The Tenth Muse

by Catherine Chung

  Henry, on the other hand, held opinions on everything, and she never stayed quiet. At home she had organized protests and flown east just so she could ride a freedom bus to the South. She had watched a man get beaten by a mob on the street and stood on the sidelines watching in horror, unable to intervene. Afterward she had walked up and down the area where the crowd had dragged him, picking her way around the blood and broken glass, looking for the teeth she had seen get knocked out of his mouth. She had found three of them and cradled them in her palm. She put them in a glass of milk and took them to the hospital, and left them there, though she knew it was probably futile. She had just wanted, she said, for the man to know that someone had been looking out for him. That someone had tried their best.

  “You know, until I came to Germany, I didn’t really realize somehow that the history going on outside our doors included me,” I said. “I just always felt excluded. Our building on campus was protested last year, and even though most of the people I work with are anti–the Vietnam War and pro–civil rights, it didn’t matter to the protesters, who were radically antiscience and antitechnology. I felt like they’d already put me on one side, the other side—which to be honest has been what’s happened to me my whole life. The truth is I feel freer here in Germany than I ever did back home.”

  “Well,” Henry said. “We’re used to everyone thinking we’re foreign in America, but here it’s actually true. We’re not constantly explaining ourselves, and that leaves us a degree of anonymity and freedom we’ve never been allowed before.” She smirked. “Which I really think you should avail yourself of.”

  Henry had tumbled into bed with at least two men that I knew of in our first month of acquaintance—this was also how she surprised me—how decisively she acted on her own desires, without pause or second-guessing, and how she reveled a bit in shocking me, looking at me sideways with a wicked gleam, teasing me about what she saw as my outrageous innocence. All my friends, as it turned out, found me charmingly old-fashioned. They were free with their affections, physical and emotional, and looked down on anything they found prudish.

  They teased me relentlessly about my love life and demanded details about Peter, which I resisted, because as happy as I was to find myself in Bonn, and to throw myself into this new life, the one thing that wasn’t going well at all was my relationship with Peter. He didn’t answer the letters I wrote him, and on the phone he was distant and withdrawn. He didn’t want to talk about everyday things, and he didn’t want to talk about math. It was all compounded by the fact that we could only ever find time to talk in the middle of the night for me, or the wee hours of the morning for him. “I’m just not a telephone person,” he said. Every time we talked I felt further and further away from him. Had I imagined our connection, I sometimes found myself wondering, or had I just broken it? It was an excruciating time for us, but strangely, I was able to compartmentalize it completely, so that I’d find myself sobbing inconsolably over the telephone, asking him what he wanted from me, and then be able to go out drinking and dancing with my friends two hours later, exultant, as if I were two different people.

  And I did feel I was turning into a new person. I found this unfamiliar openness that my friends were so adept in—this talking about anything—exhilarating. In this new environment, it was easy to talk with strangers. I discovered I actually liked parties, especially afterward, when my friends and I would scoop up anyone we’d liked and go to a bar, and after that walk for hours, still talking. So this, I thought, was what Peter had with his friends—this easy camaraderie that I had not acquired in college or graduate school. I sank into it with gratitude.

  Among my new friends, my awkward attempts at German and occasional forays into French, all my missteps and ignorance, were met with indulgence and laughter. It was easy to be curious and to bear the curiosity of others. When I rode my bicycle, I did not feel like a woman impersonating a woman riding a bicycle, but like myself, getting from one place to another.

  The irony of this, as well as of the sense of freedom and happiness I felt, was not lost on me. Here I was, feeling comfortable and free in the country responsible for my orphaning. And yet I had a feeling—not only for my classmates and fellow foreigners and the jolly band we formed there, but for the buildings, for the streets themselves. Everything was new to me, but everything about the place itself was old. The streets were old, the stones of the buildings were old, even the rubble from the war that still lined street after street was old. And something about the oldness of it all—older than the entire country of America—made it feel timeless, made it feel welcoming. I tried to remind myself that this was a country that was responsible for the extermination of millions (millions!) of people. I was still wrapping my mind around what Liliane had told my father—that I had Jewish blood in me. Here was a secret identity, whereas all my life so many of my identities had been visible and immediate. And yet, despite this (or because of it?), I didn’t feel endangered in this country. Instead, I felt strangely at home.

  “Göttingen!” Henry exclaimed when I told her I planned to visit there during my stay. “The Brothers Grimm were the head librarians there for years! They’re part of the research I came to Germany to do. I want to go there too!” And so we decided we’d go together during the midsemester break.

  In the meantime, we went on a pilgrimage to the house Beethoven had been born in; we went on picnics on the great lawn of the university and watched the other students go by; we went to hear musicians playing in the park; we went shopping in men’s clothing stores where Henry draped us both in luxurious fabrics.

  Amid all this social activity, there was also school. I chose classes to fill gaps in my education, and I ate up anything that might shed light on the Mohanty problem or the Riemann hypothesis. I was delighted by the seminars, which were beautifully prepared and executed and aimed often just above my comprehension, so that I spent hours poring over my notes, reaching for a concept I could barely see the edges of. I made good progress on my own work and even worked up the nerve to write to Charles Lee to tell him I was working on an extension of his proof. It was a risk, just in case he was working on it himself—Peter had told me to keep my work quiet, lest Lee take my interest as some kind of challenge—but once I had something of value to offer, something real to share, I found myself wanting to reach out, to wave to him from across the distance.

  The rest of my time I spent frolicking with Henry and meeting and talking with other students, who spoke practically flawless English and were also particularly kind about my less-than-flawless German. I found that talking with them was easier in some ways than it had been with my colleagues back home: I was accorded respect without having to fight for it, without having to prove myself. Even my professors allowed me to drive the conversation in a way I’d never gotten the chance to do before.

  I made great strides on the Mohanty problem, and as much as I’d loved working with Peter, I felt for the first time how good it felt to be firmly in charge of my own work—deferring to no one, trying to impress no one, just following my own instincts and interests. A problem can be interesting or beautiful in the way that it is formulated, and it can also be meaningful—the most important ones are both. It was in Bonn that I realized with a thrill that my problem would be both.

  There were other welcome professional developments: I had never taught a class before, but in Bonn I was asked to guest teach a course, and after every class, my students applauded by knocking their fists against their desks. They came to office hours and asked me questions with eager, open faces. They wanted to show me around the city. They were excited by what I had to offer them, and when I looked at their smiling, welcoming faces, I thought: I could live here. I fell a little bit in love: I told myself this was the country that had produced Bach and Beethoven, Gauss and Einstein, Rilke and Arendt. The university counted Nietzsche and Marx as alumni. But of course the same country had also burned books in the street, murdered poets and thinkers and childre
n. And it was a fact that the University of Bonn, which had welcomed me with open arms, had been used as a Nazi institution during World War II. Everywhere I went I was reminded that we were surrounded by the vestiges of war.

  Chapter 18

  PROFESSOR BEHR WAS DELIGHTED WHEN I TOLD HIM I’D be making a trip to Göttingen. “Beautiful town,” he exclaimed. “I have happy memories of visiting colleagues there before the war, and taking long walks in the woods.” He asked me what I wanted to accomplish on my trip, and I told him that I was going more for the people who used to be there than those who remained, and he said, “Ah, you’re making a pilgrimage. Very proper.” And he gave me the name of a beloved former student who “alas, lacked the talent for serious study” but had risen in the ranks of the administration there and was now the provost. He promised to write to him to tell him I was coming, and “to see what he could do.”

  “Frank was never a particularly good mathematician,” he explained, “never had the imagination for it, but he was exceptional at every other thing he put his mind to.” He continued, “You, however, are a very good mathematician, so though I wish you the best on your travels, I implore you to return after a reasonable amount of time, and do not lose track of your research.”

  I agreed enthusiastically. “I only have one small lingering hole I’m trying to plug in the paper I’m writing, and then I’ll be ready to show it to you and submit it,” I told Professor Behr.

  “Just don’t wait too long,” he said. “You don’t want to get scooped.”

  “Of course not,” I agreed, but I wasn’t really worried. I had a feeling about this paper, a calm confidence that it was my paper to write, that it was my time. And when I was done, I hoped it would be enough to establish me—if not among the ranks of Peter Hall, at least within his circle. I wanted to be able to return to America with some kind of crowning achievement. I wanted to see what would happen between us if I returned not as his starstruck student, but as an equal.

  In the meantime, Henry had received an invitation in response to her request to access the archives for research pertaining to the Brothers Grimm. She’d gotten permission from her program to go for an extended period of time, as well as to travel to the nearby Harz Mountains where the Brothers Grimm had collected many of their fairy tales.

  Aside from my trip with Peter to Chicago, I’d never traveled with a companion before, and Henry and I prepared for two full weeks before we left. We went back and forth about what clothes we might need, how many papers and notebooks, how many pencils and pens. In the end I took a midsize satchel heavy with books: Henry packed two enormous suitcases filled with more things than I had brought for my entire trip to Germany. She had books and clothes and shoes and skin creams and cosmetics, and an additional handbag overflowing with two loaves of bread, a jar of jam, some butter, two rolls of salami, and a bag of pastries.

  “Don’t you think they will have food in Göttingen?” I laughed, but Henry warned, “Make fun of me, and I won’t share.”

  It turned out she was right: our train broke down on the tracks, and we ate all the food in her bag, and ordered more, as well as coffee, tea, water, and juice from the attendant who came pushing a cart through the aisle every few hours. All day long we sat in our train compartment, and Henry told me fairy tales. I’d seen Snow White the movie, of course, and Sleeping Beauty—but these were not the stories I’d grown up with.

  “Neither did I,” Henry scoffed. “It’s not like I got these stories from my parents.”

  “Where did you get them?” I asked.

  “The library!” Henry exclaimed. “I read all the fairy tales I could get my hands on, all the different versions from all over the world, in translation. I already knew Chinese, so I taught myself German, and then in college I took Russian and Italian and French so I could read everything in their original language.”

  “Henry,” I said, “has anyone ever told you that you’re a little bit terrifying?”

  Henry dimpled. “All the time,” she said.

  Henry was working on a book to collect fairy tales and folktales from all over the world and organize them into archetypes. Every culture, she said, seemed to have a Cinderella story, a Little Red Riding Hood story, a Snow White story. “They’re not just stories about rags to riches, powerless to powerful,” she said. “They’re also really sobering critiques of what we value in women. Do you know in the original Brothers Grimm version, the sisters don’t just try Cinderella’s shoe on, they hack off their toes and their heels to get them to fit? When they pass the test, they’re taken to the prince to marry, except that they’re caught when their blood leaks through the bandages and out of the shoes. The prince doesn’t care about Cinderella, the girl he supposedly fell in love with at the ball. He would marry anyone who had her tiny feet!” She laughed. “All these stories have these underlying, terrible messages that Disney just erased in his movies and replaced with happy endings, which is arguably worse.

  “In the Brothers Grimm version of Snow White, the prince doesn’t actually fall in love with her sleeping body—he comes upon her in a glass coffin because she’s supposed to be dead, but the dwarves found her too beautiful to bury. The prince doesn’t wake her with a kiss—he’s loading her onto a horse to take home to look at, like a pinned butterfly or a stuffed animal, and while they’re jostling her body, the apple piece she choked on gets knocked loose and she wakes up, and that’s when they get married.

  “And that’s not the only catatonic-girl-in-a-coma story we’ve got. There’s Sleeping Beauty, too, of course—there are all these princes falling in love with the empty, unconscious shells of girls who basically go limp right as they hit adolescence. Sends an interesting message, don’t you think? Girls—be as lifeless as possible, and the more likely it is you’ll be desired.”

  By the time our train finally got moving again, it was night. We stretched out in the sleeping car under one of two blankets Henry had packed, our heads propped up by two rolled towels. “At first I was astonished at the amount of luggage you were bringing,” I told her. “And now I’m amazed at how much you managed to fit into the luggage!”

  We were both exhausted but couldn’t sleep because we kept talking and talking. We kept saying, “We need to sleep,” but then Henry would say something, or I would say something, and we would keep going on and on, like we were making up for all the years we hadn’t yet known each other, all the years we hadn’t been able to talk.

  “Did you know that the stepmother as a villain is an invention on the part of the Brothers Grimm?” Henry asked. “The original folktales had the mothers as villains, but the Brothers Grimm changed them to stepmothers in the retelling. Just think about that! The original versions were about how dangerous mothers can be, how jealous even of their own children—and then the Brothers Grimm went and sanctified the mother. Also, in the folk version of Little Red Riding Hood, she isn’t rescued by a woodsman, she frees herself by tricking the wolf with her wits.”

  “What? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes. She pretends she has to go to the bathroom and the wolf says she can, but to tie a string around her finger so she won’t get away. She ties the string to the door of the outhouse, to trick him when he pulls it, and then she runs away.” Henry stopped here and grinned in delight. “And here’s the kicker: it all makes sense when you consider how folktales were mostly told and passed along orally by women, but that the written versions have universally been set down and altered by men, that in the women’s version the girl gets away by her wits, and in the man’s version she’s saved by a hero. Two very different lessons, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Ha!” I said. “That sort of reminds me of the tenth muse.”

  “Who’s that?” Henry asked.

  “You’ve never heard of her?” I asked. “She’s not a fairy tale?”

  “Not exactly,” Henry said. “The muses are technically Greek myths, but tell me more, I want to hear!”

  So I told her my mother
’s story.

  “Ah, I love that story,” she said, when I had finished. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  “There’s another story I always think of along with that one,” I said. “Because it’s also about a woman who leaves her family to choose her own fate. The Wise Princess Kwan-Yin. My mother told me that one as well.”

  “Oh, I know that story!” Henry exclaimed. “It’s Chinese. Tell me your version!” And so I did.

  Afterward, Henry lay looking at me for a long time. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “the two are almost opposites: the tenth muse is all about fulfilling her own dreams as an individual, and the Princess Kwan-Yin is all about self-sacrifice, or self-transcendence. You know she’s a religious figure in China, right? She’s a bodhisattva in Buddhism, dedicated to alleviating the suffering of mankind. People have statues of her in their homes. They chant her name in prayer.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, struck with the thought that I didn’t know if my mother had had any kind of religion. We hadn’t gone to church—another strike against us in New Umbria—but for some reason I’d just assumed she had no religion. Now I wondered if she’d been Buddhist.

  Henry abruptly leaned forward. “Listen, Kat,” she said urgently, taking my hand in hers. “Forget princes. Forget men. Let’s never get married. Let’s stay single and free forever, and do what we want. Let’s be heroes or villains, but never the princess. Or if we have to marry, let’s be like the girl in Bluebeard, who marries the villain with all the dead wives in the basement, and then kills him in self-defense and inherits all his wealth.” She laughed. She was leaning forward and smiling at me intensely, and I felt a little dizzy and breathless, like I was standing at the edge of a precipice and wanted to take her hand and jump.