Heir to the Glimmering World (10 page)

I poured the hot water directly from the kitchen kettle: Bertram's way.

Anneliese whispered, "The teapot! Use the china teapot, can't you?"—with such ferocity that I began to understand that some ceremony was under way. Was it to be a down-at-the-heels echo of those Berlin salons where Mitwisser had once been fêted? Was it a celebration, a commendation? The tea darkened in the pot. The little cakes gleamed. The visitors murmured, indifferent, detached, waiting.

"Go up and let papa know they're here," Anneliese said finally.

I knocked on the study door, though it was open. Professor Mitwisser was standing in the middle of the room with a brush; he was brushing the jacket of his suit.

"How many have come?" he asked.

"I think eight."

"Eight? Then four have declined."

So he had summoned them. This night was his own creation.

"Tell them I am just finishing a bit of writing. Tell them in ten minutes I join them."

He went on brushing. Whoever they were, he would be their master.

Anneliese had posted me just outside the dining room, with the teapot at the ready. I refilled the cups, and still Mitwisser did not come down. I had misjudged—there were seven visitors, not eight: a dozen had been summoned, and it was five who had declined. I took in that irregular row of drumming fingers and tightened shoulders fixed in a forward curve, and temples either bald or graying, lined with ridges. Even the youngest of them had darkly graven markings under the eyes. These were worn and creviced faces, accustomed to tedium, like a crew of salesmen biding their time before making their pitch. I was struck by the mildness of their patience. Only the man in the skullcap showed a vague irritability, rolling and unrolling the tip of his mahogany beard with a stiffened thumb. The beard, together with the skullcap, signaled an aspect of some practice or piety, and this set me to reflecting on how Mitwisser, a student of the history of religion, after all, was in his own life bare of any sign or vestige of belief. In that family there was no rite or observance, no Sabbathday or Passover or sacral new year. It had been the same—the same absence—for my father and me, and for Bertram; my father had declared himself an atheist, and Bertram relished Ninel's aloofness from such matters. But Professor Mitwisser's brain rocked and shuddered with the metaphysics of long-ago believers, men for whom God was an unalterable Creator and Ruler—and still God was nowhere in that house. Like the biologist who is obsessed by the study of the very disease to which he is immune, Mitwisser had raised a wall between belief and the examination of belief.

That was what it all came to, then: this wall, which the others doubted, or condemned, or assailed.

When at last he stepped into the light, they stood up with a formal cordiality, and he shook hands with each man, one by one. He was wearing his freshly brushed suit-coat, though the molten August heat was so intimately invasive that it crept into the ears and along the necks of the company: they had all torn open their collars, where the sweat pooled in the hollows of their clavicles. From the constraint of these unraveled visitors it seemed improbable, at first, that Mitwisser had met any of them in some former circumstance; or yet again perhaps he had, distantly, at one of those international congresses frequented by seminarians, or even on his home ground, at sessions of the Religionswissenschaftliche Vereinigung, in Berlin or Frankfurt or Heidelberg, before world-upheaval had thrust him into this unlikely place. Or he may have confronted them only through some cautious yet abrasive correspondence. It was anyhow clear that he was familiar with their views and positions, whatever they were, as they were familiar with his. A dangerous awareness glowed between Mitwisser and the visitors: it was his imperial force that had compelled them to await him in the steaming heaviness of this equatorial room, where damp elbow pressed against damp elbow and the tea misted their eyeglasses with its own hot breath, and a secret savagery, like an ember rekindling, longed to break out. The man in the skullcap, it developed, was a refugee Viennese. A white-nosed fellow with a deformed left hand was revealed to be a specialist on tenth-century Egypt; with his good hand he quietly plucked a cigar out of his moist shirt pocket and sucked at it with so much diligence that he soon had the ceiling befogged. This encouraged the cigarette smokers, and since there were no ashtrays to be had (these were as foreign to the house as electric fans), I ran around the table dealing out extra saucers to catch the burnt-out stubs.

The bearded Viennese had started off, diffidently enough, in German; Mitwisser nearly flogged him into English. It was a surly moment: a ukase.
I have disposed of that tongue,
it said,
and so must you.
In all that smoke and swelter I saw how this aroused them, though I could detect no plausible link between the ordinary plainness of these men (except for the yarmulke and the bad hand, it was pointless to try to distinguish one from the other) and the turbulence that was beginning to spiral out of their suddenly violent mouths. These mouths, which had seemed so flat and contained, like the mouths of shrewdly affable grocers, were now wildly twisting and spewing, a gathering tornado of virulence. Or they were like the mouths of those sideshow magicians who draw out strings of colored cloth flags from their throats, an infinitude of flags, endlessly, endlessly. But these were not innocent flags; they were brutally pelting philosophies.

They were fighting him. They had come to fight him. They had come because he had summoned them to fight, and they felt the old vestigial power of his call; or because they were led by the dark curiosity that trawls minds to the grotesque, or the superseded, or the discarded, or the openly perverse; or because he was in merciless and deadly eclipse; or because it was they—their side of it, the party of victory—who had tossed him into eclipse; or because of their own volcanic anger. They raged against his will, his obsession, his desire—his thought. He was a violator (but he believed himself violated by world-upheaval, by their accusations, by their doubting enmity); his purpose, they said, was to subvert, to overthrow. He had deserted the green and fertile furrow, he had turned passionate, he had left disinterestedness behind, he had ruptured the Olympian surface of the scholar's detachment, he had submerged the distinction between the investigator and the investigated, the hunter and the hunted, he was no longer a historian after quarry, he had become the quarry, he had flung himself into the hearts of his prey. He had broken through the wall, the wall he had professed—the wall between belief and the examination of belief. A false profession. He had the smell of a renegade.

The white-nosed man with the bad hand dropped his cigar. A cry—high-pitched and sharp, a treble upstairs shock—was shooting through the smoke.

"Waltraut," Anneliese whispered, "all this noise, it woke her—"

But I kept my place under the dining room lintel. "Leave her be, she'll fall back—"

"Go and see!" Anneliese commanded.

I kept my place. It was Mitwisser I wanted to see. He stood—he had never taken a chair—under the spell of a resignation concentrated and embattled but strangely tranquil: a ship captain who is unsurprised by a squall. He looked satisfied; I thought he was satisfied. If you court the sea there will likely be a storm, and he had courted the sea, he had brought the sea into his own house, he had
made
the storm, he was the god of the storm, he was satisfied!

Again that cry: now it was descending the stair, now it had thinned to tiny breathless phantom moans enveloping a barefoot figure. Like a bird in a rush of wind, Mrs. Mitwisser flew into the room.

"Gentlemen, it's no good, it's no use"—she pulled and pulled at the torn breast of her nightgown—"no good at all—"

The visitors fell into a motionless silence.

"My dear Elsa," Mitwisser said.

"No good at all," she chanted, "no use, no good—"

"Mama," Anneliese pleaded.

"What is broken, gentlemen, you cannot put it again back,
nicht wahr?
"

The visitors rose in a body and mutely trickled out the door; only the man in the skullcap hesitated before Mrs. Mitwisser. "
Guten Abend,
" he said.

"
Guten Abend,
" she replied: a chatelaine presiding over farewells after an evening of delicacies and wine.

Anneliese took her mother's hand and began to lead her away. Mitwisser's enameled blue eye trailed after them; his face blazed. "Quite right," he said. I hardly knew what he meant by this; I was thinking what an oddity it was that he had ever lain beside the woman in the torn nightgown. He turned back to me with a little shrug of surprise, as if he had just discovered me there: "You see how it is," he said. "I have no peers in this matter. What lies beyond the usual is dismissed, it is regarded as wasteful and perverse. They judge it—my work—to be pointless. What was once valued there is not valued here. Here they lack the European mind, they are small."

"But isn't one of them from Vienna—"

"That one is no one at all. I will return now to my study. Please to shut off all these lights." He gestured toward the kitchen, where the kettle still steamed, and reached out himself to the dining room switch.

He left me in the dark, among empty cups and littered plates.

13

T
HE VISITORS
never came again. The house resumed its isolation. The drawn-out heat wave ebbed. Mrs. Mitwisser no longer asked my forgiveness. Her playing cards remained under her pillow; a new pursuit lured her. She sat on the edge of her bed, with a little low chest drawn up beside it, sorting out the curlicued colored shapes of a vast jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the box was of a forest scene: masses of leaves, the trunks of trees casting dark columns of shadows, a foxtail glimpsed in a clump of bush—a confusion of chiaroscuro. I watched her assess the jumble of pieces, and saw how shrewdly she judged and matched and fitted together; she considered before she experimented. She was a scientist in a laboratory. If the experiment turned out to be successful, it was because she had considered. A square of noon sunlight fired the wild wisps of her hair; she yawned; then she continued the hunt, bathing her fingers in the mixed-up cardboard froth of yellow and orange and brown.

"There will after this be two more boxes," she informed me. She was prepared for a season of puzzles. This one belonged to Willi; he didn't care for such things. Neither did Gert or Heinz, who had given up their own boxes. The boys, all three of them, had no interest in puzzles or cards (they hated cards) or even books. They fled the house the instant they woke. They were bored with water and marsh, and nowadays were out exploring the neighborhood, where they happened on a meadow ideal for kite-flying. It lay behind a soldiers' monument—a tall cenotaph topped by a winged bronze Victory and dedicated to the fallen of the Great War. Every morning they ran to the meadow to fly their kites. Then they would lie on their backs in the grass, manufacturing whistles out of moist green blades and staring up at the sun-gilded angel. And afterward they would jump up to run with the kites again, in a flagging wind, so that the kites would swoop down and suddenly lift and finally crash, like fallen soldiers.

"He gives presents," Mrs. Mitwisser said. "Many presents.
Immer, immer!
Puzzles, kites. This James!" It came out "Chames," bitterly, in her resisting and clotted accent. With a wandering hand she sculpted an apparition out of the air: a puzzle-piece in the form of an invisible man, whose presence hung over the house.

I said, "He's kind to the boys then—"

"To my husband he is kind. So kind we become
Parasiten.
" Her attention flitted away. With quick precision she locked a scalloped bulge into its small harbor. A flowering twig materialized under her palm. "And you, Rüslein, they don't pay you, hah?" Her tongue felt along her lower lip, navigating, as though she might find a word cruising on its surface. Then she found it: "Confess!"

"They don't pay me, no. I mean they haven't yet."

"They cannot pay until he permits. There is no money until he permits. He permits the puzzles and the kites. He permits the new shelves for my husband's books. He permits the pretty little cakes. He permits the flat in the city, and when that is not useful he permits this house. He does not permit you because he does not know you are here." Mrs. Mitwisser laughed. It was a laugh of perfect sanity. "We have no money because we are
Parasiten.
When he comes he will see you and they will tell him and he will know."

"When will that happen?"

"When he wishes, then he will come."

She held up a pair of unlikely shapes—each one a circle of fangs—and snapped them together, efficiently, like the jaws of a crocodile. Or like a navigator squeezing the legs of a caliper in order to shrink the world.

14

T
HE KARAITES.

I begin to see them, dimly, dimly, passing shadows, remote echoes, grayly trudging on the farthest rim of history, the other side of history, the underside. They are inked letters seeping through the backs of the pages of old chronicles: faint glyphs glimmering, just visible, an inside-out alphabet.

They come to me piecemeal, little by little, at Professor Mitwisser's whim. Or else he discharges them in a great cannon-blast of erudition, a whole colony shot out all at once in a single obscuring cloud.

They are dissidents; therefore they are haters. But they are also lovers, and what they love is purity, and what they hate is impurity. And what they consider to be impurity is the intellect's explorations; and yet they are themselves known for intellect.

Intellect engenders meaning: interpretation; commentary; parable; illumination; insight; dialogue; argument; corroboration; demurral; debate; irony; anecdote; analysis; analogy; classification; clarification. All these the Karaites repudiate as embroidery and fraudulence in the hands of their enemies (though not in their own hands). And all these are Talmud, the first layer of which is Mishna, containing commentary on Scripture, and the second layer of which is Gemara, containing commentary on Mishna. The exegetical voices calling to one another across the centuries grow more and more populous, denser and denser. A third-century sage will contradict a first-century sage; a fourth-century sage will disagree, and take the side of the first-century sage. A fifth-century sage will hold to a new idea altogether. If you were to stand on a mountain—Mount Tabor, say, or even Olympus—and turn your ear downward toward where the minds of the philosophers reside, you would hear the roar of impassioned colloquy below, like a wakening polyphonic thunder. And this would be Talmud, the fuguelike music of the rabbis conferring over the sense of a syllable out of Genesis.