Heir to the Glimmering World (17 page)

26

S
NOW FELL;
and a letter came from Bertram. The snow, beginning stealthily in the middle of the night, blew down hour after hour, as if some bloated invisible sky-bound stomach was spewing it out: a cold white vomit. It wrapped itself around the feet of the telephone poles and tufted and weighted their wires until they drooped. The snow was a surprise; it was early December, and autumn's traces had not departed: there were still dry leaves, shaped like crumpled conches, along the curbs. A torrent of dense flakes noiselessly covered roofs and bushes and sidewalks. The train trestle was clogged with snow. The trains ran sluggishly or not at all; ice coated the tracks. Professor Mitwisser opened the door, looked out, saw the struggling letter-carrier slanted against the wind, took the letters from him, and put away his hat.

"Today, then," he told me, "I must work in my study."

He handed me Bertram's letter and picked his way around Waltraut, who had turned the stairs into a stadium for her dolls. Each doll was propped on a step: six steps, six costumed figurines. The boys, relieved of school, were chattering over Chinese checkers in their room, breaking out now and then into shrieks; there was the irregular crash overhead of some heaved missile. The dazzle at the windows seemed to dim the house into a cavelike dusk. Anneliese and James had not returned.

Mrs. Mitwisser was putting on her shoes. "I go downstairs," she said.

"I'm just about to bring up your breakfast—"

She found a shawl and threw it over her nightgown. "I go downstairs," she insisted.

She sat at the dining room table and allowed me to serve her. Her shawled back was regal. She kept her eyes on her toast. Only yesterday the toaster had been useless; one of its panels was twisted sideways off its hinge. Heinz had fixed it.

"My husband," Mrs. Mitwisser said, "
er ist doch zu Hause.
"

I had seen him shut his study door as his wife descended past it.

"And this James, he is not in the house."

"The storm—"

"He will not come back. That one, no." She took my hand with conspiratorial warmth. "So we are free,
ja?
"

Bertram's letter was in the pocket of my dress; Bertram's voice was in my pocket, against my thigh. How I wanted to be quit of Mrs. Mitwisser's portents—if only she would go to her bed again and sleep her perpetual sleepless sleep!

But she bent and plucked a scrap of white triangle out of her shoe and unfolded it.

"
Schau mal!
"

Inside the little paper boat was an inch of dark hair.

"That one! I see, I find—" She waited for me to comprehend. "My Anneliese, she puts under that one's pillow."

"Anneliese's hair? Under James's pillow?"

She displayed it. An oval cutting of deep brown. Unmistakably the color of Anneliese's. But it was, I saw, no different from Mrs. Mitwisser's own brown hair, straying and wild.

"If my husband will know," she confided, "
wie tragisch
... ach, how unhappy he becomes."

She smiled a little—a lament—and moved to the bottom of the stairs to survey Waltraut and the tiers of dolls; it was plain she wanted her husband to know what lay in her shoe.

She spoke to the child in German. Waltraut did not reply—she was diligently poking at the clown doll's celluloid lids, opening and closing them. Up-click, down-click, up-click.

"
Komm, die Mutter ist da—
"

Waltraut did not reply.

The mournful vague smile ebbed. "That one takes my children. That one steals my children. I have no children—"

"You have five," I said, pointlessly; Bertram's letter was secretly heating my side, my thigh, my hip.

A dark whisper. "Four." She held up her fingers, hiding the thumb. "My husband,
nein!
That one is thief!" she cried.

Mitwisser called down, "Please to come immediately." A thunderclap of urgency.

I left Mrs. Mitwisser standing forlornly in her shoes and shawl, and pulled out the new typewriter and set it up on the table in Mitwisser's study. James had abandoned his teacup there. I removed it; a redolence of schnapps meandered out of it. Mitwisser was gripping a packet of notes in his big fist. He was strong and ready: the ghostly hunched shape of the Library was transfigured. Ambition reared up in him like an animal awakened.

"Al-Kirkisani!" he announced. He gestured at the keys almost violently, and despite their recent familiarity spelled these syllables out for me; then let loose a volcanic flood of recitation. I was already well acquainted with this name: Jacob al-Kirkisani, the peerless Karaite thinker of the early tenth century, born in Circesium, in upper Mesopotamia. Principal works extant:
The Book of Gardens and Parks,
and
The Book of Lights and Watchtowers.
Numerous as-yet-undiscovered treatises. Traveled to China and India; recorded certain Hindu social customs of the time. A believer in reason, in
rational proofs built upon the knowledge based on sense perception
(Mitwisser dictating), in
the perfection of the whole of Scripture in the way of account, address, statement, and question, relating to fact, metaphor, generalization, advancement, postponement, abridgment, profusion, separation, combination
(Mitwisser dictating, all this from the "Principles of Biblical Exegesis"). His grandest assertion:
Scripture as a whole is to be taken literally. If it was permissible for us to take a given biblical passage out of its literal meaning, without a valid reason for doing so, we would be justified in doing likewise with the whole of Scripture, and this would lead to the nullification of all the accounts therein, including all commandments, prohibitions, and so forth, which would be the acme of wickedness
(Mitwisser dictating).

The acme of wickedness! I was shocked by these words. They were dear to Mitwisser; they were all at once a vestibule to memory. In the middle of the night, he said, he had been startled by glare; there was too much light, falling sheets of a white brilliance that played eerily over the ceiling. The house was still. Across the hall James's room, the room that had lately been his daughter's, the room she had surrendered to James, was empty. James was gone, he had not come back; his daughter was gone. Because of the storm they had not come back. The snow, the undulating heaps of snow; the midnight veil of light. Long ago, snow in Berlin, everywhere a multitude of Christmas lights; but he was far to the south, in sunlit Spain, researching an archive, where he found nothing. In the north the trains were stopped, the trains were frozen to the tracks, snow and ice all the way up to the Baltic Sea! Berlin ringed by mountains of snow. He could not get back—because of the storm he could not get back. He sent a telegram, extended his stay, returned to the archive (an obscure Islamic library), and discovered the Egyptian he was looking for. The weather grew milder, and he was restored to Berlin in a state of satisfaction: the Egyptian was in his hands. Yes, yes, it was long ago, and his wife ... never mind his poor wife. Today a letter had come! A triumph of a letter! Only today! An hour ago!

(Today! An hour ago! A letter! It burned against my hip.)

Some weeks past, idle in the alien city, in the Library, his head down, dreaming perhaps, troubled, ah, call it wretched, he was after all a miserable fellow with his poor wife and despite his dear children, his dear Heinrich, his splendid Heinz, he thought of that long week in Spain, those crumbling documents, sanctified writings, sanctified by age and reverence, precious old scrolls in their fluent Arabic calligraphy, the beauty of ancient things, how they rejoiced his eyes, and yes, he had found his Egyptian, but he remembered now—he lifted his head and stretched the muscles of his seeing upward to the Library's embossed gilt sky as if the labor of it could carry him away, away from New York to the life before—how he had happened on a certain slot, a niche, a cache, crusted with grime, the place was neglected, the curator was pleasant but lazy, a dark dirty hole in fact, where it might be possible ... His fingers scurried into the filth of that cavity, drew something out, something on India, an insufficient glance, he wasn't looking for India, he was after his Egyptian, he shoved it back. That was a decade ago. It had turned to dust in his thoughts. But under the gold of the Library, his head down and dreaming, dozing, wandering ... The upshot was this: he had written to that obscure Spanish archive, never imagining anything might come of it in the chaos and commotion of that torn country, always there are divisions and hatreds, elections overturned, the threat of tyranny. The old curator, a gentle Moroccan, was dead. The new one, an Arabist from Cádiz, a Fascist—he was now termed Director—was a dervish of organization, and had cleared out grit and disorder, and could put his hand precisely on any document that was desired. The fee for hiring a copyist, however, was tremendous, and also the fee for the service itself (which he suspected meant, in plain language, a gratuity for the director); but here was James, right here in the house, and James understood the need....

Seven barren weeks, and today! Today the letter from Spain! Here, right here in the house, a thin letter, two thin sheets, in al-Kirkisani's own densely graceful style, signature of that unparalleled scholar's mind! A fragment—ah, well, a copy, to be sure, yet see, a fragment of a lost work on Hinduism, far richer in its brevity than the meager notes in
The Book of Lights and Watchtowers,
belonging apparently to a separate and much longer tractate based on an Arabic translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. The Bhagavad-Gita! Inconceivable, amazing find! That a Karaite thinker, indeed a genius, had once touched on the Bhagavad-Gita, oh immense, immense! Inconceivable, amazing, immense! It opens before us a fathomless well of speculation, of unsuspected new leanings, of unknown marvels! And the
mystery
of it—consider that where Karaism contracts, Hinduism teems. Therefore! Can it be that al-Kirkisani, King-Jewel of the Karaites, looms forth as a heretic among heretics?

On Professor Mitwisser's vast open palm lay a battered envelope with many foreign stamps. He looked down at it with the ravenous eye of a conqueror. Then he tapped the typewriter with his thumbnail; there was a faint ringing sound, as of water spilled into a narrow glass. "It is because of James that I have it," he said.

From the foot of the stairs came a repetitious thump. Bump-bump. Bump. Bump-bump. Someone was jogging the dolls up the steps and down again. "See, see!"—Mrs. Mitwisser's imploring whisper.

Because of James (because of money), Krishna and Prince Arjuna were coming to lodge among us. And al-Kirkisani, ferocious fence-builder against the extraneous, ferocious claimant and defender of the scripturally pure—Mitwisser's treasure, Mrs. Mitwisser's firefly!—was letting them in.

Meanwhile I was certain (I believed absolutely) that Mrs. Mitwisser had clipped those shreds of curl from her own head. A head that insinuated; a head that incriminated. A head that spiraled equations. She was a woman of schemes and hypotheses. Thievery germinates, pullulates: a boy is a thief, a man is a thief, a continent is a thief! And if James's bed conceals a secret intimacy, if he means to steal Anneliese for himself, if he is seducer, violator, thief, then will not her husband send him away? And will they not then be free?

27

14V2 S.E. State Street
Albany, New York
December 2, 1935

Rosie, hello, you needle in a haystack!

What a time I've had tracking you down! That swanky Madison Avenue address you sent just before you departed our fair city? Nice picture postcard of designated destination that was: a thicket of skyscrapers. Wrote to said swanky address amid said thicket. Letter came back.

I admit I never returned the favor—never let you know where I was headed. Your card came and Ninel saw it too. Then we moved over to Ninel's place. No point now letting you know where—she isn't there anymore, and neither am I. More's the pity. You can see from the above where I've landed—in someone's attic. A tiny attic in a big old brown-shingled house. I like it well enough. The owners are a nice Neapolitan family. I've got two windows and one medium-size flowerpot containing four geraniums, courtesy of Mrs. Capolino.

How did I find you?
(If
I've found you.) The truth is I owe it to Ninel. She put me in mind of how to get to you. If something collides with her principles, she can be pretty passionate—you used to see this for yourself. She was never against the Quakers, though, since she's a bit of a pacifist anyhow. Who knows if that'll last, the way things are heating up in Spain these days. A bunch of the comrades, Ninel's gang, are thinking about going over there to join the Loyalists and fight the Fascists. It wouldn't surprise me if Ninel went, pacifist or no pacifist, if there's actually a war.

We were having an argument about it—we were having lots of arguments around that time. I said, You can't be anti-Fascist and still be a pacifist, and Ninel said, What about the Quakers? It's part of their religion and they're anti-Fascist, they save people from the Fascists. I said, What's this sudden esteem for religion? You don't give a damn about religion. And just then, out of the blue, I remembered your telling me, maybe it was in the postcard with the skyscrapers, that the fellow you went to work for used to be involved with some Quaker college around here. So I looked it up, and hied myself over there, and sure enough, it's how I got on your trail. Seems they've been requested to forward any letters for Herr So-and-So to some unlikely boondocks in the outer Bronx. Well, if you're still with Herr Whatsisname, then I've found you.

The big sad news is that Ninel walked out on me. Too many arguments, I guess. Not that I didn't enjoy watching her blow up! She's got a demon's tongue, and I admire that, even if she did break my heart. She walked out on me, and did it behind my back no less. I got home one night from the hospital with a chicken I'd picked up from the butcher's, and no Ninel. So I threw out the neck and the legs—Ninel usually made soup—and cooked the thing myself and ate it alone. Didn't much like it.