[38] Mister Professor

On the boulevard, the speed of his walk leaves passers-by in his wake, draughts horsedrawn carts alongside him. Nothing is chasing him but much is pulling him forward. A narrower street would not contain him – he would bowl over pedestrians like a gale between houses, knock them down with his stare if he must. This is the Dream City’s broadest street, with the buildings set back to form a circling amphitheatre – the Parliament, the Council House, the State Theatre, the School of Thought. Nothing is new to him here; little is new in the crowds that part for him. In his study, where he spends all of his days and many of his evenings, he coils his energy around himself, disciplines it, and turns it like a beam of light towards his patients, his monographs, his correspondence. Then, at one o’clock every day on the boulevard, he lets his energy run free an hour.

He is a dapper man for whom appearances matter, dressed by his wife to his clear instructions. His black suit is perfectly cut, his wool coat brushed that morning, his beard and hair trimmed at eight each morning by the barber who visits him. Stocky, the harder to go quickly but the easier to plunge forward. Black-rimmed glasses soften his liqueous brown eyes until people approach. One has to be up close to feel their thrust. When he wants to project their power, he does, but out in the world, out of sight of his loved ones, he has learned to contain himself and vanish into his own blur.

Last night’s snow has been pressed into ice by the morning’s foot traffic. On the way to the square behind the Mighty Palace, the gale is bowling and sliding passers-by towards him. The wind has coated his face with crystals, which melt into a million tears, flowing into his brindled beard. The most important thing in his life at that moment is his cigars: he is down to half a box. Most afternoons he would walk the entire length of the boulevard after lunch, then home along the quay. Today he passes behind the theatre, the Mighty Palace gardens on his right, and crosses the square in front of an ancient church. The Inner World’s sort of power means little to him. He is discovering a new world, and those who have looked through the door he has forced open now act terrified at what he’s done. He was a pariah for decades, and now that he need not be, he has learned to prefer the life. Enough people come to him for help and instruction that he no longer need suffer the indignity of seeking them out.

He pays little attention to his surroundings, which have changed little for decades, for him – the walk is the thing. It takes him past the Café Pavilion. He does not look in the windows, though he would know most of the people there. He will look in on Saturday evening. That is the only time it matters to him, and then he will be happy to indulge himself with coffee and cards for ninety minutes.

As he enters the chemist and turns towards the tobacco counter, the owner approaches to serve him directly with a familiarity less grating than the professor avoids in others below his station. Really, there is little they have to say after all this time. Nothing ever changes about the order he places at the counter. Sometimes he brings his daughter, that’s all, who waits outside whatever the weather. A cigar counter is no place for a daughter. The professor glances at the day’s newspapers, which are tacked to the wall, and sees nothing new to interest him, while the owner wraps his week’s supply in pale-green paper. But today a messenger comes up behind Mister Professor while he is waiting – a waiter from the Pavilion, a new hire. Did he follow me here?, the professor wonders, offended and bothered. No one who knows him would think of following him like this. They know where he lives and when he reads his messages – every evening from 5 to 5.10. The professor considers putting him in his place, surmises there would be no purpose, and – suddenly even to himself – steps into the world with a rueful smile.

‘I don’t recognize you, Mister Waiter.’

‘I was employed last week, Mister Professor. A Mister Doctor Aaronson left his card for you after breakfast, and I thought, since I saw you walking past …’

… that you would make an excuse to say hello to Mister Professor, so that on Sunday you could tell your Waiters’ Circle acquaintances that we spoke.

‘I come to the Pavilion every second Thursday on my way home from the Brith,’ he says. ‘Be good enough to hold my messages until then.’ Yes, and stare as long as you must – I won’t frighten you today. ‘Never mind, and I thank you very much for your trouble.’

He pulls off his black kidskin glove and slips the card into his coat pocket without reading it. The manager has ignored the exchange. In the cigar store, the professor knows his place and purpose as well as the manager does. They exchange pleasantries for a brief minute about the weather before the professor turns for the door.

‘A warning, Mister Professor,’ the manager says. ‘There’s a disturbance today in front of the university – a march towards the Parliament.’

‘I saw them gathering.’

‘The nationalists again, sir.’

‘It’s all right,’ says Mister Professor. ‘I’m a fervent admirer of German culture.’

‘They’ll be blocking the street, you know – the police will be out. In case you’re walking that way. I don’t know which direction you walk …’ He begins to stutter. Something in the professor’s silences makes grown men gibber.

And I needs cross the boulevard back to the Ninth Quarter. The shaved Jews’ quarter. He rues petty obstructions in a world where so many are monumental. A mob is a valid phenomenon, worth someone developing a theory. But it won’t be him, not yet, though for the next few moments he will be saddled with understanding one in practice.

‘They’ll block my way home unless I detour to the Irish Tower.’

‘You’re a busy man.’

‘Please remind everyone. I have a consultation at 2.05.’

He leaves with a nod of his hat and continues through the Inner World, the Mighty Palace still on his right, then the Court Opera. From here to his apartment by the usual Thursday route is four-and-a-half kilometres – forty minutes, just right. There is a book to be written some day about the psychology of crowds, and he can see in his mind what it would need to say, but he doesn’t intend to write it. Perhaps Wallenstein, a young colleague at the university – he must suggest it to him. The older he lives, the more interesting he finds the world. In that, he is like few others his age, who prune their interests as their time on earth contracts. He learned one thing long ago, and it opened the door to everything else. He is the keymaster, the keeper of a map. In the shadow of the cathedral he reaches in his breast pocket for his cigar case and feels the card. He sighs and reads it now.

It’s signed with a shaking hand by Mister Doctor Aaronson but written in a woman’s hand, his wife’s presumably. Aaronson used to come for cards at Professor Auerbach’s. A terrible player, by the end – sliding for years. Slow onset pox, though that’s none of my business – not my patient. A harmless man enough. One wonders how someone so weak-spined got so rich. Gets nothing from his wife, and the explanations for him surely start with her before they wind back. Treated his daughter ten years ago – no, twelve – another teenage girl. They all get tags when they come to him: not nicknames but names for concealing their identity in articles and lectures. She was Wolf Girl. Hysterical cough, but selective, and right-side haemiplegia, and her mother’s piano playing made her deaf for days. Interesting dreams – about wolves’ eyes. Not wolves, just their eyes. The question: Why did she harbour such certainty that they were wolves? Answer: She didn’t – they’re weren’t wolves, they were people with wolves’ eyes and their eyes were all she saw. But if their eyes were all you saw, why did you think they were people with wolves’ eyes and not wolves with wolves’ eyes? Oh yes, and she was profoundly ashamed of being left-handed. Her mother ended the treatment before it could succeed. Heard she was married now, to an artist somewhere. That should have settled her down, it usually does. ‘Take one penis, apply repeatedly at bedtime,’ he sometimes jokes to his disciples. Don’t tell me that didn’t settle her – it usually does. Settles them enough, anyway. A chronic onanist, she was by her own defiant admission. A girl who learns to do that too soon can never completely recover from it. It spoils her for the real pleasure only men can give. But she should have improved. A woman gets married and sooner or later bends herself around a man, and the worst they face then is mundane unhappiness, which is everyone’s lot and no worse than what men get. Till they do, they’re … vampires. Teenage girls, he sighs, as in another one …

Now, her father. Could they meet at the Pavilion on Saturday at six in the evening? No, they could not. He stops in a patch of sunlight by a churchyard that fences in a statue of the Christ, and hears the crowd assembling their chants on the boulevard two blocks away. He and the statue listen for a moment, then he writes a note in his most polite Gothic hand, in which he apologizes for the short reply on rough paper but begs the demands on his time, and asks whether they might meet instead at Auerbach’s house on Saturday evening. They assuredly could speak for a moment then. He crooks his left index finger at a public messenger shivering at the entrance to the Café Billiard, hands him the addressed note and a few groschen, and thanks him kindly for his assistance. He walks, listening to the chants grow louder on his way to the canalbank underpass. To himself, he admits that it’s a relief – more than that, a new opening – to examine this world more than one person at a time. He wants to be able to say something about anything, and his work is taking him in that direction this year – his own work, and that of some of his colleagues who won’t stop rattling their tongues about the collective psyche. Just by making him argue their point with them, they win by making him take in their own notions. They won’t let him tyrannize them any more – that’s the problem. They won’t allow any more that he’s the king of the world he’s letting them enter. It’s too late to stop that, but now that he’s facing the questions they’re asking, he’s already telling himself they’re missing the point: the crowd can’t want for itself what individuals want from other individuals. What, then, do crowds gather to want? He could answer that, but he still hasn’t decided whether to try.

Taking a rare shortcut, he works his way toward the edge of the Inner World and the foaming river of Christians that he somehow must cross. He looks in the window of an antiquary and stops to stare with baleful guilt at the driver of his own spending habits. In this shop he has never been – not his usual route. Yes, there are chances here – a box of Roman coins, not that he collects coins, but they’re a sign of something perhaps more interesting at the back. Bavarian carvings, saints and Christ children. No, not for him. What look like Toltec figurines, surely reproductions, but he will verify that. He will stop in again, some day, once, and let his eyes run, and ask his usual friends who owns this place. He would rather buy through people he trusts. Otherwise, once they know the buyer, they raise their prices.

His walk takes him past the back of the Marine, his summer coffeehouse, with its patio overlooking the boulevard, near the State Theatre. It’s a big demonstration today. What do these people not know they want? The university has become a twice-weekly war zone, just like the Parliament, with all this bellowing and not a word to be understood. Black-and-white banners proclaiming something significant to a spreading amoeba of downtrodden Christians. And he is the pushy conniving Jew of their nightmares. They can’t kill us all, but they can despise us all – it’s what power they have at moments like this. Today, as most days, it is students protesting about student matters. The German ones are demanding their own cafeteria, which is an excuse to protest against Jewry and Czechs. It’s unfathomable, and without wanting to he finds himself trying to fathom it – to uncover the darkness from which this rises. Some are carrying placards, some are carrying wooden stakes. To him, they could be clubs and bearskins – for all the rest he sees, the sound of them, and the look on their faces as he draws nearer, moments like this could be that ancient. There is no order to this mob, and that is a dangerous thing. Adler every May Day used to get his workers marching in lockstep in absolute silence. He remembers those days well. The workers frightened the wealthy with their silent discipline more than these fools ever will with their ragged chants. Police have lined the street, shoulder width apart, two ranks deep. There will be cavalry up beyond the Art Museum to be called down if needed. The All Highest will be at Pleasure Palace today, the Archduke at the Pantheon. And even if Parliament were open the deputies would be screaming and whistling at one another too loud to heed this. He can ignore everything about this moment except how to cross to the Council House park. So he picks a spot at random and enters the thick of it without breaking stride.

‘Out of my way,’ he tells the tallest student in his path, striding directly towards him with his shoulders square and cane raised.

The student does, simply at the brisk tone of his voice, and turns to him only after he has passed him.

‘We have a right to be here,’ he shouts. ‘More right than you.’

But the professor is already pressing through the thick of the crowd, brushing past one slow march line, the next and the next, walking directly towards each of the hundreds he sees on his way to the safety of open ground. He flourishes his walking stick and lengthens his stride and says ‘away’ in a voice too resonant to answer. A crowd abandons thought, abandons complexity, for temporary certainty. A crowd is not life as people must live it, but a temporary eradication of the self and a rebellion against the future that reason would provide them. Why, then, do they fear the future so much that they resort to this? Why do they fear reason? He looks without knowing why yet – only that something is here to understand that all the people he sees can’t express as individuals.

Then he runs into a knot of them too dense for him to move through without a collision, and they instantly form a pack around him. This is an outing for them, an amusement, an entertainment. There’s no rage in them, but the fun is meant to be at his expense. He comes to a stop and examines their faces one by one.

‘All right, then,’ the professor sighs, stopping in front of the biggest of them, the flaxen-haired one with a moon face and early beer gut. ‘So what do you want?’

‘You turn around,’ he leers to their audience. ‘This is our street today. No Jews can cross.’

‘That’s it. Thank you for telling me. So it’s your street today. And these are all your old schoolmates. And you’re their leader.’

‘Yes.’

‘So he’s your leader?’ He turns to the rest one by one, and they all nod yes, shoulder to shoulder, with jackal smiles. He waits for their wall to finish forming. Almost finish. They haven’t planted their feet yet. Here’s the trouble they wanted, their pickings for the day, and it came straight to them, they want to remember later.

‘Very good, so you’re the leader,’ the professor tells him, leaning on his cane, no more. ‘So which of these young men pulled your wee-wee till you went ha-ha?’

It’s too late for this lad, who had just met his eye. This one’s almost still a child and has just been reminded. Mister Professor’s brown eyes are glowing like heated metal. They seek, lock, and press in. That’s right, lad, he thinks, try not to stutter. Do you think your father judged you? Look at how certain I can be, compared even to him, if you wonder what real judgment is.

‘Come on, lad, don’t be infantile. One of them used to, back in youngers’ school. One of you did. He’s your leader, I believe it. Then which of you used to do it for him? You? Then you?’

From their faces, it was more than … His voice is a carefully enunciated baritone, approaching thunder. He glances into each boy’s eyes one by one and lets the sheet lightning flare till they blink one by one. Then, just at the right time –

‘That’s hard to believe. You, leader – you’re a man now. Tell them you’re not ashamed. The rest of you – are you ashamed for him?’

Now his eyes bore into the big one’s face, playing the Big Daddy, watching the fear show and freezing it in place so the others can’t help but see it.

‘Some leader you are.’ And as if parting a rock, he crashes his walking stick to the ground so that two of the students jump, and presses forward, and this time the way is clear. But he turns around before he’s out of their grasp.

‘A leader,’ he says, a shrug in his voice. ‘Get him to show you this, if he hasn’t yet.’ And he tugs his thumb up and down. ‘He started faster than any of you.’

They jump at the chance to laugh, and while they’re laughing, he forces his way to the other sidewalk. He’s less of a coward than anyone, he always has been. For too many for too long, he had been worse than a Jew – he had been utterly alone. Allies he now has, but even they don’t understand yet. He reaches the far sidewalk and crosses the police lines without looking back and strides with his face craned at the robin’s egg sky, through a square darkened by black trees and clockwork ravens. He smiles to himself, broadly, once. My that was fun. A good argument is the answer to every self-doubt. He smiles again, though strangers who looked just then would see a frown. ‘My city,’ he’s telling himself. ‘My home. Can’t I find better enemies here than that?’ Jaunting his cane, he walks on towards his family’s apartment, the only warm place he permits himself