Heir to the Glimmering World (24 page)

"What would you get for a thing like that?" he said.

"It depends on who wants it. I'd say a couple of thousand now. More later."

"You would say that, wouldn't you. I've been conned before. If it's the real McCoy, how'd
you
get hold of it?"

"The author gave it to me. Years ago."

"Then why would you stand the chance of losing it?"

"I hated that man. You don't want to keep what you hate."

"Bravo. Here's five bucks on it. If you want, I'll throw in my kid for free." The fellow didn't talk like anyone's father. He didn't act like anyone's father. He said, "Why not? It's the goddamn fifteenth."

It was night; the schoolyard was deserted. He was just off the bus from Clarksville, where he had heaped up the roses for his ladies, and was on his way to look for a place. The usual kind, without the smell of face powder. He had a bottle in his pocket, and wandered into the schoolyard to get his bearings and have a smoke. The cigarette was unsatisfactory, so he tossed it away. Then he saw that angry fellow walking across the yard, his head down, his neck showing yellow in the murky light of a helmeted bulb clamped to brick. He had stayed late to mark exams, the fellow said. If he went home there was the kid. A neighbor woman was watching the kid, he said. He had no wife, he said. He was probably a liar: if he had no wife he had no child. He was a liar, and angry; his anger had something to do with the fifteenth of February.

"I'm stuck," the fellow said. "I've always been stuck." Him with a doctorate from Yale, he said, and here he was teaching elementary algebra in no man's land. "Now wait a minute, how do I know it's the real McCoy?" he said again. "I'll put five on it anyhow." He kneeled on the pavement. With a nicely turned wrist he rolled the dice—his lucky dice, he said.

In less than a minute the cadaver in the knapsack was expelled into Thrace.

The Bear Boy knew he had never before spoken those words aloud: that he hated the author of the Bear Boy.

38

"T
ONIGHT
," Professor Mitwisser said, "there will be a visitor. Consequently I will not require your usual assistance, and since Dr. Tandoori will perforce arrive quite late, I will ask you to bring him to my study straightway. He has an auto and comes from a distance. Doubtless he will be chilled from the drive. Please to serve the tea immediately."

Not a single visitor (Ninel was hardly that) had appeared since the summer before, when Mitwisser's antagonists had muffled the dining room ceiling in the languid mists of their cigarettes—but then it was Anneliese who had directed the motions of hospitality. I had ascended; or perhaps Anneliese had descended into the smoke of absence.

There had been, it seemed, an exchange of letters. Dr. Gopal Tandoori, formerly a scholar of Indian philosophies at a college in Bombay, was invited to confirm not merely the quality of al-Kirkisani's rendering of the fragment from Spain—Mitwisser had himself confirmed this—but the nature of a particular strain of Hindu thought in relation to the thought of al-Kirkisani. At ten-thirty I stood at the green front door, waiting. A bitter wind blew in under the threshold. There were few automobiles at this hour; now and then I stepped into the cold and watched as the occasional pair of headlights approached and then passed by. Icy ovals gleamed in the road. The cars grew fewer and fewer. I went in and started the kettle. At ten past eleven, as I was setting out the tea things (James's things, on James's gilded tray), I heard the squall of a struggling engine and resisting gears: Dr. Tandoori had bumped the whole right half of his car over the curb and onto the pavement, just missing the streetlight.

A small man wearing a brown fedora and large red earmuffs emerged from the car, assessed its position, and left it as it was. I was disappointed. I had expected an Indian to be wrapped in white homespun, with his knees exposed, like Mahatma Gandhi in the newsreels. Dr. Tan-doori was dressed in no extraordinary way. He headed into the house with a kind of bounce, handing me his coat and shoving the earmuffs into a sleeve. They promptly fell out. He bounced down to retrieve them. "Gravesend," he said, "and as I am an immigrant, I am often puzzled in the way of immigrants. Brooklyn, my dear, Brooklyn! The conditions of the roads, very bad, ice here, ice there! I confess I lost my way during several attempts to find it. When I first heard this name, Gravesend"—he was following me up the stairs—"I thought how the end of mankind is the grave, and yet, and yet! The name may refer to the afterlife! No doubt there are omens in the names of things, though I myself do not adhere to this belief. Ah, sir! Sir! We meet in this inconstant flesh, and shall we speak of universals and eternals? Truth to tell, I am myself something of a materialist, a position that has determined my fate, though the notion of fate is hardly becoming to one professing materialism—"

When I returned with the tea, Dr. Tandoori was seated in Mitwisser's chair, and Mitwisser had taken my customary place, facing the typewriter. "My, my, what a pleasant beginning. This fine hot tea," Dr. Tandoori said, "I am grateful for it. As I am an immigrant without a family, I am compelled to live a restricted life. I must boil my own tea! Put it that I am compelled"—a bounce, and the tea overflowed a little into the saucer—"to abandon text for textiles. My small joke, if you please. In my shop I must keep late hours, as you are kind enough to tolerate even now. May I assume that this young person is your daughter?"

"She is not," Mitwisser bit off. "She is my amanuensis." I had never before heard him use this odd word; it was briny with anger and, I thought, mockery. I was nothing so elevated as an amanuensis; it had lately become my morning's task to make up Mitwisser's bed. "You may leave now," he ordered.

"Please don't go—a young face is such a pleasure in the world. A young lady is so much a refreshment when two elderly gentlemen such as ourselves converse. It is like the presence of a bird at dawn."

I went to sit on the edge of Mitwisser's bed. I knew it to be a defiance and a violation, yet Mitwisser did not remonstrate—whether it was the restraint of his distaste that silenced him, or deference to his guest, I could not tell. There was nowhere else for me in that strange space—all at once strange to me then, seeing it through the visitor's eyes: the old books all around, the heaps of papers, the crates of files, the cramped odors of obsession, the intimate intrusion of the massive bed (it occupied nearly half the room) with its bodily reminders. Mitwisser was a man who had procreated; he had lain with his Elsa, he had gripped her body with his. He was not elderly, he was only worn. Dr. Tandoori was not elderly either; he was if anything too lively. He had taken up tailoring, he said, in place of philosophy. He reiterated that he was at heart a materialist. "I left my place in my college not quite voluntarily, a circumstance that obliged me to deal, as tailors do—pardon again my small joke—with
material.
With the fabric of unalloyed realism! It was said that I leaned too heavily in my lectures—indeed, perhaps too exclusively—on the school of Brihaspati and Brihaspati's followers, the Charvakas. Collectively they are known as the Nastiks, the materialists, the skeptics, the deniers—"

So Dr. Tandoori too had been thrown out, though he could not be called a refugee. He had merely been sacked: for championing a sect that sneered at the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita. He did not seem humiliated—getting thrown out was something to relish.

"It was claimed," he said, "that I jollied my students. I jollied them, true, it is my nature, but it was claimed that I overjollied them. Nowadays I jolly my customers, and it is entirely—um—fitting. No one wants a grave tailor, surely not in Gravesend, declaring as it does the end of gravity—"

I was astonished to see a minute crescent of a smile grow itself on Mitwisser's lip. He had the look of an admirer.

"You speak of skeptics and deniers," he said.

"Oh yes, they disrespect the priests. You will find even in the Upanishads how the priests in procession are compared to white dogs in a line, each dog holding in its mouth the tail of the dog in front of it. Skeptics become mockers."

"The Karaites also mock."

"The Nastiks repudiate."

"The Karaites also repudiate. They separate from the mainstream. They ridicule the mainstream."

"The Nastiks are not merely separatists. They are nihilists. They repudiate mystical devotion, they repudiate faith. Faith for them is illusion." He burst out, "I like them awfully much!"

The crescent that was almost a smile widened. Mitwisser was pleased. I had never seen him so pleased. "Then are your Nastiks," he pressed, "the 'demoniacal men' whom al-Kirkisani—"

"—turned up in that bit of the Gita? More than possible, more than possible. But sir, your man ... all your Karaites, as you describe them, look to divinity. My Nastiks contend that God is a figment. A figment! The world is composed of atoms, man is ruled by instinct. Holiness is vapor."

"Then you are telling me that your interest has nothing in common with mine," Mitwisser said. But he said it lightly.

"Oh sir! Dear sir! On the contrary, the impulse you showed in posting to me your
most
engaging inquiry is entirely—
entirely
—justified. And in truth it is impulse—impulse!—that unites us. Surely you see how we are united, you with your Karaites, myself with my darling Nastiks? Brihaspati, you know, their founder, ridicules the sanctity of the Vedas—"

"The Karaites ridicule the sanctity of the Oral Law—"

"Quod erat demonstrandum!"

Dr. Tandoori gave one great bounce and catapulted himself out of his chair; I nearly expected him to seize Mitwisser by the hand and dance with him in a ring. "Oh sir, nothing, nothing signifies more than this! The hot drive to dissent, to subvert, to fly from what all men accept! To deny tedium, to deny what passes for usual wisdom! To deny the given, the received, the begotten, the whole benevolent common foolishness! I had rather be an outcast tailor—though I insist that my Singer is a
very
fine machine and I am
entirely
attached to it, it holds a high place in my affections—oh, rather an outcast among outcasts than to stand with officialdom! With those who reign over thought! Oh sir, dear sir, you and I, we are free men!"

Professor Mitwisser laughed. It was different from the laughter he had laughed with James. His visitor, I believed, had brought him an hour of clear happiness.

"And that one," Dr. Tandoori asked, "that one out there, is he yet another amanuensis?"

A pale boy had appeared in the unlit hallway, breathing hard. A pair of earphones hung from around his neck.

"Papa," the boy began, and stopped. He stared at Dr. Tandoori.

"Or perhaps he is your son?"

"What is it? What? Why are you at this hour not in your bed? You see I have a guest—"

Heinz said, "There's blood. Blood on mama. Coming out of mama—"

"And why should he not be my son!" Mitwisser roared, and fled to his wife.

39

D
R. TANDOORI
carefully smothered his ears under his oversized muffs. "With family it is not possible to rule exclusively over oneself. I had a wife once—a wife absolutely. She was pleased to have me leave her where I found her. In Bombay she is happy in my long absence. Rule or be ruled, an ancient observation. Tell me, my dear," he said, "how many children has Professor Mitwisser? That boy with the red eyes, and are there others?"

"Five altogether," I said.

"How unfortunate. Then despite all he is not so free. And how many—forgive an Oriental's small witticism—how many wives?—Oh my, my, a calamity—"

The calamity was a tire. It had gone flat. Bare-armed, I had accompanied Dr. Tandoori out to his car; I stood clutching myself in the cold as he circled all around it, examining the wheels, two in the road and two on the sidewalk.

"How unfortunate," he said again. "A testimony to the dominion of chance. Rule or be ruled, yet chance is king and matter its viceroy. Who can rule matter? Here! The culprit!" He held up a fat rusted nail that lay at the foot of the streetlight.

I left him pumping a jack (the bright earmuffs bobbing up and down) and philosophizing about the world's materiality, interrupted by explosive imprecations in an unknown tongue.

The bloodletting was minor. There were two injuries, one over the right breast, the other vertically along the wrist. Both were minor. What great harm could a silver picture frame do? Its corners were sharp, but a picture frame is not a knife. A picture frame is not a weapon. Mitwisser washed his wife's wounds and tried clumsily to bandage them.

"Elsa, Elsa,
was hast du gemacht?
" Blood was smeared across the face of the woman in the photo and on the stone urn and its cherub. He looked wildly around the room. "Anneliese, why is Anneliese not in the house? You, Heinz! How did this come to be?"

The boy was sobbing. "I was listening to my crystal set—"

"Your what?"

"My radio ... and I heard a sound from mama—"

"Radio? Radio is forbidden. No radio!"

"It's my own, I made it"—tugging at the earphones—"and nobody else can hear it anyhow—"

Mitwisser brandished the bloody frame. "Who gives mama this? Idiot! Look how she cuts herself—"

"Willi, he found it and showed it to mama and she wanted it, so he gave it to her—"

"You are to protect mama!"

The flat of Mitwisser's huge hand came down brutally on the boy's head. A soft mewl, like an animal's, spilled out of him. Blank shock dulled his eyes.

"You see now." Lazily, almost dreamily, Mrs. Mitwisser turned to me; her fingers were fidgeting with the gauze patch above her breast. "My husband," she said in a tired voice, "he has the wish to kill this boy."

"It was Willi," Heinz wailed.

I was witness then to something new under the sun of Mitwisser's universe: he had beaten a child, and out of more than local rage. Some demon had caught him. Was it his wife he wanted to thrash? Was it (I thought of Dr. Tandoori's parting judgment) that he was not free? Chained to his Elsa, to his children, to his Karaites? To world-upheaval, to this house in a wilderness of insignificance? An hour of pleasure, and with a tailor!