[36] A forest of thronging spirits

The Aaronsons have sent a cab for us, but on the street, where grandfather is waiting, Emma tells us, ‘I want to walk.’ With the air and the pavements clear, probably she can do it, with grandfather and me carrying Johnny in his bundle. These days it does her better to try: if you want a life, you can’t let yourself always be carried to it. Since Johnny’s Big Day, she’s getting stubborn for the life she almost lost, for as much of it as she can again. So we step (me), amble (grandfather), and totter (her) into winter’s glittering jaws away from the Eastern Quay in the half-light, half-life – the Inner World never looks quieter than just after dark when this much new snow has stopped falling, however crowded the streets, with the other pedestrians fleeing past the brooding doorways – then slip through the alleys between the palaces and across Big Square … This city, I tell you, this time of evening, is a liminal moment, a compressed vision. In the silence of the city, we hear the unbridged spaces between all and the next. We walk under invisible stars, down passages where the moon is the only light and our faces the only shadows, indistinguishable. When we look up again, we’re on the boulevard beside the State Theatre. Under a lamp’s yellow pool, grandfather takes Johnny from my arms while Emma turns her face from the needling snow and fumbles to light a cigarette, her signal for us to stop for a minute.

Look up. That apartment house across the way behind the Council House, the cement wedding cake – no, the darker one to the west of it with the cringing gargoyles and electric frills. It takes half a city block. The two top storeys are Aaronsons. No villa in the wine country for them. Not enough culture out there. When we turn the corner to approach their carriage gate, Emma tells us ‘stop’ and presses herself against the wall. So do we.

A man is striding up the hill towards us down the centre of the pavement, a young woman one step behind and beside him who must be his daughter, they have the look. The man has a walk that parts crowds. I have a few seconds to watch him before he’s flown past us, long enough to see how neatly he’s dressed in a black suit and black topcoat and hat, to see a middle-aged face under a close-trimmed brindled beard, a stare like a searchlight landing first on Emma, then on me and grandfather and Johnny. Just long enough to know that he has recognized her and that he has no reason to say hello. At the same instant, I can tell she remembers him. She turns to watch him disappear.

‘Who was that, dear?’ grandfather asks her.

‘A doctor on their street,’ she tells us. ‘Number 19. No matter.’

We enter the carriageway of the apartment block, push through the doors at the end of the courtyard, and sigh in unison: the lift is out of service. That would have been an excuse for Emma – ‘I can’t do the stairs.’ She would have thought of it, yet here she is, panting and shuffling towards the evening that looms with my hand on her elbow, as we climb the Aaronsons’ staircase, back and forth up the shallow steps. She stops on a landing to catch her breath, once, twice, again. At the top, I knock on the double-oak doors. The first downstairs maid opens them in her black shirtwaist, white apron, and lace cap. She wants right away to take Johnny, but Emma for that moment has a life grip on him, and the maid would disappear with him. No babies allowed here, you know? Because babies mean mothers nearby, and mothers aren’t to be acknowledged. So the maid turns to grandfather:

‘May I take your cap, sir?’

And he hands her his fisherman’s cap with a little bow.

‘And may I take your other cap, sir?’

He unclips his yarmulke from what’s left of his hair and folds it in half and slips it in a pocket over his heart with a smile that saw this future yesterday. ‘But I’ll keep my cap, if you don’t mind. It’s rather chilly tonight.’

This night will end horribly somehow. We all know it. If Mrs Aaronson doesn’t make sure, Emma will. It’s a matter of who and who first. As if we’re devils, the maid invites us in.

With three people this year in twenty-eight (???) rooms, you wait to be found. I still haven’t seen the entire apartment, but basically, it’s four skylit halls in a row beyond a circular foyer, surrounded by a dozen smaller ones with windows, and a dozen more stacked above those behind a mahogany balcony. You see doors everywhere – double-oak ones, little pasteboard ones, nesting ones, beaded ones, a few hidden ones if you know which panel to press. You could live in a space like this for twenty years without drawing all the connections, without anyone knowing where everything is. Every room a different side of someone, a different masked side, a different side to show the world. Foyer to formal parlour to music room to family parlour to library takes up the centre, okay, but about the ones on either side, I can’t tell you much. Emil lives upstairs, in three rooms with a separate entrance, but I’ve never seen them. Emma’s old room is across the skylight from his study. I’ve been in it twice, and both times it made me sad – almost a closet: a narrow little bed stripped bare, hollow bookshelves, an armless doll on a grit-covered windowsill, the night wind keening through a cracked windowpane. Daddy will be in his study, which is left off the music room. Mommy will be in her boudoir still, waiting forever for me to pound on her door. You can see what living here can do to people – nobody has to connect, then nobody tries to, then after a few years of that, nobody remembers to, then suddenly nobody wants to but they keep acting as if they do because they’re trapped by one another’s hollow stares. The library has a view of the Church of the Lucky Soul, and I’m sure that’s as deep as I’ll have to advance tonight. Which means that Emma and I need to separate. I’ll be walking straight ahead through the music room, which she refuses to enter. Meanwhile, she and grandfather take the hallway into the library.

Which leaves me in the foyer, entertaining three dusting and straightening maids. I make them nervous at the best of times. I need to tell you, nothing here feels big. There’s too much furniture for that, all placed so that you can’t help bumping hip while you’re walking around it. There are three decades of taste here, good and bad, and every time I’ve been, someone’s shifted everything a little. On the walls, from floor to high ceiling, I see a crowd of mediocre paintings and a few strong ones, all ages and styles. And plenty of dark tapestries, Art Factory work mixed with the old. These people can’t bear emptiness; without distractions everywhere they would implode. The family portrait I painted of them is over the foyer hearth. I haven’t seen it there before. You marry someone’s daughter, you’d better paint her family’s portrait. It was a price they set six years ago for saying and doing nothing while I swam the river with Emma. The first six weeks after our return from The Prague Years, that was our life – fixing up the cottage above the nerve asylum, and every second afternoon I walked down to the city to work on this. Perhaps they thought I’d go easy on them while I was still a blushing groom, and perhaps I did a little. They’re floating over a plain ground, which I liked figures to do back then. The ground looks empty, a neutral grey, but then you step closer and see plenty going on, but under the field, you know? Under, not below. I worked on the background harder than usual even for me, before I started to think about portrait studies. For the faces and figures, the hardest part was getting them to look in the directions they had to. It couldn’t be towards one another, but I had to bind them somehow. For once, I applied impasto, except for Emma, who’s floating above all of them with her right arm reaching out of the frame, riding an invisible wind, white silk dress covered with pink and gold florets (Gus still had me, see, and that was hard – it shows – getting the flowers to ride the folds of the dress so that you could hear the wind), looking down at her father with her left arm bent to wave goodbye or protect herself. She’s the only one in profile, and I made sure it was an accurate likeness; everyone else is stylized and thick and facing the world with a blank expression. Her father standing straight in a soft brown suit and high leather shoes, with a joiner’s saw in his hand like a furled umbrella. A fair likeness, I’ve been told, except that his head is impaled on the tip of the saw. Emil dressed exactly like his father in his perfect clothes and careful stance, but smaller and rounder, his brown eyes shocked open, his cheeks sunken, his forehead high and wrinkled. Down in the corner farthest from Emma, her mother in a Flöge dress, silver and red squares, with a high collar covering the lower part of her face, and wearing a turban like a helmet and with a mermaid’s tail and raising a trumpet with one hand. That isn’t her at all, but I’d just met her, I wasn’t prepared to dwell on that vision, though I had to paint something there.

The maids vanish suddenly and at once through the kitchen door on silent feet, the door behind them shutting with a click that startles. The electric lights fade and return, a cloud passes over the moon, the wind sends shivering arms of snow across the skylight. I shudder. You never hear her approach. With all the layers of Turkey carpet, you never hear anyone walk, and there she is at my elbow before I can brace myself.

‘So you noticed how we’ve hung you, how nice,’ she says, after an attempt at bussing me. ‘We moved it here last week, when we knew you and your wife would be coming.’

At the sound of her own word wife, she begins to sprout little blood-red horns, poking through her rinsed black hair. Her hands turn into wizened claws, clutching each other. When she stares at me her eyes turn into tongues of flame and start to spin, and her mouth when she opens it dribbles green bile. She still hasn’t found a way to destroy me for stealing Emma, who was never meant to be happy.

‘I knew you’d find me here,’ I say. So happy to see you … Glad we could come … No, I can’t say it. My good manners are powerless here. They’re yelling at me to let them out, but her bile-caked smile won’t allow it.

‘What is there to understand, right?’ she says while we both look up. ‘It’s better just to enjoy it, don’t you agree?’

‘Oh yes,’ I tell her. ‘Some things just can’t be spoken, they mustn’t even be named.’

‘Well, we’re grateful to you, and proud, let me admit. So many intelligent people recognize your work nowadays.’

‘The opinion of your friends matters a great deal to me, Mrs Aaronson.’ The yelling stops. ‘But what about you, eh? Still … you know … tickling those ivories on Thursday nights?’

She giggles like I just pinched her. When she recovers her breath …

‘We’re so glad Emma found someone like you,’ she says. She swells towards the ceiling, flames spraying from her ears while she deflates. ‘But how is she? She doesn’t visit enough. Why, we haven’t met the baby once since you returned to the city.’

She hasn’t met the baby at all, actually. I can see it – before the night is over, I’m going to be a suitor in a parlour room scene with no door.

‘And Mr Aaronson is well?’ That is to say, has he gone tertiary yet?

‘He’s just getting over a chill. We do wish you’d come one of our Thursday nights. Alex Zemlinsky is going to come next week … oh, and Ricki too. I’ll be premiering Alex’s new sonata. Do you notice I’m wearing one of Emilie’s dresses?’

Emma can’t bear to listen to music. Have I told you about that? Okay, when the music is background to something else, or someone singing in another room, she can tolerate it when she must. But you sit her down in a room with musicians in it, and she goes mad from the psychic pain. Oh yes … Emilie Flöge is Gus’s old dear friend. He designs patterns for her shop, and she designs the dresses. She forbids him touch any of the models she sends him, which is how Emma was still fresh when I came along.

‘It’s a beautiful dress,’ I tell her. Just not on her. It would be beautiful on someone slim and young. On her it looks like a bursting tent, but I’m not going to … She may loathe being a mother, but she can’t help looking like one, with those flat-wide hips and wrestler’s belly and breasts wandering in the south.

‘Emilie tried talking us into crimson, but it just didn’t feel right. Emil was right – green silk is how I look my best, don’t you agree?’

I watch her do a pirouette. Emil chooses her clothes for her. Don’t launch me – you don’t want to dwell there. Try it sometime, lying in bed at night, spooning Emma, taking a draw from her cigarette, feeding each other sips of wine from one glass, your skin and hers still damp from her tremblous sirens, and your mind wanders into the jaws of that thought.

‘You’re asking me as a professional painter?’ I say. ‘I think your true nature would really come out best in, oh, Norwegian grey. Something with a hint of yellow in it.’

But by then I’m hearing Wagner on their Victrola. Something about dying of love. I lost touch with Wagner during my first Act III of Tristan, which is what we’re listening to now. The fool, you can die of anything but that. The parlour doors swing open as if on cue, a hothouse warmth sweeps over us. Far away, through two sets of open French doors, Emma’s cradling Johnny deep in the end of a horsehair sofa, her face pinched at the music – yes, hold tight, Emma – and Emil standing behind her, looking down, grandfather at the window with his back to the lacework spire of the Lucky Soul.

I do a slow-time walk through the music room and parlour. All watch me approach, breath bated for the scene that always develops. Emma looks up at me: What next?

‘I was explaining to grandfather,’ Emil says, ‘that hatred of Jews has a theoretical base. The Marxist view is that historical circumstances have turned Jews into predatory economic competitors. As a result, we’ve intensified the worst features of capitalism. We aren’t responsible for what we now are; even so, our actions have brought about hatred towards us. A socialist society will do away with the demand for supposedly Jewish economic qualities and hasten our assimilation. Once we have lost our unattractive economic side, hatred towards us will end. The last anti-Semite will cease to exist with the last Jew.’

‘It’s a hopeful sign that you’ve remembered to add history and society to your equation,’ grandfather tells him. ‘But I still think that society is too complicated for economic history to explain it independently. I agree that we have to deepen our understanding of history if we’re ever to explain anti-Semitism. Even so, Emil, how people organize and understand themselves varies so greatly across cultures that history alone can’t explain what the world has come to at any given moment. Reason can only take us so far. It can’t take us the final step.’

‘A world without Jews?’ I ask Emil. ‘Why would anyone want a world without Jews? And what on earth is capitalist about Emma?’

Grandfather smiles. ‘Her parents, Paul, if you accept Emil’s point. You see, Emil, capitalism isn’t a system. No, it’s the expression of one more force of human nature among many that will play themselves out as humanity progresses, which it will do despite itself. It will swallow all that is material, play itself out, and then, some far day, whatever is left will be whatever humanity was always meant to become, whether it’s socialism or something we have yet to imagine and lack the foresight to predict.’

‘What he means, Emil,’ I say, ‘is that the values that will save us from ourselves and bring forth a just world haven’t been imagined yet. That’s why it’s so important to allow values to keep evolving. The only real progress is spiritual, and any manufactured ideal that impedes that progress endangers us all.’

Emil’s face turns dark: we’ve surrounded him. Grandfather nods to me, close enough … Emma sighs with a moment’s relief: this is going better …

‘Besides,’ I add. ‘The loudest complaint you hear about Jews these days is that they’re all socialists. Anti-Semites can’t have it both ways.’

‘Of course they can,’ Emma says. ‘There’s more of them.’

‘There are historical forces, Paul,’ Emil says. ‘Events can always be explained by them, and man is capable of understanding them.’

‘There are also ahistorical forces,’ I tell him, ‘that people still can’t fully understand.’

‘Yes, those,’ he says. ‘And which can be ignored, wheras historical ones cannot be.’

‘That’s what I mean by a destructive ideal,’ I tell him. ‘It is possible to imagine a world without history. A strand of red hair. A baby’s laugh. The veins on the underside of a laurel leaf. Those never disappear, and that’s where the world is most authentic – outside the history that people force on it. There was a world before there were people in it, Emil. Before there were people to think about it. That’s where the answers are – in the capacity to imagine the world that exists outside our awareness of it.’

‘You’re conflating nature with culture again,’ Emil says. ‘Your problem, Paul, is that you don’t believe that ideas exist. Perhaps they weren’t always, but they’re more powerful today than any belief system – than anything you will ever believe. The supposed “life of the spirit” you want to introduce through the back door of this discussion is an ignorant response to fear, no more. But ideas, Paul …’

‘Oh yes, those,’’ grandfather sighs. ‘Emil, really, if you want to watch the world turn on its head, wait for the historical progress you seek to give all ideas the power to impose themselves on values. Wait for the powers to begin making ideas the key to their power, the centrepiece. We all agree that wars of religion are unspeakably cruel, but they’ve been moral according to the people who waged them. Take morality out of politics, and inject the science of history into it, and all there is going to be is power for its own sake – who has it and who can be robbed of it. If you think the last century was bloodsoaked, you have no idea what a century like the one I’ve just described would be.’

‘Go ahead, then,’ Emil shrugs. ‘Insist that there’s a God in all things, but you’d better be prepared to die for him, because God is the next thing ideas are going to kill.’

‘Each era in history has its own values,’ grandfather says.

‘Not any more,’ Emil interrupts. ‘Technology is obliterating them, and rightly so. Progress is obviating the need for them.’

‘You’re espousing the modern perception, I know,’ grandfather tells him. ‘But think about this – Paul is telling you that history happens in time, and the world still largely exists outside of time. The values of the moment can never explain everything, but society will never destroy all values, either. People will never stop seeking values – they need them too badly. Values always generate contradictions among people, I know, and when they clash, the violence that results always leads to new fundamental values. History isn’t a march towards the end of values, it’s a product of the values people develop among themselves over time. So we can always still hope.’

‘Technological progress will render values unnecessary,’ Emil tells us.

‘They’ll make values more important than ever,’ Emma tells him. ‘If machines are going to rule us some day, more important than ever to talk back to them now. You’re shouting in a bell jar, Emil. Really, go downstairs some day and stop the first person on the street, or the next street, or in the Factory Outlet or some village in the Salt District and ask them what they think about history. To be polite, you know, since the socialists are planning the world for them. If what you’re saying doesn’t make sense to them, ask them what does. Then come back here and tell me that a world can be designed according to a theory that only exists to reinforce itself.’

I think, this started quickly, even for us.

‘Children,’ grandfather says. ‘What Emil’s suggesting about the monstrosity and terror of our age is hardly new. Perhaps the most pertinent question tonight is the one that he began with. Personally, I don’t want to be anything but Jewish. Not because we’re better than Christians, mind you, but because by embracing my faith I find that my hatred vanishes, not just for myself but for others. The Jewish self-hatred that’s so much in the air these days is a reflection of other people’s attitudes towards us, no more than that. The question then becomes, How to we make other people’s hatred of us disappear? Because our own self-loathing would disappear the same moment. When we look for solutions to anti-Semitism by turning our backs on our own faith, we’re only encouraging persecution by accepting Christians’ false evidence of our venality. Isn’t that a beautiful dress Emma’s wearing now?’

She’s put on one of Emilie’s frocks, ivory silk with gold stitching and flecks of red flowers. She does look beautiful it, but I can’t bring myself to tell her that here, because it would mean complimenting Emil, who would have chosen it for her.

‘It’s mother’s birthday present to me,’ she says.

I stand behind her and squeeze her shoulders gently. Johnny looks up and sneers at me, a new trick he’s learned.

‘Mother thinks Chinese red is her best colour,’ Emil says. ‘We had quite the argument about it.’

I let him rattle on. Grandfather is standing at the window with a view of the Lucky Soul, a book open in his hands. He shows it to me: something about depth analysis. He doesn’t know what it is either.

‘What about it,’ I ask him. ‘As a socialist Jew, do you hate yourself?’

‘No,’ he says, his smile holding back a laugh. And he pats me on the hand. ‘Why would I? Perhaps I could hate a god who isn’t merciful. But I’m certain he is, and I can still hope to embrace his plans, so I suppose I’m not capable – ’

Johnny begins to scream, Emma to rock him in her arms. Her mother, who has just appeared, laughs and says sweetly –

‘Would you feed him in the pantry, Emma?’

I help her onto her feet and watch her go. I’ve been told that strychnine tastes sweet, too, for that half-second. After twenty-three years (tonight) of being a daughter, her mother’s words are still poison darts, her laughter still lands like a hammer. Emma’s going to feel horrible for a week, and she doesn’t need that. I’ll be in for it bad, because she’ll take it out on me and then hate herself for doing it. Then she’ll hate herself for hating herself, and the spiral will keep feeding back until it topples from its own height. This is what the Aaronsons do to her. Perhaps if there was only one thing I dreaded about being here, I could swat it down. But when everything makes you recoil, there’s nowhere to start. You’d spin into space, going after it all.

‘And how are you, grandfather,’ Emil asks. ‘Still writing your letters?’

‘Oh, those, yes,’ he says. ‘One every day. There’s always plenty to do there. Fritsche alone is work enough for ten.’

He showed me Fritsche’s big book once: Handbook of the Jewish Question. Not that he had to – it was in uncle’s library in L.–––, and in the one at the Gymnasium. Like any good Dominican, I grew up with tales like these. Rumours, old wives’ tales, the blood libel, the rest of it. What Fritsche does is collect them all and sort them into piles. A list of Jewish murderers of the past hundred years. Statistics about mixed marriages, by city and province. Do you know that Jews are 1 percent of the population but 38 percent of the poets? that 60 percent of the lawyers in the Dream City are Jews? and 71 percent of the doctors in Berlin and Darmstadt? and 64 percent of the science students in German universities? Fritsche compiles all of that and has it printed. Telling himself, probably, that ‘it must be true because someone said it,’ and passing what he collects along to other anti-Semites, who send him more facts that someone said were true. The trick, of course, is to make it all sound scientific. I don’t pay much attention any more, it doesn’t matter much to me. If someone ever insulted Emma that way, categorized her to her face, I know what I’d do, but no one ever does, not with her hair, not with her own intimidation factor. The only ones I ever notice treating her like a filthy Yid are her family. A fun-loving bunch, these. Gathering around the table every night, despising themselves silently. Tweezering out whatever love they might ever have been capable of feeling for each other or the world.

The point: grandfather looks into these facts, Fritsche’s and other people’s, and then writes to whoever published them to correct the record. ‘Dear sir, please allow me to inform you that according to the Statistical Bureau of the State of Saxony’s own figures …’ ‘I noticed in your recent article reviewing the Hauser trial in Bohemia in 1879 that you misapprehended the prosecutor’s own figures about Jewish landownership by a factor of …’ There’s no end to it, really. If it wasn’t Fritsche, it would be any of the dozen yellow journals in the empire. He collects them, perhaps Emma told you. He has a roomful of hate literature in his stable, and he spends his spare time sorting through it, looking for patterns and for ways to explain them to himself and then others.

‘A believer is a difficult thing to be these days,’ Emil tells him.

‘Really, Emil, no. It’s the easiest thing to be. It’s the only thing anyone can be. You can’t reason your way to faith. If it were possible there would be no faith, yet there is – faith is there. People will always believe they believe, and because that’s true, they will always seek what they are meant to believe.’

I cheer up at the sound of his voice, at the way he meets disrespect with respect. You wonder how long he survived in the Dream City without learning to lie through a smile.