935

  Dear Bertram,

  The first thing you'll probably notice is hovv every double-you has a split all the vvay dovvn the middle, so that vvhen I vvant to type "vvindovv," say, or "vverevvolf," it comes out looking like that!

  There are other problems too. VVatch out for those big blank skips that look like stutters in mid-sentence! Sometimes vvhen I'm using this machine I feel as if I'm piloting an
aeroplane in a vvindstorm. I can never tell vvhat's about to happen, vvhether I'll be pitched up or dovvn or sidevvays. (See?) It takes getting used to, though by novv I can pretty vvell control the rudder, or vvhatever you call the thing that keeps an aeroplane on course. I could ask Heinz—he knovvs all that sort of science thing. (I'll explain vvho Heinz is in a minute.)

  VVell, novv that you see vvhat I've been given to vvork vvith here, you'll understand hovv much I miss your typevvriter. (I had almost begun to feel it vvas my typevvriter.) Only I'm afraid you'll think vvhat I really mean is that I miss you. (I guess I do.) I'm pretty sure Ninel doesn't vvant me to bother you vvith letters, since you never told me vvhere you'd be. So I've tried hard not to vvrite, and for two vvhole months I haven't. Not that I'd exactly knovv vvhere! And you haven't been able to vvrite to me, just in case you ever vvanted to, because that address in Nevv York City I sent you (I hope you got my postcard!) isn't vvhere vve've ended up. There aren't any skyscrapers, it's definitely not Manhattan! VVe're in a strange half-vvild place at the edge of things, some little houses and plenty of empty lots, and a svvamp nearby attached to a st ony beach.