He kept me close to him at the little typewriter table while he paced before his shelves, seizing one volume after another, and tossing them on the bed behind us, where Mrs. Mitwisser's hairpins coiled like insects in the folds of her nightgown. The bed was unmade. The door was shut. There was nothing for me to do.
"Do you want me to go? I can come back later if you like—"
"You are not to go," he said.
But I saw that he was hardly prepared for our usual session. He had in hand nothing to dictate. I sat idly at the typewriter. The books he had removed were all in Arabic and Greek.
"Here is a man," he said, "a mind comprehending vastness, a luminary, a majesty, and history obscures him, buries him, suffocates him! Ejects him! Erases him from the future, suppresses him, names him dissident, subversive, heterodox, transgressive—"
Mitwisser's eyes flung out their electric blue.
"Transgressive, the key, the key! Dissident from the normative, then dissident from the dissidents ... here, find my notes on Lights and Watchtowers—"
A ziggurat of typed sheets, my own handiwork, ascended jaggedly out of a carton at the foot of the bed. Mitwisser himself had classified them; they were in an esoteric order I had learned to understand.
"How slow you are," he complained. "There, just below that one, don't you see? Good. There, you have it. Please to read it."
It was a haphazard list. I read:
knowledge and reason
witchery
sleep and dreams
interpretation of dreams
the value of the shekel
suicide
medicine
astronomy
natural science
philology, Arabic
philology, Hebrew
commentary on Genesis
commentary on Job
commentary on Ecclesiastes
Mohammed and prophecy
Jesus and prophecy
art of textual interpretation
art of translation
solar calendar
nationalism
angel intermediaries
consensus and transmission
unclean animals jubilee dietary laws
Sabbath
the morrow after the Sabbath
kinship
the Nature of God
"Only a little finger's worth, it is not finished. One cannot make an encyclopedia on a single paper. And so much lost. Please to look! Is there Hindu thought on this paper?"
"No," I said.
"Then we shall put it there."
He picked up the two thin sheets from Spain, and recited (in darkened cadences, searching English out of foreign hooks and curves), "Not by austerities, nor by alms, nor by offerings can I be known, but by devotion to Me Alone may I be perceived and known. He whose supreme good I am, without hatred of any being, he cometh unto Me. Words from the Bhagavad-Gita, translated by al-Kirkisani into his own Arabic. He praises these words! And he writes—extraordinary!—he writes ... he writes .. ."
The frightening electric eyes, blue tears seeping, and I again their witness.
"'I, Jacob, am become Arjuna.' Extraordinary! And yes, yes, more and more! Demoniacal men know neither right energy, nor purity, nor even propriety. Truth is not in them. The universe, they say, is without truth, without basis, without God. So say demoniacal men. What, what is this? Truth is not in them, and do not the Karaites say exactly this of the Rabbanites? Here it is, I have discovered it, this knowledge, this new thing, mine!"
I felt very far from him then. I thought him the loneliest creature on earth. The path of tears was brilliant on his cheeks, even as it stumbled through low bristle—more and more he was neglecting to shave. Or was deliberately cultivating a brambly beard. A beard would exaggerate him—was that what he wished? His concentration was already exaggerated, and in a beard he would resemble a pietist. He had plummeted centuries backward, he was abandoned on the cold planet of the past, and all for the sake of a rejected schismatic, a rebel Jew, a man who had left no mark on the tree of history. A forgotten sectarian who mattered to no one. No one on any continent. No one distant, no one intimate. No one in this house. Not Mrs. Mitwisser, not Anneliese, not Heinz, or Gert, or Willi. Not James, no!
James was not in the house. A taxi had come, he had gone away with Anneliese.
I said, "What will you do now?"
"I shall record what I have found. Proof will be arduous. Provenance and context may require many months. Are you prepared to remain here?"
The question startled me. It was my own question: where was I to go? Only five days before, I had quietly—stealthily, it seemed—turned nineteen. "Nineteen years since my Jenny left me," my father might have said. I recalled his emotion—his only emotion that I knew of—with ebbing bitterness. I had no reason to be bitter. It was plain that Professor Mitwisser regarded me as alien but useful. I was compliant, I was quick, I was most often silent. My silence concealed watchfulness, but there was no answering notice. I had a kind of practical invisibility: beyond my usefulness at the typewriter I was extinguished. I was his typist, nothing more. But I gave him freedom to surrender to whatever moved him: he could stand before me weeping—for the second time!—because I was without substance.
And for the second time I asked, "Your wife calls James a Karaite, why is that?"
"My wife?"
"Is it that he's sympathetic to what you do?"
"Sympathetic? What language is this? Sympathetic how? To have feeling for my work one must have conquered the writings, the period—" He stopped; he would not waste breath on a catalogue of what he had conquered. He had conquered empires, continents, histories. He had conquered millennia. "I will require your presence here without interruption, do you understand this? I intend to prepare ... to reveal ... to lay an indisputable track—a track, not a mere trail—from al-Kirkisani to—" Again he stopped. I was the half-seen figure at the typewriter; he would not waste breath on what he intended. He dragged the hump-veined back of his big hand across his eyelids.
"My wife," he said. "She cannot relinquish. For that reason she cannot discern. For myself, exile becomes relinquishment. I speak of exile. I ought to speak of escape. Naturally one must read German, but I will not employ that tongue, neither in speech nor in writing, however flawed or foreign my English may be."
"But sometimes you call me Fräulein—"
"What else would you wish?"
"I don't know. Rose. My cousin in Albany used to call me Rosie."
"I have no interest in familiarity. I have no interest in your cousin. My wife is not your concern. James is not your concern."
"He's yours, isn't he?" The tremor of my boldness.
"He attends to my children. He is fond of them. My children are fond of him."
I felt myself imprisoned in that room by a clever man with a hard heart. He cared for his children, he cared for James, he cared for al-Kirkisani, a thousand years dead. How I envied Anneliese! I was ready to believe Mrs. Mitwisser: Anneliese, not yet seventeen, had left the house with her lover.
They were returning now. It was early evening, they must be returning. Voices. A disturbance at the door. A disturbance on the stairs. Mrs. Mitwisser distraught, wailing. A tearing, a scraping.
Heinz: "I didn't let him in, he pushed me—"
Mrs. Mitwisser: "You cannot do this!"
Gert: "He's going up to papa's study—"
Willi: "It's not allowed—"
Mrs. Mitwisser: "Lieber Gott, nein, nein!"
The study door was wrenched open.
"I got it out of him, he told me you were out in the sticks somewhere, but I got it out of him. It wasn't easy getting here either, longest subway ride on earth, they tried to keep me out—"
Mitwisser stood frozen; the giant had become suddenly small. Ninel did not look at him. She was fixed on me. She was wearing a creased leather jacket and a workman's cap. She had on the same trousers she had worn when I had last seen her, but now the
y were clipped to a pair of suspenders. I recognized the suspenders. They were Bertram's.
"Bert had no right to give you that money," she said: the raucous call of the coxswain.
"But he did, he gave it to me."
"Fine. Now you can give it to me. I've got a use for it, and Bert said you'd hand it over."
"He didn't say that."
"What do you know about it? He said you'd give it to me."
"Are you back with him?"
"That depends on you."
I did not know how to answer.
"I told him," Ninel said, "if you gave me the money I'd run up to Albany now and then."
"Then you are back with him—"
"Maybe sometime. Right now I need the cash, I'm going to Spain."
Mitwisser's breathing grew shallow; the vibration of his throat had diminished. The ruined archive. The disappointing telegram. Falangists; Loyalists; the refugee fragment...
"Did Bertram really say—"
"Well, it wasn't all my idea, was it? He's broke himself, and you're in good shape here, you've got some sort of job—" She took in the disordered bed against the wall, Mrs. Mitwisser's nightgown, the errant hairpins, the typewriter. "At least you're not in cahoots with the gentry, like your old man." The white mist of Mitwisser's beginning beard had crept to his brow and neck. He was white all over. "The kid's got a job with you, right? I'll say one thing for her, she types like a demon." She threw herself down on the floor. I saw the soles of her boots. "Go get the dough, will you? Believe me, I'm sticking around until I can feel it in my pants pocket." She grinned up at Mitwisser. "Ever hear of a sitdown strike?"
I raced up to the third floor and pulled my suitcase out from under what had been Mrs. Mitwisser's bed. From Willi's old sneaker I drew out Bertram's blue envelope. The money was not whole. The ribbon and the rest of what I had bought for the old machine had depleted it by a small sum. I made up the difference with five dollars taken from my salary.
Into Ninel's open palm I counted out Bertram's money.
"Good. Five hundred. This goes to the cause."
"And what is that?" Mitwisser said in his new thin voice.
"Against the Fascists. For the people."
"You've tricked Bertram. He thinks he's getting you back," I said.
"He'll get over it."
The front door blasted like a gunshot: she was gone. I had obeyed her, I had been craven, Ninel in battle array had bullied me into submission. The money was snatched away, surrendered. I had raised no hullabaloo.
Then it hung before me that it was Bertram, not Ninel, I had obeyed.
Mrs. Mitwisser sat on the bottom step. Her shoes were in her hands; she was staring into their dark caverns.
"My poor Elsa," Mitwisser murmured.
Heinz said, "The man kept on yelling Rose. He wanted you."
"It wasn't a man. It's someone my cousin knows—"
The pants, the cropped head, the cap. They had thought Ninel in her cap and pants was a man. A man invading the house. A man storming in, a roughneck, howling, demanding, ordering! As before. As before. Round and round in the black car, the El Dorado, the tunnels of her shoes, the blocked tunnels. Blocked. Blackened.
Mitwisser loomed and swelled; he thickened to a roar. "See what you have done to my wife!"
That night Mrs. Mitwisser did not return to her husband's sheets; once again she was deposited in the bed opposite mine. And again I was dependent on the household's good will. Without Bertram's money, what was I? Even with it, I had nowhere to turn; but Bertram's blue envelope had supplied the illusion that my fate was my own, that liberty lay open before me, that I could depart when I wished, that I was the prisoner of no one's hard heart ... and that Bertram had spread over me the wings of his affection. Bertram had no wings. He had given them to Ninel. His kiss was ash. My fear was that Mitwisser would send me away: I had brought into the house the most perilous commotion of all—it had undone his wife. His fragile wife, crushed. Foundering. She would not eat, she would not put on her shoes, she would not come downstairs. As before, as before. And how blooming she had been in her nice dress, how beautifully restored, how tenderly and coaxingly she had won back her littlest child!
I had lost Bertram's money, and without his affection what did it matter? James had anyhow assured me that I was an heiress. The Bear Boy in the green hat. Worth, James had implied, thousands. Thousands? A treasure taken on faith. Like my father, what did I know of collectors? Where would I find one?
In a day or so it became clear that Professor Mitwisser was not going to send me away. I could type like a demon; and besides, I was familiar with his undulating accent, his ellipses, his silences, the formal vagaries of his English; and when he requested it I could put my finger on any volume on his shelves, whatever its language. I knew the controversy over the conversion of Rabbanites to Karaites according to the testimony of Tobias ben Moses of Constantinople. And I knew the refutations of Karaite rationalism, in favor of poetry, by the Rabbanite Tobias ben Eliezer of Thessalonica. I knew all those curious conflicts and feuds, and those even more curious names and towns and regions.
He would not send me away. He could not.
James, passing in the hallway, whispered, "She's out, I'm back in, how about that?"
"No," I said, "it's going to be Anneliese's lessons."
But it was neither. Mrs. Mitwisser had vacated her husband's bed. The late hours in his study were released for Mitwisser's disposal. Spherical trigonometry and Molière with Anneliese, or shrieks and teacups with James. He chose the fragment from Spain; he chose the Nature of God; he chose al-Kirkisani. Each night I entered his study promptly at ten, shut the door, and typed against Mitwisser's ecstasy far into the sleeping stillness.
34
HE HARDLY KNEW why he'd picked Cairo. Probably it was because of the Pyramids. Or because there were rumors that war was about to break out in Europe. He didn't care anything about it, but he guessed that if it was going to be England against the Kaiser, he was for the Kaiser, he couldn't be for England: his mother had dressed him like a little English boy, and his father had drawn him that way, he had been turned into a caricature of Englishness, and some people had even gone so far as to compare him to Christopher Robin. So of course he hated everything English, and was indifferent to Europe—but if there was going to be a war, he didn't want to be anywhere near it or in it. He did what all tourists in Egypt do, hired a guide, rode on a camel, sailed down the Nile in a dhow, gaped at the endless sands, the ancient stones, the crumbling paws of the Sphinx—and, in a decaying museum whose walls were cracked and patched, met the eerie stretched-leather face of a mummy. The mummy was in a glass case; a living fly had somehow got in and was standing on a horrible cracked yellow tooth, rubbing its front legs together. There were flies everywhere.
Jerusalem wasn't far; he went to Jerusalem, where there were just as many flies, and idling squads of Turkish soldiers, and monks in long brown robes and Arabs in dusty white djellabas and Jews in dusty black caftans. The soldiers and the Jews and the Arabs mostly wore proper shoes; the monks wore sandals, exposing their dusty toenails. It was as hot as it had been in Cairo, unendurably hot, but at dusk, which came on suddenly, a delicate coolness drifted from hill to hill.
He took a room at the YMCA, and every day walked over rocky fields sprouting sparse scrub—sheep nibbling at it under the weary eye of some elderly shepherd—to the Old City. He wandered into the souk to watch the cobblers and bloody butchers in their dim cavelike shops, and men in kaffiyehs smoking waterpipes in dirty doorways under medieval arches. In another part of town (to his surprise, fabled Jerusalem was no bigger than a small town) he bought a hat with a great brim from a Jewish shop, to keep the sun off. He avoided the Wailing Wall, but once he stumbled into what he thought was one of the smaller churches—the place was rife with sects—and though he never knew it, it was an old Karaite synagogue. Now and then there were riots: Arabs, Jews, soldiers. Knives, shots, screams. He ignored these e
vents as well as he could; they weren't his affair. In late June he learned about the assassination in Sarajevo. He read it in the Palestine Post, went up to Jaffa, found an Italian freighter, and headed for Algiers.
It wasn't easy to get passage, even on a freighter, but in Egypt he had discovered the law of the Levantine bribe, which could procure anything one liked and satisfy any whim. All he had were whims, why not? He could buy whatever he pleased. The ship clung to the African coast, as if, like himself, it feared Europe's bellicose touch. In Algiers they spoke Arabic and French. By now he was used to the sound of Arabic, which he preferred to the sound of French, though both were only discord. France was in the war, and France was in Algiers, but it was also far away. He picked up a little French, enough to buy his dinner in a restaurant. Now he experimented with living well: a suite in the Hotel Promenade. He claimed he was an American businessman. He was almost twenty-one and no one believed him, but the value of his money was never in doubt. He bought a couple of bespoke suits and a Panama hat with a ribbon and a little blue feather; he bought a heap of silk ties, and flirted with the lipsticked blonde waitress in what had become his favorite restaurant. Sometimes she came late at night to his suite. He had been warned to keep away from Arab girls. Their brothers would take revenge.
But he disliked living well. He disliked his expensive clothes and gave them away, all in a bundle, to a beggar on the street, who kissed him on both cheeks and showered him with Allah's blessings. The silk ties and the bespoke suits felt like a costume. The Bear Boy had had enough of costumes: those humiliating scalloped round collars, that lace and trimming! He put an end to Jim and Jimmy, and began to call himself James. All around him they were attending to the war. The French were heatedly loyal; the young men enlisted and joined the fighting. He had more in common with the Arabs, who were inclined toward the Kaiser; they hated the French and wished them ill and wished them gone.
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