Heir to the Glimmering World (35 page)

"True heresy is neither rebellion nor rejection, and I tell you I have uncovered it in the heart of al-Kirkisani! It is refusal of every refusal but God's, a new thing, a true thing! It descends into the labyrinth of renunciation, from abyss to abyss, until in the bottommost depth of bottomlessness there is nothing to breathe, only the vacuum of the One God, the One true God, God the heretic, who disbelieves in man, who casts off this worshipful creature for the charlatan he is. This is Jacob al-Kirk-isani's meaning, it is what he has written—that it is God who is the heretic! Karaite, Arjuna, one or the other, it is all lost in the labyrinth, the One true God of heresy renounces all."

He had been pacing here and there, as I had so often heard him do, from the wall of books to the smooth broad bed and back again.

"You understand this, yes?"

I did not understand, I could not; but my instinct was for what inflamed him. The fragment from Spain; the Karaites, whose child he was, who were his children; al-Kirkisani, fallen out of Karaite rebellion into trust in a heretical God.

"You see, you see," he said, "what is my conviction worth? How will it be judged? What am I to do with it? It cannot be proved, it cannot be corroborated. There is not a scrap of paper in the world to verify it. I have only this thin copy, a copyist's hand, it will be taken for counterfeit, they will suppose me to have been duped, it is all in vain, in vain, I blinded myself, I was too quick, too quick—"

He came to stand before me.

"My dear Rose," he said—I was astonished to hear him say my name—"I ask you, where, where is my daughter?"

53

Dear Rose,

We are staying in this place for a time. I think it will be a long time. Where we are is called Thrace. Papa read to me once about a man from Thrace who looked up to study the stars and fell into a ditch. People laughed, but papa said it is common for a man of learning to be laughed at, especially in this country. I think of papa very much. I am sure I have disappointed him, but perhaps after a while he will not be so angry. He was very angry when I would not go to school, but later on he stopped. I hope he will stop again.

James never wants to go out in the auto. In the auto we went everywhere to see things, all the little towns, and it was so interesting and strange. Sometimes I am sick in the auto, I thought it is because of this that James never wants to go out, but it is really because he is so sad in the little towns. That is why we have come back to Thrace. James says he can laugh in this place, I dont know why. Thrace is not so very different from all the other places, and even here James does not laugh so much, he is always sad. Perhaps the schnapps makes him sad, I dont know. We stay a great deal in our little room and hardly go out at all. Mama would not like it about the schnapps, but I dont mind. I think of mama very much. She is so very thin, you must make her eat more. You must make sure that Waltraut is not unhappy. She likes a pink ribbon to tie her hair.

Anneliese

There was no packet. There was no money.

54

T
HEY DROVE
from town to town—Carthage, Rome, Ithaca, Oswego, Oneonta, Cortland. In Elmira he took her to see Mark Twain's grave; there were two or three other visitors there, all standing under umbrellas in the hard rain. She had asked to come to this place: she had read
Tom Sawyer
at home, she said. She remembered that Tom had cried at his own funeral, and that was comical, but she liked Erich Kästner so much more. And she liked
Der Bärknabe
still more—so often Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had read it aloud, singsonging the verses! And, later, Madame Mercier—but in French. She had forgotten the French, but she remembered Mademoiselle De Bonrepos's singsong, with her flat French accent overlaying the bouncing rhymes. She could recite some of those rhymes, she told him, this minute. When she was very young she had no idea that what she was hearing was a translation—
Bärknabe
seemed to have been born into her own language.

—Do people come to look at your house?

—What?

Her questions, the intensity of her confessions.

—Where you used to live. The way they come here.

—It's gone. It doesn't exist. Got turned into an old people's home.

Mr. Fullerton, Mr. Winberry, and Mr. Brooks had informed him of this long ago. "Sold for quite a fortune," Mr. Fullerton had crowed, as if he might care. What he cared about then was his new knapsack with all the pockets, and his steamship ticket.

—But the
house
is there, she prodded.

—I suppose.

—People could stand outside and look through the windows! Do they? Do they come from all over the world to look?

—Good luck to them, he said roughly, if they do.—

James! I want to go there! I want to see!

—No, he said. No.

—But I want to, she insisted.

This child. At such times she was more child than woman. It was as if, in fleeing her family, she had released herself from dutifulness to defiance. To willfulness.

—It's nowhere near here, he said.

—Where is it?

—Over the state line.

—But we have the auto, so...

A hiss of recognition flew from her.

—Oh! Passport! We have no passport, no papers...

—What's the matter with you? he said. Where do you think you are?

—But if it is a border...

The preposterous ignorance. A foreign child who did not grasp ordinary reality. They had kept her from school, from an American high school, where she belonged. Not meandering all over in a Ford, pointlessly.

—What's the matter with you? he said again. Passport, what are you talking about?

She knew he was impatient with her, and it was only a misunderstanding, like her papa with the Quakers, why was he so impatient? One could go from upstate—that was what he called all these little places, towns unlike any she had ever seen before in all her life—one could go from here to anywhere at all, he explained, and no papers, no border officials! He explained this—how angry he seemed—but the misunderstanding left a cold space between them. She could not make out how to warm this space. And anyhow he did not comprehend what it was to be without papers, to have no passport, to cower before a uniform, to pay for forged papers, to bribe to get genuine papers, to learn afterward that they were no longer valid, never to have good papers, valid papers, a genuine passport! Never! He could not comprehend any of this, how free he was, how simple, he was like an angry child. Her papa had said the Americans were like children.

—Without papers, she instructed him soberly, we could not have run to Sweden, and from Sweden...

He shut out the rest of it. Sweden. He did not tell her (why should he? his thoughts were his own) that he had once longed for Sweden, the farthest north it was possible to think of. A country encased in immaculate cold, as numb and immobile as ice. The doll house had come from Sweden, and the wooden doll house children with their yellow hair...

—At the William Penn, he said instead, when I first saw all of you, I thought it was Swedish you were speaking. But you all had such dark hair.

—Even Heinz, she put in.

Her hair was very dark. It was as dark as her mother's. She lifted a heavy handful of it and pressed it into his mouth, to stop up the misunderstanding. For a moment it made a kind of peace between them. But then he gave her a little shove: he didn't want her hair in his mouth. The rain had soaked it.

After that they drove to Thrace. It was a considerable distance away, and he pushed into the night without halting, except once, at a diner set all by itself, like a lost segment of train, on a truncated street edged by a field. It was close to midnight when they came into the neighborhood of the schoolyard, and the deserted tract of concrete looked nearly as he had remembered it—the lit bulb, helmeted by a metal grid, protruding from the building's brick flank, candy wrappers crumpled here and there. A basketball hoop clamped to a pole—that was new.

He had the girl by the elbow and led her across the yard.

—Right about here. The burial ground, he said.

The glare from the single bulb filled his lenses; she could not see his eyes.

—What place is this? she asked.

—You want to visit a shrine? This is it. Here!

He broke into his high thin stretched-out laugh, the same laugh that burbled out of her papa's study when he sat in there with her papa, the two of them convulsed by intimacy.

—The Bear Boy's tomb. Here's where I dumped the thing. Only, he said, it turned out to be a joke.

The high garbling laughter. She thought it had the sound of Niagara Falls from far away.

—It came alive again, he said. Voodoo! Up from the grave.

It was troubling that she could not see his eyes. He was laughing at some secret thing. Usually it was the schnapps that brought this on: an angry sadness that shattered into a vindictive snigger. But a whole day had passed without the schnapps, and still she heard it.

—Where are we? she demanded.

He put his thumb under her chin and lifted it. Across the top of the building, in the wan orange light, she read:
THRACE CENTRAL HIGH
.

—Where you ought to be. A place like this. Rudi sends the boys, why not you?

It was the same as having no papers, he could not feel it, he could not know!

—Papa teaches me. He teaches me so much. I know more than you! she burst out. No one can make me go to school.

—Rudi won't allow it, that's why.

—Papa?

—He keeps you home.

He could not feel it, he could not know! The Americans are like children!

She showed him the fist of her left hand: how it would not close all the way. It curled only partly, like a reluctant snail.

—When we came papa said I must go to an American school. He said I must, I must...

She showed him the fist of her right hand: the fingernails hurt her palm.

—Papa said in Rome do as the Romans do. There is a law, you must go to an American school ... No one can make me go to school!

Frau Koch's desk was on a raised platform. A short metal bar lay in the drawer of this desk. The lesson was on Bismarck: name two achievements that can be attributed to Chancellor von Bismarck. Frau Koch broke the bones of the left hand. Not with a ruler. The ruler was for the others. The ruler would not have been so savage. With the short metal bar Frau Koch smashed two narrow bones. Because I gave the answer. Because I forgot that I was forbidden to speak. Because by then it was forbidden to be in that school at all. Because I would soon be thrown out of that school. Because it was imperative to be silent. Because it was imperative to be invisible. Because I spoke aloud. Because I gave the answer.

—No one can make me go to school ever again. Not even papa. Look, she said, I can easily make a fist with my right hand, see?

They drove to Ilion, Cobleskill, Homer, Horseheads, Naples, and Odysseus, and then came back, for the second time, to Thrace. The room they found was small and dark, but it was cleaner than most, and the house had a garden behind it: some nameless stalks in an exhausted weedy plot. The landlady served an early breakfast and a late dinner. In between she went off to her job as a waitress. There were no other boarders; they were alone.

But more and more James would not go out. It was odd, and disappointing: he had wanted to return to Thrace, where there was nothing of note to see, only a monotonous stretch of scrubby abandoned farmland all around, dead barns, a soporific Main Street (how queer, all these towns had blocks of shops identically named), and no local lore that anyone cared about. Thrace was unsympathetic. It appealed to some streak of perversity in him: to seek out the very site that aroused in him a bitterness, an irony she could not fathom, no matter if he explained it.

—A farce. A comedy, he said.

It was in Thrace that he had buried the Bear Boy, and among Mitwissers that the ghost had risen. That was how he explained it, with that short high laugh that attached itself now more to Thrace than to her papa.

—But look how much you help papa!

He was lying on the bed, with his hands tucked under his neck. Her mouth was on his throat, idly licking. He raised a shoeless foot and circled the shadows with it.

—A lot of good I'm doing his daughter, he said.

—Oh James, James, she said, I want to be with you, that's all.

—You don't.

—I do. I do, she said.

But she felt the little space spring open between them. Sometimes, when he caressed her, and let her put her hair in his mouth—it was a game they had, that led hastily to lovemaking—there was no space at all. And at other times a coldness seeped in, inch by inch.

She left him in that small dark room, monkish with its single dresser and two brittle wicker chairs (these had suffered a previous life outdoors), and went walking. All the days in Thrace seemed gray: did the sun never sojourn here? She passed the muddy Ford, unused for nearly three weeks. She felt vaguely lonely, perhaps because of the gray streets; otherwise she was never lonely. But why did he speak of her as her papa's daughter? Did he think of her simply as immersed in her family? Yet when she heard his way of saying her name—Annie—she believed she was herself, only herself, and when he grew impatient, it was because he was seeing her as he must first have seen her, as her papa's daughter, merely that. A refugee girl, an outlander. She supposed he took her in flickeringly, like one of those optical illusions where an image metamorphoses into a different image, but you cannot hold both images in your mind simultaneously. When he became impatient with her, even distant, she was all at once Anneliese, this foreign thing; and when he caressed her, Annie appeared. Oh, why could she not be Annie for him day and night?

She walked all along Main Street. At the end of it she turned back, having spied not far ahead the red-brick building that was the high school. Thrace, it turned out, was a drab town like all the others—but the others had enchanted her. They drove, they stopped, they gawked—he at her, amused at first by her delight. They ate in tiny steamy cafés smelling of fried potatoes. In Medusa they stood in a patch of grass in front of the courthouse and gazed at the violet fuzz of mountains that blurred the horizon's edge. In Odysseus (having landed there by bus; it was before they had the auto) they discovered a small traveling circus, with half a dozen acrobats, a clown, monkeys, a Fat Lady and a Fire-Eater. There was also a Sword-Swallower, but he was sick with flu and could not perform. Wherever they found themselves, she was exhilarated by an eerie newness: what unsuspected villages these were, what browning landscapes, what vegetable odors! And the fumes of fallen apples, sweet in their rot. How peculiar people's voices were, vowels inimical to her own larynx, staccato grunts that declined courtliness. No one bowed; it was democracy. The language too was uncivil, it did not distinguish between high and low. In Parnassus they drifted by a prison with pink walls and a garden of cabbages, unfenced; it did not frighten her. A man in an orange cap who was tending the cabbages waved. The strangeness was elating. The buses with their long noses and hard seats might have hurtled down from a different planet. The soup they ordered in one of those little cafés tasted of pickles; a red electric sign in the window bluntly announced
PIE, FIVE CENTS.
These towns, these towns, it was another country; the creatures who lived in it were not like those at home. The dogs barked unfamiliar notes, the cats curled their tails like alien clefs.