Heir to the Glimmering World (21 page)

"Are you back with him?"

"That depends on you."

I did not know how to answer.

"I told him," Ninel said, "if you gave me the money I'd run up to Albany now and then."

"Then you
are
back with him—"

"Maybe sometime. Right now I need the cash, I'm going to Spain."

Mitwisser's breathing grew shallow; the vibration of his throat had diminished. The ruined archive. The disappointing telegram. Falangists; Loyalists; the refugee fragment...

"Did Bertram really say—"

"Well, it wasn't
all
my idea, was it? He's broke himself, and you're in good shape here, you've got some sort of job—" She took in the disordered bed against the wall, Mrs. Mitwisser's nightgown, the errant hairpins, the typewriter. "At least you're not in cahoots with the gentry, like your old man." The white mist of Mitwisser's beginning beard had crept to his brow and neck. He was white all over. "The kid's got a job with you, right? I'll say one thing for her, she types like a demon." She threw herself down on the floor. I saw the soles of her boots. "Go get the dough, will you? Believe me, I'm sticking around until I can feel it in my pants pocket." She grinned up at Mitwisser. "Ever hear of a sitdown strike?"

I raced up to the third floor and pulled my suitcase out from under what had been Mrs. Mitwisser's bed. From Willi's old sneaker I drew out Bertram's blue envelope. The money was not whole. The ribbon and the rest of what I had bought for the old machine had depleted it by a small sum. I made up the difference with five dollars taken from my salary.

Into Ninel's open palm I counted out Bertram's money.

"Good. Five hundred. This goes to the cause."

"And what is that?" Mitwisser said in his new thin voice.

"Against the Fascists. For the people."

"You've tricked Bertram. He thinks he's getting you back," I said.

"He'll get over it."

The front door blasted like a gunshot: she was gone. I had obeyed her, I had been craven, Ninel in battle array had bullied me into submission. The money was snatched away, surrendered. I had raised no hullabaloo.

Then it hung before me that it was Bertram, not Ninel, I had obeyed.

Mrs. Mitwisser sat on the bottom step. Her shoes were in her hands; she was staring into their dark caverns.

"My poor Elsa," Mitwisser murmured.

Heinz said, "The man kept on yelling Rose. He wanted you."

"It wasn't a man. It's someone my cousin knows—"

The pants, the cropped head, the cap. They had thought Ninel in her cap and pants was a man. A man invading the house. A man storming in, a roughneck, howling, demanding, ordering! As before. As before. Round and round in the black car, the El Dorado, the tunnels of her shoes, the blocked tunnels. Blocked. Blackened.

Mitwisser loomed and swelled; he thickened to a roar. "See what you have done to my wife!"

That night Mrs. Mitwisser did not return to her husband's sheets; once again she was deposited in the bed opposite mine. And again I was dependent on the household's good will. Without Bertram's money, what was I? Even with it, I had nowhere to turn; but Bertram's blue envelope had supplied the illusion that my fate was my own, that liberty lay open before me, that I could depart when I wished, that I was the prisoner of no one's hard heart ... and that Bertram had spread over me the wings of his affection. Bertram had no wings. He had given them to Ninel. His kiss was ash. My fear was that Mitwisser would send me away: I had brought into the house the most perilous commotion of all—it had undone his wife. His fragile wife, crushed. Foundering. She would not eat, she would not put on her shoes, she would not come downstairs. As before, as before. And how blooming she had been in her nice dress, how beautifully restored, how tenderly and coaxingly she had won back her littlest child!

I had lost Bertram's money, and without his affection what did it matter? James had anyhow assured me that I was an heiress. The Bear Boy in the green hat. Worth, James had implied, thousands. Thousands? A treasure taken on faith. Like my father, what did I know of collectors? Where would I find one?

In a day or so it became clear that Professor Mitwisser was not going to send me away. I could type like a demon; and besides, I was familiar with his undulating accent, his ellipses, his silences, the formal vagaries of his English; and when he requested it I could put my finger on any volume on his shelves, whatever its language. I knew the controversy over the conversion of Rabbanites to Karaites according to the testimony of Tobias ben Moses of Constantinople. And I knew the refutations of Karaite rationalism, in favor of poetry, by the Rabbanite Tobias ben Eliezer of Thessalonica. I knew all those curious conflicts and feuds, and those even more curious names and towns and regions.

He would not send me away. He could not.

James, passing in the hallway, whispered, "She's out, I'm back in, how about that?"

"No," I said, "it's going to be Anneliese's lessons."

But it was neither. Mrs. Mitwisser had vacated her husband's bed. The late hours in his study were released for Mitwisser's disposal. Spherical trigonometry and Molière with Anneliese, or shrieks and teacups with James. He chose the fragment from Spain; he chose the Nature of God; he chose al-Kirkisani. Each night I entered his study promptly at ten, shut the door, and typed against Mitwisser's ecstasy far into the sleeping stillness.

34

H
E HARDLY KNEW
why he'd picked Cairo. Probably it was because of the Pyramids. Or because there were rumors that war was about to break out in Europe. He didn't care anything about it, but he guessed that if it was going to be England against the Kaiser, he was for the Kaiser, he couldn't be for England: his mother had dressed him like a little English boy, and his father had drawn him that way, he had been turned into a caricature of Englishness, and some people had even gone so far as to compare him to Christopher Robin. So of course he hated everything English, and was indifferent to Europe—but if there was going to be a war, he didn't want to be anywhere near it or in it. He did what all tourists in Egypt do, hired a guide, rode on a camel, sailed down the Nile in a dhow, gaped at the endless sands, the ancient stones, the crumbling paws of the Sphinx—and, in a decaying museum whose walls were cracked and patched, met the eerie stretched-leather face of a mummy. The mummy was in a glass case; a living fly had somehow got in and was standing on a horrible cracked yellow tooth, rubbing its front legs together. There were flies everywhere.

Jerusalem wasn't far; he went to Jerusalem, where there were just as many flies, and idling squads of Turkish soldiers, and monks in long brown robes and Arabs in dusty white djellabas and Jews in dusty black caftans. The soldiers and the Jews and the Arabs mostly wore proper shoes; the monks wore sandals, exposing their dusty toenails. It was as hot as it had been in Cairo, unendurably hot, but at dusk, which came on suddenly, a delicate coolness drifted from hill to hill.

He took a room at the YMCA, and every day walked over rocky fields sprouting sparse scrub—sheep nibbling at it under the weary eye of some elderly shepherd—to the Old City. He wandered into the souk to watch the cobblers and bloody butchers in their dim cavelike shops, and men in kaffiyehs smoking waterpipes in dirty doorways under medieval arches. In another part of town (to his surprise, fabled Jerusalem was no bigger than a small town) he bought a hat with a great brim from a Jewish shop, to keep the sun off. He avoided the Wailing Wall, but once he stumbled into what he thought was one of the smaller churches—the place was rife with sects—and though he never knew it, it was an old Karaite synagogue. Now and then there were riots: Arabs, Jews, soldiers. Knives, shots, screams. He ignored these events as well as he could; they weren't his affair. In late June he learned about the assassination in Sarajevo. He read it in the
Palestine Post,
went up to Jaffa, found an Italian freighter, and headed for Algiers.

It wasn't easy to get passage, even on a freighter, but in Egypt he had discovered the law of the Levantine bribe, which could procure anything one liked and satisfy any whim. All he had were whims, why not? He could buy whatever he pleased. The ship clung to the African coast, as if, like himself, it feared Europe's bellicose touch. In Algiers they spoke Arabic and French. By now he was used to the sound of Arabic, which he preferred to the sound of French, though both were only discord. France was in the war, and France was in Algiers, but it was also far away. He picked up a little French, enough to buy his dinner in a restaurant. Now he experimented with living well: a suite in the Hotel Promenade. He claimed he was an American businessman. He was almost twenty-one and no one believed him, but the value of his money was never in doubt. He bought a couple of bespoke suits and a Panama hat with a ribbon and a little blue feather; he bought a heap of silk ties, and flirted with the lipsticked blonde waitress in what had become his favorite restaurant. Sometimes she came late at night to his suite. He had been warned to keep away from Arab girls. Their brothers would take revenge.

But he disliked living well. He disliked his expensive clothes and gave them away, all in a bundle, to a beggar on the street, who kissed him on both cheeks and showered him with Allah's blessings. The silk ties and the bespoke suits felt like a costume. The Bear Boy had had enough of costumes: those humiliating scalloped round collars, that lace and trimming! He put an end to Jim and Jimmy, and began to call himself James. All around him they were attending to the war. The French were heatedly loyal; the young men enlisted and joined the fighting. He had more in common with the Arabs, who were inclined toward the Kaiser; they hated the French and wished them ill and wished them gone.

He tried to ignore the war. It wasn't only England and France (and the city was filling up with uniforms), it was Russia, Belgium, Serbia, Italy, Japan! America belatedly, thanks to that fool Wilson. And on the Kaiser's side, Turkey, Bulgaria, the whole Hapsburg empire; such uneasy bedfellows. Half the world shooting at the other half, what sense did it make? He was glad he could not read the newspapers, but the war was a nuisance anyhow, his money was repeatedly held up, and Mr. Fullerton wrote that Mr. Winberry was now in Officers' Training, and what a pity that James was stuck in such a godforsaken corner of the globe. He did feel a bit stuck; he had hoped to get a look at Scandinavia, mists and fjords and northern lights, but there was no possibility of ordinary travel now. So instead he strolled at night into certain alleys he had discovered, and shooed away the little boys who were selling themselves, and found the shadowy wall where kif could be bought from a man in Western dress who, in daylight, could pass for a local
avocat.

The kif gave him dreams. He was always awake and could manipulate the dreams, though they came of themselves—and yet he could turn them, he could swell them up or narrow them down, he could lighten or darken them. It seemed he was in control of the plots of stories that were imposed on him. Once he dreamed he was a king, and at the same time he was the king's footman, and he could choose which he preferred to remain, king or footman; but it was imperative to choose, so he chose to be king, and the self that was footman dissipated into vapor, a perfumed vapor that wafted away into folds, like draped silk. And another time the dream had the shape of a window, through which he could see red storms and whirlwind-tossed gardens. Mostly the dreams were peaceful, the kif was friendly, and got him through the war, so that finally he was not obliged to take much notice of it. And when he visited the shadowy wall in daylight, the sun glared sharply against it; a shawled old woman sat with her back to it, cutting open melons for sale.

The kif was friendly, and under its tutelage he attained this knowledge: he did not want to be or to become.

In the daylight alley there was a creature with a hairless yellowed face who played a flutelike instrument, a short pipe pocked by triangular holes. He could not tell from the rags around its head whether the creature was male or female. A rusted pot on the cobblestones was there for the coins. He threw in, for the sake of the tune, the equivalent of ten American dollars, and the creature crowed with jubilation, and piped its single wavering tune again and again, lifting its knees, hopping and marching. The tune was thin, unclear, strange, derived from some unrecognizable set of scales; there was no orderliness in it, it wound and wound, a wire spiraling into an abyss, and he thought: That is what I wish, to be formless like this tune, and wayward: no one will predict me, no one will form me.

The blonde waitress (she wasn't at all pretty, but her legs were pleasingly long) who had come to his suite in the Promenade, now that he had given it up would no longer come. He had a room in a lodging house—bed only, no board. He did not like his French landlady, who (he assumed) suspected he was a mobster or a thief lying low; but he liked his little room, with its conscientious doily on this or that surface, to prevent water marks. He liked it because it did nothing to constrict or confine him, and the doilies, which had that intention, were only comedy. Algiers was comedy: the haughty French, the angry Arabs, the stupid war. The sexless creature, tootling on its pipe; the tune that emptied meaning out of Creation. His kif-dreams were senseless, formless, aimless. Under the tutelage of the kif he laughed. Crowing and laughing over the void.

The war ended. His ship docked in New York—a Swedish ship, the closest he would ever come to Norse imaginings. Mr. Winberry was dead, buried in France. But Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Brooks were where he had left them. "I'm back," he giggled into the telephone. They told him that because of the Bear Boy's continuing vitality, and despite the tumult of the recent conflagration, his assets—they never said money—were more vigorous than ever. He laughed again, straight into the telephone. Comedy, he said to himself (but his language was simple and loose, his language was down-to-earth, his father's elevated whimsy was banned from his mouth), is that which cannot define me. It was portentous to think this, it was arrogant, it was shallow—or so Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Brooks would have privately judged—but he believed it.