—A farce. A comedy, he said.
It was in Thrace that he had buried the Bear Boy, and among Mitwissers that the ghost had risen. That was how he explained it, with that short high laugh that attached itself now more to Thrace than to her papa.
—But look how much you help papa!
He was lying on the bed, with his hands tucked under his neck. Her mouth was on his throat, idly licking. He raised a shoeless foot and circled the shadows with it.
—A lot of good I'm doing his daughter, he said.
—Oh James, James, she said, I want to be with you, that's all.
—You don't.
—I do. I do, she said.
But she felt the little space spring open between them. Sometimes, when he caressed her, and let her put her hair in his mouth—it was a game they had, that led hastily to lovemaking—there was no space at all. And at other times a coldness seeped in, inch by inch.
She left him in that small dark room, monkish with its single dresser and two brittle wicker chairs (these had suffered a previous life outdoors), and went walking. All the days in Thrace seemed gray: did the sun never sojourn here? She passed the muddy Ford, unused for nearly three weeks. She felt vaguely lonely, perhaps because of the gray streets; otherwise she was never lonely. But why did he speak of her as her papa's daughter? Did he think of her simply as immersed in her family? Yet when she heard his way of saying her name—Annie—she believed she was herself, only herself, and when he grew impatient, it was because he was seeing her as he must first have seen her, as her papa's daughter, merely that. A refugee girl, an outlander. She supposed he took her in flickeringly, like one of those optical illusions where an image metamorphoses into a different image, but you cannot hold both images in your mind simultaneously. When he became impatient with her, even distant, she was all at once Anneliese, this foreign thing; and when he caressed her, Annie appeared. Oh, why could she not be Annie for him day and night?
She walked all along Main Street. At the end of it she turned back, having spied not far ahead the red-brick building that was the high school. Thrace, it turned out, was a drab town like all the others—but the others had enchanted her. They drove, they stopped, they gawked—he at her, amused at first by her delight. They ate in tiny steamy cafés smelling of fried potatoes. In Medusa they stood in a patch of grass in front of the courthouse and gazed at the violet fuzz of mountains that blurred the horizon's edge. In Odysseus (having landed there by bus; it was before they had the auto) they discovered a small traveling circus, with half a dozen acrobats, a clown, monkeys, a Fat Lady and a Fire-Eater. There was also a Sword-Swallower, but he was sick with flu and could not perform. Wherever they found themselves, she was exhilarated by an eerie newness: what unsuspected villages these were, what browning landscapes, what vegetable odors! And the fumes of fallen apples, sweet in their rot. How peculiar people's voices were, vowels inimical to her own larynx, staccato grunts that declined courtliness. No one bowed; it was democracy. The language too was uncivil, it did not distinguish between high and low. In Parnassus they drifted by a prison with pink walls and a garden of cabbages, unfenced; it did not frighten her. A man in an orange cap who was tending the cabbages waved. The strangeness was elating. The buses with their long noses and hard seats might have hurtled down from a different planet. The soup they ordered in one of those little cafés tasted of pickles; a red electric sign in the window bluntly announced PIE, FIVE CENTS. These towns, these towns, it was another country; the creatures who lived in it were not like those at home. The dogs barked unfamiliar notes, the cats curled their tails like alien clefs.
Her papa and his old, old, lost Karaites. No one in this new country bothered about them, only her papa. Her broken mother. How heavy they were, how heavy it was to be who they were, how heavy it was to be Anneliese! And how good, how free, to be with James. He could not know what she knew, he could not feel it, he had not seen the bonfires in the streets at night, and the broad black leaves of charred books, like spread-out bats' wings, and the smoke. He knew so little, it puzzled her, it was an absence in his brain, but it was also a relief, an anodyne, why should she not be glad that the Americans are like children? And he was that child, eternally: the boy in the lace collar, with a twinkling squint and rosy knees, and garlands of rhymes all around.
Schau ich mir Bärknabe an,
hab ich wenig Freude dran.
Fallen mir die andern ein,
nur Bärknabe will ich sein.
He was still lying on the bed, with his shoes off. This disturbed her; lately he never wanted to go out, why would he not go out? It reminded her a little of her mother.
—Hey, he said. You've been gone two hours.
—I had to walk all over until I found it. In such a funny place. I didn't find it on Main Street...
—You wouldn't. It's a dry town, I told you.
—Here, she said, and handed him a rounded object, swaddled like an infant.
He took it from her, and she recognized from his resisting sigh, and from the tiny inscrutable whistle that followed it, what he would say next. If he said it, it would hurt her. If he said it, she would feel sick. Sometimes the sick feeling came even when he did not say it.
—Annie...
—No, no, I want to be with you!
—You don't belong here.
—I do!
—You belong with your father, not here. Not this way.
—You don't know where I belong! she cried. You don't know anything! You don't understand any of it, you're like a child!
The runaway child calling him a child. He wrested open the bottle she had brought him—what else was there to do in this godforsaken Thrace? He could no longer endure how she ministered to him, how she yielded, how her yielding had become importuning, why would she not leave him be? Even her willfulness was servile: to have pestered him about the Bear Boy's house, why would she not leave him be? She was seventeen. She had pretty teeth, like her mother. Otherwise how was she different from that Bridget, why would she not leave him be?
Then it came to him that he could make a present of the Ford to their mostly absent landlady.
55
ELSA MITWISSER, formerly of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, doctor of physics, colleague of Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger (yet it was she who had bitten the egg), was unexpectedly in possession of an extra pair of shoes. They were blue leather pumps, delicately soled, scarcely worn, with a tease of ribbon bow at each toe. Plainly they had been danced in once or twice; and now they were newly polished, like two moons reflecting blue light.
Bertram had found them in a Salvation Army bin. On the day he came to us, he reminded me, he had mistakenly left the train at the stop before, did I remember that? A long walk under the snaking trestle; but on the way, dejected, unclean, he was all at once put in mind of Ninel.
"You had a vision," I said.
"Oh come on, Rosie, be nice. It's only that I spotted this Salvation Army place, that's all, and it just somehow brought her back. She used to get all her clothes that way, she didn't believe in dressing according to ... well, class. And she got you those goodbye presents, Dickens I think, and what was the other?"
"Jane Austen. All about class. But I don't have it anymore—Mrs. Mitwisser chopped it up."
"She hasn't chopped up anything lately." He said this proudly; his conquest of Mrs. Mitwisser gratified him. It noticeably gratified her husband.
So I supposed it was Ninel's ghost that inspired Bertram to return one morning to the Salvation Army's bins, half a mile off under the trestle. Mrs. Mitwisser had allowed him to measure her naked foot; a familiarity was passing between them. Ten cents bought the blue pumps. Another ten cents bought the renewing polish. I did not ask him if he had communed with Ninel's spirit among the castaway shoes.
The pumps were Mrs. Mitwisser's trophies. She kept them next to her hairbrush. They were the spoils of the war she had long waged against the terrors of the house—had she not always insisted that
it was not reasonable to live in a place of danger with only a single pair of shoes? Consider if they wore out, consider if they grew tattered from use, then how could one flee? The shoes Bertram had brought her were for dancing, admittedly—but no matter, this surely augmented their value.
"Sometimes," she confided, "one must put on the shoes as if for a ball. Even if not."
"How is that?" Bertram asked. But he already knew. She had told him about the El Dorado. She had told him how they had ridden round and round, round and round, day after day. She had told him about the juggler, and how she had fooled Fritz into thinking her mother's silver frame was only plate, and how she hoped it was the juggler Fritz had stolen from their walls, so that he could be fooled again.
Her bright look pleaded with Bertram to ask; she was ready to tell a third time, a fourth.
The extra pair of shoes gave her courage. She put on her old shoes and tidied her hair. She buttoned on a dress and palely, unsteadily, came down the stairs and into the life of the lower house. Bertram led her into his kitchen—it was by now entirely his. He had propitiated her demons, or stilled them; he had won her.
"I've got her chopping again." His sidewise grin. "Carrots for the stew."
"She never did that sort of thing," I said, "at home."
Those Mitwisser syllables—at home—sprang from me easily; I had acquired the native language.
"She's my sous-chef. She likes it."
"At home they had servants."
"Had," he retorted. "Had isn't have. I had Ninel, didn't I?"
"Oh Bertram, can't you see that she left you?"
"It was my fault. If I'd joined up—"
"You could never have joined up with those people." I took a deliberate breath. "You're too soft."
"What a thing to say. What a nasty thing." He gave me a wounded look. "You know what? You're not such a kid anymore. And you've never said a word of ... I don't know what to call it. Condolence. Commiseration. It isn't as if you never knew Ninel. You haven't got any pity in you, they've done something to you here."
What had been done to me? It was mainly Bertram who had made me useless. His sympathies had engulfed and calmed them all—Mrs. Mitwisser and her children. Mrs. Mitwisser was in his charge; Waltraut was willingly under his thumb. Bertram's pockets were empty, he was powerless, he was a stranger in this fiefdom. But his mildness could somehow tame the boys—they were hardly aware of how he directed their armistice—and he had put a spell on Waltraut, who trotted after him like a small convenience. By becoming a servant to all, he had made servants of all. I was displaced; once again I felt that Bertram had exiled me.
I tapped on Mitwisser's study door. It was more than a week since he had called for me—it was left to me to search him out. His silence was permission. Otherwise he would send me away with an abrupt "Go." I entered at the usual time—it was ten o'clock—and saw that he was pacing in the dark, back and forth from bed to wall. I switched on the lamp that stood over the typewriter; its uncertain light showed me a man like a ship—an ocean liner viewed from the dock below. He had never seemed so thickly huge: the breadth and length of him, the massive shoulders, the great grieving head. Like a ship he moved in that confining space, lifted and lowered on the waves of his rough exhalations.
"I have no need of you now," he said. But he had allowed me to come in.
"I'll come back tomorrow then—"
"It will be the same tomorrow."
I had no care for decorum; I was frightened; I was fearless.
"No, no," I protested. "There's so much—"
"There is nothing."
The room was mobbed and heaped with my transcriptions. Stacks of portfolios pressed against the foot of the bed, along the walls, behind the door. Yet it was not only these hillocks of paper that surrounded and penned him: it was his own unraveling voice secreting those antique sages as a spider secretes its intricate lines, and the glass-shod keys lancing my eyes, and the phantom heretics mocking. And al-Kirkisani, prancing in air, close to the ceiling, circling the mosquelike dome that sheltered Mitwisser's brain.
"Professor Mitwisser," I said, and halted.
"My wife is improved. My house is in order, is it not? Your cousin is clever, I have observed this." With a muted thunder he heaved himself into his chair. "But my work is at an end, and my daughter ... my daughter..."
I made my way through tides of manuscript to the wrinkleless coverlet (tended to with geometric precision by Bertram that morning) and sat down on its rim. Our eyes were almost level; his mouth was a warped knot.
"The amusing Dr. Tandoori," he murmured, and I grasped that he had last seen me there, at the edge of his bed, tentative and noiseless, during Dr. Tandoori's visit. "Do you understand that no one in this excellent country has ever given a thought to my investigations? They lack necessity, they invite futility. Obscurity breeds comedy. How then do I differ from a godless tailor?"
"Those men who came that night, they knew—"
"They came to deride."
How far away all that seemed! The cries of the man with the bad hand, and the man in the skullcap, had grown dimmer and dimmer, as if Mitwisser's adversaries had diminished to voiceless stunted china figurines.
"I am conscious," he said, "that I am open to such mockery. It is conceivable that I mock myself." He unknotted his mouth into a parody of a smile. "I suffer now from the silence even of my negligent antagonists. And in my foolish search for an attentive colleague I uncovered only"—the self-whipping smile stretched wider—"a sewing machine. Perhaps I too should take up tailoring, is this not so?"
"Professor Mitwisser," I tried again, "you see how your work is all around you, you see how immense—"
"Yes yes, how remarkable they are, my so very learned admirers! A hireling like yourself, oh yes, think how I am complimented. And that other, the ignorant itinerant who claims to be possessed by what he is unequipped to know—" His bitter rebuking breath invaded the narrow air between us. "I permitted it. I permitted it! Out of pity I permitted it!"
I made myself ask the reason for it. It was James he was sorrowing over, his wife's chosen enemy, and mine; I could not console him. It cut me that he spoke of pity; Bertram had charged me with having none.
"And why not? The man had no place. No present. No purpose. Nothing. Can you understand what it is to have nothing?"
"I came to tell you," I said slowly, "there's nothing much left. It's stopped coming."
The blue eyes burned. They inspected me. They looked murderous.
"Stopped? What is it that stops? My purpose? My place on this earth? My life? The life of my family?"
"The money," I said.
"The only one! Him alone! Who else but this ignorant itinerant has ever staked his life on my Karaites? Who else other than myself? Why should I not have pitied him? He and I, we two, no one else, that is how I am mocked! And in the end, in the end, in the end," he howled, "I sold this man my daughter!"
I felt then a terrifying blow, like that of a boulder crashing into the very center of my body. Mitwisser had thrust his great head into my arms, sobbing. I held it there, the weighty dome of that mind, for a long time, until the hot wetness seeped into the fibers of my dress.
56
THIS TIME she knew the way, so she avoided Main Street and zigzagged through side alleys, past back yards where hints of growth sent out small sensual botanic odors. The world was turning yellow, yellow everywhere: a low fence of white pickets, mostly broken, was tinged yellow, the tin roofs of half-rotted sheds glowed with a yellow shine. It was a late-March sun, a cold sun still, but warmly colored, hiding a tropical secret. Thrace in this bright hour was beginning to resemble all those other towns that had so amazed her with their unfamiliarity and lit her with a curious happiness. Here it was the towns that were foreign, not she, and she was drawn to everything that had no likeness to what she had known before. It was as if these unkempt straggly places could wash her eyes clean. She didn't much mind her errand, and she minded
it now even less. James had promised her it would be the last; he was thinking, he said, of getting out of Thrace.
She made her clandestine purchase—not so clandestine after all; there were half a dozen other customers in that makeshift shop in a damply fetid basement. The proprietors were an elderly farming couple, half deaf and as ramshackle as their creaking house (the shingles were falling off, the porch was sagging), yet as cheery and innocent as if they were selling baskets of apples and pears. Their bottles were of all different shapes, and since James had asked her to bring him not one but two (why not, he told her, since these would be the last), she left with a pair of wrapped packages, the first of which might have been a narrow lamp, and the second a rounded pitcher.
It was a long walk back through the shortcuts she had discovered. The route that led from Main Street was far more direct, but the sunlight was new, and the little lifts of pleasure she detected circulating from her throat to her groin—they seemed to shiver with each heartbeat—took her by surprise. It was her old gladness—she didn't belong with her papa, she belonged with James! It was plain that she had made him understand this finally: for days and days he had stopped saying the thing that sickened her. How pleased she was that he had stopped! She followed him into their landlady's garden, grateful that he was all at once willing to catch the light. In his dour moods their room was becoming more and more cell-like, and the garden had the shamed yet brazen look of all back yards in Thrace. But the air was sweetening, and green points were pushing up around a mud-caked hose that prowled across the grayish earth. A silky wind shook her hair—it was always unbound now. She widened her nostrils to take in the perplexing mix of smells, impetuous bursts of grass, aging rubber, the sour excitements of James's sweat. He kicked at the hose; he was sweating, why was that, was it the schnapps? But he had announced that the lamp and the pitcher were the last, there would be no more, he was ready to leave Thrace behind, and good riddance to it. She was jubilant—they would soon be off in the liberating Ford, and oh, oh, where would they go?
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