A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  The only way to avoid looking at it now was to leave. He was yelling about calling a policeman. There was something ridiculous in that—not a cop, not the police, but a policeman, like a small child with great faith in all public servants.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll see whose side he takes,” and she turned and flounced off. She did—she flounced. Entitled and superior. A mean, spoiled brat. She who was none of those things, not ever.

  Over the Puddle Styx, up the stairs, onto the train. Even now she wants to say that this was when she first began to grasp the enormity of what she’d done, but that would be a lie. She’d known what she was doing as she was doing it. Stop it, she’d thought as she raised her arm. Walk away, she’d thought as she threw the green tool. What the fuck are you doing? she inquired of herself as she slithered under the gate.

  She hadn’t stopped, though. Hadn’t walked away. Thoughts versus feelings, and the winner had been feelings. A huge upset. No one would have predicted it.

  But as the euphoria of her fury wore off, Lady became aware of a terrible pain inside her, sharp and systemic, as if she’d swallowed the millions of screws in the store and they were now scraping her organs as they tumbled through her bloodstream. She knew the reason for the pain. The entire encounter had been a test, and she’d failed, and she was hurting inside over that failure—because no matter what that man had done, no matter how badly he’d behaved, no matter how much of an asshole he’d been, she should have been kind. She’d seen the numbers. She’d known his life. Our family had played a part in that life, that living death.

  And what had she done? She’d thrown the screwdriver.

  To this day, whenever Lady thinks of the hardware store owner—and she thinks of him more often than you’d imagine—she feels the same shame, the same painful scraping of threaded metal through her body. She has to stop what she’s doing. She closes her eyes. She focuses on her breath. She inhales. She exhales. She tries to envision the store owner, wherever he is—dead, she supposes, given that the store is long gone, and he was an old man even in 1976—and when she has conjured him, she does her best to bathe him in love or as close to love as a sinner like Lady can manage.

  But back then, as the train carrying Lady home tunneled underground, she felt no love for anyone. She felt only the pain. She was mortified, and she didn’t use the word casually. You didn’t have to be a Latin scholar to figure out its derivation. She wanted right then and there to mort.

  CHAPTER 3

  1868

  The American Civil War is three years over. Abraham Lincoln is three years dead. Jesse and Frank James have just joined the Cole Younger gang. And in the city of Breslau, in the Kingdom of Prussia, a pair of first cousins have fallen in love and eloped.

  When the cousins return home and announce what they’ve done, the groom’s father and bride’s uncle declare the union unnatural. The bride’s father and groom’s uncle pour themselves stiff drinks. The mother-aunts embrace and sob.

  “What kind of child do you think a marriage like this will produce?” the fathers and mothers, the aunts and uncles, demand.

  We think it’s sad that the bride never gets to say, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a Nobel Prize–winning kind of child.” She never gets to say it because she dies nine months later while giving birth to the future laureate. From the first, his head is exceedingly large.

  1871

  The Franco-Prussian Wars have ended. The unification of the German Empire is complete. The Second Reich has begun, though of course the real power remains with Prussia. The former Prussian king, Wilhelm I, is emperor. The former Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, is chancellor.

  When affairs of the empire bring Bismarck to Breslau, the widower Heinrich Lorenz Alter leaves his dye factory to stand among the throngs waiting to see the champion of iron and blood emerge from his carriage, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high as if he’s a figure in a portrait by an artist enamored of the golden mean. As Bismarck passes, the crowd heaves like an unfettered bosom in a bodice ripper. Much of the attraction in coming to see Bismarck is being a part of this impassioned heaving, this surging forward—this element of danger, the possibility that one may be caught in a lustful stampede, may be knocked to the ground and literally perish from love of king and country.

  The first time he brings his motherless son with him, Heinrich hoists the boy onto his shoulders. The child perches there stolidly, expertly. He’s a sober two-year-old who’s been left to the care of redoubtable nurses with quick tempers and paddles and switches. He’s well trained in the art of keeping still. Even when Bismarck arrives and a roar takes over the square as the crowd buffets Heinrich, the boy makes no sound. Heinrich has to twist his neck, look up at his son to make sure the boy isn’t frightened. When he does, he sees tears, but they are tears of joy; Heinrich’s certain of that. “Two years old,” Heinrich writes to his youngest brother, Rudi, the only member of the family he still speaks to. “Two years old, and such depth of feeling for his country.”

  “You’re raising him well,” Rudi replies dutifully, “and under such difficult circumstances.”

  Heinrich revels in Rudi’s praise. It’s true, he thinks. He has raised the boy well. There’s a small photograph of the dead mother, Line Alter Alter, in an oval frame on the boy’s bedroom dresser; the child is tasked with kissing it each night before getting beneath the blankets. But what dominates the nursery is the portrait of Bismarck that hangs on the wall facing the bed. It’s the same portrait that currently hangs over the toilet in our Riverside Drive apartment. The generations before ours hung it in the foyer, the centerpiece of an arrangement of old photographs and paintings. As soon as we could, we moved it.

  The tragedy of unrequited love for the blond beast, Einstein will someday call the love that Jews like Heinrich Alter (and later, Lenz Alter too) harbored for Germany, but Heinrich Alter calls it patriotism. He calls it Heimat. Being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith. He’s determined that his child will embrace this faith too. Even the boy’s name is meant to play its part. Heinrich Lorenz Alter chose the name himself, no female sensibility involved, although he believes Line would have approved. The boy is called Lenz, but his full name is Lorenz Otto Alter. Lorenz to remind him of Heinrich. Otto to remind him of Bismarck. Alter—it implies age and wisdom, and who, Heinrich argues, is older and wiser than God?

  No mother, but three fathers. This is what Heinrich tells the baby long before words have any meaning to it. Leaning over the cradle, his palm cupping the crown of the small head, Heinrich croons manifestos in lieu of lullabies. “Three fathers,” Heinrich says. “Me, Bismarck, God.” Lenz’s job is to disappoint none of them.

  Meanwhile, across town, Zindel Emanuel is also teaching his children about Bismarck. When military parades pass by, he takes his two oldest girls, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, out onto the second-floor balcony. “You remember all the speeches about iron and blood?” he asks Rose and Lily, who stand on their toes and peer over the balustrade. “Well, those rifles the soldiers are holding—that’s what Bismarck meant when he said iron. And you see that sleeve pinned to that soldier’s shoulder—or there, the patch over that guy’s eye? That was the blood. You’ll notice, though, that while the iron’s still held high, the blood’s been washed away.”

  He lifts them, one at a time, so they can more easily take note of the weapons and prettified gore.

  “They love talking about blood,” Zindel Emanuel says. “It stirs the passions of the sheep. But they’ll never let the sheep see the blood. Sheep love talk of blood, but they faint dead away at the sight of it.”

  “Baaa,” Lily calls to the soldiers below. The ones directly beneath the balcony look up, laugh, wave to her.

  Emanuel’s wife joins them, new baby in her arms. “Lily,” she says. “Don’t make barnyard noises at the infantry.” She gives her husband a look that’s both reproving and affectionate. “Maybe we should try one more time to g
et you a son. You’re training these girls to behave like little boys. Yelling at people in the streets. Thinking all the time about politics.”

  Emanuel takes the infant from its mother. Iris Emanuel is overwrapped in linen and lace; she looks like nothing more than a small, smiling doll’s head. “This was supposed to be my boy,” he says.

  Iris beams at him, at the clouds, at the soldiers, at whatever her eyes land on. When she grows up, her father thinks, she will look like the goddess Isis: dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes. This doesn’t please him. He has no intention of raising an Isis, a goddess of domesticity, of weaving, of the moon. And he’s concerned about those blue eyes, so unusually pale. A curse in some cultures, the least sensitive of his acquaintances say. “They’ll darken,” his wife says defensively—though time will prove her wrong—but that’s not what bothers Zindel Emanuel. He’s unfazed by curses, he’s not superstitious. He doesn’t believe in mythology, not the myths of Egypt though he knows them all, not the myths of his own people—the Jews. Not even the myths of the Prussians. He enjoys pointing out that despite the infantry uniform the chancellor wears, Otto von Bismarck was merely a reservist. He never served a day in the active military. He neither carried iron into battle nor shed a drop of blood—or at least not a drop of his own blood.

  No, what Zindel Emanuel dislikes about the toddler’s pale blue eyes is the attention they’re already commanding. He doesn’t want this girl to be admired for her appearance. He has high hopes for Iris, a disappointment by virtue of her sex, true, but a child who, he has already determined, will disappoint him in no other way. There’s something about her—how alert she is, how lively, her arms and legs churning even in her sleep as if she’s climbing or building something—that has convinced him she’ll be the person he’s already imagined.

  “No more babies,” he assures his wife. “I’m going to work with the materials you’ve given me.” He lifts the little girl so she, too, can see the parade. He busses her on her cheek, his wife on the forehead, and, Iris still in his arms, leaves the balcony for the warmth of the house. The two older girls follow him: his acolytes, his ducklings.

  Alone now, his wife looks down at the victorious soldiers parading by. They fall into two categories: the hobbled and maimed, and the unscathed and ashamed. Such a relief, she thinks, not to have sons.

  1874

  Heinrich Lorenz Alter’s dye factory is the most successful in western Europe. The dark blue of the Prussian infantry’s uniforms? The forest green worn by the Jaegers? The Prussian blue of Bismarck’s own tunic? The dyes for the cloth come from the Alter Dye Works. And if Heinrich has made the military’s uniforms rich, the military has returned the favor.

  When Heinrich speaks of his exquisite dyes, it’s with tenderness, with genuine love. Mention his spring green, that precise shade of lettuce upon its first fragile leafing, and Heinrich’s suddenly as effusive as Keats encountering an old vase. Ask about his scarlet, and he’ll tell you it’s more vibrant than a cardinal’s feathered belly. Bring up Alter indigo, and he’ll describe it the way other men might their mistresses, praising her unparalleled beauty to people who smile and nod and glance at the nearest clock.

  Because Heinrich wants Lenz, his son and sole heir, to begin working at the factory as soon as he completes his basic education, Lenz’s training begins early. “Never too young to start developing an eye for color,” Heinrich writes Rudi, “especially with a boy who seems already to have a natural aptitude for nothing.”

  This has been a revelation: the number of things that Lenz, now five, is bad at. He’s clumsy with balls and bats, he’s slow at his letters, he still needs assistance in tying his shoelaces, and though he’s eager to spend time with other children, he seems to put them off. The once silent little boy has become a blabbermouth. He stands too close, tells long, tedious stories about war, his favorite subject. He’s fascinated by war. He corners little girls at birthday parties and expounds upon the campaigns of Napoleon.

  “I’m going to be a general,” he tells his father.

  A Jewish general. Heinrich winces. He pats the boy’s shoulder. He says, “You’ll be the general of Alter Dye Works. You’ll dress the generals in the military. You’ll give them the pride they need to win wars for Germany.”

  Lenz may be socially awkward and dull and only five, but he knows when he’s being patronized. He also knows how he feels about the factory. All his biographers agree: from a very young age he dismissed the idea of taking it over. Still, that particular battle between father and son is more than a decade in the future. Now, his father not yet realizing it’s a waste of time, Lenz’s training takes place on the streets of Breslau. Every evening before dinner Heinrich insists that Lenz accompany him on a constitutional, and every evening Lenz, knowing what’s coming, sulks and grumbles, but ultimately obeys.

  We have a photograph of him at that age. He’s the most mournful little boy we’ve ever seen, his tremendous noggin home to large dark eyes and lips that are pursed as if he had been about to cry when someone—Heinrich, probably, although maybe it was the photographer—ordered him not to move a muscle. And so he stands miserably and rigidly next to the ornate wooden chair that these days lives in our foyer (where it’s laden, sometimes to the point of tipping over, with our handbags and jackets and winter scarves and, back in the day when Vee still wore a wig, that luxuriant prosthesis slung on one of the uprights). In the photograph, though, only a boy’s beribboned boater lies on the chair’s seat.

  The boy himself wears a child’s version of an infantry uniform, the brass buttons oversize, the collar flat, the trousers cuffed over knee-high boots. His hair is severely parted close to his right ear. He holds a rifle as if it’s a walking stick, its butt on the ground, its muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

  And here’s another photograph of the young Lenz Alter, this one with his uncle, Rudi. According to the fat biography of Lenz Alter on our living room bookshelf (Lenz Alter: Deutsch, Jude, Heiliger, Sünder), Rudi Alter was a homosexual, malarial dwarf—that’s a quote—with delicate features and charm to spare, and we have to admit the description is supported by the photo, where Rudi, not much taller than Lenz, is matinee-idol handsome with kohl-rimmed eyes and the ornate and waxed facial hair of the times—the handlebar mustache, the scalloped muttonchops—not quite concealing a sweet smile. He also possesses a pair of sculpted, fine eyebrows.

  This photograph must have been taken during one of Rudi’s brief visits home, because his work as a trade consulate keeps him mostly in Asia. In 1874 he’s Germany’s trade representative to Japan. This means that Rudi is either so competent and charming that he’s overcome what we assume must have been his government’s reluctance to have a quote unquote homosexual malarial dwarf represent it, or it means that the German government in the late nineteenth century was far less uptight than our own is today. We suspect the former is the truth, that Rudi’s charm overcame prejudice, but that could be because we have a collective crush on him. We love that in this photograph, he and his small nephew are both dressed in identical kimonos. We love that Rudi’s kimono is accessorized with several long strand of pearls.

  Rudi is the person responsible for the dye factory’s indigo. He’s the one who negotiates the exclusive deals between Heinrich and the best ai farmers in Japan, the one who has arranged for hundreds of cases of sake to accompany the ai leaves as they’re transported from Hokkaido Province to Breslau in the damp holds of ships. That’s the heart of the recipe for Alter indigo: imported ai leaves and imported sake with some imported wheat bran tossed in. Heinrich also throws in some domestic lye because he doesn’t have it in him to turn his back on western techniques entirely. The mixture is then stirred for several days by the factory’s workers, those immigrants and day workers from Poland wielding wooden rakes also imported from Japan until the dye bath is the color of a fresh bruise and its fumes turn the sclerae of the workers’ eyes crimson.

  That there’s nothing like Alter indigo anywhere else on
the continent is one of the dominant themes accompanying the father and son’s constitutionals. “Look,” Heinrich says, loud, rudely pointing. “Do you see that worker’s uniform? That indigo is close to ours, but not as complex.”

  Or, “Look at the eye of that peacock feather in that woman’s hat. That’s close to our indigo but not as rich.”

  Or look at the blueberries on that vine or the violas in that field or the arc in that rainbow. Close but not as pure, not as perfect, not as poignant.

  Every night, not only their neighbors’ clothes but nature herself are judged and found lacking.

  Lenz is found lacking too. His mind wanders. He’s more interested in the dyeing process than the colors the process produces. He likes to imagine the moment when roots and petals and the carapaces of insects magically turn into cerulean or chartreuse or the vermilion that Uncle Rudi mixes with beeswax and daubs on his cheeks just above his muttonchops, brushes onto his lips just below his mustache. This—the process, not the cosmetics—holds a degree of fascination for the little boy. But his father’s lectures are those of an artist, not a manufacturer. His father carries on about aesthetics, about the general populace’s inability to distinguish muddy colors from crisp colors, their failure to appreciate natural colors, with their variations, their own personalities, from the monotony of the new chemically made dyes. Even at eight Lenz knows he’s part of that general populace. He’s inferior. He’s undiscerning.

  Then—it’s still 1874—comes the afternoon in early May when Rudi Alter—he’s still in Japan—decides to take a walk through a park that, like the park across the street from our apartment, runs along the river of a port city. We imagine the Japanese park filled with bamboo fountains and cherry trees and miniature red maples, the latter pretty much the same height as Rudi. In our imagination he’s wearing native dress, but his own native dress. A suit, a straw hat.