[58] A seven-headed beast from the sea

One day, she may tell me how. The first night we spent together should have signalled me her nature – not the way she followed me into the forest without a word or look, not her first moment of swoon, or the firelight on her hair, or the way she sat so still there when the Hungarians found us – I was registering those while we lived them. Remembering how other women had acted like that, and other ways. No, it was later, in the stove darkness, that she cut her own self out of the flock, while I was fumbling for my trousers between bouts number two and three – in the middle of that – and she told me where they were: not they’re under your boots but they’re FOLDED under your boots. I don’t know, in the mood we’d put each other in by then, how she did that when I wasn’t looking, and they still had a crease three days later, in the woods. She was already controlling the madness between us. She was as controlling as she was mad, the calibration as exact as it had to be, always. She’s always been her madness and its keeper both. Once a week ever since, I’m telling you then, I go into the studio and all my week’s drawings are stacked on the edge of the desk in the order I made them, and the stack that was there before is – I know – wafted away downstairs while I wasn’t looking. I go into my paper files ever since, the ones in the parlour cabinet that holds nothing else, the cabinet with all my thousands of past drawings in it, and she’ll be watching me the way she does, making sure I don’t try to put anything back once I’ve looked, because I’d ruin her system. And each sheet I look at has the day/month/year of when she filed it written in her fly-speck code that hasn’t changed in eight years, below a neatly dotted line in the lower right corner. I tell her sometimes, ‘the cottage that night after the thunder, the men in the lokal after lightning struck the village steeple,’ and she’ll reach in with one eye and one hand and yank, there’s the folder, fourth sheet from the bottom, big guy, and God help if I move to put it back when I’m finished with it.

We’ve moved into the canal flat, the first rainy night since the housewarming and her red dress. The way the lights are when I come back from the walk, and the table lit by candles just so, and my three-finger chalice on the low table by my chair, and from the dress she’s wearing, I tell myself she’s planning a sailing expedition for two, but that isn’t quite it. Not quite it yet. Since that bout of swoon the night of the party, we’re holding our breath when we look at each other, waiting for signs that what we know is also true. Over a roast chicken and potato cakes, her only menu, and a bottle of French Bordeaux, she opens the file of 1906 drawings, the first ones I made of her. You love a woman, you smile and tell yourself sure, okay, at the things you know how much she wants to do. There’s the first drawing I made of her in Gus’s garden, and there are the ones I made of her by firelight that night, and I smile at the memories that show on her. And the ones from that summer, when I was so short of tools for it that I pared down my strokes and worked as small as I could, and there … the Great Wheel. I can tell from her look that these are the ones she wanted to see, which tells me how much she wants grandfather to know that we’re likely to be three by next Christmas. This was the drawing I made before I knew him, when he’d seen me but before we’d been introduced. I only had a minute to watch the two of them without me, and there they are, Emma in her simple, sun-fading dress, and grandfather with a thunderous look that was the first he threw me. They’re sitting side by side turned to each other at whispering distance, as different as any two people could possibly be but bound together by a look, and the Great Wheel behind them, spinning slowly just behind their awareness. The faces are simple, I’ve focused just as much on the wheel and how it has almost framed them together. I can tell you: I’ve never told a visual lie. One day we’re going to show grandfather this one and he’ll remember that day as well as Emma does, before all that came from it.

And here’s the first drawing that I made of him after we spoke the first time, when he was waiting for me to prove something, to prove the first thing I knew I was going to have to. You could tell what he was waiting to know. First of all, that I wasn’t an axe murderer or wanted for embezzlement in Bremenhaven. Him looking direct at me, waiting for me to finish with him, and I see his doubts and fears and his protectiveness when I look up, but when I look down at the sheet all I sense is the look they gave each other when she walked up to him, the love and the worry, but the love is an old one newly attached to her, and the worry is older than the two of us. When I turn the sheet around to show him, he’s sitting with Emma, just her shoulder in the drawing, and the Great Wheel behind him, and his weathered face looks proud with age and also younger from her presence. And when he looks up from that, his stare tells me I’ll smile at you later, if only it’s possible. He isn’t going to stop being doubtful about this for a long time yet.

She’s always visited him on Sunday mornings, never missed once. Those are the only times we’ve been apart that summer. The only moments of herself that she hides where I can’t get my hands on them. It’s the animal in her that always comes back to me, and it’s something else that visits her grandfather. She needs to let him know where she is, and I’m leaving her alone about that, until she tells me one morning, ‘I want you to meet someone.’ I shrug and think, ‘That’s cute.’ I don’t know what difference first impressions make. People who live on first impressions aren’t feeding very well. I already love her, though I wouldn’t know how to tell her and it won’t be the point of us for a long time yet. She’s just there, which makes me glad beyond reason, and she’s still there each morning, which is becoming a huge relief when I think about it, which I’m starting to do. I don’t know what my days that summer would be like without her, and I have to tell myself sometimes, when I wonder why she’s still there, that I don’t have to know. And anyway, I make her laugh, which is something I didn’t know I could do, and something I can tell she isn’t used to doing. It sounds more like a cough, and her face contorts a little with surprise. Her most flattering look back then is this composed inward stare, those brief seconds she isn’t thinking about me at all.

They meet on Sunday noons near the eastern gate to the Great Wheel, always at the same bench in a cordon of bushes near the duck splash. She stops me and asks me to wait, and goes to find him, and then comes back and beckons. A solid-looking old guy in a fisherman’s cap and a grey wool sweater, parked on a bench with a raised newspaper in his fists while I approach. He stands up and in front of her when he sees me and says across his shoulder to her while I’m still walking up—

‘Emma, what have you done?’

She remembers his words as sad, I remember them as angry. She’s told me nothing about him yet, and she’s told him nothing about me, not even that I exist, until this moment.

‘This man is why you’ve looked so tattered the past month,’ he says. ‘Where do you take her, you?’

I tell him about the hut in my brother-in-law’s deer park. This is no moment for reasons or explanations. He’ll get those when he asks for them; for now he only wants my facts and I’m telling him no more.

‘Your name?’

‘Paul Karsch.’

‘You both look exhausted. So, now I know why her tan’s been so deep. Karsch is a name in this empire. Do you have anything to do with that family? The Karsches of L.–––?’

‘Josef and Friedemann, my father and uncle.’

‘How on earth …’ he gasps. ‘Emma, what have you done. So, you, is it true about the horse?’

‘I’m the only one who knows what happened.’

‘Yes, by all means, say as little as possible. And keep looking at me that way. That’s all you can do until I’ve stopped staring a hole in you.’

While he does that, families go by on the path. Shopkeepers out for the day – silent for the moment – clockwork children sucking penny sweets, bench dwellers in tattered blankets, bullied awake and into movement by the pleasure crowds.

‘Do you love her?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know what love is.’

‘Do you want to know? Do you hope for love? Because I tell you, if you do, then everything’s forgivable, no matter how it looks, or ends, but if you don’t …’

He’s put on a stone face, and I can tell it’s a labour for him – that he’d rather be angry about this but that he’s holding it back for Emma’s sake in the faint hope he shouldn’t be.

‘I’ve never asked the question that way,’ I tell him. “It’s something I’m finding out lately.’

‘Be gentle to her,’ he tells me. ‘Start there. What are you two doing? Oh, we still have our Sunday mornings. But until this one she’s told me nothing about a man in her life, though of course I’ve been guessing. And now you. Sit with me there.’ And Emma sits on his other side.

‘The Weekly Truth,’ he tells me, and he shows me the paper he’s reading. ‘I never miss it. It makes me feel powerful. Yes, it’s good to be reminded that we own all the banks and railways, that we control the government through bond issues, that the next war is going to be started by a cabal of Jewish cannon founders. Quite a future my people have. Do you know any Jews?’

‘Like they were friends or something? No. It doesn’t make any difference to me that Emma’s a Jew.’

‘But it makes a difference to her, and to me, that you’re not one. When I leave my little island, I’m every Jew – that’s what Christians see. That’s what you’d see if you saw me on Procession Street. But here, on this bench on a Sunday, I can read my paper and tell myself I’m a Jew alone. No one but me can tell me what I am.’

I’ve seen The Truth handed out on street corners, though I’ve never read it. It’s a hate sheet for Catholic shopkeepers.

‘I didn’t know that paper was trying to move up,’ I tell him. ‘Usually it’s about Jewish prostitutes and the diseases you get.’

‘There’s still plenty about that, too. Karsch … that’s an old name. It sounds like a boulder does when you drop it on someone’s head. Which is what you just did to me. If there’s an angel inside you, tell him to come out now. You’re a Catholic.’

‘Yes. I came here from early mass.’

‘So you believe in your God truly?’

‘Faith means not having to know the truth. I still have to know.’

‘Faith is not having a desire for the truth. That’s what I think when I look at people who don’t want to know us. And you’re an artist. Do you paint church art? People like me have an interest in knowing.’

‘I’ve enamelled some wall tiles for a new church outside the city.’

‘The asylum church?’

‘That one. Flowers, mostly. That was last year.’

‘But none of the apostles or that such? It’s alien to me, the way churches fill themselves with pictures and statues. One isn’t supposed to see the One you turn to. When people despise us, it’s not because we’re Christ killers. No, that’s too easy, and perhaps the more ignorant followers fall that line. No, when your authorities hate us, it’s because you’re so sure you’ll see Him one day, and we insist it isn’t necessary. So tell me, which of our houses signifies the regression?’

‘When I attend mass, it’s because I hope there’s a reason for it. When I just go inside a church, on my own, it isn’t to look. It’s for the quiet.’

‘An aural equivalent of not seeing Him? Well … You showed her your cross, and knowing where you must wear it … When I see a cross, all I can tell myself is “I won’t be next.”’

I lift the chain from my collar and show him. Charlotte and I were given the same one the same day – tiny, carbon steel, as if was the family jewel. It’s the steel not the shape we were meant to feel against our skin.

‘All the Christian talk of faith,’ he says, ‘as if that is all you need to go to Heaven. Christians value salvation over virtue. That’s what’s so frightening to people who’d rather put their hope in virtue. They end up at the mercy of people who make everything about blind belief.’

‘I know,’ Paul says. ‘Salvation isn’t up there, it’s down here. Salvation is only possible on earth. That’s what virtue means to me – looking for salvation in the moment. Christ was put on earth to die. That’s why the discussion about who to blame for his death doesn’t make sense to me. Even if Jews killed him, how could anyone blame Emma for what God intended? Or the rest of you? It’s silly. I remember what the priests told us in school. So maybe later on you have to challenge the doctrines in your mind. Maybe most people I’d want to know have already done that. You’re a grandfather looking out for his granddaughter, okay. But if you’re making this a religious question, there are other ones.’

‘What a luxury. For a Jew in this world, all questions end up being tribal. We can try another. What are you doing to my granddaughter?’

His look demands I look back. But he hopes he can like me, I can tell. He hopes he can do that, and I can tell that this first few moments, he’s hopes he can trust me with her. He hoped for that almost as soon as he saw me. In fact, he was thinking about liking me the minute he saw Emma after she met me, before he knew I existed. This won’t be the first time he knows something before we do.

I take a breath and volunteer the first thing he hadn’t asked me. ‘When I looked at her the first time, I didn’t think anything. Then I got to know her for an hour and told myself, “Whatever she saw before me, it was always worse than me.”’

‘In Galicia – I was born there – a young cavalry officer is every Jewish parent’s nightmare. You were cavalry, correct?’

‘I was a cadet in the Seventh Hussars for fourteen months, the Chernovohrad barracks. I won’t make any excuses.’

‘You haven’t met her parents.’

‘I don’t know anything about them. Emma hasn’t talked about them.’

‘You’ve been too busy? None of that, thank you. I’m telling myself that perhaps you’ll be kind to her and tolerate her foibles and treat her with respectful decency. On the other hand, looking at you two, it’s too late. Emma, I can’t believe you’re looking for happiness this way. You, have you heard the proverb “Trust but make sure”?’

‘It’s the Russians who say that,’ I tell him.

‘You could be in horrible trouble if you’re treating her badly,’ he says. ‘So could Emma. Paul, when you love a woman, you have to love her more every day. That’s the only way you can make your love real. If I said, “Over for dinner next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and after that.” What would you say?’

‘I’d say yes.’

‘Then start tonight,’ he says. ‘And next Sunday, and the next. But for now, sit with me and show yourself.’