He tried to ignore the war. It wasn't only England and France (and the city was filling up with uniforms), it was Russia, Belgium, Serbia, Italy, Japan! America belatedly, thanks to that fool Wilson. And on the Kaiser's side, Turkey, Bulgaria, the whole Hapsburg empire; such uneasy bedfellows. Half the world shooting at the other half, what sense did it make? He was glad he could not read the newspapers, but the war was a nuisance anyhow, his money was repeatedly held up, and Mr. Fullerton wrote that Mr. Winberry was now in Officers' Training, and what a pity that James was stuck in such a godforsaken corner of the globe. He did feel a bit stuck; he had hoped to get a look at Scandinavia, mists and fjords and northern lights, but there was no possibility of ordinary travel now. So instead he strolled at night into certain alleys he had discovered, and shooed away the little boys who were selling themselves, and found the shadowy wall where kif could be bought from a man in Western dress who, in daylight, could pass for a local avocat.
The kif gave him dreams. He was always awake and could manipulate the dreams, though they came of themselves—and yet he could turn them, he could swell them up or narrow them down, he could lighten or darken them. It seemed he was in control of the plots of stories that were imposed on him. Once he dreamed he was a king, and at the same time he was the king's footman, and he could choose which he preferred to remain, king or footman; but it was imperative to choose, so he chose to be king, and the self that was footman dissipated into vapor, a perfumed vapor that wafted away into folds, like draped silk. And another time the dream had the shape of a window, through which he could see red storms and whirlwind-tossed gardens. Mostly the dreams were peaceful, the kif was friendly, and got him through the war, so that finally he was not obliged to take much notice of it. And when he visited the shadowy wall in daylight, the sun glared sharply against it; a shawled old woman sat with her back to it, cutting open melons for sale.
The kif was friendly, and under its tutelage he attained this knowledge: he did not want to be or to become.
In the daylight alley there was a creature with a hairless yellowed face who played a flutelike instrument, a short pipe pocked by triangular holes. He could not tell from the rags around its head whether the creature was male or female. A rusted pot on the cobblestones was there for the coins. He threw in, for the sake of the tune, the equivalent of ten American dollars, and the creature crowed with jubilation, and piped its single wavering tune again and again, lifting its knees, hopping and marching. The tune was thin, unclear, strange, derived from some unrecognizable set of scales; there was no orderliness in it, it wound and wound, a wire spiraling into an abyss, and he thought: That is what I wish, to be formless like this tune, and wayward: no one will predict me, no one will form me.
The blonde waitress (she wasn't at all pretty, but her legs were pleasingly long) who had come to his suite in the Promenade, now that he had given it up would no longer come. He had a room in a lodging house—bed only, no board. He did not like his French landlady, who (he assumed) suspected he was a mobster or a thief lying low; but he liked his little room, with its conscientious doily on this or that surface, to prevent water marks. He liked it because it did nothing to constrict or confine him, and the doilies, which had that intention, were only comedy. Algiers was comedy: the haughty French, the angry Arabs, the stupid war. The sexless creature, tootling on its pipe; the tune that emptied meaning out of Creation. His kif-dreams were senseless, formless, aimless. Under the tutelage of the kif he laughed. Crowing and laughing over the void.
The war ended. His ship docked in New York—a Swedish ship, the closest he would ever come to Norse imaginings. Mr. Winberry was dead, buried in France. But Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Brooks were where he had left them. "I'm back," he giggled into the telephone. They told him that because of the Bear Boy's continuing vitality, and despite the tumult of the recent conflagration, his assets—they never said money—were more vigorous than ever. He laughed again, straight into the telephone. Comedy, he said to himself (but his language was simple and loose, his language was down-to-earth, his father's elevated whimsy was banned from his mouth), is that which cannot define me. It was portentous to think this, it was arrogant, it was shallow—or so Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Brooks would have privately judged—but he believed it.
35
HEINZ SAID, "It was a man, whatever you say—"
"It wasn't."
"I saw him, I was the one who went to the door, wasn't I? He said his name was Nino, and that he wanted you, and then mama looked right at him and yelled for me to shut the door, so I started to, but he shoved it in and ran up the stairs. It was a man."
He was carrying up Mrs. Mitwisser's tray: squares of toast, butter, jam, tea. An invalid's meal.
I said, "It was just someone who came to get money she thought I owed her, that's all there was to it." And added: "Her name is Miriam."
His neck reddened, the distinctive Mitwisser way; this seemed to me significant. "A lady wouldn't scare mama so much."
"She's a lady who dresses like a man."
"Why?"
"She wants to be a soldier."
"Ladies can't be soldiers."
"Sometimes they can."
He poked a finger into the jam and sucked on it. "Was that the money mama took? That other time she was sick?"
"Your mother's waiting for her food," I said.
"She won't eat it anyhow.—If you owed that money to the man ... to that lady, why didn't you pay it before?"
"I didn't really owe it."
"We always owe lots of money," Heinz said. "Mostly we can't pay it until James comes."
I had no answer for this.
"Mama doesn't like James," he said.
"But your father does."
"Papa doesn't like strangers."
"Is James a stranger?"
"Anyone who isn't in our family is." His narrow brown eyes, so unlike Mitwisser's, sentenced me: "You're one too."
I remembered how Anneliese had once insisted on just this.
"Look at mama's tray," Heinz urged. "See? There's only a spoon. Anneliese said to cut the toast into little pieces, so mama won't have to use a knife. Mama isn't allowed to have a knife on her tray from now on. And you know what? Anneliese threw out Waltraut's little doll-scissors, the one mama messed up James's pillow with. And you know what else?"
"What?" I said.
"James is getting me a handbook that tells how to build a crystal set, and he's even getting me all the parts. I'm going to make my own radio, that's what!"
The house had no radio at all. Professor Mitwisser had barred it; he would not permit the presence of an instrument that vibrated with trivia and inferior caterwauling all day long. But Anneliese had told me that Mitwisser did not wish his wife to hear the news from Germany. Hitler had already dissolved the Reichstag, and a proudly Aryan people was about to cast their ballots for him in a jubilant national election.
"A proudly Aryan people": these were Mitwisser's words. Anneliese, repeating them, spoke them in the same tone Mrs. Mitwisser had used in pronouncing the El Dorado.
36
MRS. MITWISSER had lost interest in her playing cards. She handed them to me with a single angry syllable: "No." And again: "No." And because I continued to demur (what was I to do with them?): "Nein!" And when I failed to take them from her quickly enough, she tossed them to the floor, where they fanned out in confusion.
She had gone back to dozing in the afternoon. But at night she was horribly awake, watchful, suspicious of every sound. She flicked her eyes from side to side; in the half-light they were dim marbles rolling. She sat up in bed, listening.
"What is that?"
"It's Waltraut. A little night cough."
The child was bewildered. Her nose chafed and leaked; she had caught cold, as if from grief. So recently befriended, so seriously coddled, the dolls on the stairs, her mother's closeness, her mother's look ... all abruptly withdrawn. She could not puzzle it out, and even Anneliese, and even James ...
Gert shook her off, Willi shook her off. But Heinz took her by the hand and showed her the long wire that was to be the aerial, the short wire that connected to the crystal, the copper wire that had to be wound around the coil, the capacitor with its interleaved wings, the funny earphones that turned him into a sort of animal. All these strange things were scattered on the big table in the dining room. Mitwisser never troubled to look.
"What is that? Who comes?"
The front door opened and closed: Anneliese and James, returning past midnight. Their outings—how else to name those recurring eclipses?—were growing longer and later.
But Mrs. Mitwisser, tremulous, let out a terrified croak: "Der Mann!"
And another time, when a passing car with an injured muffler roared by on our ordinarily silent street: "This boy, this boy!"
This boy? The house was full of boys. Willi, the beautiful one, and Gert, and Heinz. And the aftermath, the material residue, of the Bear Boy.
"Your father," she threw out, "this boy—"
He was alive in her mind. The boy whose body was broken up, together with my father's, on the rainy road to Saratoga. The boy she had taken no notice of when I dropped the rough stone of my father's crime into the roiling stream of her errant desires. But it had struck deep, it had lodged itself, she had swallowed it down. The stone lay in her belly.
"This boy your father kills, who is he?"
"I never found out his name. A schoolboy. My father was his teacher. It was an accident," I said, "it was night, and wet—"
"He teaches what, your father?"
"Mathematics. But my father's dead."
"To this boy who has no name he teaches death."
Her voice had the bitterness of words incised in blood.
"My Heinz," she said, "he wears my husband's name but he is not my husband's boy." And wrathfully: "I tell you before!"
But she had told me the boy was loved.
"My husband will do like your father, he will kill this boy. One day he kills him."
She had reverted to nightmare; she had usurped my father's nightmare. I saw, in the conflagration of her seeing, the critical logic of what hardly deserved the name of madness. Nothing was obscured, reality burned and burned. She knew and she knew. In the shadowed seclusions of our little house on a forgotten street in a nondescript cranny that turned its back on everything urban, hidden in cattails along the lip of a bay where the tide, going out, left behind the odors of seaweed and bird-lust—here in her nightgown, alert to the subterranean calamities of the world, sat the sibyl. All masks fell; or else all wore masks, in a teeming of reminders and representations: the past was the present, the present was the past, the meaning of one thing was the meaning of another, all meanings were one. Into this cauldron of all-ness a familiar evil had burst, wearing the mask of Ninel, and behind it a procession of upheavals unmasked, the black car circling, the dead boy, the son who was and was not a son, and James, always James, invader, usurper, thief. All one.
The house was in disorder. Gert and Willi had become enemies. They fought with fists and lungs and teeth. They fought over property—who owned what, whether James had given the kaleidoscope to Gert or the mechanical frog to Willi, or vice versa. Heinz let go of Waltraut's hand, retreating beastlike behind his earphones, tapping the wire onto the crystal, catching invisible whirrings out of the air, while Waltraut ran wailing from boy to boy, crying for breakfast, crying for supper, and Anneliese drifted through the maelstrom, powerless, detached. Her notebooks lay unopened. Her eyes were furry. She kept them on James, sidewise, with a slyness new to her. And here was James, jumping into the cacophony, egging it on, promising new frogs, new kaleidoscopes, promising property heaped on property—a friend to anarchy and greed. His teacup dallied on the sideboard. It gave out its familiar fume, and he visited it often, sometimes scooping up Waltraut, who wriggled wildly, or deflected en route by an excited boy's pummeling. Wild, wild Waltraut, wild Willi, wild Gert! Heinz in communion with the ether, deaf to bedlam. Anneliese in trance: earrings glinting like bits of shattered glass.
Professor Mitwisser's door was a wall against this chaos. The work in the study had doubled; he had begun to call on me in the mornings. In these hours his recitations were rapid and decisive. Sporadic mutters of "Rote Indianer" strewn without heat, were drowned by wave after wave of his thickening phrases, dictating, parsing, rushing, flooding. Nights were different, sunk in the silences of ten o'clock. The silences were bottomless. Patient at the typewriter, my arms uselessly dangling, waiting for the coarsening voice to resume, I was, I knew, a blank mote in that blank muteness—the white pool out of which he drew, hesitating and straining, the phantom eels of his thought. He lifted his large ugly knuckles and clawed at nothingness. The grooves in his forehead darkened. And then a single volcanic word would spit from his whole face, a rage of gluttonous spite would overcome him, and his lips would rattle and babble those alien names, Yehudah Hadassi, An-Nahawendi, and old lost towns on obsolete maps, Castoria, Zagora, Mastaura, faster than I could keep up with them.
During one of the swollen silences that surrounded these nightly storms, I fell asleep over the keys.
"Sluggard!" Mitwisser's breath. The hairs of his nostrils. "Negligence! Delinquency!"
I said weakly, out of my shame, "Mrs. Mitwisser ... she doesn't rest, she talks all night—"
"It is not my wife who is delinquent. It is not my wife who is negligent."
He released me then. It was meaningless, he said, to attempt to continue with a sluggard: I should return tomorrow in fitter circumstance. But his accusations reverberated—a delinquent wife, a negligent mother, a woman in bed. A sluggard.
My eyelids were heavy with sleeplessness. The previous night had worn me out—Mrs. Mitwisser chattering, clattering, clutching. She was clutching an object. It shone in the window's mild glimmer.
"Make the light," she commanded.
I switched on the lamp. She was crushing a silver rectangle against her breasts. The corners were sharp and left wedgelike marks in her flesh. I remembered the photograph in the ornamental frame—I had last seen it in the house in Albany: the black-haired young woman overshadowed by a tall wide-leafed plant; the stone urn; the cherub.
"Die Mutter," she said, as if speaking of a relic, or an icon. She pressed it harder into her body: under her nightgown the nipples pouted. It seemed to me that the madwoman in her sanity was suckling her own mother, and why not? For the whirling electrons there is neither before nor after, up nor down, and consequence can precede cause, why not? The lesson of the bitten egg.
Willi, I learned later, had found the photograph secreted among Anneliese's things.
37
HE KEPT HIS old knapsack, a little ragged now (but the leather straps held), and wondered if he ought to get himself a motorcycle. In the end he took buses. He had no destination. To have a destination one needs an education: how else to be a pilgrim? He went, for instance, by happenstance—because the bus was headed there—to Walden Pond; it was no different from any other water. He contemplated enrolling in a university, but the thought of studying made him tired, and besides, what would be the point of it? He recoiled from books: he was a book himself, he was fifteen books, his bangs and his knees had been turned into a sort of scripture. The buses led him all over New England, and New England was boring, so he rode back to New York, telephoned Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Brooks (he declined to visit their offices), had a loud argument over what they called "numerous valuable items in storage," and found his way to certain clandestine bars. He missed the kif and tried a greenish powder recommended as "almost as good"—it wasn't—by a silly fellow he met in a bus station. These days it was necessary to drink in secret cellars, speakeasies that seemed jolly enough to their denizens, who smoked and flirted and snarled arms and legs around the nearest body of whatever sex (he did the same), and laughed about raids as if they were as random and likely as rain. He was in a raid himself once, and spent a few hours in the lockup, until he handed
out hundred-dollar bills, which made his jailers suspect him of robbery, from the look of him—but they pocketed the bills and let him go. The next day, a Friday, he got on a train at Grand Central—on a whim he treated himself to a sleeper—and in the dining car sat down opposite a middle-aged man in a clerical collar and cassock. The man was not a priest. He was an actor traveling in costume. His name was Arnold Partridge, and he was getting off at Altoona, where he hoped to join the rest of the cast just before the curtain went up. He was, he said, wearing a bald wig, which took a terribly long time to put on. Yesterday he had been obliged to attend the funeral of an aunt, his mother's sister, in Yonkers; the director could not prevent his going, but insisted (there was no understudy) that he return for the Friday night performance—hence his arriving fully garbed and accoutered, ready to set foot on the stage. He didn't mind running around impersonating a priest, he said. People treated him respectfully, as they never did without the collar, and anyhow impersonation was his business. It wasn't much of a business: he belonged to a small itinerant repertory company that lived from hand to mouth, playing only on the weekends.
"Playing what?"
"Rubbish," Arnold Partridge said. "Murder in the monastery."
"Are you the murderer?"
"I'm the one that gets his throat slit in the third act. Come and see."
His ticket was stamped straight through for Chicago. He tore it up (it hardly mattered, he could see Chicago another time) and alighted at Altoona together with the fake priest, who was, as he confidently announced, just in time for his entrance in Scene Two. At one dollar and eighty cents a ticket the Little Glory Theatre's sixty-eight seats were all filled, mainly with white-haired ladies in white shoes holding hand fans with the company's name printed on them under a picture of a Japanese bridge over a stream. The men wore unbuttoned vests over shirtsleeves and no jackets, and docilely kept their straw boaters in their laps. The plot was both intricate and ludicrous, but the audience was grateful, and clapped at intermission, and even more vigorously when the actors took their bows. The ingenue, who played (in pigtails) the priest's unacknowledged daughter, looked to be close to fifty. A ten-year-old boy had a walk-on part, and stood wordlessly, his eyes deadened by tedium. This same boy mounted a stool behind a table at the back of the auditorium during intermission and sold five-cent candy bars and bags of saltwater taffy marked "Genuine Atlantic City Boardwalk" for twenty cents each. He was the ingenue's son. He traveled with the company and never went to school.
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