The World as I Found It (23 page)

If logic was the text, grief was the subtext of this equation that Wittgenstein was now beginning to unearth. More than life separates the dead from the living, and more than logic separates this world from the next: with logic there is illogic, too. As a philosopher, Wittgenstein was just coming to the realization that logic cannot make anything
more
logical: a thing is either logical or it is not; there is no in between. Likewise, he had concluded that all sentences are well formed and intelligible, insofar as we have
given
them sense. But what sense was he to make of his own grief, so ill formed and seemingly unintelligible, with neither words nor limits, nor any reason but that it is grief and never entirely goes away.

These are the bitterest herbs, that we should so resent the malingering dead. In its first grips, grief makes itself a felt thing, but then, like an ice face, it shears off, sliding beneath the waves, as fathomless and deep as an iceberg. Wittgenstein's drive to survey the limits and interior of logic, then, was not unlike this deeper need to survey the buried mass of his own grief, that hazy curtain dividing sense from non-sense. And entangled with this grief was guilt. Once having consigned the dead to the ground, the living do not wish the dead to return, not really. They feel that the dead are strangers to life, and especially to the present. Still wearing their old suits and gowns, and burdened with their outdated notions and former bad habits, the dead are like discharged servants: they have found another situation.

This was the most unspoken truth around that table. Not only were the dead brothers not needed, they were not even wanted. For them to have returned would only have botched and complicated matters. Yet, in their minds, Wittgenstein and his siblings would periodically revert to these magical half-conscious wishes that said
if only if
and
had not
and if one could only make right these things that
ought
but
aren't
and
can't
and
never will be
.

Wittgenstein would not soon, or perhaps ever, disentangle the grammar of these illogical propositions. In some his father was the subject, in some the predicate, but in none was his father a logical, complete or entirely human entity. Further, Wittgenstein's grief was complicated by the fact that while the dead brothers had been troubled, scarred and indeed wretched creatures, they had never been even remotely likable. If Wittgenstein as a boy had merely disliked Rudi, he had thoroughly despised Hans, who was forever tormenting him with his cruel, belittling remarks.

Still, a brother is a brother. As much as Wittgenstein's anger at his brothers weighed on him, their youth made them heavier still, the young suicide being, next to a parent, the heaviest of all the dead, and far and away the most illogical.

Wittgenstein's two living brothers were another matter.

Contrary to what their father had said at the table earlier that evening, it was Wittgenstein's brother Paul, a year older than he, who was the real stoic in the family. Nothing could have driven Paul to suicide. For Paul, life itself was a wedge against his father; there was no need to scatter mere words against him, as Gretl did. Paul had no tolerance for what he saw as Gretl's wasteful and frivolous troublemaking. A consummate rationalist, Paul, like Wittgenstein himself, was especially contemptuous of Gretl's lay psychologizing now that she was on Freud's couch. Invoking the satirist Karl Kraus, who regularly excoriated Freud and his followers in his weekly paper
Die Fackel
, Paul said the science of the “soul doctor” was the disease of emancipated Jews. Inside the ghetto, Kraus said, there was the business mentality; outside it, there was the soul doctor, just another manifestation of the Jewish business spirit, robbing men of their souls. As a Jew who believed he had expunged from his character all objectionable Jewish traits, Kraus regularly exhorted his fellow Jews to be less Jewish. All educated Vienna, including Kraus's many enemies and detractors, read him religiously. Once an avid reader of
Die Fackel
, Gretl had now come to hate the satirist's astounding denials. Paul and Wittgenstein loved him, though. They reveled in Kraus's self-appointed mission to cleanse the Augean stables of the German language; and they took special delight in his vow to kick the “Austrian corpse,” which Kraus swore still had life in it, in spite of all signs to the contrary.

It was not Freud but Kraus who was the disease, Gretl told Paul. Kraus's much-vaunted word play did not impress her. She said he reminded her of a child who had opened his diaper and begun playing in it. Oh! crowed Paul. How analytical! The soul doctor could not put it better himself! And so Paul would persist in his Krausian misanthropy and sloganeering, needling her till inevitably things took an ugly turn, as they did one day when Gretl told her brother that he was bound in an invisible corset. You ought to let it out, she snipped. It might help your piano playing.

Gretl immediately apologized for this remark, but characteristically Paul withdrew in icy contempt. No one in the family was colder or more tightly reined in; even Karl Wittgenstein was unnerved by his son's seeming air of invulnerability. Yet how else could Paul, having assumed that death warrant of a musical career, have withstood his father? After years of exercise, Paul's spiny, almost double-jointed fingers had grown almost reptilian in length. Tense as a bow, grimacing, he even enunciated with his fingers, flexing them with a slow and awful cracking, as if his whole rachitic psyche were on the rack. In this respect, Gretl was quite correct about his playing. While technically superb, it was too cold and tense, lacking that surrender necessary to overcome the corset of mere technique.

Kurt, six years older than Wittgenstein, was another story. Woeful Kurt. Even his father was willing to concede that somewhere Kurt had been lost, or dropped on his head. By any standards Kurt was well above average intelligence, but by Wittgenstein standards he was deficient, and Karl Wittgenstein made no effort to conceal the fact. Not that this fazed Kurt. To him, it seemed his father's standards were meaningless, and yet this patent denial had also taken its toll: with no apparent will to combat his father, Kurt's personality had gone from a liquid to a gaseous state. He was perfectly pleasant and intelligent, but he was a counterfeit. Karl Wittgenstein even had a gesture for him: a vague pass of his hand, as if he could merely waft his fingers through Kurt's ghostly head.

The irony was that Kurt had never defied his father. Having entered the business, he was following his father's wishes to the letter. But because Kurt had no real brains or backbone, Karl Wittgenstein found him only another disappointment. With the help of a ghost manager, Kurt ran one of Karl Wittgenstein's lesser steel factories on the eastern outskirts of the city. Once a month or so, usually on a Sunday, Kurt would spend the day at home, burying himself in the paper or affably moping. Otherwise he lived alone and collected stamps — at least, his father said, when he was not collecting dust.

Like compass points, the three brothers faced in different directions, while all veering away from that force field emanating from the head of the table. The two other brothers were installed above in a now bygone constellation called
The Empty Chairs
, two staring holes where once stars had flickered.

All this and more was weighing on Wittgenstein as he sat there pitted against the face of his box, the symphony imploding below him with Schubert's Ninth. And then he could wait no longer. He had to relieve himself.

He dreaded this in public, especially the pressure of doing so during intermission — having to
produce
, with a line of uncomfortable men butting up behind him. Turning to Gretl, he whispered, My leg is cramping. I must get up now. I will see you by the stairs at intermission.

He knew, and she knew, why he was leaving. Wittgenstein saw his sister's disappointment, that he should still be suffering this anxiety, but then in his urgency he was gone, walking stiff-legged down the gilt and marble foyer, hoping to find the lavatory empty now as the orchestra was storming to crescendo.

And he was in luck! The lavatory was deserted, and he whisked in, clasping the stall shut as he spread his black tails and dropped his trousers. But just as he was settling himself on the seat, the lavatory door opened, and he heard someone lock the next stall. Trying to relax, he closed his eyes and thought of
water
— clear, free, running water, as his knotted bladder unclenched, draining into the ringing porcelain. But when he opened his eyes, Wittgenstein suffered a shock: beneath the marble divider, he saw in the next stall not trousers but a skirt and high-heeled shoes.

His first thought was, The poor woman, she took the wrong door. But then he heard the lavatory door open again, this time with women's voices! But how was this possible? He yanked up his trousers and crouched atop the seat with his knees hiked to his chin, certain he would be exposed, arrested!

And no escape! Outside now he heard applause, then the hubbub of the intermission crowds, a sound like rushing surf down the foyer. Quick! What to do? Hide as if the stall were out of order? Run?

He did not run. Flushing the toilet to cover his escape, he walked out like a gentleman, ramrod straight, eyes half closed. Up went a gasp, a cry! A fox was in the hen house! Amidst those clotted pink walls, he had a fleeting sensation of angry geese, of threatening white crinoline wings warding him off. He flinched as a woman looming under a gigantic nebula of hat veered toward him with a sound of either excited clucking or choking. Huddled in the corner, another woman covered her face.

Shrieks and cries as he burst out the door and pushed through the clotted bodies, slipping down the stairs, past the attendant, then out the doors and down the darkened street, where, against all principle, he started running, his forked tails flying as he tore like a thief through the dirty December snow.

O
NCE SAFELY
down the street, he felt soiled. Deranged. Not daring to return for fear of being recognized, he took a cab to the palais, where he telephoned the concert hall to ask that his family be told that he had been taken ill and was now resting at home.

Hardly had he hung up than his mother appeared, having been alerted by her excitable maid, who had been told by the night butler — in spite of Wittgenstein's explicit orders not to disturb his parents — that her red-faced son was so terribly ill and in such a state that he had come home in a cab,
gnädige Frau, without even a coat and hat!

What-
is
-the-matter? demanded his frantic mother, indignant to find him sitting up in his condition.

Please, he said. I'm really all right. I became ill.

Ill?
she sputtered, as if to say he surely must be gravely ill to appear at this hour hatless and coatless and plainly absent of his senses. Where is Gretl? she asked, looking around.

Dabbing his eyes, he said very softly, I called the hall. She's there still.

Frau Wittgenstein was incredulous.
You left and did not tell them?

And he, laboring now, I told you … I felt too ill.

Ill! she cried. What is this,
ill
!
How
are you ill?

But here he was stuck: in all the ruckus, he had had no time to concoct an alibi, and so he found himself in the double bind of having to find an illness serious enough to justify his sudden departure yet not so grave that he would be plagued for days with questions and solicitude. At the same time, he dared not make things any fishier by hesitating, so he said, I vomited. But in that flash of his mother's eyes, he saw his error.

I knew it! she cried, knitting her frayed fingers together. With overwork and this needless stoicism of yours, you have given yourself a nervous ulcer.

It's not
stoicism
, he said irritably. Those are Father's words. A stomach is not a creed, it's only a stomach.

Don't be clever, his mother reprimanded. You never had such a stomach in my house. Did you see blood in your sputum?

Blood?

His father's voice. Rushing in still slick from his evening bath and swaddled in his smoking jacket, Karl Wittgenstein was leading a brigade consisting of the guilty maid and the butler, who was carrying a chest filled with enough bandages and medicinals to have supplied a polar expedition.

What blood? demanded his father.

No blood. Peeved at him for barging in and taking over as usual, Frau Wittgenstein was unusually snappish. I asked if he vomited blood.

He vomited
blood
?

And he said no, insisted Frau Wittgenstein.
No
.

Well, the father demanded, shaking his arms. Then what
did
he vomit?

My
dinner
, groaned the son.

Oh. The father nodded. Our
dinner
, was it?

It hardly helped matters when, in the midst of this now heated medical inquest, Gretl arrived, throwing off her fur in alarm as Wittgenstein stared her down, directing her with his emphatic eyes not to make this any more of a scene.

Fifteen minutes later, it was all he could do to convince his father not to summon the family physician out of bed, and this only after promising he would see him in the morning for a complete physical examination. Still, for Karl Wittgenstein to persuade his son to see the doctor after the fact was hardly as gratifying or demonstrative as taking action
now
, even if it only meant picking up the telephone. Karl Wittgenstein found few acceptable opportunities to show fatherly solicitude. These moments were rare as eclipses, yet despite their bungling, awkward quality, the feeling in them ran deep, so deep that Karl Wittgenstein finally burst from the room, wounded that his ungrateful son should deny him even this. Wittgenstein called after him appreciatively, while for his mother, who seemed sure he was hemorrhaging, he contrived to swallow some buttermilk. Then, with a worried, suspicious look, Frau Wittgenstein also left, off to quell her wounded husband.