The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  Candide inquired: “Whatchoo got in here’s worth some-thin?” Under the ski mask a pair of eyeglasses glinted; his head was horrible, supernatural, a great woolly maroon knob with two ferocious headlights. In the bedroom closet he found Puttermesser’s old typewriter. He didn’t want it. He gave it a kick. He opened a dresser drawer and scrabbled around in it and pulled out Puttermesser’s papa’s silver watch; it went right into his pocket. It was an old-fashioned wind-up watch.

  Candide inquired: “Rings? Earrings? Where you put em?”

  But she had none of these things. Exegetical onomastic urban puritanical Puttermesser! A necklace or two might have saved her life.

  Her eyes fled to the one possibly desirable object within reach: on the teak table in the corner of her bedroom stood a computer. Puttermesser had acquired this device as a hand-me-down; she was now technologically ascended. Harvey Morgenbluth, upstairs in 6-C, had bought himself a newer model. The old one was already obsolete; superseded—though good enough for a novice like Puttermesser. These machines were spawned in “generations,” Harvey Morgenbluth explained, and succeeded one another with the rapidity of fruit flies. Puttermesser was reluctant to give up her workhorse typewriter for a fruit fly; she felt much as her turn-of-the-century predecessors had felt when they were obliged, willy-nilly, to move from gas lighting to electricity, or from Dobbin’s warm flanks to a motorcar. Still, humanity was turning on its temporal hinge, and Puttermesser was obliged, willy-nilly, to turn with it.

  “You can take that,” she said to the horrible woolly knob, with its lit-up peepholes. “Just take it and go.”

  “You got rings? Earrings? No?” He lifted the computer off the table, wrenching it free of the keyboard; the wires trailed. Then he set it down on the floor and gave it a kick. “Where you keep em? Rings, bracelets, hah?” She watched him shut the bedroom door and barricade it with Harvey Morgenbluth’s obsolete old model. There was no escape. The computer’s silent glass mouth was indifferent, though she had brought it to life often enough, a genie spewing alphabets. Lately Puttermesser had begun to type out improbables; or the genie had.

  Secreted inside the computer’s dead mouth, improbable, impalpable, were these curious fragments:

  My father is nearly a Yankee: his father gave up peddling to captain a dry goods store in Providence, Rhode Island. In summer he sold captain’s hats, and wore one in all his photographs. From Castle Garden to blue New England mists, my father’s father, hat-and-neckware peddler to Yankees! Providence, Rhode Island, beats richly in my veins.

  My younger sister was once highly motivated as a scholar, but instead she married an Indian, a Parsee chemist, and went to live in Calcutta. She has four children and seven saris of various fabrics.

  Not a single syllable of any of this was true. She had no sister, whether younger or older. There was nothing of New England in her veins. Her history was bare of near-Yankees. She had never known her grandfather, dead now for more than seventy years; that grandfather, sickly, had never left the wretched little village of his birth in cold corrupt old Russia. It was her papa who had run from the Czar’s depredations and passed through Castle Garden’s great hall: an immigrant speck in an immigrant tide.

  The genie in the computer was revising Puttermesser’s ancestry, it was dreaming Puttermesser’s dreams—even her newest dream of Paradise:

  Here is how it will be [the genie had written in Puttermesser’s voice]. I will sit in Eden under a middle-sized tree, in the solid blaze of an infinite heart-of-July, green, green, green everywhere, green above and green below, myself gleaming and made glorious by sweat, every itch annihilated, fecundity dismissed. Day after celestial day, perfection of desire upon perfection of contemplation, into the exaltations of an uninterrupted forever. In Eden all insatiabilities are nourished: I will learn about the linkages of genes, about quarks, about primate sign language, theories of the origins of the races, religions of ancient civilizations, what Stonehenge meant. I will study Roman law, the more arcane varieties of higher mathematics, the nuclear composition of the stars, what happened to the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian, and Icelandic.

  Ah, false, false! Paradise, when Puttermesser was transported there, bore no resemblance to this hungry imagining. Paradise, when Puttermesser was transported there, was . . . but no. No and no. First it is necessary to get through the murder and the rape.

  Clearly the computer had no interest for Candide. He was looking for something portable. Puttermesser undid the band of her wristwatch and tossed the watch across the room to where he was standing. He caught it with one hand, examined it, dropped it to the floor, and stepped on it. The plastic face crackled under his sneaker. “Garbage,” he said. “Worth ten bucks. Don’t dis me, lady.”

  And then she did not know what to do. “Try the kitchen,” she said. “The spoons and things.” She thought: let him just open the bedroom door, and she would fly through it and get away.

  “Sterling?” inquired Candide.

  “Oh yes,” Puttermesser assured him. There was nothing in her kitchen drawers but stainless steel.

  “O.K.,” he said. “I’ll go look. But don’t you move, lady.”

  He shoved aside the computer and opened the door. The green lamp reflected greenly in the ski mask’s portholes. “Hey wait,” he said, and felt for something in his pocket.

  It was a narrow rope. In no time at all—his fingers were admirably quick—he had tied her wrists to the radiator. With a twist of the rope she was flung to the floor. There she lay, contorted, staring through the rungs of the chair.

  He went out and came back.

  “You lyin to me, lady. It’s all garbage in there.”

  “There’s cash in my purse.”

  “Where you keepin it, hah?”

  She was weeping now—a painful mute weeping, as if her vocal cords had been suddenly cut.

  He found her purse—it was right there on the dresser—and turned her wallet upside down. Through the rungs of the chair she saw the falling fan of cards and green bills. But there was a raging light in the holes of the mask.

  Candide said: “I don’t like no credit cards and I don’t like no chicken shit.”

  How quick and fastidious his fingers were! He wiggled the knife and made it shimmer and shiver; then he put the handle to his lips, like a flute, and kissed it. He pushed the chair out of the way to clear a space, and stood astride her, a sneaker close to each ear. She could smell the rubber soles of his sneakers, but the rubber smell was oddly mixed with vomit and she understood that it was her own vomit; she was vomiting, and she felt defiled by her own vomit, and also by a terror so frigid that it left her unaware of the spasms that must be convulsing her esophagus. It seemed to her important—she sensed this acutely—not to offend him by crying out, but her breath ran thin, it was anyhow not possible: he had placed the weight of Joseph and His Brothers on her breasts, and was heaving downward with one powerful flattened palm. He began efficiently, with the throat—the vocal cords were sliced through instantly—and then crisscrossed the blade rapidly over the ears, lopping off (it was unintended) half a lobe on the right ear. Her breath ran thinner now, but she could taste the rusty wetness that was her blood. Then he repositioned her torso, ripped the knife through her underpants. . . .

  But enough. By then Puttermesser was in Paradise. Like the excruciations of labor (but how could Puttermesser know this? she had never given birth), dying, even agonized dying, generates its own amnesia. And since the rape was committed after the last living sigh had left her body, there was nothing to erase from Puttermesser’s posthumous cognition. For her, the rape never happened at all.

  It is sometimes supposed that in Paradise one is permitted to bend over the bar of Heaven, so to speak, for a final contemplation of one’s abandoned flesh. This is a famous untruth steeped in a profound illogic. Had Puttermesser been able to view herself tethered, bloodied, torn, mutilated, stripped, striped, violated—had she taken in so malignant a scene, so degene
rate an act: the lower quarters of her carcass still hot, the tissues still elastic, yet resistant to easy penetration because the wall of death has already blinded every cell, death its own stricken fortress; had Puttermesser seen that engorged member crash through the entryway to the lately untrodden tunnel between her elderly thighs, had she seen the ski mask smeared with vomit, and the wily fingers that held the knife lavish vomit on that ramming organ—she might have been swept and rent by a pity so enduring that Paradise could not tolerate or sustain it.

  That is why a last look is not allowed. That is why there is no pity in Paradise. And that is why Paradise is cold-hearted.

  A second misconception: Paradise has no gate or door or vestibule. Simply, one arrives—or, rather, since this is Puttermesser’s history, Puttermesser was all at once there. Or here: though this too misrepresents. In Paradise there is no before or after, no over there or right here, no up or down, no then or now, no happy or sad. The last phrase may puzzle. No sadness in Paradise is to be expected; but no happiness? Isn’t happiness the point of Paradise?

  Return for a moment (but in Paradise there are no moments: no hours, minutes, or seconds) to that earliest word in the world’s earliest tale: PARDES. The orchard, the garden. But PARDES is also an acronym for a way of understanding—even for understanding the meaning of PARDES itself. Dismiss the vowels and consider: PRDS. All the letters tied in a bouquet constitute PARDES. (Or Paradise. Or PARADEISOS.) But taken one by one, each letter contains its own meaning. Now follow closely:

  P. This stands for p’shat.

  R. This stands for remez.

  D. This stands for drosh.

  S. This stands for sod.

  Now follow closely again; these are words for adepts. (And be patient. We will come back to Puttermesser. Only see how mistaken she was in dreaming that Paradise is a place to study in! In Paradise everything has already been learned; all intellectual curiosity is slaked.) Then let us begin:

  P’shat is the obvious sense: the readiest meaning.

  Remez is the allusive sense; that which is hinted at or inferred.

  Drosh is the induced sense; an interpretation; that which requires investigation and must be drawn out. A theory, in

  short.

  Sod, ah, sod: this is the secret meaning.

  In Paradise, it must be said at once, only Scriptural languages are spoken. You will recognize Hebrew (of course), Sanskrit, and Arabic. The tongues of other hallowed texts may be less familiar; yet all these sacred tongues are interchangeable—i.e., their speakers are not aware of any differences, whether in their own speech or in the speech of other paradisal denizens. Puttermesser, for instance, imagined she was uttering the syllables of her native New York; in actuality, she was speaking the archaic Hebrew, bold and blunt, of Genesis. —But to continue:

  Paradise in its obvious sense: it is where you find yourself when you die. (Simple!)

  In the allusive sense: there are hints in Paradise of how your life deserves to be judged. Also hints of indifference to all that.

  Paradise interpreted: this Puttermesser is sure to accomplish.

  The secret meaning of Paradise: it resides solely in the pupil of the Eye of God.

  Even before her ascent to this place, these formulations were not new to Puttermesser. What chiefly struck her was that PRDS in all its branches had nothing to do with any idea of the future: yet wasn’t Eden particularly known as the World-to-Come? So here was still another misapprehension: Puttermesser, like all mortals, had erroneously assumed that Paradise was the future. It was, she thought, immortality.

  But as she wandered through its various neighborhoods, she came on living persons, in full health; she was certain they had not died. There were theaters and concert halls and movie houses and video shops; there were poetry readings. She stopped to listen to one of these: a middle-aged Russian, disheveled, red-haired, out of breath, a trifle irascible. His Old Church Slavonic, recited at a rapid clip, had the explicit inflections of the streets that sidle away from the Nevsky Prospekt. And then (this was perhaps remez) Puttermesser understood that all this was what in an earthly vocabulary would be called hallucination. Surely the living were not in Paradise. She looked around for W. H. Auden, who had befriended the Russian poet, and who was unarguably dead. But she saw and heard only the still-alive and lively Russian. There were flowers at his feet; she recognized tulips, red, yellow, and white, and gladioli, and violets, and a patch of tiny impatiens. The trees were indistinguishable from earthly trees. Everything had an inner fluorescence.

  It was plain, then (she had arrived at drosh), that Paradise was the place—though it was not exactly a place—where she could walk freely inside her imagination, and call up anything she desired. But anything she might call up would inevitably be from the past—what else had she brought with her, if not the record of her own life? Yet if, as she now somehow knew, there was, in fact, no past or future in Paradise—and only a puzzling present, with a flesh-and-blood not-yet-resurrected poet declaiming from a lectern in a flowery realm famously reserved only for the deceased—then what was it she was actually calling up?

  The lost, the missing, the wished-for. The unfinished and the unachieved. Not the record of her life as she had lived it, but as she had failed to live it. If she was curious about a poet (and yes, she was curious about the Russian, who, like her own papa, had escaped a ferocious tyranny; and also she was a little bewildered by him, even a little suspicious, because hadn’t he once slyly declared for polytheism, or at least against monotheism?)—well, there he suddenly was. She could hear him out; she supposed she could, if she liked, ask him anything at all, and he would have to answer her; he was, after all, a simulacrum, a palpable vision, and wholly subject to her newly celestial will. Whereas—while she lived—he had been a remote figure, inaccessible, distantly lofty and strange. She had felt his exclusions, his hauteur, his rebuff.

  But now the whirlwind of her mind could command his presence. His presence or anyone’s! She had only to think, and the thought would appear incarnate before her. Ah, delightful! Splendid! It was, in truth, Paradise.

  No rebuff could go unrepaired.

  At nineteen she had been enormously in love, and was rejected.

  The man’s name was Emil Hauchvogel. He was twenty-two. He had a beautiful head, molded like a Roman sculpture, and he was a student of philosophy. His voice was blurred, very faintly, by a thread of foreignness pulled along the edge of the vowels; as a child of eleven or twelve he had fled from Hitler’s Germany with his parents. In Frankfurt his father had been a well-off wholesaler, and though the family had arrived as impoverished refugees, Emil’s father worked his way up and managed to establish himself securely enough in the same business. Emil reflected this paternal striving and success: he had the confident air of a young lord, but not in the sense of easy inheritance. He was trained for ambition.

  Emil’s college was small, bucolic, venerable, revered. Puttermesser’s college, a patient subway ride from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, was urban, mobbed, brash. She too longed for philosophy, but it was too hard for her. Her brain was not subtle enough: desire wasn’t capacity. There were questions she could barely grasp the import of, and theories that floated by like so many indefinable cloud-shapes. What did Thrasymachus intend? Was it possible to trust the Nicomachean Ethics? Is pleasure an activity or merely a feeling?

  One morning in early January she read a notice on the bulletin board just outside the cafeteria:

  NEW ENGLAND WINTER WEEKEND RETREAT

  SUBJECT: CAN THERE BE MORALITY WITHOUT GOD?

  Puttermesser knew what she thought. An ethical imperative without a divine order to implant and enforce it was unlikely, was no imperative at all. The unheated bus rattled and groaned uphill for miles on a narrow highway between wintry fields. The claws of naked branches were black against the snow. In her old galoshes Puttermesser’s feet grew numb. The dozen other students ate their sandwiches or catnapped; now and then they sang; the pom
poms on their hats bounced. Wound in scarves, clapping their woolen mittens in time with the singing, the live breath steaming like teakettles from their rounded mouths, patches of red brightening their cheeks, they seemed as remote from metaphysics as their lunch bags and knapsacks. Yet weren’t they all heading for Emil Hauchvogel’s college to talk of God?

  Emil met the bus in the parking lot behind the dormitories. The dorms were mostly empty, he explained: everyone had gone home for New Year’s, and the little group of philosophers would have the whole campus nearly to themselves. It wouldn’t all be High Thought—in one of the halls there were skis and sleds ready for use. It was instantly clear that Emil was the organizer. Puttermesser got off the bus with cramped legs and a full bladder. Wherever she turned, the ground was white. The low college buildings peeped out of the snow like miniature Swiss chalets. Puttermesser’s citified heart rose in her well-bundled ribs.

  First there was toast and vegetarian soup, and then came the sledding. It was already dusk. Puttermesser went on her belly down the long hill, forgetting to steer: she ended half-buried in a snow mound. “That’s not the way,” Emil said. He was in charge of everything and everyone. At the top of the hill he eased himself down flat on the sled, and Puttermesser climbed on. The length of her lay against his back and rump and thighs. His legs stuck out well beyond the curve of the runners. The two of them rushed downward like some mythical double creature, or else it was only the wind that rushed; her body resting on Emil’s, Puttermesser felt warm, cradled, lazy, even sleepy. The slope seemed infinitely longer than before, the descent dozingly slow. “See?” Emil said when they reached the bottom of the hill. “It’s all in the hands. You have to control the direction, you can’t just go hurling yourself any old way.”

  And after that he paid her no attention at all. From a little distance she saw him helping with the straps of a pair of skis. The skier breathed out teakettle steam and had ruddy cheeks under a pompomed wool hat; nevertheless she had not been on the bus. She belonged to Emil’s own tribe; she belonged to this superior landscape. Streamers of white-blond bangs swayed under the wool hat. With a fierce and ready shriek she plunged through the blue-black dark, a flying crescent on a falling path.