In the meantime, I was hiddenly flush with money of my own, in twenty-dollar bills. Ribbon, carbon, paper; alcohol for cleaning the keys; a small can of oil. For a few dollars the fossil might be restored to life, and then my acquaintance with the Karaites, whatever they were, could begin; I knew only that Karaites were not Charismites. Cautiously, noiselessly, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my dresser. The Bear Boy, quiescent in his scalloped collar, lay there as silently as Mrs. Mitwisser in her bed. I pushed him aside to find Bertram's blue envelope.
It was not there. My fortune was gone.
11
IN THE MORNING I raised a hullabaloo.
I was eighteen, an unformed creature, and (as people say) ignorant of the world. I had endured my stringent childhood in Thrace, a backwater townlet where lives were turned away from the impress of events even as they were unfolding—a period of turbulence that had begun to shake the ground of Europe. For the denizens of Thrace—for Lena and her sons, and for every other native household—Europe was beyond reality, and for me it was nearly the same: the fanciful habitation of Pinocchio and Becky Sharp and Sidney Carton. (Only many decades later would I come to agree with Ninel about the useless delusions of literature.) Yet I question now why I did not question then, in that third-floor bedroom in the marshy reaches of the Bronx, what even I, in my unformed ignorance, could see was Professor Mitwisser's peculiar situation. Why, after his rescue by the conscientious if mistaken Board of the Hudson Valley Friends College, was he not instantly recruited by some eager university? It was an era—I have since understood—of foreign flooding: an influx of refugee scholars, injured, diminished, confused, streaming into the chaos of an alien haven and hoping for an academic berth of some kind; for a replica of the old life, the old reverence. A substantial flock settled in the New School in New York; a handful went to Chicago and Princeton; the rest, in their broken dignity, dragging their medals and degrees, drooped toward whatever uncertain welcome they might find in institutions north or west or south. Mitwisser was not among any of these.
At eighteen I was as uncomprehending of the times—of all that world-upheaval—as if I were still a raw weed in the hinterlands of Thrace; even so, I saw in Mitwisser something vengeful. He was off course; he was not what he had been; but the weeping that had terrorized me made me believe that everything was tainted for him, he had given up on retrieval. No waiter would bow to him ever again. What was a university to him now? Devils lurked in those honored halls; his own students, his own colleagues, had ended as devils. And all those others, the great foreign influx, the scholars, the refugees—they were only dwarves in this new place. Mann, Einstein, Arendt, yes, the grand explainers (I would one day pursue them myself), idols of the popular journals; but the rest were dwarves, rebuffed, humiliated, obscured, trampled on, zwergenhaft. Better to be a heretic! Better to be a Karaite! Better to separate oneself from the explainers! To set oneself against the explainers!
It was through glimmerings like these—primitive and unschooled though I was—that I took in Rudolf Mitwisser's discontents on the night the money in Bertram's blue envelope vanished. I knew nothing of world-upheaval, I knew nothing of that great scholarly flood. But in Mitwisser's tears as they fled down the rough channels of his scored skin, I caught the glitter of heresy—the resolution of a man who has turned his back on a received course.
And I did raise a hullabaloo. I thought it was my right. I lasted until morning and then I raised a hullabaloo—and in between, roiling on my pillow in that airless room through which drifted the silent inhalations and whispery expulsions of Mrs. Mitwisser's breathing, I schemed how I would compel Anneliese to speak of money. Now she would speak of it. I would force her. I would press her with the force of an iron press. There was a thief in that house, and except for me no one who was not one of them: no one who did not belong to Professor Mitwisser.
Mrs. Mitwisser, as usual, slept late. It was her habit to keep to her bed until the morning's tumult of ablution and tramping was over and the house had grown quiet. I dressed noiselessly and stayed where I was. I heard the front door open and close; from the window I could see Mitwisser stepping into the beginning heat of the day in his fedora and proper woolen suit. He had a rapid, concentrated stride, and the end of the street soon digested his giant's shape; it dematerialized around a corner, uninnocent of some recondite heterodoxy perhaps, but guiltless, I was certain, of theft. He never came near his wife's domain. He had never set foot on the third floor.
A boy stood on the threshold, a yard from Mrs. Mitwisser's shut-up eyelids: they resembled pale oyster shells. I had by now learned which boy was which. This was the middle-sized one.
"Anneliese wants you."
"Good," I told him; it was Gert, Anneliese's most frequently employed messenger. "Tell Anneliese I want her. Tell her I want her right away."
"You have to get papa's machine fixed. It has to be ready for when he needs it tonight."
"Tell Anneliese I want her upstairs, quick!"
Gert's glance went anxiously to his sleeping mother. "Is it mama? Is mama all right?"
"It has nothing to do with mama. Now will you go? I'm telling you to go!"
Mrs. Mitwisser's legs twitched under the blanket. Her eyes shot open. "Ach, lass mich in Ruhe," she murmured, and lifted a shoulder for shade against the infiltrating sunlight. Her lids hopped up and down.
There was a drumming on the stairs: Anneliese with her troops, Waltraut in her arms, three excited boys stomping behind her like a round of popping ammunition.
"Is something the matter with mama? Gert says something's the matter—"
"Was ist los?" Mrs. Mitwisser sat up with the mindless jump of a marionette.
"I had money in my dresser," I said. "It's gone. Someone took it."
"Da muss etwas los sein—"
"See what you're doing to mama!"
"My money's been taken. I had it right in there," and I pointed a shaking finger at the open drawer next to my bed.
Anneliese picked out her coldest tone. "Is this what you wake up mama for?"
"My money's gone," I said again. "I had money put away and it's gone."
Heinz looked as interested as if a night moth had at that moment unaccountably passed through the room. "Where'd it go?" he asked.
"Maybe into your pocket," I said.
"Don't you dare accuse that boy!" Anneliese cried.
"Not that boy? Then which other boy?"
Abruptly she set Waltraut down on her feet; I watched Anneliese's fist jut into a small boulder crowned with taut knuckles; but the other hand hung open. Her temples, exposed by the tightly drawn hair, reddened, then ebbed to a bloodless translucence. A shrewdness seeped into her whitening stare. "You haven't got any money at all. It's a story, isn't it? If you had money of your own, you wouldn't stay with us, isn't that so?"
"It was in an envelope, a present from my cousin—"
Gert broke in with plain relish: "How much was it?"
"Whoever took it knows how much."
"There was nothing to take," Anneliese said grimly. "It's just a story. To make a commotion about money—because you think you won't get paid. Paid for what? You haven't begun yet. Have you begun? What have you done for papa? Nothing. Papa wants you to put his machine in order, and you haven't done even that."
"I can't buy a new ribbon without money."
"You think of nothing but money," Anneliese said.
She was, I recognized, a marvel of cunning: she was reversing the charges; she was accusing the accuser. The hullabaloo was slipping away from me to become her own. And meanwhile there was a confusion of movement all around: Mrs. Mitwisser tearing at her nightgown, frantically ripping holes in its bosom with her fingernails, Willi darting from Anneliese's side as though her hot scorn would lick out and burn him, Waltraut dropping to the floor and crawling strangely, fearfully, as if in dread of a slap, toward her mother's bed, Heinz and Gert all at once snickering—alarmed elastic giggles that growled into mutenes
s—because they had glimpsed, through a long rent in the fabric of her gown, Mrs. Mitwisser's sunken pink nipples.
"Heinrich, Gerhardt," Anneliese warned, "let mama rest. Leave her, please." To me she said, "You've made mama worse again. I'm going to tell papa to get rid of you.—Willi, downstairs, schnell!"
But Willi was peering into the space where I had hidden the blue envelope. "Look, she's got it, didn't I say so?" He held up the ragged Bear Boy. "She keeps it down in there, see?"
"Get away from my things," I told him lamely. I was defeated; I saw how Anneliese was swelled up with her bitter powers. To be sent away—the desolation of it, the peril. Where could I go? Where, and to whom? My money was stolen; my hullabaloo was stolen.
Willi fled. Like the others, he was all obedience. And Waltraut, on hands and knees like a tiny dog shrinking from a blow, went creeping, creeping toward the flailing figure in the bed across the room, the worried moon of her small face appealing for some motherly reflection. None came. Mrs. Mitwisser's quick eye preferred the wandering cracks in the ceiling. She was a mass of clutched banners—her sweated hands were bunched in streamers of torn cloth. She seemed to chew the air; those wretched German noises were wrenched out of a keening mouth.
Crouching on the floor, Waltraut put up a little wrist and pushed it under Mrs. Mitwisser's mattress. Out swept a flying fan of playing cards. Then she put up her little wrist again, as thin as a flute, and drew out Bertram's blue envelope.
She who would not agree to be a beggar had become a thief.
When the uproar of the morning lessened (I was the owner of that hullabaloo after all), what fell out from Anneliese's subdued account was this: Mrs. Mitwisser had merely intended to assure herself that when her only pair of shoes wore out she would have the wherewithal to pay for another pair.
My money was restored. I removed a bill from it and went out to reconnoiter a fresh typewriter ribbon for Professor Mitwisser's antediluvian machine.
Anneliese said, "When James comes, we'll have plenty of money again. He's going to come, you know." I did not know. I did not understand, and she had returned to the haughtiness that declined to expose the further history of her family.
12
I BEGAN MY NIGHTLY VISITS to Professor Mitwisser's study—a name it hardly merited, since he kept away from it more often than he inhabited it. It put me in mind anyhow of a monk's cell: the wall of books like mute stones set all around, the marital bed abandoned by conjugal twoness, immured and ascetic, the little wooden table toward which Mitwisser's lordly curl of a finger impatiently propelled me. I was an "assistant" with a simple duty: I was to record Mitwisser's words as he recited them from his notes. The crippled typewriter, it turned out, failed only intermittently, and I soon adapted to its several idiosyncrasies. The "w" was damaged, and the letters would sometimes skip, leaving wide spaces within a single syllable. The shift key had a habit of getting stuck, so that I would type a line all in capitals, as if the phrases were shouting back at me.
Mitwisser was oblivious to these difficulties. He was lost in his own intentness. At times he would stagger up like some large prehistoric form and claw at a volume in the wall; his eyes narrowed over the open pages as before a grassy veld concealing some living morsel of a creature about to be snapped up. These intervals of sudden prey may have hinted at a certain quickness of concentration, but the process as a whole was achingly slow. Often I sat languid with my hands uselessly dangling; I loathed these long waits. The silence was almost glutinous. It was August, in the heart of a heat wave that had lasted for days. In the mornings Professor Mitwisser would depart wearing his thick felt hat as usual, but with his jacket over his arm: the relentless early sun, already merciless, had the power to unbutton his formality. The nights were worse; the roof tiles had been absorbing torrid scorchings for hours, and there was not an electric fan in the house.
His notes were mainly in German. He spoke them aloud, translating into English as he went. It was not for my sake—what had I to do with any of it? And even if I had been able to respond to German dictation, he would, I saw, have chosen otherwise. He was disposing of his mother tongue; henceforward his work (no matter that he formulated it privately in the language of his birth) would venture forth publicly in this new, if somewhat overlavish, dress. His words, as I wonderingly transcribed them, were ornate, now and then boldly archaic; they had a lingering stately pace, logical, reasoned. On occasion they halted altogether, like a turn in a dance, or a rest in a march.
All that was a deception. It was a disguise. At first it seemed that the unbreathable sultriness of those summer nights was our influence, our muse—but it might have been the opposite. It might have been Mitwisser who was the muse of that stifling airlessness, that ovenlike seizure—or so I felt, as little by little his cause was revealed to me. Boiling rebellion was Mitwisser's subject. He was drawn to schismatics, fiery heretics, apostates—the lunatics of history. Below the scholar's skin a wild bellows panted, filling and emptying its burning pouch; a flaming furnace exhaled fevers. It was not August's torch that spilled the sweat from our necks. It was Mitwisser's own conflagration, invading, heaping up a pyre in that room with the shut door, out of which stuttered the unsteady nightly tapping of a typewriter.
There were libraries beyond his horizon: an archive in Cairo, another in Leningrad, destinations as remote and as unlikely for Rudolf Mitwisser in 1935 as the rings of Saturn. New York—the Reading Room—disgorged for him what it could: certain rarities, and secondary and tertiary chroniclings. Deficiencies. But—by now—Cairo, Leningrad, London, New York, the irretrievable Berlin, what did they matter? He had become his own archive. Babylonia, Persia, Byzantium teemed in the sockets of his eyes; choirs of esoteric names rang out against the ceiling. I grew used to hearing the twisted Egyptian music of al-Barqamani, al-Kirkisani, ibn Saghir, al-Maghribi, and the braided trio of Arabic and Aramaic and Hebrew, and, when contrariness overcame him, the exclamatory extrusions of German. He was that—an archive; a repository of centuries; a courier of alphabets and histories. At home, before they threw him out, they had esteemed him because no one knew what he knew. And here—now—he was scorned for the same reason: no one knew what he knew. He was scorned, he was in isolation, he was alone in his quest. (His quest? Is that what it finally was?) He was violated. He was friendless. He was, in a manner of speaking, wifeless.
One night visitors came. They came at ten o'clock, when Waltraut and the boys were asleep. I had already buttoned Mrs. Mitwisser into her nightgown; I had already forgiven her. Each night I was obliged to forgive her: it had grown into our mutual ritual, she begging my forgiveness, I patiently granting it. Each night she recited the narrative of her theft, how she had once spied me looking into an envelope filled with dollars, how she had been tempted, how she had considered only the matter of her shoes wearing out, and then what? The shame of it! The peril! She would not be a beggar, no! They might ingratiate themselves with that James, they might go on their knees to that James, they might James themselves inside out, she would have nothing to do with their scheming, no!
I left Mrs. Mitwisser in her bed. She was alert, breathless, bright-faced; she pulled at my blouse to keep me. But my duty was below: Anneliese had instructed me to stand at the green front door and guide the visitors into the narrow dining room.
Earlier I had set out teacups all around the scarred oak table, where the family, except for Mrs. Mitwisser and Waltraut, habitually had dinner. "Not like that," Anneliese scolded; she removed the cups and laid out a white tablecloth. The occasion was to be an elevated one. Six or eight men filed in; one wore a skullcap. They had arrived nearly simultaneously, in two cars, and appeared to be all of an age—between forty-five and sixty. It was the first time since I had entered the insular fortress of the Mitwisser household that strangers were being entertained. And still there was no air of welcome, or even of invitation; it was more a convention than a visit. The men exchanged small familiar grunts and settled into their chairs whi
le Anneliese and I handed out plates of miniature frosted cakes. I marveled at these cakes: they were not our ordinary fare. I had never before seen such exquisite morsels, delicately layered, each crowned with its own sugar-whorl in the form of a tiny flower. Somehow, for the sake of this unusual company, money had been found for fancy cakes; but the cups were chipped, and mazy brown cracks meandered over them.
I poured the hot water directly from the kitchen kettle: Bertram's way.
Anneliese whispered, "The teapot! Use the china teapot, can't you?"—with such ferocity that I began to understand that some ceremony was under way. Was it to be a down-at-the-heels echo of those Berlin salons where Mitwisser had once been fêted? Was it a celebration, a commendation? The tea darkened in the pot. The little cakes gleamed. The visitors murmured, indifferent, detached, waiting.
"Go up and let papa know they're here," Anneliese said finally.
I knocked on the study door, though it was open. Professor Mitwisser was standing in the middle of the room with a brush; he was brushing the jacket of his suit.
"How many have come?" he asked.
"I think eight."
"Eight? Then four have declined."
So he had summoned them. This night was his own creation.
"Tell them I am just finishing a bit of writing. Tell them in ten minutes I join them."
He went on brushing. Whoever they were, he would be their master.
Anneliese had posted me just outside the dining room, with the teapot at the ready. I refilled the cups, and still Mitwisser did not come down. I had misjudged—there were seven visitors, not eight: a dozen had been summoned, and it was five who had declined. I took in that irregular row of drumming fingers and tightened shoulders fixed in a forward curve, and temples either bald or graying, lined with ridges. Even the youngest of them had darkly graven markings under the eyes. These were worn and creviced faces, accustomed to tedium, like a crew of salesmen biding their time before making their pitch. I was struck by the mildness of their patience. Only the man in the skullcap showed a vague irritability, rolling and unrolling the tip of his mahogany beard with a stiffened thumb. The beard, together with the skullcap, signaled an aspect of some practice or piety, and this set me to reflecting on how Mitwisser, a student of the history of religion, after all, was in his own life bare of any sign or vestige of belief. In that family there was no rite or observance, no Sabbathday or Passover or sacral new year. It had been the same—the same absence—for my father and me, and for Bertram; my father had declared himself an atheist, and Bertram relished Ninel's aloofness from such matters. But Professor Mitwisser's brain rocked and shuddered with the metaphysics of long-ago believers, men for whom God was an unalterable Creator and Ruler—and still God was nowhere in that house. Like the biologist who is obsessed by the study of the very disease to which he is immune, Mitwisser had raised a wall between belief and the examination of belief.
Heir to the Glimmering World Page 7
