The Syme Papers (19 page)

My father looked at me now, sadly I supposed, as if I had confessed to a slighter, more personal emptiness. ‘I have only to look at the company I keep,’ I said at last, more quietly, ‘to know that such a man as I cannot have the measure of the world. Not here. I had rather risk my soul upon a hundred absurdities than on such certainties as I live among now.’

‘There are great things to be done, even here,’ my father said, almost timidly.

I rise to anger quick and dry, like a handful of loose grass set a-flame, sharp and indeed (to draw the analogy to its improbable conclusion) almost sweet. ‘As for that, Father – there are emptier dreams than hollow worlds, madder and more dangerous fancies. A German republic…’

‘Hush
now,’
he
said.
‘Hush.’

So I urged more gently. ‘Only imagine, Father – consider if this fellow were right, how great a revolution we should play a part in. I would stand at the side of the Napoleon of a new science and a new world.’

He lifted, with a blind tilt of the head, his spectacles from their resting-place and blinked at me, till I could see the raw pink at the corners of his eyes. He bit the tip of his thumb between pursed lips, and muttered, mostly to himself, ‘We have buried you here –
I
have buried you here, in obscurity.’

‘By the by,’ I added innocently, in the long pause that followed, broken only by the clamour below, ‘the gardener has stumbled across a rather extensive vein of bitumen at the foot of Kolwitz Castle. Running through the heart of the hill.’

My father looked up quickly, looping the spectacles once more across his plump, delicately veined nose.

‘There may be some virtue in this “double-compression” piston
Syme mentions,’ I continued, ‘some profit in it – that may appeal to a more practical mind. To common sense.’

‘We have great things ahead, my dear boy,’ my father declared, briskly once more, his mind made up. ‘Great days ahead …’ But that brave phrase lured him into some cloudy vision, and his voice trailed away once more, while he tickled the soft pink and grey of his cheek with the feather of his quill. ‘Great days ahead
…’

‘Perhaps the Prince will not spare me?’ I sniffed, beginning to blink, suddenly fearful of the prospects I had opened before me.

This seemed to settle him. ‘He shall,’ my father answered, rising and looking up at his son, for my talents, such as they are, have been spread thin and long, and I stand a head above him. ‘If I require it. And this is just the thing.’ (He kept repeating that phrase, as if to ward off doubts like devils – though ‘the thing’ was just what my father could never quite put his finger on.) ‘This is just the thing. Double-compression piston, I believe you called it? I must draft a letter to the council. Wonderful new device for excavation, along those lines. Swept America, mining at record speed the virgin country. A vein of bitumen, was it, you said, in the princely gardens?’ And on the wind of his new conviction, he swept us both downstairs towards luncheon.

A week later, by chance, Syme’s story broke in the
Hamburger Tagesblatt –
‘The Hole in the New World’ – and the news travelled to Neuburg. The council were decided; my course was set.

Such hours we used to spend in those wonderful labyrinths, the Prince and I, heads bent to our studies on sunny mornings, when the dew lay thick as rain on the grass. A blackbird drank greedily beside us from a pool in the toes of Aphrodite, who stood dripping and chilly in a loose dress of Portland stone, flecked here and there by calcareous streaks, in a gesture of frozen welcome. The paths fell away before us in such a profusion of lanes and hedgerows, such a confusion of trees – oak, ash and scattered birch – that we seemed never to wander the same way twice. Here, a marbled cave set in the hillside called us into the shade; there a tiny cupola offered a dry spot in a brisk spring shower, from which to observe the slow Elbe 
white in a misty patter. At the foot of the hill a low cultivated maze, cut from sharp yew – muddy most of the time and gleaming with black rainwater – tempted our wanderings further. And when at last we surrendered hope of ever finding the green core and the quiet bench at the centre, we had only to step high and light, giggling and steadying each other by hand and shoulder, across the prickly barriers; and by this leap of faith surmounting every obscurity of path and purpose straight to the secret heart.

In these gardens, on a bright, cold, sunshiny afternoon, I took my leave of him. Snow had fallen in the night and covered the hedgerows in chilly blossoms. The paths trailed away in softness, which our footsteps pressed into hard white bricks as we walked along. I had determined to continue our lessons, even in this, our farewell interview; and so we rambled wet and dirty to the dancing beck running down the far side of the hill. This was the subject of one of our geological experiments. We had thrust a heavy rock in the flow of the water to observe the results. (The Prince’s burgeoning strength had played no small part in this manoeuvre, and I still remember the fine white steam rising off his pink neck after the heat of these exertions.) Now we stood, in the ruins of a checked stream, to mark the changes.

The Prince, a creature of prodigious appetites, had always upon his person some assortment of chocolates or sweetmeats or nuts, mostly collected in the depths of his trouser pockets; and from these he drew forth a continuous supply of treats, which filled the flushed corner of his cheek, and lent to his voice a curious grumbling quality, like the mutterings of a much older man. He seemed, visibly, to sprout before me – such fierce nourishment did he draw from the life around him, in every swallow and breath – and had grown (in his broader, swaggering, big-boned fashion) by the tender age of fifteen till the top of his head almost nudged the tip of my negligible chin. Something had clouded his spirits that day; and he munched in a sullen, ferocious, hungerless fashion, as if he bore the chocolates between his strong white teeth some personal and particular grudge.

‘Observe,’ I said, perched on a high piece of rock to prevent my shoes from soaking through, ‘the effects of long constriction. The 
choked stream has swelled, outward and downward. The brisk flow now lies stagnant; the sodden soil offers no hope for the new year’s seedlings; the ground itself shudders underfoot. New streams have formed, to right and left, tiny trickles that dissipate over the unfamiliar ground, leaving only a trail of slickness in the snow. On the far side of the rock the ground remains dry, somewhat firmer underfoot; and here and there a film of ice has formed across the stones, though higher up no frost could sink its teeth into the stream.’

The Prince, usually attentive and eager to please (if not to learn), scarcely looked my way as I spoke; and wandered, heedless of his boots, into the soaked turf, splashing as he went. He spat from time to time a mouthful of pistachio shells, then filled his fist with a fresh handful and cracked and chewed. I fell silent at his inattention, in a cold huff. The short day set in frosty blazon on the far side of the hill; we observed only the shadows lengthen and the chill deepen, and a faint glow, as of coal fires, seeping around the edges of the sky.

‘I say,’ he said at last, climbing through the middle of the stream to the rock we had taken such pains to shift, ‘I shall be quite different when you come back. I have decided. Everything will be quite different.’ And he spat again. The dark fell quickly, and soon his crouched figure took on a dusky glow.

‘How sharp the cold makes everything you say,’ I observed, turning aside from his last remark. A fresh fall of snow had begun, and a hundred chilly kisses alighted upon my face and hands. ‘Quite astonishingly clear. I can scarcely see you – perhaps a dozen feet away, a huddled shape – but your voice rings out something astonishing. Even a whisper would carry like a bell.’ And my own voice rang across the bleak hillside, into the night.

‘As I say,’ the Prince persisted, with a thick tongue, ‘I have so many plans. All I need is time. Riding, for a start; I’ve fallen woefully behind. Hespe says a prince who cannot ride is like a woman who cannot dance. There is so much to learn of things that matter, you know. They all say I am growing fat.’

Then with a sudden fierce burst of spirits he bent his back to the great rock he’d sat upon and laboured to shift it from the stream. 
‘There was …’ he huffed, ‘nothing wrong … here,’ he grunted, ‘until you … began to meddle. Come on, Müller, bear a hand.’ (There is always a push, as well as a pull, whenever we leave.)

I stepped gingerly through the growing night and the freezing wet. ‘You are the worst kind of fool,’ I muttered to myself, picking my way, ‘a child’s plaything – and a muddy one at that.’ But as I stood soaked to the ankles and bent my back at the shoulder of my puffing Prince, a sudden and careless elation swelled within me – whether at the prospects before me or the noble youth beside me, I could not judge. Together we heaved the great rock from the sucking mud and sent it tumbling down the darkened hill, only a faint crash here and there to speak of its violent journey. But the loosened stream had lain dormant too long, and no fresh flow sprung up in the sodden turf.

‘As I said,’ the Prince repeated, as we strode back through the thickening snow, ‘everything will be different when you come back. I don’t suppose you shall recognize me at all.’

And so I took my leave of him.

And so I had come, in considerable confusion of spirits, upon my journey, three weeks before. I kissed my sister Ruth farewell in the bright doorway in Fischersallee at dawn. She stood, ghostly and light as a cobweb in a white dressing-gown, her anxious twining fingers bloodless in my palm, only her face hot and pink in the cold morning. She swayed a-tiptoe on her left foot, kicking her right leg behind – to balance her chin and lips to my face above her, though I stood on the cobbled street below the doorstep. Dear Ruth, both child and mother to me, for she came bawling into the world through the dark portal of our mother’s death. And the terror and cracked misery of her first tender weeks seemed the voice of the mourning which her birth occasioned, as if in those natal corridors she had been privy to the great secrets of chance and fate, whose whispers we spend our lives attending – and these she cried horrible and loud into the world. Now, plump and rosy cheeked at nineteen, long necked, she wet my face with tears, repressing the sniffles of her snub nose with a delicate finger, poked against its tip. ‘You shall smudge me,’ I 
whispered, ‘see, oh look, the powder has run upon your chin. Be careful of my complexion. You are an armful of damp, of cold and damp.’

‘I shall mind your Prince for you,’ she promised, her eyes bright with the dew of broken sleep.

‘Not too near,’ I teased, sobbing freely now in the light bones of her arms. But the knock of my father’s stick – clip, clip on the roof of the carriage – and the following crack of the coachman’s whip broke the spell of departure. I suffered the lapse of her embrace and fled into the morning.

My father accompanied me to Hamburg, where the snow fell upon the docks and disappeared in the endless thirst of the sea as quick as footsteps vanish behind waltzing feet. We had been silent over much of the long coach-ride, a silence which I attributed on his part to a widower’s loneliness – how heavy the absence of his children weighed on him.

‘Ruth is blooming, Father – don’t you think?’ I said once, to turn his thoughts to the child left him.

‘Perhaps she shall be married when you return’ was all he said.

My silence, I confess, was rooted in fear – at the thought of the scope and reach of the world outside my father’s shadow. A sailor had lowered my box into the jolly-boat and his oars slapped against the pier in the swell of the wave, as he waited for his passenger, to row him out to the
Leipzig,
dipping and kicking in the blow coming over the North Sea.

My father’s words to me then rang
now
in my ears, as I fastened my overstuffed portmanteau (packed with quills and papers, unguents, powders, garments of every nicety and description, a pouch of varied bolus against the sea-sickness, against insomnia, against all manners of discomforts and disquiets) – and waited for landfall, in that empty sleeplessness only a traveller knows.

‘Beware of American women,’ he said, smiling and looking up, touching me lightly at the elbow. ‘And do not be lightly taken in.’

I stooped to him now, with a wet hand against the fat of his cheek – curious, how our bodies teach us pity and love, simply, while our difficult thoughts must scramble to con the lesson – and kissed his
brow. Then the swiftness of things removed me, after a clumsy, murky fall, into the bottom of the boat, and the waves receded against his receding steps, and both bore us away. The large damp snow did truly glitter in the shine of my weeping eyes, till I hardened my heart anew at the thought of the journey before me – as if my father had cast me off, and I had not clamoured to be sent. I sat low and dejected in the boat, nursing with tender hands a bruised knee, a bruised heart.

Well, I thought now, mounting the dank companion ladder upon legs not so much used to the vicissitudes of the sea as numbed to them: my father shall see how little good I am to anyone. And I determined then and there, in the full stubbornness of youthful inconsistency: to begin afresh in a new world, a new man, unfettered by fathers, and to champion this strange prophet of a hollowed earth to the ringing skies, never to return.

And then, considerably heartsick, and at a loss for misery or hope, as one may be at a loss for words, I lifted my head into the wind of the sea, and, stepping on deck, glanced across the confusion of sail and rigging at America, this New World, up the fat of the Chesapeake River – bordered by green threshing banks of trees, their roots crumbling into the muddy waters – towards Norfolk.