"I've said it before, Rosie. You're not a kid anymore. It's time."
He kissed me, full force, crushing my lips against my teeth. Under the pressure of his mouth my teeth felt like shards of ice; his mouth pried mine. It was the kiss I had longed for in that old lost Albany flat: a man's kiss. There was nothing cousinly in its deep invasions. It was what Ninel had known. It was what Anneliese knew.
"My wife is pregnant," he said. And then: "Where will you go?"
My wife. His kiss was still wet on my lips.
"Oh, I don't know."
But I did know.
64
I WAS UNWILLING to leave so much as a trace. I resisted the possibility of being found someday, by Bertram or anyone. I was headed for the genuine New York of the skyscrapers. I saw myself as the counterpart of that hungry aspirant, the Young Man from the Provinces—modernity had granted the chance of untethered motion to my own sex. It was not my destiny to be planted in a single spot of the earth, like that other discarded amanuensis of another century, Dorothea Casaubon, deprived of the want ads in a New York newspaper by hard chronology. I had cut out several of these from the Sun, which nowadays lay beside Bertram's breakfast plate. The great city, whose high crenelations obscured the horizon, was all the same nothing but vista: innumerable offices were summoning innumerable typists. Here at the breakfast table Europe was distant and almost silenced. Armies were massing, but they were no more than the black ink of a headline or a stutter out of the radio. Though her quick ears were alert to the infant's slightest stir, Mrs. Mitwisser was growing deaf to the thunder of Europe. She was healthy and shining. Her body, in tune with Anneliese's body, was shutting out world-upheaval. She no longer fought it with madness, or with the formula for thermodynamical equilibrium. Anneliese's child was distracting her into normality; her son-in-law was distracting her; and the new house. Bertram had promised servants, a daily maid and a weekly gardener. She was drained of fury, and of fury's magnificence.
These were not my thoughts as I prepared to leave that cramped house in an inconspicuous region of the city; they came to me long afterward, when the Bear Boy, with its stained pages, was all I had left to remind me of my sojourn among Mitwissers. Like Anneliese's child, I too was the Bear Boy's heir. It had held my mother's death certificate. My father, almost by instinct, had tossed for it. And if the Bear Boy had fancied himself a Karaite (so woven are past and future), it was all I had of the Karaites. Night after night the boy in the pictures insinuated his unspoken prophecies. They were old-fashioned, these pictures, and for the most part pastel-colored. They had the golden charm of nostalgia; but they could kill. The boy in the pictures—his bangs, his blue socks, his squint, the green hat, the dangling kettle—who, after all, would not pity him? He lay now in the troublesome grave Mr. Brooks had painfully contracted for: not every burial ground under the eye of heaven will welcome a suicide. Not far off, under the sanctified earth of Troy, my father lay in disgrace. Somewhere in Spain lay Ninel, in what I took to be a soldier's grave. And in a suburb of Baghdad, for a thousand years, lay al-Kirkisani, author of those forgotten Books of grandeur, Gardens and Parks and Lights and Watchtowers. He had seen the Ganges, he had defended Scripture against the false adornments of men, he had uncovered heresy in the Godhead itself. He had tunneled like a worm into Mitwisser's brain. His bones were Mesopotamian dust, yet they had permitted me to witness ecstasy.
On my last day, in its last hour, I found Mitwisser sitting alone on the bench below the lilac bush. The big purple heads were failing under the first autumn chill. He was wearing his hat. Bertram had given him a cane to walk with.
"I'm going now."
"Yes," he said.
A silence hung between us. I tried to think how to fill it.
"Anneliese's having another child. Bertram told me."
"It is what is natural."
"And Waltraut starts kindergarten—"
An irritable flick of the cane. "Please," he said.
He could not endure domestic talk, and now that the worm in his brain was withered, what else was I to say? I put my hand on his shoulder.
"I'll always think of you."
"Perhaps not. It is what is natural."
"Goodbye, Rudi."
"Yes," he said.
I moved a few steps away and turned. "Will you walk back to the house with me?"
He lifted his cane. "I have here my new friend. He tells me to look sharp. He opens my eyes."
"Then goodbye. My Rudi, goodbye."
The boys were gathered before the green front door. Patches of the Goldberg Variations drifted out—masses of bees.
"Bertram telephoned for a taxi! Where were you?" Gert called.
"It came ten minutes ago," Heinz said, "and the meter's running."
There it was, a yellow hump in the street, its engine vibrating and giving off heat.
"Mama can't come down. She's helping Anneliese with the baby's bath, and Waltraut's up there too."
Bertram emerged, carrying my suitcases.
"You're all set now, Rosie. Off to the big world."
He pulled at the taxi door. Someone was crouched in there, hiding.
Out jumped Willi.
"Mrs. Tandoori! Mrs. Tandoori!"
* * *
Acknowledgments
Sources for the Karaites include Karaite Anthology: Excerpts from the Early Literature, edited by Leon Nemoy (Yale University Press, 1952), and Karaites in Byzantium: The Formative Years, 970…1100, by Zvi Ankori (Columbia University Press, 1957).
For assistance with German idiom I am grateful to Dr. Susanne Klingenstein.
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Heir to the Glimmering World Page 32
