Heir to the Glimmering World (25 page)

"Go back to bed," he told Heinz.

And to me: "Look how the gauze loosens. Perhaps you can ... or when Anneliese—"

"I'll take care of it," I said.

He was uncertain, distracted. The blow had shot back through his own body. He shook; the skin whitened under the white tendrils of his progressing beard. The hand that had pounded the child's head blazed.

His wife in her fading voice said, "You will not kill him. This boy, you will not kill him."

"Calm, Elsa, calm. It is only a little cut, a little accident. Lie back. Here, I fix the pillow so nicely,
sei ruhig
—" He took a volcanic breath; there was violence in it. "Oh my poor Elsa," he said, "why do you make such an accident? Such a danger to yourself—"

I leaned over her to apply the new dressing. She nudged me aside with a weak push. But something secretive in her look held me.

"So much danger," she said drowsily, and unexpectedly called out her peculiar name for me: "Rüslein, you see now? Elsa must kill Elsa, then he will not kill this boy, you see now?"

Mitwisser covered his face with his terrible fists.

40

M
RS. MITWISSER
slept. Professor Mitwisser had instructed me to stand guard over his wife for the remainder of the night: I was not to take my eyes from her, I was not to doze off. He said all this almost meekly, brokenly; it was more an appeal than a command.

The house in its muffled half-silence took on an underwater blur. Sounds lost their origins—was that Heinz whimpering in a dream, or Waltraut softly snorting, with a throb as steady as a metronome? Breathings all around, as elusive and slippery as the dartings of small fish fleeing the jaws of big ones. On the floor below, between the walls of his study, Mitwisser's footsteps padded forward and back, measuring out time, or trying to undo it. Finally they stopped. He had heaved himself into the vacant tract of his bed. Anneliese was not in the house; James was not. The smell of urine swelled in acrid waves.

I saw the dawn. Or it saw me, peering over the windowsill and seeping higher and higher, until it cast itself across the sky, a vertical violet light, like a risen watchtower.

Mrs. Mitwisser stirred. I put my hand on her upturned hip.

"Let me clean you."

I brought a basin and washed her body, feeling ashamed to see her naked; but she was not ashamed. A willing invalid, she rolled over obediently as I set down a clean sheet.

"
Durstig,
" she said.

I gave her water and she drank and drank, and asked for more. Her face was luminous in the brightening morning light.

"They do not come," she said. Her voice was rapidly growing stronger. It was acquiring a low thick timbre; it rumbled out of her bandaged breast like an orchestral drumming. "You see now? They do not come," and though she pulled at my blouse, I wanted more than anything else to be allowed to fall into my own cold pillow. I was heavy with exhaustion and the sickening press of enclosure; I envied Dr. Tandoori's self-declared freedom. How simple it was for him to change a tire and be off! How simple for Anneliese to break through the bondage of this house and vanish! Dr. Tandoori had his philosophy—it bound him to no clear structure—and Anneliese ... Anneliese had James.

"Already it is the sun," Mrs. Mitwisser said, "and they do not come."

A jubilation had overtaken her, a cascade of talk tumbled from her throat, or from somewhere deeper, a foam of domestic schemings, busy feints and cunning surges, breaking now and then into a helpless sputter of German. She had succeeded, she had bled out her shrewd victory. Her victory was Heinz. He was safe. She had choked off her husband's thoughts. Never again would her husband dare to contemplate whose son her clever boy was—just let him dare! Only let him
look
at the boy, only let him
wonder,
and blood, her own blood, the blood of her hand, the blood of her heart, would rush out and vanquish him! She would die to save Heinz, and now her husband was caught, now he comprehended, now he would not ever again disguise hate as love. That is what harlots do, and who then is the harlot?

She spoke to me as to an accomplice. It was I, after all, who had supplied the seed, the hint (
der Kern,
she put it in one of her lapses) of her success. At this word—success—she felt for the dressing at her wrist, proudly: a dueling scar on display. As for the seed, as for the hint, it was this: my father, that other boy, my father had killed that other boy long ago, it was too late for that boy. But no, not too late for Heinz! Her husband's wild blow to the child's poor head was the first, yes—and it was also the last. It was her intent (her tone turned sermonic) to clean house, to deliver them all from dishonesty. She had completed half. Heinz was safe, and that was half.

She was logical, methodical; empirical. The piercing, the silver frame, the bleeding—these were the furnishings of her laboratory. No wonder she touched the glory of her wounds!

"If they will come," she said, and stopped. It was odd to hear that "if," a musing over an unproved theory, a kind of reversal: it had the sound of hope, and what was it she hoped for? She raised herself a little, to see out the window. There were only the snaggletoothed rooftops of neighboring houses. But her mouth was open, and her fine teeth threw off glints from the early sun like a purposeful code signaling to some farther sun beyond our own.

During the next several days Professor Mitwisser did not ask for me. I was to care for his wife, the work at the typewriter was subordinate to his wife's well-being, I was to keep his wife calm, calm above all, his own presence would not do, when he went in to his wife it stimulated her in dreadful ways. And the children too must be barred. He rattled out all these things again and again, and then shut his door against the troubles of his house.

On the fourth day he called me to him.

"What do you know about my daughter?"

"She went with James."

"Yes, yes, with James. That is not my question. I do not inquire about James. I inquire about my daughter. Her mother is ill and she is not in the house. My sons fight, the small child is distraught, and where is my daughter?"

He was ignorant of the life around him. He observed little that was not to his convenience. The crystal set, the Spanish doll sprawled on the stair, the teapot with the golden spout—so many additions and transformations, and he was blind to all of them.

"She no longer studies. She becomes indifferent."

"If she were sent to school—"

"My daughter has the European outlook. An American school is not fit for her."

"You send the boys."

"My sons are children. My daughter is a young woman. She should be at her mother's side. My daughter, not a stranger."

A recklessness gripped me, a contagion of unrestraint: I felt infected by Mrs. Mitwisser's exultation. Her bloody victory.

"That bit of hair," I said, "in your wife's shoe, that she found in James's bed—"

"Do not speak to me of this!"

"If it was your daughter's—"

"My poor wife is stricken, she hallucinates, she has lost her reason, she accuses this one and that one, she accuses herself—" The long bones of his forearms, giantly black in their black sleeves, chopped at emptiness like a pair of hatchets.

I said slowly, "Mrs. Mitwisser doesn't hallucinate. I think she sees."

"Please to go now, I have no need of you."

The great hands fell. He stood helplessly.

"My daughter," he said, "has been absent from this house for three nights."

"With James."

"He is our good friend, there is nothing amiss." I had lost all awe of him. "Your wife," I began, and left the rest to dissolve in the air.

"I have no wife, my wife is mad!"

His wife saw everything. He saw nothing.

41

W
ILLI BROUGHT ME
two letters. He looked disappointed: the post had come, and there were no packages. James's gifts, his surprises, had begun to diminish. Of late there was nothing. But the house was already mobbed by toys and games and boxes of various shapes, some of them barely opened and pushed aside. A corner of the kitchen was blocked by a pyramid of these acquisitions. It seemed to me that the postman's ring, and the shrieks and excited unwrappings that followed, aroused rather than sated the household greed. Only Waltraut was content with her dolls in their coats of many colors. Or at least she did not hope for more.

Willi said, "Somebody wants to marry you."

He was panting a little. He had run up the stairs. His comely head, an unripe version of Anneliese's, was all abandoned hair. It stood over his eyes like a lattice covering darkness; for weeks Anneliese had neglected to trim it.

"It says so in here," he said.

"Is that letter for you?"

"It's for you," he admitted.

"Then why did you read it?"

"The envelope was open. It fell out."

I examined the envelope. The flap was partly unglued. But the rest of it had been torn free.

"It's wrong to read other people's letters. It's wrong to go through other people's things," I said.

"If you get married papa will have to find someone else to take care of mama, and what about Waltraut? Anneliese isn't back, and papa—papa—" It was difficult to tell about papa.

I saw he was afraid. We were sinking still more deeply into wilderness—the boys at war, underwear unwashed, pots boiling over, Mitwisser pacing behind a shut door, his wife finicky in her bed, Waltraut unbathed and growing dispirited. At times she fell into inconsolable howls. If I made order in one part, decay was already seeping into another part. I, the stranger, was all that kept us from the last stages of anarchy—I had become a hidden engine of survival. No one took any notice of this. In that family, Willi alone—this thievish child—showed any curiosity about who, or what, I might be.

"I'm not marrying anybody," I told him.

I recognized the handwriting instantly. But I was cold to it. A letter from Bertram no longer had the power to stir me. He had sent Ninel to take away what had been meant for me. Even his kiss was not meant for me. He was hardly a cousin anyhow.

In the Mitwisser fiefdom a letter was nevertheless an event. Besides being deprived of a radio (the unearthly grumbles in Heinz's earphones didn't count), the house had no telephone. In 1935 almost every American family owned a radio, but a telephone at home was still not a widespread convenience. It was odd that such a thing was not among James's household surprises—had Mitwisser, condemning intrusion, prohibited it? Or had James himself inscrutably withheld it? We ate and slept on an island; we were marooned. The boys were a nation unto themselves. They squabbled and fought, but their loyalty was inward, despite their lives at school. No chum or classmate ever crossed our threshold. The disruptive world had no access to us, except by letter. And letters were rare enough: the cataclysmic revelation from Spain; now and then, in reply to Mitwisser's inquiries (I had typed a handful of these), a contentious Karaite trickle from here or there. Anneliese and Mrs. Mitwisser received nothing. And I—well, here again was Bertram. But I was apprehensive: why was he writing this time? Was it another needling from Croft Hall, was it some further remnant of my father's ignominy?

I took up the envelope Willi had invaded (let Bertram wait, I thought), and drew out a letterhead embossed with a picture of a spool of green thread. The thread wound outward in a long coil; at its end appeared the head of a snake, and out of the snake's mouth these words:

Gopal V.Tandoori, M.A., Ph.D.
Avatar of the Serpent's Philosophy
Fine Custom Tailoring
118 Gravesend Neck Road
Gravesend, Brooklyn, New York

My dear Miss [I read], my dear Amanuensis!

I beg your patience with this missive. Shortly I shall explain. May I hope that Mrs. Professor Rudolf Mitwisser has recovered well from her unhappy injury? And that you yourself continue in good health?

You should know that I have published numerous articles in the International Journal of Historical Metaphysics, situated in New Delhi. I was formerly a consultant to this distinguished periodical, but since my removal to these shores, alas no more. Fortunately, however, copies are stored in the Public Library, through which circumstance Professor Rudolf Mitwisser, disengaging my person from its wonted obscurity, discovered them. Following which, his communication journeyed around the great world! From New York to New Delhi to Bombay and ultimately, may I say happily, to Brooklyn!

Hence my acquaintance with this delightful gentleman, made still more gratifying by the presence of his charming Amanuensis!

During the period of my most pleasing visit, she (my portrait, please note, courteously eschews the second person) remains silent. Nevertheless I observe that she observes. I myself am crucially observant. I observe this silent yet very intelligent young lady. Her eyes are small but respectful. Her upper lip is short, a style most admirable also in our Indian young ladies. Her silence augurs modesty. She neglects easy mirth, displaying a most becoming gravity of disposition. She listens with understanding. She is ripe in perception, yet appears to be robed in melancholy.

Not all freedom is desirable (you may recall that I touched on the subject of freedom). Not all rule is undesirable. One can be ruled by the eye—unexpectedly! One can be ruled by the heart—unexpectedly! It is not always possible to deny the immaterial inward coursings of one's material nature. Hence you deserve to be informed that my wife (who is no more my wife) became thus through family arrangement, according to custom, neither through eye nor heart.

Allow me to clarify. Diligence in my shop, combined with indefatigable hours, has made me not precisely prosperous; but I may say that I want for nothing. It is my plan to curtail my night labors in order to pursue further work on a study already well launched. Indeed, it was begun some years ago, and I am only now inspired (dare I confess?) to bring it to fruition. It extends, until this moment, to one hundred and five leafs, all in the hand you see before you!