The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  I was a god for really quite a while. Only at the end did she say that cruel thing about my breasts. I had been foolish enough to think aloud, wondering could it be that wet nurse who sickened first our girl and then our little boy.

  “So you blame me,” she hissed. “How dare you.”

  “No,” I cried, “a thousand times no.”

  I was the one with the breasts, she told me. I should have been the mother, which I clearly wished to be. My breasts were disgusting and hairy like a dog. How could I continue to be alive? she wished to know.

  Only in the heat of battle did I blame her for her famous breasts, those false promises which would never touch her Percy’s hungry mouth.

  In Furtwangen I slept while imagining myself awake. I woke inside a realm of gold, first light, floor, an effect of light. In truth, the dawn in Furtwangen was so much less a wonder than my True Friend’s own white room in Low Hall where the plain and decent Irish nurse would presently arrive with a cup of beef tea. Then they would sit together and wait for dear George Binns to bring the mail in through the garden gate.

  Oh dear, I was hungry as a tank of acid, but Percy must know exactly where I was. I found my pencil and wrote my letter in the form of directions to my present home. If he followed these instructions he would find Furtwangen on a map and then he would know exactly where the duck was being made, for him alone. No other child in England would own such a thing, no child in all the world. I promised I would describe the manufacture in its fullest detail so he would imagine he was at my side, or perched up in the rafters like a clever bird, looking down on the miracles performed.

  Then, I addressed the envelope to dear old Binns. With no innkeeper to entrust my letter to, I must now discover how the Germans sent their mail.

  My first day in Furtwangen began.

  No chamber pot, so it was Adam’s Duty, after which I washed in the stream and was observed by a surly sawmill worker. I might have tipped a peasant to post my letter but no, not him.

  There was nothing for breakfast but some small bitter strawberries which made the hunger worse. No life was evident except the Huguenot writing by a window.

  I asked him when was breakfast served.

  “Sir,” said he, “one becomes accustomed to it.”

  He continued with his scribbling.

  “You wonder what I am doing?” he said.

  I had not.

  “I am a fairytale collector,” he said.

  How extraordinary, I thought, I have met a fairytale collector. Whatever will happen next?

  I set off to find the village of Furtwangen where I was intent on posting my letter. Awful morning. No need to describe my humiliations. Foreigners not liked, obviously. A boy threw a stone at me. Not even the priest would understand what I needed with my urgent envelope and by the time I had been forced to stand aside to permit the locals right of way, had tramped along a rutted road and then a highway, I was completely lost. It took me all afternoon to find the sawmill by which time I was suffering the most painful bilious hunger. My stomach was tight as a drum, filled with sloshing river water.

  It was late afternoon, nothing but a boiling kettle on the stove. I would not steal food. I would endure, but what of Percy? How long can a small boy wait?

  Carl came to fetch me in due course. He held my sleeve, which small show of kindness I was grateful for. The dinner was the same as the previous night. What I would have given for all the old boarding-school favourites I once reviled—toad-in-the-hole, stewed beetroot, fried bread, frog’s spawn. I was so hungry now I could have swallowed maggots and asked for more. My hosts looked down at their plates, and I knew they were embarrassed by my manners, but I was in a rage. I turned my eyes upon them one by one and dared them return my gaze.

  Finally they retired and when Sumper left the field, I scraped his plate, the last skerrick of cheese sauce as well.

  Then I stepped out into the dark, my guts in agony.

  I lay on the damp path and listened to my hosts—grotesque moustached hens setting each other off, exploding bass and treble, sighing. Sometimes I woke and heard them laughing, and then I understood I had been snoring.

  The stars were out. I was damp with dew, too shy to walk through the kitchen to my bed.

  They spoke excellent English except when singing and composing lists which was a passion it would seem. What lists these were I could not know. Men’s names, or perhaps villages or landmarks which would assist in finding where an individual lived, or so I guessed. The so-called fairytale collector’s thin voice remained dominant. Why this was, I could not imagine, unless he was like those tramps who knew the names of farmers, which one is a “soft touch,” etc. On and on they went. When not lists, then folk songs. When no songs, then crickets.

  “For God’s sake, you will die.”

  Sumper helped me to my feet, and led me to the kitchen. Here he sat me at table and watched me as if he was my mother. Frau Helga served me a sort of porridge. Sumper remained watching while I ate it.

  “What are you up to, Herr Brandling?”

  “It is urgent that I send a letter to my son.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, having no notion of the life at stake.

  In the mornings, from my bedroom window, I observed how strange bright-eyed Carl went trotting off, hopping along the goat path, waving to the harvesters, returning in an hour or two with a package or a basket or no more than a bulge in his pocket, which mystery would be delivered up the stairs, across the chute, knock knock, and greeted with exclamation either of triumph or reproof.

  He had the most extraordinary hands, Carl, so long and thin you might think he needed another set of knuckles. Sumper treasured this boy. He called him Genius and Spirit and other extravagant expressions that led me to believe that it was with those unworldly hands that Percy’s machine was being constructed.

  Without looking up from her darning needle Helga said: “Show him our new post box, M. Arnaud.”

  “Directly,” Arnaud replied, but then he wandered off. I was still in that same room at supper when he finally returned.

  After the remains of the meal had been cleared away, I announced that I would leave to find the post box by myself.

  The fairytale collector leapt to his feet.

  “Do you have your letters ready, Herr Brandling?”

  I saw that the wretch was now dressed “for town,” with waistcoat and breeches of dark green velveteen, stout boots, and a broad leather belt which he now took in a notch around his narrow waist.

  “I do not have stamps,” I said.

  “We have stamps in beautiful colours,” said the fairytale collector. “It is for England that they are required. Two letters I think?”

  You have known this all day, I thought. Soon it will be dark.

  “We will need a lantern.”

  “No need.”

  “There will be a moon?”

  “I have the eyes of a cat,” the queer man said. And we descended into the spray and chaos of the gorge.

  When, minutes later, we emerged, the world was alight with golden straw. One could hear the birds again, the light clink of the chain that tethered three dwarf goats beside the stream.

  “My mother was a cat,” said the fairytale collector, as if he had made the most common observation.

  I made no riposte but in truth I have a horror of fairy stories not because I believe them but because I cannot stop myself imagining the evil stepmother, say, being forced to dance inside her red-hot iron shoes. What cruelties we humans practise every day.

  The village turned out to be very near. I deposited Percy’s letters in an iron box with golden tassels like a General. Then we turned the corner of a lane and I beheld the quaint houses pressed together, the pointed roofs with their projecting eaves, the wooden staircases, and, drenched in the last rays of the setting sun, a glorious yellow inn, now glowing golden.

  “The inn is not too far, Herr Brandling,” he said shyly, and I finally understood why he h
ad made me wait all day.

  THE COLLECTOR OF ANCIENT cruelties was a mere smidgen, a tiny creature, with a mass of curling salt-and-pepper hair. At the sawmill he had not seemed any more eccentric than anybody else, but at this village inn he cut a most unusual figure, soft-skinned, half man, half child, with his head in perfect proportion to the whole.

  At the sawmill he had been completely at his ease. At the inn he was as nervous as a bird, its heart always pattering as if everything, even a single grain of wheat, might pose a mortal risk. Perhaps he saw the possibility of violence in the schnapps bottles, or perhaps it was his Protestant bones in a Catholic atmosphere, or the excessive smoke, or the fearsome physiognomies—Jews and Germans playing cards, arguing, in too many languages to count.

  The mistress of the inn, a stout bustling little missus like you see in the old engravings, greeted M. Arnaud very fondly, found him a table, and brought us cheese and small beer before we had a chance to ask. I said how very nice she was.

  Arnaud leaned close toward my ear.

  What did I know of Herr Sumper? Why had I brought my plans to him? Why had I not commissioned a Karlsruhe clockmaker where the sort of work I wished could have been more surely done?

  I thought, whoa Dobbin. I did not need my confidence undone.

  I asked him how he came into Sumper’s circle.

  He spilled some volatile oils onto a handkerchief and dabbed at his cartilaginous nose. In the candlelight his nostrils seemed alight with blood.

  Why, he demanded, had I not asked Sumper for letters of reference?

  I was perhaps naïve but I saw where the road was heading: he was saying that I had made myself the quarry of a gang of criminals. He would rescue me, for a price.

  As he spoke, he leaned forward, but looked down in the manner of a hen who spied a likely worm.

  Had I not been troubled to learn how Herr Sumper had fled the village years before?

  He did not look at me. He sipped his beer fastidiously. He said he had not taken me to be the reckless type.

  I assured him I was not.

  Just the same, he said, as if excusing me: Herr Sumper was a big man. People were frightened to say a word against him. It was very, very hard to find the truth.

  He darted a glance across his shoulder as if he was in danger of being victimized whereas, in fact, his sole purpose was—surely—to have me as his prey.

  Was HE not frightened?

  Oh no. Fairytale collectors were accustomed to the most dangerous situations. It was these violent types, here, in the inn, who were frightened of Sumper. On the clockmaker’s return from England he had been “opinionated.” He had claimed to be “better qualified” which astonished those who had not previously imagined that a man would be “qualified” to be a clockmaker, no more than ride a donkey or void their bowels.

  A less brutal man would not have survived, but Herr Sumper was Herr Sumper. He never went to a dance without first stuffing into his long pockets a dozen of the heavy iron axes—Speidel they are called—used for splitting wood, and so even the notorious quarry men kept out of his way. Sumper’s greatest happiness was to dance for twenty-four hours without stopping, or rather to stop only so long as there were pauses between the dances. During these opportunities he drank unceasingly, quart after quart of wine.

  In order to know what he had to pay, he tore off a button each time, first off his red waistcoat, and then off his coat, and redeemed them at the end of the evening from the landlord.

  As this was the man I had commissioned to save my Percy, I did not wish to hear that the site of the old sawmill was the most “backward” part of the district. The fairytale collector perhaps sensed this for now he said there could be no more perfect place to perform advanced work in secret. It was already believed that Sumper had used his isolation to hide his secret trade in blasphemous cuckoo clocks.

  This did not comfort me at all. I asked him what such a thing would look like.

  M. Arnaud could not guess. But it would be, he said, totally consistent with the clockmaker’s irreligious nature. As for his technical abilities—whenever Sumper’s conversations touched on matters with which Arnaud was well acquainted—metallurgy for instance—he had found Sumper to be in no sense primitive. Indeed the opposite.

  Was he as “advanced” as he boasted?

  Arnaud did not answer me.

  Instead he told me that Sumper’s old father had been as ignorant as any saw miller and was as violent as his son. His chief pleasure consisted in rolling up into balls the tin plates used at dinner at different inns.

  On the most notorious occasion, he ordered the younger Sumper not to go dancing at a wedding but to attend to the business of the sawmill instead. I would have noticed, at the mill, the logs had not been floated, but that was only because Sumper had now let the mill to Proudhonists and they could not agree on anything. Those logs should have been sent floating down the river weeks before my arrival. They would then have constituted rafts one hundred yards long—nine logs wide at the stern, three logs wide at the bow. It was in order to supervise the construction of such a raft that the father had sent Heinrich Sumper home from the wedding.

  This was when the son decided to “step aboard” as the saying was. As far as anyone could gather young Sumper never said goodbye to his father or mother, and rather than guiding the raft to any customary destination, he (according to the police report) rode it down into the Rhine (which was, I soon realized, geographically impossible). He stepped ashore somewhere, with what money no one knew, and somehow made his way to England, which is where he claimed to have received his exalted education.

  It was still not forgotten that logs had been stolen and his parents were left the poorer. Perhaps he repaid them with his English gold, but who can say? Later a letter from London was seen at the post office. Naturally this could not be opened by anyone but his parents, and when they both died ten years later the lawyer could not find a letter, only a will which had never been amended.

  Thus the unfilial son inherited the sawmill.

  During our conversation Arnaud continually ordered whatever dish he liked. He cut white cheese into exceedingly thin slices and I watched him nip them with his small rat-catcher’s teeth.

  Arnaud said that no one was in a better position than himself to help me. He intimated that he was far more powerful than he might appear.

  So, I thought, as he ordered one more small beer, he is a spy for some Baron perhaps. He began to whisper about Frau Helga. Well, let him gossip if he wished, although I told him frankly that the woman was of no importance in my life. But yes, it was Frau Helga’s foolish husband, M. Arnaud revealed, who had taken little Carl to witness the “victory” of the workers in their so-called revolution. Thus he was shot dead before her very eyes and the bullet, before penetrating the husband’s heart, severely injured the baby’s leg.

  Being a member of that cruel race of fairytale collectors, he was very pleased by this disaster. He pursed his lips. He sliced his cheese. I was so angry that I could not pay attention to the story until the mother and orphan came to Furtwangen where she had an uncle who had once been kind to her. Unfortunately, the fairytale collector said, on the day before her arrival, the uncle dropped dead in the middle of the town square.

  Unfortunately? I thought. But is this not exactly the type of nastiness valued by your guild? The child is orphaned. The child dies. The child is lost in the forest. The child walks with a limp forever.

  Small men are the cruellest. He told me how Helga had been given shelter by the priest, and I thought, good heavens, thank the Lord at least for that, but of course the priest then threw her out.

  I thought, you are a miserable little dung beetle, forever collecting the misery of the poor.

  Then or soon thereafter I thought, to hell with you. Do not presume that I will pay the bill. I walked out of the inn and of course I went out the wrong door and then had no idea where I was. Lost again, lost always. Great buffoon. The little fel
low found me and led me home, his mother was a cat. What will happen when we die? Who will ever tell the truth?

  Henry & Catherine

  I WAS A RICH MAN, Henry Brandling wrote and Catherine read, and therefore attracted the usual pests. And yet my past and present fears and agonies were nothing in comparison to those suffered by this poor German woman.

  Catherine understood that Henry was referring to Frau Helga.

  She and I, wrote Henry Brandling in 1854, both knew how a child could sing to your soul and twist your veins and fill you with continual dread and trepidation. I had seen her lay her hand upon Carl’s shoulder, cup her hand around his golden head. This was something M. Arnaud could not know.

  What conceit, thought Catherine Gehrig, in London, 156 years later, off her face with rage and cognac. How truly pathetic, his pompous discrimination: the love for a child is better than the love for an adult. How could it be?

  The poor dull blind posh fool had never guessed his reader would be a woman with no children. Please don’t tell me that I don’t know love, or that the love I know is of a minor kind. I am eviscerated by love.

  I threw the book across the room. It flew into the kitchen, its acid paper pages shattering like dead leaves.

  Let Matthew see what he has done to me.

  After the catastrophe with the book, the only undamaged paper was a receipt in which Sumper was titled Monsieur Sumper. It recorded the purchase of a large amount of silver.

  It was intolerable that these crooks should rob Henry in this way, but also it was offensive, if understandable, for Henry to go on with this nonsense about children. He did not quite say that parental love was superior to other loves, but it was clearly his assumption. Of course I wished him no unhappiness. I pitied him. But it is true, in general, that these child lovers make themselves deaf and blind to the likely conclusion of these relationships which so often end in heroin, suicides, boredom or estrangement. All those awful fights are waiting for them, when all the poor dears wanted was a perfect love.