The Tenth Muse

by Catherine Chung

  Emmy moved among these men without self-consciousness. Without constraint or fear. Later, Sophie told Karl it seemed to her the deepest kind of freedom: Emmy’s benevolent, blinking ignorance of what people thought of her in either direction. She did not care. To Sophie it seemed liked a miracle: to not even struggle against the crippling self-consciousness she so often felt, but to simply set it aside! Sophie wanted to learn that power. And it was in those first weeks at Göttingen, watching Emmy Noether, that Sophie decided that she did not wish to aspire to loveliness, but to a different kind of grace.

  “Sophie wanted to be a mathematician, and was well on her way to becoming a formidable one. As are you.” Karl smiled. “Blood always tells,” he said. And then, “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you think might be in the notebook?”

  I felt a flush of shame at my earlier lie. “I really don’t feel like I can,” I said.

  He nodded. I felt I’d displeased him, but he said, “Anything else you’d like to know?”

  “Everything, I guess,” I said. “Whatever you can tell me.”

  And so he described Sophie’s house to me and drew a beautiful and detailed sketch for me from memory: he said the house had been large and yellow, two stories with six gabled windows facing front, built in the traditional German style. He drew the interior, pointing out where each room had been, including Sophie’s and the two guest rooms he and his family had occupied whenever they visited. He drew the living room with its bookshelves reaching all the way to the ceiling, the gleaming grand piano that Sophie’s father had given her mother upon their marriage: the one extravagance he was known for. He told me how beautifully Sophie’s mother had played it. He told me about a lake that the cousins swam in together nearby, and about picnics and long summer days, and all the beautiful things that had been in their house. Beneath the drawing he scrawled out their address.

  At the end of our conversation, Karl said I could keep the drawings he’d made. I had more questions to ask, but at some point, I sensed a constraint in the way he was talking to me that hadn’t been there before. It made me feel awkward and confused; I didn’t know why his manner would have cooled. I tried to charm him back into the way he’d been when we first met, until I realized that he seemed to be waiting for me to leave.

  WHEN I GOT BACK to my pension, I felt inexplicably unsettled. The owners had strictly forbidden long-distance calling, but I called Peter’s office from my bedroom, collect.

  “Yes?” he answered the phone. His voice was cold.

  “Not even hello?” I asked.

  “Katherine, you don’t call for weeks, not even to say that you arrived in Göttingen safely, and then you call me collect and you’re going to complain about how I answer the phone?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot to call when I got here.”

  There was a pause. A crackly sigh. “Katherine, I’m at the office. I’m trying to get some work done. What do you need?”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice,” I said. “I miss you.”

  “Well,” Peter said flatly, “then you should have stayed here.”

  “Why are you acting like this?” I asked. “Why are you being so cold?” And we went on and on like this for a while until Peter reminded me that this call was collect, and would cost him a fortune, and I said, “Fine, let’s hang up.” Then he asked for my number and said he’d call back, but I told him no, not to bother. It was an exhausting, stupid conversation, and at the end of it, I had told Peter that if he was so unhappy with us, maybe we should break up, and he—to my shock—had agreed.

  I avoided Henry that night and went to bed before she came home, and first thing the next morning I snuck out of our pension and left her a note saying I’d be back late, after dinner. I went to the train station and boarded a train to Sophie’s hometown of Gurz, which was a four-hour ride away. I felt weighed down by sadness, but through that sadness, I also felt a thrill of excitement to be traveling by myself, at the thought that no one in the world would know where I was, not Henry, not Karl, who hadn’t been to Gurz since Sophie’s family had left.

  I fell asleep with my head against the window, watching the trees roll by, and I slept deeply until we finally arrived in Gurz around noon. Standing on the platform, I ate the sandwich I had packed. Everyone who passed by turned to look at me and stare. I finished eating my sandwich, took out an old map that I’d marked with the location of Sophie’s house, and feeling very conspicuous, began the walk, which Karl had described as being a leisurely half hour out of town and into farmland.

  I walked for a long time on the main road out. After an hour, I turned around. The sun was now firmly fixed in the center of the sky, and the books I’d brought weighed heavy on my shoulder. I had only passed three streets on my way out, and though they’d had the wrong names, I thought I would go back and look again.

  I walked up and down those three streets with the wrong names—the first was a line of small houses that went on and on. None of them could be Sophie’s, I thought—they were too small and close together, some of them gated, with people sitting on their porches or working in their gardens. As I passed one, a dog rushed down from the backyard at me, barking. I saw someone push back a curtain from inside the house, but no door opened, no voice called the dog back. It stood in my way barking and not letting me pass until I decided I had come far enough, the house was not on this street, and I backed away while the dog chased me, rushing at my legs until I stopped and stood still, at which point he stopped and retreated. It went on like that for a while until we were at the main road again, and then the dog was suddenly friendly, wagging his tail and grinning companionably as he followed me on.

  The next street I turned on was empty save for one house at the end that was grand and all brick, but nothing like the house Karl had described or drawn for me. As I stood staring up at it, a man came out of the door and walked down toward me. The dog beside me growled at him. “Oh hush,” I said irritably. All I needed was for that man to think the dog was mine.

  “Guten Tag,” said the man, who looked to be in his mid- to late forties, and I responded in German, asking him if he’d known any Meisenbachs who’d lived in town.

  “No,” he said. “There are no Meisenbachs here.”

  “Yes, I know they aren’t here anymore,” I said. “I’m looking for the house they used to live in, before the war.”

  The man shrugged. “There was never any such family in this town,” he said.

  The third street I came to had no houses on it whatsoever but led to a large and beautiful lake edged by a flock of birds that lifted into the air as the dog and I approached. He went wild, sprinting after them from one side to the next like a madman. I stood and watched how they rose in one motion, fashioning their bodies into little arrows as they soared.

  I sat on a large rock with a flat top, perfect for sitting on, and wondered where Sophie’s house was, and if it still stood, and how I could find it. I wondered what I would do if I did find it, who would be living in it now, how I could explain why I’d come. How peaceful it looked all around me. How happy even the dog was now, lying beside me, his tongue lolling out. The birds were still circling overhead, launching themselves onto the water. The sky was cloudless, and the trees on the other side of the lake waved gently at me. It looked like the kind of place generations of a family could come to, year after year.

  After a while I rose reluctantly and started on my way back to town. I wanted to get on the next train back to Göttingen, but I felt compelled to ask at the station, and then at the bank, and then at the grocery store, what had happened to the Meisenbachs. I was met with the same blank look, even from those who were old enough to remember. “The Meisenbachs? There was never any such family here.”

  “The Jewish family,” I said, overcome by a creeping sense of déjà vu at the feeling of being in the wrong place, in a parallel reality perhaps, of things not being as they should be, of the facts not lining up.

&nb
sp; “There were never any Jews here,” the woman at the grocery store said, smiling at me with pity, like the poor foreigner that I was, lost and in over my depth, trying to communicate in my stilted German.

  “But what about before the war,” I said.

  She shrugged. “The Jews lived more in the big cities, not here—never anything like that here,” she said, and she looked at me, squinting a bit, and I felt uneasy. I felt no menace or danger coming from her, but a general feeling of distrust mixed in with a reluctant impulse to be friendly.

  “What about Brandt Street?” I asked. “Can you tell me where that is, or was?”

  She looked at me blankly. “Brandt Street?” she said. “There’s no such place here.”

  “Is this the town of Gurz?” I said, wondering if I had gotten off at the wrong station.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling exasperatedly now, nodding at the other customers in the shop.

  “Is there perhaps another town named Gurz?” I said. “Nearby?”

  And now she shook her head with finality, as if she’d finally confirmed an initial poor opinion of me, and said, “This is the only one.” She turned her back to me and began to stack cans of peas onto the shelf behind her.

  I caught the next train back. As I sat on the train and watched the streets of Gurz roll away, I recalled a memory I had long suppressed. Once, when I was a child, I woke up after a midmorning nap and my mother was not in the house. I ran from room to room, a sick feeling like stones in my stomach. I opened every door, I looked under the bed and in the cabinets, anywhere my mother might fit—as if she was hidden there. I’d read a story about a fox who went out to work every day but really hid under the bed, and I was struck by the terrifying thought that perhaps my mother labored under a similar curse.

  And after I had searched the whole house twice and still she had not returned, I tucked myself into a cabinet and waited in the dark, leaning against the cupboard, folded into the small, dank space, waiting. When I heard the door open, I stayed put. I heard her walking from room to room. I heard her steps quicken. I heard her calling my name. Still, I stayed. And then the door opened and my mother was kneeling, peering in at me, on her face the unmistakable and miraculous expression of worry and relief.

  I didn’t crawl out, but stayed there, my head folded into my arms, until my mother reached in and pulled me out. She didn’t ask what I was doing there, or why I had hidden, and I didn’t ask where she had gone.

  I WAS SUDDENLY EAGER to be back in Göttingen, to see Henry, to ask her to tell me what she had found out about folktales. I wanted to stand in the kitchen of our apartment and cook a meal together. I wanted to lean my head against her shoulder and feel the solidity of her—dear Henry, always so sure.

  Before we’d left for Göttingen, she’d shown me some pictures of Bonn that had been taken before the war. Near the university where I now lived, there’d once been a park filled with statues. In the photo, it had been filled with people: children running about among the fountains, a pair of lovers in silhouette kissing against a tree. There was another set of photos taken the following year. Everything was gone. No people, no statues, no gates. The bushes, the flowers, and the trees were now charred black lines against the ground. The buildings framing the garden had been obliterated—entire twelve-story apartment buildings, grand and beautiful, missing, gone, as if they had never existed.

  Chapter 21

  A MAN AND A WOMAN HAVE A BOY. THEY HAVE ANOTHER boy. They have a girl. Aunts and uncles and cousins come through their house, and the days fill with voices, music, and laughter.

  There are household pets—two dogs, a rabbit, a snake, and a toad. There are days and days of dinners and jokes, there are nights filled with stars. A war comes in the early years, but the battles are elsewhere, and the boys are barely walking. The father is not called away, and so as terrible the toll on the country and their less-fortunate neighbors, the family itself is untouched. The boys grow up. The girl goes to university. Her brothers get married and have children of their own. Look at them. The parents, their girl, two boys and their families.

  There is growing unrest in the world, but for a long time the family is shielded. For a long time it remains untouched. There are rallies and disagreements, but they seem far away. The family believes it is safe. Then there’s a shift, and the language of politics grows barbs, but in their house, the family believes in the goodness of people, in the stability of things, and they wait for the moment to pass. Life goes on. In the elections, the wrong man wins. A clown and a bully. A bigot. The changes come fast, the changes come slow, the changes come to their town. They come to their door.

  Now. Subtract the father’s job. Subtract the girl from university. Subtract the university from the girl.

  She is home now, with her brothers and their wives and children. They have gathered in this house their parents built, the house they grew up in. Look at them, standing so somber in the living room, surrounded by candlelight. Nobody in this tableau knows what will come next, but there is fear. Now. Subtract the books standing upright on the shelves. They are the first to go. Then subtract the candlesticks and the jewelry. Subtract the piano from the living room, subtract the mother’s favorite songs. Then subtract the mother, bent with worry. Subtract the father. Subtract the boys. Subtract their wives and children. Subtract the beds they slept in, the linens and their clothing. Subtract their woolen slippers, their mismatched mittens, the paintings on the walls. Subtract the walls. Subtract the memory of this family’s voices. Subtract the memory of their lives. Just turn them into dust. Do it all at once. Subtract them from this earth.

  Chapter 22

  I GOT SICK IMMEDIATELY UPON RETURNING FROM GURZ. It was the kind of illness that strikes all of your body at once, needing no time to ramp up and leaving no chance to struggle against it. I stepped out onto the train platform and nearly fell over with dizziness. I staggered back to the pension and crawled into my bed, pushing aside Henry’s worried exclamations, and answering only—when she asked how my excursion had gone—“Later.”

  I asked her to deliver Karl a note, apologizing for not stopping by like I’d promised, and letting him know as soon as I was on my feet I’d come by to see him. For the next week, I lay in bed, hot with fever, restless and aching, and oppressed by a feeling of misery such as I’d never felt before. My throat hurt and it was hard to breathe: I’d had bad colds before, but this illness took hold of my nasal passageways and my throat and coated my lungs in a thick mucus that I could barely cough up, and when I did, I had to tip myself over my bed to cough with one hand to my chest and one to my mouth, everything sticky and gelled inside me, refusing expulsion.

  Henry tiptoed in and out of my room, but I turned away from her and moaned for her to leave me be. Still, I gratefully drank the water and ate the warm broth she left by my bedside. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the long and lovely roads of Gurz, the pretty houses, the shining lake. And underneath all that loveliness was an undercurrent of menace: the ground beneath hid terrible secrets, the smiling faces were murderers. I tossed and turned, dreaming I walked up and down the streets of Gurz, as Sophie’s voice and the voices of her family called from every house I passed. When I knocked frantically at each door, someone new and yellow haired and perfectly pleasant arrived to greet me. Behind them, voices wailed and pleaded with me to find and free them, but the person at the door blinked at me in a friendly manner as if they didn’t hear them, as if they heard nothing unusual at all.

  I elbowed my way in, disturbing the furniture, breaking open doors, searching for the source of those voices, and always each house was empty, and always each owner, unperturbed by my agitation, cheerfully wished me luck on my way out. As I searched house after beautiful house, up and down those streets, I began to wonder if I was insane.

  I said, “I want my mother,” and woke myself up with my voice.

  There was a scuffling in the room next door, and the sound brought me back to myself, to my bed, to my
room. Henry came in.

  “Did you say something?” she said, touching my forehead anxiously. “Did you call for me?”

  “I just need to rest,” I said. “Please leave me alone.”

  Afterward, into the emptiness that remained, I said again—quietly, “I want my mother.” And I didn’t know who or what I meant.

  AFTER MY ILLNESS PASSED, I was filled with a restless, nervous energy to leave Göttingen as soon as possible. Gurz had planted a sinking sense of doom in me, which I still felt, its long roots winnowing down.

  “I’m going back to Bonn,” I told Henry as soon as I was on my feet. “I promised Professor Behr I wouldn’t be away too long.”

  I went as soon as I could to take my leave of Karl and collect my notebook.

  “Did you not get it?” Karl said. “I sent it back to your pension.”

  “When?” I asked, the sense of dread I’d carried since my trip to Gurz mushrooming inside me.

  “Weeks ago, after you stopped by to inquire about it,” he said. “I sent it by messenger the next day, it seemed urgent.”

  “I never got it,” I gasped. “I didn’t know to look out for it.”

  “And I just assumed you received it,” he said. “Oh no.”

  “Who took it over to the pension? Who accepted it?”

  “My errand boy,” Karl said. “I’ll ask him what happened as soon as I get home this evening. Perhaps somehow he still has it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and I walked out of his office and straight home, trembling. When I asked the owner of the pension if any package had come, he shook his head. Henry was out, so I had to wait all day and evening until she came home to find me sitting on the sofa in front of the door, wringing my hands.