The family is strange, too—all tightly bound together, vvhich you'd expect of refugees, only there's a sort of desperation in this house, they're still not feeling safe. The mother is sick. The father is a kind of fanatic. It's the father I'm supposed to be vvorking for—I'm something like a secretary, though actually I don't knovv vvhat I am. I do knovv that I'm an outsider to these people—it's as if they've got a secret society of their ovvn. There are three young sons, and each one has three sets of names. That Heinz I mentioned, he's Heinrich, and sometimes, vvhen they're in the mood, Hank. Right novv he's interested in clocks. He takes them apart, so that you can never tell vvhat ti me it is. The chronology seems all vvrong anyhovv. There's a daughter vvho's only tvvo or three years younger than I am, but from the vvay she is—very strict and solemn—you'd think she's a tired old vvoman of forty. And there's a three-year-old, going on four, vvho still sleeps in a crib like a baby. Her name is the ugliest thing I've ever heard. The mother doesn't take care of her at all.
The house is mostly very quiet, especially novv that summer's over and the boys are in school. They go to the local public school, vvhich the father thinks is useless but doesn't oppose, since he's all for their forgetting they're Germans. The older daughter and I vvatch over the little girl. That's the part of the day I don't like, it's terribly boring, though it vvould be considerably vvorse if she vvasn't still taking long afternoon naps. The father stays avvay until evening, vvhich makes it sound as if he has a job. He doesn't. The older daughter ought to be in high school, but isn't. It's partly because the father vvants her to look after the mother and the little girl, but mostly it's because he vvants to supervise her education himself. She's the most studious one and his favorite. He's alvvays bringing home books for her to read, or else he finds something on his ovvn shelves, and then he quizzes her. Lately he vvon't allow any of the family to talk German. (He has the older daughter read it, though.) The mother speaks German some of the time any-hovv, you really can't tell her vvhat to do. Sometimes I think her sickness is a kind of vvar. She's like a revolutionary—she vvon't go along with the rest of them.
I've tried and tried to find out vvhere they get their income from. Not that they're anything like vvhat Ninel vvould call coupon-clippers! The mother lives mainly in her nightgovvn and the father in his one suit. The mother keeps hinting that they're dependents of some sort, but you can't rely on anything she says, vvhich is too bad, because she's the only one honest enough to vvant
Here I stopped. What did Mrs. Mitwisser want? And what was it I wanted from Bertram? The crack in the damaged key—so familiar by now that I scarcely knew it was there—all at once began to leak light, like an unexpectedly opening door. A clear split, a severance: Mrs. Mitwisser from her family, Mitwisser from his former elevation, the Karaites from the mainstream ... Bertram from me. I thought of Bertram in his new life with Ninel. I imagined Ninel reading this letter; I imagined what she might say. I thought of the money in the blue envelope. The crack widened, the light shot through. A bribe! The money was a bribe. Bertram had bribed me to keep out of his future.
I took hold of a corner of the sheet and tore it from the platen. The paper came out ripped, jagged, with a zigzag scallop across its lower half.
And there stood Anneliese in the hallway, reddening like a sudden scar.
"What are you doing in papa's study in the middle of the day when he's away? You have no business in there now, get out!"
16
MY NIGHT SESSIONS with Mitwisser were growing sparser. Often when I appeared at the door of his study he sent me away and summoned Anneliese instead. Then the door was shut against me. I leaned my cheek on the wall and listened. There were nights when they read Carlyle and Schiller; at other times it was Spinoza. One week Mitwisser set Anneliese on a course of spherical trigonometry. The hum of their voices, seeping through, was unruffled. Anneliese was eager and quick.
"Papa puts off his night work for me, so you mustn't let mama interrupt," she warned me. "Papa wants you to keep her occupied while I'm having my lessons."
I knew what "occupied" signified: Mrs. Mitwisser was to be silenced. She had taken to singing again, German songs with pretty tunes. She had a loud coarse alto that seemed unnatural, as if what erupted from her throat was unable to reproduce the sound in her head, or as if she was punishing the music. Or else she was punishing Anneliese: the singing had begun when it was announced that Anneliese would not be going to the public high school.
"My husband makes her like himself," Mrs. Mitwisser grumbled. "She will become eine Puppe, he will give to her too many books, she will become verrückt."
She sang to blot out Anneliese's lessons. Gert and Willi slept through it all, but Waltraut habitually awoke and cried, and Heinz who was in the bed next to her crib awoke and complained, and the house that was so quiet all day was noisily chaotic at ten o'clock at night.
Mitwisser put an end to it. He called me into his study, where Anneliese was sitting at my little table—the typewriter had been cleared away. I looked all around for it, and there it was on the floor, pushed into a corner. It meant I was dismissed, displaced. Anneliese's notebooks lay open before her. I glimpsed her handwriting, as vertical and orderly as a row of chessmen—a European script not unlike her father's.
"My wife," Mitwisser began, "suffers from intellectual tribulation. She is perforce distant from her own affairs, deprived of her laboratory, of her true life. Her mind"—here he hesitated, while Anneliese opened her fist to play with her fingers, pressing the index finger of one hand against the index finger of the other—"I will say instead her spirit: her spirit looks back. You see it is the language—the language draws her back into the old places, the old life, so it is the language that must be deflected, defeated, evaporated—"
"Papa would like mama to improve her English," Anneliese said. It was the coldness of diplomacy, the father's anguish, or desperation—or was it merely his hope for relief?—translated into the daughter's briskness. And I, taking in the bossy lift of Anneliese's chin, the small suggestive tilt that signaled my obedience, translated further: no more intrusion, no more noise, no more German! Not in song, not in speech.
"You will read to her," Mitwisser finished.
"But if she won't—if Mrs. Mitwisser isn't willing—"
"She must be induced."
The rough artificial voice pitched itself higher and came fluting down on us in a flood of light-hearted mockery—an imitation, it almost seemed, of a madwoman's merry mockery:
Mein Hut der hat drei Ecke,
drei Ecke hat mein Hut.
und hätt' er nicht drei Ecke,
dann wär er nicht mein Hut!
I found Mrs. Mitwisser on the edge of her bed, as usual, bent over her puzzle pieces; but they were all undone, scattered. She was detaching shape from shape, restoring them to a scrambled mound, her quick wrists shuttling with the speed of a gleeful child pulling the legs off insect after insect.
"So ein schöner Wald!" she greeted me. "No more. You see? I break it."
"You can work it all over again," I assured her, "some other time."
Then I saw that she was taking pains to twist and crush each piece: the forest demolished.
"It is dead now. What is broken you cannot put it again back." She let the mutilated pieces sift through her fingers (fingers faster and nimbler in their movements than Anneliese's, and also smaller and more flexible), and looked up at me with a smile so obscurely at odds with the actions of her hands, and so unexpected and fresh and pleasant, that I felt I had for some reason won her approval. "Do you enjoy my funny song? A funny song, you know, for children."
"The children are sleeping, you wouldn't want to wake them—"
The smile receded. "Anneliese, she does not sleep!"
"Anneliese isn't a child, she's studying—"
"Down there, in his Bücherei, do you know what he teaches to her there?"
"History, I think. And literature and some math."
"H
e teaches to be ein Bettler, ein Schmarotzertier! Ein Parasit!"
And she sang:
Fünf Finger, aber keine Hand,
Ein Schuh, doch ohne Sohle,
Erst weiss wie eine Wand,
Dann schwarz wie eine Kohle.
"Please," I said. "It's not the time now, Mrs. Mitwisser."
"Such a funny song, ja?" The smile had resumed. "I explain it for you —ein Handschuh! What is clean you make dirty. You put in this glove the hand, it becomes puppet, you see? And if you teach to hold out the hand, it becomes beggar, dirty, Parasit, you see? It is because we have no more money. No money!" She threw out the kind of laughter that had long ago married itself to satire.
In her unpredictability, Mrs. Mitwisser had grown predictable; she specialized in refrains. Her broken mind, wherever it wandered, came back to money—though often enough, because of the needle-eye of taunting through which she threaded those refrains and obstinacies, I doubted that it was broken at all.
I missed my nights at the typewriter; I missed Mitwisser's Karaite recitations and emanations. I envied Anneliese, closeted with the conflagration of her father's furies. I even envied the three boys, who seemed wilder every day (they were gradually turning more and more American), departing in the morning with shouts and returning with shouts and punches, schoolboy style, their bookbags spilling loose sheets. School had solidified their names: they were now, incontrovertibly, Hank, Jerry, and Bill, though only with one another, and never for Anneliese. I envied them the liberated boisterousness of their lives outside our decorous and disciplined walls. Within these walls, only Elsa Mitwisser had chosen unrestraint.
It did not occur to me to envy Waltraut, still clinging to a motherless infancy she ought to have outgrown. Except for the two chocolate bars I remembered to give her, her fourth birthday had passed without notice. Her crib was her refuge—lately she was refusing to climb out of it, and lingered there all afternoon, dozing like an elderly dwarf. Or else she would sit on her pillow and dress and undress her doll, sometimes peering through the bars to see if anyone was happening by. The doll was an early possession, a refugee along with the Mitwisser family: it had a porcelain head, a red circle on each cheek, a tiny tongue protruding from partly open lips, and long legs stuffed with straw; also black fabric shoes frayed at the toes. It was a yellow-haired Bavarian doll in a dirndl. Now and then Waltraut dropped the doll and squeezed her knuckles against her ears; I had been witness to this oddness more than once, when Mrs. Mitwisser's singing drifted down the stairwell. I pitied Waltraut—I was her only playmate, and an unwilling one. In that house no one inflamed my thinking more than Professor Mitwisser.
"Have you started mama on her English?" Anneliese asked, a few days after her father's directive.
I said we had begun a novel.
"An American novel? Papa says it ought to be something that won't get her agitated."
"An English one."
Anneliese was satisfied; she trusted that what was not American would not shout or punch or agitate.
The novel we had begun was Sense and Sensibility. There were books all around—rows and rows of them, quantities and quantities— but, as far as I could tell (so many were in recondite tongues and alphabets), no books of invention. The Karaites, to be sure, had invented themselves—not out of nothingness, but, as heretics will, out of an already existing splendor; yet they subtracted from imagination rather than added to it. Mitwisser's ten thousand volumes, with their bottomless excavations of Karaite heresy, could be thought of as fable, since history, in its own way, is fable, or at least parable. But what was wanted—what was wanted for Mrs. Mitwisser—was simply Story: a story about men and women free of history, except their own. "She must be induced," Mitwisser had decreed. Mrs. Mitwisser was not to be induced; she would slip away like a cloud altering the light, or she would thin her cheeks with the irritable vibrations of her little songs and lullabies. And since she was not to be induced, I reflected, she must be seduced.
This idea sent me to the middle drawer of the dresser next to my bed (the drawer just above the Bear Boy and Bertram's envelope—that blueness for which Mrs. Mitwisser had been forgiven a hundred times), where Ninel's scavenged presents lay among my underthings, the claylike smell of the Salvation Army's damp cellar still faintly in their pages. Hard Times, which had Ninel's tepid approval, I set aside at once—Mrs. Mitwisser had endured enough of hard times. It was Jane Austen I snatched up, and I knew exactly why. It was because of the money. Ninel had intended Sense and Sensibility as punishment or rebuke or sneer, to remind me that the novels I loved were steeped in the pre-Marxist capitalist darkness of their wickedly imperialist times; their domestic attractions eluded her.
I recited:
The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the center of their property, where for many generations they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
Mrs. Mitwisser understood all this very well; it glimmered with unfamiliar familiarity; none of it was beyond her comprehension. She understood it pleasurably—remembering when she had herself lived in so respectable a manner as to engage, etc.; and when the Dashwood fortunes fell—"Their mother had nothing, and their father only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal"—she warmed to the affinities she instantly felt: the loss of money, the necessity of money, the hope of money; standing, expectation, repute.
I read and read until my throat thickened and my voice blurred. I read aloud night after night, the Scheherazade of that half-barren spot in the distant reaches of the city. The squat wooden chest on which Mrs. Mitwisser had been working her puzzles was still in its old position. I placed a lamp on it and drew up a chair; Mrs. Mitwisser sank back into her pillow. Below, in Mitwisser's study, the cadenced iambic murmurs of father and daughter, question and answer, intermingled. The boys slept on. Waltraut, secure in her crib, never woke. The madwoman's songs were snuffed.
We had got as far as Chapter Thirty, with the faithless Willoughby betraying Marianne Dashwood, and Mrs. Jennings deploring the man who "has no business to fly off from his word only because he grows poor, and a richer girl is ready to have him," when Anneliese appeared at the door and whispered my name.
"Rosie! Come out here for a minute."
Mrs. Mitwisser's head, under the lamp, bucked like a small shaggy horse. Her quick hand took hold of my knee. "You must finish," she said.
"Anneliese wants me—"
"First you must finish."
Anneliese stepped toward us. The two brown braids that coiled around her ears had lost their pins; her hair flooded down past her shoulders and over her breasts. I had not known that her hair was so long. It was as if, with its release, the danger I had always been wary of, the danger of a restrained ferocity, was draining out of her: out of the ends of her spreading hair. One demon was dissolving; another was forming: it had begun by undoing her braids.
She caught up the book—her wild arm circled and made a wind—and threw it on Mrs. Mitwisser's bed.
"Come out, I want to tell you something!"
I followed her. We stood in the dark of the hall.
"Papa gave me the news just now. Just now, though he's known it all day—since this morning. There's a letter finally."
An impatient shifting in the bed. "Röslein, where do you go, komm schnell zurück—"
"If mama hears, she'll just carry on." Anneliese pushed me deeper into the dark. "It's James," she whispered. "James is coming! Papa kept it to himself—he waited till the boys were asleep, he doesn't want them to get all excited too soon. But we need to get ready right away. Heinz goes in with Gert and Willi, and I go in with Waltraut, and James goes across from papa, in my room, so we need to do the sheets and things."
"And your mother?"
"She stays just where she is. In with you."
"No, I mean about—this James."
"Well, she
has to take it, she has to swallow it, that's all!"
I thought this over. Fear of Anneliese was dying in me: with her hair unbound and raining down, hiding those diminutive matronly alien earrings, she was, I saw, only a girl.
I said, "Will Professor Mitwisser have to swallow it too?"
"What a stupid thing to say," Anneliese spat out. "Papa and James, you don't know a thing about it. They're like one person. They're exactly the same." She whirled away from me so forcefully that the spray of her hair came whipping against my face. "I need you to help with the bedding early tomorrow morning, that's the point. Now go back to mama."
Half-sitting, sunk into her pillow, Mrs. Mitwisser had grown quiescent. I believed she had fallen into a doze in spite of herself. The lamp was pulled nearer; she was very still. The light whitened the visible bones of her wrist and her narrow fingers. But her eyes were unsealed, sleepless, rapt. The small white fingers were gripping the book that smelled of cellar. Mrs. Mitwisser was reading, in a seizure of concentrated intelligence, an English novel.
Her canny husband had accomplished the obliteration of German in every room of the house except his own.
17
THE MITWISSER BOYS had long bones and long feet. It was plain that they were destined to grow tall. Heinz was already showing signs of lengthening: his arms strained out of their sleeves. Willi, the smallest and the youngest, was the most beautiful. His eyes were as round as wheels, with almost no tapering at the corners, brown melting into a black so dense that one expected distant starlight to filter out of it, as out of a bottomless black firmament. The impatient skin of his temple pulsed; his was the sexless beauty of a young child. Waltraut had none of this. She was languishing, she had lost smiles and affection, she was becoming a tiny crone: the life of the house was aging her. She cared for nothing but her doll.
Heir to the Glimmering World Page 9
