The Organs of Sense

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  The astronomer tugged on his hood and held up his staff. “Go on, my son.”

  To Leibniz he noted: “Soon I must begin to pay more attention to the sky.”

  Leibniz wrote: “There were fifty minutes until the eclipse he had predicted. Through the slightly warped slat the sky looked the same as it had all morning.” He had the (nonscientific) sense that he would see something at noon, but he did not know what. “That it should in fact be an eclipse of the Sun: this I now felt increasingly to be doubtful.”

  Now, having seen with what lack of squeamishness little Ludmila watched his blood gather in the stone bowl, Heinrich resolved one Wednesday not to look away from the bowl but to look directly into it. He wanted to see how blood looked to her, for blood obviously did not look to her as it did to him, or to the royalty by whom he was perpetually surrounded, all of whom shared his aristocratic blood squeamishness. “Blood actually looked different to her. It wasn’t that she thought of blood differently, if she had merely thought of blood differently she would have been squeamish, too, and have had to pit, as I did, her squeamishness against her thoughts, against her will, in the hope that her thoughts and will would overcome her squeamishness instead of her squeamishness her thoughts and will. But there was in Ludmila’s head no such battle of thoughts-and-will versus squeamishness, there was simply no squeamishness for her thoughts and will to overcome. When she looked at blood she saw something different. What did she see? This question possessed me, Father.” Again and again he thought: “Not the Emperor’s son but a bloodletter’s daughter … How the Empire appears to the Emperor’s son, how blood appears to a bloodletter’s daughter…” And he thought: “Which of us is seeing how the Empire actually looks? Which of us is seeing how blood actually looks?” And he thought: “You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, no touching, no, no, this one’s not to be touched!” So, on that particular Wednesday, in his endeavor to see how blood looked to her, he looked right into instead of away from the stone bowl she was holding, but fainted immediately. He was awoken by Ludmila crouching over him, gently slapping his cheek, he recalled. You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, he told himself, no, not yet. “From that angle, Father, she actually did look a little like Katharina, as Greta liked to tease me by saying.” To tease him, Heinrich added, Margaretha, the moment she saw the way he gazed at the bloodletter’s daughter, had taken to calling her “the Czech Katharina,” she claimed to see a “remarkable resemblance” between the two and used this resemblance to torment him. Greta, of course, had teased him this way before, he had never taken a lover whom Margaretha had not insisted looked exactly like Katharina, “typical sibling ribbing!,” there had already been an Italian Katharina, a French Katharina, a Portuguese Katharina, and a Big Swedish Katharina, not one of whom resembled Katharina “in the slightest” except insofar as they were all brown-haired, sweet-tempered, finely featured, and, apart from the big Swede, small, Heinrich said. “I suppose,” he said, and he burst into laughter, “it was a funny joke, Margaretha can be very funny, she’s the funniest of all of us, we always say we have no idea where Greta got her sense of humor from, certainly it wasn’t from Father! She makes wonderful jokes, though most of them I admit I don’t totally understand, such as this one about my mistresses all resembling Katharina, since anyone who looks at them can see they look nothing like her.” The likeness if there was any did not go beyond hair color, affect, bone structure, and size: perhaps they shared certain accidental properties “but they did not share her essence.” Standing above him gently slapping him, Ludmila did perhaps resemble Katharina standing above him gently tickling him, but the semblance was physical, not metaphysical, Ludmila had no metaphysical semblance to anyone in the Prince’s world, she was different, different. Katharina for example “is the single most squeamish person I know, Father.”

  As she stood above him Heinrich resolved to make Ludmila his concubine.

  Less and less did he find himself saying to himself, “You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, no, no, she is not to be touched.”

  There remained however the difficulty of language, for she spoke hardly a word of German, and he not one word of Czech.

  The next Wednesday, after Zikmund had opened and closed one of his veins, the Prince looked at Ludmila, pointed to the contents of the bowl she was holding, and said with a warm smile the Czech word for “blood.” He’d rehearsed that all week, the astronomer told Leibniz that Heinrich had told him. “His pronunciation was perfect.” Zikmund was delighted; ever since the Emperor had moved to Prague it had been a source of some tension that neither he nor his family spoke the language of the locals; now, the Prince had spoken his first word in their noble Slavic tongue, not only (as Prince Heinrich speculated that Zikmund must have felt) in Zikmund’s presence and in reference to his trade, but directed at his daughter. “She for her part did not know how to react,” the Prince said. “In the whites of the eyes which she cast frantically at her father one saw an entirely charming and wholly endearing social anxiety. Blood was nothing to her, but never before had Ludmila been addressed by royalty, and she had not the slightest idea how to respond! She had no fear of blood but a tremendous fear of repartee.” Her father uttered a few firm words to her and she turned back to the Prince, curtsied, and repeated the Czech for “blood.” “I said it again, and she said it again, blood, blood, blood, blood, back and forth, blood and blood, blood and blood, blood and blood, in Czech, Father,” Heinrich said. “What was interesting to me was that though we were saying the same word in the same language we obviously meant something quite different by it. Blood for me meant dynastic lineages, inheritances, and controversies of succession, it meant physical abnormalities and psychical irregularities, warfare and territorial losses, it meant this huge Habsburg jaw of mine (the fact that it is hard for me even to chew!) and this debilitating Habsburg madness of mine, the fact that it is hard for me even to think straight, it meant my mother’s inability to sleep and my father’s mechanical preoccupations, it meant what I share with my family and what I don’t share with them, what I share with my father and what I do not share with him, what I share with my sisters and what I don’t, what I can never share with them … That’s what I meant by blood. What I can’t share with Wilhelmina, what I can never, ever share with Katharina. How my sisters avoided inheriting our father’s madness and also avoided inheriting his jaw, except I suppose for Margaretha, who did get the jaw, yes, true, Greta got the jaw, she got Father’s jaw but not his madness, no, I do not think his madness. Ina and Willa, no madness no jaw, Greta, no madness yes jaw, I, yes madness yes jaw. When I say blood I mean my father’s madness, I mean my father’s jaw, I mean his crown and my head. That’s what blood meant for me. For Ludmila, however,” Prince Heinrich went on from the floor of the turret, cradling in his arms the astronomer’s father’s emptied-out automaton head, “blood was labor, blood was money, blood was shelter, blood was one’s livelihood, blood was just a substance that one handled in that family from the time one emerged from the womb, blood was what one worked with, what one dealt with, blood was what one did, a life lived in blood, around blood, with blood, a life bathed in blood. Blood was almost too ubiquitous in her life to mean anything at all, it’s just what life was, what the world was, the whole thing was blood! To ask Ludmila what blood meant would be like asking her what the world meant … What a goat is for a goatherd and salt for a salt miner, what the water is for fish and the sky for birds, so blood is for a bloodletter, a barber-surgeon. And doubly so for his children, Father.”

  For the following Wednesday, Heinrich learned the Czech word for “bowl.” “I said bowl, she said bowl, I said bowl, she said bowl.” It meant something different to each of them.

  Next Wednesday it was the word “sleep.”

  The following Wednesday it was “castle.”

  The Wednesday after that it was “tonight.”

  And the Wednesday after that Heinrich haltingly stitched together his first complete Czech sentence, an invitation
he whispered into her ear: “Ludmila sleep castle tonight.” Her reaction was not what he had hoped. What had he done wrong? Brooding upon it afterward, Heinrich realized—“Like my father I have no talent for languages!”—that he had conjugated “sleep” in the imperative rather than the interrogative. The sentence had emerged as an injunction rather than an invitation. The following Wednesday, Heinrich once again whispered into her ear “Ludmila sleep castle tonight,” but so fretfully did he concentrate on conjugating “sleep” in the interrogative mood that instead of the word “castle” he accidentally said the words “blood bowl.” Her reaction was not what he had hoped. The Wednesday after that, however, Heinrich said the sentence flawlessly, at last, and just loud enough, evidently, for Zikmund to overhear, for though Ludmila, whose daughterly devotion was unequaled in the world, wrapped her arms round one of her father’s legs and gave every indication that she did not wish to be separated from him, Zikmund, who it must be said was an ambitious man who must have foreseen the benefits that would accrue to the father of the mistress of the heir apparent to the imperial throne, walked with stiff clownish steps over to the Prince, one leg heavy with the weight of his weeping daughter. Heinrich: “I ask you, Father, does a man like this deserve his daughter’s devotion? She binds herself to him, to his leg, and he strides over and offers her up to me. What kind of father is this? Was it merely self-justification to ask myself, as I playfully pried little Ludmila off her father’s leg, if she would not actually be happier with me in the Castle?” That playful prying of Ludmila off her father’s leg was the first time he had ever touched her. Zikmund left, Ludmila’s wails dwindled in time into whimpers and snorts, Heinrich told her that she had nothing to fear, nothing at all to be afraid of, they would have fun, “We shall become family!” Of course he said this all in German and she understood none of it. He tried to soothe her with a comforting remark in her own tongue but the words that came spontaneously to his lips unfortunately were the words “blood bowl.”

  Thereafter Ludmila lived at the Castle.

  The astronomer tugged on his hood and held up his staff. “Go on, my son.”

  “For the first three days, Father, she did not rise from that bed,” said Prince Heinrich, pointing through the astronomer’s chest to the bed that stood in the darkness behind him. Even on the evening of the third day, when, through a stonemason employed in the Castle Workshop who spoke both of their languages fluently, Prince Heinrich suggested to Ludmila as sweetly and discreetly as he could that she repair to Margaretha’s boudoir to cleanse herself and dress herself, in preparation for the act he had in mind for that night and which could—“forgive me, Father!”—be postponed no longer, she refused, so that he had to have Greta’s ladies-in-waiting cleanse and clothe her in the bed. As they did so she whimpered continually for the man who had abandoned her, “a whimpering which began to infuriate me,” the Prince told the astronomer, “for what apart from begetting her had he done to warrant such unremitting devotion? Would she ever be as devoted to me as she was to him? Is not the unremittingness of the devotion of a daughter to her father even in the face of the father’s iniquity a sign that it is something less than love, something more mechanistic than love, something more deterministic?” Naturally Heinrich thought of the unremitting nature of the clocks he dismantled, how they ticked and tocked unflaggingly till the moment he took out their innermost gear. Mustn’t a feeling be able to flag to be love, indeed to be a feeling? Heinrich mused, the astronomer quoted him as saying, and the act that ensued once Ludmila had been scrubbed and scoured was consumed, on his end, by such ruminations on the quirks, oddities, and clocklike qualities of the filial bond. This did not, Heinrich noted, lessen the pleasure they took in it.

  That night the Prince slept six hours. And in the morning, another miracle: although the Sun, by design, had not penetrated his turret in years, he awoke in a beam of light. Propping himself up on an elbow he saw that Ludmila had not only risen at last, she had also torn down the dark Flemish tapestries he had hung over the windows three, four, even five thick to stop natural light from interfering with his “investigations into the mechanism or mechanisms of nature and man.” In the fur-lined nightgown Margaretha’s ladies-in-waiting had lent her from Katharina’s wardrobe, Ludmila stood there staring at one such investigation. In her primitive German she demanded: What is this? And he, elated, leapt out of bed, summoned the stonemason, and through him explained that this was a clock in an early stage of being dismantled. That seemed to please her. She said: And this? This, replied Heinrich, by way of the stonemason, is a clock in a late stage of being dismantled. That, too, seemed to please her. She said: And this? This, he replied, is a clock that has been completely dismantled. “Please tell her,” he told the stonemason, “that I am someone who likes to take clocks apart, please tell her completely apart, I like to take clocks completely apart to see how they work. You cannot understand how something works until you take it apart, say that. To know something, tell her this verbatim, is to have taken it apart, completely.” This seemed to please her also. Later there occurred to him a different explanation of her pleasure, namely relief at learning that these perhaps frightful-looking apparatuses were instruments of science and not, as he realized the poor thing might have feared, as though he were an agent of the Inquisition, instruments of torture; and later still he realized that her pleasure sprang from another source altogether; but that sunny morning he took it as a sign of her interest in the properties of time, of duration, or if not her interest in the properties themselves, then of her interest in his interest in them. He took it as an overture. The first sign that their worlds “might be made to merge on a plane higher than that of mere matter, Father.”

  There followed the happiest days of his life. “Perhaps,” Heinrich said, “the only truly happy days of it.”

  Hand in hand they strolled through the Imperial Arboretum and the Imperial Rose Garden, through the Imperial Menagerie and the Imperial Portrait Gallery, the route he sometimes walked with Katharina when he sought to inform her about the ways of the world. In the arboretum he taught Ludmila about trees, first their nature, that is, their leaves and trunks, the range of their root systems, how they jostle with one another for sunlight, and then their meaning, the melancholy thoughts trees inspired in his head, thoughts that had their origins in his childhood experiences with trees, the way trees figured in his adolescence and in his early adulthood, the connotations of trees, their associations, gnarled knots that called to mind his mother’s father’s bent bulging fist gripping the knob of his cane, the gorgeous springtime flowering of a particular tree that reminded him of the dreadful, very drawn-out and very depressing springtime death of his beloved paternal grandmother long ago. Heinrich said: “I wanted to be transparent to her, Father—I wished Ludmila to know exactly what I was thinking when I looked at a tree.” The thought that a tree might put in his head a thought which she remained unaware of was actually painful to him; he felt the strange sensation that his head (which just a few weeks ago had been empty, continuous with everything else and the same as it) was teeming with personal arboreal associations which, if he didn’t want his head to shatter from the pressure, he had to reveal to Ludmila at once. In the rose garden he taught her about roses, first their nature, the purpose of their thorns and scents, and then their meaning, his own personal rose associations, of which, like his tree associations, Heinrich felt an urgent need to unburden himself, to share with her, lest his head shatter from the pressure of them. In the Imperial Menagerie he explained how the animals worked, how the hog worked, its nature, and what the animals, and particularly the hog, meant to him, what and whom he associated with them. Same with the portraits in the Imperial Portrait Gallery. He came to realize that the pressure he felt in his head, which was not unpleasant but which could only be relieved by disclosing to Ludmila with perfect precision what everything—hogs, trees, people, paintings, and everything else—evoked in him, in his head, was love. It was what love w
as. The feeling of being in love is the feeling, Heinrich realized, of one’s head being no longer equilibrated with the cosmos but being instead perilously albeit pleasurably out of equilibrium with it, overinflated with private associations that must at all costs be discharged, or pumped, into the head of the loved one. One’s head never feels more private, more cloistered, more one’s own, than when one is in love, love seals us in our head and our lover in our lover’s head, “Every single poet from Homer till now has got this backward, poets think love joins heads, fuses them together, when in fact it sequesters them.” This head sequestration was by no means an unpleasant phenomenon. The fervid urge to share one’s thoughts, in conversation, is the mental counterpart of the material urge to share one’s seed, in the carnal act, Heinrich observed, and how often after sharing with Ludmila that, say, the knot of this tree reminded him of his departed grandfather’s arthritic fist, darkened here and there by blood pooling beneath the skin, did he take her by the hand, dismiss the stonemason who’d been translating for them, and draw her down into the dirt.

  Now and then Margaretha teased: “How goes your edification of our little Czech Katharina?”

  But of course he had never drawn Katharina down into the dirt with him, except of course to tickle her, and of course to be tickled by her.

  Strolling with Ludmila around the Castle complex, articulating to her each and every one of his innermost thoughts and copulating with her there in the dirt beneath the big windows of the North Wing, with his father’s eyes possibly on his back, or hers, the Prince felt that no one had ever seemed more real to him than she did, a “wonderful, wonderful feeling.” Prince Heinrich said: “I cannot express to you, Father, how real she seemed to me in those days, how really real, what a really real person Ludmila seemed to me to be! A real person, a real other person, not me, with another person’s head.” She even learned to speak excellent German, far better, actually, than she let on at first, and upon discovering this he was able to dismiss the stonemason permanently and commune with her directly in his mother tongue.