[37] To look down into the drained pool

Paul thinks I’ll go home after tonight and tear a strip from him, since I’ve done it enough. But no … I’ll go home with Paul and Johnny, and close the door behind us, and tell myself, ‘This is ours.’ Our bed, Paul’s studio, the kitchen stove, the parlour stuffed with books and soft chairs and glowing candles and wine bottles, the view of the canal chestnuts and grandfather’s little shop across the distance. Mommy will never stand where I now stand, she’ll never find the place. Johnny will never know her, I promise you.

She used to punish me by sending me to the kitchen, can you imagine it? She was thinking that since the maids and cooks spent so much time there, I’d learn to tell myself I was no higher than them. But it was always warm here, the warmest place in winter. And full of cooking smells and sunlight, and there was always more to play with than there ever was in my room. And the cook used to feed me scraps of dough while she was baking. And mother never came in, and I never had to listen to her at the piano while she was practising in the afternoon. Let’s see if I can stay here till dinner. I sit on a soft chair with Johnny at my breast and begin to feed him the bottle the cook has warmed for me.

‘That’s a lovely dress, Emma. Did Emil choose it for you?’

Father is wearing a dark wool suit, tailored perfectly to his shoulders, and an ivory shirt with a glowing green silk tie with a silver pin, the same silver as the tip of his briar-root cane. Those are his working-day clothes, except that he has changed into fluffy yellow slippers. Everyone dresses everyone else in this family. Mommy tells daddy what to wear, and Emil chooses mommy’s dresses, and daddy used to dress me when I was his little girl. Even before he started going tertiary, I sometimes thought twice to remember what his face looks like. Nowadays even more, because it changes so often with his day’s health. Today it’s thin, eyes deepset and bloodshot, two cadaverous lines on each cheek, the skin purple from the wind on his walk home. He missed a place under his chin when he shaved this morning, the scrape mirrored by a piece of sticking plaster on his other cheek.

‘And how is the little girl,’ he says.

I almost remind him, Johnny’s a boy, daddy, then remember I’m his little girl. He stares straight ahead in middle distance.

‘Well, that’s good,’ he wheezes, before I answer. ‘We’ve missed you, little pet. Emil is always telling me how you love playing in the kitchen. And that must be Joey.’

He’s never seen Johnny. He didn’t visit the cottage last month, and none of them visits our apartment except grandfather. I turn to show him.

‘He’s healthy,’ I say. ‘His name’s Johnny.’

‘I’ve had a cold the past few days, in the chest, which moved up to my throat just this morning. But I find that two throat lozenges in the morning and a third before lunch seem to soothe it somewhat.’

Now he’s staring at the baby. No, not the baby. He’s staring at the pattern of my dress, with Johnny against it. We sit side by side, looking straight ahead, while I feed him his bottle. Johnny punches his right fist in the air – enough – and I place the bottle on top of the ice box.

‘Father?’

Place him in a crowd on the boulevard, in a room full of men like him, in his office at the factory, and he would be no better or worse than anyone around him. But inside these walls, among the four, it’s two by two, always two by two, and he’s shattered, and I’m supposed to be, and Emil has mother’s permission to matter up to a point, but only she does.

‘That’s a lovely dress,’ he says. ‘Mother showed it to me.’

‘She wanted me to wear it tonight.’

His face begins to crumble. ‘Will you please tell her I’m sorry? I won’t do it again. I know it was wrong …’

One tear falls from the corner of his right eye. No reason to ask what was wrong: everything and nothing, but he’ll never know or articulate it.

‘She’s terribly cruel, isn’t she?’ I tell him. ‘She’s mean to just everybody.’

‘I’m so sad,’ he says, and begins to whimper and sob. ‘I’m afraid of everything all the time. You won’t tell them?’

‘I think some people may already know, daddy.’

‘If I only knew how to … What can I do?’

‘Daddy, there’s nothing much you can do. This is it, daddy. Sorry.’

Johnny’s just drooled on my dress. When I look up, father has shuffled away in his slippers. I can still smell his tears. Through the open door, I hear mommy playing Wagner with two hands.

I steel myself and look in the door of the music room, which is as close as I ever approach the piano. She has had built a platform large enough for the piano and four or five string players, and the room is heavily draped to control the resonances. Her parents never allowed her to play in public concerts, but the people who know have known about her since she was a child. Every Thursday night she invites three or four string players from the symphony or the conservatory to join her here, and filled the room with chairs – see them? stacked up tonight behind the drapes? A light supper, an audience of musicians, critics, students, and Mozart and Beethoven and something new until midnight. Hans Brahms was a friend – hers, not anyone else’s. Ricki Strauss comes every month or so, another bastard, ice in his eyes in highest summer and a hangdog look as if a black dog bit him years ago and never let go. They, and the guests that train behind them, are mother’s public, and she doesn’t have to leave the apartment to make a mark with them. Now she’s playing with Wagner, one hand weaving around the other, a waltz pounding a march into submission, the pedals flooding the room with overtones. Music is her iron bubble. It’s how she lets herself out so that none can come in. I close the door behind me. It immediately opens again, and Emil throws me a frown of disapproval. Why don’t they look at Johnny? I could be carrying a shopping bag.

Then Emil does: ‘What are those stains on his hands?’

The palms of Johnny’s hands are covered with red.

‘He plays with Paul’s chalks,’ I tell him. ‘Red’s his colour today.’

‘Don’t get any on your dress,’ he says. ‘Mother would be furious.’

‘She’s always furious with Emma,’ Paul shrugs, from behind me, taking his Alsatian stance. Paul never cares what mother thinks, except when she’s thinking about me. What must that be like?

In the library, father and grandfather are sharing a sofa, looking like each other, except that grandfather looks younger and more solid. He makes cradling motions with his arms, and I let him hold Johnny. Through the open oak doors, we sit in silence and listen to thunder and passion. We all feel it, or we wouldn’t recognize it. So why will no one ever show it here? In the dining room, the next room over, the third downstairs maid is setting the table, tweaking cutlery and napkins.

‘I was telling Paul,’ Emil says to me, ‘that he received a paragraph in the Chronicle Dresden two weeks ago, in a commentary on the Berlin Secession. Holy Town, Copper Roofs.’

‘The one Doctor Walther purchased last year,’ Paul says. ‘He named it, did he. He must have loaned it to them. I’m supposed to be told.’

‘He did inform us,’ I tell him. ‘The letter was waiting when we returned from the cottage.’

‘You have no people in that one,’ Emil says. ‘I remember best the ones that have no people in them.’

‘There are people,’ Paul says. ‘An absence of people is still people.’

‘Don’t you worry that your art will lose significance?’ Emil asks him.

He’s throwing bait, looking for a way to get even from the last parlour debate, knowing that Paul and grandfather can’t double-team him when art is the theme. I know where this can go so quickly. With Paul sighing, it isn’t art … Not to him, anyway. And that slow, entitled smile he puts on while he’s beginning to imagine slugging someone. It isn’t art, not to Paul. Art is what other people keep telling him he does. It just is what it is, a process he taps within himself, not a result, an extension of what he is, the outgrowth of something he can’t deny in himself. All the things it is that he doesn’t want to explain to people who don’t already know.

‘Don’t you worry about your work lasting?’ Emil tries again.

‘Not for a moment.’

‘But any photographer could – ’

Emil just used the P word. Grandfather and I look at each other and hold our breath. That word saddens Paul, Emil surmised long ago.

‘Could what, Emil?’

‘Oh, never mind,’ Emil says, now that it’s too late.

‘Photographers distort the world,’ Paul says. ‘Surfaces can’t tell you the truth entire. Surfaces are something that creation sees through.’

Emil as a sideline makes photographs for the New Socialist Man, their first journalist to do that.

‘Very well,’ Emil smiles. ‘Perhaps you should start thinking about surfaces, Paul. The camera is the new era’s means of expression. It’s no coincidence that photography and socialism rose almost the same day.’

‘Emil, listen to your camera when you release the shutter. Do that one day. Do you know what you’ll hear? A gunshot – that’s just what it sounds like. The same way that a cinecamera rattles like a machine gun. Photography is a lot of things, but it isn’t a human expression. We’re all still children when we play with it, the same way that we’re fools when we look at the results. We look at a photograph and we can only think we’re sure what we’re seeing. We’re at its mercy. But there’s never been a day that people haven’t made art and responded honestly to it, willingly or despite themselves. Cameras can’t perform magic, Emil. Magic is what art injects to the world. The magic is why people yearn for it when they do.’

I tell myself, he must have prepared that one.

‘Really, Paul, what’s the difference between a Rembrandt painting and the photograph of a Rembrandt painting?’

‘Well let me think for a minute, Emil. I know – the difference is that you know that one is a photograph.’

‘They’re both as eternal.’

‘A work of art can’t be copied or repeated. There can never be more than one.’

‘But even paint starts to lose its colour over the centuries.’

‘I know,’ Paul says. ‘Most reds you’re meant to see in Renaissance museums turned green over the centuries. But posterity has nothing to do with its value. Art lives in the moment you make it, the impact is the echo that follows from it. By the time I’m gone, someone else will have taken my place, which is how it should be. I’m the keeper of an impulse, that’s all. I carry it forward for a few years to the next person.’

‘Photographs are a record – ’

‘History again. I don’t think much about history. Not personally. History will happen without me.’

‘It certainly will,’ Emil says, smirking as if he’s made his point. Paul sees the smirk and demonstrates an honest smile.

‘Emil, if you died tonight during dinner, would you mind that people kept eating? If you knew you were speaking your last words over the döböstorte, would it bother you that no one believed them?’

Emil is always trying to get under Paul’s skin, but always misses and sticks himself when he tries. Paul, if you provoke him, is just as arrogant as my brother. Wounds close instantly on both of them, as long as it doesn’t come to throwing punches, and Paul would end that quickly enough. So what is the point? Why can’t both of them just stop?

A bell tinkles in the dining room. Mother is playing Liszt now. How long will it take for me to get this out of my head? The clouds of disconnected notes will keep me up tonight, and I pray I don’t start coughing again. Knowing what can cause it doesn’t stop it from happening.

Place cards – a family dinner, and place cards. Paul glances at his own, smiles at mother, and rips it in half. He sits beside me at the other end, between me and mother, who is at the head of the table. When the first maid begins serving shrimp bisque, grandfather says no thank you, dear, and opens a salt roll with his fingers. He’s sitting beside father across from Emil, who glares at Paul, who has taken his place.

I open a salt roll with one hand while Johnny yanks my left ear.

‘Aren’t you going to touch your soup, Emma,’ mother says.

‘Not tonight,’ I tell her. ‘Pass the butter, please, grandfather.’

‘That is a lovely dress you’re wearing,’ father tells me again.

Emil and grandfather agree that it is lovely. Mother sighs with contentment. Paul presses my foot gently under the table.

‘Yes, indeed, lovely,’ mother says. ‘What would you call that red, Paul? You have such a gift for colours.’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Paul tells her. ‘I’ve never seen that colour in nature.’

‘This talk about nature,’ Emil says. ‘Don’t you think nature is dying, Paul? With civilization advancing so quickly, what is nature going to have left to tell us?’

‘Emil,’ Paul smiles, to me. ‘Come out and play at being human some day. Show us what your nature is trying to tell us.’

Mother laughs. ‘You’re telling us that Emil has thought more about it than you. Emil made an interesting point this morning … Husband! Stop shaking like that! Have you taken your nerve pill tonight? Gaad … Let’s wait while he gets it.’

We wait, eyes averted, while father fumbles in his pocket for his medicine vial. Paul plucks it from his hand, pulls the stopper for him, and shakes out a pill. That’s Paul for you – a small good deed for the person next to me.

Mother laughs. ‘Emil made an interesting point in his last – No! a green one! – in this morning’s feuilleton about society’s alienation from itself. Wasn’t it interesting, Emil?’

‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘That one.’

‘Many people found it so,’ Emil says. ‘I wrote that religion alienates man from himself. It is a projection of human wants onto an imagined figure. We project onto God what we lack and wish we had. In other words, God is man’s expression of his own alienation from materiality.’

‘Really, Emil?’ Paul says. ‘And how does that make Him less real? That’s an explanation for how He shows himself. In other words, it’s another proof that He exists. It’s another means for us to believe in one.’

I crunch Paul’s hand into his lap.

‘I personally believe –’ Emil adds.

‘Emil,’ I tell him, ‘“I personally believe …?” You’re the only person I know who doesn’t make that sound like the redundancy it is.’

‘Let him finish, Emma,’ grandfather says.

‘Yes, exactly,’ Emil says. ‘I personally believe that Man is finally eradicating God by conquering nature. That science is replacing religion and morality, and that when the world perfects itself all men will be equal and society will be greater than any God could ever be.’

‘You speak eloquently about God for someone who professes not to believe in Him,’ grandfather says. ‘You’re conferring too much power on religion, like most avowed atheists. People began to accept God’s existence when they found that reason and the senses could never be enough to assuage us. But your reasoning is going to take you one day to a place where God’s existence is the only explanation for what you still can’t know. God is a place you arrive at, Emil, not something you start with.’

‘I’m more interested in what Paul thinks,’ mommy says.

Under the table, I threaten to break Paul’s fingers. He winces.

‘It’s better to believe than not,’ Paul says, squeezing back till I wince back at him. ‘Me, I’m all in favour of reason. The farther reason takes us, the closer we are to awareness of its limitations.’

‘The Golden Rule is all you really need to know about faith,’ grandfather says, ‘The rest is footnotes. Paul is telling you that that rule isn’t just something you start with – it’s also something you need to arrive at, and the yearning for a merciful deity is what makes that journey possible. That’s where the rule’s power manifests itself – in the effort you make to understand its consequences for the world. You have this tendency to conflate the existence of a deity with all the religions that man has invented. Those can never be more than a pale copy of the message you would hear if you allowed yourself the possibility of His existence, leaving aside our human expression of Him.’

‘You don’t need a God to know the Golden Rule,’ Emil says. ‘Any person could arrive at the Golden Rule through reason alone.’

‘Then why haven’t you yet?’ Paul replies. ‘Reciting it isn’t the point – anyone can do that. The other part is being among people accept it alongside you. Christ demands obedience, but not blindly. To accept His message, you have to find a way to come to Him autonomously.’

‘If you have reason,’ Emil insists. ‘you don’t need God. If people believe there’s a God, it’s only proof that too many people aren’t yet capable of being improved by reason.’

‘If you want to understand reason’s resonance,’ grandfather says, ‘you need to accept the validity of religious experience. Without a solid place for people to confirm their values together, people turn their backs on those values. It matters that people hope to believe one thing.’

‘Marx arrived at it scientifically.’

Grandfather clears his throat and raises a hand for Emil’s attention:

‘None of us can supply all his needs individually. Each of us is held up by our neighbours. People must hold each other up mutually. Do you accept any part of that, Emil?’

Emil sighs and grins at mommy.

‘Well, you’ll agree, I hope,’ grandfather continues, ‘because those are Engels’s own words. And in considering, you’ll find your socialist utopia. And you’ll find God there, too. People look for him in themselves, and they look for him in nature, and some look for him in the Pentateuch. But he’s here too – in community.’ He weaves his fingers together. ‘Yes, in socialism. The world changes, and so does our view of it, but it is still and always an expression of Him. No one will ever see Him, yet it’s the nature of human desire to try. No, people will never lose their yearning to believe simply because He manifests Himself differently, in a different age, in a different culture or social system, as a renewed metaphor, if you like. Without metaphors and the capacity to create and understand them, knowledge of anything unseen – including of God – would be impossible. Reason is never enough, and your senses can only take you so far. At some point there is no other way to progress except by letting go of reason, by standing outside it and questioning its validity, and when you do you’ll see that community is perhaps the greatest of all metaphors. It means that people are gathering for the same purpose, walking the same road in the same hope. That is what humanity wants most to do. And the destination – what could it only be, Emil? I’m sure you know, even if you nowadays think the religious impulse is dying. When you believe, you needn’t think that nothing exists but the Deity. Sometimes he’s more powerful than other times, more distant or less, more historically powerful or less. The one thing He never stops being is the end of our collective searching.’

‘Well there you have it,’ Emil says. ‘God is a metaphor for something that doesn’t exist.’ He eats his soup a little hurriedly.

‘I’m saying,’ grandfather tells him, ‘that metaphors are how God expresses himself to us. We can recognize and understand them, but only He could have created them. If you can see them, you can see Him. Metaphors are proof that God exists, Emil.’

Johnny wiggles his limbs and tries to lift his head. I put down my fork and turn him only his tummy. Now he tries to paddle away.

‘Why aren’t you eating?’ mother asks me again.

I’m thinking, and this was the soup course.

‘I am eating.’ I hold up my roll to show her. I haven’t touched my soup. I never liked shrimp much anyway. Johnny begins to laugh, as if mommy was the funniest thing he ever saw.

‘You get your strength up,’ mother tells me. ‘Don’t come to me if – ’

‘Yes, I’m done,’ I tell the maid. And she takes my plate away. The next course is roasted loin of pork with creamed potatoes. Grandfather beams brightly and asks mother, who is serving, ‘Just some potatoes, please. They’re so delicious here.’

‘Same for me, mommy.’

‘I think I’m beginning to develop a headache,’ my father says.

‘Then take all your pills,’ mommy hisses.

Paul: ‘So how’s the cabbage business, grandfather?’ He stares at Emil, daring him to crack a joke about it.

‘They get larger every year, with the new crop-growing techniques. They tasted better, I think, better when most of them were all this size.’ And he holds two fists together.

‘Don’t forget to retire someday,’ Emil tells him. ‘No man can want to lift cabbages forever.’

‘Yes, I’ll have lots of potatoes, please, Mrs Aaronson,’ Paul says.

‘It looks like you’re eating for two tonight,’ mother says. ‘What’s getting into Emma, Paul?’ As if I’m not there.

‘Ask Emma.’

‘The pork’s too dry for me, mother. I’ll just have some potatoes.’

‘I like them that way too,’ Paul says. ‘Nice and creamy. In fact, I think Emma’s receipt is better.’

I look around the table: Mother has changed into a chinoiserie house dress. Paul is wearing a bulky dark-brown sweater and canvas trousers. Emil is wearing a brown wool suit-jacket, ivory shirt, and yellow tie. Father is wearing a brown wool suit-jacket, ivory shirt, and hunter-green tie. Grandfather is wearing a black frock coat with a boiled shirt and narrow black tie, and his yarmulke (again). Johnny is wearing a powder-blue blanket and a red-embroidered little nightshirt. His breath smells like milk when I look down.

‘Thank you ever so much for the dress,’ I tell mother.

‘That’s better, then,’ mother says. But we’ve crossed a line and she’s backed up instinctively, watching us while she serves. Johnny begins to gasp, inflating his lungs for a scream, and then sinks into my arms.

‘Will you take him to the kitchen,’ mother gasps, ‘if he has to do that while we’re eating? There, he’s done it.’

I don’t mind the smell, because it’s Johnny’s smell, and I’m more used to it than anyone. I stare at the pork roast and think, no one’s going to be eating that for a minute.

‘Disgusting,’ she says. ‘Can’t you take him somewhere else for that?’

‘How do you know it’s him, mommy?’

I raise my bum from the chair and give a push, and watch mommy’s face begin to curdle. ‘Another present from us both,’ I tell her.

I rise a little more and press down from inside. Emil coughs, grandfather looks sad, father begins to notice.

‘Two of life’s pleasures,’ Paul says, fussing with his flies for a minute. We all listen to his stream strike the bottom of the tabletop and form a pool on the parquet. Mommy suddenly remembers to lift her feet.

‘Macintosh,’ Emil gasps.

‘Mother, you don’t get to tell Johnny when to shit,’ I say.

Grandfather whispers towards Paul: ‘Shall we say goodbye?’

‘In a minute,’ Paul says.

We can hear his stream feeding its own pool.

He helps me to my feet. A few moments later, grandfather has been waiting for us on the staircase. We wait for him to show us how to think about this.

‘So,’ he says, ‘we can all agree on what happened the next time.’