The Beautiful Possible (2 page)

November 1938

Walter awakens to the smell of burning paper. With the bedroom shades drawn, the late afternoon street sounds are muffled. He untangles Sonia’s hair from his hand, steps to the door and peeks. His father kneels before the fireplace, feeding the flames with rolled-up sheet music. Josef rips the pages from their bindings and shapes them into logs, the edges cinched tight. Walter winces at the sight of his father’s fuel supply. Maybe the fire will release some kind of strange music, he thinks. A prompt, a sign, a directive.
Leave this place; embrace your future
. But a flute étude cackles like ordinary paper, heats the living room for a brief spell, and then flickers out.

Josef lights a cigar with the last embers and steps over to his typewriter. He taps a few keys slowly, then attacks the whole alphabet with ardor. Here he goes again, thinks Walter. Another afternoon of futility for the father; another afternoon of love for the son. He listens to the keys explode under Josef’s fingers and
knows his father is writing yet another letter to his former colleagues at the university that no longer employs him, claiming that Josef Westhaus educated a generation of Berliners to understand Plato and Aristotle and this defrocked professor is not like other Jews. For a while Josef mailed these but now he doesn’t even address the envelopes.

Walter would give themselves another two weeks. Enough time to convince his father that he could teach philosophy and make music in Palestine, that he could survive the heat and possibly again know happiness. Two weeks would be enough time for Walter to arrange for their visas and pack up the whole traveling circus: Josef, Sonia, her parents in Leipzig, their embroidered tablecloths and Sabbath samovar, his father’s flute, the unburnt sheet music—and himself, an eighteen-year-old student who needs no luggage of his own, a man who memorizes all the poems he loves. Walter imagines a caravan of loaded camels meandering through the streets of Berlin, Sonia riding in the lead, wearing a white veil, her long blond hair brushing the camel’s skin.

“What’s the plan?” asks Sonia, her voice thin and hoarse.

Walter returns to the bed and spoons behind her.

“My father’s burning up his études,” he whispers.

Sonia presses her nose to his hand and inhales the faint smell of vodka they drank sometime that morning, in between the lines of poetry, the languid sex, the hours he spent sketching her toes, her incessant question:
when,
schatzi,
when?

He pulls at her long curtain of hair and sniffs the ends.

“Cardamom?”

“Cheap perfume.”

“I could smell you forever.”

“Palestine will be our forever.”

Sonia winces, thinking of the flute études burning on the other side of the wall.

She once believed every piece of sheet music was holy, that the pages filled with Italian words—
con brio, andante, agitato, subito piano—
were her cues for how to shape time with her voice. Even if Sonia had memorized Brahms lieder she would hold the sheet music in her hand and fix her eyes on its elegant code. She misses the nights she sang in a café, and longs for the moments after the applause when a stranger would approach her with words of praise.

If Billie Holiday sang Brahms she would be you.

“I asked you about the plan, Walter.”

“What?”

“Stop dreaming, schatzi
.
The currency of real life. Certificates and visas. We can’t live in your childhood bedroom forever, waiting for your father to pack his bags. I can’t breathe in here. His cigars, the burning—”

“Think of us standing on the deck of the boat,” says Walter.

Sonia points to her wrist. “When?”

“Two weeks.”

“Promise?”

He holds up two fingers and presses them against her lips.

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” says Sonia. “The minute we arrive, let’s buy your father new music.”

Walter tries to imagine his father crossing an arid desert in Palestine with a folio of études under his arm, but he can’t picture
him anywhere except this apartment, or laying flowers at his wife’s grave, or delivering lectures at the university, speaking the only language he knows. No new verb forms lie ahead for Josef Westhaus; no tender pangs of a life marked by change.

“And if he won’t come?” asks Walter. “I can’t leave him behind.”

Sonia springs up and sits on her heels. “We will convince him! There will be orchestras and cafés and Arabs selling rugs so we can buy him one that doesn’t stink of old smoke. He will be happy again; he will remarry! And he will find new students, even if he has to stand before them wearing short sleeves for the first time in his life.”

“And us? What will we do over there?”

“I’ll sing lieder in the cafés.”

Walter’s friends talk about this haven called Palestine but he can only imagine the words from the Bible he learned in poetry classes. Sonia’s café would be built from a pile of stones, a dish of gold, and a measure of barley.

“You won’t be singing lieder over there.”

“But everyone loves Brahms.”

Walter maps her gaze. He can tell when her thoughts careen into a private fog, and he waits until she finds her way back.

“What are you remembering?”

“Nothing important.” She shakes out her hair, piles it on top of her head and lets it down again.

“I’ll sing a new kind of lieder then. I’ll set the Song of Songs to music and we’ll play it at our wedding.”

“And me? What will I do?”

“You will sketch Mediterranean beauties and become a professor of world religions. It’s your destiny! How many men your age see their work translated into English and then published in a journal?”

“A silly joke. I only wrote that paper to impress you.”

“My seducer.
‘The words of the texts echo in the lives of the people who read them.’
If I had told you I was in love with the Book of Lamentations and not the Song of Songs would you have written a paper on that?”

“I’m glad you didn’t try me,” says Walter.

“I wouldn’t have. I’m not one for sorrow.”

“Then you were born into the wrong time.”

Sonia sits up and straddles her legs around his. “A few more weeks and life with you will be beautiful.”

Walter runs his hands through her hair.

“I could swear it’s cardamom.” He inhales. “One day I will rub spices on your belly.”

“And?”

“We will pluck dates from our own trees—”

“And—”

“Stand in a wadi—”

“And—”

“With our children—”

Sonia wraps her palm around Walter’s wrist, shaping her hand into a bracelet. “We will make the beautiful possible.” She closes her eyes and shudders.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” she says. “Toss me a line, please.”

“Tagore or Heine?”

“Oh, Tagore. And say it slowly.”

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

“Now Whitman.”

“The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.”

“You and your faithless American poet! How can you believe that?”

“Poetry is my god, Sonia. My one and only.”

“When I read your paper on the Song of Songs, I honestly thought you were religious in some way.”

“The Song is a poem. Nothing more. Are you disappointed?”

“You never disappoint.”

“Two weeks. All of us. I promise,” he says.

“One more line and maybe I can trust you.”

“Tagore? Whitman?”

She smiles. “Ours. The Song.”

“His belly is an ivory tablet on a sapphire stone.”

“Sounds like you. Only they didn’t have
spritzkuchen
back then. You, schatzi, have an excuse for your untableted belly.”

She rubs her cheek along Walter’s chest, draws circles around his torso.

“Promise we’ll go to Palestine?”

“Promise,” he says.

The fire has gone out. The cackling from the living room has stopped, along with the thrum of the typewriter keys. Walter pulls the blanket over their shoulders, and Sonia closes her
eyes, listening to Josef warm up with a minor scale, then an arpeggio, then the first movement of the Bach Flute Sonata, unaccompanied.

“Your father sounds good today. Softer. I feel as if I’m underwater.”

Walter slithers to the edge of the bed. “Need anything from the kitchen?”

“We finished the crackers last night,” she says. “Every crumb.”

“I’ll look.”

“No, Walter. Let me. I’ll go crazy if I spend another minute inside this love cave.”

“Check for vodka too. There may be a drop left.”

She reaches for a slip and laughs. “Will your father faint from the sight of me?”

“Possibly.” Walter passes Sonia his sweater. She wraps it around her shoulders, twirls, and winks.

Her face will never age, he thinks. One day we will both be old and I will brush her long white hair and remember her standing before me like this, half-dressed, fully ripe, smelling like cardamom.

“Better, yes?”

“When you come back, stay just as you are so I can sketch you.”

She winks again.

The bedroom door closes behind her and Walter reaches for his pad and charcoal. He gazes at a blank piece of paper and imagines Sonia in the center of it, his sweater wrapped around her breasts, a glass in her hand. This time he will sketch with focus,
committing this moment with her to a kind of permanence. Everything is backwards, he thinks. His world is ending and he and Sonia stand on the edge of a new story to be lived in a new land. Sonia’s love will keep him safe and when she gets lost in the tangle of her thoughts he will recite lines of poetry, surround her with words of comfort.

“Scheiss!”
yells Josef.

Parading herself in a slip was a mistake, thinks Walter.
Forget the crackers! Come back!
Glass breaks, shatters, the front door pops, the music stops, Josef screams. From the bed, Walter smells gunmetal and grime, stench from another world. An icy shrill passes from Sonia’s throat, then a shot rings out, then another, another. The flute crashes to the floor, two bodies fall. Walter reaches for a shirt—
save them!
—but then freezes and slips under the bed, lies facedown, his arms wrapped tightly around his head.
Save them, you coward! Save them—

The bedroom door cracks open,
that stench!

The profile of a man’s boot is close enough for him to touch, gleaming, black. A bloody footprint. Another pair of boots casts a shadow at the door. Walter flinches.

“Lass uns gehen!”

Hands press on the bed above him; a man sniffs the sheets like a crazed dog.

“Kardamom. Das fraülein—”

The boot pivots.

“Gehen!”

A sharp inhale; a groan.

“Gehen!”

The men gallop down the back stairs, a door flails on its hinge, a woman shouts in the street. Breaking glass, a gunshot, more glass.

The living room is silent; his father’s cigar is ash. The radiator hisses, stops, and hisses once more. Walter lies under his bed, facedown in his own vomit, shit oozing between his legs. He slithers on his belly, reaches for the bed frame, and stops himself. Sonia. His father. One more body left to fall. Too soon to get out of here alone; too late to save them. It should have been me, he thinks.
It was meant for me.
Walter pulls his arm close to his torso, his body a rolled-up rug.

He hears nothing, just the rasp of his breathing and the rodent sound of his teeth chewing off his thumbnail.
Come back to me, Sonia. Forget the crackers. Forget the vodka.
His tongue finds his lips and just before Walter fades out he tastes the last remains of cardamom, and there he finds her, climbing a mountain where spices grow, and she takes his hand and pulls him onto a slab of rock.
The words echo in our lives now, just like you wrote in your paper
, she says. And then Sonia lets go of his hand and runs onto the hills where hyssop grows alongside mint and she runs and runs and then she is gone.

December 1938

The alabaster moon brightens the surface of the Mediterranean and Walter leans against the rail of the
Conte Rosso,
staring at the shimmering light. His jacket rests loosely on his shoulders and his body feels untethered, a feather in free fall. He could jump, he thinks; his body would float in the vastness like a swirl of seaweed and then descend. As a child, Walter loved swimming across Lake Wannsee, caressed by buoyancy. His father would wait at the shore and Walter would propel his arms and reach him in a few strokes. But now he has been washed into the ocean by sorrow, saved so he can live out his days in mourning. The passengers babble about the mysterious destination called Shanghai.
What a shithole! Illness and poverty await us all! But Shanghai is the promised land! Silks! Opium! Tea!
The sound of laughter wafts from the ship’s bar and cackles like fireworks against the night sky.

Walter has not spoken to anyone on board and he wonders if he has gone mute. The lights of Brindisi flicker in the distance
and he holds up his hands. The left is steadier than the right, even though he has chewed off his thumbnail and the raw skin throbs. Perhaps in Shanghai he will see a doctor.

Sorry, Sonia. No promise kept. This boat isn’t sailing to Palestine.
Only a month ago he had promised her they would live the words of the Song in the place where they were written.

Nard and saffron, fragrant reed and cinnamon, with all aromatic woods, myrrh and aloes—all the choice perfumes.

As if poetry would save them.

At night, the boisterous chatter of cocktail parties fills the decks. Every kiss is welcomed; every stranger’s touch encouraged. Women paint their lips red and invite men to rest their palms at the small of their backs; older couples lie in each other’s arms on narrow chairs and gaze up at the stars. To Walter it all seems like a display of relief or a vast delusion. When the Aga Khan and his wife board at Djibouti Walter peers at their elegant costumes as if he is standing on the other side of a painted screen. Life has two shades of color: muted grays that cover some kind of pain, and vivid primary hues that strain to defy death. Walter can intuit how each person on the
Conte Rosso
is either wounded or miraculously unscathed.

He tries to utter simple phrases to his fellow passengers—
pass the salt
or
where are you going?
—but he can only stammer. The effort to speak feels overwhelming. Walter shares his cabin with three other men, two of whom entertain women during the day. The third man has a mustache and wears a brown felt hat that he only removes at night. He sneaks glances at Walter and then snaps his head away, revealing a twitch in his left eye. Walter
watches his every move and decides that he won’t go to Shanghai after all; wherever this man disembarks, Walter will follow. After losing Sonia and his father and boarding the wrong ship, the code of his life will be random. Tagging along like a loyal mutt to a stranger is the perfect course for him, a roll of the dice that will determine his future.

When the ship docks in Bombay Walter is half-asleep in the cabin. His head swims with voices he can’t reach: his father calls his name and Sonia sings lieder that fade into murmurs. Walter hears the whistle and commotion on the decks above, but his thumb throbs harder than ever, and just as he imagines a Shanghai doctor standing above him with a scalpel, he spots the man with the brown felt hat fold his coat under his arm and step out of the cabin. He turns toward Walter and winks.

“Follow me,” he says. “You will be better off here.”

Walter jumps to his feet, grabs his suitcase, and trails the man down the gangplank, striding in his shadow. No one asks for his ticket; no one asks his name. Walter could be invisible. He pauses to tie his shoelace and then looks around for the man he followed, but he only spots different hats worn by other strangers. Throughout his life, he will leave out the details but will say,
I followed a man wearing a brown felt hat and ended up alone in Bombay.

He wanders the streets for hours, a single suitcase in hand. The thick air and unfamiliar sounds give Walter a migraine but he can’t find a place to sit. Cows loiter on the roads and rickshaws speed past, shaking up dust that blinds his eyes. Just before sunset, Walter finds a brothel and arranges to rent an empty room.
He spends his first days in India lying on a thin cot, clutching a pillow to his chest. Every morning a prostitute named Kavita brings him soap and a towel and teaches him the English words she learned from her British clients. Walter asks her to stare at his hands and tell him if they still tremble. Her eyes glance from one to the other and every day she measures the level of tremors on a chart she has drawn. After many days the line is flat.

As Walter saunters through the city, he can hear Sonia’s voice calling to him.
When are we going to Palestine, schatzi?
Beggars line the streets and pungent spices waft around him but Walter cannot discern them; he can’t even smell his own sweat. When passersby veer away from lepers, Walter moves in close enough for the flies to circle his arms. The world holds no perfume and no stench; his nose is oblivious to its offerings.

Four months pass in a haze. Every afternoon Kavita shaves Walter’s face and ties his hair into a ponytail. Walter asks her to bring him some charcoal and a sketchbook. At first he only writes numbers, the tally of days since it happened. The day after the gunshots. The day after that. The futile attempt to find Sonia’s parents. The train to Trieste and the confusion at the port. The man who handed him a ticket and told him that the
Conte Rosso
was not sailing to Palestine, but he should board anyway. Another man who pointed to the ship and said, “Shanghai is good for the Jews.” The haze of dialects. His aching thumb. The porter’s question:
Is anyone traveling with you? Not anymore.

Walter sleeps with the sketchbook nestled in the crook of
his arm. When Kavita comes into his room each morning she moves the book aside and lies beside him, waiting for a response, but Walter does not break away from sleep until the afternoon. After her last client leaves at midnight, Kavita poses for him and Walter uses the shape of her body to remember Sonia. Her neck is longer than Sonia’s, her hips slimmer; Kavita’s toes are stubby like a small girl’s, while Sonia’s toes were shaped like question marks. Instead of sketching Kavita, he sketches Sonia as if she were still alive.
This is a picture of my fiancée,
he tells Kavita. When he opens his eyes after long naps, Walter can hear Sonia asking him if he can rub spices on her belly and if they have packed their bags for the journey home. He can feel her lips on his earlobe, her hand resting on his chest. At times he speaks to her as if they are a long-married couple.
Taste this, schatzi. You like fluffy rice.

One night he falls asleep with a fresh drawing resting beneath his cheek and wakes up to the chalky smell of charcoal. Walter asks Kavita to bring him a clean bedsheet and he envelops himself in its faint whiff of lemon, soap, and women’s hands. He runs outside and the smells overwhelm him: the acrid cow shit, the lepers that reek of rotting skin, and the carnival of spices—arousing cumin, sweet tamarind, the dungy stench of
hing
—that fills his nostrils and saturates his brain.

Walter runs from market to market, plunging his hands into barrels of seeds and herbs. He inhales turmeric root and clutches thick chunks of it until his palms turn yellow. He rubs fenugreek seeds into his hair and chews on them until the bitter center pops open on his tongue. He hoards fistfuls of coriander seeds and sucks on them until he releases the soapy center that makes
him feel giddy. He snaps apart black cardamom pods that carry the earthy smell of the Grunewald Forest he visited as a boy and he clutches the cracked pieces in his fingers and sways from side to side. In the street markets of Bombay, where the sight of the deranged and the lost is not unusual, Walter covers his head with a shawl, holds seeds and roots to his nose, and
shuckles
like a Jew in prayer. A merchant named Rohan teaches him the names of the spices and shows him how to use a
sil batta
so he can grind them in the traditional Hindu way. At night, Walter sprinkles Kavita’s naked body with the spices he’s hoarded.

With his senses awakened, Walter rises at dawn and arrives at the market when the merchants are setting up their stalls. He learns the names of every spice and in time Rohan hires him as an assistant. He lifts heavy seed sacks from a rickshaw and carries them to the stall. The muscles in his arms twitch from the effort but then grow tighter with each passing day. Walter summons Sonia a bit less and responds to Rohan’s prompts to carry a sack of hyssop from one corner to another, grind turmeric root into powder, help an elderly woman load her bags.

“I haven’t seen this one before,” says Walter. Rohan has just finished arranging the stall and the first customers meander in. Walter sticks his head inside a sack filled with pods and inhales.

“
Kamal kakdi
,” says Rohan. “Lotus seeds.”

“A well-known aphrodisiac,” someone says in German.

Walter leans deeper into the sack.

“Don’t you remember your own language, Walter? A handful of those pods could seduce the world.”

Walter pops his head out and glances at the man’s sandals.

“Who are you?”

“Be careful whom you follow next time.”

Walter looks up at a man with a mustache who is dressed for a cricket game. The man’s left eye twitches.

“You were on the
Conte Rosso
.”

“Until I got off, with you walking in my shadow.”

“You told me to. And then I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“See that? I’m not a stranger after all.”

Walter feels lightheaded. He has chores to do, new spices to sample. This is no time to play rhetorical games with a cricket player. Back to work. Kamal kakdi. Lotus seeds.

“Look at me, Walter.”

He glances up. The man’s twitch seems absurd to him.

“How do you know my name? I didn’t talk to you on the ship,” says Walter. “I didn’t talk to anyone.”

“I know your work.”

“What work? What have I ever done?”

The man laughs. “Join the club! All of human accomplishments are as illusive as dust. Every one of us is in the process of becoming, aren’t we, my friend?”

Walter glares. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I apologize. Subtlety is not my strong point.” He offers his hand. “Paul Richardson. I read your paper on religious desire in the Song of Songs.”

“That was a lifetime ago,” says Walter.

“Do you have any idea what you wrote? You pulled the words of the Song outside of their context; you opened all the windows.
If you apply your erudition to the entire Bible, future generations will read the words in a brand new way.”

Walter grimaces. “Who are you to care?”

“I teach this stuff. An itinerant underpaid scholar or a professor of enlightenment—take your pick.”

Walter shrugs, then lowers his head into the sack and sniffs.

“I heard about your father and your fiancée. I’m very sorry. Maybe I can help you in some way.”

Walter pops his head out.

“Have we met? Before the
Conte Rosso
?”

Paul laughs. “In a karmic way, of course. But no, we were never introduced. I was a student at Oxford, had a fellowship in Berlin. And now I bounce around the American university system with frequent interludes in India.”

“A guru without the robes.”

“A small iota of scholarship and a whole lot of preaching to eager young students. At the end of the day, it’s a livelihood. You might consider it—academia would suit you.”

Walter shakes his head.

“You have no idea what you hit upon in that paper,” says Paul.

“I wrote it to impress my fiancée. She loved the Song.”

“Your work had traces of brilliance.”

“I wrote that paper as a romantic wink, an inside joke.”

“That was some wink, Walter. A love letter like that can alter the field of religious studies.”

“It’s yours for the taking.”

Paul grabs Walter’s hands. “Study with me,” he says.

“Thank you, but no.”

“Look. I don’t need another young man to turn misty-eyed over my stories about Hindu gods. My American students think scholarship is a slot machine for wisdom. Line up the cherries and out pop the aphorisms.”

“What makes you think I can do any better?”

“I’d love to find out.”

“You’re looking for a protégé.”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Walter stares at Paul’s face, looking for a sign, a hint of an idea. He boarded the wrong ship, followed a man wearing a hat, and wound up here. In Bombay. He has a friend named Kavita and a job in a spice market. Isn’t that enough?

“I don’t think so,” says Walter.

“You are such a lost man.”

“I have a job.”

“You haul sacks and get high on spices. I’d call that a dalliance, a goddamn waste.”

Walter shakes his head.
Go play cricket. Go off to your American students and teach them Tagore’s line about the butterfly that counts moments and tell them how my Sonia was shot. Just go—

“Please leave me,” says Walter.

“Is that what you really want?”

“Yes, it is. I never should have followed you. There were other strangers on that ship. Beautiful women. I should have trailed someone else. Or stayed until Shanghai, where no one would have found me.”

“I will leave you then. I’m sorry.”

Paul leaves and wanders off, first slowly and then more quickly, winding his way through a maze of alleys.

That night, Walter asks Kavita if she knows Tagore’s work.

“Of course,” she says. “Even a Bengali whore knows her national poet.” She closes her eyes and Walter listens to her sing in a scratchy high-pitched voice. When she finishes, she opens her eyes and takes his hand.

“Gitanjali,”
she says.

“What is the song about?”

Kavita pulls a sheet of paper from Walter’s sketchbook and draws a footpath crossing a river. Then she sketches a primitive boat with a stick figure standing at the helm, playing a flute. Walter lies beside Kavita and closes his eyes. He has no boat, no river, no flute. Sonia and his father are dead. Kavita, Rohan, and Paul are the only people in the world he knows. One. Two. Three. No more.