Heir to the Glimmering World (20 page)

A grin. "He thinks about me."

"Because of the money."

"He likes the money, sure, I don't deny that—" He stopped and looked around, like a man suspecting spies. But there was only the watery clamor upstairs. "It's not old that counts for Rudi, it's throwing things over. He's got appetite, he's out to upset the apple cart. He works at it."

"You don't know anything about his work."

He took off his glasses, blew a speck off one of the lenses, and restored them. "I hear things, I pick things up. I tutored his boys, didn't I? Even Annie, for a while. Rudi knows I do him good."

From the top of the stairs came a slippery padding noise: Waltraut, naked and shining, escaped from the bath, a fugitive river-nymph spilling downward.

"Here's old Wally!" James said, and caught up the gleaming little body.

"I'm a mouse!" the child cried.

"A very wet mouse. And I'm the cat that's got you!"

To me James said, "Tell the Frau Doktor I'm here to stay until I decide to go."

33

O
N CERTAIN DAYS
—there was no pattern to them—James and Anneliese left the house together and did not return until evening. Mrs. Mitwisser had become resigned: she no longer hoped that James would vanish on one of these outings. If James should vanish, so might Anneliese, and then what? Her husband had dismissed the curl of hair—if it was a stratagem it meant nothing to him, and if it was not a stratagem it also meant nothing. It was no more than commotion. He resented and despised commotion. Since his wife had come back to his bed commotion had increased. His children were safe, there was no one to harm them, why all this commotion? She was in his bed; that was commotion enough. No conjugal heat warmed that bed. I knew this—wasn't I witness to Mitwisser's true coupling? His ardor was for the fever fuming out of the fragment that had been sent from Spain, those two thin sheets, purchased (by now this was hardly a mystery) with James's money. But the miraculous fragment was only a copy. He lusted after the original, a scribe's hand on rolled and pitted parchment; it was plain that the archive's new director was susceptible. A large enough offer—a superior bribe—might secure it, supposing James was generous, and when was James not generous? All that was needed for James to be generous, Mrs. Mitwisser confided, was for Mitwisser to cosset him, to work up that awful mirthful howling; to laugh and laugh and laugh. Thank God she had at least put an end to the laughter. And what did the terrible laughter signify? Ah, the fireflies. This James and her husband, they adore the fireflies, the fireflies blind them, her husband is blinded by this James!

No bribe, not all the money in the world, could now loosen the rough thing Professor Mitwisser had felt with his fingers in that filthy slot the old Moroccan had overlooked. And who, after all, will credit a fresh copy, so patently subject to fraud, who will dare to put his trust in it? Nevertheless here it was: the worldly al-Kirkisani, author of "A Survey of Jewish Sects," scornful of the Mishawites yet entranced by Hindu thought! No one had ever dreamed it. Erudition was against such a finding; intuition was against it. But Spain was in turmoil, and when Mitwisser inquired again, this time by telegram, the director replied that he was fortunate to be alive. The archive had been burned to the ground. The director was a Falangist; the arsonists, he said, were a criminal gang of Loyalists. The copy was all there was. Mitwisser's grand discovery—if anyone cared!—was doomed. They would say he had invented it; they would call him a forger. They were ready to accuse him of anything. Still, his children were safe, his Anneliese, his boys, his beloved tall Heinz, who was so ingenious with his hands.

Mrs. Mitwisser said, "Erwin Schrödinger, he also was tall. Tall like my husband."

And she said, "This James, he takes away my daughter."

"He always brings her back," I said.

"One day he will perhaps not."

She opened her narrow nostrils. She was afraid for Anneliese. She feared the illicit, she smelled the illicit. My husband, she said, he cannot so much as wind his watch to set the time, he is clumsy at such things, his big fingers, how clumsy and thick they are—
so gross und dick!
—whereas Heinz ...
dieser verdammte Mann und seine verdammten Geschenke, er gibt, er gibt!
The boy Heinz, twice he pulls to pieces the funny clock James gives to him, and twice he fits the pieces together again. .. .

Her nostrils opened, she was exerting tiny rapid sniffs. Did she want me to think that Heinz was not her husband's child? She had shown her husband the curl of hair; he had turned away. And when, after childbirth, she had shown him Heinz, did he turn away? The curl of hair was her own; Heinz was her husband's own son. So I believed. But she was a purveyor of hypothesis, of possibility. She was a theorist. She had made me suspect Heinz. I often stared at him. He had the long bones of the other boys, and eyes as brown as theirs.

The weather was milder now, and still the Library did not draw Mitwisser into the city. Under that gilt ceiling he had hidden his futility; or else the Library had itself withered to futility. His intellect—his desire—was a greater repository than any other; was there any archive extant in the world that knew of a Karaite link to India? Not New York, not Cairo, not Istanbul! Only he possessed this potent, this seductive, fragment—or if, elsewhere, someone had got hold of the rest of it, what difference, how could it matter? What greater master of Karaism was there? Al-Kirkisani had condemned the rival Mishawites:
There is not a single man skilled in knowledge and speculation among them,
al-Kirkisani wrote (and I had transcribed). And wasn't this precisely Professor Mitwisser's opinion of those other scholars of Karaism—if in fact there were any worthy of his esteem remaining in our century?

He kept me close to him at the little typewriter table while he paced before his shelves, seizing one volume after another, and tossing them on the bed behind us, where Mrs. Mitwisser's hairpins coiled like insects in the folds of her nightgown. The bed was unmade. The door was shut. There was nothing for me to do.

"Do you want me to go? I can come back later if you like—"

"You are not to go," he said.

But I saw that he was hardly prepared for our usual session. He had in hand nothing to dictate. I sat idly at the typewriter. The books he had removed were all in Arabic and Greek.

"Here is a man," he said, "a mind comprehending vastness, a luminary, a majesty, and history obscures him, buries him, suffocates him! Ejects him! Erases him from the future, suppresses him, names him dissident, subversive, heterodox, transgressive—"

Mitwisser's eyes flung out their electric blue.

"Transgressive, the key, the key! Dissident from the normative, then dissident from the dissidents ... here, find my notes on
Lights and Watchtowers—
"

A ziggurat of typed sheets, my own handiwork, ascended jaggedly out of a carton at the foot of the bed. Mitwisser himself had classified them; they were in an esoteric order I had learned to understand.

"How slow you are," he complained. "There, just below
that
one, don't you see? Good. There, you have it. Please to read it."

It was a haphazard list. I read:

knowledge and reason
witchery
sleep and dreams
interpretation of dreams
the value of the shekel
suicide
medicine
astronomy
natural science
philology, Arabic
philology, Hebrew
commentary on Genesis
commentary on Job
commentary on Ecclesiastes
Mohammed and prophecy
Jesus and prophecy
art of textual interpretation
art of translation
solar calendar
nationalism
angel intermediaries
consensus and transmission
unclean animals jubilee dietary laws
Sabbath
the morrow after the Sabbath
kinship
the Nature of God

"Only a little finger's worth, it is not finished. One cannot make an encyclopedia on a single paper. And so much lost. Please to look! Is there Hindu thought on this paper?"

"No," I said.

"Then we shall put it there."

He picked up the two thin sheets from Spain, and recited (in darkened cadences, searching English out of foreign hooks and curves), "
Not by austerities, nor by alms, nor by offerings can I be known, but by devotion to Me Alone may I be perceived and known. He whose supreme good I am, without hatred of any being, he cometh unto Me.
Words from the Bhagavad-Gita, translated by al-Kirkisani into his own Arabic. He praises these words! And he writes—extraordinary!—he writes ... he writes .. ."

The frightening electric eyes, blue tears seeping, and I again their witness.

"'I, Jacob, am become Arjuna.' Extraordinary! And yes, yes, more and more!
Demoniacal men know neither right energy, nor purity, nor even propriety. Truth is not in them. The universe, they say, is without truth, without basis, without God. So say demoniacal men.
What, what is this? Truth is not in them, and do not the Karaites say exactly this of the Rabbanites? Here it is, I have discovered it, this knowledge, this new thing, mine!"

I felt very far from him then. I thought him the loneliest creature on earth. The path of tears was brilliant on his cheeks, even as it stumbled through low bristle—more and more he was neglecting to shave. Or was deliberately cultivating a brambly beard. A beard would exaggerate him—was that what he wished? His concentration was already exaggerated, and in a beard he would resemble a pietist. He had plummeted centuries backward, he was abandoned on the cold planet of the past, and all for the sake of a rejected schismatic, a rebel Jew, a man who had left no mark on the tree of history. A forgotten sectarian who mattered to no one. No one on any continent. No one distant, no one intimate. No one in this house. Not Mrs. Mitwisser, not Anneliese, not Heinz, or Gert, or Willi. Not James, no!

James was not in the house. A taxi had come, he had gone away with Anneliese.

I said, "What will you do now?"

"I shall record what I have found. Proof will be arduous. Provenance and context may require many months. Are you prepared to remain here?"

The question startled me. It was my own question: where was I to go? Only five days before, I had quietly—stealthily, it seemed—turned nineteen. "Nineteen years since my Jenny left me," my father might have said. I recalled his emotion—his only emotion that I knew of—with ebbing bitterness. I had no reason to be bitter. It was plain that Professor Mitwisser regarded me as alien but useful. I was compliant, I was quick, I was most often silent. My silence concealed watchfulness, but there was no answering notice. I had a kind of practical invisibility: beyond my usefulness at the typewriter I was extinguished. I was his typist, nothing more. But I gave him freedom to surrender to whatever moved him: he could stand before me weeping—for the second time!—because I was without substance.

And for the second time I asked, "Your wife calls James a Karaite, why is that?"

"My wife?"

"Is it that he's sympathetic to what you do?"

"Sympathetic? What language is this? Sympathetic how? To have feeling for my work one must have conquered the writings, the period—" He stopped; he would not waste breath on a catalogue of what he had conquered. He had conquered empires, continents, histories. He had conquered millennia. "I will require your presence here without interruption, do you understand this? I intend to prepare ... to reveal ... to lay an indisputable track—a track, not a mere trail—from al-Kirkisani to—" Again he stopped. I was the half-seen figure at the typewriter; he would not waste breath on what he intended. He dragged the hump-veined back of his big hand across his eyelids.

"My wife," he said. "She cannot relinquish. For that reason she cannot discern. For myself, exile becomes relinquishment. I speak of exile. I ought to speak of escape. Naturally one must read German, but I will not employ that tongue, neither in speech nor in writing, however flawed or foreign my English may be."

"But sometimes you call me Fräulein—"

"What else would you wish?"

"I don't know. Rose. My cousin in Albany used to call me Rosie."

"I have no interest in familiarity. I have no interest in your cousin. My wife is not your concern. James is not your concern."

"He's yours, isn't he?" The tremor of my boldness.

"He attends to my children. He is fond of them. My children are fond of him."

I felt myself imprisoned in that room by a clever man with a hard heart. He cared for his children, he cared for James, he cared for al-Kirkisani, a thousand years dead. How I envied Anneliese! I was ready to believe Mrs. Mitwisser: Anneliese, not yet seventeen, had left the house with her lover.

They were returning now. It was early evening, they must be returning. Voices. A disturbance at the door. A disturbance on the stairs. Mrs. Mitwisser distraught, wailing. A tearing, a scraping.

Heinz: "I didn't
let
him in, he pushed me—"

Mrs. Mitwisser: "You cannot do this!"

Gert: "He's going up to papa's study—"

Willi: "It's not allowed—"

Mrs. Mitwisser: "
Lieber Gott, nein, nein!
"

The study door was wrenched open.

"I got it out of him, he told me you were out in the sticks somewhere, but I got it out of him. It wasn't easy getting here either, longest subway ride on earth, they tried to keep me out—"

Mitwisser stood frozen; the giant had become suddenly small. Ninel did not look at him. She was fixed on me. She was wearing a creased leather jacket and a workman's cap. She had on the same trousers she had worn when I had last seen her, but now they were clipped to a pair of suspenders. I recognized the suspenders. They were Bertram's.

"Bert had no right to give you that money," she said: the raucous call of the coxswain.

"But he did, he gave it to me."

"Fine. Now you can give it to me. I've got a use for it, and Bert said you'd hand it over."

"He didn't say that."

"What do you know about it? He said you'd give it to me."