Heir to the Glimmering World (34 page)

During one of these bewildered truces Willi asked whether Bertram was going to be my husband someday.

"You don't marry cousins," I said.

"Was Dr. Tandoori your cousin too?"

"Of course not."

"But you weren't going to marry him either—"

This annoyed me; there was cunning in it, an unripe cleverness. "I told you," I said, "I'm not marrying anybody."

It was not only Willi who was unsettling me in those raw days when Bertram was occupying Anneliese's bed and taking my place (or so it felt) with Mrs. Mitwisser. It was easy for Bertram to make himself invisible to Professor Mitwisser—he was upstairs whole afternoons, tending the invalid. He had enlisted Waltraut in the rite of carrying up Mrs. Mitwisser's tray—Waltraut following as usual with napkin and spoon, and lately with a small cup of something sweet-smelling, Bertram bearing his own warmly redolent concoction, and also, I noted, a glass of wine—but this newly encumbered ceremony was becoming mysteriously prolonged. When the boys were at school, and Bertram and the child were hidden away with Mrs. Mitwisser, the house was uncommonly still. It felt uninhabited, abandoned. I had nothing to do but wait for the night and Mitwisser's sharp call.

Ninel, I began to recognize, had all along been right: Bertram was too soft. He could be turned this way and that way; he was too obliging. This obligingness had its underside; it robbed Peter to pay Paul. Out of goodness, and to oblige my father's rough importuning, he had taken me in; but to please Ninel he had expelled me. He had lavished on me the blue envelope with its fat fortune, and then he had allowed it to be usurped. Bertram's goodness was treacherous. His softness was treacherous: a soft compliance was his unresisting means of setting the world to rights. With maternal guile, he could persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb—only, when this was accomplished, it was the lion who prevailed.

Wine had never before entered the house. Yet here it was, the glass that went up to Mrs. Mitwisser, and the glass that was set down at Professor Mitwisser's plate, and at mine. I had never tasted wine, and knew nothing of its subtlety, if it had any—but when Mitwisser put his glass first to his nostrils and then to his lips with a distracted, almost dreaming, concentration, it was as if some familiar wind was passing over, or even through, him: a wind from a great distance, from the past, from the time before they had thrown him out, from that Europe I had come to think of as a dense volcanic mass concealed under a disintegrating black veil. I knew nothing of Europe, I knew nothing of wine; I dimly believed that it was somehow noble, "aristocratic," the elixir of priests and kings. But I did not like this wine that Bertram had brought us—it was too tart, and too dark, like venous blood, and it smelled of seduction, of ingratiation. Bertram had quickly seen whose hand held the household scepter. I was merely the sentry who had let him in. Professor Mitwisser was the majesty who might keep or eject him, and to gratify this inconstant sovereign it was needful to nurse the curious invalid on the uppermost floor. Bertram was an excellent nurse. In ten minutes he could supply a poultice for an itchy scar, or a savory dish for a slothful appetite. The wine gladdened both the sovereign and his wife. It honored the sovereign, it calmed the wife.

"In Albany," I reminded Bertram, "
we
never had wine." I rarely spoke to him of those sheltering months when he had been my rescuer and comforter. But now I felt sullen.

"Ninel put me onto it."

I said acidly, "I didn't think the Party approved of wine."

"Well, Ninel did, why not? Italian peasants, French workers, wine is what the masses quaff. You know, the masses." He half grinned, in the winning self-parody I remembered.

A moment later the grin undid itself; it folded into a hangdog mouth. Whenever Ninel's name erupted between us, Bertram lapsed into somberness. At times I would mention Ninel solely for the sake of watching the gloom creep over him—these flushed openings into Bertram's buried suffering revenged me. I wanted to undermine his softness. It was not because of Ninel; Ninel was dead. In this house Bertram was, at least for me, a bad angel: that all-around usefulness, that stringent plea for harmony, for pleasing everyone, for sweeping us all clean of blemish—he was too liquidly noble, like the wine. Only the thought of Ninel made him seem solid.

He had begun to do the marketing. This had been Anneliese's task, and afterward mine. Bertram liked to poke among the vegetables, and in the dusky crannies of the shops under the trestle: it gave him ideas, he said. Waltraut went with him, pushing a little wicker doll's pram. It had been rediscovered in a heap of twisted and neglected toys—there were so many toys, a jungle of toys! The wicker pram was vital: he stooped to fill it with grocery bags. The bottle of wine—two bottles, in fact—he stuffed into his pockets, to free his arms for the bigger bundles.

He did not ask where the money for these provisions came from. But when I doled out the bills he said, "Cash ... I never see anybody write a check around here. Or go to the bank. All right, none of my business—"

It was a kind of bravado. This small tactile transaction, his palm flattened before me as I counted out dollars, stung him. It shamed him; it shamed me. We were standing close, Bertram's face too close to mine (we were nearly the same height), shrouded by the intimacy of money dropping from hand to hand—the naked smell of public paper, its weightless burdensome rustle, its worn creases, like the skin of an aged woman.

"You don't understand, Rosie," he lamented. "You never saw her fired up, she had the spite of justice in her, and if I'd done things differently, if I hadn't let her take that money—"

It was his old chant. "You wouldn't be you," I said. But this bland-ness—I meant it only as evasion—fell on him unkindly.

"Soft!" he cried. "She called me soft!"

The spite of justice. It seemed to me he was enshrining Ninel in a hard shell of sainthood.

There had been three sporadic packets since the last—the last that had arrived without a letter—and these also were bare of any word from Anneliese. They were bulging, crammed with more dollars than before, as if in compensation for their muteness. Each packet was stamped with a different postmark. I had given up informing Professor Mitwisser of their appearance: he did not welcome it. A silent ukase was in force: silence answering silence. His children sensed it; even Waltraut understood that one must not speak of Anneliese, one must not speak of James—not to papa, not to anyone, not to the new stranger in the house.

But Mrs. Mitwisser was bound by nothing.

At midnight, in my bed across from hers, I said, "What do you and my cousin talk about all afternoon?"

She did not reply. She was asleep. She slept deeply and long. The empty wine glass had been left behind. It lay on its side next to her hairbrush. She had taken to brushing her hair, which had grown, in her self-confinement, down to her breasts. In the mornings she arranged it in a round braid at the back of her neck, with a few hairpins to secure it. Her hair was as brown and thick as Anneliese's.

"When you're upstairs with mama and Bertram," I asked Waltraut the next day, "what do they talk about?"

Waltraut looked at me with her small Mitwisser eyes. She had none of Willi's beauty.

"Mama talks about Heinz," she said.

51

I
T WAS FORGIVENESS
they talked of: the bitter, bitter withholding of it. Professor Mitwisser had never forgiven his wife for the secret journey to Arosa. Bertram could not forgive himself for Ninel's journey to Spain. So they talked and talked, while Waltraut busied herself with a wooden puzzle in the shape of a line of goslings, or fed make-believe pudding bird to her dolls.

They talked of how they were not forgiven, how they would never be forgiven, how Mitwisser would not forgive his wife, how he would not forgive his daughter. They talked of spite.

Mrs. Mitwisser did not know that the woman who spited Bertram by dying in Spain was the man who had forced his way into the house and frightened her into her old black tunnel of fright.

She spoke of another man. He had commandeered her family and spited them all, her husband, her children—her daughter! She spoke of this man incessantly, her mouth with its orderly teeth and pleasant scent of wine breathing in and out too rapidly, too urgently—so that Bertram thought the insinuator, the invader, whom she called James, had stolen money. She spoke of thieves and beggars, of parasites and fireflies. Her cries and confidences, which had belonged to me, all went to Bertram. She felt in him what she had never felt in me: a pliant sympathy, a nurse's sympathy; a mother's. Bertram was motherly. He listened and shook his head. He listened with angry smiles. He mourned Ninel exactly as she mourned Anneliese, angrily, unforgivingly.

"If they will come," she said, plucking at her faded haunted rhythmic plaint.

"They?" he echoed.

"My daughter. And that one. That one!...if she will come—"

That one,
he knew, was James. A glowering phantom.

"She
will
come. She will," he assured her. I had never assured Mrs. Mitwisser of anything—the Mitwisser kingdom was too fragile, too tentative, subject to earthquake. I could not hold out a belief I did not own. Observing Bertram, I saw what this meant: in this unforgiving house I had insufficient sympathy. Or else my truest sympathies were with Professor Mitwisser, who welcomed them least, who was estranged from sympathy. It was typical of Bertram to swim meltingly into the instant face of need. Hadn't he once told me that I should trust in that untrustworthy tendril of memory, my dying mother clutching a rag doll? And hadn't he once persuaded me that my father had unaccountably secreted a worn children's book in his most private hoard out of a sentimental affinity for a picture of a boy hiding in a hat? Bertram said these things to assuage the moment's exigency. The moment won him. If the way to terra firma lay through the cosseting of the wife of the man whose word was law, it no longer mattered. What had begun thinly as opportunity thickened into sympathy. He was growing into the sinews of the house. It was slowly educating him, as it had educated me. I had had Mrs. Mitwisser as my unsteady teacher of fragmented histories. Bertram had me.

"This James she carries on about," he said, "the one who took money—"

"He didn't take any money."

"She calls him thief—"

"He took Anneliese," I said.

"The daughter. The daughter who went away."

"She went with James." It was somehow necessary to say this outright: the very thing that was forbidden. "It's his money they live on."

Bertram stared. "They pay your wages. You get ... a salary"—he brought out this word unhappily, guiltily—"and you sent me a piece of it—"

"They haven't got anything on their own. Everything's from James.

All of it."

He sucked in a long reflective breath, as if he meant to inhale all the world's mysteries. "How about that. How
about
that. He isn't in business or anything, is he? Some company big shot?"

"Nothing like that. It's some sort of inheritance—"

"A moneybags. Daddy Warbucks."

A whiff of Ninel. Her ghost speaking through him.

"Bertram, it's not like that.... They live on it," I said again. "The money just ... comes."

The familiar half-twist of Bertram's mouth. The little pillowy intimate swell of his lower lip. It made me resist Ninel. It made me long for his sympathy, for his old, old kiss, with his knee on my bed.

"But why?" he said.

I knew why. It was not new knowledge. I believed I had known it ever since I had first heard Professor Mitwisser laughing together with James, a laughter that had the sound of grief.

"He likes to do it," I told Bertram. "Out of hatred, I think."

But I had no inkling of what it was that James hated.

52

T
HERE WERE NIGHTS
when Professor Mitwisser did not call for me at all. And on the nights he did, it appeared that he had no work for me: but it was clear that he expected me to stand at the ready. He looked down from that immensity of neck and torso to make certain I was attentive—to what? He had given up shaving altogether. The new beard was creeping imperceptibly, laggardly; yet it aged him too quickly. His shoulders had an old man's hunch. Out of a white face the hot blue eyes leaped like panting tigers.

A distance from where I loitered, the tepee-shapes of the volumes he had turned topsy-turvy to mark his place were undisturbed.

"It is perhaps not possible," he said finally. He said it to the ceiling globe, where one of a pair of light bulbs had gone out. The room was dimmer than usual. "Without corroboration it remains only ... conviction."

I caught—if not his meaning—his imperative, that urge below thought that beat in his brain. It pulsed against me mothlike, and I snatched it out of the darkening air. More and more it seemed to me that I inhabited his mind. Or the reverse: his mind came to me. I pinched it between my finger and thumb.

"'I, Jacob, am become Arjuna,'" I recited. It was an offering, as on an altar.

"Yes, yes—the very words.
Those
words!" he cried. "And the uncanny knowledge of the Bhagavad-Gita ... Jacob al-Kirkisani, a runaway from the whole history of religion, do you understand? You understand this, yes?"

He was addressing me; I felt addressed. He was not speaking above or around me, as when I rattled the typewriter keys in tune with his voice. It was the first time he had allowed me entrance (how I felt this!) into the sanctum of his meditations. I had all along been typist, amanuensis, servant, convenience; animate tool—Aristotle's term (I had once read this) for a slave. I was not his slave, no; but I had become his tool. One does not address a tool.

"What I have uncovered," he said, "is the labyrinth of renunciation. I have uncovered it in the heart of Jacob al-Kirkisani. In his heart only. It is not conversion, it is not syncretism, though there are fools who will insist on this. He does not journey to India to become a Hindu. He is no more a Hindu than a Hindu is a Karaite. He accepts, he receives, in order to refuse. In a man of supreme feeling refusal gives birth to refusal—that is the essence of it. The Karaites—how deeply, deeply I know them, I am their child, they are my children, I have penetrated into their lungs, their angers, their prayers! They reject, they rebel. But al-Kirk-isani reveals that he is apart from these things. Those who rebel do not regard themselves as heretics. Hardly so! They believe heresy lies in the very men they repudiate. For them, whatever is orthodox is heretical, so they depart from it.