Heir to the Glimmering World (11 page)

All this the Karaites refuse and deny. In the ninth century they become the rabbis' foes. Scripture! they cry, Scripture alone! They will not tolerate rabbinic interpretation. They will not allow rabbinic commentary. They scorn metaphor and the poetry of inference. Only the utterance of Scripture itself is the heritage divine!

The rabbis (whom the Karaites call the Rabbanites, or the school of thought that clings to the rabbis) reject the Karaites as literalists. The Karaites, they say, see only the letters; they do not see the halo of meaning that glows around the letters.

The Karaites ridicule the Rabbanites. They ridicule them because the Rabbanites declare that the Talmud, which they name the Oral Torah, was received on Sinai by Moses together with Scripture, the Written Torah. The Rabbanites claim that the sacredness of the Oral Torah is equal to the sacredness of the Written Torah.

Literalists! retort the Rabbanites. Narrow hearts! At Sinai the minds of men were given the power to read the mind of God. Otherwise how would men know how to be civilized? How would we know how to understand a sentence—or a story—in Scripture?

You understand it twenty different ways! scoff the Karaites. One says one thing, another says another thing. And this clamor of contradiction you call equal to the Torah itself!

It is equal, the Rabbanites respond, because the radiance of Torah directs men's thoughts. Out of the soil of strenuous cogitation, which is the engine of holy inspiration, and which you Karaites demean as mere contradiction, burst the sweet buds of Conduct and Conscience. The Rational Mind is the Inspired Mind.

The Rational Mind, argue the Karaites (but they do not notice that they are arguing Talmudically, since Talmudic argument is what they disdain)—the Rational Mind will not accept that the so-called Oral Torah, codified by human hands recording human opinions, is equal to the Written Torah given by God to Moses at Sinai! You Rabbanites indulge yourselves in delusion. There is in you no law of logic. Hence we depart from you, we reject all ordinances and adornments, inferences and digressions, alleviations and mildnesses, that are not in the Written Torah. We sweep away your late-grown lyrics that have crept into your prayerbooks. Our liturgy draws purely from Scripture, not a jot or tittle of it man-made! Away with your late-grown poets, away with your late-grown jurists! Moses alone stood on Sinai!

Thus spake the Karaites. But the Jews until this day embrace the Rabbanites and their ocean of exegesis and disputation, of lore and parable, as fertile and limitless as the cosmos itself—while the Karaites are a speck, a dot, a desiccated rumor, on the underside of history. Sa'adia Gaon, in the tenth century, in his famous polemic against the Karaites, blew them with a puff of his lips into the darkness of schism.

This was how, dimly, dimly, and little by little, I derived the nature of the Karaites at my typewriter at night, to the chanting of Mitwisser's esoteric recitations.

And dimly, dimly, and little by little, like ink bleeding through paper, I came to believe that of all the creatures on earth, it was only Mitwisser, Mitwisser alone, who thought to resurrect these ancient dots and faded specks. Their living remnants might languish still, across from the Baltic Sea, or close to the Black and Caspian Seas, sequestered in queer European pockets; but they were shriveled, hidden, lost. Mitwisser's illuminations scarcely followed them there. Isfahan, Baghdad, Byzantium had seized his brain and driven it back, back—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen centuries back, into the muffled quarrels of sect after sect, doctrine upon doctrine. The Karaite laws of consanguinity and incest were more urgent to Mitwisser's gaze than the streets he walked on. These fevered and forgotten heretics and schismatics—their creeds and codes and calendars, their migrations and mutations, the long generations of their thinkers—these were his own.

Only his children mattered as much.

15

328 St. Peter's Street
The Bronx, Nevv York
September 5, 1935

Dear Bertram,

The first thing you'll probably notice is hovv every double-you has a split all the vvay dovvn the middle, so that vvhen I vvant to type "vvindovv," say, or "vverevvolf," it comes out looking like that!

There are other problems too. VVatch out for those big blank skips that look like stutters in mid-sentence! Sometimes vvhen I'm using this machine I feel as if I'm piloting an aeroplane in a vvindstorm. I can never tell vvhat's about to happen, vvhether I'll be pitched up or dovvn or sidevvays. (See?) It takes getting used to, though by novv I can pretty vvell control the rudder, or vvhatever you call the thing that keeps an aeroplane on course. I could ask Heinz—he knovvs all that sort of science thing. (I'll explain vvho Heinz is in a minute.)

VVell, novv that you see vvhat I've been given to vvork vvith here, you'll understand hovv much I miss your typevvriter. (I had almost begun to feel it vvas
my
typevvriter.) Only I'm afraid you'll think vvhat I really mean is that I miss
you
. (I guess I do.) I'm pretty sure Ninel doesn't vvant me to bother you vvith letters, since you never told me vvhere you'd be. So I've tried hard not to vvrite, and for two vvhole months I haven't. Not that I'd exactly knovv vvhere! And you haven't been able to vvrite to me, just in case you ever vvanted to, because that address in Nevv York City I sent you (I hope you got my postcard!) isn't vvhere vve've ended up. There aren't any skyscrapers, it's definitely not Manhattan! VVe're in a strange half-vvild place at the edge of things, some little houses and plenty of empty lots, and a svvamp nearby attached to a st ony beach.

The family is strange, too—all tightly bound together, vvhich you'd expect of refugees, only there's a sort of desperation in this house, they're still not feeling safe. The mother is sick. The father is a kind of fanatic. It's the father I'm supposed to be vvorking for—I'm something like a secretary, though actually I don't knovv vvhat I am. I do knovv that I'm an outsider to these people—it's as if they've got a secret society of their ovvn. There are three young sons, and each one has three sets of names. That Heinz I mentioned, he's Heinrich, and sometimes, vvhen they're in the mood, Hank. Right novv he's interested in clocks. He takes them apart, so that you can never tell vvhat ti me it is. The chronology seems all vvrong anyhovv. There's a daughter vvho's only tvvo or three years younger than I am, but from the vvay she is—very strict and solemn—you'd think she's a tired old vvoman of forty. And there's a three-year-old, going on four, vvho still sleeps in a crib like a baby. Her name is the ugliest thing I've ever heard. The mother doesn't take care of her at all.

The house is mostly very quiet, especially novv that summer's over and the boys are in school. They go to the local public school, vvhich the father thinks is useless but doesn't oppose, since he's all for their forgetting they're Germans. The older daughter and I vvatch over the little girl. That's the part of the day I don't like, it's terribly boring, though it vvould be considerably vvorse if she vvasn't still taking long afternoon naps. The father stays avvay until evening, vvhich makes it sound as if he has a job. He doesn't. The older daughter ought to be in high school, but isn't. It's partly because the father vvants her to look after the mother and the little girl, but mostly it's because he vvants to supervise her education himself. She's the most studious one and his favorite. He's alvvays bringing home books for her to read, or else he finds something on his ovvn shelves, and then he quizzes her. Lately he vvon't allow any of the family to talk German. (He has the older daughter read it, though.) The mother speaks German some of the time any-hovv, you really can't tell her vvhat to do. Sometimes I think her sickness is a kind of vvar. She's like a revolutionary—she vvon't go along with the rest of them.

I've tried and tried to find out vvhere they get their income from. Not that they're anything like vvhat Ninel vvould call coupon-clippers! The mother lives mainly in her nightgovvn and the father in his one suit. The mother keeps hinting that they're dependents of some sort, but you can't rely on anything she says, vvhich is too bad, because she's the only one honest enough to vvant

Here I stopped. What did Mrs. Mitwisser want? And what was it I wanted from Bertram? The crack in the damaged key—so familiar by now that I scarcely knew it was there—all at once began to leak light, like an unexpectedly opening door. A clear split, a severance: Mrs. Mitwisser from her family, Mitwisser from his former elevation, the Karaites from the mainstream ... Bertram from me. I thought of Bertram in his new life with Ninel. I imagined Ninel reading this letter; I imagined what she might say. I thought of the money in the blue envelope. The crack widened, the light shot through. A bribe! The money was a bribe. Bertram had bribed me to keep out of his future.

I took hold of a corner of the sheet and tore it from the platen. The paper came out ripped, jagged, with a zigzag scallop across its lower half.

And there stood Anneliese in the hallway, reddening like a sudden scar.

"What are you doing in papa's study in the middle of the day when he's away? You have no business in there now, get out!"

16

M
Y NIGHT SESSIONS
with Mitwisser were growing sparser. Often when I appeared at the door of his study he sent me away and summoned Anneliese instead. Then the door was shut against me. I leaned my cheek on the wall and listened. There were nights when they read Carlyle and Schiller; at other times it was Spinoza. One week Mitwisser set Anneliese on a course of spherical trigonometry. The hum of their voices, seeping through, was unruffled. Anneliese was eager and quick.

"Papa puts off his night work for me, so you mustn't let mama interrupt," she warned me. "Papa wants you to keep her occupied while I'm having my lessons."

I knew what "occupied" signified: Mrs. Mitwisser was to be silenced. She had taken to singing again, German songs with pretty tunes. She had a loud coarse alto that seemed unnatural, as if what erupted from her throat was unable to reproduce the sound in her head, or as if she was punishing the music. Or else she was punishing Anneliese: the singing had begun when it was announced that Anneliese would not be going to the public high school.

"My husband makes her like himself," Mrs. Mitwisser grumbled. "She will become
eine Puppe,
he will give to her too many books, she will become
verrückt.
"

She sang to blot out Anneliese's lessons. Gert and Willi slept through it all, but Waltraut habitually awoke and cried, and Heinz who was in the bed next to her crib awoke and complained, and the house that was so quiet all day was noisily chaotic at ten o'clock at night.

Mitwisser put an end to it. He called me into his study, where Anneliese was sitting at my little table—the typewriter had been cleared away. I looked all around for it, and there it was on the floor, pushed into a corner. It meant I was dismissed, displaced. Anneliese's notebooks lay open before her. I glimpsed her handwriting, as vertical and orderly as a row of chessmen—a European script not unlike her father's.

"My wife," Mitwisser began, "suffers from intellectual tribulation. She is perforce distant from her own affairs, deprived of her laboratory, of her true life. Her mind"—here he hesitated, while Anneliese opened her fist to play with her fingers, pressing the index finger of one hand against the index finger of the other—"I will say instead her
spirit:
her spirit looks back. You see it is the language—the language draws her back into the old places, the old life, so it is the language that must be deflected, defeated, evaporated—"

"Papa would like mama to improve her English," Anneliese said. It was the coldness of diplomacy, the father's anguish, or desperation—or was it merely his hope for relief?—translated into the daughter's briskness. And I, taking in the bossy lift of Anneliese's chin, the small suggestive tilt that signaled my obedience, translated further: no more intrusion, no more noise, no more German! Not in song, not in speech.

"You will read to her," Mitwisser finished.

"But if she won't—if Mrs. Mitwisser isn't willing—"

"She must be induced."

The rough artificial voice pitched itself higher and came fluting down on us in a flood of light-hearted mockery—an imitation, it almost seemed, of a madwoman's merry mockery:

Mein Hut der hat drei Ecke,
drei Ecke hat mein Hut.
und hätt' er nicht drei Ecke,
dann wär er nicht mein Hut!

I found Mrs. Mitwisser on the edge of her bed, as usual, bent over her puzzle pieces; but they were all undone, scattered. She was detaching shape from shape, restoring them to a scrambled mound, her quick wrists shuttling with the speed of a gleeful child pulling the legs off insect after insect.

"
So ein schöner Wald!
" she greeted me. "No more. You see? I break it."

"You can work it all over again," I assured her, "some other time."

Then I saw that she was taking pains to twist and crush each piece: the forest demolished.

"It is dead now. What is broken you cannot put it again back." She let the mutilated pieces sift through her fingers (fingers faster and nimbler in their movements than Anneliese's, and also smaller and more flexible), and looked up at me with a smile so obscurely at odds with the actions of her hands, and so unexpected and fresh and pleasant, that I felt I had for some reason won her approval. "Do you enjoy my funny song? A funny song, you know, for children."

"The children are sleeping, you wouldn't want to wake them—"

The smile receded. "Anneliese, she does not sleep!"

"Anneliese isn't a child, she's studying—"

"Down there, in his
Bücherei,
do you know what he teaches to her there?"

"History, I think. And literature and some math."