Heir to the Glimmering World (37 page)

57

T
HE MONEY
had stopped coming. The house was asleep; only Bertram and I were awake. I was by now hardly the confident chatelaine who spilled dollars into Bertram's humbly waiting palms. He had entered, perforce, into the intimacies of our straits and stratagems. We sat at the dining room table, together calculating how to make do with what remained.

"No more wine," I instructed.

"The Professor's fond of it. It does his wife good."

"Bread or wine, one or the other."

"In that case, the staff of life. Wine."

"Bertram—"

"You never can tell, you could get another batch any day now."

"No," I said, "there's nothing," and heard in these hollow words an echo of Mitwisser.

A wild scratching at the green front door. It was not unusual: raccoons sometimes scurried at night up from the weedy woodsy outskirts of our neighborhood to sniff after the scent of habitation and its rinds and castoffs, bold enough to invade the very thresholds of human sancta. A feral scratching, a clawing, a beating, a bleating. A desperate creature. The noises went on and on, now with concentrated ferocity, now weakly, falling back in exhaustion or resignation. And then a girl's midnight convulsions.

Bertram let her in. He knew at once who it must be, but Anneliese was bewildered—had she mistaken the house after so many months? This small man, standing shocked in the doorway, no, no, she could not be mistaken, it was only the dizziness, yet here was a stranger taking her two hands, murmuring her name....

"I live here," she told him. She could not think what else to say. The dizziness troubled her sight. She had fumbled for the doorbell and could not find it.

"So do I," Bertram said. In her loose dress, wound all around her, her body curled into itself, she was no better than an abandoned bundle. There were traces of dried vomit on the front of her dress. He picked her up and carried her in.

"Put her in her own bed. Take your things out of there and put her in her room," I said.

Bertram set her down and covered her shoulders with a blanket. She was shivering. She had brought nothing with her. A few coins dropped out of the pocket of her dress; it was all she had left. She had eaten nothing since leaving Thrace. She had not slept at all. On the bus she was sick. She tried to clean herself in the lavatory of the bus depot in the city, but her coat was too badly soiled, so she discarded it there, and then went down into the subway, and when the train drummed up from underground and ran along the trestle it was already night, and she felt sick again, and after that the half-blind walk from the street of shops, the dizzy blur, the small man opening the door, small but strong enough to lift her....

The ends of her hair were sticky with vomit.

"Rose," she said. But she turned from me.

"Lie back. Bertram will bring you some tea."

"Where is papa?"

"You can see him in the morning. Lie back now—"

She obeyed. Her look slid nervously from side to side, as if tracking the movements of an invisible Japanese fan.

"Who is that man?"

"The bearer of mug and muffins," Bertram answered. "These should fix you up pretty quick."

The spoon wobbled in her hand. Bertram fed her bits of warm muffin. One by one she accepted them; one by one she spit them out.

"I can't," she said.

"You can"—Bertram's most maternal tone.

"Papa will be so angry—"

"If you swallowed a few crumbs? That's sure to get his dander up, won't it?"

"Bertram, don't tease. Let her be."

"The poor kid." A burble of vomit trickled over the blanket. He wiped it away and bent over her. "You want to sleep now, all right?"

Her eyes kept up their rapid waverings. I thought she must be hallucinating—what did she see?

"He will be so angry," she said again. It fell from her faintly, hoarsely, imploringly—but it was Bertram she was invoking. Abruptly she seized his wrist. "Why are you here? Why do you live in this house?" She pulled him nearer. "Is it for papa? Do you give papa money for his work?"

Her last errand in Thrace was for her papa, she said. She said it excitedly, pressing against Bertram, appealing to him. James had sent her out, not for schnapps—the two bottles were finished, he wanted no more. She must take another packet to the post office, he told her: it had been too long, there was no time for a letter. She watched as he cautiously backed the Ford up a narrow trail, hidden from the street, that sidled along their landlady's shabby garden. The Ford had been languishing where they had left it so many weeks ago, and its glossy black paint had grown brown with dust and spatter. A film of dried mud crusted the running board. Then she saw him tugging at the tangle of hose, and knew that he meant to rinse the auto clean before they set out.

She disliked going to the post office. It brought her within sight of the high school, and she disliked the high school, she disliked it that James had led her there, she disliked the schoolyard where he had laughed so bitterly.

It was bright noon. She heard the treble din of girls' shrieks from the schoolyard, and the repetitious thuds of a basketball on concrete, and the bellowing of young males. The post office was antiquated and ill-lit, with grooved wooden counters and a wooden grill, behind which the clerk in his formal collar and vest scowled as he weighed her packet on his brass scale. It was fatter than it had ever been before. A wall of murals loomed over her, Indians tending bonfires and Pilgrims harvesting, and across from these a dim flat row of locked brass boxes. James had the key to one of them, and sometimes came to collect a message, or whatever it was, from an old acquaintance named Brooks. It was plain that he loathed this Brooks; yet there was a sort of communication between them, if only now and then. He had given her the key: he had never before entrusted it to her. She opened the box and peered into it: it was long and dark and empty. The key was useless now, James said, she could toss it away if she pleased—but instead she surrendered it to the clerk, who took it with a speckled hand. She was impatient to slough off this relentless Thrace, to be rid of that speckled hand, and the brutal thump of the canceling stamp, and the screeching schoolyard nearby, and their spectral landlady's indifferent meals simmering all day on a greasy stove, and that shadowy languorous room.

A ragged privet hedge obscured the Ford as she approached, but when she went round to the garden side of the house she saw it. It did not look very clean after all, and the sun struck the windshield with so sharp a twelve o'clock glare that it made a blue-black spot on her retinas. Behind the blue-black spot the windshield wiper was shifting left to right, right to left, back and forth, in a frenetic beat. Under the falling sea of sunlight the wiper made a little hopping song:
whish-whoosh, whoosh-whish,
with a tiny squeal when it changed direction. The motor was on, rumbling and hiccuping. James must have stepped into the house to fetch their things. Shoeprints marked the dust on the running board. The Ford was alive and ready.

James was not in the house. He was in the Ford. His head was heavy on his chest. His hair, uncut for weeks, drooped over his eyes. He seemed mesmerized by the sun's dazzle, and by the sweeping music of the windshield wiper, tolling like a clapper. The Ford's windows were shut, all but one, and this one open only enough to leave a gap for the snout of the hose to slip through. She followed the hose to its tail. The tail was plugged into the auto's exhaust pipe.

Bertram was still in her grip. She threw off the blanket; she would not relinquish him; he let her wail against him.

A softness on the stairs: Mrs. Mitwisser in her nightgown, restless and barefoot. Her daughter's voice, low though it was, had risen to her. I almost believed she had a dog's hearing, or else she was like the hapless man in the fairy tale whose ears are so sensitive that he must stuff them up, lest he be compelled to listen to all the stirrings of earth and cosmos; a gnat's wings are thunder for him.

"That one? That one?" She searched all around. But there was only Anneliese in her dirty dress, clinging to Bertram.

She pushed me aside and gaped. "
Mein Gott! Sie ist schwanger—
" She rounded a hand over her own belly.

"Papa will be so angry," Anneliese whispered.

But Mrs. Mitwisser had gathered herself up; her whole face shone, her teeth shone like armor; she was all at once a force. With the assurance of an empress she called out to Bertram, "You will marry my daughter,
nicht wahr?
"

Bertram produced his conciliatory smile. An ambassador's smile. An invader's, a colonizer's. "Not yet," he said, "not yet."

58

T
HE NEXT MORNING
saw a perplexing scramble of sleeping arrangements—mattresses transported from here to there, sheets set flying. It was very like the day James had come into the house; only then Anneliese had presided over the turmoil. All night she dozed unquietly, startling into wakeful fright. Bertram kept up his vigil—the fitful clutching of her fist, her face pressed hiddenly into the pillow that yesterday had been his. Shaking with resolve, Mrs. Mitwisser ordered Waltraut's bed to be trundled out to take its turn opposite mine, while her own was carried into the boys' room; it was to be Bertram's. And what of Mrs. Mitwisser, alone left standing in this game of musical chairs—nine players, eight berths—where was she to lay her head?

"I go to my husband," she said.

He submitted to it wearily. My typewriter was out of sight, shoved behind raw heaps of manuscript. His table was unrecognizably bare. His study, which I had felt to be the furnace of a laboratory where revolutionary affinities raged into conflagrations, was now no more than a commonplace marital chamber. I had no place in it. He was a monarch who had abdicated. He had recovered his daughter, but in humiliation. He was weakened; only his wife was made strong. The Karaites were surrendered to their oblivion. Al-Kirkisani was silenced. Mitwisser's aimlessness became mine.

I was aimless, I had no place in this house. Bertram ruled it. "There is sickness," he told the boys: they must not distress Anneliese, they must not come near. The warning sobered Heinz, it sobered Gert; but Willi took to taunting me. "Papa doesn't want you anymore, mama doesn't want you," he sang. And when he was sure no one heard: "Mrs. Tan-doori! Mrs. Tandoori!" I was reduced, Waltraut was now my bedroom companion, and what was I?

Together, Bertram and Mrs. Mitwisser deliberated over Anneliese. She must not get chilled. She must have proper nourishment. They bustled around her, tempting her with this dish and that. Bertram could seduce sparseness into delicacy: his ideas, as he called them, were growing more and more ingenious. The money was dwindling; he was careful to be frugal. He had begun to shop as I had when I was a child, cadging vegetable leavings from the greengrocer. There was no meat. There was no more wine.

I was shut out from all but Mitwisser. His melancholy lured me to whatever unlikely corner he might settle into, turning round and round, a large restless animal. His stricken shoulders were hunched like a bison's. In the kitchen Mrs. Mitwisser was cutting up celery for one of Bertram's magically long-lasting stews, while Waltraut stirred at her feet, or went trailing after Bertram: the three of them were a cadre of industry. When Mitwisser rose, heavy in his big bones, I went after him. He did not object. He moved up and down our unobtrusive street—an airier version of those indoor pacings—and surveyed the row of house-fronts with their identical stoops and stumpy lone evergreens planted like sentinels. "Where am I?" he muttered. "Why am I here?" He wore his mourning like a corruption. I watched him. I divined him; I absorbed him. I saw how he was fallen.

"Come down to the water," I said.

His sons in their noisy wanderings had now and again gone hurtling to the miry edges of our neighborhood, where the cattails and sharp rocks skirted a trickle of inlet. But Mitwisser, self-confined, had kept aloof from this small geography. His soil was alphabet, his sky was parchment. He let me take his hand—how broad it was, and rough—to draw him to the water's lip. We entered a boggy softness. Seagulls trafficked overhead. Seaweed smells lifted around us, as tactile as a skein. And before us rippled this tiny tributary of the Atlantic, whose outer limbs touched the docks of Hamburg and Stockholm.

"My daughter," he said.

"Bertram's taking good care of her. So is your wife."

Heavily he mounted a high flat boulder, and stood there like some great extinct Viking at the helm of a wooden ship.

"My wife is without remorse. My daughter has redeemed her."

I knew his thought. He was hemmed in by willful transgressors. Rebels swarmed around him. His wife had betrayed him; his daughter; his nation. Among these weed-slimed stones the street lamps of Berlin, the cafés, the salons, the honors, were as remote as myth. And ah, ah, once he had been infatuated with transgression and rebellion! With the spurned and reckless exiles of the past!

"Tell more about James," I urged. "There must be more—"

"Why should you wish this?" A gargling sound escaped him. He spat out a viscid clot. "The wise man speaks of ideas, the middling man of actions, the fool of persons. This, my dear Rose, is an intelligent proverb of the Arabs." He stepped clumsily off the rock; it was nearly a plunge. "How poisonous it is to breathe in this wasteland. What is this stink the wind brings?"

There was no wind. The crowns of the cattails barely swayed. "Seaweed and dead fish," I said.

59

I
ALSO WATCHED BERTRAM.
He was preoccupied with Anneliese: Mrs. Mitwisser was his satellite. In the mornings, huddled under her mother's shawl, Anneliese was brought into the dining room to be enthroned and fed. The boys were afraid of her. She shut her eyes and turned from them. Motionless, swollen under her wrappings, she was as cryptic as an idol. Often she wept secretly. She spoke only to her mother and Bertram.