Memoir From Antproof Case (9 page)

Not for a while though: she had come to spring me. Because I was confined to that place by law, the rector reported my absence to the Swiss police. Had we remained in Switzerland I suppose they might have found me, but we didn't and they didn't.

We arrived at the local railway station at exactly the moment the train pulled in. This we could do because we all knew, to the step and the second, how long it took to get down there by foot or by pony cart, as the younger among us had the job of picking up the mail. The trains ran on time then, not that they don't now (although I wouldn't know, and Brazilian trains are not much of an example, as the populace has yet to discover whether one rides inside or on top). Apart from lake steamers and pony carts, railroads were the only means of transportation. No network of highways, no airplanes to speak of, and, naturally, no ocean liners were present to distract the Swiss from their single-minded devotion to keeping the trains on time. Actually, it was triple-minded: the French part of the Swiss mind loved the trains themselves, the marvelous
linearity
of the railroad; the German part insisted on punctuality as if each and every German were a ticking time bomb that required periodic and exact disarming; and the Italian part, which liked very much the food on the trains, deferred to the other two parts even though it thought they were crazy.

Before anyone missed us we were in Bern. Not more than three minutes after we exited the portals of the Bern station we were seated in the private office of the director of the Bern branch of Switzerland's leading bank. With no wavering or hesitation, without even the blink of an eye, Miss Mayevska withdrew a hundred thousand Swiss francs, which was, then, a fortune.

She did it by giving a numbered code and answering a few questions. I asked how she had access to such wealth and what she planned to do with the money.

"We're going to the North Pole," she said.

"Oh."

"I know that someday I'll be gone, so even if my temptation is to be thrifty I insist upon using the money now, in a flash, for something memorable."

Each member of the family had several accounts in several Swiss banks, and safe-deposit boxes scattered here and there, with money for emergency or escape. "For Jews," she told me, "money is, most importantly, a life preserver. We amass it, when we can and if we do, not from greed but out of fear."

"How can you enjoy it?" I asked.

"We don't," she said. "But we try."

I begged her to return it, feeling some of the age-old anxiety that had led her father to provide secret stores all over the continent in case his children should be hunted like rats. She told me not to worry. He owned a shipping line and many buildings in Paris, on or near the Champs Élysées, and her withdrawal would trouble neither him, nor her, nor their chances in the fearsome future. She gave me fifty thousand francs to carry, and we took a walk through town before we boarded a sleeping car that carried us, lying in one another's arms, to Hamburg.

Our ship was the
Meteor.
We had to wait ten days for it to depart, and during that time we rented two rooms in a small garden hotel, pretending to use them both. This was when I discovered that people who encounter one another while sneaking through hotel corridors in the middle of the night pretend against all odds that they and the people they see are invisible, and at breakfast the next morning turn a hot red color that is reminiscent of a velvet curtain in a Danish opera house.

And even if the next morning it is a double world, it is all the sweeter because one is moved by love—sweeter, in fact, than the cup of tea into which one absentmindedly dumps sixteen teaspoons of sugar.

Hamburg, being a sea port, was the site where German sailors brought from the tropics those fragrant, yellow, and acerbic things they called
Zitronen,
a word that to me suggested an electric bicycle or a granular disease of the cells. We had lots of
Zitronen
in our hotel, enough to cut the sugar and make the scene sunny even in the fog.

Each day we walked many miles. We shopped for clothes to wear at the North Pole. We went to music halls and the theater. And Miss Mayevska played the piano in the hotel salon, astonishing the other guests, for in those times great musicianship was recognizable even to the common man, was a badge of honor, something appreciable and respected. I suppose we could have stayed there forever, Miss Mayevska and I, but then the
Meteor
came, gliding down from the Norwegian fjords.

Though we were to stop in Edinburgh and Iceland, where one might conceivably meet a grasshopper, most of the voyage was to be in northern places where the grasshopper potential was nearly zero. We were going to the edge of the permanent pack ice of the Arctic Ocean, at about 82 degrees latitude. The cruise promotions said that if conditions permitted, we would actually reach the North Magnetic Pole, but that was just a lie. They lied as well about the aurora, but, still, we saw it half a dozen times arising with startling precision in the exact middle of the few minutes of darkness we experienced each night as the ship navigated carefully between Spitzbergen and the polar cap, in seas remarkably free of ice.

No one would look for us in the Greenland Sea, for, after all, very few people had even heard of it, and it was the kind of place that led to instant dismissal as the destination of an adolescent who has fled a mental institution. And Miss Mayevska had heard that the light was like the light of purgatory, that, as far as the human imagination could tell, this was the light in the timeless chambers after death—a sad gray certainty behind which waited an uncertain brightness greater than that of the sun, a leonine roar of white and silver, something that, like the aurora, danced in buckling walls, fans, rays, curtains, and arcs, and did so in every bright and pastel color known and in others yet to be seen. She wanted to sense this brightness through the gray that masked it from mortal view, and she wanted, as well, several weeks of the absence of what she called "my great fear."

The
Meteor
was old but fast, and between Hamburg and Edinburgh I had just enough time to injure my back on a mechanical horse. I have neither seen nor heard of mechanical horses since then, and no one may ever want to describe them again, in which case you would never know them, which would be a pity, for they were ridiculous and sad, and they foretold all that would go so terribly wrong with the rest of the century.

In Rio, where ever since I can remember the bodily ideal has been founded in roundness, smoothness, and softness (round breasts and buttocks, shoulders that curve as smoothly and uninterruptedly as the descent of swallows) of flesh the consistency not of a leather saddle or even a sausage but of a balloon half-filled with warm water ... even in Rio the fulcrum of desire has become firmness, strength, capacity, and solidity. Which is to say that now women, no less men, exercise for strength.

I regret that it was not so when I was not an old man. Perhaps if Constance could have run ten kilometers and levitated on a high bar she would not have felt the need to leave me. On the other hand she probably
could
have run ten kilometers and levitated on a high bar: she was very athletic. Perhaps had Marlise had the dolphinlike breasts and strong lithe arms of a swimmer, we would not have so many arguments. Who knows? I do know that even in the Botanical Garden women run past as if tormented by devils, as if breathing their last: but when they are beautiful and move gracefully, they look like goddesses.

Not long ago I saw a girl running against the blue sky in the gardens of Niterói. She wore a peach-colored tank top. Her face was mottled red with the blood coursing through it. And she glistened with sweat. Wisps of displaced blond hair rode softly on the heated air, and her green eyes seemed impossibly alight and deep, with so many flecks of blue and gray that I jumped to attention, my heart pounding, and I thought, 'She must have been born in a jewelry store.'

In my day, exercise was equated with work, because most work involved exercise. As only aristocrats had to devise ways of straining themselves so as not to atrophy, the health establishments, such as they were, reflected an aristocratic bias. For example, the scales in the
Meteor'
s gymnastic salon had tasseled chairs mounted upon them, lest the weighee demean himself by standing. Every position on the exercise equipment was reserved as if it were a box at the opera, and attendants cleaned and polished each apparatus between occupants. The Indian clubs were varnished like the paneling of the elevators at Brooks Brothers, their necks rewrapped daily in Irish linen, the knobs at the end of the handles plated in gold.

But everything in that place was as nothing compared to the row of fifteen mechanical horses, each facing a carefully executed oil of the hunt, each a perfectly rounded rosewood half barrel surmounted by a London saddle and attached to pistonlike devices projecting from heavy plates on the floor. Massive wheels and reciprocators, painted red and green, moved them. The smell of leather and the creak of stirrup straps led the eye to look for horses tossing their heads, for sharp hooves embossing the dirt, and sweat-strained chestnut-colored flanks. But the horses had been replaced and machines ground on under the aristocrats in tweeds and long boots, their crops weaving perilously through the air like fly swatters with Saint Vitus' Dance, although some seemed just to float, chest-high, as if on a current of tropical air.

I suppose that one of the things that qualified Miss Mayevska and me for the mental institution was the characteristic we shared that moved us, together, to the kind of dismay that caused us both, without plan, to enter the salon and ask accusingly, "Where are the horses? This is madness. What have you done with the horses?"

We were immediately ostracized, but the low nobility with whom we traveled began to think that we were the high nobility. We were either that or revolutionaries, to have the nerve to challenge fifteen mounted Prussian landowners, all former army men. As lunatics, we knew that you cannot do without the living horse under the saddle, that to ride on reciprocators and wheels that have neither life nor breath is a sin against God.

I have always been decisive. Indeed, part of the reason my life has been as it has been is that I have looked to God rather than to man for the limits of action. When the war came I did not dither, I simply joined. And I volunteered at each stage, like a madman, until I found myself, by my own writ, riding the gusts of high pressure that fled in spheres from the unpredictable stars of white phosphorus cracking in the air around us. We flew through valleys made in the sky by lighted trajectories streaming up from the ground in lines that were as delicate as the traces of luminous sea creatures lapping in the waves. I trembled with emotion as I hurtled through this, thinking that I was going to die, but I didn't, and she did.

Action, not for its own sake, but without regret, was the river I rode in my early life, and there was something that I almost did, which, if I had done it.... My God, if we had done it, we might be living now together, and she might have borne my children. My course was set, my entire life decided, not by war or the sweep of history, but by the breaking of a biscuit.

The
Meteor
was not a large ship. It was about the size of the royal yacht
Britannia,
its stern raked and rounded in the fashion of a later day. It had many yachtlike characteristics, and was so unlike the boxy Las Vegas-style cruise ships of today that it is as if the sixty years between the two were six hundred. Many of the so-called ships that I see in the harbor at Rio are nothing more than the thoughtless fusion of a jukebox, a cafeteria, and a whorehouse set afloat and asquare by naval architects not worthy of the name, computer-sucking apes whose lives are spent scattering giant slot machines upon the sea.

But the
Meteor
—swift, silent, fitted with grand pianos, a string quartet, and nothing more sinful than a mechanical horse—was shallow of draft and nimble of maneuver enough to take us into the Scottish firths so deeply that you could lean from the deck and pick an apple. The
Meteor's
library (Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Goethe, and new and exciting authors like Yeats, Bunin, and Rilke) was inserted deeply into the creases of Scotland—including even the German newspapers (hung on cane racks), which had then, as they have now, nary a space as big as a beetle unfilled by language as dense as a diamond.

We disembarked over still water and were taken in huge carriages—they must have been huge, each one held twenty-five Germans—to the lakes, castles, and hotels of the interior. The sight of that country drew me in as if I had been born for it.

Miss Mayevska could not begin to understand the brogue. Indeed, not a soul on the ship had the faintest idea of what the local people were talking about, but not only did I understand, I quickly picked up the patterns of speech and could talk as if I had lived there all my life. I was proud of this, for, as I had no family left, my home was in the language and I loved it as if it were as warm and alive as the beautiful young girl by my side.

We were taken in our tremendous carriages to a hotel in the countryside, chosen undoubtedly because it was beautiful, isolated, and luxurious, and because its name,
Trossachs,
was a word the Germans could pronounce as well as the Scots. The hotel was surrounded by hills and glens, and it was in the glens that we felt most strongly the inimitable peace of early June. I have heard it said that Scotland is so beautiful it is banal.

From my position in the garden, in a fume of early light, I cannot understand the notion of banality. So many people spend so much time protecting themselves from the ordinary and the worn that it seems as if half the world runs on a defensive principle that robs it of the tested and the true. But if the truth is common, must it be rejected? If the ordinary is beautiful, must it be scorned? They needn't be, and are not, by those who are free enough to see anew. The human soul itself is quite ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are the best. They last into time as inviolably as the light.