The Chemistry of Tears (9 page)

More candles had been lit and the males were at table, the boy’s hair filled with golden flame.

“Are you hungry, Herr Brandling?” Sumper asked.

“Make no fuss on my account,” I said.

Frau Helga, however, was stoking the firebox with crackling yellow wood. Her face was very red.

Herr Sumper’s countenance, in contrast, was cool. He nodded that I should be seated next to him.

“How long will it take?” I asked.

He placed his considerable hand upon my own as if that sign could be an answer.

I told him: “In England we would say, time is of the essence.”

“You are, as they also say in England, ‘in good hands.’ ”

“Indeed, but surely you have some idea how long those hands will take to do their job.”

“I have a very definite idea,” he said, accepting a dripping green wine bottle from the child. He boxed the boy gently across the head and the latter squeaked happily and ducked away. “I have a very definite idea that you will achieve your heart’s desire.”

“Vaucanson’s duck.”

“Your heart’s desire,” he said.

He was slippery, of course. I watched as he shared the wine, giving the boy a thimbleful before emptying a good half bottle into his stein.

“And what is my heart’s desire?”

“Why, the same as mine,” he said and poured for me.

“
Spargelzeit
,” said he.

“
Spargelzeit
,” I said, and raised my glass.

“In English,” said the precise little Arnaud, who had been left to fill his own glass, “you might translate
Spargel
as
edible ivory
.”

“
Königsgemüse
,” said the musical boy, and happily suffered being squashed against the clockmaker’s massive chest.

“It is the King’s vegetable,” announced Frau Helga placing in front of me a plate of white asparagus and small unpeeled potatoes.

So
Spargelzeit
was not a toast. Far from it—a curse—I cannot swallow egg whites, liver, brains, cod, eel, anything soft and slimy. If they had given me a plate of maggots it would have been the same.

My companions at Furtwangen were hogging in, sighing and making very personal noises. Frau Helga, in particular, was so emotionally affected by this spectral
Spargel
that she made me quite embarrassed.

I selected a small unskinned potato and scraped the sauce away.

“Eat up,” instructed Herr Sumper, picking up the long white vegetable, the secret organ of a ghost which he sucked into the maw
beneath the bush of upper lip. “We have yet to agree on what you will pay for board. But at this meal you are our honoured guest.”

The potato tasted of wet jute. The asparagus lay before me naked. I cut its tip off and washed it down with wine.

Sumper narrowed his eyes.

“You like it?”

“Immensely.”

He considered me closely.

“You don’t know how to taste it,” said Herr Sumper. “I can read your thoughts.”

I did not comment. He winked at the boy, who squealed with laughter. I was not sorry when Frau Helga slapped his leg. I thrust my plate away from me.

“The more for us,” he said, dividing my meal between the other diners. When the gluttons had eaten my meal, Sumper wiped his mouth and spoke to Carl behind the napkin.

Immediately the boy sprang from his chair and up the stairs. To work, I thought. I put aside my pride and followed him.

There is nothing better to soothe the stomach acids than the company of an artisan when he is at his careful labour. When my wife’s first “portrait” had commenced, I would often walk into the village to the workshop of my widowed friend George Binns, whose father had been the clockmaker to Her Majesty the Queen. There amidst all the quiet ticking I found some peace. So I expected it would be in Furtwangen. The child slipped through the workshop door but a large hand restrained my shoulder.

“You are the patron,” said Herr Sumper, dancing me around then blocking my path through his doorway. “I am the artist.”

Well, of course this was preposterous. He was not an artist, he was a clockmaker. I had already endured a surfeit of
Artist
in the place from which I had been sent away. I thought, you damned rascal. It would serve you right if I was sick all over you.

“I cannot work with you at my shoulder.”

So I must eat insults too.

“I wish to assist,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I have brought you this.”

He placed in my hand the sort of ruined book you find in barrow carts, its pages freckled brown, its boards bowed.

“It is
The Life of Benvenuto Cellini
. In English. This book will teach you how artists suffer from their patrons and will instruct you on how to play the important role you have chosen for yourself. By the time you have read it, I will be able to tell you when the work will be complete.”

Thus did I abase myself to achieve my end and I, Henry Brandling, not only permitted a foreign tradesman to pretend he was an artist, but allowed myself to be sent to bed without a decent meal.

NO SLEEP, MY MIND
a carousel of memory. For instance: the night before my departure from home I informed Percy that I might not return until Christmas. “How lovely, Papa,” he said. “What a Christmas we will have.”

Round and round I saw it once again, our conversation then, the following morning when I bade my brave red-eyed boy goodbye. I should never have mentioned Christmas. I had been too whimsical. But I could not say to him: your True Friend’s heart is bursting. I did not know the terms wherein I might be permitted to return.

“Goodbye, silly Papa,” he had said.

I thought, who told you that? I kissed him twice. I could not be certain I would see him in this world again.

In Furtwangen my allotted room was filled with the roar of water, endless torrent, the drowned squealing of a silly turning wheel.

Hour after horrid hour I thought of the nights when his mother and I were first married, till death us do part, I never doubted it, round and round, and how she shuddered beneath my human weight. Hard heavy man, she called me recklessly, round and round.

I was a god for really quite a while. Only at the end did she say that cruel thing about my breasts. I had been foolish enough to think
aloud, wondering could it be that wet nurse who sickened first our girl and then our little boy.

“So you blame me,” she hissed. “How dare you.”

“No,” I cried, “a thousand times no.”

I was the one with the breasts, she told me. I should have been the mother, which I clearly wished to be. My breasts were disgusting and hairy like a dog. How could I continue to be alive? she wished to know.

Only in the heat of battle did I blame her for her famous breasts, those false promises which would never touch her Percy’s hungry mouth.

In Furtwangen I slept while imagining myself awake. I woke inside a realm of gold, first light, floor, an effect of light. In truth, the dawn in Furtwangen was so much less a wonder than my True Friend’s own white room in Low Hall where the plain and decent Irish nurse would presently arrive with a cup of beef tea. Then they would sit together and wait for dear George Binns to bring the mail in through the garden gate.

Oh dear, I was hungry as a tank of acid, but Percy must know exactly where I was. I found my pencil and wrote my letter in the form of directions to my present home. If he followed these instructions he would find Furtwangen on a map and then he would know exactly where the duck was being made, for him alone. No other child in England would own such a thing, no child in all the world. I promised I would describe the manufacture in its fullest detail so he would imagine he was at my side, or perched up in the rafters like a clever bird, looking down on the miracles performed.

Then, I addressed the envelope to dear old Binns. With no innkeeper to entrust my letter to, I must now discover how the Germans sent their mail.

My first day in Furtwangen began.

No chamber pot, so it was Adam’s Duty, after which I washed in the stream and was observed by a surly sawmill worker. I might have tipped a peasant to post my letter but no, not him.

There was nothing for breakfast but some small bitter strawberries which made the hunger worse. No life was evident except the Huguenot writing by a window.

I asked him when was breakfast served.

“Sir,” said he, “one becomes accustomed to it.”

He continued with his scribbling.

“You wonder what I am doing?” he said.

I had not.

“I am a fairytale collector,” he said.

How extraordinary, I thought, I have met a fairytale collector. Whatever will happen next?

I set off to find the village of Furtwangen where I was intent on posting my letter. Awful morning. No need to describe my humiliations. Foreigners not liked, obviously. A boy threw a stone at me. Not even the priest would understand what I needed with my urgent envelope and by the time I had been forced to stand aside to permit the locals right of way, had tramped along a rutted road and then a highway, I was completely lost. It took me all afternoon to find the sawmill by which time I was suffering the most painful bilious hunger. My stomach was tight as a drum, filled with sloshing river water.

It was late afternoon, nothing but a boiling kettle on the stove. I would not steal food. I would endure, but what of Percy? How long can a small boy wait?

Carl came to fetch me in due course. He held my sleeve, which small show of kindness I was grateful for. The dinner was the same as the previous night. What I would have given for all the old boarding-school favourites I once reviled—toad-in-the-hole, stewed beetroot, fried bread, frog’s spawn. I was so hungry now I could have swallowed maggots and asked for more. My hosts looked down at their plates, and I knew they were embarrassed by my manners, but I was in a rage. I turned my eyes upon them one by one and dared them return my gaze.

Finally they retired and when Sumper left the field, I scraped his plate, the last skerrick of cheese sauce as well.

Then I stepped out into the dark, my guts in agony.

I lay on the damp path and listened to my hosts—grotesque moustached hens setting each other off, exploding bass and treble, sighing. Sometimes I woke and heard them laughing, and then I understood I had been snoring.

The stars were out. I was damp with dew, too shy to walk through the kitchen to my bed.

They spoke excellent English except when singing and composing lists which was a passion it would seem. What lists these were I could not know. Men’s names, or perhaps villages or landmarks which would assist in finding where an individual lived, or so I guessed. The so-called fairytale collector’s thin voice remained dominant. Why this was, I could not imagine, unless he was like those tramps who knew the names of farmers, which one is a “soft touch,” etc. On and on they went. When not lists, then folk songs. When no songs, then crickets.

“For God’s sake, you will die.”

Sumper helped me to my feet, and led me to the kitchen. Here he sat me at table and watched me as if he was my mother. Frau Helga served me a sort of porridge. Sumper remained watching while I ate it.

“What are you up to, Herr Brandling?”

“It is urgent that I send a letter to my son.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, having no notion of the life at stake.

In the mornings, from my bedroom window, I observed how strange bright-eyed Carl went trotting off, hopping along the goat path, waving to the harvesters, returning in an hour or two with a package or a basket or no more than a bulge in his pocket, which mystery would be delivered up the stairs, across the chute, knock knock, and greeted with exclamation either of triumph or reproof.

He had the most extraordinary hands, Carl, so long and thin you might think he needed another set of knuckles. Sumper treasured this boy. He called him Genius and Spirit and other extravagant expressions
that led me to believe that it was with those unworldly hands that Percy’s machine was being constructed.

Without looking up from her darning needle Helga said: “Show him our new post box, M. Arnaud.”

“Directly,” Arnaud replied, but then he wandered off. I was still in that same room at supper when he finally returned.

After the remains of the meal had been cleared away, I announced that I would leave to find the post box by myself.

The fairytale collector leapt to his feet.

“Do you have your letters ready, Herr Brandling?”

I saw that the wretch was now dressed “for town,” with waistcoat and breeches of dark green velveteen, stout boots, and a broad leather belt which he now took in a notch around his narrow waist.

“I do not have stamps,” I said.

“We have stamps in beautiful colours,” said the fairytale collector. “It is for England that they are required. Two letters I think?”

You have known this all day, I thought. Soon it will be dark.

“We will need a lantern.”

“No need.”

“There will be a moon?”

“I have the eyes of a cat,” the queer man said. And we descended into the spray and chaos of the gorge.

When, minutes later, we emerged, the world was alight with golden straw. One could hear the birds again, the light clink of the chain that tethered three dwarf goats beside the stream.

“My mother was a cat,” said the fairytale collector, as if he had made the most common observation.

I made no riposte but in truth I have a horror of fairy stories not because I believe them but because I cannot stop myself imagining the evil stepmother, say, being forced to dance inside her red-hot iron shoes. What cruelties we humans practise every day.

The village turned out to be very near. I deposited Percy’s letters in an iron box with golden tassels like a General. Then we turned the
corner of a lane and I beheld the quaint houses pressed together, the pointed roofs with their projecting eaves, the wooden staircases, and, drenched in the last rays of the setting sun, a glorious yellow inn, now glowing golden.

“The inn is not too far, Herr Brandling,” he said shyly, and I finally understood why he had made me wait all day.