The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  “It is very simple, Herr Sumper—if you cannot prove satisfactory progress.”

  Perhaps Sumper made a sign to Helga. If so I did not see it. In any case it was she who now announced: “You will be shown.”

  I followed them, not up the stairs, but out and into the dark cold air of the mill. Here, in a summer workshop previously unknown to me, I was shown a heavy workbench, freshly built above the shadowed stream. In front of the bench were three trestles. Atop the trestles was a barrel-vaulted structure, the hull of a small rowing boat, but too short and beetled to properly serve that purpose.

  Around this folly the four of us all gathered.

  “What on earth is this?”

  Sumper dared to shrug. “It is as I said, you will not understand.”

  “Did my plan ask for a boat?”

  “Did I give you one?”

  “Then what in God’s name is it?”

  “You have a pond,” said the ridiculous Sumper. “This is designed so the water of your pond will wash across the gunnels and then run along this groove so this whole floating structure will be invisible below the water. Here your duck will appear to swim, eating fish which will endeavour to escape their fate.”

  Dear God, my boy lay in his bed, his cheeks pale, his blood sucked by vampyres every hour.

  “Ducks do not eat fish.”

  Sumper sighed and bowed his head and placed his thumb and forefinger so as to support his naked brow. “Mergansers eat little else. But that is not the point.”

  “I do not have a pond,” I cried. I thought, I have a boy, a dear child I cannot lose.

  “You have something. A pond, a tank. You are an English gentleman. Am I correct?” And now he was smiling like a magician in a circus and I could not admit to the sulphurous cistern in the nursery.

  I said, “Vaucanson’s duck ate grain.”

  Perhaps he saw my deep distress for when he spoke his voice was kinder. “In every respect you have the truth,” he said. “Only in one way is there an error. Ask me, Herr Brandling, ask me what is the error? I will tell you—I am not Vaucanson,” he laughed, patting my back as if to give me comfort. “Ask me what is London?”

  “I am sure you will tell me.”

  “Yes, London is the jewel of heaven,” Herr Sumper said to me, his voice now soft as velvet. “Of this I had no idea. When I left Furtwangen I did not seek a noble fate. I fled my destiny, which was to become a patricide. Walk with me,” he said, passing me his handkerchief. “I am not Vaucanson. Thank Jesus we have agreed on that.”

  Dear Percy, forgive me.

  PARADOXICALLY, AS A RESULT of our two conflicts, a greater intimacy was established between us, and we developed the habit of walking together in the melancholy dusk. That he had little curiosity about my own life, I truly did not mind. Frankly I preferred that. Also his talk was hardly boring. For instance, it was on one such walk, on the edge of a ravine, that he revealed that he had planned to murder his father, by causing a tree to crash onto his bed. Alas (his word) a pulley jammed and the tree fell on the wrong room. This, he realized now, was the first truly original machine he had devised. It was in this peculiar way that he spoke to me, showing no remorse, but a detached admiration for his own genius.

  As it was a genius that I required I dared not judge him.

  When he failed to murder his parents—for of course they would both have died if the plan had succeeded—he jumped aboard the raft of logs and danced away. “I had no clue that I was floating towards another constellation.”

  In the gloom a German goat was doddering up a bare and rocky hill. “Has not my entire life been a wonder?” he said.

  He admitted a “typical peasant prejudice” against the English until he met an English woman in Avignon and followed her to London. And when she showed him what his valley had hidden from him, he could have sent a flood and washed all the Schwarzwald into the sea.

  I could hear the plaintive bleat of the goat. I could see no more than the palest chalk mark of the road.

  But Sumper, Sumper was in London, already in the future of the world. Miracles surrounded him, he told me so. Did I have any idea what a barometer was? Had I seen a hot-air balloon? No one in Furtwangen had ever seen a balloon, he said. If he had floated over them, they would not have seen him. They were like the savages in New South Wales who did not even see the English ships, because they did not know that such things existed.

  Had it ever occurred to me, he wished to know, that I too might suffer from this blindness? What if I walked along this road and it was suddenly illuminated by blazing sea horses? Would I be able to see what I judged impossible?

  In the distance Frau Helga rang her bell for dinner. This caused Sumper to say he would not make false digestive systems. He was not a cheat. He tried to persuade me to touch his own stomach where he said he had a scar caused by an incision through which he had received direct Instruction.

  I pretended to misunderstand him and he was forced to hurry after me towards the ringing bell.

  FORTUNATELY WE DID NOT return to the subject of the scar that night, but when the meal was over and Carl and Frau Helga had retired, he produced what I took to be a joint of meat wrapped in a cloth, perhaps a leg of goat, a bone to give a dog.

  I was writing. He sat without invitation and threw onto my page a little silver leaf. I admired it with some trepidation, hoping it was nothing to do with me.

  “Perhaps this is more pleasing,” he said, slowly unwrapping the large object he had kept resting on his lap. It was not a bone at all, but five gleaming steel sections, articulated at their junctions.

  “Neck,” he said. “For your boy.”

  But this was not the neck of any duck. I’m afraid I rather panicked.

  “Please, my patron”—he ensnared my hand—“you must be happy. You must celebrate your good fortune.”

  For myself I could have cried.

  “Think, Sir,” he purred, “how unlikely it is that you would wander into a second-rate hotel in Karlsruhe, and end up with this?”

  “But this is not a duck.”

  I could not shame him. He made a snakelike dance with his arm and hand, extraordinarily sinuous, and deft, moving down to pick up the salt shaker and then, with a fast flick, letting it slip down his sleeve. In the face of his own fraudulence and theft he stood triumphant.

  “The neck is too long,” I insisted. “You must agree.”

  First came the deep coarse laughter and then a curious bright-eyed solemnity.

  “As in the case of the male member, that is impossible.”

  Perhaps I groaned. In any case, I was the victim of my own considerable emotions.

  “I am a rough fellow, yes, please examine the fine work that your money has provided. Here is a tolerance of half one-thousandth of an inch. Consider that. See how the parts move within each other, how they turn.”

  “What is this thing, Sir?”

  “Herr Brandling, this will be the most extraordinary swan.”

  “Damn you man, are you not human? No one gives a swan to a child.”

  “You will be the first to do so.”

  “You cannot make a swan serve as a toy.”

  “But I would never make a toy.”

  “Swans break bones. They kill, man.”

  “Herr Brandling, what you say may be correct but swans also make love to young ladies. This swan will do no such thing. It is made to be a child’s enchanter. It will be beautiful and friendly. No one will be hurt. Nothing shall die. Even the fish it eats will rise up from the dead and swim again.”

  “A miracle,” I said.

  “You are sarcastic?”

  No, I was furious. But then, in the middle of my temper, I glimpsed the half-full glass. Sumper was both coarse and conceited, but might not this other creature do exactly what I had expected of the duck? Might not this incite magnetic agitations just as well? Why not?

  “The English are always sarcastic,” said Sumper, “but when you say ‘miracle’ I
say yes, yes it is. And as a miracle placed you in Frau Beck’s inn in Karlsruhe, so a miracle placed me in Bowling Green Lane in London. No, sit. Please remain. You are angry. You feel powerless, but you are the patron, and you have no idea of what you make possible. Your power is so much greater than you know.

  “Henry, I had seven words of English: ‘I am a very good Swiss clockmaker.’ This lie had done me no good, and by the time I got to Bowling Green Lane I had only two coins remaining. Do you know the name Thigpen?”

  The pater had a fob watch from Thigpen & Thwaite.

  “It is someone who is begging for coin. I was a cold and hungry Thigpen, and I stopped at the window of Thigpen & Co. only because it had my name on it, in gold leaf like a tobacconist’s. Behind the glass was displayed an instrument unknown to all in Furtwangen. A barometer, in fact.

  “Through the door I found a young Englishman with a leather apron. I told him my usual lie about being Swiss. What did he do? Ask me what he did.”

  There was no need.

  “Why, Herr Brandling, he fetched Herr Thigpen, as Schwarzwalder as you could get and the minute I opened my mouth he decided I was some useless cuckoo man. But,” Sumper said, holding my wrist as if I would escape him, “but, Herr Brandling, I had been so pleased to hear my native tongue, I begged him let me labour for one week without wages.”

  What Thigpen needed was a vise and lathe man in his instruments factory.

  Sumper immediately claimed he was that very thing.

  Thigpen seems to have been a shrewd old fellow, with keen blue eyes beneath tremendous eyebrows and his grey hair swept back and tied with a ribbon.

  “You were a Swiss?” he sneered at Sumper. “Now you are a vise and lathe man?”

  He demanded the young man show his hands. These hands had already been judged too big for the English clock trade.

  “You like your hands?” Thigpen asked. “You think you can keep your hands attached?” He frightened Sumper, naturally, for the only lathes he knew were tiny, used by clockmakers.

  “Come, Cuckoo,” said Thigpen, “follow me.”

  He led the way through bench-loads of clockmakers, at their prayers like seminarians, and then down beside the outhouse and into another factory which ran all the way to Northampton Road and here, in a long cold workshop with a ceiling made of glass, loomed some immense scientific instrument, like a giant’s abacus, like a locomotive engine, as astonishing as an elephant of brass and steel. Sumper claimed that this strange machine would completely change his life, but at the time he could not afford to see it. He was occupied with being a vise and lathe man.

  “Herr Brandling, you cannot imagine the hatred toward a stranger.” The English lathe men drew their hands across their throats, meaning either that they would kill Sumper or the machine would do it for them.

  Yet when Sumper was introduced to the bench lathe it did not seem so terrifying at first. Thigpen explained that the other tools in his workshop were of great delicacy, requiring accurate adjustment every occasion they were used. In many cases the time employed in adjusting the calibration was longer than the time of production.

  I told Sumper I was not a mechanic. I could not understand him.

  “The same for me, exactly, Herr Brandling. There was no time to even memorize the names of things.”

  Broadly speaking, Thigpen explained to Sumper, it was good economy to keep one machine constantly employed in one kind of work. No fiddle-farting, he said. One lathe, for example, should be kept constantly making cylinders. His men were proud to spend their hours in fiddle-fart, but those days would soon be over on Bowling Green Lane.

  “One lathe, one job,” he said.

  Sumper was a foreigner and he was doing what the English would not do. He was not scared of them. He said this many times.

  If he was to be killed it would be by tedium. Work at that pre-set lathe required the murder of all intelligence and skill.

  Yet even if he was of the lower orders, he soon noticed that there was a higher game being played. As he became more skilled he had time to look around, and then he understood that there were gentlemen, lords and dukes coming and going all day long, members of the Royal Society.

  “The Royal Society,” I said. “I suppose they came to give you Instruction.”

  The joke was not well taken and I leapt to make things right. “And what did you learn in Bowling Green Lane, Herr Sumper?”

  “What did I learn, my little one? Only that there were worlds beyond my knowledge and your imagination.” He lifted the swan’s steel bones and danced them before my eyes in such a menacing way that I regretted my silly joke. With his long, long arm, like a dancer, he mimicked the motion of the neck and, standing on his chair, all fifteen stone of him, essayed a vast and fearsome raising of the wings.

  Catherine

  AMANDA HAD CLEARLY TOLD her grandfather I had stolen Carl’s blue cube. The grandfather had then told Crofty. I could see them as vividly as I could see Brandling and Sumper in the inn—Amanda, her grandfather, Eric all gathered in some decaying Suffolk sitting room—glass-fronted bookcases and a portion of the ceiling fallen in—the spy reporting, the three of them making decisions that were not theirs to make.

  The Courtauld girl must be taught that she reported to me, not her grandfather or Eric Croft.

  So I spoke to her, not about the cube of course. I punished her. I forbade all work “beyond the limits of your job description.” I was a total bitch. I separated her from her beloved silver rings (which she had been cleaning very well) and set her to inputting all the measurements and functions of each numbered part. This was a stupid use of her time as she was clumsy with the micrometer and emitted despairing little cries with every error. This was upsetting for both of us, but I was determined to have her accept who was in charge. I suppose I made a hash of it. I confused her more than anything, especially when I said she could not use her so-called Frankenpod, not even at lunchtime which she spent nibbling on dried fruits and nuts and peering at some stormy image on its screen.

  “What is it?” I demanded as we ended our rather sweaty interview. “A music video?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I have no other reason to ask you, Amanda.”

  “It is the oil spill. It is a webcam of the oil spill.”

  Thus: Catherine Gehrig was the last person on the planet to learn that millions of barrels of oil were spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. This catastrophe had apparently occurred on the day before Matthew died.

  Amanda was teary. She packed her things, and took her Frankenpod away but I, being a sneak and a hypocrite, had already memorized the URL. When I was home that night, I watched the sickening image for hours on end.

  When I entered the studio next morning Amanda was waiting and I saw she now wanted to push our conflict out into the open. But I could no more reveal my personal relationship with the cube than I could confess my horror at the filth spewing into the waters of the gulf, an “accident” that seemed the end of history itself.

  I immediately made myself busy, looking through the Excel charts Amanda had prepared for me.

  “These charts are very good,” I said. It was true. They were perfection. But I still would not forgive her betrayal.

  This must have been the moment when I finally understood Amanda was Amanda, and therefore she would not go away. When I had finished with the charts, she compelled me to deal with her.

  “I have been so stupid,” she said. “I am very sorry for talking out of school. I apologize.”

  She was so young and her lovely skin so tight and clean. Who would doubt her contrition?

  “You love your grandfather,” I said.

  “But I do understand what I did wrong, Miss Gehrig. I should not have gossiped with my grandfather.”

  “Mr. Croft pays visits to your grandfather I suppose.”

  And there it was—some curious fear or sense of honour made her step away. “Oh I don’t know anything about Mr. Croft. Really.”<
br />
  “Amanda! Surely he helped get you this job.”

  “No!”

  She was now red, crimson really. “No. My grandfather would never do a thing like that. He despises influence-pedlars.”

  I didn’t believe her, but it was clear she believed herself, and the result was that our conversation calmed us down.

  We shared a sandwich at lunch. Afterwards I presented her with the multi-function cam. It would be hers to dismantle, clean, photograph and document. It was a very handsome gift.

  In the early afternoon the sun came out and our blinds were suddenly soaked with light.

  At five she asked if she could leave for a “stuffy drinks.” Who could imagine where she went, but her eyes were clearer and brighter and I rubbed her angora shoulder.

  “Did you watch that webcam thing last night?” I asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Does everybody watch it? Your friends.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Please can I go, Miss Gehrig?”

  When they invented the internal combustion engine, they never envisaged such a horrid injury. It did not occur to anyone that we would not only change the temperature of the air but turn the oceans black as death.

  Henry’s saw-tooth pen strokes had cut wormholes into time. I had been there. I had witnessed Herr Sumper unwrap the articulated neck. I had glimpsed Carl’s exploding toy roaring past the inn, his voltaic mouse, his blue cube, Thigpen’s immense scientific instrument the size of an elephant. Through one of these wormholes, as thin as a drinking straw, I had seen all that bright and poisonous invention.

  At home, I put water on the stove and lit the gas. I would cook. Dry pasta, sardines, capers, stale bread, olive oil. I would eat, macerate, excrete.

  And then the door bell rang—Eric, come to have his cube returned. I fetched a plate and fork for him. “No, no,” he said.

  “I made too much. I can’t stop doing it.”

  “I have a dinner engagement,” he said.

  Still, I made a place for him. The blue block was wrapped in a handkerchief. I set it beside his plate.