False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  That would be all then, said Mr. Fourchette. His office would frame the petition and send it along to us for signing. “In due course”—we never knew whether this was the legal interval or the sauntering routine of that office—we would receive notice to present the petition, with ourselves, before the judge. Once granted, notice of same should be published in the local newspaper, Denoyeville’s, since Tuscana had none. That was all.

  He passed a clean handkerchief over his forehead—he wore a coat, although the dog days were already beginning—stretched an arm, forcing the stiff shirt cuff almost to his knuckles, and dismissed us as a lawyer should, leaving us with the conviction that the law was still arcane, and our problem almost too humble for it. Only later did we realize that since he was also the judge, he was in effect petitioning himself.

  I had decided to let them give me the full name, George Higby. Any admixture with my own seemed to me specious, confusing, shiftier somehow than the full change. Somehow I knew furtively that I would never assume it; it was like one of those rubber stamps whose print would not cling to the skin. Providence would take care of how this would come about; as I have said, I knew uneasily early that providence was the other side of ourselves. At worst, I could drop the name in the North, averring some hitch with the scholarship, or even flinging it rebelliously back to them, over the distance between us.

  Distance has a special import for me, of whose significance I am not quite sure. It is not the idea of travel that haunts me, the romantic dispensation with the daily, although I know as well as any man with closer ties how the departure, the tour, the “time out,” relaxes the moral bonds with others and heightens the tie with oneself. In travel we all browse upon ourselves. Nor am I much struck with the rapidity with which distance can be melted. In an age of air travel, I am still an eighteenth-century man, in a bent universe still a Euclidean. I can never believe that increased speed between two points, even the speed of light, can ever annihilate the gap between them.

  The place of departure … the place of arrival, and their simultaneity on a point of time, that is what hypnotizes me—the simultaneity that no speed can outwit. I feel this on a bus shuttling between two villages, in the same city between two hills—the gap between “here” and “there” that no shuttle can close. And when I look down on a map of the world, it is not the nervously dotted lines of communication that compel me, nor the hemi-demi-semiquaverings of the transoceanic wires—but the incurable coexistence of places. I am not alone in this. My whole century suffers from it, now that it can truly survey its heterogeneous world. But a man with two names itches more than most to be in two places at once. Or in one that is all.

  But in Tuscana, of course, I still thought that there was a permanent alchemy in leaving. The petition came and I watched my mother sign it, pursing her lip over the shoddy typing, the erasures, knitting her brows over the circuitous phrases, in whose designation I appeared as the “infant.” The long envelope was given me to leave at the Fourchettes’ office, a small wooden annex attached nepotically to one wall of the courthouse itself. It was in front of the courthouse that, each morning, I took the bus for school, and was deposited by the return bus from Charlotte, in the early dusk.

  The first afternoon when I went there, the office was closed. The second day it was open, but there was no one there. A fan was on, idling just enough to scatter the flies. I sat down and waited for some minutes, watching the flies as they lighted on the desk, struggled in the swath of the fan, flew off to a corner and circled the desk again, returning to the vortex as if it were honey. No one came. I do not mind waiting for someone in a quiet corner. It is like the travel time in which one regains oneself, in which one can watch the time of day that no one else appears to be watching, as it sinks toward the earth. At last I put the envelope on the desk. The envelope was thick, but the breeze of the fan lifted a corner and would end by inching it on the floor. Just as it reached the edge, I retrieved it. I centered it again, and weighted it down with a large conch shell that I found near a typewriter on a second desk beneath a window. Still I sat on, listening to the loud flies. It was the last time that I was to be fully myself, although I was never to be “George Higby.” No man knows the date of his death. Or the ovum the exact hour of its birth. Then the mill siren blew its long, swelling cry for six o’clock, and I left, closing the door on the hush-hush of the fan, and when I arrived home and my mother asked if I had delivered the letter, I said I had.

  Chapter V. The German Lesson.

  IT WAS THE NEXT day that I had the German lesson, the fourth or fifth in a series that Demuth had instituted about a fortnight before. Once the scholarships had come in, he had advanced one reason after another for continuing the coaching: I had been lucky in the examination questions, in being the only candidate from my region; up North the standards were severer, and I would be competing against boys who had been prepared by many masters for years, in the way he alone had had to do in one. Would I like to start calculus, for instance? We both knew that he had kept abreast of me best in mathematics. In Latin, the only language of which he had a smattering, I had outstripped him once we got past Cicero to Virgil, and in Horace and Catullus, where the understanding moves as much by elision as grammar, he had been utterly lost. No, I said cruelly, if anything I would rather do a new language, perhaps Greek.

  He looked down at his hands. We should have to wait for the books, he said, and of course he would have to check on what was required. But he was an honest man. “I realize,” he said, “that as a mentor for you now, I have certain … certain—” he paused. “Certain … lacunae,” he said, and irrepressibly he brightened. “You know what that means?”

  I had not the heart to tell him so. He revived, in explanation. “Come tomorrow at four!” he said then, plopping his hands excitedly together. “Maybe I have a surprise. Yes, we shall have a surprise!”

  And the next day we began on German. He had already sent away for a dictionary and a grammar. Meanwhile he brought out a German Baedeker and an old brown-paper edition of Struwwelpeter, whose flyleaf, flaking off as I touched it, was inscribed Herzlichster Geburtstagwunsche. Mutterchen. He had never once mentioned knowing German. It must have come hard for him to reveal it.

  He knew German as a man knows his earliest language, one rejected before he had learned the colorless abstractions needed to cope with trouble and fear. We began with what he knew, and in the bread-and-milk words as he remembered them, in his excited asides as he disinterred a nursery rhyme, a family aphorism, I could almost see that simple, fundamentalist household emerging. As he recovered the forgotten nuances, his English inverted.

  “Bitte,” he would say, “how can I explain to you what means bitte! It means ‘if you please,’ and ‘you’re welcome’ if it comes after the danke schön … it is so much more convenient than anything you … And gemütlich—how am I to explain to the boy what means gemütlich!” He sighed with pleasure. “You have nothing like … it is so much more convenient!” he said. He flushed suddenly and touched a furtive finger to his crown. But in a moment he was off again. “Rahm!” he said. “You know the skin that forms on boiled milk or hot cocoa, that is what we used to call it—Rahm!” And from there he might go on to the bits of Goethe or Heine that he had been taught to “speak” for company—Über alien Gipfeln or Du bist wie eine Blume, that he taught me too, until the grammar books, of which Tuscana had none, should arrive by mail. Occasionally he would hum under his breath a song that he sometimes identified—“Rose in the Heather” or “Die Lorelei,” and once by accident one that he cut short and never repeated; later I knew it as Die Wacht am Rhein.

  It was a queer way to learn a language, lisping it in the numbers of another man’s childhood, and I suppose it helped to project me back into mine. What happened that next afternoon, the day after I had left the letter, was only as predestined as any ordinary event is—and that, within certain terms, is considerable. It is the terms that are fresh and personal to each life;
the process is always the same. We live by the blind collision of what we are, or have come to be, with events that after a time seem to strain toward us because of what we are. This interplay is no less occult for the most humdrum life than it was for mine. I was already predisposed to live by remembering; Demuth was not strong enough, as few are, to live by forgetting. One wonders, to no profit, whether things would have occurred any differently if the grammar books had arrived on time. This is what did occur.

  The Baedeker had proved too difficult, the Struwwelpeter too foolish. Demuth, who was unsure of his conjugations and had never learned script, had ended by teaching me altogether orally, repeating the names of objects as he himself recalled them, rehearsing me on how to enter a room and leave, greet my elders and bid them adieu, coaching me in all the formal, scraping little phrases with which a German childhood begins.

  “No,” he said this afternoon, “the books are not yet here. I have written them a second letter. Also, sitzt du!”

  I sat down.

  “And how would you say that to me?”

  “Setzen Sie sick, Herr Demuth.”

  “Richtig! I say du not because you are a child—you, a young man with two scholarships—but because we are friends, intimate, verstehts du? Still, it would not yet be nett for you to say du to me. When you have your degree, perhaps, when you come back to Tuscana.”

  Through his window I could see his landlady’s washline, the dishclouts hanging rigid in the flat haze of the sun, and beyond it, on one of the dun back porches, two women slumped on a torn parlor settee, their boneless voices blurring toward us through the sweaty air.

  “I shan’t come back here.”

  He shrugged. “And if you did, maybe, maybe I would not be here either.” He pursed his lips and looked down, his hand going out automatically to the siphon that stood on the desk, on the tray with its one glass. I was sitting low enough to see, almost at eye level, the red frizz on his knuckles, the creases and spots that life had dealt one of those rounded, middle-aged hands that are like a worn boy’s. Physical nearness to a person, no matter of which sex, often makes one think suddenly and sharply of the physical contexts that may be theirs, and I wondered suddenly whether he did as other men did about women, whether he went without, if his slight tinge of the ridiculous clung to him when he was with them, whether that hand would lie uncertain on a breast, or sure. Then the thought faded, and perhaps because of the low stool and the language that reduced me to a child, I had a vague sense of having sat so once, seeing, long ago, the black hairs on another man’s hand, I did not know whose. Then the sensation passed, and Demuth’s hand offered me the glass of Seltzer. As was customary, I refused it.

  “Speak in German!”

  “Nein, danke schön.”

  “Bitte. You are no quicker than many I have had. But you retain.” He drank. “Yes, you retain. And this is anyway not such a bad way to learn a language. Very modern. And very ancient. Der Water spricht. Das Kind antwortet. The father speaks. The child answers.” His voice died to a whisper, as if he were retelling himself a fond tale. His eyelids pinkened. “The father sneezes. And the child answers—Gesundheit!” He got up and stood at the window.

  “Gesundheit.” I imitated him without difficulty. “Does that mean … ‘God bless!’?”

  “No,” he said, his back to me. “It means … ‘health.’ And the word for sickness, when a child is sick for instance, that is Krankheit. And the word for a smart-head like you I do not know, we will look it up when the books come. But the word for ‘stupid’ I know. It is dumm … Dummkopf.”

  “‘God bless,’” I said. “Is that … Gott … Gott schütze dich?”

  “‘God keep you,’ that means.” He turned around. “I did not teach you that. Where did you pick that up?”

  “I don’t know … somewhere. I must have read it.”

  “Not when you can make the ü like that, like a parrot. You have heard it somewhere.” He brightened. “What a sponge you are, eh … we will look that word up too. Also, komm! To work! Enter the room! You are me, Hans Ulrich, and the ladies and gentlemen are here for coffee.”

  I lingered, looking at the desk. Gott schütze dich. There was a voice connected with it, a sexless old voice, the voice of memory itself, at times meandering, at times hard. A wine glass stood beside it, not thick like Demuth’s tumbler, but an etched bell, on an amber stem that joined the wine as it was poured. I could see no more than this, hear nothing more, but I could feel one powerful thing. I could feel myself—back there. There was another receptacle back there, besides the glass with its wine, and it was I. I was the glass, open as a bell to the voice as it poured verse and chapter, chapter and verse into me. I had no face other than the face of the wine, another’s wine as it poured into me. I heard the impersonal sound of the wine-voice, listen-listen, as it poured. I had no face of my own. I was the glass. “Madeira …” I said. “There is a wine called … Madeira?”

  He nodded. “I have never tasted it. Warum?”

  I shook my head “I don’t know. Let’s begin.”

  “Also—I give you the English words, you give them in German, and answer.” He perched on the edge of the desk, screwing up his eyes with pleasure. “I am—whomever. You are Hans Ulrich, you answer.” He began. “Hans! The door!”

  “Hans, der Tür,” I repeated. “Ja, ich geh.” And so the lesson went. I greeted Damen und Herren, brought chairs, passed cakes to uncles and aunts, all as Hans Ulrich Demuth had long ago. I said Milch? and Zucker?, brought a Fräulein Schmidt her Handtasche and replied that no, I was not at school today because heute was Sonntag.

  Now and then his landlady, going up and down the stairs, passed our door, ajar because of the heat, but she ignored us, used to the droning of our catechisms, and in any case would not have noticed, as he no longer did himself, how often he repeated, with hypnotic insistence, “You are Hans Ulrich.” I did not much notice it myself, habituated as I was to the way people inclined their image of me to their own uses—as Miss Pridden had done, and Johnny, and returning to me now, another old voice that had begun it all.

  “And when do you go?” said Demuth.

  “Go?” I said in English. I could hear that other voice struggling toward me. “Go where?” And the voice said, through the phlegm of the past: So this is the last time, eh, handsome waiter. You go in the morning.

  “To school, Dummkopf,” said Demuth. “Where else? The lady asks when you go.”

  “Morgen,” I said mechanically. You go in the morning.

  “Korrekt! And what do you say to the teacher?”

  Through the window I could see one of the women on the porch, alone now, rocking and nodding.

  “What do you say?” said Demuth. And the voice said it also. What do you say?

  “Guten … guten Tag …” I said, and dreaming, my hand stole toward the tray.

  “Nein, guten Morgen!” said Demuth, but I had already lifted the tray. And as it lifted, I remembered. Across the way the woman was still rocking, and holding the tray stiffly against my chest, I remembered it all.

  “No … guten Tag it was,” I said. “Guten Tag, gnädige Frau … that is what it was. Now I remember.”

  “You remember?” he said.

  Aha, said the voice, I see you have not forgotten.

  “No, I have not forgotten,” I said. I was grown now. I knew I could never get back. The gap was permanent between “here” and “there.” I put down the tray, Demuth’s tray, and nothing was smashed. But I could still remember, with the harsh breath one draws to cover the gap.

  “She would say Wer kommt hier? Wie heisst er?” I said. “That means ‘Who comes? What is his name?’ Doesn’t it?” He nodded mutely. “And I would say … “Das Heine Herrgöttle von Bieberach. Little Mr. God from Beeberock. It was some sort of joke … it didn’t mean anything.”

  “Who?” he said. “Who would say?”

  “It was—before I came here. To America.”

  “So. So someone has t
aught you. So you knew German already, you rascal.”

  “No,” I said. What had she taught me? Or had I been born to it? To listen. To be the glass. “That was all I ever learned to say. But that last day, when she found out I didn’t know it was the last one, that no one had told me, she gave me some of the wine to drink and taught me a German prayer. And when I left the room, that was when she called out after me—Gott schütze dich!”

  “And you were how old?”

  “When?”

  “When you knew … whoever it was … this person, these people?”

  I was born there, I thought. When does one begin to know the people among whom one was born? But I saw him looking at me with that semiofficial interest he always had in my mind—“the mind,” as he was fond of referring to it, and I thought: Ha, no, that is not for you, that is mine, it is for no one.

  “I was ten when I came here,” I said. Back there I had asked her something; what was it? She had shaken her head sadly, the old godmother, everyone’s godmother but mine, and whatever it was, she had refused me. For once I had asked something of someone; the glass had assumed a face of its own, a mouth, and had spoken. I had gone down on my knees to her, to ask it. I remembered it well, how it felt to speak for oneself at last. But she had refused me whatever it was, fending me off with the wine and the prayer. Four short phrases the prayer had had, but I had refused to repeat them after her, to learn it, so that, as she had said, I could always remember. I had refused her, as she had refused me, and I had closed my mouth. I had closed it.