She spoke of another man. He had commandeered her family and spited them all, her husband, her children—her daughter! She spoke of this man incessantly, her mouth with its orderly teeth and pleasant scent of wine breathing in and out too rapidly, too urgently—so that Bertram thought the insinuator, the invader, whom she called James, had stolen money. She spoke of thieves and beggars, of parasites and fireflies. Her cries and confidences, which had belonged to me, all went to Bertram. She felt in him what she had never felt in me: a pliant sympathy, a nurse's sympathy; a mother's. Bertram was motherly. He listened and shook his head. He listened with angry smiles. He mourned Ninel exactly as she mourned Anneliese, angrily, unforgivingly.
"If they will come," she said, plucking at her faded haunted rhythmic plaint.
"They?" he echoed.
"My daughter. And that one. That one!...if she will come—"
That one, he knew, was James. A glowering phantom.
"She will come. She will," he assured her. I had never assured Mrs. Mitwisser of anything—the Mitwisser kingdom was too fragile, too tentative, subject to earthquake. I could not hold out a belief I did not own. Observing Bertram, I saw what this meant: in this unforgiving house I had insufficient sympathy. Or else my truest sympathies were with Professor Mitwisser, who welcomed them least, who was estranged from sympathy. It was typical of Bertram to swim meltingly into the instant face of need. Hadn't he once told me that I should trust in that untrustworthy tendril of memory, my dying mother clutching a rag doll? And hadn't he once persuaded me that my father had unaccountably secreted a worn children's book in his most private hoard out of a sentimental affinity for a picture of a boy hiding in a hat? Bertram said these things to assuage the moment's exigency. The moment won him. If the way to terra firma lay through the cosseting of the wife of the man whose word was law, it no longer mattered. What had begun thinly as opportunity thickened into sympathy. He was growing into the sinews of the house. It was slowly educating him, as it had educated me. I had had Mrs. Mitwisser as my unsteady teacher of fragmented histories. Bertram had me.
"This James she carries on about," he said, "the one who took money—"
"He didn't take any money."
"She calls him thief—"
"He took Anneliese," I said.
"The daughter. The daughter who went away."
"She went with James." It was somehow necessary to say this outright: the very thing that was forbidden. "It's his money they live on."
Bertram stared. "They pay your wages. You get ... a salary"—he brought out this word unhappily, guiltily—"and you sent me a piece of it—"
"They haven't got anything on their own. Everything's from James.
All of it."
He sucked in a long reflective breath, as if he meant to inhale all the world's mysteries. "How about that. How about that. He isn't in business or anything, is he? Some company big shot?"
"Nothing like that. It's some sort of inheritance—"
"A moneybags. Daddy Warbucks."
A whiff of Ninel. Her ghost speaking through him.
"Bertram, it's not like that.... They live on it," I said again. "The money just ... comes."
The familiar half-twist of Bertram's mouth. The little pillowy intimate swell of his lower lip. It made me resist Ninel. It made me long for his sympathy, for his old, old kiss, with his knee on my bed.
"But why?" he said.
I knew why. It was not new knowledge. I believed I had known it ever since I had first heard Professor Mitwisser laughing together with James, a laughter that had the sound of grief.
"He likes to do it," I told Bertram. "Out of hatred, I think."
But I had no inkling of what it was that James hated.
52
THERE WERE NIGHTS when Professor Mitwisser did not call for me at all. And on the nights he did, it appeared that he had no work for me: but it was clear that he expected me to stand at the ready. He looked down from that immensity of neck and torso to make certain I was attentive—to what? He had given up shaving altogether. The new beard was creeping imperceptibly, laggardly; yet it aged him too quickly. His shoulders had an old man's hunch. Out of a white face the hot blue eyes leaped like panting tigers.
A distance from where I loitered, the tepee-shapes of the volumes he had turned topsy-turvy to mark his place were undisturbed.
"It is perhaps not possible," he said finally. He said it to the ceiling globe, where one of a pair of light bulbs had gone out. The room was dimmer than usual. "Without corroboration it remains only ... conviction."
I caught—if not his meaning—his imperative, that urge below thought that beat in his brain. It pulsed against me mothlike, and I snatched it out of the darkening air. More and more it seemed to me that I inhabited his mind. Or the reverse: his mind came to me. I pinched it between my finger and thumb.
"'I, Jacob, am become Arjuna,'" I recited. It was an offering, as on an altar.
"Yes, yes—the very words. Those words!" he cried. "And the uncanny knowledge of the Bhagavad-Gita ... Jacob al-Kirkisani, a runaway from the whole history of religion, do you understand? You understand this, yes?"
He was addressing me; I felt addressed. He was not speaking above or around me, as when I rattled the typewriter keys in tune with his voice. It was the first time he had allowed me entrance (how I felt this!) into the sanctum of his meditations. I had all along been typist, amanuensis, servant, convenience; animate tool—Aristotle's term (I had once read this) for a slave. I was not his slave, no; but I had become his tool. One does not address a tool.
"What I have uncovered," he said, "is the labyrinth of renunciation. I have uncovered it in the heart of Jacob al-Kirkisani. In his heart only. It is not conversion, it is not syncretism, though there are fools who will insist on this. He does not journey to India to become a Hindu. He is no more a Hindu than a Hindu is a Karaite. He accepts, he receives, in order to refuse. In a man of supreme feeling refusal gives birth to refusal—that is the essence of it. The Karaites—how deeply, deeply I know them, I am their child, they are my children, I have penetrated into their lungs, their angers, their prayers! They reject, they rebel. But al-Kirk-isani reveals that he is apart from these things. Those who rebel do not regard themselves as heretics. Hardly so! They believe heresy lies in the very men they repudiate. For them, whatever is orthodox is heretical, so they depart from it.
"True heresy is neither rebellion nor rejection, and I tell you I have uncovered it in the heart of al-Kirkisani! It is refusal of every refusal but God's, a new thing, a true thing! It descends into the labyrinth of renunciation, from abyss to abyss, until in the bottommost depth of bottomlessness there is nothing to breathe, only the vacuum of the One God, the One true God, God the heretic, who disbelieves in man, who casts off this worshipful creature for the charlatan he is. This is Jacob al-Kirk-isani's meaning, it is what he has written—that it is God who is the heretic! Karaite, Arjuna, one or the other, it is all lost in the labyrinth, the One true God of heresy renounces all."
He had been pacing here and there, as I had so often heard him do, from the wall of books to the smooth broad bed and back again.
"You understand this, yes?"
I did not understand, I could not; but my instinct was for what inflamed him. The fragment from Spain; the Karaites, whose child he was, who were his children; al-Kirkisani, fallen out of Karaite rebellion into trust in a heretical God.
"You see, you see," he said, "what is my conviction worth? How will it be judged? What am I to do with it? It cannot be proved, it cannot be corroborated. There is not a scrap of paper in the world to verify it. I have only this thin copy, a copyist's hand, it will be taken for counterfeit, they will suppose me to have been duped, it is all in vain, in vain, I blinded myself, I was too quick, too quick—"
He came to stand before me.
"My dear Rose," he said—I was astonished to hear him say my name—"I ask you, where, where is my daughter?"
53
&nb
sp; Dear Rose,
We are staying in this place for a time. I think it will be a long time. Where we are is called Thrace. Papa read to me once about a man from Thrace who looked up to study the stars and fell into a ditch. People laughed, but papa said it is common for a man of learning to be laughed at, especially in this country. I think of papa very much. I am sure I have disappointed him, but perhaps after a while he will not be so angry. He was very angry when I would not go to school, but later on he stopped. I hope he will stop again.
James never wants to go out in the auto. In the auto we went everywhere to see things, all the little towns, and it was so interesting and strange. Sometimes I am sick in the auto, I thought it is because of this that James never wants to go out, but it is really because he is so sad in the little towns. That is why we have come back to Thrace. James says he can laugh in this place, I dont know why. Thrace is not so very different from all the other places, and even here James does not laugh so much, he is always sad. Perhaps the schnapps makes him sad, I dont know. We stay a great deal in our little room and hardly go out at all. Mama would not like it about the schnapps, but I dont mind. I think of mama very much. She is so very thin, you must make her eat more. You must make sure that Waltraut is not unhappy. She likes a pink ribbon to tie her hair.
Anneliese
There was no packet. There was no money.
54
THEY DROVE from town to town—Carthage, Rome, Ithaca, Oswego, Oneonta, Cortland. In Elmira he took her to see Mark Twain's grave; there were two or three other visitors there, all standing under umbrellas in the hard rain. She had asked to come to this place: she had read Tom Sawyer at home, she said. She remembered that Tom had cried at his own funeral, and that was comical, but she liked Erich Kästner so much more. And she liked Der Bärknabe still more—so often Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had read it aloud, singsonging the verses! And, later, Madame Mercier—but in French. She had forgotten the French, but she remembered Mademoiselle De Bonrepos's singsong, with her flat French accent overlaying the bouncing rhymes. She could recite some of those rhymes, she told him, this minute. When she was very young she had no idea that what she was hearing was a translation—Bärknabe seemed to have been born into her own language.
—Do people come to look at your house?
—What?
Her questions, the intensity of her confessions.
—Where you used to live. The way they come here.
—It's gone. It doesn't exist. Got turned into an old people's home.
Mr. Fullerton, Mr. Winberry, and Mr. Brooks had informed him of this long ago. "Sold for quite a fortune," Mr. Fullerton had crowed, as if he might care. What he cared about then was his new knapsack with all the pockets, and his steamship ticket.
—But the house is there, she prodded.
—I suppose.
—People could stand outside and look through the windows! Do they? Do they come from all over the world to look?
—Good luck to them, he said roughly, if they do.—
James! I want to go there! I want to see!
—No, he said. No.
—But I want to, she insisted.
This child. At such times she was more child than woman. It was as if, in fleeing her family, she had released herself from dutifulness to defiance. To willfulness.
—It's nowhere near here, he said.
—Where is it?
—Over the state line.
—But we have the auto, so...
A hiss of recognition flew from her.
—Oh! Passport! We have no passport, no papers...
—What's the matter with you? he said. Where do you think you are?
—But if it is a border...
The preposterous ignorance. A foreign child who did not grasp ordinary reality. They had kept her from school, from an American high school, where she belonged. Not meandering all over in a Ford, pointlessly.
—What's the matter with you? he said again. Passport, what are you talking about?
She knew he was impatient with her, and it was only a misunderstanding, like her papa with the Quakers, why was he so impatient? One could go from upstate—that was what he called all these little places, towns unlike any she had ever seen before in all her life—one could go from here to anywhere at all, he explained, and no papers, no border officials! He explained this—how angry he seemed—but the misunderstanding left a cold space between them. She could not make out how to warm this space. And anyhow he did not comprehend what it was to be without papers, to have no passport, to cower before a uniform, to pay for forged papers, to bribe to get genuine papers, to learn afterward that they were no longer valid, never to have good papers, valid papers, a genuine passport! Never! He could not comprehend any of this, how free he was, how simple, he was like an angry child. Her papa had said the Americans were like children.
—Without papers, she instructed him soberly, we could not have run to Sweden, and from Sweden...
He shut out the rest of it. Sweden. He did not tell her (why should he? his thoughts were his own) that he had once longed for Sweden, the farthest north it was possible to think of. A country encased in immaculate cold, as numb and immobile as ice. The doll house had come from Sweden, and the wooden doll house children with their yellow hair...
—At the William Penn, he said instead, when I first saw all of you, I thought it was Swedish you were speaking. But you all had such dark hair.
—Even Heinz, she put in.
Her hair was very dark. It was as dark as her mother's. She lifted a heavy handful of it and pressed it into his mouth, to stop up the misunderstanding. For a moment it made a kind of peace between them. But then he gave her a little shove: he didn't want her hair in his mouth. The rain had soaked it.
After that they drove to Thrace. It was a considerable distance away, and he pushed into the night without halting, except once, at a diner set all by itself, like a lost segment of train, on a truncated street edged by a field. It was close to midnight when they came into the neighborhood of the schoolyard, and the deserted tract of concrete looked nearly as he had remembered it—the lit bulb, helmeted by a metal grid, protruding from the building's brick flank, candy wrappers crumpled here and there. A basketball hoop clamped to a pole—that was new.
He had the girl by the elbow and led her across the yard.
—Right about here. The burial ground, he said.
The glare from the single bulb filled his lenses; she could not see his eyes.
—What place is this? she asked.
—You want to visit a shrine? This is it. Here!
He broke into his high thin stretched-out laugh, the same laugh that burbled out of her papa's study when he sat in there with her papa, the two of them convulsed by intimacy.
—The Bear Boy's tomb. Here's where I dumped the thing. Only, he said, it turned out to be a joke.
The high garbling laughter. She thought it had the sound of Niagara Falls from far away.
—It came alive again, he said. Voodoo! Up from the grave.
It was troubling that she could not see his eyes. He was laughing at some secret thing. Usually it was the schnapps that brought this on: an angry sadness that shattered into a vindictive snigger. But a whole day had passed without the schnapps, and still she heard it.
—Where are we? she demanded.
He put his thumb under her chin and lifted it. Across the top of the building, in the wan orange light, she read: THRACE CENTRAL HIGH.
—Where you ought to be. A place like this. Rudi sends the boys, why not you?
It was the same as having no papers, he could not feel it, he could not know!
—Papa teaches me. He teaches me so much. I know more than you! she burst out. No one can make me go to school.
—Rudi won't allow it, that's why.
—Papa?
—He keeps you home.
He could not feel it, he could not know! The Americans are like children!
She showed
him the fist of her left hand: how it would not close all the way. It curled only partly, like a reluctant snail.
—When we came papa said I must go to an American school. He said I must, I must...
She showed him the fist of her right hand: the fingernails hurt her palm.
—Papa said in Rome do as the Romans do. There is a law, you must go to an American school ... No one can make me go to school!
Frau Koch's desk was on a raised platform. A short metal bar lay in the drawer of this desk. The lesson was on Bismarck: name two achievements that can be attributed to Chancellor von Bismarck. Frau Koch broke the bones of the left hand. Not with a ruler. The ruler was for the others. The ruler would not have been so savage. With the short metal bar Frau Koch smashed two narrow bones. Because I gave the answer. Because I forgot that I was forbidden to speak. Because by then it was forbidden to be in that school at all. Because I would soon be thrown out of that school. Because it was imperative to be silent. Because it was imperative to be invisible. Because I spoke aloud. Because I gave the answer.
—No one can make me go to school ever again. Not even papa. Look, she said, I can easily make a fist with my right hand, see?
They drove to Ilion, Cobleskill, Homer, Horseheads, Naples, and Odysseus, and then came back, for the second time, to Thrace. The room they found was small and dark, but it was cleaner than most, and the house had a garden behind it: some nameless stalks in an exhausted weedy plot. The landlady served an early breakfast and a late dinner. In between she went off to her job as a waitress. There were no other boarders; they were alone.
But more and more James would not go out. It was odd, and disappointing: he had wanted to return to Thrace, where there was nothing of note to see, only a monotonous stretch of scrubby abandoned farmland all around, dead barns, a soporific Main Street (how queer, all these towns had blocks of shops identically named), and no local lore that anyone cared about. Thrace was unsympathetic. It appealed to some streak of perversity in him: to seek out the very site that aroused in him a bitterness, an irony she could not fathom, no matter if he explained it.
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