Heir to the Glimmering World (28 page)

He noted that in speaking to him she no longer said "my father": it had become papa.

"He keeps you on a tight leash, doesn't he?"

She did not comprehend.

"He watches over you."

"Oh yes. We are very much cared for."

"But there's nothing to be afraid of. It's not like over there."

"There is danger everywhere," she said.

"Those people Professor Mitwisser's involved with," he said, "are they dangerous?"

"The people at the College?" she said in alarm. "No, no, they are so good to us, papa's work, and also the house—"

"Not the College people. The ones in those books he's got his nose in."

She flickered out a rapid little smile. It came and went. "Papa's people have been dead a thousand years."

A thousand years. That was as far as he could get with the girl. The small child sidled up to him, pulling at his pockets. "Hey, you Wally you," he said, and lifted her to his shoulder and bounced her up there until she shrieked with laughter.

Mitwisser never laughed. Apparently his people, this old rabbi and that, had declared against it.

It was Frau Mitwisser who finally explained about the Karaites. He found her on the threadbare sofa in the dimly lit sitting room. She was looking into a silver-framed mirror (something else they hadn't left behind?), studying herself in the half-dark. He understood that they fretted about the electric bill. They ate boiled rice because it was cheap. They wore clothes out of season; the soles of their shoes had thinned.

When he came near she set down the silver frame on the scarred little table next to her; it wasn't a mirror at all. A hand-tinted old photograph: a small woman, a large plant.

He knew she disliked him. She had disliked him from the start. Was it that he was nothing like her idea of a proper tutor, deferential in suit and tie, deferential especially to his young charges—surely they were of a station superior to his own? His station: she could not fathom it. He had no station, no standing, no place: he had been sent to them out of nowhere, like the sunken mattresses and the worn tables. He seemed a sort of clown—he cavorted with her sons, he turned them into panting dervishes. Their shouts rang out all day. She felt detached from her own children. She could hardly recognize them.

She had noticed him in the hotel—in what they called the breakfast parlor. It wasn't very impressive, that hotel. She had known grander hotels at home, so grand that they had caused her to shake and walk with her hand on her chest to hide her fright. The new hotel—the one they had been sent to—was very plain. The breakfast parlor had no servants; one was expected to serve oneself from a bureau, like a waitress in a public café. From the corner of her eye she saw him rooted beside her, shining all over, sweat trickling down his forearms, his face mottled with heat, as if he had been heaving a sledgehammer. He took a step away; now he was behind her. She poured some berries into a dish. He was fearfully close, just behind her, she could smell the mammal heat of his armpits, there was danger everywhere, what did he intend? She began to shake, the berries shot out of the bowl...

It was a mistake, but still she begged Rudi to prevail on the Board to get them out of the hotel. In this place there were many mistakes. Charismites are not Karaites—her poor Rudi. They would leave this place as soon as there was money, he said, they would go to New York, it was of course useful to his work to be near a great library. But they had no money, there would never be money, they were thrown out, Charismites are not Karaites, she could not recognize her own children! Danger everywhere. Oh, if her mother could know how they had all been brought low! Her mother, ten years dead, the tinted face in the silver frame saved by a tremulous lie: it's nothing but worthless plate,
nicht Silber, sondern nur eine dünne Silberauflage. Völlig wertlos!

He had given her a fright. She did not trust him. He was teaching her sons strange things. He was asking her strange questions—Rudi's work, Rudi's people. Rudi's people were runaways. Why did he wish to pursue them, why did he come to her, why did he not go to Rudi? But Rudi would deny him. Rudi was cautious, he was wary, he guarded his people, they were the same to him as his children, and also—how strict he was! how arrogant! To seize Rudi's people one must first penetrate their languages, their writings, their beliefs, their history, their exclusions. They abjured all that was not Essence. They denounced every abuse of Essence, every addition, every embellishment. What has fallen from the hand of God must remain precisely as it was received. What is first is eternal. To add is to undermine. Rudi's people, she told him in her thwarted English—she, her quick brain and tongue hobbled by unnatural, unwanted, impositions!—Rudi's people, she said, care for nothing but God's own word and will.

There is no God. He didn't believe in God. God was nothing to him. His mother, long ago, had murmured to him about the Baby Jesus, and his nanny had spoken sternly of the Cross and the Resurrection as if they were no different from the times tables, and had to be learned by heart. Among the scores of presents heaped at his bedroom door each morning there was sometimes a pillow embroidered with a religious picture, mostly clouds and cherubs with fat dimpled elbows and tiny wings surrounding a bearded saint wearing a halo. The halo was like the golden rings on his mother's new teacups. He was indifferent to cherubs and saints. They weren't toys, and the only toy that mattered (it was more than a toy, it had a real roof and windows you could peer into and a door that opened and shut) was the one that disappeared, the one that was taken away, the one that was an unconscionable distraction (his father grumbled) from the business at hand.

Her tongue was hobbled, but she knew her Rudi, she knew his people, and it was rare that anyone came to
her
to tell who they were! Rudi's people are perfectly obscure, she said in her hobbled voice (making do with fragments of meaning, pressed by him into eruptions of meaning), and except for Rudi they are of interest only to a handful of others, three or four in all the world. There are also the enemies of Rudi's people, who become Rudi's own enemies, even if Rudi's people are merely specks on the face of the earth, hidden lost particles incapable of revivification, so who should fear them? And who should desire them? They are no more substantial than fireflies.

Rudi's enemies, particles and fireflies, she was roaming now, ruminating foreignly, slipping away from
what is first is eternal, to add is to undermine,
how it burned in him!
They denounce every abuse of Essence.

He fell to his knees before the battered table that held the silver frame. What, what was he doing? He grasped her two wrists, she was shaking, he was making her shake, he was threatening her, what was he doing? A tutor, no! What hideous creature had Rudi let in? His hideous eyes behind their lenses! The yellow light of the lamp, the yellow glints spiking his lenses, what was he doing? Would he harm her, would he harm her sons, her little daughter?

She could not see into his mind, but he—he saw, it was clarified, it lay before him, there in the thorny nettles of her half-choked thoughts, the pocked fragments of her telling. The monstrous burning. He released her wrists; he kissed them. He was frightening her, he recognized how he frightened her, but it couldn't be helped, it was monstrous, a conflagration,
what is first is eternal, to add is to undermine!

"
Verrückt!
" she cried.

Somewhere a door opened: Mitwisser returning from his afternoon's lectures—the wool vest, the felt hat with its ribbon band, the cheap new briefcase.

"Elsa," Mitwisser said. He turned to his sons' tutor. "How is it that my wife is disturbed? Get up, if you please."

He got up.

"Rudi, Rudi," Mrs. Mitwisser called out, as if her husband were far away, in a distant room. But he was right in front of her.

"
Dieser Mann,
" she called, "
er hat so viele Fragen, Fragen, Fragen, er frägt und frägt—
"

"Elsa," Mitwisser said, "you must quiet yourself—"

But she looked at the man who had kissed her wrists. Her wrists were still trembling. She saw into his mind. She knew of whose party he was.

"He is Karaite," she said.

And Mitwisser laughed.

43

A
N HOUR CAME
when the first boy, the boy born Jim, despised the second boy, the make-believe boy. He despised him, he renounced him, he threw him away. The fiery coldness (it was bitterness, it was rage) released him; he was free. The Bear Boy was a shed skin, and if at the same time he was proliferating, if he was a Household Name from one continent to another—according to Mr. Brooks and Mr. Fullerton, he had recently made his mark in South Asia; "lively, winsome, and adorable," noted the
Times of India
—well, never mind. For him the Bear Boy was a dead thing. Though not entirely. Not quite dead. The money came pouring out of the Bear Boy's head, and whoever believes that money begets absolute freedom has never known money that pours from the Bear Boy's head.

The woman had named him Karaite. She saw into him; she was deeply shrewd. She saw a man who ran; a runaway. A fugitive, a deviant. A danger. She understood him exactly. The husband didn't. The husband saw a man on his knees, his son's tutor; he saw his wife's agitation. And that was nothing anomalous. His wife had dropped something perhaps. She was often in tremor; she often dropped things. When she shook she became agitated. "Get up," he told the tutor. He got up. It was nothing. And when, shaking and agitated, his wife named the tutor Karaite, what else could the husband do but laugh?

It was the beginning of the long, long money-laughter.

The tutor, the impostor (they had taken him for a tutor, beggars can't be choosers, how the mighty, etc.), was given to improvisation: he had this much self-knowledge, though he supposed it was only the itch of restlessness. Living high in Algiers; and then not. Carrying the Bear Boy like a hump on his back for years; and then suddenly not. Arnold Partridge and Bridget. He felt tossed by an inner wind, sometimes a boiling khamsin, sometimes a numbing cold. And sometimes he could not tell whether the wind was a furnace or an ice storm, they were so much the same. Now and then he received a note from Mr. Brooks and Mr. Fullerton (he rented a post office box wherever he landed), tactfully chiding him for "incaution." He was not incautious. He was counterfeit.

The woman opened her nostrils to take him in, as if deciphering an odor. She judged him. The girl—he avoided the long German worm that was her name and called her Annie—the girl had told him that her father burned to be in New York. She told him that at home in Berlin her mother had belonged to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute: a scientist of some sort. That seemed unlikely: she was a witch more than a scientist. She had cast a spell and changed him into a Karaite. The husband laughed then—he laughed as a scholar laughs, hearing absurdity. It was not absurd. How was he, the counterfeit tutor, different from the Karaites, who rejected graftings on the pristinely God-given? He too rejected graftings. He was born unencumbered, nakedly himself, without a lace collar. The author of the Bear Boy had grafted on the lace collar. The moment he was free he tore it off. From then on he was all impulse.

An hourglass filled with money: this was the thought that came to him. An idea of affinity.

—I can get you people out of here, he said.

Mitwisser asked the source of this unusual offer of philanthropy, so unexpectedly, so absurdly, from his sons' tutor. Like the lawyers, he would not utter "money."

—I can get you out of here, he said again. Wherever you want to go. Whatever you need.

—And why would you wish to do that? Mitwisser asked, hearing nonsense.

—Because of those people. The ones you work on. I could set you up, you know. I wouldn't mind, I've got the money.

So he confessed. He confessed to being the Bear Boy.
Der Bärknabe!
Mitwisser's sons roiled in a tumult of excitement:
der Bärknabe!
The Bear Boy all grown up! But
der Bärknabe
spoke German; their tutor didn't. He looked like an ordinary man. Was he really the one? How could this be?

The girl explained about artists' models; she stared and stared. He was a nonentity who had come to their door. A nobody who had been somebody and was nobody again: the preposterous future of a fabled child.

Mitwisser did not at once believe him. It was too bizarre a thing to profess. Had he made it up, was it a ludicrous lie? On the other hand, why not believe him? He was not claiming to be a prince of the House of Romanov. He was not claiming to be a prophet. A modest enough assertion: he had oncehad a life in rhyme and pictures, he had once been the subject of a children's book—albeit an internationally famous one; in this lay Mitwisser's suspicions. Was this unprepossessing creature, of whom his sons were so lavishly fond, the destiny of that rosy painted elf? Mitwisser's children, all but the youngest, were intimate with the elf and his doggerel, they knew all of it backward and forward—at home their nanny had read
Der grüne Hut
to them over and over again. The red-haired Madame Mercier had read it to them in French! And here was the Bear Boy, in all the mystery of his transformation, standing before them like a prince or a prophet—the glamour of it, the enchantment in his sons' eyes!

From her corner the woman began to tremble. She picked up the silver frame from the little side-table and pressed it to her bosom—it slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

—I used to drag a copy of it around with me, he told them. No more.

—No more, the woman echoed pointlessly.

—But I can't say I'm done with it. I mean it's not done with me. I'm still getting royalties and such, there's no end to it.

Royalties. A plausible word. There was a tincture of plausibility in the man. But also an unconfined raffishness. He was somehow off center, of a piece with this new country and its wild schoolchildren, its disorderly streets—only consider that patch of filth some yards off, where his daughter brought the small child to play in the dirt: at home in Berlin you would not see such civic deleteriousness anywhere! He reflected on disease. He was diseased in this place of exile; his wife diseased, his children tainted. He remembered the watchtowers of ancient citadels, the golden light of distant libraries.