The Syme Papers (51 page)
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
‘Come on, boys,’ Susie said, and bent to her knees and pressed her perplexed forehead to the slant of the wall, and began to read; and thus inspired, we did.
*
We found, of course, mostly red herrings. Herrings, after all, are a plentiful fish. And we learned, naturally, more of Ruth than of Sam. The boys lay on their backs and pushed themselves into the corners; they were covered in dust when they rolled back, their bottoms brown, and the rolls in their socks thick with dirt. There was in general a great deal of sneezing, in which Inge Muller led the field, protesting she always sneezed, she delighted in it, she
used to pinch snuff for the pleasure, never to think of it, dears; and she sat on her bed, delighted indeed, and clapped her hands when anyone called out, to ‘come, come quick, Dad, and look’. Slowly the walls grew pink and then red indeed, with the sun in setting, before a fine shadow, almost gold, fell across them when it dropped below the trees.
Ruth grew clear. Though the boys and Susie barely understood a word of what they read, they called out from time to time a question, and Inge answered them in that slow-burning drawl, with her eyes closed, and her white-bunned head now propped against the back of the bed. ‘The Staatsaengerfest’, she intoned, ‘was a festival of music, of German music, held in the summer every year at Fredericksburg. I suppose you’ve found the bill for it,
Thursday
to
Saturday,
isn’t that right? And
fifty
cents
at
the
door?
Ruth played piano, until her fingers got too stiff; and then there are two blank years – in her journals, too, she used to fill them with music, and they dried up, when she stopped performing. I would have thought it was the other way around, but no – you need to be a
little
bit happy to write – a little will do. And then she appears again, in the
plays.
Every year the Staatsaengerfest (say it slowly, boys) put on a play and Ruth, as she says herself, took on
“die
olle
Greisin”,
the old hag, whoever she was.’
There were sketches, too. Little pencil drafts of the house we crawled about in now, standing on an emptier road; two or three neighbours scattered among trees until the lights of Market Avenue appeared, glowing in criss-crossed scratches against the page. An outline of a hand (perhaps her own)? A boy in a plump frock (Inge’s father)? And the land itself: the swift, slight Campo River at the edge of town, long clear since the red wine spilled and famously drunk by her son, in Roland’s Toast; hill-country in spiky flower; broken slabs of rock at the foot of a cliff; and the enormous skies, too big for the page, a cloud stretched wide between two stars that signified how impossible it would be to sketch the entire firmament.
It was Aaron, in the end, who discovered Phidy’s letter. He cried out, ‘Sam!’ but there had been other
Sams
before, and I
sighed, as I bent to the floor beside him and rolled over on my back to inspect. He did not flinch from me then, but pressed his finger, across his father’s rib, to the spot on the wall where the scribble from a different hand, and life, lined the slanted paper:
Friedrich’s,
as I recognized at once.
*
I sit now at home, in the blow of the air conditioner, under the telegraph slots hung on the bedroom wall. Susie leans upon my shoulder and peers. She has reproached me, as a father and a scientist (these, I believe, were her words), for a
lack
of
enthusiasm
– in Pitt, of all people, of all things! – at Aaron’s discovery, at his
break
through.
Merely because I had questioned – I had ventured to question – I had made bold to venture to question – its greater significance to the task at hand. To wit: Syme’s revival, founded upon that proof of his genius, the
New
Platonist
itself. Because I had questioned
that,
in front of the boy, in the first flush of his excitement, as he stubbed his finger, there, there, upon the wall.
‘Write it,’ she says, ‘write it, put it all in, all of it. The whole
bit.
I’ll stand and watch to see you do it.’
She is a lady of passion and great insistence, Miss Pitt. Her round face bright with the heat of her persuasion; her hands, still childish and warm, only the palms, ever so faintly etched with the criss-cross of age, upon Pitt’s cheek, in threatening tenderness. ‘If you put everything else in,’ she says, ‘put that in too – for that’s the heart of the story, if you ask me, and you don’t.’
I have mentioned her boyish nose, thick and straight; her cheeks, broad and pinchable, soft and plump enough to fill thumb and forefinger; her lips, wide and full; and her eyes, blue rings, bright as gas flames in her anger now. And dare a husband say how plain he finds his wife, in the best sense, a face like the beginning of faces, the pattern upon which all other countenances are based, those cluttered corruptions, weakened sophistications, degenerate embellishments upon
her
original – which, Pitt hesitates to say, might serve equally as the foundation of woman
or
man (as it shall serve for her boys, who grow every day into her beauty), so simple in its lines and rich in various expression, that
Pitt feels every visage, stripped to its essence, would resemble her again, and look the better for it.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘what I can’t bear is that you get to the heart of the matter, and turn away. What I can’t bear is that you take the joy out of it, to prove a point; just when Aaron was about to be happy for you, too. But do what you like,’ she says. And leaves him, there, poised above the laptop.
No, Susie, never say Pitt is joyless. Not with fingernails, two days clipped, the shell snug upon the nibs, no longer red or raw, but perfectly formed, to fill the hollow of the keys. Not when the patter of thought runs so happy through his fingers, steps among the perplexity of punctuation, leaps cascading at the edge of paragraphs, to the next bank, a breathtaking inch below, while the faint tip, tip, tip of the key falls and the next black mark appears on the white glow of the screen. Not to mention, most wonderful of all, that breathless caesura before a difficult thought. There is a break in the patter, while the perfect word forms upon his tongue, and Pitt waits, waits, to see it form, like a bead of water at the nose of a tap, and waits, waits, then claps his hands – once, briefly,
thus,
for sheer interrupted joy – to dislodge it, whereupon the flow returns, gushing to the end of sense and sentence, and Pitt is away once more.
Never say that Pitt, short in many things, is short of joy.
But perhaps he shall do as she says and mention Aaron’s discovery, Phidy’s unfortunate letter (or rather a piece of it), papered to the bedroom wall of his great-great-niece – though Pitt has his reasons (and Syme’s) for … suppressing it:
though you are some years dead, since Tom’s letter found me in that Berlin garret. I was desperately in love with – or, as I should say, passionate for – an illiterate Jew girl, with a most vulgar faith in sophistication, whom I met once at Varnhagen’s salon. She loved me for my gentile manners and literary conversation (both of which she borrowed freely)-and how little else, I dare not guess, though I persuaded myself – an easy convert, always a willing audience to my own arguments –
that I should shoot myself, etc. unless she quit her husband and shared my bed – a piece of logic best contradicted by practical experiment. But I ramble, my dear Sam, and you could never abide anyone’s digressions but your own; though you are dead now, though you are dead.
The news of which struck such a blow to my head and heart, I stank of the grief, of the wounds of grief, and scarce crept into the sunlight for a month – demonstrating what you had in a sense devoted your life, both in precept and example, to proving: how much we live in possibility. (In the event the girl mistook my mourning, and came at last, sincerely believing I loved her sincerely, to my darkened bed, where I accepted her chiefly in order to empty my heart of you.) For your death changed little else in my circumstances (a fact unhappy in itself). I had not seen you – in a quarter-century – since those swift sad days at the close. Had not Tom written me directly, the rumour of ‘the great Syme’s end’ should never have reached me, so little greatness remained, and such as had survived confined entirely to your own thoughts and extinguished with them. In the back of my mind, I had never doubted that we should be reconciled at last, yes, with your fame established, and my faithlessness forgiven. (Odd, the convictions we carry with us and never guess that we possess until they are disproved. Well, no one can prove your greatness now; and my forgiveness has run dry at its only source.)
And yet how often I interrupt the past in its progress through my memory! Here and here, crying, hold, an amendment – for an error has slipped into the print-works, and threatens an endless repetition. I should have said – I should have said – a thousand things, but what I said. I should have done – I should have done – a thousand things, but what I did.
To speak plain: I have never loved anyone more than you, Sam Syme. And the great error of my life was not the foolish betrayal (paradoxically vengeful and affectionate) for which you dismissed me at last, but the fact that I never told you,
simply this: you are wrong, you are wrong, it is all absurd, you are wrong. Not when I counted your quiet breaths beside me in bed, that long night on the road when Tom lay ill – I should have waked you. Not when you clutched my head in the crook of your elbow, and whispered ‘enough’ to me, pushing away – I should, for once, have pressed my point, and argued a quite different – sufficiency – that we were better off, happy and young in the ordinary way, than chasing such empty dreams.
‘Sam is my only love and a great man, and I would rather be miserable with him than happy with another. He is grand and fine, and everything around him matters wonderfully – the least thing, like me.’ But these alas are not my words, and
Phidy was wrong, wrong, wrong himself, Pitt avers, suffering from a different, more loving wound, misdiagnosed as doubt. There is no nonsense like the nonsense of self-justification. Tom and Kitty, to soften the news of Sam’s death, bade Phidy to come ‘home’ to them again – a designation less of place than time, a year of youth in which Phidy lived happy and easy among his highest ambitions, before the inevitable indolence of age wore such furniture down to threadbare shabbiness. And Phidy did indeed mean to revisit them; got as far as Paris, on his way, before succumbing to his usual prevarications and delays, before
he
flinched
again; and this shameful letter, addressed perhaps as much to Tom as to Sam, no doubt played the part of his excuses – some low morning, when we go to such lengths to explain
why
we are
where
we are and
what
we are, precisely because we wish to be
somewhere
and
someone
else. But he never sent it; Sam was dead; and Phidy left it out in the grass of his neglect, as Auden says – among his other papers, memoirs and journals, themselves, in their ways,
unsent
letters to the future (till Pitt delivered them). Ruth must have stumbled across it packing up house on her journey west, stuck it in a leaf of ‘Amerikareise’, where Inge Muller discovered it and pasted it to her bedroom wall. Where my son found it. I publish it now (despite obvious hesitations) to please him, and Susie – a
woman who, to do her justice, has the gift of being pleased, the grace of it.
It is only a scrap, but Susie is right, I suppose. This is a love story, after a fashion.
We arrived that first night,
nowhere it seemed, after dark. Tom led
us and Sam and I followed in a dull stupor, through which the
rhythm of the carriage wheels still rattled like feverish dice. Then
Tom stopped at a door and knocked softly and then louder till a
woman came wrapped in a green robe. ‘Mrs Bevington?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Mr Cooling mentioned you.’
‘Of course he did, I’m his aunt. Just go round the back and it’s all
laid out for you. A little cabin, quite cosy and you can bang about as
much as you like.’
I could not guess where we were being led but I found a bed there
and lay in it and slept.
The morning promised a hot day. We woke up early, like children,
from the heat. It rose in a white mist from the breathing ground and
hung in thick vapours round the lamp-posts and the trees, and lay
low over the open field outside our window. The air had a sleepy
power that barely stirred when the dawn broke, like a lion uncon
cerned
– full,
fat
and unconcerned
– by
the approach of a cat. Tom
had arranged a lecture for Sam the next day, but in the meantime
nothing could be done, and we realized, like children, that the day
lay empty before us.
Sam fretted himself into a temper at any idleness, though he loved
it too and could not tear himself from the sweet enchantment of a
listless hour. ‘Hold
your cooing at that duck,’
Sam snapped once, ‘I
cannot read
– for
all your love-making.’
I threw a piece of the bread intended for the bird at him.
‘You are going grey in the mouth, Sam, like a dog,’ Tom said,
laughing. ‘Let’s go exploring.’
We set off from the back of our cabin through the dry yellow
grass. The field fell to a river, thick with the cast-off shells of buds.
They formed a green, starry meadow in the deep black reflection of
the water. Syme stepped slowly on bare feet through the hard grass
and dry earth, marked with ant tracks like a path of crumbs. Tom
and I followed, trailing our shirts over our shoulders. Happiness,
that homeless beggar, had come to us in the warm weather.
I remember a trivial incident of that day, less interesting in itself
than as a symbol of what was to come. A boat lay moored by the
arched foot of a willow tree. The rotting rope hung heavy with weed
and wet, draped round the last pole of a small wooden pier. Syme
stepped, unexpectedly ginger-footed, to the end of it. ‘Hey for a turn
at the oars!’
cried Tom. ‘Climb in.’
Sam placed a heavy foot in
front
of the first cross-bench and fell full-bodied in the boat. He came up,
tumble-mad and bruised, and cursed Tom with a real viciousness,
whose heavy anger I had learned to ignore. ‘Lead your own damn-
fool
way
in
future. Get me out of here – get
me out of here. Phidy,
where’s your hand?’ But Tom stepped in neatly, ‘Nonsense, sit
down and be still,’ timing his second step with perfect ease to rise to
the roll-back of the boat. ‘Hey for a turn at the oar,’ Sam mocked,
recovering his humour and holding up one rotting green pole.
Tom strained the water with his makeshift oar till it caught in
the river bed, planted, and gave us a firm foot forward. Tiny
green-bladed buds flew away like minnows. We reached the middle
of the river, Syme running his hand through the thick water. O
easy time. The thick vapours softened the hard sun like cotton
round a watch. The boat made its slow path unmarked down the
unmoving river.
But I could not remain unmoved, as Tom idly urged our stump-
legged gait. Syme sat deep in thought, and I alone was uneasy,
deeply aware of those two men as they were not of each other, or, I
am sure, of me: Tom’s loose-limbed stance, high-rumped, swaying
from the hips down like a tall woman, his browned hands active;
Syme’s heavy shoulders and white-skinned forearms, spotted with
unhealthy freckles and odd moles, a pallor that always seems lone
ly to me, though I could not answer why. And that powerful scent,
of shaved wood, breathing from his skin, that tickled my nose and
made me shy of him. But for once I was glad of my discomfort,
that like a fine skin sensed the very motions in the air. And I must
have been sensitive indeed to note the passage of that slow wind.
As I was lost in these thoughts I saw the water rise, over Syme’s
boot, held in a careless hand, then above his wrist, touching the edge
of his sleeve as he dipped it deeper. Tom said in a law, laughing voice,
‘We’re sinking.’
The rotted vessel wallowed like a waking beast. Water lipped over
the edge and lost itself among the loose wooden ribs of the boat’s
bottom. Gathering strength, it swelled above the cross-benches and
would soon submerge us completely. Tom cried, in falsetto bravado,
‘We’ve been struck!’ and perched at the head. When he saw it was
no use, he leapt into the water, crying, ‘Abandon ship!’ and ‘Death
to the King!’ I shrank further and further from the rising wet,
desperate to keep my white shirt dry. But the boat tilted with the
shifting weight as Tom sprang free, and I fell in, disgusted and
fearful, knocking my head against a suddenly lifted side. We swam to
shore, splashing through the green buds.
Syme sat still in the bottom of the boat, neither moving nor speak
ing, a very grave look on his face. I wondered briefly if he had a terror
of water, though he had the air, I must say, rather of a two-penny
prophet, who discovers to his horror that his vision of apocalypse has
proved true. A sniff of
‘
I
told you so’ wrinkled his nose. The river
filled the vessel and swelled gradually above his head.
He is a big-boned
man
and sank
easily, with folded arms
–
the river
swallowed him in a little gasp of bubbles. Tom lay panting and laugh
ing
in
the earthy grass at the riverside
–
the laughter subsiding to
pants, the pants giving way to caught breath. We peered into the
thick green water and saw nothing, waited in growing apprehension,
white with a fear that justified itself by its own increase. Tom perched
at the edge, prepared to dive. ‘Damn him,’ Tom said, and then again,
‘damn him.’ Peace returned to the slow stream. A century of obscuri
ty seemed to flow over Sam’s head, a green reflection of the branched
sky above. Nothing. And then again, ‘Damn him.’
Why
does he not dive,
I thought, myself frozen to the bank
–
why
does he not leap in? Perhaps because there was nothing but impene
trable quiet to explore, a smug green passage of water that dared us
to dispute its
innocence. Perhaps because the act
of rescue itself
proves the moment’s desperation. Why did I not stir from the spot,
where my elbows made a wet scrape in the steep verge? Surely, it
was Tom’s place
at his side,
I thought
–
as if I had not yet
earned the
right to protect him! How a thought swells the space of a second, and
expands it, across ages, it seems; till time itself loses its elastic
virtue and begins to droop, fail. Tom did not jump. I did not jump.
We both
–
looked on
–
at nothing.
A minute later –
I
suppose, it seemed like hours, days, years
–
a
grey shape loomed like a fish and then like a shadow that deepened
our reflections rising against us in the water; a curious phenomenon,
as if he emerged from our own fearful
images, staring back at us – and Syme broke the water and clawed at the bank.
‘Damn you,’ Tom cried again.
‘I
strode
it underwater,’ Sam boasted between thick pants. ‘A diffi
cult
business, I tell ye.’
He heaved himself out, leaving deep hand
prints in the earth, and wiped his paws on his white trousers. ‘A
lesson, I believe
–
that the easiest gait
–
retards us – on
certain roads.’
‘You are a rare fool,’ Tom said, as his fear ebbed into bubbling
exasperation, ‘and make a great fuss to discover what a child knows
full well’
But Sam hardly listened and lay on his back in the mud, his broad
ribs heaving at the good fat air they gulped again. And Tom, having
partly recovered his humour
–
no great trick, given the sight of us – lay down at Sam’s side, where the pair of them dried slowly in the
fumy sun. (I dared not join them, but crouched, holding my cold feet
in dirty hands, at the river’s edge.) For an afternoon at least that
swift dousing in wet luck lifted our spirits and the three of us
talked in better fellowship afterwards. (Tom and I were bound now,
lightly, by a guilty secret
–
that we were content in
the end
to look
on together while Sam …
well,
we shall mark the progress of his
burrowing.
Yet the incident proved a too faithful emblem of what
was to come, if indeed I have read it right.)
The sweet day gave way to a sullen night. Syme sat at the table
writing. I lay on the ottoman reading
Waverley,
and bored at
length with the hero’s iressolution, rose to give Syme some
compan
ionship
in
his solitary labour and stood over his shoulder. Certain
figures he had consulted me upon lay scattered over the rough table,
lying across a well-thumbed map of the globe.
‘Phidy,’ he said in a still small voice, sensing the weight and heat
of my presence at his shoulder. I placed my palm in the softness of
his hair. He sat staring at the map, spread beneath his hands. ‘Have
a look at this.’
And he traced his fingers along the edge of Africa,
lovingly bending with the curve. ‘Does nothing strike you?’
‘Of course,’ I
answered. ‘An old … coincidence, I suppose, is the
best word,’
as I touched my own thumb lightly along the pregnant
swell of Brazil. ‘The Americas and Africa might once almost have
been lovers, along the lines of Aristophanes’ account, of a split self,
searching for its
dislocated half.’
‘Suppose the shell had cracked …
’
he said, in
a voice as quiet as
blown dandelions.
‘Yes,’ I
prompted …
‘Lay
floating,’
he said, trailing off into the mists of a speculation.
Then Tom asked, looking up, ‘Have you prepared the acid of sulphur
for the volcano – for
tomorrow’s lecture?’
Sam remained silent, the butt of his palm banging against his
stubborn chin, as if to dislodge an Idea.
‘Go on,’ I
said.
The banging stopped. ‘Suppose a great eclipse –
along the lines
we’ve discussed
–
had at some
point
–
inconceivably distant
–
only
suppose …’ And resumed.
‘Have you prepared the acid
of sulphur for the volcano,’
Tom
repeated, ‘for tomorrow’s lecture?’
‘Hush,
Tom,’
I whispered, mostly to myself. Perhaps he envied
my place at Sam’s shoulder; but, to do Tom justice, Sam could be
most wonderfully slack in his own cause, forgetful of anything that
did not serve his present thought, never mind his future honour.
While Tom himself laboured in a swarm of minor perplexities, just
such niggling considerations –
as time and place,
engagements,
equipment, lodgings, etc.
–
as Sam delighted to neglect.
‘Just so,’
Sam said. ‘Now, Phidy, give heed.
Consider the eclipse –
overlapping cracks in
the concentric spheres, etc.’
He took my hand
in his and squeezed it, once, as if to relieve the pressure of his
thought. ‘But suppose now that
currents
in
the fluvia
itself –
occa
sioned
by these flaws –
produced a friction
–
that in
turn
…’
He
released it again
–
I
touched the palm, involuntarily, with the tip
of
my finger –
and the banging resumed.
‘
I
am
not in
the habit’, Tom said, in
a passion at the edge of tears, ‘of
being ignored, for
this,’
he added, sniffing and squinting at me. Then
louder: ‘Have you prepared the acid of sulphur for tomorrow’s lecture?’
There was to be no more speculation that evening.
‘No,’ Syme said at last, and Tom rose to his feet.
‘What are you about?’ he asked in a tight voice. Another storm
was brewing, not to be put off by Syme’s silence. ‘Turn to me when
I speak to you. What are you about?’