Homeland

by John Jakes

  The waiter brought Rhukov’s beer in a glass with a Pabst crest. He tipped with a three-cent piece. “When did you make the crossing?”

  Paul answered, then described a few of the circumstances.

  “Out of Hamburg, you say? And you weren’t struck down? You’ve got a guardian angel, my friend. There was an epidemic.”

  “I heard.”

  “Eight thousand, ten thousand dead before the autumn frosts came to stop it. The Hamburg politicians tried to ignore the epidemic for a while. Hush it up. Nothing wrong here, they announced, strolling past corpses still drooling and dribbling out of their dead mouths and dead asses.” He threw his cigarette on the ground.

  “Well, who expects anything else from those in power? Politicians, prime ministers, princes—all the same. Pack of jackals. Swine at the public trough. Lie, rob, kill their mothers to keep their office or their throne. You’ll get used to it when you’re older. Either that or you’ll stand on a chair and hang yourself.”

  He shook two cigarettes from a crushed paper pack. Paul took one, Rhukov struck a match and lit both. Paul took a puff and doubled over, hacking.

  “You hate it,” Rhukov said.

  “I do. I wanted to be polite.”

  “That’s crap.” He snatched the cigarette away and tossed it over the fence into the street.

  “Rhukov’s rule number one. Do nothing that you hate. It shortens your life.” He tilted his head back and drank the rest of the beer. “Waiter. Another.”

  “Here also,” Paul said, although the heat and dust and this astonishing reunion were making him a little groggy.

  Rhukov paid for both beers, waving aside Paul’s protests. “Do you like America?”

  “Except for school.”

  “School! What do they teach you?”

  “Nothing I want to know. I’m doing terribly.”

  “But otherwise happy?”

  “Very happy.”

  “I’ll ask you again in five years.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question, Herr Rhukov. What are you doing here?”

  “Same as before. Hunting a few stories.”

  “You must like the job.”

  “Oh, certainly. The free and glamorous life of the roving journalist! Bedbugs and body lice. Sleeping in doss houses. Bedding elderly whores because they don’t charge so much. Alternatively, risking a bullet in the back from a crazed husband. I eat well, though. Truly. I get a shave and then I haunt the hotels. There’s always a banquet. War veterans, temperance societies, electric motor salesmen, homeopathic physicians, clergy exhibiting reformed whores. Always plenty of leftovers waiting to be thrown out. I know how to talk to the busboys. I’m at home with the lower classes. So here I am, searching for glimpses of the future. Plenty of those to be had. Not as pretty as some like to pretend. Seen the Krupp gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Scary. How about the exhibits from my own beloved country?” Paul shook his head. “Christ, how can you miss them? Mother Russia is a huge presence here. One of the largest. Finish your beer, we’ll have a look.”

  They walked to the Russian state pavilion, one of many located inside the vast Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Rhukov led Paul to a display of exquisite bronze miniatures of animals and peasant groups.

  “Don’t they look happy, the precious little things? You can’t smell them, you can’t feel the anguish when the crops fail, there’s not a back broken by years of toil. The serfs are bleeding out their lives in poverty, children are starving, and Tsar Alexander has decreed that every ruble paying for this romantic bullshit—every Russian display at this circus—shall come straight from the imperial treasury. Does it ever slip into his feeble brain that he might spend the same money to succor his own people? Never. Well, the clock’s running down for the Tsar and rulers of his ilk. Certain men are laying plans and building bombs. The world is coming to an end, Berlin boy. The world as we know it. The birth of the new one will be bloody. You’ll see it in ten years. Or less.”

  Paul thought of Benno Strauss. Despite the heat, he shivered.

  Rhukov hurried them out of the pavilion. “I can’t stand a big dose of this. I have to search out antidotes. Something that faintly suggests a little measure of humanity. A spark of enlightenment—a grain of progress. You’ve seen the Electricity Building?”

  “Not yet.”

  He yanked Paul’s arm. “We’ll remedy that immediately.”

  In the Electricity Building at the south end of the Lagoon, they stood before Edison’s Tower of Light, a shaft nearly eighty feet high, studded with electric globes of all sizes and colors. They flashed in constantly changing patterns and rhythms.

  “Truly marvelous, isn’t it? A few years ago I was ignorant of inventions like this. I didn’t realize the nature, the magnitude of what’s rushing toward us like a locomotive with the throttle wide open. In my first year trying to scratch out a living with my pen, I had an experience that opened my eyes. It happened in Vienna, in a great amusement park, the Prater, heard of it? For a few pennies they sold electricity. You paid your money and gripped two handles which gave you a jolt of this new thing electricity. I felt an incredible force tingling through my hands, racing up my arms and through my body. In an instant, I knew the future was coming, couldn’t be escaped. New ideas crashing upon us, science digging the floor from under us, everything tumbling, thrown about, rearranged—an apocalypse, and not wholly political this time. It’s here, boy—it’s here at this fair, if you can search it out. You think this tower is spectacular? I’ll show you something you truly will not believe. Down this side aisle, follow me.”

  The aisle was dim, flanked by small booths with uninteresting exhibits. Rhukov pointed to a signboard on the left.

  THE AMAZING TACHYSCOPE

  See Pictures That Actually

  MOVE!

  Pictures that moved? How could it be?

  The booth itself didn’t look promising. In front of some drab draperies, between drooping palms in pots, stood a large rectangular box with a wooden step in front. It was about Paul’s height. A metal piece much like a stereopticon viewer was attached to the sloping front at eye level. There was a coin slot. Paul wondered about the price; he only had a few cents left.

  Alternately dubious and seduced, he followed Rhukov into the booth. Two men were talking at a table in the corner. The men strolled over to greet them. “It’s the journalist again,” said the heavier of the two. “Good day, sir.”

  Rhukov switched to slow, less than clear English. “Good day to you. My friend here—” Paul tried to look adult and thoughtful. “He doesn’t believe your sign.”

  The man chuckled. “Skeptic, is he? We’ve seen plenty of those. Lad, this gentleman is Mr. Ottmar Anschütz, owner and perfecter of the Tachyscope. Which is very much worth the modest price of a dime.”

  “What sort of pictures does it show?”

  “My boy,” said the inventor—actually it was mein boy; he was another German—“have you seen the animals at Hagenbeck’s Zoological Circus on the Midway?”

  “No, sir.”

  “There is in the performance an elephant whose name is Bebe. Inside my Tachyscope, Bebe moves and performs just as realistically as in real life. The pictures in the machine were taken in the Tiergarten.”

  “In Berlin? I’m from Berlin.”

  “I suspected as much from your accent.” Anschütz fished a coin from his checkered vest. “Step up, I will treat the young skeptic to a viewing.”

  Paul stood on the step and leaned into the eyepiece. He saw only darkness. At his elbow, the other man, the heavy-set American, was saying, “Mr. Edison was supposed to have his machine, the Kinetoscope, on exhibit here. It’s similar, but they didn’t get it ready in time.”

  “Watch closely,” Herr Anschütz said. The coin dropped in the slot. Inside the box machinery whirred and clicked. A sudden flash of white light dazzled Paul.

  He grabbed the box, almost falling off the step. In
the viewer he saw a grainy picture of an elephant with a fanciful little ballet skirt around its middle, prancing, sidestepping, moving back and forth over a stretch of grass that might have been the Tiergarten but was unrecognizable to him.

  Paul hardly dared to breathe. The movement seemed jerky, as though interrupted at very short intervals by the flashing light. Never mind, it was astounding, greater by far than the lifeless still photographs he’d tacked up in his room on Müllerstrasse. This was a moment like Rhukov’s in the Prater, light pouring out of the eyepiece like blinding flashes of revelation, flash, flash, another, and another, and another …

  Moments later, groggy, he stepped down from the Tachyscope. “Sirs—Herr Rhukov—that is the most astonishing, incredible—wait. Where is he?”

  The others turned. Herr Anschütz pulled a face and shrugged. The American said, “He was standing right there. I saw his silhouette against the flashing lights on the Edison tower. I turned to speak to Herr Anschütz—no more than a second or so—and when I looked again—gone.”

  Paul smelled smoke from a strong cigarette and thought he saw a blue wisp of it dispersing in the air. In Berlin, Rhukov had disappeared with the same eerie abruptness. But this phenomenon was overwhelmed by the miracle of the Tachyscope.

  Herr Anschütz walked off to speak to a young couple hesitating outside the booth, possibly wondering, as Paul had, whether to spend their money. Paul said to the American, “Do you know all about this machine?”

  “I know something. I have my own studio of photography”

  “How does the machine work?”

  “Well, you are not looking at pictures that actually move, merely at separate still pictures which create that illusion when they’re flashed at a rapid speed. Inside the cabinet there’s a revolving drum. The pictures of Bebe are mounted on the drum sequentially. The flashing light is the excited gas in a pair of Geissler tubes. It enhances the effect.”

  “I’ve never seen anything so lifelike. It’s amazing. Wonderful.”

  “Good for you! I knew you were a smart youngster the minute I spotted you.”

  A strange little man. He wore a nondescript suit and a string tie. He came up to Paul’s shoulder. He had a potbelly and a salt-and-pepper mustache so bushy and unkempt it nearly hid his mouth.

  His hair needed barbering. His eyes were huge behind spectacles with thick round lenses. He had the pale skin of a mole or some other creature of the dark. He wasn’t forbidding, or menacing, as the vanished Rhukov could be. He was just—odd.

  Except for his eyes. The spectacles enlarged them, making them all the more arresting. The eyes looked as if they could reach into your head, seize your very brains, and twist them until you were convinced of whatever the man wanted you to believe. Like Rhukov’s eyes, they had a power.

  “But, sir, do you think these moving pictures will ever be more than a—uh—”

  “Novelty?”

  “A novelty, yes, I think that’s what I mean.”

  “Of course I do. They’ll be entertainment, my boy. Entertainment and education of such a scope and scale, you can’t imagine. Someday moving pictures will be shown on giant screens in great auditoriums, for the amusement and edification of all. Pictures like these speak a universal language. They’ll sweep the world. It may take a few years, inventors are still struggling to perfect a projection machine. But it will come, make no mistake. It will come just as the new century’s coming. Rooney says so.”

  “Rooney?”

  “Wexford Rooney. Here’s my card.” He fished in one pocket, then another, finally found it in a third.

  “That’s the address of my present studio. North Clark Street. Drop around if you ever need a camera, or want instruction, or just a little chatter. I photographed up and down the country during the late unpleasantness.” Paul looked blank. “The Civil War. Been in the trade ever since. Drop around.”

  “I will, it is a promise. I have one more week of school, then I will come.”

  “Fine, just fine. Can’t find enough willing converts. Nine tenths of the world consists of Doubting Thomases. Plain fools.” He flipped Paul a coin. “Take another look at Bebe, my compliments.”

  He stood back with his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and a pleased look on his face. Paul bent over the Tachyscope with the white light flashing, flashing into his eyes, into his bones and his soul, making the miracle part of him forever.

  On the tram ride home, Paul patted his shirt pocket a dozen times, to be sure he hadn’t lost Rooney’s card.

  He had always thought the still photograph, as exemplified by the lost Kodak and his picture cards, to be the greatest of all miracles of the new age. He was wrong, he had seen something that leaped a thousand miles beyond. He was euphoric when he ran into the kitchen at half past five, and nearly bowled over Louise, the cook.

  “Gott im Himmel, what’s got into you?”

  “Is Aunt Ilsa home?”

  “No, gone out with Fritzi and Carl.”

  “Joe Junior?”

  “Upstairs.”

  He was panting when he knocked on his cousin’s door. Joe Junior had just come from the bath. He was wearing a suit of ventilated summer underwear, light gray, which he’d unbuttoned to the waist and pushed down to his hips. Damp hair clung to his head. He was toweling water from his flat muscular chest.

  “What are you so damn excited about?”

  “Joe, I must tell you what I saw at the fair.”

  Joe Junior scratched his crotch and perched on the edge of the bed. “Little Egypt.”

  “No, no—a machine! A marvelous machine.” He sat beside his cousin, struggling for the English to describe the miracle.

  “I could learn to make such pictures, Joe. I always wanted to draw but I have no talent. This talent I could learn, it employs machinery.”

  “If it’s so great, how come everybody isn’t talking about it? I never heard of it.”

  “But—”

  “What does it have to do with anything? What does it have to do with lifting a burden from some workingman’s back?”

  Silent anger flared in Paul. Could his cousin talk of nothing but poor people? Joe squeezed Paul’s shoulder and delivered grown-up advice with a smile.

  “I’d forget it. Call me when it’s supper, will you? I need a nap.”

  Paul quickly forgave his cousin. Hadn’t Rooney said the world was full of unbelievers? It was the easy thing, to scoff. That night he sat on his bed, his glance flying back and forth between the board with the photographic postal cards and the calling card in his hand.

  It was a very poor card. Old, grimy, bent at the corners. The printer’s ink had smeared. Still, it seemed a magic key to a magic door. On the other side of that door, if he could believe Rooney, he could learn about photographs and how to make them. And then, perhaps, learn more about the pictures that moved.

  One more week until school was over, then he’d have free time, he could go. Being held over in Mrs. Petigru’s room no longer dominated his thoughts. He pinned the card carefully on his board and stood gazing at it.

  One week. How would he ever endure the wait?

  Before school on Monday morning, he shared his exciting discovery with Leo Rapoport. Like Cousin Joe, Leo was unimpressed. Called the invention “cracked.” This, he explained, meant the same as crazy.

  Leo had other things to talk about. “Sit down,” he whispered. Paul sat on the low cement wall at the edge of the schoolyard. After swift looks both ways, Leo opened his battered school bag of brown duck. He took out a wad of folded sheets with printing on them.

  “Finally my old man threw out last year’s sales sheets. Lamp this stuff, will you? Just don’t wave it around. I’ll stay on guard.”

  On guard against what? Paul unfolded the sheets, and quickly leafed through the pages, which were identically designed. Above blocks of feature and price information, three quarters of each page was given over to a full-figure engraving of a beautiful young woman wearing an item from M
r. Rapoport’s line. Every girl was incredibly voluptuous, with enormous bulging breasts, vaguely erotic pouting lips, a slight forward tilt to the body affording a peek into a gorge of cleavage. There were sheets for plain undecorated corsets and fancy French corsets with silk embroidery; lightweight four-hook summer corsets and high-hip corsets daringly cut to reveal more flesh. The wickedest pictures showed the woman’s foot on a chair or stool, to display an expanse of forbidden inner thigh.

  “These are for buyers who work for stores, not for the ladies who wear the stuff,” Leo explained. Suddenly he grabbed Paul’s sleeve.

  “Look out, here comes Maury Flugel. Hide those, quick. If he sees ’em, he’ll snitch.”

  Paul shoved the folded sheets into the left pocket of his linen school jacket, pushing them out of sight without glancing down. Maury arrived a moment later.

  Fists on his hips, he said, “I seen you two reading something. A yellow-back dirty book? Come on, Leo, be a pal, let me see.”

  “You’re no pal, you’re a snitcher,” Leo said, shoving him. Leo marched toward the schoolhouse door. Paul was right behind. As he neared the doors he checked his left pocket. He was horrified to see that a corner of the folded bundle had popped out, very noticeably. His heart raced. He didn’t touch the sheets until he was inside and the double doors hid him from Maury.

  In the cloakroom he turned his jacket inside out, making sure the printed sheets were entirely hidden, and then hung the coat on the last hook at the end.

  Just before morning recess, Mrs. Petigru called Paul to the desk to say the letter to his aunt and uncle would be ready on Thursday, and he was to deliver it, she would telephone that same night to make sure he had. The bell rang. Pupils rushed to the cloakroom for wraps; outside it was overcast, with a strong wind blowing. Paul started to go.

  “Stand there, young man, you are not excused until I say so.” The room was empty when she finally gave him a curt wave. “You may go.”

  He rushed to the cloakroom. His coat had been disturbed. He stabbed a hand into the pocket holding the sales sheet. It was empty.