by Bruce Duffy
It was midnight, and everyone was below asleep. With him on deck the only living thing was a pale brown cow with little knobbed horns who lay kneeling on her forelegs in a bed of straw. She was a sweet, docile bossy with a broad face, long ears and a heavy, four-fingered udder. Earlier, pressing his head against her soft, gurgling flank, Wittgenstein had milked her, thinking about God as the hot milk squirted in the tin bucket, ploot ploot ploot. Then as now he had felt the aspect of God. It was the imposition of that single struck key, that sense of being in agreement with the world and at last consigned to it. Red sky. Red cow. Red Wittgenstein.
He had been in such a strange mood in these weeks since his father had died: excited, then more subdued, with an unaccountable sense of well-being and happiness. His sister Gretl had not been so sanguine about him — she felt he was much too calm. In fact, she wondered if his father’s death had even hit him, or if subconsciously he even believed it. Not believe it? he had asked. In contrast to his feelings at Christmas, Wittgenstein was not angry at his sister for saying this; if anything, he was faintly intrigued. How could he not believe his father was gone? he asked. For weeks, he had watched him waste into a long, dangling ash, eaten up with cancer. As it happened, he was the only one present when the old man finally died.
All that night the dying man had held on, until his family was wrung out with blear weariness. At last there was only Wittgenstein, sitting on a chair beside his father’s bed. It was he who went downstairs to tell them it was over, and it was he who then led his mother to the sickroom to see, as it were, what had formed or transformed in that bed, the residue of a life. Approaching the open door, he could see how his mother dreaded what she would find. Why? he wanted to ask. She had already seen the worst. In the space of three months, she had watched her robust husband age thirty years. Why this dread? What was to fear? A few minutes later, when his siblings returned and they all stood mutely by the bed, he found himself wondering what had come over him during those last few minutes. Physically he was standing in the same room as his family, but otherwise he was not part of their world at all. He was forgiven and free, as was his father. Loss there was, but to his surprise there was no longer heat, nor spite, nor anger. What was sorrow? Where did sorrow go after the last spent fumes of a soul? Looking down at his father’s wrecked, still warm body, he saw only that a dying man’s suffering was over. Was he to be sorry for this? The morning sun was on the sill. Shrunk beneath the covers was an animal starved and cannibalized and finally expelled from his own corrupting body. Sorrow? Was that the word for this?
No, he thought, the dead don’t need the alms of our sorrow. If he was sorry for anyone now, it was for his mother. Frau Wittgenstein gazed helplessly at her children, and then, seeming to think she must say or do something, she suddenly squealed, I can’t— and covered her mouth with her balled-up handkerchief, ashamed at her outburst. This upset Mining, who clutched her mother and started weeping. The others — Gretl, Paul and Kurt — were distinctly uncomfortable with this scene, which only made them more uneasy about their own contradictory feelings, caught somewhere between good-bye and good riddance.
As through a glass, Wittgenstein could see their grief in all its guises and shades, its manifold traps. Miserable, guilty, ambivalent, Gretl looked at him as if to say, And what are you so pleased about? How was he to explain happiness coincidental with death and not sound callous, unbalanced or vengeful? How to account for this desire to venture out into the free air to watch the light pour like sand through his fingers? An hour before, a debt had been forgiven. The golem had been newly chartered into a whole man. But he couldn’t rightfully say this — it would seem crazy, fishy. And not seem, either. From Gretl’s expression, he could see his behavior did seem crazy, but inwardly he was still beaming and did not care.
The preceding two months had not been easy.
From the day Wittgenstein had arrived home, there had been a subtle competition over the sick man, a competition moreover that was largely the sick man’s doing. Mining had been the one to care for him, but as his condition grew more severe and compromising, Karl Wittgenstein personally hired two nurses, heavy Slavic women with smooth, dark skin and tightly rolled black hair. Ostensibly, he did this so as not to overburden his wife and children, yet it also gave him a heightened sense of control over not only this uncontrollable disease but his family as well. He would not be hostage to his family’s good graces. He would remain a sovereign state, with the nurses acting as a buffer between them.
This almost immediately created bad feelings, especially as the nurses appropriated the sick man as their patient, dictating, under the broader fiats of his doctors, meals, sleep schedules, visits. It was uncanny how the nurses would joke, wheedle and even boss him about once the door was closed. Karl Wittgenstein seemed to thrive on it. In the midst of his sickness and his growing helplessness, the two fleshy nurses pampered him in a way he never would have tolerated from Mining or even his wife, who one morning tearfully referred to them as those prostitutes. In dictating and enforcing visiting hours, the two nurses also fell into friction with the servants, especially with Herr Stolz, Karl Wittgenstein’s personal butler of thirty-four years. The nurses even angered that most unlikely nurse of all, Gretl. Every afternoon, Gretl would bring fresh flowers from her greenhouse. Arriving around four, she would emerge from her car with all the grim vivacity of one on her way to a pressing business appointment. Freud might have lessened Gretl’s anger and anxiety, but he needed to do nothing about her psyche, which floated over life like a full-drafted ship, always managing to displace more pain than it carried. Nevertheless, this impending death was a constant drain on her, and she was absolutely furious when the older nurse told her one day that she would have to leave. Can you imagine? she told Wittgenstein. Asking his own daughter to leave! And in that tone! I looked at Father, but of course he just lay there, letting that idiotic what’s-her-name speak for him. And I thought, You’re even managing your own death, aren’t you? Even now you must wrest control, mustn’t you?
But it was easier for Karl Wittgenstein to let strangers do these things, and like many invalids, he took a secret, crafty pleasure in being willful and unpredictable, closing off his family even as they were preparing to lose him. The old man did not easily surrender to fatality. Painful as it was for him to move, he still insisted, in those first weeks Wittgenstein was home, on sitting at the head of the supper table. Careful… careful, he would hiss as two young footmen carried him down the stairs, placing him in his carved chair, then wedging him in with an elaborate assemblage of pillows. Propped up there, valiantly eating his own bland and pitiful portion, he looked like a pasha, albeit a rapidly thinning one, bundled in his smoking jacket and muffler. With his gray hair oiled and combed and his muttonchops carefully trimmed and scented, the old man looked more fastidious than ever, thanks to these two hirelings, as Mining called his nurses. And still, greedily, the sick man licked the delicious dew off those last leaves that life held out to him. After dinner, following a sponge bath and massage, the nurses would help him onto the oval settee where, as was his custom, he would play his cello, hugging it to him like a woman as he coaxed forth those last nocturnal groans.
More than ever now, Karl Wittgenstein’s home was a factory in which his children took their shifts. Kurt would sometimes play several rubbers of bridge with the old man, who took great pleasure in beating him. Paul’s job was to play the piano downstairs, letting the music rise like a draught up the grand stairway into his father’s open chambers. At first his father might clap weakly. Later, he would send a footman down to convey his compliments — or, just as likely, to present a piece of criticism scrawled on a sheet. As time progressed, though, Paul was asked to play shorter and shorter pieces. Playing along, Paul would see a handkerchief waft past his eyes. And looking upstairs he would see the nurse who had dropped it as a sign to stop: the old man was asleep.
As his favorite, Mining took up much of her father’s availab
le day. Wittgenstein’s job was to relieve her. In the corner of his father’s room was a gramophone with a trumpeting brass bell, with stacks of records heavy as plates on the table beside it. In the afternoon, after opening the curtains to let the sun beam across the Oriental carpets, Wittgenstein would often crank up the gramophone and play several records for his father. Caruso singing Puccini, Beethoven performed by the Berlin Philharmonic — his father listened and never said a word, careful not to betray the emotion that surely surged within him when he heard great music. Peeping out with those bulgy, watery eyes, the old man rather showed tremendous, cultivated attention, stoical and aloof. Still, Wittgenstein noticed how, when he thought his son wasn’t watching, the sick man would tightly shut his eyes, almost shuddering at moments of exceptional beauty. Yet if Wittgenstein ventured to praise a passage later, his father would cut him short, saying, Yes, it was excellent. Very nice. Very nice, indeed.
But Wittgenstein and his brothers felt another unspoken reproach. This came every few days when the old man’s solicitors reported to him on the plans he had set in motion to sell all his interests in the Wittgenstein Gruppe. For Kurt, who was titularly in charge of one factory, this was in effect a vote of no confidence — why, his future wasn’t even a matter of serious question. Certainly Kurt didn’t question it, his own confidence having eroded to the point where he grudgingly agreed with his father’s estimation of him.
Had Wittgenstein and Paul shown any desire to assume control of their father’s enterprises, it might have been a different story. That developments had passed that point — not to mention the fact that neither wanted a business career — did not make them feel any easier about what Karl Wittgenstein no doubt saw as a repudiation of his life and values. Talking together in the study one afternoon, Wittgenstein and Paul recalled one summer nine years before when their father had attempted to introduce them to the business life. This was the summer following their brother Hans’s suicide, when the recalcitrant Rudi was showing many of the same disturbing signs. Kurt, if unpromising, was at least stable: he was working under the stern eye of Herr Graben, one of his father’s top assistants. With Kurt in tow and Rudi a losing cause, a worried Karl Wittgenstein instead focused his attention on his two youngest sons, Ludwig and Paul.
Wittgenstein and Paul were then fifteen and sixteen, respectively — old enough, their father said, to learn about the affairs of the world, meaning, of course, the business world. With this in mind, Herr Wittgenstein took them on a tour of his factories in lower Bohemia.
From the start, Wittgenstein felt it was hateful, two princes who had never done a day’s work being trotted through plants to watch other men toil. And fearsome toil it was, too, ladling liquid fire and beating red-hot ingots under a burning pall of poisonous yellow smoke.
Karl Wittgenstein would question and reward only his very best workers, and he was carefully advised beforehand as to who deserved this signal honor. Imagine how a latheman feels to explain his lathing to me, the Direktor himself, Karl Wittgenstein told his sons. And for him to see that I thoroughly understand his problems and cares, as if I wore the same greasy black apron. Or for the soot-faced forge operator to shake the factory owner’s hand — why, for him this is as if God visited hell.
Wittgenstein best remembered the first plant on their tour, a machine shop in the vast Teplitz works, which made special steel castings for the Imperial-Royal military. At his father’s entrance, with the nervous plant manager hurrying before him, the grinding, banging and shrieking of the iron-girdered shop abruptly ceased. Wittgenstein could still remember the feel of the floor, slick with a heavy black coating of grease, carbonized steel and curled lathe filings. Shrouds of yellowy sunlight filtered through the grimy skylights, trickling over the chain hoists and massive geared winches onto the hairy shoulders of the men, all heavily muscled as draft horses as they stood hobbled by their lathes, anvils, punches and presses. Herr Wittgenstein was dignified and charming — the two boys saw the awed, admiring looks of the workers as he walked down the line, more than a man, someone actually clean, bespeaking rectitude and prosperity in a suit that his butler, who accompanied him on all his travels, had zealously pressed and brushed that morning. Of the hundred and fifty men in that shop, Karl Wittgenstein personally complimented just four, the shop’s top producers. The chosen men were moved beyond words — moved almost to tears, several of them — as the Direktor stopped in the stream of his busy life and told the whole shop, in his gruff and barreling voice, how much, and precisely why, he valued this man, whom he called by name as he seized his grimy hand. This done, the Direktor gave a hortatory speech, emphasizing the importance of their work to the empire. And when the speech ended, they were at first unsure, afraid to applaud. But then with a stutter it started, clapping, then cheers and then the whistle that brought on the grinding, banging and shrieking that continued for two ten-hour shifts, six days a week.
They went through one more plant that morning, and another that afternoon. But at one factory Karl Wittgenstein told his sons to wait outside the foreman’s office, saying ruefully, I have to speak to several individuals. From the long bench where they sat, his sons could hear his voice, hunking, guttural. The tempo was all too familiar, and as they sat ashen on that bench, three men and then a fourth hurried through the door with ruined faces. Stripped of their aprons under the gaze of a guard, they were summarily given their pay and their belongings. It was not by accident that the sons witnessed this. Wittgenstein could well remember his father’s charged expression, his active eyes, when he returned to bundle the two novitiates inside. And before it seemed they were even through that door, they could see their father’s aspect change like the sun. Looking back genially, he said, They all have their story. Always the same story, with variations of course. The sick wife and the children, the sore back, the bottle that calls to them. Believe me, I have heard them all. Look, he said under his breath, with a glance at the workers who were working harder than ever now, with the killing done. Look at these fine men. Do you suppose for a second they are angry at me for this? Angry? For sacking the slacker, the drunk who might get them maimed or killed? I did these men a service. Sad and unpleasant business to be sure, but one cannot delegate everything. Sometimes to clear the air, I must see to this personally. Men respect this in a leader. It is not enough to hand out awards. They must see your face. They must see it in both guises.
Karl Wittgenstein’s fate was certain. Less certain was his youngest son’s.
In those last weeks, Wittgenstein increasingly felt the force of his father’s critical gaze. As he sat reading to him, he would feel that questioning look like a burning handprint on the side of his face. They both knew the question: What will you do with your life?
Karl Wittgenstein made various feints at asking this question. After dozing off during their concert one afternoon, the old man awoke to find his son at his bedside, making those peculiar logical notations in his notebook. Blinking with irritation, the father asked:
Tell me, what does all that business mean?
What? asked Wittgenstein, offering him the scrawled page. These symbols?
His father nodded. Any of it.
Do you really want to know?
Yes. Please explain it to me.
So against his better judgment Wittgenstein explained. His discussion of logical symbology was basic and down to earth, but his father grew increasingly agitated. Yet whenever Wittgenstein tried to end the lesson, the old man insisted that he continue, apparently in the hope that his son would hear his own foolishness. But finally, looking up, Wittgenstein saw that his father was near tears — impotent invalid’s tears.
I’m sorry, gasped his father with a heave of his chest. I did not mean to say this — honestly, I didn’t — but I do not see what relevance this has to anything, or — With a sudden wince of pain then, he hissed, Leave me now — go! He pressed his hand over his face, his voice frantic, and there came a sharp smell. Please! I can’t continue
this now! Don’t you hear me? I said, Call the nurse! Call her, will you —
The sick man did not have to call the nurse again. A moment later he was covered with comforting flesh, and Wittgenstein was hurrying down the long hallway, mortified at the coddling way the nurse spoke to his proud father, whom he could hear crying.
Gretl fared no better. For her there was also this criticism, as powerful as it was unspoken. Even now, and ever so subtly, they were still quarreling. Yet Gretl knew that by keeping her composure she would win — by outliving him she would win, for all the good that winning would do. Her father could see she was winning. She always dressed especially smartly when she came to visit him, the better to remind the sick man of their now vastly differing status. A black dress with bottle-green panels. A veiled hat with a brace of pheasant quills fastened by a diamond signet. With each subsequent visit, Gretl seemed to outdo herself, the better to show herself as one of the secular world of the living, while he, succumbing to his own dark medicine, was fast slipping into that black tarn of his own belatedness, soon to be a face sunk beneath the earth, unheeded and forgotten.
