The Syme Papers (50 page)

‘Germans can read them,’ Ben said, stout lad, who took naturally to whatever he did not understand, wherever he did not belong – a habitat I believe to which he was more accustomed than most, and where he felt himself (like the blind in the dark) to be at a certain advantage.

‘No they can’t,’ Aaron replied, in that happy denial of the obvious characteristic of an older brother.

‘Weren’t you listening in the car?’ Susie whispered, in the hushed hiss that set her on a level with the children, and made them love her.

‘I was listening,’ Aaron replied,
‘that
was the problem.’

Corridors walled with books opened here and there; arches appearing unexpectedly led between them or around them, or, in one cramped instance, to an upright coffin of books set against a window where Pitt squeezed (but could scarce unsqueeze) himself. (The view of the yellow yard and the AC unit and the neighbouring weatherboard house proved somehow a gloomier vista than the rows of old and unreadable volumes on either side.) Pitt stumbled once upon a slight door in the wall locked (he tried it) above a stoop; a steady and low drip behind it suggested a kitchen and a sinkful of plates. There was another door somewhere else – or was it some
time
else, and the same door? Pitt felt lost, happily lost, in the accumulated – neglect – and endurance – of secondhand books.

Some of them carried no doubt in boxes, portmanteaus, coat-pockets from the Vaterland, grown old on foreign soil; others born in New Braunfels itself, a second generation of immigrants, self-consciously uttering a mother’s or grandmother’s tongue. They followed one another, row upon row, stack on stack (as Pitt supposed, in his whimsy) through such a maze of assertions – fictional, historical, biographical, poetical, theatrical, financial, geographical – clauses and sub-clauses, brief conclusions, qualified at once, and later reversed, revived and discarded again (not to mention the endless asides, and unashamed digressions, in parentheses), that I
felt I had wandered into a great all-encompassing argument, one Teutonic sentence several generations long, and knew not which way to turn, to reach the beginning, or where to stop, and call it an end.

Susie would say, I suppose, that it was a bookshop, and leave it at that. (But this is Pitt’s story, and he shall do as he pleases.)

There was a table – or rather a pine board levelled on stacks of books – in a corner looking over the porch. A TV perching upon it, a black-and-white box, reached its antenna askew to the heavens whence all inspiration flowed. An old woman with a tight white bun on her head and a few loose crackling strands of hair across her face sat with her elbows on the table. She sniffed from time to time, and rubbed a bony thumb against the nib of her nose, to appease the sniff; then sniffed again. She was watching basketball; and the low chatter of crowds filled the shop, the squeak of gym-shoes, the bang of the ball, the dry interruptions of the announcer.

‘Give me a minute,’ she drawled, when Pitt approached her. Her low sniffs, regular as ticks, continued, pausing only for the brief application of her thumb – now to the bridge of her nose, which she rubbed like a schoolgirl erasing a foolish mistake. ‘Back-door,’ she muttered at the flickering screen; ‘damn kids. Back-door’s open all day long. Can’t shoot – can’t cut. Not much good for anything, are they?’ she added, turning towards her customer with a smile that sagged a little after registering eighty-nine years of variegated bemusement. ‘Half-time,’ she declared, suddenly at attention. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I am looking’, I said, ‘for Inge Muller.’

‘You are looking’, she said, ‘at Inge Muller.’ Then added, in a slow-burning drawl dry as juniper, ‘Never underestimate a preposition. They move worlds.’

A woman, Pitt recognized, after his own heart.

There was the inevitable stumbling around the question at hand. A certain lengthy digression on a possibly unknown cousin? Name of Karding? Long, dark fellow from the German side of the family? Not unknown at all, thank you – Inge proving
a keen genealogist – rubbing the sniff in her nose – brother of Ferdinand Müller (‘before this barbaric country took the umlaut out of us’) had a boy who bought the house on Fischersallee when Ruth packed up – name of Karl Heinrich, good-looking kid, who fathered only daughters, seven of them, and the oldest married a Karding – noble family, owned a great deal of land in Schleswig – produced in their heyday even a minister of finance at Berlin, before the ordinary falling away as the stock dried up.

We were interrupted at this point by a clatter from the back room, where Ben, through a low door above the step, had disappeared. (Ben was in his way the more fearless of the two, belonging as he did to no conventions – an awkward child, who
wriggled
into thoughts and corners his brother could not, and usually knocked over a great deal on his way. Aaron, golden boy, believed in rules, because he won; and proprieties, because they shone on him; and sat mum beside us, only twisting his neck a little to catch the half-time show on TV.) Inge lifted herself in the brittle weightlessness of old age, and moved to examine; and Susie and I, her hand in mine (the embarrassment of our children always rendered her a little
childish),
followed. (She turned always to me in her shame.)

Ben was discovered raising a small whitish beast by the loose-bunched neck, and trying to balance him on what I suppposed to be a
second
stack of paperbacks against the wall. (He, like his father, was nothing if not persistent, and, having stumbled upon
cats
on the one hand and
books
on the other, could not resist the temptation to – experiment.) ‘Ben!’ Susie cried, squeezing harder, as if to say, The son of Pitt …

But Pitt’s attention was elsewhere. He could not help reflecting on the sadness of storerooms – especially this, where once perhaps Ruth Müller had spent her age. A sheet of baking paper had been plastered to the small back window to frustrate prying eyes; it wrinkled in the stuffy chamber and let in only a squeezed grey light. Heaps of dusty books tumbled about us. Some of them boxed and spilling over – redundancies, perhaps, or ballast at an auction, but there needs no special reason for a book to suffer
neglect. Some of the boxes three-quarters empty (a strangely hopeful condition), their fellows I supposed already broken free for the border and the opportunities of the showroom. Ben desisted (the cat scrambled off yowling), widened his eyes to ‘O’s, and wrinkled the ends of his mouth downward – he had learned early a wonderfully adult air of apology. It served him well. ‘Only books,’ Inge said, accepting. ‘Nothing holy about books.’ The cat, a dirty creature the colour of old newspaper, had perched on an empty container of fresh water beside a stack of what looked like albums. ‘We may as well start here,’ Inge continued. ‘I suppose you’ve come about Mutti’s papers.’

Susie’s soft palm was instantly damp in my own. How wonderful that the machine of man, a device infinitely older than all learning, has adapted itself to register (in the sudden sweet perspiration of animal heat) nervous pleasure at the thought – how shall I describe it? – that a heap of scribbled and dried-out pulp lay at hand, which may offer traces that a gentleman a hundred and fifty years dead had developed his theory of concentric internal spheres to prove (Pitt breathes), etc.! All of this distilled into a fine sweat pressed into the wrinkles of Pitt’s palm.

Pitt, of course, was too familiar with such hopes.
Mutti
proved indeed to be Ruth Müller (Inge’s great-grandmother), a tough and accomplished lady who would, I suspect, have proved a more useful confidante to Sam Syme than did her brother Phidy. Certain betrayals, of course, are possible only to men among men. A heap of papers, or books rather, neatly and privately bound in calico, had survived their … editor Ruth, like bones in a grave. (Are we not all
editors
of those fates and physiques Nature has thrust upon us, amenders, at best, of a set text?) These Inge lifted from an old Sony box, gone at the edges, home once of her little TV – and set down in a cloud of dust on the blue carpet peeling back from the walls. Susie, slipped already to her knees, blew on the covers, and lifted the edge with her finger, as slow as if a butterfly trembled beneath.

‘Oh, Pitt,’ she breathed, ‘it’s just as you said.’

What
exactly
she meant by this has never been clear to me. Pitt,
I believe, could be forgiven for taking offence at her tone, which suggested, if nothing better, a former lack of faith. Which suggested more, in fact (and less):
surprise,
that any of Pitt’s concerns should have its material echo in the world at large; surprise that Pitt is not imprisoned in his own thoughts, but ranges freely over Things As They Are; surprise, in short, that there is
meat
to Pitt.

And yet Pitt took no offence, for there is something in delight (in
her
delight) that trumps resentment and distrust, something indisputable about delight, and irresistible. Pitt was pleased to watch her, bent above the books, recognizing here or there among the German narrative a familiar name, a ‘Phidy’, ‘Tom’ or ‘Sam’. She did not question, as Pitt did, the purpose of these several copies. Had Ruth hoped, perhaps, to publish them, and make her brother’s posthumous name, in the manner of Fritz Ernst and Herman Seele, whose testimonials of American life had achieved a general currency in the homeland? What labour of love was here? Is that why she strained out all the unhappiness (like pits from a confection), Syme’s futility, her brother’s faithlessness and bitter departure? For even a quick glance (bent beside his wife, his knees aching slightly against the wall-to-wall and the creaking boards) revealed to Pitt that ‘Amerikareise’, as Ruth had titled Phidy’s memoirs, had bowdlerized (a word eminently suggestive of the
guts
it removes) the Syme Papers, and left behind a travelogue, curious if not happy; indeed, often happy. Wonderful what an
edit
can do, I thought, the natural selection according to which we are all judged in the end. (Unless Pitts come along, and sift.)

Then Pitt thought, Perhaps she needed courage for her own journey.

Venerable Muller broke in above us and declared, in her crackling voice, ‘There was a letter in one of them – from Friedrich – unsent. Gone now. Well, not gone strictly. Just lost – and not that, either. I suppose, young man, I should invite you to my … bedchamber … to explain. You see, I ran short of – paper. Better take the boys with you. You’ll need them.’

She led us through the shop again, trailing Pitts of all sizes; up
another little stoop, through a low door into what proved indeed to be the kitchen: checkerboard lino, smoked-glass windows where the diminished sun breathed dust into the room, and a wet sink, where a pan of bacon fat stood propped, on which the tap
did
drip. An awkward set of steps rose out of the back into the roof; and these we climbed, Susie following first, her straight, boyish nose bent forward to sniff the possibilities ahead. Boys like corners and attics, and even Aaron galled her mother’s kibe as he tumbled after her up the stairs. I heard
her
wonder first. ‘Oh, Pitt,’ she said, ‘oh, Pitt – how beautiful. Oh, Mrs Muller.’

Sunshine fell at a slant into the loft. There was a low bed pushed into the corner, over the wooden boards, bleached the colour of pale ale where the light reached. A white chest of drawers beginning to peel, with postcards Blu-tacked to the sides: of Paris and New York and San Francisco. A red yarn runner thrown the length of the attic, on which the boys slipped about, rumpled it an – forgetting their bad manners in the hushed excitement – even smoothed again with careful feet. Through the narrow dormer windows, I saw mostly the cheerful blank of a blue sky, and the tops of the trees and the television antennas on Market Avenue. But it was the wallpaper we peered at and touched, with the tips of fingers and the backs of hands; and even sniffed.

Her bedroom smelled powerfully of – paper. Perhaps the atmosphere of the shop room had leaked above in the heat of the spring day. Press your nose into the bent spine of a book and you have the snuff of it – rich and sweet, faintly dusty, and redolent of fermented … words. I had never before considered the beauty of the human hand, by which I mean the scratch of the pen wielded, and not the paw itself. ‘I never looked at Mutti’s papers any more,’ Inge said. ‘They sat in boxes and got dusty. So I called a nephew round to help me plaster them – that’s when I could still get on my knees. It took a day, and we used everything we had. The over-leafs, I’m sorry to say, were sacrificed. But she kept her journals mostly on one side; and when she didn’t – in the letters, for example – we read them out and picked the better one. So this’, she added, looking round herself, ‘is what there is.’

What struck me most forcefully, in the fields of Ruth’s penmanship on either side, was how much like
fields
they appeared: the grasses of her alphabet swaying in the soft breath of her eloquence, always forward, a little forward, as she thought of a new thing to write. Trees and hedgerows grew where a date stood out; names occasionally appeared in capitals, alongside the titles of plays attended, and, as we soon discovered, performed. Little hills rose when she was drunk, I believe: large letters gave scope to her wandering hand, to slip and find its course after all, and a few lines filled the page, and comforted her with the thought that a day had not passed by unreflected upon. Grass in a graveyard was not a more natural crop of human life than the written word. Like a harvest half-finished, her letters were scattered about the walls, bundled into sheafs of words, and laid out to dry. They stretched even into those dark corners where the slant of the roof met the floor; for which, as Inge had predicted, we would need the boys.

‘Come on, boss,’ Susie declared, setting her hat on the rug, and rolling her stockings in little bundles down to her shoes, ‘tell us what we’re looking for. (If we may, Frau Muller, if we may.)’

‘Mention of
Sam,’
I said, as Ruth kept her journal in German, and only names would do, ‘or
Syme,
or the Professor; or Highgate, or Tom, or Jenkyns, or Phidy, or Friedrich; or,’ Pitt added, spitting slightly,
‘Geognostisch,
Wissenschaftlich,
Abraham Gottlob Werner.
Genius.
But mostly Sam Syme, Sam Syme, Sam Syme.’