Kitabı oku: «A Reunion of Ghosts», sayfa 3
And what had she done? She’d thrown the screwdriver.
To this day, whenever Lady thinks of the hardware store owner—and she thinks of him more often than you’d imagine—she feels the same shame, the same painful scraping of threaded metal through her body. She has to stop what she’s doing. She closes her eyes. She focuses on her breath. She inhales. She exhales. She tries to envision the store owner, wherever he is—dead, she supposes, given that the store is long gone, and he was an old man even in 1976—and when she has conjured him, she does her best to bathe him in love or as close to love as a sinner like Lady can manage.
But back then, as the train carrying Lady home tunneled underground, she felt no love for anyone. She felt only the pain. She was mortified, and she didn’t use the word casually. You didn’t have to be a Latin scholar to figure out its derivation. She wanted right then and there to mort.
CHAPTER 3
1868
The American Civil War is three years over. Abraham Lincoln is three years dead. Jesse and Frank James have just joined the Cole Younger gang. And in the city of Breslau, in the Kingdom of Prussia, a pair of first cousins have fallen in love and eloped.
When the cousins return home and announce what they’ve done, the groom’s father and bride’s uncle declare the union unnatural. The bride’s father and groom’s uncle pour themselves stiff drinks. The mother-aunts embrace and sob.
“What kind of child do you think a marriage like this will produce?” the fathers and mothers, the aunts and uncles, demand.
We think it’s sad that the bride never gets to say, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a Nobel Prize–winning kind of child.” She never gets to say it because she dies nine months later while giving birth to the future laureate. From the first, his head is exceedingly large.
1871
The Franco-Prussian Wars have ended. The unification of the German Empire is complete. The Second Reich has begun, though of course the real power remains with Prussia. The former Prussian king, Wilhelm I, is emperor. The former Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, is chancellor.
When affairs of the empire bring Bismarck to Breslau, the widower Heinrich Lorenz Alter leaves his dye factory to stand among the throngs waiting to see the champion of iron and blood emerge from his carriage, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high as if he’s a figure in a portrait by an artist enamored of the golden mean. As Bismarck passes, the crowd heaves like an unfettered bosom in a bodice ripper. Much of the attraction in coming to see Bismarck is being a part of this impassioned heaving, this surging forward—this element of danger, the possibility that one may be caught in a lustful stampede, may be knocked to the ground and literally perish from love of king and country.
The first time he brings his motherless son with him, Heinrich hoists the boy onto his shoulders. The child perches there stolidly, expertly. He’s a sober two-year-old who’s been left to the care of redoubtable nurses with quick tempers and paddles and switches. He’s well trained in the art of keeping still. Even when Bismarck arrives and a roar takes over the square as the crowd buffets Heinrich, the boy makes no sound. Heinrich has to twist his neck, look up at his son to make sure the boy isn’t frightened. When he does, he sees tears, but they are tears of joy; Heinrich’s certain of that. “Two years old,” Heinrich writes to his youngest brother, Rudi, the only member of the family he still speaks to. “Two years old, and such depth of feeling for his country.”
“You’re raising him well,” Rudi replies dutifully, “and under such difficult circumstances.”
Heinrich revels in Rudi’s praise. It’s true, he thinks. He has raised the boy well. There’s a small photograph of the dead mother, Line Alter Alter, in an oval frame on the boy’s bedroom dresser; the child is tasked with kissing it each night before getting beneath the blankets. But what dominates the nursery is the portrait of Bismarck that hangs on the wall facing the bed. It’s the same portrait that currently hangs over the toilet in our Riverside Drive apartment. The generations before ours hung it in the foyer, the centerpiece of an arrangement of old photographs and paintings. As soon as we could, we moved it.
The tragedy of unrequited love for the blond beast, Einstein will someday call the love that Jews like Heinrich Alter (and later, Lenz Alter too) harbored for Germany, but Heinrich Alter calls it patriotism. He calls it Heimat. Being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith. He’s determined that his child will embrace this faith too. Even the boy’s name is meant to play its part. Heinrich Lorenz Alter chose the name himself, no female sensibility involved, although he believes Line would have approved. The boy is called Lenz, but his full name is Lorenz Otto Alter. Lorenz to remind him of Heinrich. Otto to remind him of Bismarck. Alter—it implies age and wisdom, and who, Heinrich argues, is older and wiser than God?
No mother, but three fathers. This is what Heinrich tells the baby long before words have any meaning to it. Leaning over the cradle, his palm cupping the crown of the small head, Heinrich croons manifestos in lieu of lullabies. “Three fathers,” Heinrich says. “Me, Bismarck, God.” Lenz’s job is to disappoint none of them.
Meanwhile, across town, Zindel Emanuel is also teaching his children about Bismarck. When military parades pass by, he takes his two oldest girls, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, out onto the second-floor balcony. “You remember all the speeches about iron and blood?” he asks Rose and Lily, who stand on their toes and peer over the balustrade. “Well, those rifles the soldiers are holding—that’s what Bismarck meant when he said iron. And you see that sleeve pinned to that soldier’s shoulder—or there, the patch over that guy’s eye? That was the blood. You’ll notice, though, that while the iron’s still held high, the blood’s been washed away.”
He lifts them, one at a time, so they can more easily take note of the weapons and prettified gore.
“They love talking about blood,” Zindel Emanuel says. “It stirs the passions of the sheep. But they’ll never let the sheep see the blood. Sheep love talk of blood, but they faint dead away at the sight of it.”
“Baaa,” Lily calls to the soldiers below. The ones directly beneath the balcony look up, laugh, wave to her.
Emanuel’s wife joins them, new baby in her arms. “Lily,” she says. “Don’t make barnyard noises at the infantry.” She gives her husband a look that’s both reproving and affectionate. “Maybe we should try one more time to get you a son. You’re training these girls to behave like little boys. Yelling at people in the streets. Thinking all the time about politics.”
Emanuel takes the infant from its mother. Iris Emanuel is overwrapped in linen and lace; she looks like nothing more than a small, smiling doll’s head. “This was supposed to be my boy,” he says.
Iris beams at him, at the clouds, at the soldiers, at whatever her eyes land on. When she grows up, her father thinks, she will look like the goddess Isis: dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes. This doesn’t please him. He has no intention of raising an Isis, a goddess of domesticity, of weaving, of the moon. And he’s concerned about those blue eyes, so unusually pale. A curse in some cultures, the least sensitive of his acquaintances say. “They’ll darken,” his wife says defensively—though time will prove her wrong—but that’s not what bothers Zindel Emanuel. He’s unfazed by curses, he’s not superstitious. He doesn’t believe in mythology, not the myths of Egypt though he knows them all, not the myths of his own people—the Jews. Not even the myths of the Prussians. He enjoys pointing out that despite the infantry uniform the chancellor wears, Otto von Bismarck was merely a reservist. He never served a day in the active military. He neither carried iron into battle nor shed a drop of blood—or at least not a drop of his own blood.
No, what Zindel Emanuel dislikes about the toddler’s pale blue eyes is the attention they’re already commanding. He doesn’t want this girl to be admired for her appearance. He has high hopes for Iris, a disappointment by virtue of her sex, true, but a child who, he has already determined, will disappoint him in no other way. There’s something about her—how alert she is, how lively, her arms and legs churning even in her sleep as if she’s climbing or building something—that has convinced him she’ll be the person he’s already imagined.
“No more babies,” he assures his wife. “I’m going to work with the materials you’ve given me.” He lifts the little girl so she, too, can see the parade. He busses her on her cheek, his wife on the forehead, and, Iris still in his arms, leaves the balcony for the warmth of the house. The two older girls follow him: his acolytes, his ducklings.
Alone now, his wife looks down at the victorious soldiers parading by. They fall into two categories: the hobbled and maimed, and the unscathed and ashamed. Such a relief, she thinks, not to have sons.
1874
Heinrich Lorenz Alter’s dye factory is the most successful in western Europe. The dark blue of the Prussian infantry’s uniforms? The forest green worn by the Jaegers? The Prussian blue of Bismarck’s own tunic? The dyes for the cloth come from the Alter Dye Works. And if Heinrich has made the military’s uniforms rich, the military has returned the favor.
When Heinrich speaks of his exquisite dyes, it’s with tenderness, with genuine love. Mention his spring green, that precise shade of lettuce upon its first fragile leafing, and Heinrich’s suddenly as effusive as Keats encountering an old vase. Ask about his scarlet, and he’ll tell you it’s more vibrant than a cardinal’s feathered belly. Bring up Alter indigo, and he’ll describe it the way other men might their mistresses, praising her unparalleled beauty to people who smile and nod and glance at the nearest clock.
Because Heinrich wants Lenz, his son and sole heir, to begin working at the factory as soon as he completes his basic education, Lenz’s training begins early. “Never too young to start developing an eye for color,” Heinrich writes Rudi, “especially with a boy who seems already to have a natural aptitude for nothing.”
This has been a revelation: the number of things that Lenz, now five, is bad at. He’s clumsy with balls and bats, he’s slow at his letters, he still needs assistance in tying his shoelaces, and though he’s eager to spend time with other children, he seems to put them off. The once silent little boy has become a blabbermouth. He stands too close, tells long, tedious stories about war, his favorite subject. He’s fascinated by war. He corners little girls at birthday parties and expounds upon the campaigns of Napoleon.
“I’m going to be a general,” he tells his father.
A Jewish general. Heinrich winces. He pats the boy’s shoulder. He says, “You’ll be the general of Alter Dye Works. You’ll dress the generals in the military. You’ll give them the pride they need to win wars for Germany.”
Lenz may be socially awkward and dull and only five, but he knows when he’s being patronized. He also knows how he feels about the factory. All his biographers agree: from a very young age he dismissed the idea of taking it over. Still, that particular battle between father and son is more than a decade in the future. Now, his father not yet realizing it’s a waste of time, Lenz’s training takes place on the streets of Breslau. Every evening before dinner Heinrich insists that Lenz accompany him on a constitutional, and every evening Lenz, knowing what’s coming, sulks and grumbles, but ultimately obeys.
We have a photograph of him at that age. He’s the most mournful little boy we’ve ever seen, his tremendous noggin home to large dark eyes and lips that are pursed as if he had been about to cry when someone—Heinrich, probably, although maybe it was the photographer—ordered him not to move a muscle. And so he stands miserably and rigidly next to the ornate wooden chair that these days lives in our foyer (where it’s laden, sometimes to the point of tipping over, with our handbags and jackets and winter scarves and, back in the day when Vee still wore a wig, that luxuriant prosthesis slung on one of the uprights). In the photograph, though, only a boy’s beribboned boater lies on the chair’s seat.
The boy himself wears a child’s version of an infantry uniform, the brass buttons oversize, the collar flat, the trousers cuffed over knee-high boots. His hair is severely parted close to his right ear. He holds a rifle as if it’s a walking stick, its butt on the ground, its muzzle pointed at the ceiling.
And here’s another photograph of the young Lenz Alter, this one with his uncle, Rudi. According to the fat biography of Lenz Alter on our living room bookshelf (Lenz Alter: Deutsch, Jude, Heiliger, Sünder), Rudi Alter was a homosexual, malarial dwarf—that’s a quote—with delicate features and charm to spare, and we have to admit the description is supported by the photo, where Rudi, not much taller than Lenz, is matinee-idol handsome with kohl-rimmed eyes and the ornate and waxed facial hair of the times—the handlebar mustache, the scalloped muttonchops—not quite concealing a sweet smile. He also possesses a pair of sculpted, fine eyebrows.
This photograph must have been taken during one of Rudi’s brief visits home, because his work as a trade consulate keeps him mostly in Asia. In 1874 he’s Germany’s trade representative to Japan. This means that Rudi is either so competent and charming that he’s overcome what we assume must have been his government’s reluctance to have a quote unquote homosexual malarial dwarf represent it, or it means that the German government in the late nineteenth century was far less uptight than our own is today. We suspect the former is the truth, that Rudi’s charm overcame prejudice, but that could be because we have a collective crush on him. We love that in this photograph, he and his small nephew are both dressed in identical kimonos. We love that Rudi’s kimono is accessorized with several long strand of pearls.
Rudi is the person responsible for the dye factory’s indigo. He’s the one who negotiates the exclusive deals between Heinrich and the best ai farmers in Japan, the one who has arranged for hundreds of cases of sake to accompany the ai leaves as they’re transported from Hokkaido Province to Breslau in the damp holds of ships. That’s the heart of the recipe for Alter indigo: imported ai leaves and imported sake with some imported wheat bran tossed in. Heinrich also throws in some domestic lye because he doesn’t have it in him to turn his back on western techniques entirely. The mixture is then stirred for several days by the factory’s workers, those immigrants and day workers from Poland wielding wooden rakes also imported from Japan until the dye bath is the color of a fresh bruise and its fumes turn the sclerae of the workers’ eyes crimson.
That there’s nothing like Alter indigo anywhere else on the continent is one of the dominant themes accompanying the father and son’s constitutionals. “Look,” Heinrich says, loud, rudely pointing. “Do you see that worker’s uniform? That indigo is close to ours, but not as complex.”
Or, “Look at the eye of that peacock feather in that woman’s hat. That’s close to our indigo but not as rich.”
Or look at the blueberries on that vine or the violas in that field or the arc in that rainbow. Close but not as pure, not as perfect, not as poignant.
Every night, not only their neighbors’ clothes but nature herself are judged and found lacking.
Lenz is found lacking too. His mind wanders. He’s more interested in the dyeing process than the colors the process produces. He likes to imagine the moment when roots and petals and the carapaces of insects magically turn into cerulean or chartreuse or the vermilion that Uncle Rudi mixes with beeswax and daubs on his cheeks just above his muttonchops, brushes onto his lips just below his mustache. This—the process, not the cosmetics—holds a degree of fascination for the little boy. But his father’s lectures are those of an artist, not a manufacturer. His father carries on about aesthetics, about the general populace’s inability to distinguish muddy colors from crisp colors, their failure to appreciate natural colors, with their variations, their own personalities, from the monotony of the new chemically made dyes. Even at eight Lenz knows he’s part of that general populace. He’s inferior. He’s undiscerning.
Then—it’s still 1874—comes the afternoon in early May when Rudi Alter—he’s still in Japan—decides to take a walk through a park that, like the park across the street from our apartment, runs along the river of a port city. We imagine the Japanese park filled with bamboo fountains and cherry trees and miniature red maples, the latter pretty much the same height as Rudi. In our imagination he’s wearing native dress, but his own native dress. A suit, a straw hat.
He’s climbing a hill when he feels a poke in the back. He turns, smiling, expecting to see a colleague playfully jabbing at him with the tip of an umbrella. Instead he finds himself grinning foolishly at a young Japanese nationalist brandishing an antique Samurai sword.
From the autopsy report:
Wound 1: scalp entirely pierced through
Wound 7: carotid artery completely severed
Wound 11: entire elbow joint completely severed
It goes on. Twenty-two wounds in all. Twenty-two fully pierced or completely severed pieces of Rudi Alter.
The nationalist says that the gods came to him in a dream. They sent him to the park to kill the first foreigner he ran into. That turned out to be Rudi. The nationalist saw him from behind, took in the European garb, perhaps the scant height as well, and the gods said yes, go ahead. They said what are you waiting for? The young assassin has composed a poem about the whole thing, which he recites from memory at the police station. He recites it again at his trial. He’s declared insane. They behead him anyway.
At the foot of the path where Rudi died—a young man of thirty-three—the port city erects a granite monument shaped like a giant headstone. On its base the words Our Brother are engraved in German. Our is misspelled.
On the day that Rudi Alter dies in Japan, the temperature drops dramatically in Breslau. People stop strangers in the streets to comment on it. “This is the kind of weather that causes influenza,” they inform one another. They say, “This morning I had to take off my jacket, I was so hot, and now I’m wearing it buttoned to my chin and I’m still chilled to the bone.”
By the time Heinrich and Lenz leave the house for their mandatory evening stroll, the sky over Breslau is the sleek gray of an iced-over lake and the streets are shadowed in wintry violets. Because it’s so cold, Lenz is less amazed than he should be when several snowflakes waft down and alight on his father’s outstretched palm.
“Look closely,” says Heinrich. “Each one different,” but by the time Lenz looks, the snowflakes have melted. Heinrich wipes his wet hand on his trousers. He cranes his neck, searching for more drifting flakes. There aren’t any. It’s May, after all.
What there is, though, is an inky slash along the horizon that makes Heinrich’s heart lurch. He points to the slash with such energy he feels the gesture in his shoulder socket.
“Look!” he cries. “Look. Lenz, do you see that? There! Now, that—that’s ours!”
The color of the slash between earth and sky is rich and complex, pure and poignant. It’s the precise shade Newton observed on the day he understood that the spectrum contained not six colors, as everyone believed, but seven, and this color, this purple-blue, the one too long overlooked.
In a moment Lenz will also see the ribbon of indigo, but for now he completely misunderstands. He thinks his father is pointing to the entire sky. “That’s ours,” his father has declared, and Lenz believes his father means the whole canopy, the boundless firmament, every square inch of the heavens. For a fleeting, confusing, yet immensely gratifying and possibly life-changing instant, Lenz Alter believes his father has declared himself heaven’s landlord.
And here is Lenz, son and sole heir.
Death in childbirth. Evisceration among the cherry trees. Typos on your tombstone. These were the stories our mother told us. Bedtime stories, we called them, though we were talking her bedtime, not ours. The three of us tended to stay up long after she went to sleep. But though she turned in shortly after dinner, she slept in fits and starts, as we often do now, and she’d wake up throughout the night and sometimes she’d shout our names, and we’d leave our beds or, more likely, whatever late-night movie we were watching in the living room and troop in. By then she’d be sitting up, cigarette already lit. We’d take our positions at the end of her mattress, Lady in the middle, the younger ones on either side of her, Vee a smaller version of Lady, Delph a smaller version of Vee. “The nesting dolls,” our mother called us, and we could tell she found this off-putting rather than cute.
Even we found it a little unnerving to look at each other. So that’s what I looked like when I lost my front teeth. So that’s what I’ll look like when I’ve entered adolescence. And yet this resemblance was also the only reliable and reassuring thing in our lives. There was the sense that we would always have each other. There was, to be honest, a never-articulated belief that we actually were each other, just at different stages of a single life. When our mother called us for bedtime stories and we arranged ourselves at her blanketed feet, each of us heavy-lidded, Vee and Delph lolling their heads against Lady’s arms, we must have looked on the outside as we felt on the inside: a single creature, strange and many-limbed, and in desperate need of a good night’s rest.
Of all the stories our mother told us when we were girls, the story about Lenz and the snowflakes and the sky was our favorite. We were children ourselves; we empathized with a little boy’s failure to understand an adult’s message. We got why his misapprehension was cute and silly, but we also got why it was wonderful, why his was a glorious way to see the world: not reduced to one of its component colors, but broad and encompassing and mystical, and the whole thing revolving around little old you.
As time went on, though, when we requested this story our mother began adding new details. When Heinrich and Lenz left home, they were led through the city streets by an eerie light that was an iridescent silver like mother-of-pearl. When Heinrich looked up, it was because a clap of thunder or shooting star or roaring voice had called his attention to the horizon.
In these new versions, on the day Heinrich caught the snowflakes in his palm, he understood at once that they weren’t snowflakes. (Snowflakes in May, our mother said. Did you actually believe that?) He knew immediately that they were Rudi Alter’s essence, fragments of Rudi’s very soul making their way to his brother on that day: Rudi’s deathday. Heinrich Alter had no way of knowing his brother was dead at the time he saw that indigo slash. But, said our mother, Heinrich Alter knew.
Eventually even the punch line was no longer a punch line, Lenz’s conclusion no longer the funny misunderstanding of a little boy but a genuine revelation. In these new versions, when Heinrich pointed upward and proclaimed, “That’s ours!” he did mean the entire sky, he did mean everything the human eye could see. He meant everything the human eye couldn’t see too.
Soon, when our mother told us the story, she was no longer looking at us, her purported audience, but gazing upward with confusion and wonder just as her great-grandfather and her little-boy grandfather had done all those years ago. Perhaps she was addressing the faces that we, too, could see in the swirls of ceiling plaster when we softened our vision. Perhaps she was talking to someone only she could discern. Maybe it was the ghost of one of her gone-by relatives: her mother Karin, her father Richard, her great-uncle Rudi. Or maybe it was Lenz, who she’d known briefly when she was a very young girl, her grandfather Lenz who told her some of these bedtime stories before Hitler came and the family fled. Or maybe she thought she was talking to Der Alter, that is, to the God she’d always told us did not exist.
“What does it mean?” our mother asked the ceiling or the ghost or God. “If my great-grandfather owned heaven and my grandfather inherited it from him, what does that mean for me now? Shouldn’t it be mine? Isn’t that the law?”
At first we tried to persuade ourselves that she was clowning, trying to amuse us. She wasn’t, though. Wasn’t clowning. Wasn’t amusing.
Sometimes it seemed as if the ceiling was responding to her. For us it was like listening to one side of a phone call. “Yes,” she’d say, and then a long pause. “Well, yes,” and another silence. Finally, “I understand your argument, but I think some of your basic premises are incorrect.”
Sometimes she remembered that we were sitting there, and she frowned as if we’d interrupted or voiced disapproval when we hadn’t said anything at all. “Don’t worry,” she’d say with exhaustion. “When I die, it will all pass to you. No one’s going to deny you your potage.”
She never said this with passion or conviction or joy. She said it as if she were recalling one more tiresome chore on her life’s to-do list. She managed the jewelry and cosmetics department at Woolworth’s, and if we never were well off, we always had rent money and food and a substantial supply of lipsticks and plastic clip-on earrings. She took care of us as best she could. If she said she’d get us our potage, we believed her. Of course, we thought potage meant porridge, and we wanted no part of it. We made faces. She chafed at our lack of gratitude. “Don’t look so stricken,” she’d say. “This is the good news. It’s the only good news anyone unlucky enough to be part of this family’s going to get.”
Other times she said nothing, just smiled wearily. This was worse than her conversations with the ceiling. We dreaded her smiles. They were time machines that carried her away, transported her to the distant past or the faraway future, left us with only her body, a hand with a cigarette dangling off her bed, hot ashes wafting down to the carpet fibers like snowflakes in Breslau, like cherry blossoms in a Japanese park. One night she came back from one of those trips and said, “If God owns heaven and I own heaven and there’s only one owner of heaven, what does that force you to conclude?”
It took us a moment to realize she was talking to us.
“That you’re God?” Vee said.
Our mother nodded as she considered that answer—hers had been a genuine, not a rhetorical, question—but Vee, upon reflection, glowered. “I thought we were atheists,” she said.
“I thought we were humans,” Delph said.
“We are atheists,” Lady said. “Which means, if (a) there’s no God and (b) Mom’s God, then (c) Mom’s nothing. That’s called the transitive property.”
Our mother looked at us as if we were all very wise, and being wise was a terrible burden she wished she could have spared us. Her eyes filled with tears. She drew on her cigarette, blew the smoke up toward the faces in the ceiling. She tried to be careful about us and her smoke.
“They’re right,” she said to the ceiling, tears dribbling down her face. “I’m God and I’m just some old bag of bones and I’m nothing, all three at once.”
God, bones, and nothing. Lady calls this the Alter version of the holy trinity. Delph says it’s the best definition of mortal man she’s ever heard. We are, at all times, all three.
Vee thinks that from God to bones to nothing is also a pretty good description of life. It’s sad, she thinks. It’s the opposite of the way she wishes life worked. From nothing to bones to God—that’s what she longs for, that’s what she wishes for—the fantasy, the fairy tale, the capacity for faith. But Vee can’t go there. None of us can.
