The Syme Papers (49 page)

Ruth’s survived a little longer. Her son had for some time been trying to set up a German press in New Braunfels, and had spun a number of schemes to raise the money for the printing press, including a concert, arranged by Dr Alfred Douia. (Roland did not believe in spending lightly, until he had tried everything else. A good thing, too – three years later he was bankrupt.) Nobody came, and the plans were dropped, until Ruth happened along and took the thing in hand. Roland proposed another musical programme, and advertised his mother, ‘The Wonderful Ruth Müller, Star of the Neuburg Concert Halls’, as the chief attraction. The concert was a great success, and not ten days later the first edition of the weekly
Neu
Braunfelser
Zeitung
appeared in the shops.

She had arrived; and had never been so lonely in her life – despite being in some respects (unwed, for one; a mother, for a second) an expert in the field of loneliness. The ‘enormous evenings’ terrified her, black skies that filled the great bowl of 
night, and leaked even to the horizon at the end of a road, or a turn in the liver. ‘I feel’, her quill whispered to the attentive ear of her journal parchment, ‘that I could step off the end of the world, at any moment, and nobody would know that I had gone. I know now what
nowhere
looks like: very dry, though the rains come hard when they come; there are occasional trees, which grow in no garden, and mark nothing; a river that passes in a great hurry to get away; a few poor huts, cobbled together from timber and dry stone, littered here and there, as if indeed, at a summer picnic, people had simply sat down when their feet were tired, and they could go no further, and begun to build. Nothing makes any sense, but nobody dares to admit this, so we all carry on, as if home were only a carriage ride away, sing songs, make bread, etc., in the old style.’

She had learned what her brother had discovered forty years before, the terror of landscape: ‘How vast the loneliness of an uninhabited country late at night, careless of the tiny creatures who travel through it! … In the open country there is no mistaking the scale of our pretensions, six feet high in a waste of empty miles.’ And indeed these words may have comforted her, if there is comfort in a dead brother’s fellow-feeling – as she sat in her bedroom and looked out of the back of her son’s house towards Market Street and the occasional lights, and turned over these papers from home.

But Pitt outruns himself. We are not there yet! Have only turned past the Safeways on to MoPac, with an ice-box knocking about in the back of the Volvo, and a wife beside him, and two boys clambering over each other in the rear. For Susie loves a day-trip, the fuss over maps and roads, the free local advertising pamphlets in unfamiliar gas stations, the bags of ice in metal bins on the pavement outside (only a dollar a pop, ‘So much for so little,’ she says, ‘isn’t it? So heavy and crackly and only a buck’), the constantly rebuffed anticipation of arrival. Even a day-trip to the heart of her husband’s content (his word) or madness (hers); yes, she’ll drive even there for an afternoon in high spirits, being sweeter by nature than Pitt, who has promised her a Texan Yorkville, an old
German town, and a taste of immigrant loneliness at the end. Not to mention bratwurst and beer.

I should say now, Pitt had few great hopes for this expedition (as far as Syme was concerned), and in this (among other things) he was not … disappointed. He came out of curiosity; this was satisfied. He came to give his sons a glimpse of the business he was in, for they knew little of their father, and, in the case of Aaron, respected less. Susie once said to me, ‘You’re not
his
kind of dad’ – an absurdity all the more painful for being … true. Aaron glowed with brown and Texan health, brushed the sweat that clumped his cowlick to his forehead with the famous air of a boy to whom life comes easy. (Nothing comes easy to Pitt, or Ben.) He boasted long legs and quick hands, and the bony behind of athletic youth. He feared Pitt, I believe, as an image of the potential awkwardness and ugliness within him, just as he feared Ben for the imperfection of his brother’s arm. Clumsiness and shyness and inadequacy disgusted him, in the same way that prim old ladies are ‘put off’ by the ‘realism’ in TV. He lived in his imagination, and was seldom disappointed. The body of Pitt appalled him, the sweats and rolls of it, the broad hams, and splayed feet, and glistening face. When Pitt used the bathroom I saw him wait, until the lid on which his father had sat cooled down, before he dared to go in, no matter how urgent the demands of nature upon him. Aaron wished for no touch of his father’s heat.

This, in a fashion, is exactly what his father wished to give him. So he hauled the boys out of bed on a Saturday morning and set off, on one of those rinsed spring days only the end of a Texan winter can provide: cool enough that the noon sun battled no haze of heat to cut bright through the clear blue air. The highway sparkled as we drove through the ‘nowhere’ of the Texas hill-country, between the lines of the telephone wires and the low juniper hunched over the rocky soil.‘We followed’, Pitt murmured to himself, quoting his researches, ‘the fresh wagon tracks, civilization’s first imprint in this wind-beaten sea of grass. To our right, nothing but river and desolation’ – and, as it happens, a descendant of the railroad line on which Roland Müller built his second fortune.

Pitt had small hopes of a second
beginning,
however, and desired mainly an …
interlude,
such as belong to the best of life, never mind the misery between. A word, by the by, that signifies not only a gap, but the entrance, of Comedy and Love upon the stage, to break the heavy acts of a morality play. (I had forgotten that
breakthroughs
involve often the slightest of gaps or entrances – half an opening through which the pent-up floods can burst, in wonderful, joyous violence, before they reach the next obstruction, and the waters level then rise again.)

‘Schlitterbahn,’ Aaron said, waking up. ‘I want to go to Schlitterbahn.’

We had passed one of those monuments to the American West, a
billboard,
a particularly prominent and revolting member of which species advertised just such a sluicing and sliding, and eruption of happiness upon the thrust of water, as I desired in its metaphorical sense. Among the scraps of old Germany remnant in the Texas hill-country, the most popular by far and generally known is the word to
‘schlitter’
–
one of those onomatopoeias that signify nothing so much as the stupid jibber emitted by mind and tongue to match the natural and equivalent clumsiness of the body. The great-great-grandchildren of the Müllers and Klebergs and Ernsts who settled this wild country to ‘establish a true, a
German
state, which shall itself become a model for the new Republic, and an inspiration to Europe’ had retained little perhaps of their Wilhelm Meister, and their Beethoven, and their Biedermeier, but recalled an old word that meant nothing but ‘sliding about in the wet’, and put it to new and more elaborate uses.

All of which, by the by, I explained in rising tones to my elder son (who stared across the fleeting strip malls in deliberate, and, as it were,
concentrated
inattention) to indicate, No, we shall not go to Schlitterbahn.

And for once Susie supported my paternal resolve. ‘No,’ she repeated, frowning and leaning forward in that particular way that means she desires the end of a journey, and the beginning of
arrival,
‘we are on a
treasure
hunt, at least according to your father. Tell them what it’s all about,’ she said, as if Pitt had talked of anything
but
since coming home.

Pitt began, described the library at Friedrichsgracht, the nook, where he alleges that slim volume of Syme’s thought, the
New
Platonist,
stood pressed between bigger and lesser works; explained the route by which the great catalogue (a recipe of the ingredients cooked together in young Alfred’s mind) arrived at the British Library at last, where Pitt
reheated
the mixture, and – But perhaps I should begin with Wegener himself, buried between upright skis in the ice of Greenland, where he had come to prove a shift in the bleak island no greater than … Or the question of mass, that slight discrepancy, into which Syme stuck the razor of his wit and pried, until a glimpse of the earth’s core (or so he thought) opened beneath him … Or should I list the men (from Wegener to Ferdinand Müller, and Syme, I believe, between) who died in some fashion chasing their fancies, to prove, over the clamour of absurdity, what has since …

‘Second
thoughts,’ Susie broke in, reconsidering, ‘I’ll do it, I’ll do it better. You’ll put in a hundred revelations that have nothing to do with the matter, and leave out the sex and the tragedy and the futility, etc., and how the whole thing boils down to the fact that you shouldn’t leave home in the first place. Boys,’ she said, rounding in the car, ‘let me tell it like it is. This is the story of a nut who thought he could prove
the
earth
is
hollow;
and another nut, who thought he could prove the first one was right. Nut number two is your father. He has staked his professional reputation (and our house) on a man named Sam Syme, who lived a hundred and eighty years ago and went around digging things up and declaring there was nothing there. Everyone would have forgotten about Sam except he looked like Orson Welles or George Clooney [Susie made sure our sons knew each], and the girls and the boys both liked him – including a German gentleman who ran away from his own dad (another nut who argued nothing could be better than Germany united) to investigate Syme’s theories.

‘The trouble was, of course, that Sam was wrong. And the
German gentleman (named Phidy, whose sister ended up
here,
God help her) knew this, and wrote a great many agonizing pages about it, but never actually
told
him.
(As I am telling your father right now.) And then Phidy got a little mixed up about the girls and the boys and eventually …’

‘No,’ Pitt said, red in the face, ‘that is not it, that is not it at all.’ And left it (he shames himself to admit) at that. Because (shall he confess?) there was some pleasure even in hearing his wife botch the story, as we delight most in the hand that tickles our parts least familiar to the human touch. He guessed then the great misery of the crank and the pedant. Not that no one
listens
to them, for there is always a kind ear or tongue too shy to interrupt – but that they so rarely hear the
echo
of their thoughts against another soul, and they live as it were without walls in the unresponsive space of their imaginations. As my father had lived (in spite of his son’s best efforts at a generous hearing), travelling further and further afield. This, too, is a mark of the Symist – except, in the case of the original, for one famous evening at the Zweivierziger Club.

Susie kept mum now, twisting a corner of her lip round to the middle, and biting it – in some perplexity, aware that her good spirits had in the proof betrayed an alloy of bitterness, to say the worst, and anxiety, the least. And yet her blunt, strong nose pressed forward again as she resumed her seat; her shoulder strained the seat-belt at the pulley; she sniffed, as if to say, in the enduring girlhood that never left her, How much longer, how much longer till we get there? For Susie, runs Pitt’s theory, had, in spite of herself, developed a taste for that black blood, faded on yellow skin, of the written word, on which Pitt feeds.

‘IN NEU BRAUNFELS 1ST DAS LEBEN SCHOEN’ read the banner that greeted us as we turned on to South Seguin (or ‘Life is Good Here’, a line unlikely to have originated in Miss Ruth). Weatherboard warehouses and restaurants pushed up against the sidewalk; a hardware store advertised its wares in Gothic script; waitresses in red frocks and plumped blouses wheeled trays of heavy beer against their bellies as they negotiated the swinging saloon doors on to the porch. Punters of every variety crowded
the sidewalk, in the festive understanding that held the word
German
to be a kind of acknowledged public code for the word
Beer,
just as
French
passes for
Lewd
or
Rude.
One or two lederhosen propped up skinny mustachioed, slightly balding gentlemen, who squeezed their nether parts into them, and practised what they believed to be their culture. ‘Our first view of the colony’ was, as Herman Seele had declared a hundred and fifty-odd years before, ‘expansive’.

Pitt experienced that strange blend of intoxication and sadness that accompanies decay of any kind, whether of grape, grain or town. And he turned in some relief towards the green side-street on which Ruth Müller had spent her last days, and slid the Volvo into the shade of a sycamore outside Inge’s Books: Second Hand German.

Stretching and creaking, Pitt emerged, and opened the back door to the boys, who fell out grumpy and wrinkled as if they had been tumbled in the wash of sleep. Susie strode up to the low porch already, her broad bottom plumping the blue corduroy skirt at every step, first one buttock and then the next. She stood impatient outside the screen door, and lifted her hat – Susie believed greatly in hats of all kinds – a Mayan weave of brown straw. Holding this by the dimpling round, she fanned her face so the rose stuck into the brim by its thorns trembled. Susie in Pitt’s humble opinion occasionally wanted
taste,
in the manner of the rich and the worldly, who have come out again on the other side, and returned to kitsch – but Pitt, son of San Diego, raised in the business of construction, confesses his humility, and would not dare to comment.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘come
on.
There is always too much –
delay.

Pitt led the way (as was proper), lifted the latch and creaked open by a finger, with that infinite gentility reserved for the elderly, the screen door, and stepped into the gloom and old tobacco scent of books. Aaron, following last, let it clack behind him, clatter, and clack again on the rebound. He glanced around him in the arrogant disinterest of youth, plucked a title from the shelf (Grillparzer, I believe, in the wrought-iron tangle of German
Gothic script), and said, ‘Why have we come all this way – to look at books – nobody can read?’