Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  After that there was much more excitement, with the doorbell clanging, and people gathering at the gate and looking in the windows to see if anyone was inside, to see if he was inside, and new grownups everywhere, strangers, someone to Answer The Letters and someone else to Take Care Of him, though he wanted only his mother, who smelled thrillingly of cigarette, he never wanted his father, who needed him to stand still and pose, with his bangs all the way down in front of his eyes and making a blur, and suddenly there was a Gardener, and his mother said how nice it was that they now had Means, his father was Famous and he was Famous too, but what was Famous?

  He was five then, and when he was six two bad things crept in: he stopped being Jimmy because all the people who were reading the stories to their children (there were thousands of them, his mother said) had begun to think of him as the A'Bair Boy, which got to be the Bear Boy, and the second bad thing was he had to go to school and learn to read, and in school everyone called him the Bear Boy, as if he was a stuffed animal you took to bed, or as if he was exactly the same as the pictures his father made, and not a real boy. Also there was a third bad thing: he did learn to read, and when he was seven—by then half a dozen of his father's storybooks had Arrived From The Publisher—he could read them himself; and he hated them, because his father in the books was naming him the Bear Boy, and he felt (and he was right) that he would never be Jimmy again, he would have to be the Bear Boy in buckled shoes and long bangs and flounced collars all the rest of his life, like a Raggedy Andy doll that never changed its clothes. Toys were nothing to him now, he had heaps of toys, he had trains and a dozen large and small Raggedy Andys, and trucks and cars and a wooden milk wagon with a wooden horse to pull it and a fort filled with lead soldiers in different uniforms and an Indian tent. For a little while he even had a doll house; it was the only toy he truly cared for. And he was ashamed of his knees.

  But he knew he was Important; that is what Famous means. His father, who made up the stories and painted the pictures, was the Famous One really—his mother told him this—and the woman who Took Care Of him told him the same, the woman whose neck hung down all on its own and was all wrinkly, like an empty cloth bag; still, it wasn't his father they came to photograph, it was the Bear Boy. They picked out three or four of his toys (his toys were becoming public things, like swings in the park) and sat him down in the middle of these and called him the Bear Boy and tried to get him to laugh. He never laughed for them, and that seemed to increase his Importance. "A small grave face under blinding bangs," someone described him (it was in the rotogravure section of a newspaper), which was how his father now began to draw him, so that the later books showed him to be Solemn, and Solemn looked Preternaturally Wise, and Preternaturally Wise was Delightfully Whimsical. And they had to take him out of school, he was too Famous for school, he was in danger of being kidnapped (though this was kept from him), so he had to be Educated At Home, which is how The Bear Boy from Apiary to Zedoary arose, the eleventh of the series and the most colorful, with flower and animal decorations framing each page, and the silly green hat singing:

  Apiary's bees.

  Aviary's birds.

  Zedoary's petals.

  Those are words

  To make you sneeze

  Among the golden kettles,

  and here was the Bear Boy kneeling beside the green hat on his rosy knees, with a miniature golden kettle nearby, and another one dangling from a tree. An owl perched on his left shoulder, while overhead a big orange sun, petals all around its face, was being showered with bees. The Bear Boy knew that the kettles had been inspired by teapots (altered to kettles for the rhyme), because the Bear Boy's mother—now that they had Means—had acquired several lavish tea sets, china with gold rims, and sugar bowls and creamers and fat round gold-rimmed pots for tea leaves. Oh, they had Means!

  It was all right until he was ten, and endurable when he was eleven, but at twelve he had glimmers of a certain oddness, not the usual oddness, he recognized (how could he not?) that his life was different from the lives of other boys, that only he was Important, the others plainly weren't, and he knew that he was bound to be stared at, though the photographers had gone away and his wrist bones were beginning to stretch the sleeves of his blouses. At fourteen he grew an Adam's apple, and the glimmer of oddness darkened into a dread. It was a dread of everything; it was a dread of living. He understood that there would be no escape, he would always carry the mark of the Bear Boy, he would have to carry it into old age; when he was forty they would say of him, "Look at that fellow, he's the Bear Boy all grown up," and when he was seventy they would say, "That was the Bear Boy, can you imagine?"

  In January of the year he was sixteen, his mother went out of doors with her cigarette and caught cold, and the cold invaded her lungs; she coughed wildly for a month and of course began to get better, she seemed well enough, but then all at once succumbed. He was alone with his father and his father's drawing board. He was no use to his father, he was too tall, his father sketched from photographs, the stories were coaxed out of the air, they were woven of air, they turned more and more Whimsical, and the boy in the pictures was still five years old, and meanwhile the Bear Boy was enameled, he was immortal, though his author was not—so that one day, three years after his mother's death, the Boston Herald ran a half-page notice with this headline:

  JAMES PHILIP A'BAIR, SR., 68,

  AUTHOR-ARTIST,

  CREATOR OF TALES BELOVED

  BY CHILDREN WORLD-WIDE

  But the Bear Boy did not go under the earth with his creator. The Bear Boy could not perish, he had voyaged into too many languages, he went on and on, furry-haired and solemn-eyed, Preternaturally Wise and Whimsical, equipped with his Jellydrop spell and his bouncing multisyllabic verses. In Germany he was second in sales only to Emil und die Detektive, in Great Britain and all its colonies he vied with Beatrix Potter. He turned up in Italy and France and the Low Countries, and even (clandestinely) in the newly founded Soviet Union, where his dress was vilified and he was denounced as an idle aristocrat.

  The Bear Boy wrote bitterly in the margin of the notice in the Herald:

  APIARY

  AVIARY

  ZEDOARY

  MORTUARY!

  —or else he did not actually write this in the margin, though he had intended to, instead he sang it meanly to himself in the green hat's voice, meanly, because now all the Means, the plentiful horns of plenty, were spilling over him, the Bear Boy had become an Estate (royalties unending, royalties into the far, far future!), and he was its Inheritor. He was the possessor of everything he loathed; he was the possessor of what his father had made of him. Whatever he had been in the purity-time of his birth, whatever he was meant to become, his father had overlaid with embellishment: with lie and impurity. He did not speak in verses. The games his father devised were not his games. The Jellydrop spell was a fabrication. Even his clothing, the blouses, the socks as high as his knees, the double-buckled shoes, the rouge—all a romantic imagining. Even his hair! And when it developed that he was somewhat shortsighted and in need of eyeglasses (the woman who Took Care Of him had discovered this), he was certainly supplied with the glasses, but denied the relief of wearing them too often: the pale oval of the Bear Boy's small face, as innocent as an empty plate, was not to be cluttered; so he lived with blur, the blur of the long bangs tickling his eyelids, and the blur of mild myopia. He knew himself to be an appurtenance: the offspring of the impostor who animated his father's books. He was not a normal boy, he was his father's drawing, his father's discourse, his father's exegesis of a boy. His father had created a parallel boy; his father had interpreted him for the world. The Bear Boy was never himself. He was his father's commentary on his body and brain.

  26

  SNOW FELL; and a letter came from Bertram. The snow, beginning stealthily in the middle of the night, blew down hour after hour, as if some bloated invisible sky-bound stomach was spewing it out: a cold white vomit. It wrapped it
self around the feet of the telephone poles and tufted and weighted their wires until they drooped. The snow was a surprise; it was early December, and autumn's traces had not departed: there were still dry leaves, shaped like crumpled conches, along the curbs. A torrent of dense flakes noiselessly covered roofs and bushes and sidewalks. The train trestle was clogged with snow. The trains ran sluggishly or not at all; ice coated the tracks. Professor Mitwisser opened the door, looked out, saw the struggling letter-carrier slanted against the wind, took the letters from him, and put away his hat.

  "Today, then," he told me, "I must work in my study."

  He handed me Bertram's letter and picked his way around Waltraut, who had turned the stairs into a stadium for her dolls. Each doll was propped on a step: six steps, six costumed figurines. The boys, relieved of school, were chattering over Chinese checkers in their room, breaking out now and then into shrieks; there was the irregular crash overhead of some heaved missile. The dazzle at the windows seemed to dim the house into a cavelike dusk. Anneliese and James had not returned.

  Mrs. Mitwisser was putting on her shoes. "I go downstairs," she said.

  "I'm just about to bring up your breakfast—"

  She found a shawl and threw it over her nightgown. "I go downstairs," she insisted.

  She sat at the dining room table and allowed me to serve her. Her shawled back was regal. She kept her eyes on her toast. Only yesterday the toaster had been useless; one of its panels was twisted sideways off its hinge. Heinz had fixed it.

  "My husband," Mrs. Mitwisser said, "er ist doch zu Hause."

  I had seen him shut his study door as his wife descended past it.

  "And this James, he is not in the house."

  "The storm—"

  "He will not come back. That one, no." She took my hand with conspiratorial warmth. "So we are free, ja?"

  Bertram's letter was in the pocket of my dress; Bertram's voice was in my pocket, against my thigh. How I wanted to be quit of Mrs. Mitwisser's portents—if only she would go to her bed again and sleep her perpetual sleepless sleep!

  But she bent and plucked a scrap of white triangle out of her shoe and unfolded it.

  "Schau mal!"

  Inside the little paper boat was an inch of dark hair.

  "That one! I see, I find—" She waited for me to comprehend. "My Anneliese, she puts under that one's pillow."

  "Anneliese's hair? Under James's pillow?"

  She displayed it. An oval cutting of deep brown. Unmistakably the color of Anneliese's. But it was, I saw, no different from Mrs. Mitwisser's own brown hair, straying and wild.

  "If my husband will know," she confided, "wie tragisch ... ach, how unhappy he becomes."

  She smiled a little—a lament—and moved to the bottom of the stairs to survey Waltraut and the tiers of dolls; it was plain she wanted her husband to know what lay in her shoe.

  She spoke to the child in German. Waltraut did not reply—she was diligently poking at the clown doll's celluloid lids, opening and closing them. Up-click, down-click, up-click.

  "Komm, die Mutter ist da—"

  Waltraut did not reply.

  The mournful vague smile ebbed. "That one takes my children. That one steals my children. I have no children—"

  "You have five," I said, pointlessly; Bertram's letter was secretly heating my side, my thigh, my hip.

  A dark whisper. "Four." She held up her fingers, hiding the thumb. "My husband, nein! That one is thief!" she cried.

  Mitwisser called down, "Please to come immediately." A thunderclap of urgency.

  I left Mrs. Mitwisser standing forlornly in her shoes and shawl, and pulled out the new typewriter and set it up on the table in Mitwisser's study. James had abandoned his teacup there. I removed it; a redolence of schnapps meandered out of it. Mitwisser was gripping a packet of notes in his big fist. He was strong and ready: the ghostly hunched shape of the Library was transfigured. Ambition reared up in him like an animal awakened.

  "Al-Kirkisani!" he announced. He gestured at the keys almost violently, and despite their recent familiarity spelled these syllables out for me; then let loose a volcanic flood of recitation. I was already well acquainted with this name: Jacob al-Kirkisani, the peerless Karaite thinker of the early tenth century, born in Circesium, in upper Mesopotamia. Principal works extant: The Book of Gardens and Parks, and The Book of Lights and Watchtowers. Numerous as-yet-undiscovered treatises. Traveled to China and India; recorded certain Hindu social customs of the time. A believer in reason, in rational proofs built upon the knowledge based on sense perception (Mitwisser dictating), in the perfection of the whole of Scripture in the way of account, address, statement, and question, relating to fact, metaphor, generalization, advancement, postponement, abridgment, profusion, separation, combination (Mitwisser dictating, all this from the "Principles of Biblical Exegesis"). His grandest assertion: Scripture as a whole is to be taken literally. If it was permissible for us to take a given biblical passage out of its literal meaning, without a valid reason for doing so, we would be justified in doing likewise with the whole of Scripture, and this would lead to the nullification of all the accounts therein, including all commandments, prohibitions, and so forth, which would be the acme of wickedness (Mitwisser dictating).

  The acme of wickedness! I was shocked by these words. They were dear to Mitwisser; they were all at once a vestibule to memory. In the middle of the night, he said, he had been startled by glare; there was too much light, falling sheets of a white brilliance that played eerily over the ceiling. The house was still. Across the hall James's room, the room that had lately been his daughter's, the room she had surrendered to James, was empty. James was gone, he had not come back; his daughter was gone. Because of the storm they had not come back. The snow, the undulating heaps of snow; the midnight veil of light. Long ago, snow in Berlin, everywhere a multitude of Christmas lights; but he was far to the south, in sunlit Spain, researching an archive, where he found nothing. In the north the trains were stopped, the trains were frozen to the tracks, snow and ice all the way up to the Baltic Sea! Berlin ringed by mountains of snow. He could not get back—because of the storm he could not get back. He sent a telegram, extended his stay, returned to the archive (an obscure Islamic library), and discovered the Egyptian he was looking for. The weather grew milder, and he was restored to Berlin in a state of satisfaction: the Egyptian was in his hands. Yes, yes, it was long ago, and his wife ... never mind his poor wife. Today a letter had come! A triumph of a letter! Only today! An hour ago!

  (Today! An hour ago! A letter! It burned against my hip.)

  Some weeks past, idle in the alien city, in the Library, his head down, dreaming perhaps, troubled, ah, call it wretched, he was after all a miserable fellow with his poor wife and despite his dear children, his dear Heinrich, his splendid Heinz, he thought of that long week in Spain, those crumbling documents, sanctified writings, sanctified by age and reverence, precious old scrolls in their fluent Arabic calligraphy, the beauty of ancient things, how they rejoiced his eyes, and yes, he had found his Egyptian, but he remembered now—he lifted his head and stretched the muscles of his seeing upward to the Library's embossed gilt sky as if the labor of it could carry him away, away from New York to the life before—how he had happened on a certain slot, a niche, a cache, crusted with grime, the place was neglected, the curator was pleasant but lazy, a dark dirty hole in fact, where it might be possible ... His fingers scurried into the filth of that cavity, drew something out, something on India, an insufficient glance, he wasn't looking for India, he was after his Egyptian, he shoved it back. That was a decade ago. It had turned to dust in his thoughts. But under the gold of the Library, his head down and dreaming, dozing, wandering ... The upshot was this: he had written to that obscure Spanish archive, never imagining anything might come of it in the chaos and commotion of that torn country, always there are divisions and hatreds, elections overturned, the threat of tyranny. The old curator, a gentle Moroccan, was dead. T
he new one, an Arabist from Cádiz, a Fascist—he was now termed Director—was a dervish of organization, and had cleared out grit and disorder, and could put his hand precisely on any document that was desired. The fee for hiring a copyist, however, was tremendous, and also the fee for the service itself (which he suspected meant, in plain language, a gratuity for the director); but here was James, right here in the house, and James understood the need....

  Seven barren weeks, and today! Today the letter from Spain! Here, right here in the house, a thin letter, two thin sheets, in al-Kirkisani's own densely graceful style, signature of that unparalleled scholar's mind! A fragment—ah, well, a copy, to be sure, yet see, a fragment of a lost work on Hinduism, far richer in its brevity than the meager notes in The Book of Lights and Watchtowers, belonging apparently to a separate and much longer tractate based on an Arabic translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. The Bhagavad-Gita! Inconceivable, amazing find! That a Karaite thinker, indeed a genius, had once touched on the Bhagavad-Gita, oh immense, immense! Inconceivable, amazing, immense! It opens before us a fathomless well of speculation, of unsuspected new leanings, of unknown marvels! And the mystery of it—consider that where Karaism contracts, Hinduism teems. Therefore! Can it be that al-Kirkisani, King-Jewel of the Karaites, looms forth as a heretic among heretics?

  On Professor Mitwisser's vast open palm lay a battered envelope with many foreign stamps. He looked down at it with the ravenous eye of a conqueror. Then he tapped the typewriter with his thumbnail; there was a faint ringing sound, as of water spilled into a narrow glass. "It is because of James that I have it," he said.

  From the foot of the stairs came a repetitious thump. Bump-bump. Bump. Bump-bump. Someone was jogging the dolls up the steps and down again. "See, see!"—Mrs. Mitwisser's imploring whisper.

  Because of James (because of money), Krishna and Prince Arjuna were coming to lodge among us. And al-Kirkisani, ferocious fence-builder against the extraneous, ferocious claimant and defender of the scripturally pure—Mitwisser's treasure, Mrs. Mitwisser's firefly!—was letting them in.