[18] How do we know we love?

Paul went yesterday afternoon to ask Rosemeyr who the guy was, whose name I don’t know. There was no point telling him not to. He had a reason to walk that way, and after cracking his head open the night before, I owed him some tolerance.

I’m not looking forward to the next while, because I know how this will play out: Paul goes back to the Rosemeyrs’, who ask about me, and he finds out I fainted because the other guy who was there frightened me almost to death. I’d turned my back on Death a few weeks ago, and there He was in front of me again. Paul’s not going to let it go – he’s going to look for the other one. It would be better if he didn’t so that I could manage my own mind, which I’m already doing. But he won’t – it isn’t how he’s made.

I haven’t been alone in five weeks. I almost forgot – there’s Johnny. He’s learned to suck his thumb, but left or right doesn’t matter to him yet. He hasn’t tried to kill me today, and I think that’s a good sign. Something tells me he already knows Paul wouldn’t like it, the way those two get along. Sometimes I take my eyes off him for ten minutes at a time, and nothing bad happens when I do.

If he isn’t careful, Paul is going to fall behind. It will depress him if it happens, but he has his own internal clock for his work. I know it, though that’s intuitive observation on my part – he’s never shown it to me. All right, I tell myself that his own clock has always saved him. There are three canvases still blank entire – the ones he returned with from Mister Rosemeyr’s last night – he’s trained one or two of the carpenters there to undercoat them to his instructions, more later – which means at least two more drawing trips for him to make, and him about to descend into himself while he thrashes for how to fill them. He almost never brings models to his studio – he goes to them and then works from his drawings. I’m the exception, of course. He draws and paints me all the time. The months before May Day will be all about him – he needs that – so it’s up to me to show him he can have them.

After six weeks away from our neighbourhood, my body is going to let me go out for an hour. I can’t stride and I can barely handle steps and I can’t sit down without a stack of cushions, but I can walk. In the hall beside the candleman’s desk, there’s our new perambulator that we haven’t used yet, and our luck – this building has a lift. I will bow to this vision of the days to come – I’m going to need reasons for every thought I have for myself. Johnny, you can’t know how terrifying.

Our second morning back, there was a note from Emil an hour after Paul left for his rooftop studio, asking me to meet him at the Singing Swan for coffee and dessert in the afternoon. I don’t know how he learns things – for example, how he knew we’ve just returned to the city – but he always does. The weeks we were in the cottage, he came to visit once. He struggled up the rope walk in a chocolate-brown overcoat over a dove-grey two-piece suit with a pale-blue shirt and striped grey-blue tie, his bespoke brown leather shoes slipping on the ice, one hand raised to the wind and pinning down his bowler, and knocked on the door with an embarrassed look on his old man’s face. He’s here because mommy sent him, but still. Why an old man, I don’t know. He’s barely thirty, he’s a month younger than Paul. But he’s always been an old man, as if he saw his whole life in one flash when he was seven and has been blinded by it since. Like most very short people, he dreads looking foolish. Paul says he’s another of mother’s spies. Of course he is, but I don’t see why it matters. We don’t tell her anything about us, but we don’t care what she hears, either. Any case, he’s the one person in my family I’ve been able to hold a conversation with that doesn’t leave me feeling overinvested. (Grandfather too, but I never knew I had a grandfather until after mommy moved me into a home for hopeless girls. She didn’t want me to have grandparents – Jews, you know.) Most of what Paul says about Emil is true, but Paul doesn’t adjust well to how complicated it is between Emil and me. I knew him before he became himself, from the same height for a while (imagine that, will you), so I see things in him, with him, that no one else ever will. If Paul wants to disrespect him, I know there are good reasons why. But I’m the one who watched him climb the path to visit that day, in his polished leather shoes, and I can wish that he wanted to be doing it.

I’m taking chances outside, the wind stronger than I expected, polishing the crooked pavement ice. I push the pram the 10 metres down the pavement. The Singing Swan is two doors down the quay from our building, a cellar coffeehouse with a half-barrel door five steps down. In the evening it will be full of people we know well, but this time of day there’s only Josette, who pops out to help me with the pram. Show the baby. She clucks his chin until he drools on her finger, then wafts him to the kitchen for warming and to show the baby for me to the cook and the dishwasher. Josette lets us open the place, and her husband in the kitchen pokes his head out when we do. She looks mirthful and jolly, and Johnny giggles at her breasts when she buries him between them, then gasps when he comes up for air. She returns with a mothering smile for us both along with a tall espresso, a tin of Turkish cigarettes, and four pillows. She brings them to our table on the dais near the back, our power spot, where we can scan people as they come in and cull out the friends from the people who aren’t. Above the bar is the last cartoon Paul left, two months ago – the two of us as Ferdinand and Sophie in a limousine, him in full military regalia, me in a feathered hat and bustled daytime dress, except that I’m sitting on his lap and our eyes are popping out. Just as I light a third one, and blow a smoke ring at Johnny’s right shoulder, Emil comes through the door, wearing a black woollen overcoat, a grey Tyrolian with a green feather, and a green silk scarf. He’s here often, though it isn’t his coffeehouse. It’s our coffeehouse, so by logic it can never be his. Everyone we know has their own coffeehouse, and Emil and Paul are never going to have the same one.

I know what he’s here to say, and while he gets to it, I put a leash on my feelings. He’s more comfortable when I do, and I try not to be cruel to him just so he’ll understand that cruelty isn’t inevitable. Somehow I think he’s never known that unconditional acceptance is possible, so the best I can do is wait him out. Out in the world, he’s the perfect surface: clothes, manners, and career (cultural essayist for the New Socialist Man, page three Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays). He’s also a vicious careerist, not that there’s anything wrong with that. So is Paul, and they’re equally underhanded when it will do them any good. The difference is, Paul would always draw the line at hurting his friends or anyone he respects, and Emil has no friends and respects no one. Besides, artists can flash their talent at the world in a way that writers never can. No, there’s no one Emil lets see all of him. I do see through him most of the time, but it isn’t as if he chooses to let me. I try to imagine what he’s like when he isn’t promoting himself, when he isn’t out there, and if anyone can do that, it should be me, but even I can’t. I know this: if you placed him alone in a darkened room, he’d suffocate, while Paul could live in a room like that forever until you dragged him out. Paul wouldn’t need anything to fill himself – he could do it in his head, while Emil would suffocate without his society to breathe from. But what Emil is to everyone else, he can’t be around me. I knew him before he became himself, so he stays close to me, acts nice to me, looks out for me, and even champions Paul (whom he loathes) to make sure I don’t tell tales about his inverted desires. I’m not blackmailing him, but he can’t stop assuming otherwise, his logic being that anyone who knows must automatically be doing that. And … I can’t let my family go yet. It still seems too drastic. Maybe now I’ve got one of my own, that will change. But until then, he’s the one I can see and talk to and think about without the undertoad grabbing me, without the sharks starting to rip.

I watch him sit down and hear him say hello. I’d like one day to see him do those two things at once, but he always turns it into a two-step process.

‘And how are mommy and daddy?’ I ask.

‘Why, they’re both very well, thank you. I’ll tell them you asked.’

‘Do tell them they needn’t feel guilty about not visiting. The maid was so much help to us.’ Now the truth: ‘I didn’t want them near the cottage. I hope Johnny never knows them.’

‘I know that. It’s sad, Emma, that’s all. You could at least put a show on once in a while. It isn’t a lie to withhold the truth sometimes.’

‘That’s all they’ve ever done. Then it’s a lie.’

‘Did you get plenty of other visitors?’

‘There was grandfather every two or three days, and there was Paul’s sister every three or four.’

‘How did those two get along?’

‘Wonderfully. They always have. Everyone else was there at least once. The Marzipan gang, nine of them came up together last Saturday night.’

‘So Gustav has been – ’

‘Gus, no. He dreads visiting people and writing letters. So he sends people. That’s what he does – he sends. People, things.’

Josette takes his order. He always says for coffee and dessert in his messages to me, but he always asks for tea and never orders a dessert. That’s as rebellious as Emil ever becomes. Paul told him once, when he was visiting us during The Prague Years and we dragged him to a beer cellar down our street for some real-world excitement: ‘What you really need, Emil, what would fix you, is a public display of insanity. Rip off your clothes and do a lap around the block. Sing some Puccini while you’re at it. Let the police chase you for a while. When they let you out, you’ll be human.’

‘I’ve never seen that cap before,’ Emil tells me.

He means the red silk one I’m wearing, with the yellow stitching. ‘Gus sent it last week.’

‘Did he tell you the provenance? It’s a Central Asian skullcap. For, you know, Jews from Tashkent and so on.’

‘I know. It’s my perfect colour. Sometimes a cap is just a cap, Emil.’

He’s always a little embarrassed around me. For all he dreads it that I know too many of his secrets, part of him is relieved to know that it’s me who does. Trust is at least possible that way.

‘Even so.’

‘Jew in the house,’ I say. ‘Only one, if mommy asks. Grandfather tells me he was a Caesarean, so laws of descent don’t automatically apply.’

‘Perhaps during the Babylonian Exile,’ he says, ‘twenty-five centuries ago. If you’re a Jew, so is he. Have you listened to our mayor lately? These days, the world gets to tell us who a Jew is.’

‘I know. I’ll have to be able to tell Johnny something, won’t I. It didn’t matter that I knew nothing about it when it was just me. Now on, I don’t have any choice. People are going to tell him he’s one, so I’m going to have to explain him something. And you, you’re a Jew your own way – you can’t stop being one any more than I can.’

‘If the world calls us Jews, we’re Jews, and it does. The question then is what to do about it. No one has answered that one yet. Oh, there are plenty of answers to be had, but none of them are useful.’

‘I just know I’m tired of passing as a Christian when I don’t have to. And I don’t want Johnny to grow up thinking he has to pass. Look how we’re talking about it, Emil. Do you see how they win? By defining us.’

‘We all convert. I’ve begun to surmise that as the only solution.’

‘They’d distrust us even more. “Which of us are the hypocrites?” That’s what they’d ask themselves.’

‘And have you ever asked yourself what Paul really thinks of Jews? A celebrant Catholic like him?’

Even for Emil, that’s cold. It isn’t in him to understand Paul and me together. Better to pity him than get angry. So I count backwards from ten and remember the luck I’ve known that mommy and daddy have never been able to change since I met him.

‘Even for you, that’s low, Emil. Ask him one day what he thinks about us. It’s all you’d have to do instead of surmising it from a distance, and then he’d tell you what he believes without you having to guess. For your sake, I wish you did know what Paul and I have. Right now, whether you know it or not, you’re getting even for the last time the two of you met.’

‘I don’t have to get even,’ he says. ‘It’s enough that I’ll have an answer for his views the next time we meet. Paul really hasn’t the least notion about politics. He’s a child that way.’

‘He wasn’t making a political statement. You have the idea that all statements are political.’

‘Precisely,’ he says, warming up. ‘All statements are political, and he doesn’t know it. When he told me that history is nothing more than –’

I’m rubbing my forehead. ‘Stop,’ I announce. I know how to punch that word. And when he does: ‘What Paul said was, “If history has any purpose at all, it’s to reveal the Kingdom of God to us all, which means that if people have a purpose it’s to transform social institutions so they’re compatible with the Kingdom of God.” End quote. That’s not incompatible with your socialism, but you never like him dragging his God into it.’

‘Emma, in all your years knowing him, I’ve only heard him make one honest political statement.’

‘Paul not honest?’

‘Paul deludes himself.’

‘He understands your arguments, Emil – it’s just that they aren’t important to him. He can’t be bothered contesting them unless you goad him into it, which you do, unless I make you both stop. I don’t know how you bring it out in him, this need to confront you on your own terms. He doesn’t have to, when his own terms have just as much validity. But you still do that to him. As if he’s protecting me from you.’

‘My point was that the next century won’t have any need for aesthetic arguments. When he tells me that –’

I rub my forehead. ‘Stop.’ He stops again. ‘You’d just told him, “You refuse to acknowledge that art is a product belonging to the long period in human history in which the truth lay veiled, and that period will soon be overcome with the dawn of socialism.” Unquote. And he told you back: “Art is idealism – in fact, it’s the purest form of social idealism, and in the future it’s going to have the same effects on society as turning a lathe or growing wheat.” Unquote. And after that, you both sank to definitions, makes you both scoundrels. I wish sometimes you’d stop meeting. I dread that for him as much as I dread mommy for me. The aggravation he has to face for no purpose when you’re standing there.’

Josette brings Johnny a warmed bottle, and a brauner and a slice of poppyseed strudel for me. Emil looks away while I feed Johnny the nipple. If Emil and I stood up, I would tower over him. Sieglinde and Alberich. No one in the family looks like me. It’s an open secret that daddy isn’t my real daddy – he’s been registered, that’s all. Who it really is, mother herself probably can’t say. Really, in this city, it’s only middle-class housewives who don’t get much variety. Everyone else? As long as you hide it, sex is pretty wide open until the moonmaidens pox you. Any time Paul encounters mother, he finds a way to slip ‘Norway’ into the conversation, as a private joke for her to hear. I should tell him to stop, though I don’t. He needs to know by now that mommy’s incapable of embarrassment.

‘If you’re wearing that cap to upset mommy – ’

‘Not at all, Emil. My life isn’t about her. Less and less. Upsetting her isn’t a factor any more, unless it’s to defend myself against her upsetting me. I’m always glad to see you, Emil, but you’re always going to need to tell me why. It’s always mommy’s reason.’

I’m more exhausted than I expected to be. He sees that and falls silent. I know, I know, a woman who looks like me isn’t supposed to sound the way I can. I’ve got a cruel streak, which I’ve learned to keep under control, and being beautiful just adds to people’s shock when they see it. Paul and me – harnessed, when we choose out here, our force field can stun at two hundred paces. Someone like Emil, with his aberrant sexual condition, in a world like this one, can never show more than half himself to anyone, not even to me. I don’t often feel much pity, but for a minute I almost tell him about my fainting attack, just in the hope he can share back something human, something frightening. But I bite my tongue.

‘Are you feeling well, Emma? Do you want help getting back to –’

‘Paul’s in his studio.’ Which means, you’d better not. But we’ve both backed away.

‘I’ll leave him alone, then.’

‘Do you want to hold your nephew, Emil?’

His eyes tell me, but I can’t. He doesn’t know how to show feelings, but I can see just then that he does have them still.

‘I’m scared of him too,’ I tell him. ‘Terrified what I might make him become. For heaven’s sake, Emil, look at him – can you do that? A little baby just like you came from.’

‘Emma, I can’t … stop. Why do you want to embarrass me?’

‘How could Johnny do that? You can lie to anyone about anything, but Johnny? No one can dissemble to a baby. That’s his power. When he’s sitting with us listening, I know why you say what you do.’

In that instant I know what it’s like to be a stranger to Emil. Could I live with that forever? Johnny blows a bubble, and I break it with my fingertip just as he slaps his hands together.

‘So,’ he says, ‘mommy wants to know about your birthday.’

Emma’s Big Day is in two weeks, the double-two. Paul and I always go for my birthday dinner, the last thread linking me to their apartments.

‘You’re the reason I met Paul,’ I remind him. ‘I came back from Budapest and was living at the school for hopeless girls, and the Flöge sisters wanted me to model for them, remember? You talked mommy into letting me. I think you were hoping to meet the sisters. The Flöges introduced me to Gus, who introduced me to Paul, and I ran away with him.’

‘I don’t remember … well, I do. But I don’t think about it like that.’

‘You thought about it once. Once was all it took. “If I hadn’t interceded with mommy for Emma …” And so on. You must have told yourself what doing something nice for me got you. It turned out in a way that horrifies her, so you’d do anything to undo it, just to please her, because you know she’s going to be thinking about it half the time when she’s making you do things. But still, you did, so I owe you three wishes, which is what I don’t like to remember. So I’m going to forgive you for saying what you did about Paul just then. That’s one. We’re talking about my Big Day.’

‘It isn’t only about her. It would mean something to daddy, too.’

‘She doesn’t like babies. She doesn’t have to put on the show. She can stop if she wants.’

‘We all want to cast oil on troubled waters. Even her, Emma.’

I wonder for a silence whether to tell him. ‘Emil, you don’t cast oil on troubled waters. It just turns into globules – interstitial tension, you know? – which don’t calm anything. That’s why you pour it instead.’

‘Be that as it may.’

‘You don’t cast anchors either. They’re too heavy. You have to drop them instead. If you don’t believe me, try casting one sometime – I bet you drop it first.’

‘You’re still angry that you didn’t go to university.’

This time I’ve hurt him without meaning to. All right, it’s possible – just checking, Emil. He’s thirty this year. Did he ever dream? I somehow don’t think so. Not everyone dreams in this world, any more than everyone hopes. Some people are just built without qualities, they aren’t designed to reach out, the world will never be more to them than the surfaces they see without ever touching them. Years ago, Paul called him an evil dwarf and we got into a shouting match over it. In my heart, I can’t forget that Paul is right. I could trust the part of him that isn’t under mommy’s heel – there must be one. But where?

And there’s the other half of it: Emil despises Paul right back, which makes every meeting between them a choice for me, which is always Paul. I always remember the look on Emil’s face once, almost the first time they met. It was in a coffeehouse across the canal, in one of the factory quarters, the Eighteenth. Paul was never a working man – howl with laughter you now, Paul Karsch? – but those days he’d been savagely disowned and didn’t have any money either. I was sitting on his knee while he and Emil sank into a long argument about the Munich Secession. Paul kept saying that art can be evil, Emil insisted that morality has no place in art. Von Stuck is an evil artist, Paul told him. Von Stuck is an admirable artist, Emil said. That was like poking Paul with a sharp stick, to use the word ‘admirable’ in front of him. He detests that word, because it rings the same to him as mediocre. He heard it as if Emil had aimed it at him. Then instead of talking about ideas, or aesthetics, or about some subject with meat on its bones, they started arguing terms, so of course it got pettier and pettier. And it got to the point where it wasn’t an exercise any more, they were playing for blood. For once even Emil was acting as if the debate mattered to him. (Emil and words … of course.) And just as it was ending, with no side ahead, well, Paul wasn’t going to have that. So he said, ‘Oh, say, Emil,’ and looked him in the eye and threw him a wink and a big wet air kiss and squeezed my breasts at the same time so that I laughed and blushed. I was too horny back then, all the time and right now, to care who saw how good it felt, even if it was Emil. But I remembered later, after Emil had left, what the look in his eye was meant to tell Paul: ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ As if Paul had gleaned exactly where his pride was hidden and how to wound it at whim. I look at Emil now, when we’re discussing anything to do with Paul, and it’s still there lurking like some cloud of undead rage. Okay, his look had said, I hoped for a moment you would count in my life. Okay, you don’t. Things are never going to be good between them. I’ve known it since then. To give Emil the ethical high ground? An actual reason to get even? Who would have thought it possible? And how cold will his revenge be, seven years later?

‘I used to be angrier than this,’ I tell him, ‘but I found something better to want that I could have one day.’

‘It’s a cruel world, Emma. I know that. Both of us are capable of cruelty – we have to be. I just don’t think I’m really the one you want to hurt.’

Again, I almost tell him about that guy, the one who scared me, the one from two days ago and twelve years ago. About crippling terror and what it’s like to be able to feel it. It must be wonderful to have a sibling you can talk to, the way Paul can tell Charlotte anything, any time, no matter what. Emil might even remember the guy, too – he was there that night. I wish I could, but I can’t, for Paul’s sake. Because if I tell the wrong side of Emil, mommy will find a way to get Emil to use me to hurt Paul. That’s how it is in the family I’ve got.

‘Do you know what the choice always is, Emil? To be kind. It’s kindness that’s deliberate. These days, this world, it’s cruelty that’s everyone’s fallback. Emil, I’ll go to my birthday.’ If I choose to try once more, it isn’t about mommy and daddy, it’s about him.

‘It’s the best thing, Emma.’

‘If grandfather can come too.’

‘Oh.’

‘I knew you’d talk about this, so I’ve already asked, and he says he will. So tell me what mommy says about it.’

‘You’re going to insist, aren’t you?’

‘It’s Paul’s courage, you’re thinking. As if I can’t find my own. I don’t borrow his courage, he gives it to me. Grandfather’s my real family. If he can come, we’ll be there. I don’t want any more once a year playing at being a family. If I go, I want to see my real family. I don’t want to expose Johnny to the old one I’ve got.’

‘That’s not the reasoning I’ll offer her. But let me try to find a way.’

 

[ chapter 19 on 11 April ]