The Atheist in the Attic

by Samuel R. Delany

  But I remember, as I sat in Gunter’s open carriage, more or less comfortably muffled (was it colder today?), listening to his chatter, and chattering back what seemed—when it seemed—appropriate, while we went off to see his Jew, if I should really be calling mine a Jew at all.

  His own people no longer did. Did he? Today he signs his name Benedict instead of Baruch. I wonder if he’s learned how little difference that makes in how anyone else talks of him—including me. Or if he cares.

  And, of course, the always awkward third truth: this invitation to see another Jew this morning made me feel as if the world were mocking me, as if it were pushing me to say, even now: “You know I’m going to be seeing that Spinoza fellow tomorrow, if he’ll receive me.” And I was not going to say that to Gunter! I was not going to say it because I was protecting my own reputation. I was protecting Spinoza’s as well.

  And I was protecting Gunter’s and his family’s, I told myself, not to mention those strangers who’d already involved themselves in his case, those scattered in the Netherlands and Germany and France as well.

  But wouldn’t the world be a better place if I didn’t have to?

  (When your own reputation already entails a philosophy such as mine, serious thoughts about preferable alternatives can only make you weary.)

  “Of course,” I said, “let’s go,” just to plague myself with the discomfort of knowing I had decided—not to lie, exactly, but to withhold the truth, at least from Gunter. Or, at any rate, to delay his knowledge of it.

  Till I have seen my Jew? Or till after I’ve left with my trunks and bags and notions of the world for another two-, five-, or ten-year hiatus in my friendship with Gunter. Would I tell him tonight or tomorrow? (No! That was insane! Would I tell him in a year, a decade, ever? How could I know?)

  We drove in his carriage to the Jews’ neighborhood, with more chat about his sisters, his servants—“Sophie will be particularly unhappy to have missed you”—his youngest sister—“as would Peytor if you’d come three months later—I’m giving him half a year off to go back to his family in Flanders and help them out.” (What in the world is it about this Peytor?) “If he’d missed you, he’d never have forgiven himself or me, for settling his leave in winter instead of the spring—”

  I asked, “Farming? His family?”

  Gunter said, “Of course, that’s what they do.” He looked at me with the hint of questioning that asked, What else could it be?

  And I wondered when (or if) I was going to see this young houseman. (Or was he an old one … ?) I had no memory of what this Peytor looked like. I assumed he was here on my last visit. But one meets so many servants in the course of the quasi-diplomatic circuits I am always moving through, I find myself not even trying to keep them in memory.

  When we got there, Gunter gathered himself up. “Do you mind waiting out here? It’s one of those matters …” Now he smiled, shrugged, even opened up his hands, as if—I fancied—to show me he held no weapon. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “Not at all.” I smiled back.

  Gunter raised his eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to come in just to get—?”

  “Really.” I shrugged scarf and coat. If anything, I was too warm. “No, really. I’m quite comfortable—at least now.”

  Once or twice the horses stepped about so that the driver had to still them. And I was rocked along through my thoughts in the carriage—which were, I’m afraid, little like the ones I’ve been writing here.

  Above the door how many years ago had someone carved the Hebrew homily emet veshalom yesod ha’olam. Quietly I read it. It’s supposed to be Jews speaking to other Jews. We gentiles (it assumes) merely overhear it and therefore trust them more. But couldn’t it be Jews speaking to us as well, accusing us of making the world the mess that it is?

  I wondered at the discomfort of sitting below its accusation: No, you really are lying to this generous man, your friend, a member of your nation and class, endangering him and his family, moreover endangering yourself by planning this secret visit, and still moreover endangering the man—the Jew—you claim so greatly to respect that you hardly dare to write such a vilified name even in a journal. (No, I will write it!) Spinoza may be the most peaceful man—or Jew—in the world, but the world that he lives in and that I live in is not. And not to talk about it is a blatant lie of omission.

  Could that shalom (peace) if not the emet (truth) have been Jews scolding specifically the man I’d hoped to see the next day, the most peaceful of men by all reports by those who love him, and evil beyond all bearing by those who vilify him. Does the homily ask him: “Why have you fueled all this rage and uproar around our city, our country, our Lord’s world, whether your people’s Lord or mine … ?”

  But apparently he’d been doing that through his whole life: wasn’t that why his own people had already excommunicated him?

  By the time Gunter came out again and walked from under the words I had been reading and rereading—the stone words over the door—feeling around under his cloak for his inner wallet, I had decided—truly, short of abandoning my plans to see him at all—that my actions and my reticence both were for the best. But I wondered why—still—we had to live in a world where that was the best we might have.

  Better, the intaglio words were an absence of stone.

  “Well”—Gunter stepped up to the carriage and pulled back the half door—“that wasn’t as complicated as I was afraid it might be. I think he knows, in money matters, it’s well to oblige the wealthy. And you’re a good friend for your support. Really.”

  He climbed in. The driver shook his whip near the animal’s ear. We started home.

  Really, had this been necessary? But that, I thought, was my old friend.

  4.

  When we got back to Gunter’s, my traveling trunks were no longer about the steps.

  Gunter pushed inside, not ringing for anyone. A cool smell of dust in the cavernous front hall. Neither Peytor nor Mary was there to take me up to my room. “Come with me.” No one at the front to take Gunter’s coat or mine, either. He looked around, clearly put out, then shrugged grumpily and hung his over the banister. “Sixteen men and women,” he said. (That, by the way, is how I first knew for sure what I’ve written above. Or maybe it’s not important and I should cross this out—since clearly that’s implied.) “And do you see a soul? I must have said it a dozen times in the last two months. Someone’s supposed to be in charge of the door at all times. Leave yours there, too.”

  “It’s all right, I’ll take mine up with …”

  But he already seemed to have forgotten. As we started up, a woman in a bonnet and Dutch apron came hurrying in from a door along the hallway with its flowered paper. “Oh, sir—I’m so sorry, I was just out at—”

  Gunter loped up two steps, looked back, and declared: “We’ve gone through this before, Hilda. That”—he pointed to his coat on the rail—“best not be there when I come down. Come on, Gottfried. I’m afraid you’re seeing us with our clothing all untied and unhooked. Are you sure you don’t want to leave it?” Then, I realized, he thought better: I was a guest, and an eccentric one. “Let’s go. Follow me and I’ll show you where you are.” Halfway up, of course, all of a sudden he remembered something he had to do. “Before eight thirty. Someone’s coming, and I have to get to this—so we’ll be ready. Really, we’ve been putting it off since …” He sucked his teeth. “Anyway, that’s why I had to see the Jew. Look, you just go on up there. Turn … left; that’s right, left; you’re the end of the hall. I’m sure the suite’s open. Mary would leave it unlocked, I know. Peytor—it’s a toss-up with pretty much everything he does, till he does it a dozen times and gets his ear pinched a handful of times for doing it wrong. So it’s a matter of who left last. Once you’re up there, you can ring for someone to take your coat down if you’d like.” And he hurried off over blue carpeting toward what I assumed was his own suite (though his working spaces were scattered though the manse, unless
he was one of those gentlemen who try to work alone in concentrated isolation. It’s surprising how little I knew my host, especially in these last years.)

  I continued on, feeling as if every new piece of information just accused me further. Finally I pushed through my door.

  It was a very nice room—the first of three. Mary and Peytor—or possibly just Mary with Peytor getting instructions from someone (Mary herself?) who could do it far faster than he (I assumed he didn’t pay the most steadfast attention)—had finished unpacking my things in the bedroom, behind the two sitting rooms. The shutters were opened. The drapes were back. The trunks themselves I went to see in the walk-in closet. I opened the one on the top: my writing equipment, my papers—and, in the trunk’s corner, my mechanical calculator, bronze and bright, with all its parts turned by a crank that lay in the wooden box beside it. Wisely they’d known not to touch those.

  I closed the trunk.

  As I looked around, I thought: Someone has put some thinking into how this had best be done, so that I, the presumed beneficiary of that thinking, need not think at all. But here I am, thinking anyway about the individual thoughts such thinking comprised, approving this bit, questioning that one, disapproving of another—well, thinking about what’s not supposed to require thinking, that is philosophy, no? (Wasn’t this all predicated on how to get out of the house leaving as few signs as I could? “No, sir. His coat’s gone from the downstairs closet.”) And all creatures who can think must indulge it one way or the other, some more, some less, some better, some worse, all the way up to the Great and Terrible Gods of Men, wrangling and warring among our princes over the explanations offered for His behavior, and even unto your behavior in response to Him. My mind on the peaks of Zion and Olympus, Ararat and the Mount of Olives, I went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and pulled it out—

  Smallclothes. Mine. All of them.

  I’d expected handkerchiefs, hose, and shirts in the top of the bureau.

  This had to be Peytor. A sensible and experienced servant—like Mary—would either wait till asked, or, if he didn’t know what they were, put them in a bottom drawer. At various grand homes where I’d been a guest, that’s what had happened over the years.

  No, this had to be a boy—and a boy who’d waited on me once and whom I couldn’t remember. Mary, with whom I was equally unacquainted, would have thought differently—if I trusted Gunter’s passing account.

  At the desk in the middle room, I slid a visitor’s card from my wallet and signed it.

  I took out a sheet of paper, waiting for me in the stocked desk, dipped my quill in an ink bottle in its elaborate stand—it had been refilled, I assumed, within the hour—let it drip twice back into the inkwell, so that ink rippled like the sea (or one of the canals outside), then moved it from the left side of the paper, to the right side, to the left again, and again to the right, while I debated whether to write my note in Latin or Hebrew. I read Hebrew as well as any educated German once destined for the clergy (before the law had grabbed up all my energies), and I speak it tolerably. But my writing, that is, my Hebraic penmanship (unlike my Greek and Latin) is, frankly, dreadful.

  I moved my quill to the left, to begin.

  All right, Latin.

  My esteemed colleague, Herr Spinoza …

  And I explained how I had gotten his address from our mutual friend, Herr Oldenburg. I knew his health was not the best. I would be at his home in the vicinity of eight the following day. If he were not up to seeing me, he should merely decline to meet. I would respect that completely. But I was prepared to go the trouble of coming and risking his dismissal, as a sign of the great respect in which I held his learning and wisdom.

  I signed it—

  Your humble servant and fellow in truth, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

  —and added several titles, though I was sure he must know my work at least as well as I knew his. After all, he had written a book on Descartes. Presumably this would convey I was his equal or superior in society, though ready to learn from him if he would make the effort to teach me.

  When I finished and waxed it and stamped it with my seal, I rang for someone to get it into the hands of a messenger. Ten minutes later when no one had come, I stood up, took my letter, went into the hall, and started down the stairs. Somewhere there must be servants in the house. Maybe now was the time to call on the good will of the curious Peytor. But I knew nothing of him. Was he fourteen? Was he twenty-four? And none too swift—which now that I’m thirty I know means something different when it is applied to the city poor or the city rich, the country rich or the country poor. Or even men and women whenever they occupy one or the other varied station. There was a ribbon on the table with which to tie the letter.

  In the polishing room behind the pantry, three women worked at the old plank table with their kidskin and rouges and the silver candlesticks that may well have been the work of the same artisan who’d made the dining-room candelabra.

  One paused, rubbed the bridge of her nose with her knuckle, and, when I asked for him, told me that Peytor was on loan to the stable of the house two east of here. Yes, she was Mary. But she could tell me where to find a messenger. Let her put down her work a minute—her soup spoons and rubbing cloth—get her winter shawl and wrap up against the afternoon damp and gray. Two other women were sitting on the far side of the room with pillows on their laps and half a dozen wooden bobbins hanging down them, weaving at their lace as if their lives depended on it, not even looking up when Mary came back.

  Outside were a group of poor fellows. Mary walked me up to them, and they explained they would take a message anywhere locally; one said he’d even take letters to outlying townlets—Haarlem, Utrech, The Hague—because he had relatives who lived there and he could stay over if he had to, and while mail was dear, people were realizing more and more and more that it was worth it. Mary had three letters herself she wanted to start on their way. Though she would take no offence if mine were too important to send at the same time as a simple country woman’s, getting gossip to her aunts and cousins—

  “Oh, don’t be silly, old woman,” I said in Dutch.

  I assume she shared my thirty years—though probably the powder I wore made me look older, like a city corpse ready for interment. The talc is supposed to keep you cool and ward off skin cancers if you spend any time outdoors in the country sun.

  Our boys were sullen and with large hats down over their ears and whiskers; two were tied on with scarves. No, getting out to The Hague was a full day’s ride. Yes, he (the one with relatives there) would have it there by evening. Then a city church announced noon. We agreed on a price that both Mary and I thought acceptable, though she looked dour. But I suspect that was her response to prices in general. Possibly she thought the whole idea of sending a letter by a paid messenger rather than waiting for a relative or a servant on their way in a wagon an unneeded extravagance.

  And I hoped my official seven—two others in The Hague, one in Utrecht, the rest in Amsterdam itself—would not take such a tedious amount of time once I got this one out of the way.

  I needed to get an early morning carriage for the next day and a driver. Which I managed to secure—again with Mary, since a diligence was at the corner. (I was not about to use Gunter’s.) So when the mantel clock said three in the light of the lantern beside it, I was up, washed by a second lantern I’d lit from the other, and into new hose, doublet, and undercoat, from small-clothes to great coat.

  I wore only a small wig.

  Before the fine sand ran out in the candlelight, I grabbed up the baggy wallet with the books I’d wanted to take, looked in it (wrong wallet of course, so I went back and got the right one), snuffed the light and went down—and outside found my driver asleep under horse blankets up on the carriage bench. I was clothed for this time of year and of night, as Gunter had insisted when I’d mentioned to him I’d be getting an early start but not saying exactly to where.

  And I was on my way south
to The Hague.

  5.

  Sunrise was just breaking when I got down at his door (this morning). I told the carriage driver to go away and come back toward the afternoon—then stepped back a moment—

  Had my letter preceded me, or had it arrived so late last night it could do no work at all?

  I went to the door, then returned to the driver to ask him to drive around till sunrise was real—

  But I looked up to see a lamp in a second-floor window behind shutters; the shutters opened, and a bundled figure called, “Excuse me? Did you want anything, stopping here like this?”

  “No, no, of course not. But yesterday I sent a letter—” Next I knew, over my protests that it was much too early to want anything at all, the woman was pulling back the front door.

  “Hello, again. Now come in, please. Please …”

  To repeat myself, the house was not grand. From the edge of the street, looking up into the end of night, I could make out three stories.

  Again I was about to call back to my driver to take himself off for a few hours, only to see him, on the carriage bench, tugging up those blankets as heavy as canvas over his own greatcoat and big Dutch hat, to lean down on his side and, I’m sure, go momently to sleep.

  Practically at the same moment, the woman from upstairs opened the white door with its knocker I probably wouldn’t have thought of using if I hadn’t seen her light, and we said through the now-vertical crack, “Good morning.” She went on, “I’m the landlord and owner here. Did you want to see someone … ?” As I’ve already said: How Dutch. And with a few more commonplace phrases, she and I mimicked conversation accurately enough, so that possibly we even communicated some meaning.

  In her baggy white nightcap (not a servant’s) and her woolly shoulders in their blue shawl, she ushered me into the hall. (How do you call that room and the one downstairs at Gunter’s both by the same word … ? But if you didn’t how could you communicate about anything?) “No, we got your card last evening. The first thing he said was, ‘He’s coming at seven or eight? I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’ll be early—as five or six say, when I’m up and at my most alert. Well, it’s only another visitor …” (The Dutchman? The Jew? The philosopher … ?) She brought me into a downstairs room with several severe, hard-backed chairs. “Let me go up and see what he says.”