[60] Evil wonder

Paul’s silence companions me. I’m out shopping or pushing Johnny’s pram down the quay, and I picture him working, or sitting there staring past his pipe and his three-fingered shooter in his parlour chair, or dandling Johnny in the air, or walking the streets of the city around us. I never hear him when I’m imagining him. Even when I picture him on his own with Gus’s crowd, or with his artist allies, or with the tobacconist on the corner, I see him but never hear him. When he isn’t talking, he’s taken himself out of the time that words use, and we’re both in the present, which is a place I never imagined living. His silence, whether we’re together or not, is where my other senses erupt and where my feelings can come out and play in safety.

Words are what Emil does. When we were children our rooms were across the hall from each other at the far end of the apartment from mommy and daddy’s rooms. His was full of books, and he taught me to read when I was three, without telling anybody. He would write me stories about my doll, or I’d make them up and he’d write them down for me. He was a gentle little man even then, always picked on at school for it. I’ve seen him cry – twenty years ago – and I’ve seen him laugh at something funny. When you see him now, you see him formed and hardened. He wasn’t either when I was little, so don’t tell me or anyone, or let anyone tell you, that I don’t know him. I know him differently, even if I’m the only one who does. He’s plenty of things by now that I’m glad I’m not. For example, he obeys mommy still, and I loathe her and have stopped feeling guilty for wanting to murder her. But I don’t want to forget – and I still need to remember – that I knew him before he became what he is.

A city like this, the way the Inner World rotates, he’s one of the easiest people to find. The year I meet Paul, he’s a brilliant young journalist. Three days a week on page three of the New Socialist Man, you’ll know what he thinks of the latest play at the state theatre, or about Kraus’s new polemic against motor cars. Then two days a week they print one of his photographs instead – he was the first journalist in the city to pick up a photograph camera. He’s one of those people whom you always know what he’s going to think, what his mood will be, which way he’ll be looking, and that’s a large reason why I don’t fear him. He can’t change, he’ll never know how. Some people don’t. They’ve let the world swallow them. Some people get battered by it (like me), some punch it back (like Paul), and some let it disappear them (like him). Whether a gift or a punishment, to always know up from down, is something I don’t know. If people actually want stasis, Emil has found it; all I know is that even if most people do, I hated when people tried forcing it on me.

Emil isn’t a likable man – he was too much of a martinet to be a likable boy – and as for his inversive tendency, I don’t care. All else do, I don’t. I just told myself, after I guessed right (he’ll never tell, I’ll never ask), it was none of my business. He needed someone in his life who didn’t care, and I decided it would be me. And of course Paul guessed more or less right away. Even before they met he had guessed. Something in my face? In my description of him? If Emil’s too embarrassed to tell anybody, there’s nothing I can do. He must have decided it was easier to live with internalized hatred than with society’s. When I look at him now, I see what I’d be like if guilt had ruined my life along with his. That kind of destruction leaves you standing but hollowed out. He must have a few instincts left, but I never see them and I don’t know anyone who has.

If he ever discussed it with me, I’d tell him, ‘Emil, I know.’ He must have read Weininger’s book by now, everyone did last year. It was a sensation: yes, at last, someone’s explained women to us. Shall I quote for you? The woman as sexual and nothing more. The embodiment of instinct, passive but predatory. The woman as dangerous but inferior, idolized and voracious. Placed on this planet solely to weaken and destroy men. Does that remind you of anything, Emil? The stares of dread you receive, the loathing you hear in every silent look, women have been noticing it for years, but its all wrapped in what we call civilization. Society is men’s way of hiding their fear of women, and it hates inverts for their women’s tendencies, for betraying men. And if you’re Jewish besides all that, well, die inside if you think you must, Emil, learn to pass. Oh yes, you’ve done that well enough, joining the shell people in a shell world that rewards you an emotional pittance for the monolithic self-denial you’ve always practised. The world is full of choices you’ll never make because you’ve always made the best ones too hard for yourself.

The Griensteidl is a journalists’ café, right beside the Mighty Palace. I used to meet him there, I knew his table, surrounded by a circle of ferns, under the highest part of the ceiling below the grand skylight. The voices around us sounded like twittering birds. I didn’t have much experience by then of Paul around other people except me. Now we sat at my brother’s place waiting for him while he drew me sitting on the table in one of Emilie’s summer frocks. I looked older those days. The summer had smoothed me down, added mental weight to me if not physical. I was starting to feel as tall as I looked. When I saw myself in the mirror at Emilie’s after coming back, I’d never imagined myself like this – stronger, cleaner lines, sharper around the eyes. I was starting to look as old as I felt, and I wanted more.

Paul is always full aware of the crowd he’s in. I’ve never seen him in a place like this – in a coffeehouse that draws this kind of privileged crowd (journalists, professionals, bureaucrats from the Mighty Palace across the street). I’ve only seen him in the places he’s chosen, never in ones that the circumstances choose for him. Like he always does, he looks exactly like himself – that is, he looks unbowed by the people around him, sure of his own nature, which is no one else’s but his own. If anything, a place like this is something he remembers as at one time beneath him. When he chooses to, he remembers he was born to the plutocracy. He can always return to that mode in himself, to those memories of entitlement, and summon that steady downward stare – which is something I’ll realize one day though I haven’t yet.