“Well,” he says, “you tell me. Admiring, wouldn’t you say? Proud? My success is their success, after all.”
No, she says. No, that’s not who she means. She means the soldiers on the field in Ypres. Those children. When he watched them through his binoculars the week before this week. After they inhaled the gas. What did they look like?
He says, “Are you drunk?”
She says, “Despite my best efforts, no.”
He repeats what he said to the kaiser. Why is being dead worse when caused by gas as opposed to bullets?
She says, “If you think about their faces, maybe you’d have your answer.” (The phrase “She says” isn’t really accurate here. Try “She shouts.” Try “She shrieks.”)
He says, “I love my country, and I’m going to bed.” (Try “He bellows.” Try “He rages.”)
She follows him up the stairs. “Where’s your service revolver?” she says. And maybe here she thunders. Or maybe here she whispers. It would be interesting to know. It’s the last thing she will ever say to Lenz Alter.
“What did she expect?” our mother would say at this point in the story, yawning sleepily. “It was a different time. A woman with a PhD. What did she think? That the world would throw her a parade?”
The revolver is where it always is, inside the top drawer of his bedroom bureau. Lenz Alter retrieves it himself, carries it to her writing room, places it on her desk directly on top of a barely begun letter to the late Richard Lehrer. “My dearest Richard,” she’s written, and then some initial poetry about the spring weather.
Lenz knows she still writes to Lehrer. He’s found and read more than one of her flowery missives. Another day of missing you. Another day in a world where no one knows me. So what advice have you for me now, cherished friend?
“Please tell me you aren’t actually mailing those letters to Lehrer,” he once said to her, not unkindly he felt, but she blushed and said in a strained voice, “You’re spying on me now? You’re crawling around my writing room, reading my private thoughts?”
His apology was sincere. The letters, he knew, were a release for her, a kind of journal. Too adult for Dear Diary, she was writing Dear Richard instead. And although she refused to accept Lenz’s apology, chose to assume he was being mean and sarcastic, several days later, out of the blue, she said, “I burn them.” It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. Poor Lehrer, he thought when he understood. Subjected to the pyre again and again.
And poor Iris. She’d been so much happier when she could visit with Richard and Marthe Lehrer every now and again. His timorous wife had even dared go up in Lehrer’s beloved hot-air balloon on a number of occasions. She’d come back home practically trilling. Oh, the trees like tiny vegetables waiting to be picked. Oh, the birds so close you could feel the air stirred by their beating wings. Oh, the heat of the fire and the cool of the breeze.
Once she, the most fearful of mothers, even allowed Lehrer to take her own Richard up. Lenz put a stop to that as soon as his enthusiastic son told him about it. Iris carried on—“And you say I baby him!”—but then came the flames, the plummet, the crash.
Lenz didn’t say anything, but she accused him of wanting to say something. He’d never seen her sob like that. Not when her father died. Not even when Lily’s husband died a few hours before the minister sanctified Lenz and Iris’s marriage. The three sisters, Lily and Iris and the eldest, the rarely seen Rose, had held each other, weeping, before Lily left and Iris gathered herself and positioned herself at Lenz’s side.
But he’d never seen the sobbing he’d seen for Richard.
Although, he thinks, didn’t he sob just that way at Theo Meyer’s funeral?
He’s drained and weary and grateful that his pill is beginning to work. He gestures toward the pistol atop the letter. “I promise it’s loaded. I’ll be sound asleep in a few minutes. If you come in I won’t even hear you, much less have the ability to defend myself. This is a great opportunity for you.”
She says nothing. She’s done with ranting and railing. She stands rigidly, arms at her side, gun in her peripheral vision, waiting for him to leave.
Richard, who is in bed but not asleep, Richard, who can of course hear everything, stays awake listening to his father’s arrhythmic snores. As long as he hears them, he’ll know everything’s all right. He means to stay up until morning, a sentry using his ears instead of his eyes. But he’s weak and exhausted and twelve and it’s late and his eyes eventually fall shut.
Only Iris is able to remain awake all night, her husband’s ugly snoring stoking her ire. She works on her letter. She drinks her brandy. It takes so many hours for her to say what she wants to say that when she’s finished, daylight isn’t far off.
She extinguishes the unnecessary lamp. The air in the room is gray as dirty dishwater. She folds the many pages, presses them as flat as she can with the crystal inkwell, inserts them into an envelope. She seals it and writes RICHARD on the face.
When she exits her writing room, she has the envelope in one hand, the gun in the other. The envelope she places on a table in the hall. This allows her to take the revolver in both her hands. In her woolen nightgown, in her bare feet, gun pointed straight ahead as if it were a lantern and Iris searching for the source of an unsettling noise, she walks quietly to her husband’s bedroom door and stands before it, aiming.
Pause here for a moment. Pause to heighten suspense, to build tension. But, no. What are we saying? We’ve done this all wrong. There’s no suspense. You’ve already seen the chart. Iris in the garden with a gun.
All right. Then pause here because that’s what our mother did when she told us this story. Or, no, it has nothing to do with our mother. Pause here so we can meditate on what we all know is about to happen. Pause here because this is important. The curse is about to take its first victim.
Einstein says there’s no past, present, or future, but there is something, isn’t there, some force that prevents us from going back and stopping her. We don’t know how to shuffle the individual, timeless moments of human existence the way we can a deck of cards. We can’t rearrange all those moments, we can’t step into that garden, yell “No!” All we can do is sit here in 1999 and report what happened in a certain moment in 1915. Iris turning from the bedroom door, heading instead to her garden, the first tentative blossoms of spring trellising along the fencing. Richard running outside when he’s woken by the shot. Iris limp and bleeding in her son’s arms: a pietà inverted. Lenz finally shaking off his drugged sleep, finally coming outside. Lenz confused, then sickened.
Father and son carrying Iris inside.
Soon after: the cover-up that will lead to Mileva Einstein believing Iris died of heart failure.
But before the cover-up, which will begin after the sun rises and a black limousine with tiny German flags suctioned to the hood comes to take Captain Alter to the eastern front, Richard scours the house for the envelope with his name on it. RICHARD. He saw it on the little table outside his bedroom as he ran down the stairs and out to the garden. A long letter written just to him, and now it’s gone.
“I didn’t see any letter,” his father says that morning, and repeats for the rest of his life. “And, hypothetically speaking, if an envelope in this house were addressed just to Richard, it wasn’t necessarily intended for you. It could have been for Richard Lehrer.”
This is what Richard Alter finds unforgivable. Not that his father’s leaving for the front. It’s wartime. Lenz Alter’s a captain in the army. What choice does he have? And not that he’s leaving Richard alone with his mother’s corpse and no other instructions but to call his aunt Lily. But the lie. That’s what he’ll never forgive—and not merely the lie. The absurdity of the lie. Richard Lehrer has been dead since 1912.
The hearse arrives only a few moments after the limousine drives away. Richard pictures the two black cars passing each other on the road. The men in the hearse, stone-faced and dour. The captain in the limo, n
ot glancing up, engrossed in a letter meant for his son.
It’s May 2, 1915. Lenz Alter is forty-six. Iris Alter was forty-four. In a month Richard Otto Alter will be thirteen: a man.
CHAPTER 8
November 1933
Duck Soup and Dachau have opened. The worst year of the Great Depression and the last year of Prohibition are about to come to an end. And back in April, there was this: part 3 of Germany’s new Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service:
1. Civil servants of non-Aryan descent are to be retired.
2. Section 1 does not apply to civil servants who fought during the World War at the front for the German Reich.
Section 2 protects Lenz Alter from section 1. Still, after reading section 1, he doesn’t want any part of section 2. His eyes are open at last.
“Dear Minister Rust,” he writes, “According to the directives of the National Civil Service Law of 7 April 1933 . . . I have the right to remain in office, although I am descended from Jewish grandparents and parents. But I do not wish to make use of this dispensation.”
There were those who fought for him and the institute that, rid of its Jews, would turn into a shell, echoing footsteps in near-empty rooms and halls. Here’s this from Max Planck’s essay “My Audience with Adolf Hitler”:
Following Hitler’s seizure of power I had the responsibility of paying my respects to the Führer. I believed I should take this opportunity to put in a favorable word for my Jewish colleague . . . without whose invention of the process for producing ammonia from nitrogen in the air the previous war would have been lost from the start. . . . I commented that there are different types of Jews, both worthy and worthless ones to humanity. . . . [Hitler] replied, “That’s not right. A Jew is a Jew, all Jews stick together like burrs.” . . . He broke out in generalities and concluded by saying, “People say that I occasionally suffer from neurasthenia. This is slander. I have nerves of steel.” He then slapped his knee hard, spoke at an increasingly faster rate and worked himself up into such a rage that there was nothing else for me to do but to remain silent.
Nothing to do but be silent. By the next summer all the Alters have left Germany. Lenz has moved to Cambridge. Richard and his family—our mother is four—have settled in Paris. As the weather grows colder, Lenz writes to Richard: His heart is giving him trouble. The nitroglycerin helps, but not the way it once did. Could Richard secure morphine? Lenz will understand if Richard is reluctant to do so. But perhaps, when Richard remembers how his poor mother died, he will agree it’s only just that his father die the same way, by his own hands.
Richard gazes out one of the Paris apartment’s oddly shaped windows. This one is somewhat oblong, but irregularly bordered, like a small country. It’s always raining in Paris; when Richard thinks of this city after they’ve left it, he’ll recall rain-darkened cobblestones and an odd silvery light that so often crept toward him from just beyond the walls of the church of Saint-Merri.
He turns away from the street. He reads his father’s letter again. There’s a difference, Richard thinks, between shooting oneself in the prime of one’s life, driven to such a desperate and painfully slow end by a husband’s betrayal to oneself and all of humanity, and slipping out painlessly moments before the grim reaper would have shown up anyway. Lenz, so brilliant in so many other ways, seems unaware of this difference. He apparently equates the two modes of leaving this world behind.
His father’s willful blindness doesn’t make Richard angry. There are too many other things to be angry about these days. He sometimes identifies with the pigeons in the damp street below, walking in circles, shrugging and shaking their heads.
He doesn’t want to punish Lenz. He doesn’t need Lenz to make amends for Iris. If he secures morphine, it would be because he wants to help. He can see how debilitating and painful his father’s heart disease is. It’s terrible to see Lenz these days, terrible even to think of him, traveling from city to city, writing articles in English that no one publishes, delivering lectures in French that no one attends. And then there are the British chemists who make a show in public of refusing to shake his hand.
Richard loves his father. He loves his mother. It’s one of the unanticipated and bittersweet pleasures of parenthood: to observe your own imperfections, to witness the damage you’re doing your own beloved children, and so to find it within your heart to forgive and fall back in love with your imperfect, blundering papa and mama.
FROM THE LAST WILL OF LENZ ALTER
I direct my son Richard Otto Alter to arrange for my cremation. I direct that my ashes be buried in Berlin alongside those of Iris Emanuel Alter, my first wife. If, however, German policy is such that my son wishes not to travel there, then I direct him to bury my ashes and those of my first wife in such cemetery as my son determines. The grave should be marked with the inscription of our names and dates. Perhaps there may be added, He served his country in war and peace as long as was granted him.
March 1934
When the tram stops in front of his hotel, the infirm chemist boards and rides to its final stop at the city’s border. This is where the Orthodox Jews of Basel live.
The chemist himself lived here a long time ago, after the war, hiding from the Allies who sought to arrest him for committing murder on an unprecedented scale—as if they hadn’t resorted to gas themselves. The chemist had to leave his second wife and his teenage son in Berlin. He had to rent a room with access to a bath down the hall, had to dress in the same costume the rest of them wore: black coat to the ground, broad-brimmed hat. He grew his beard, his sidelocks. He felt unkempt, dirty. And the worst thing about the getup was that so long as he wore it, he couldn’t go to nonkosher restaurants—that is, he couldn’t enjoy the best food in the city.
The Nobel came through while he was hiding here. That was another place he couldn’t go: to Stockholm. He had to wait another six months, which was how long it took England and France—the Americans never cared about him—to become distracted by other problems. He’d shaved, changed his clothes, and returned to Germany where he gorged on pork and arranged to leave again to pick up the Nobel. In Sweden he gave a speech about fertilizer; the other uses of the manna process were mentioned by no one. Upon returning to Dahlem, he began the work that would lead to his gold-from-the-sea project, his attempt to distill gold dust from seawater. His plan was to repay Germany’s war debts. He was still in love with her, still willing to make a fool of himself for Heimat. It was a failure, gold from the sea—as projects involving alchemy always are—and it briefly made him a figure of ridicule, but at least he and his son, who was then eighteen, got to spend a year at sea together. Robust men doing the things robust men do.
Now he’s climbing the steep hill to Basel’s old Jewish cemetery, several acres of land that have been on his mind of late. When he lived here all those years ago, he would watch the burials from his apartment window. He liked the rituals, the mourners approaching the open grave one by one, shoveling dirt onto the casket but using the back of the shovel. He could never ask why—he was pretending to be pious, he was supposed to know why—and when he returned to Germany, he forgot all about it. Now he knows the reason: the back of the shovel symbolizes the difficulty in letting the dead go, even while you’re helping them leave.
On this day there are no burials taking place. Though the gate to the cemetery is open, there’s nobody there, not even the caretaker. The chemist sits on a stone bench in the sunlight, waiting for his no-good heart to stop spasming. When he can breathe again, he rises and walks among the graves. He starts with the oldest ones, the flat mossy stones muddy from the morning’s rain. He finishes with the newest, the marble tombstones standing upright, each with an array of small rocks on its shoulders. He knows none of the people buried here, but he knows people who have the same names. There are Alters, there are Emanuels. There are Lehrers and Rosenthals and Meyers.
When the rows of graves end, there’s a patch of grass waiting for a few more sou
ls, and then the wrought-iron fence. The chest pain has returned, and the chemist looks at his winter shadow and mumbles the Shema, the only Hebrew prayer he knows by heart. His new friends in exile are chemists and Zionists both. Chaim Weizmann. That crowd. They’ve explained the customs, taught him the tricks. “Say the Shema at the moment of death,” they say, “and you ascend straight to heaven, no questions asked.”
“And you wonder,” he tells them, “why intelligent men turn their backs on religion.”
His friends see his point, but dismiss it. “What could it hurt?” they say. “If nothing else, at least it’s something to do in those last few seconds. It’s good to keep busy.”
Standing by the iron fence that is the border of both the cemetery and Switzerland, the chemist looks out at the unattended French frontier, the tawny cattails and brown grasses stiff with winter frost. He doubles over, holds on to the fence for support. He rests his forehead on the cold iron. Reaching into his coat pocket, he withdraws a nitroglycerin tablet, places it under his tongue, waits as it dissolves. Damned by explosives. Saved by explosives. He grips the fence harder, his hands turning white. And then—there. The pain, not gone, but smaller.
When he returns to the hotel—strangers have assisted him onto the tram, off the tram, through the hotel doors—his son is in the lobby.
“You came,” he says.
“I did,” his son says.
In his room, he lets his son help him undress. In his bed, he relishes the warmth of the feather duvet.
“Where will you go next?” he asks his son. “What will you do?”
“Haiti.” The son looks at his shoes. “No other option at the moment. So, yes, Haiti, and then we’ll wait and pray that Uncle Albert persuades America to relent.”
“Palestine isn’t an option?”
His son shakes his head.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 17