Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  A small man wearing a brown fedora and large red earmuffs emerged from the car, assessed its position, and left it as it was. I was disappointed. I had expected an Indian to be wrapped in white homespun, with his knees exposed, like Mahatma Gandhi in the newsreels. Dr. Tan-doori was dressed in no extraordinary way. He headed into the house with a kind of bounce, handing me his coat and shoving the earmuffs into a sleeve. They promptly fell out. He bounced down to retrieve them. "Gravesend," he said, "and as I am an immigrant, I am often puzzled in the way of immigrants. Brooklyn, my dear, Brooklyn! The conditions of the roads, very bad, ice here, ice there! I confess I lost my way during several attempts to find it. When I first heard this name, Gravesend"—he was following me up the stairs—"I thought how the end of mankind is the grave, and yet, and yet! The name may refer to the afterlife! No doubt there are omens in the names of things, though I myself do not adhere to this belief. Ah, sir! Sir! We meet in this inconstant flesh, and shall we speak of universals and eternals? Truth to tell, I am myself something of a materialist, a position that has determined my fate, though the notion of fate is hardly becoming to one professing materialism—"

  When I returned with the tea, Dr. Tandoori was seated in Mitwisser's chair, and Mitwisser had taken my customary place, facing the typewriter. "My, my, what a pleasant beginning. This fine hot tea," Dr. Tandoori said, "I am grateful for it. As I am an immigrant without a family, I am compelled to live a restricted life. I must boil my own tea! Put it that I am compelled"—a bounce, and the tea overflowed a little into the saucer—"to abandon text for textiles. My small joke, if you please. In my shop I must keep late hours, as you are kind enough to tolerate even now. May I assume that this young person is your daughter?"

  "She is not," Mitwisser bit off. "She is my amanuensis." I had never before heard him use this odd word; it was briny with anger and, I thought, mockery. I was nothing so elevated as an amanuensis; it had lately become my morning's task to make up Mitwisser's bed. "You may leave now," he ordered.

  "Please don't go—a young face is such a pleasure in the world. A young lady is so much a refreshment when two elderly gentlemen such as ourselves converse. It is like the presence of a bird at dawn."

  I went to sit on the edge of Mitwisser's bed. I knew it to be a defiance and a violation, yet Mitwisser did not remonstrate—whether it was the restraint of his distaste that silenced him, or deference to his guest, I could not tell. There was nowhere else for me in that strange space—all at once strange to me then, seeing it through the visitor's eyes: the old books all around, the heaps of papers, the crates of files, the cramped odors of obsession, the intimate intrusion of the massive bed (it occupied nearly half the room) with its bodily reminders. Mitwisser was a man who had procreated; he had lain with his Elsa, he had gripped her body with his. He was not elderly, he was only worn. Dr. Tandoori was not elderly either; he was if anything too lively. He had taken up tailoring, he said, in place of philosophy. He reiterated that he was at heart a materialist. "I left my place in my college not quite voluntarily, a circumstance that obliged me to deal, as tailors do—pardon again my small joke—with material. With the fabric of unalloyed realism! It was said that I leaned too heavily in my lectures—indeed, perhaps too exclusively—on the school of Brihaspati and Brihaspati's followers, the Charvakas. Collectively they are known as the Nastiks, the materialists, the skeptics, the deniers—"

  So Dr. Tandoori too had been thrown out, though he could not be called a refugee. He had merely been sacked: for championing a sect that sneered at the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita. He did not seem humiliated—getting thrown out was something to relish.

  "It was claimed," he said, "that I jollied my students. I jollied them, true, it is my nature, but it was claimed that I overjollied them. Nowadays I jolly my customers, and it is entirely—um—fitting. No one wants a grave tailor, surely not in Gravesend, declaring as it does the end of gravity—"

  I was astonished to see a minute crescent of a smile grow itself on Mitwisser's lip. He had the look of an admirer.

  "You speak of skeptics and deniers," he said.

  "Oh yes, they disrespect the priests. You will find even in the Upanishads how the priests in procession are compared to white dogs in a line, each dog holding in its mouth the tail of the dog in front of it. Skeptics become mockers."

  "The Karaites also mock."

  "The Nastiks repudiate."

  "The Karaites also repudiate. They separate from the mainstream. They ridicule the mainstream."

  "The Nastiks are not merely separatists. They are nihilists. They repudiate mystical devotion, they repudiate faith. Faith for them is illusion." He burst out, "I like them awfully much!"

  The crescent that was almost a smile widened. Mitwisser was pleased. I had never seen him so pleased. "Then are your Nastiks," he pressed, "the 'demoniacal men' whom al-Kirkisani—"

  "—turned up in that bit of the Gita? More than possible, more than possible. But sir, your man ... all your Karaites, as you describe them, look to divinity. My Nastiks contend that God is a figment. A figment! The world is composed of atoms, man is ruled by instinct. Holiness is vapor."

  "Then you are telling me that your interest has nothing in common with mine," Mitwisser said. But he said it lightly.

  "Oh sir! Dear sir! On the contrary, the impulse you showed in posting to me your most engaging inquiry is entirely—entirely—justified. And in truth it is impulse—impulse!—that unites us. Surely you see how we are united, you with your Karaites, myself with my darling Nastiks? Brihaspati, you know, their founder, ridicules the sanctity of the Vedas—"

  "The Karaites ridicule the sanctity of the Oral Law—"

  "Quod erat demonstrandum!"

  Dr. Tandoori gave one great bounce and catapulted himself out of his chair; I nearly expected him to seize Mitwisser by the hand and dance with him in a ring. "Oh sir, nothing, nothing signifies more than this! The hot drive to dissent, to subvert, to fly from what all men accept! To deny tedium, to deny what passes for usual wisdom! To deny the given, the received, the begotten, the whole benevolent common foolishness! I had rather be an outcast tailor—though I insist that my Singer is a very fine machine and I am entirely attached to it, it holds a high place in my affections—oh, rather an outcast among outcasts than to stand with officialdom! With those who reign over thought! Oh sir, dear sir, you and I, we are free men!"

  Professor Mitwisser laughed. It was different from the laughter he had laughed with James. His visitor, I believed, had brought him an hour of clear happiness.

  "And that one," Dr. Tandoori asked, "that one out there, is he yet another amanuensis?"

  A pale boy had appeared in the unlit hallway, breathing hard. A pair of earphones hung from around his neck.

  "Papa," the boy began, and stopped. He stared at Dr. Tandoori.

  "Or perhaps he is your son?"

  "What is it? What? Why are you at this hour not in your bed? You see I have a guest—"

  Heinz said, "There's blood. Blood on mama. Coming out of mama—"

  "And why should he not be my son!" Mitwisser roared, and fled to his wife.

  39

  DR. TANDOORI carefully smothered his ears under his oversized muffs. "With family it is not possible to rule exclusively over oneself. I had a wife once—a wife absolutely. She was pleased to have me leave her where I found her. In Bombay she is happy in my long absence. Rule or be ruled, an ancient observation. Tell me, my dear," he said, "how many children has Professor Mitwisser? That boy with the red eyes, and are there others?"

  "Five altogether," I said.

  "How unfortunate. Then despite all he is not so free. And how many—forgive an Oriental's small witticism—how many wives?—Oh my, my, a calamity—"

  The calamity was a tire. It had gone flat. Bare-armed, I had accompanied Dr. Tandoori out to his car; I stood clutching myself in the cold as he circled all around it, examining the wheels, two in the road and two on the sidewalk.

&nbs
p; "How unfortunate," he said again. "A testimony to the dominion of chance. Rule or be ruled, yet chance is king and matter its viceroy. Who can rule matter? Here! The culprit!" He held up a fat rusted nail that lay at the foot of the streetlight.

  I left him pumping a jack (the bright earmuffs bobbing up and down) and philosophizing about the world's materiality, interrupted by explosive imprecations in an unknown tongue.

  The bloodletting was minor. There were two injuries, one over the right breast, the other vertically along the wrist. Both were minor. What great harm could a silver picture frame do? Its corners were sharp, but a picture frame is not a knife. A picture frame is not a weapon. Mitwisser washed his wife's wounds and tried clumsily to bandage them.

  "Elsa, Elsa, was hast du gemacht?" Blood was smeared across the face of the woman in the photo and on the stone urn and its cherub. He looked wildly around the room. "Anneliese, why is Anneliese not in the house? You, Heinz! How did this come to be?"

  The boy was sobbing. "I was listening to my crystal set—"

  "Your what?"

  "My radio ... and I heard a sound from mama—"

  "Radio? Radio is forbidden. No radio!"

  "It's my own, I made it"—tugging at the earphones—"and nobody else can hear it anyhow—"

  Mitwisser brandished the bloody frame. "Who gives mama this? Idiot! Look how she cuts herself—"

  "Willi, he found it and showed it to mama and she wanted it, so he gave it to her—"

  "You are to protect mama!"

  The flat of Mitwisser's huge hand came down brutally on the boy's head. A soft mewl, like an animal's, spilled out of him. Blank shock dulled his eyes.

  "You see now." Lazily, almost dreamily, Mrs. Mitwisser turned to me; her fingers were fidgeting with the gauze patch above her breast. "My husband," she said in a tired voice, "he has the wish to kill this boy."

  "It was Willi," Heinz wailed.

  I was witness then to something new under the sun of Mitwisser's universe: he had beaten a child, and out of more than local rage. Some demon had caught him. Was it his wife he wanted to thrash? Was it (I thought of Dr. Tandoori's parting judgment) that he was not free? Chained to his Elsa, to his children, to his Karaites? To world-upheaval, to this house in a wilderness of insignificance? An hour of pleasure, and with a tailor!

  "Go back to bed," he told Heinz.

  And to me: "Look how the gauze loosens. Perhaps you can ... or when Anneliese—"

  "I'll take care of it," I said.

  He was uncertain, distracted. The blow had shot back through his own body. He shook; the skin whitened under the white tendrils of his progressing beard. The hand that had pounded the child's head blazed.

  His wife in her fading voice said, "You will not kill him. This boy, you will not kill him."

  "Calm, Elsa, calm. It is only a little cut, a little accident. Lie back. Here, I fix the pillow so nicely, sei ruhig—" He took a volcanic breath; there was violence in it. "Oh my poor Elsa," he said, "why do you make such an accident? Such a danger to yourself—"

  I leaned over her to apply the new dressing. She nudged me aside with a weak push. But something secretive in her look held me.

  "So much danger," she said drowsily, and unexpectedly called out her peculiar name for me: "Rüslein, you see now? Elsa must kill Elsa, then he will not kill this boy, you see now?"

  Mitwisser covered his face with his terrible fists.

  40

  MRS. MITWISSER slept. Professor Mitwisser had instructed me to stand guard over his wife for the remainder of the night: I was not to take my eyes from her, I was not to doze off. He said all this almost meekly, brokenly; it was more an appeal than a command.

  The house in its muffled half-silence took on an underwater blur. Sounds lost their origins—was that Heinz whimpering in a dream, or Waltraut softly snorting, with a throb as steady as a metronome? Breathings all around, as elusive and slippery as the dartings of small fish fleeing the jaws of big ones. On the floor below, between the walls of his study, Mitwisser's footsteps padded forward and back, measuring out time, or trying to undo it. Finally they stopped. He had heaved himself into the vacant tract of his bed. Anneliese was not in the house; James was not. The smell of urine swelled in acrid waves.

  I saw the dawn. Or it saw me, peering over the windowsill and seeping higher and higher, until it cast itself across the sky, a vertical violet light, like a risen watchtower.

  Mrs. Mitwisser stirred. I put my hand on her upturned hip.

  "Let me clean you."

  I brought a basin and washed her body, feeling ashamed to see her naked; but she was not ashamed. A willing invalid, she rolled over obediently as I set down a clean sheet.

  "Durstig," she said.

  I gave her water and she drank and drank, and asked for more. Her face was luminous in the brightening morning light.

  "They do not come," she said. Her voice was rapidly growing stronger. It was acquiring a low thick timbre; it rumbled out of her bandaged breast like an orchestral drumming. "You see now? They do not come," and though she pulled at my blouse, I wanted more than anything else to be allowed to fall into my own cold pillow. I was heavy with exhaustion and the sickening press of enclosure; I envied Dr. Tandoori's self-declared freedom. How simple it was for him to change a tire and be off! How simple for Anneliese to break through the bondage of this house and vanish! Dr. Tandoori had his philosophy—it bound him to no clear structure—and Anneliese ... Anneliese had James.

  "Already it is the sun," Mrs. Mitwisser said, "and they do not come."

  A jubilation had overtaken her, a cascade of talk tumbled from her throat, or from somewhere deeper, a foam of domestic schemings, busy feints and cunning surges, breaking now and then into a helpless sputter of German. She had succeeded, she had bled out her shrewd victory. Her victory was Heinz. He was safe. She had choked off her husband's thoughts. Never again would her husband dare to contemplate whose son her clever boy was—just let him dare! Only let him look at the boy, only let him wonder, and blood, her own blood, the blood of her hand, the blood of her heart, would rush out and vanquish him! She would die to save Heinz, and now her husband was caught, now he comprehended, now he would not ever again disguise hate as love. That is what harlots do, and who then is the harlot?

  She spoke to me as to an accomplice. It was I, after all, who had supplied the seed, the hint (der Kern, she put it in one of her lapses) of her success. At this word—success—she felt for the dressing at her wrist, proudly: a dueling scar on display. As for the seed, as for the hint, it was this: my father, that other boy, my father had killed that other boy long ago, it was too late for that boy. But no, not too late for Heinz! Her husband's wild blow to the child's poor head was the first, yes—and it was also the last. It was her intent (her tone turned sermonic) to clean house, to deliver them all from dishonesty. She had completed half. Heinz was safe, and that was half.

  She was logical, methodical; empirical. The piercing, the silver frame, the bleeding—these were the furnishings of her laboratory. No wonder she touched the glory of her wounds!

  "If they will come," she said, and stopped. It was odd to hear that "if," a musing over an unproved theory, a kind of reversal: it had the sound of hope, and what was it she hoped for? She raised herself a little, to see out the window. There were only the snaggletoothed rooftops of neighboring houses. But her mouth was open, and her fine teeth threw off glints from the early sun like a purposeful code signaling to some farther sun beyond our own.

  During the next several days Professor Mitwisser did not ask for me. I was to care for his wife, the work at the typewriter was subordinate to his wife's well-being, I was to keep his wife calm, calm above all, his own presence would not do, when he went in to his wife it stimulated her in dreadful ways. And the children too must be barred. He rattled out all these things again and again, and then shut his door against the troubles of his house.

  On the fourth day he called me to him.

  "Wh
at do you know about my daughter?"

  "She went with James."

  "Yes, yes, with James. That is not my question. I do not inquire about James. I inquire about my daughter. Her mother is ill and she is not in the house. My sons fight, the small child is distraught, and where is my daughter?"

  He was ignorant of the life around him. He observed little that was not to his convenience. The crystal set, the Spanish doll sprawled on the stair, the teapot with the golden spout—so many additions and transformations, and he was blind to all of them.

  "She no longer studies. She becomes indifferent."

  "If she were sent to school—"

  "My daughter has the European outlook. An American school is not fit for her."

  "You send the boys."

  "My sons are children. My daughter is a young woman. She should be at her mother's side. My daughter, not a stranger."

  A recklessness gripped me, a contagion of unrestraint: I felt infected by Mrs. Mitwisser's exultation. Her bloody victory.

  "That bit of hair," I said, "in your wife's shoe, that she found in James's bed—"

  "Do not speak to me of this!"

  "If it was your daughter's—"

  "My poor wife is stricken, she hallucinates, she has lost her reason, she accuses this one and that one, she accuses herself—" The long bones of his forearms, giantly black in their black sleeves, chopped at emptiness like a pair of hatchets.

  I said slowly, "Mrs. Mitwisser doesn't hallucinate. I think she sees."

  "Please to go now, I have no need of you."

  The great hands fell. He stood helplessly.

  "My daughter," he said, "has been absent from this house for three nights."

  "With James."

  "He is our good friend, there is nothing amiss." I had lost all awe of him. "Your wife," I began, and left the rest to dissolve in the air.