Archive for category: Chapters

‘I’m cruel to everyone but you,’ Paul says. No, he doesn’t say it but I can hear him thinking it. No, he isn’t thinking it, but I can tell he’d accept that thought if it occurred to him. In fact, probably none of that. I’m saying that when I first saw him, and saw him look back, I knew he was capable of cruelty, but not towards me, ever. That’s a gift, I tell you. I’m the one he picked to be gentle, out of everyone else – he somewhere told himself, she’s the one, and on bad days, when I wonder whether I’m giving back as much, I still don’t know why. He must have needed to say it to himself one day, to hear himself think so, to envision himself as capable of being like that, and I was there looking young and beautiful and lustfully available, besides vulnerable under the face I was wearing. It must have just been time for us both, and time brought its own luck to the show. The universe isn’t a wheel for nothing. So, to be afraid of what he might do or say or feel – it can never happen. He wants to be able to tell me that but he doesn’t know how. So he just acts likes himself, honestly even when it hurts, and it’s enough proof.

He paints astonishing portraits, and people know that side of his work the best. Astonishing is an imprecise word for what people see in them. Well, it’s a word, you know? One of those. How can your own face astonish you? It will by the time he’s done with you, and I say that as the person he draw/paints more than anyone else. He takes the notion that a portrait is meant for the sitter, not dinner guests, not clients or bankers. A portrait is for the sitter to learn who he is. So, Paul never paints his own portrait – it’s because he doesn’t have to learn that, since he’s already certain. I wish he’d accept more commissions, because the sitters would buy his other work later, his allegories, his cityscapes, his landscapes if he ever does more of them. Most of his paintings have people in them, from his need to humanize his outlook that way, but they aren’t about the people in them. Allegories are what he gravitates most towards, and he has a way of injecting everything with one of those. I don’t press him one way or another – he’s been smart with his career so far. Except for clapping and cheering from the balcony, and flashing cleavage at his patrons (from where it would be if I had any), he doesn’t need much help from me. To succeed the way he does, you have to be out there a lot in the right places, walking up to the right people, working the right crowd, making the authorities see you for what you do, making them expect what you are, and he has that knack.

I don’t want this discussion with Paul, not this spring, but Emil is half-right and I want to help Paul realize it one day: he must know this one day – there’s a limit to two dimensions, and there are two others he’ll have to face one day. The plastic intuition that’s his life is going to have to adjust. Never mind that film isn’t in him: hardly the point. It’s out there in the not-him, and what will he say about it? How is he going to respond about what it’s doing to us, to the people and places that he can only survive by intuiting? Art forms can be revolutionary, they can break the world open, but that doesn’t make them bad in themselves. Yes, sometimes the world needs to be broken, then other times the world breaks without anyone’s desire or volition and you have to find a way to reassemble it to your own purposes. Collective actions don’t have to be a death kiss as long as someone can understand their power. That’s what you have to learn to tell people, Paul. That’s the world you’re going to need to learn to express back. And how are you going to do that? And the cinema will bring its own honesty along with its own dangers if people ever learn to feel the invisible hand of it, understand its impact on their lives, which is something Paul is going to have to confront if he wants to grow for his whole life. Sometime in the future, his life’s going to hurl him into that wall. He’s still finding ways to make things that have never existed before, but if he wants to keep expressing the world he sees, he’s going to have to understand what film is going to mean next year, the next ten, twenty, fifty. He’s going to have to face those authorities and argue as hard as he has to the way he does with oils on canvas. He has it in him to do that, but until he does, he can’t bear to align himself with the people who abuse film out of ignorance of its power. He’ll tell you his work isn’t political, but with a name like Karsch and a family like his, he’s going to reach the moment of no choice sooner than he thinks, sooner than he’ll want. He doesn’t want to pick up a camera or watch other people do that and wonder about the harm he might do. When he finds a way to understand the social-chemical reaction that’s facing us all, he’ll do it.

I count eleven canvases tonight and know that’s going to be all. Four of them were completed last fall, turned against the wall, and three were in various stages before Christmas. Never twelve – he’s superstitious about twelve, something about the apostles. And never thirteen, because it’s even worse than twelve, he’d start worrying that in one of them he was painting the Christ. A weekly celebrant like him, he still says his prayers every night. That must be what he’s doing. He doesn’t kneel and clasp hands, but he strips down and piles his clothes on a chair and stares out the bedroom window every night looking at … for two minutes? ten? twenty? and I just hold breath, an open book in my lap, and wait. God – all right, he’s up there. Paul grew up believing in Him – badly, but still … – and I wonder what that must have been like.

He’s been out to the moonmaidens again. He’s been going to them for years, the same ones in the same house, a trope he needs to revisit. He’s been using them for groups since his purple days, before The Prague Years, and I recognize Cassie’s body now. Her hair will be ripe-banana yellow though she’s changed the shape of it now, or he’s changed it for her. He never shows more than a corner of her face, so you notice her body more than you would – flabby but posed to show an earthy kind of strength. There are four in the group this time, and though the canvas is square, he’s arranged them like they’re all clinging to a vortex you can’t see, coiled around one another, hands and arms elongated, two of them looking away, two of them looking at each other, and one of the latter is a child, and the other almost is. I make them sound contorted, but somehow they’re not. And in the lower-left quadrant of the ground, he’s written in the hand he usually reserves for his signature square, but bigger: dead love. He’s never named his paintings except after the sitter, or the view if it’s of someplace concrete, but he’s also like everyone else in town these days: he works on his signature until it’s parcel of every painting he makes. So, something got to him yesterday. He’s left two-thirds of the painting for the ground, which is never empty – he fills it with abstracted motifs, and I can see where he’s started to faint them in. There are musical notes, okay. So the figures are singing, that tells me. Or maybe they’re hearing music. Or there’s music around them that they don’t hear. And I know the kinds of songs they’ll be by the time the colours are there, all the motion locked in place. Children of a collapsing universe – he’s tilted the four of them so that you can sense them falling. But by falling, are they escaping? I can’t tell whether they’re screaming or smiling. Paul has his own language on good days, like this one was, which I learn one word and one rule at a time.

I’ve learned that from Paul – life starts out there. Experience is what you make yourself see. And one day soon, Johnny will remember something for the first time while he’s with me out in the world, and some day he’ll tell me what it was, and I yearn for the day he can do that. Yearn till my heart almost breaks. That’s a life for you. How did I learn to love like this?

I’ve got insight into my condition, what they called it, the doctors. As if getting better was about getting their approval. Basically, you feel bad, and then you feel worse about feeling bad, and then you feel even worse about feeling worse, and so on down into the spiralling pit. Then your mother belittles you for not liking yourself, though half of you is acting miserable just to show her she’s right that you’re worthless, in case you can earn her love that way, which never works, though she never tells you that. There’s no way to let the poison out. But sooner or later, maybe, you get tired of grinding yourself in that mill, and stumble onto happiness despite yourself. A taste of it, one drop on your tongue, and another if you’re lucky, and another now that you recognize it, at some point if you remember clearly enough those moments – I’d never thought that happy memories could save me as easily as the bad ones could ruin me – and start to draw lines from dot to dot, if you’re very lucky you start to understand that every individual you fear, which is all of them, is at least as mad as you are most of the time, and that there’s nothing unique about being afraid, and that happiness exists, but you have to know it before you can look for it. Happiness is unique that way, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to seek your own resources. Getting angry is helpful, as long as it isn’t at yourself. If you’re going to strike, better out than in, but it’s the hardest thing there is to learn. You feel this need to ask someone’s permission to be angry, when the whole point of being angry is that you don’t ask permission. You really have to believe you have nothing to lose – that’s the only way to start learning it. If you grow up rich and cossetted and sheltered, like I did, like Emil did, anger is something you don’t have much reason to practise. Money buys a lot of safety, so that in the end, you learn to buy your way through life instead of having to reach for it. Sometimes being deranged is the only power a person has in the world, the only leverage they’ve got over the crowds, the dark forces, them. It’s the poor, the shell people, who have that kind of nerve – they have no choice but to find it, because we’ve goaded them into … you know … find it or die, you lumps. It’s how they survive. So when half the Inner World leaves this city on May Day, and the police and the cavalry come out to protect who’s left, and the marchers from the Factory Outlet in their leather aprons and red ribbons form their lines and take control, I almost have to laugh. I’m one of the hated ones to they. But what they show on May Day is better than being silent and alone, like most people are, no matter how much money they’ve got.

Misery isn’t much fun any more. The past month and the next couple have to be about Paul, and as long as he’s working hard and well, my life is complete. My life is basically about him. When he surfaces at dusk, I’ve got his attention, and so does Johnny, but when he isn’t there, I’m alone and that’s all right too. He’s in the studio before daylight. I go up there at dawn to pose for him and to just be where we both want me to be. Then I go on Johnny walks if the wind is down and the ice isn’t bad. I still don’t trust myself on ice, I’m still walking too much like an old woman. Some afternoons, Johnny and I go to grandfather’s and eat cabbage soup and read his books together and listen to the shop bell ring. That, or I have my mystery errands – the ones that are a mystery to Paul, anyway. He has 24,532 kroner in an accessible savings account at 3.25 compounded, but perhaps, the teller yesterday says, your husband would prefer to transfer it into a closed account at 3.75 percent. Is that one year closed, good sir? I rub my forehead for a quick minute, think that’s 412 extra kroner next New Year, and show him the proxy that Paul signed last year when we came here for him to open an account I could reach. That chore depressed him for three days – direct to the hands. Paul dreads touching money. I’ll put a couple of coins in his pocket in the morning for tobacco and a great brown one, but not the folding kind – he can’t bear to feel it on his hands. It was the same when we had four kroner between us and no roof. I buy cheese and rolls and a chicken and spices from Rotman’s down the street for evening delivery. I stop at the Singing Swan for a slow hour, and drink rhum coffee and gossip with Josette and her penguin husband. And then back upstairs at five, when I know Paul will still be out for his ten thousand metres. Dinner on the stovetop for him to light, a bottle of red open to breathe. And I take Johnny to the studio for the evening inspection, Paul’s profane garden.

Colours are something the world demands you see. If I was making the world, it wouldn’t be in colour. But it does have them, so I stare them down, and then for the relief, I work in black and white and add a touch of colour as if it was medicine or something.

There are days Emma insists on telling me things. Her inner life must be too painful, too volcanic, sometimes to keep inside. Horrible thoughts flee to her mind with horns and cloven feet, hurling molten lead and boiling oil. Deafening, I tell you – you don’t expect someone who looks like her to start sounding like that. By now I’ve guessed most of the old secrets, and she’s reached the ones she’s kept since she met me, which at least are easier for me to follow.

I do what I do when I return, which is pull off my boots and place my tablet on the kitchen table for her to open, and look down at napping Johnny, hoping he’s let her some rest. She’s in her chair, with the Goya aquatints on her lap – they’re always on the sidetable – and Johnny in the next chair under my studio sweater. She pours me my brandy shooter in the steel chalice before she says a word and glares and smiles while I drink it back. She can do those two at once. I tell her someone’s been here, and she tells me who it was. When I’m here, I’m always glad that he’s not, and I’ll be watching for the rest of the night for the mood he’s left her in. She has an ancient need to hold out hope for him, and she will never see me questioning that.

I can never think of any stories to tell about myself. But Emma has one, and I’ve learned to tell hers sometimes by watching her live it, nights like this one. She was one person, then things happened to make her someone other. She wants to know who she would have become if those things hadn’t happened. But I’m not the thing that happened – I’m the one who knocked her out of the story the world would have her tell. Somewhere are her mother and father and Emil and other people whose names she doesn’t know. She wants the story she’s inhabiting to release her, and she thought it had. She wants an eternal present, which sounds like a happy place, because that’s where Johnny lives. And nowadays I can see it when they’re together that she wants to protect him from the stories the world would make of him. She wants him to stay off that train, but first she needs to stay off it herself.

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

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.