by Bruce Duffy
Max threw his hands up delightedly. Oh! Oh! He found a way, this one! He found a way! God, the tongues start to do this, said Max, clacking his fingers together. That was when Ludwig’s trouble starts with this people. That was the start, sure.
Moore, intrigued now, asked, But how did you fix the engine, Wittgenstein?
With the hammers, interjected Max.
Sledgehammers, corrected Wittgenstein, acting as if this were nothing. I saw the engine was frozen. So I positioned Max and ten other men around the train with sledgehammers. And then I had them strike certain spots at different intervals to set up a sympathetic frequency — a rhythm to free the structure.
Moore almost upset his sherry. Can’t you see him, Bertie? he said with a sideways look at Russell. Conducting them all like a great glockenspiel?
Sure! Max sat nodding. They think Ludwig is crazy. Max touched his forehead zanily, then went on, Half the people, they are there to laugh at him, such a rich crazy man. This one who thinks he is so smart, you know, with this boom-boom, tink-tink. And, then … Max’s eyes got big. The train engine, it moves! And they looked at him, these peoples, and they get all quiet. Sure, they think he is — Max touched his head again, this time superstitiously. And then, ffssst! Like that, off Ludwig is. Gone!
My God, said Russell, raising his eyes. They must have thought you performed a miracle, Wittgenstein.
This was too much. Wittgenstein was disgusted. Nonsense! It was no miracle. Please …
Wittgenstein had just managed to change the subject when they were interrupted by a knock. It was Russell’s son, John, who ran to his father and said in a breathless whisper, Daddy, Mrs. Bride says you’re to come to dinner now. She says everything will be mush if you don’t. Are you coming?
We’re coming, said Russell, standing up. Tell her we’ll be sitting down in five or ten minutes. Have you called your mother?
Mr. Higgins says she’s coming now.
Good.
As the boy ran back, Russell turned to his guests and explained, Mr. Higgins is an American friend of Dora’s. He’s been spending the past few days with us.
Oh? Standing nearest the host, Dorothy perked up with polite interest, naturally expecting that Russell would say something more about this other guest who would be at dinner. But, oddly, Russell said nothing, and Dorothy, wanting to break the awkward silence that followed, remarked, Your John seems a lovely boy.
Russell sprang to life at this, saying after a moment’s hesitation, You know, I do hate to brag, but he is. And fearless — God! Fearless of heights, water, horses. My fear is that he will be destroyed in the next war.
It was queer how this came out, to mix morbidness with such enthusiasm. Russell did not say “next war” as anything but a certainty, but to Moore and Wittgenstein, who felt no such certainty, it sounded only cranky and political, part of his unpleasant, propagandizing side.
A Son
RUSSELL AND HIS GUESTS were just starting down the hall to dinner when John ran back to his father and solemnly asked a word with him.
We’ll only be a moment, said Russell to the others. With that, he led the boy, all huffy and disheartened, to a nearby alcove and listened for a minute before sending him off with several carefully chosen words and a squeeze on the shoulder.
It was a thoroughly ordinary transaction between a father and son, but again Wittgenstein felt that sense of loss and envy, that longing that he had felt outside earlier, when he had first seen the two of them together. What a cruel contradiction, not to desire women and yet to desire a son: to Wittgenstein it seemed that one impulse should have canceled the other. Even then, six years after it had happened, Wittgenstein still found it hard to believe that he had once asked a man to let him adopt the man’s own blood.
The boy Wittgenstein had asked to adopt was Franz Kluck, a poor farmer’s son. Franz was the most gifted pupil Wittgenstein ever had in Trattenbach. Every night after school, in the little room he occupied above the barren grocery, Wittgenstein gave Franz and a few other of his brightest boys additional lessons in Latin and Greek, geometry, biology, German literature. At eleven, Franz could recite Schiller and Goethe, write Latin verse in hexameter, discuss Pythagoras, identify local rocks and plants and follow a topographical map. At home, his father, who was drunk whenever he could scrape up the money, beat him for coming home late and ridiculed him for his airs — for reading books and for speaking correct German and not the local dialect. Franz’s three older brothers were as terrified of their father as they were jealous of their brilliant little brother. Their father encouraged them to pound sense into Franz, and the beatings were especially vicious when he was drunk and urging them on. In an effort to force the boy to drop his stupid books and confront real life, the brothers once mashed his face into steaming hot guts. Sitting on him, they poured schnapps down his throat and tickled him till he blacked out. Several expensive books Wittgenstein had lent the boy returned with broken bindings and shit-splattered pages from having been heaved against walls or flung into the pigyard. Once, after Franz had accidentally left the door open, his father made him stand for hours in the freezing cold without a coat. Not long after that, Herr Kluck went on a binge and nearly burned down the house.
Most nights after their study sessions, Wittgenstein would walk the boy part of the way home. The slender mountain road was dark but strewn with interesting rocks, and the sky was usually swarming with stars. It seemed they were always stooping or pointing, or examining something by the light of a match, but inevitably as they approached Franz’s house the boy would grow anxious and depressed. Wittgenstein knew how he felt — he had felt much the same as a boy. He knew the silence and tensed shoulders, the sick stomach. More, he knew the resentment that turned back in on a boy, especially a brilliant one, compounding the senseless pain of adult whims and cruelty into a circuitous and self-fulfilling logic: imagining biting back the dog that had bit you, then in guilt biting yourself more bitterly than the dog ever could.
Franz knew his stars because he knew the night. Knowledge of constellations came later, once one saw a logic, a fatal organizing pattern, to one’s life. Then came the obsessive building, the spiraling systems, the fantastic and oppressive apparatus to account for what could not possibly be put right, or justified. For Franz, it was the father who, in one breath, could punish him for an open door and in another declare his sovereign father’s right to burn down his own house if he liked. For Wittgenstein, it was the father whom he could remember once calling him a pig for eating three of the doughnutlike Krapfen. His voracious father, on the other hand, might eat four or five at a sitting without being branded a pig, and for no better reason than because he was a Vater.
Wittgenstein understood this night-entranced boy; he understood him all too well. As a boy, Wittgenstein, too, had made a study of the stars, especially after Hans killed himself in Cuba. Winter stars, the boy had found, were hypodermic — hot, piercing and fearfully accurate — but the summer stars, especially, he imagined, the southern stars of Cuba, were warm and hypnagogic, like overripe blooms, like bitter drugs and pistols clumsily aimed. Wittgenstein could remember habitually pinching himself under the table in his father’s august presence, finding that the smaller pain, which he could control, tended to blunt the larger one, which he could not. When this failed, there was the roof, where he could peer out as through a tube into that vast and mindless sky in which so much music had been lost and wasted, wasted as Hans had himself been wasted, leading the boy to fear that the world, which seemed resoundingly closed, would run out of numbers or melodies or places to bury people, until life itself was exhausted as he himself was exhausted by the father in the study below, coaxing moans from the boy-sized cello cradled between his knees.
The grown man knew his stars well enough to know that Franz was sincere when he turned to him one night before heading down the path to his house and said he wished that he, Herr Wittgenstein, were his father. Letting down the warm formality with which he d
isguised his love, Wittgenstein said he wished the same.
That was the origin of the idea. Afterward, it seemed to Wittgenstein that the whole scheme had been rash and ill conceived, but that was because it had all gone so impossibly wrong. Yet the truth was, there was nothing sudden about his decision. Wittgenstein had examined every phase of his adoption plan — and every possible stumbling block — in meticulous detail, to the point that, for months, he could think of little else. And certainly, he never would have dreamed of suggesting adoption if Franz had not first broached the idea. Franz was a very pure and serious boy, but Wittgenstein had nevertheless been careful to give him plenty of time to weigh his decision. In the meantime, Wittgenstein brought Franz and the rest of his children by train to Vienna, where they stayed with Mining and Gretl while touring buildings and museums and going to concerts, cafés and the Prater. Later, Franz even succeeded in getting his father’s no doubt insensible permission to go once more to Vienna, this time alone, to spend a week with Mining and Gretl as a trial to see how he liked it. And when Franz did like it, Wittgenstein made still more plans for a whole new life. Everything was set forth. He and the boy would live with Mining in Vienna. He would get his doctorate and teach, and during the summers he and his son, Franz — Franz Wittgenstein — would travel, touring England and Russia and Palestine, maybe even America, on and on.
Then came the day that Wittgenstein went with his mediator Max to talk to the boy’s father. They found Herr Kluck stooped in the muddy pigyard below the decaying house, grimy, bristled and pitifully small compared to the monster the boy had described. That he was a brute and an ignoramus was beside the point; he was still a father, and that, no matter what Wittgenstein told himself to the contrary, made him immeasurably more than he, an oddball with no wife. Even as he began talking to Herr Kluck, Wittgenstein realized that the whole scheme was ridiculous. Had Max not been there to steady him, he easily would have turned around in disgust and walked away. Afterward, Wittgenstein thought he must have been out of his mind. Did he really think that Herr Kluck, this father of nine, for whom children were basically cattle, would simply give his son up for adoption just because some crazy man from the city wanted to raise the boy as his own and educate him? If nothing else, Herr Kluck had his pride. What did he care that Wittgenstein was willing to send Franz home to visit whenever he wished? Herr Kluck said the boy was no good anyhow. He would just run back home.
Max wasn’t fooled. Max knew the story. He knew what was running through Kluck’s sodden brain, between those crusted wads of hair stuffed in his ears. He knew Herr Kluck couldn’t allow himself to be indebted to this reputedly wealthy man. To give the boy outright, even as a gift, to imply that this rich man could give the boy things that he couldn’t, much less to imply that these things had any worth — for Herr Kluck, as Max knew, this was unthinkable. Selling the boy, on the other hand, driving a hard bargain as if the boy were a bull or a pig, this would have brought Herr Kluck recognition as a clever operator, ridding himself of a mouth to feed, and for cash money, to boot.
Max pulled Wittgenstein aside when Herr Kluck, with a shrug and grunt, walked away — a typical bargaining ploy. Max was extremely fond of the boy. The orphan in Max had a large emotional stake in this adoption. Max had already throttled Franz’s oldest brother, Klaus, behind the tavern, showing him, in the most graphic terms, what he would do if he or anybody else laid another hand on the boy. Franz, then, was a kind of second chance for Max, who badly wanted to make right for Franz what had eluded him in his own life. Standing in Herr Kluck’s pigyard, faced with his friend’s sudden lack of resolve, Max was on the verge of tears.
What’s wrong with you? he asked, staring into Wittgenstein’s shamed face. You said you want him — do you? The old bastard won’t give him to you, I’ll tell you that right now. But he’ll sell him to you. Just show him the color of some money. Just a little money — he’ll take it. Get him drunk and he’ll trade you the boy for a bottle. Hell, I’ll do it, if it’s so distasteful to you! Hey! Come back here!
But Wittgenstein’s pride got in the way. Not even for the boy’s sake would he buy him — it was disgusting and out of the question. Wittgenstein walked away. He actually walked away, abandoning Max just as surely as he did Franz.
Of course the story got out, Herr Kluck saw to that. Soon it was even said that Wittgenstein offered him a fortune for the disappointed boy, whom afterward people eyed with wonder, as if he were a walking sack of money. Wittgenstein even received several half-decipherable notes offering children for sale — good Gentile stock children, the notes said, girls and boys, and pretty, Herr Lehrer, all ages.
The incident with the broken-down locomotive, then, had only been the start of Wittgenstein’s misfortunes in Trattenbach. Miracles aren’t necessarily good or fortuitous occurrences, much less happy ones. There are miracles of belief, and there are miracles of disbelief in the face of the dazzlements of belief — miracles of overcoming the lies and evasions of one’s life and time. Thus, on the one hand, there is the spectacle of a powerful man being unhorsed by a gust of light, while, on the other, there is the powerless man living with the seemingly incredible belief that one day the light will strike him, turning him, for one dazzling moment, into light itself. For Wittgenstein, in any case, the worst and most unbelievable miracle was that, after this failed adoption, in the absence of belief and in spite of all reason, he remained in Trattenbach, with the hardest revelations yet to come.
Commonplace Miracles
DINNER was not a success.
Maybe it was Dora’s reserve, the way she politely rebuffed Dorothy’s first shy attempts at friendliness. Or maybe it was the uncertainty about just who this Higgins was, sitting protectively at Dora’s arm. Higgins didn’t exactly seem to be a mutual friend — not to judge by Russell’s snide remarks and Higgins’s cold silence.
Also, there were the constant interruptions. The children were taking a bus trip down the coast the next day to tour some Bronze and Iron Age sites and do a bit of bathing — and there were last-minute problems with lunches and the bus and who among the staff would be going, since it was a Saturday. The other problem was what to do with Rabe. Taking him on the trip was hardly an appetizing idea, but then, as Dora argued, it made better sense to bring him to a ruin than to risk his turning the school into one.
Then it was 8:30. Distant thumps and caterwauling. Time to say good night to the children. We always make a point of it, said Russell, ceremoniously helping his heavy wife up from the table while the proletarian Higgins slouched over his plate. When Russell and Dora returned, they seemed silent, strained. Had there been words, perhaps? Once more the telephone was ringing. Once more, Miss Marmer peeked in with profuse apologies, this time to say it was the solicitor, long distance.
Russell looked distraught when he returned. Uncapping the decanter of sherry, he said, The solicitor thinks we ought to hire another detective to find the boy’s mother! I told him the expense of one is ruining me as it is. Then leaning toward Higgins, Russell said archly, Two more weeks in America. That’s what it will cost me, Higgins. Hoof, hoof.
It was probably in retaliation for this crack that Higgins leaned over to Dora then and said, I know one very good detective — several, in fact.
Do you now? asked Russell, bristling with fears that the plotters had been making inquiries about him. (They wouldn’t trickle poison down his ear!)
In their unhappiness, Russell and Dora were almost oblivious to how they were coming across to their guests, for whom their life was like an open bureau filled with things the visitors politely tried not to see. Dora hardly seemed to care at that point, sick of the whole pretense of it. She had barely eaten half her dinner when she excused herself, taking her sick headache back to bed. Higgins was no more discreet, excusing himself five minutes later. Russell wanted to brain him. The fellow didn’t even have the decency to leave by the other door.
It was easy to feel sorry for Russell then, left to fend al
one with his guests and the constantly ringing telephone. Wittgenstein had been noticeably quiet. So, for that matter, had Max, who was looking bored. Suddenly, he rose from the table, without excusing himself.
Oh, said Russell hopefully. The lavatory, should you want it, Max, is down the hall — to your left.
Max nodded in acknowledgment, then went out. Ten, fifteen minutes passed. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, Russell excused himself, saying, Oh, dear, I forgot to tell Miss Marmer something. I’ll be back presently.
Russell knew what he would find, and sure enough, he found it. They were standing by the banister. For a moment, Russell didn’t know what to do. Leaning against the wall with her hands behind her back, she was simple and easy — easier, certainly, than she had ever been with him. Did he detect a trace of sauciness, of rising anger in her eyes? He expected the girl to blanch and shrink with shame, but instead she faced him, querulous, but standing her ground. Max stood near her, saying with his hostile little eyes, Move me, you old goat, just try.
Russell felt his gorge rise. He would not be a hypocrite, would not enforce a code of morality he found basically false and hateful. So be it, he told himself. The girl was free, if she had no better sense, or taste, in companions. Russell felt almost fatherly, if flimsy, in his concern, which even he knew to be suspect. I was looking for Miss Marmer, he offered as if he needed an excuse. There was galling sweetness in her voice as she said, I am sorry. I have not seen her. And then she waited as for a poison to take effect, knowing that they, as two, were stronger than he.
Russell made a point of finding Miss Marmer then, but not to talk school business. They ducked into his office and shut the door. Miss Marmer could see his need and seemed pleased.