False Entry (15 page)

“You
remember
?” he said.

Aha
, said the voice, I
see you have not forgotten.

“No, I have not forgotten,” I said. I was grown now. I knew I could never get back. The gap was permanent between “here” and “there.” I put down the tray, Demuth’s tray, and nothing was smashed. But I could still remember, with the harsh breath one draws to cover the gap.

“She would say
Wer kommt hier
?
Wie heisst er
?” I said. “That means ‘Who comes? What is his name?’ Doesn’t it?” He nodded mutely. “And I would say … “
Das Heine Herrgöttle von Bieberach.
Little Mr. God from Beeberock. It was some sort of joke … it didn’t mean anything.”

“Who?” he said. “
Who
would say?”

“It was—before I came here. To America.”

“So. So someone has taught you. So you knew German already, you rascal.”

“No,” I said. What had she taught me? Or had I been born to it? To listen. To be the glass. “That was all I ever learned to say. But that last day, when she found out I didn’t know it was the last one, that no one had told me, she gave me some of the wine to drink and taught me a German prayer. And when I left the room, that was when she called out after me—
Gott schütze dich
!”

“And you were how old?”

“When?”

“When you knew … whoever it was … this person, these people?”

I was born there, I thought. When does one begin to know the people among whom one was born? But I saw him looking at me with that semiofficial interest he always had in my mind—“the mind,” as he was fond of referring to it, and I thought: Ha, no, that is not for you, that is mine, it is for no one.

“I was ten when I came here,” I said. Back there I had asked her something; what was it? She had shaken her head sadly, the old godmother, everyone’s godmother but mine, and whatever it was, she had refused me. For once I had asked something of someone; the glass had assumed a face of its own, a mouth, and had spoken. I had gone down on my knees to her, to ask it. I remembered it well, how it felt to speak for oneself at last. But she had refused me whatever it was, fending me off with the wine and the prayer. Four short phrases the prayer had had, but I had refused to repeat them after her, to learn it, so that, as she had said, I could always remember. I had refused her, as she had refused me, and I had closed my mouth. I had closed it.

“But you remember before that,
natürlich
?” said Demuth.

Then I had taken up the tray and gone out without a word. And standing at the top of the dark stairwell, I had heard the
Gott schütze dich
, the blessing, trailing after me like a scarf—with the sound that words have which when spoken are already part of the past.

“Everyone remembers,” I said. “
You
remember your German.”

I saw him flinch. Then he answered me in kind, as people will. They turn the other cheek, but not their own. The mind is not Christian yet, nor ever was. “But you—” he said. He squinted at me shrewdly. “You, my fine friend—you seem to remember
everything.
Is it not so?”

I had stood at the top of the stairs. And then I had done it. I had not dropped the tray. I had thrown it. I had sent it hurtling to the landing far below, all of it—the tray, the bottle and the thin, beautiful upstanding glass. And such had been the force of my arm that I had toppled after it to the bottom of the stair. Voices had opened out then from all levels, from the scullery to the fourth-floor eyrie, and had come toward me, marveling at how I had remained uninjured, hovering over me where I lay for a minute in the welter of wine and shards, with my mouth closed. All was smashed. And that was the end of the last day.

“No …” I said. “Not everything.” I recognized this with fear. For to remember is to be in possession, to be safe, and although I remembered much, more than most, it was not all. I could forego the blank lapse between that last day and Tuscana—it had been merely the gap between. But there was something more. I could not recall, try as I might, what I had asked Frau Goodman and she had refused me. I could remember with all my being how it felt to trust, to ask. I knew the taste of the Madeira after she had refused me; I could have told him that it had the taste of justice. And I could remember how it felt to learn for the first time that the listener is not the friend. But I could not remember what I had asked.

“
Nun
?” said Demuth. “Then let us proceed.” He settled in a chair, head thrown back, smiling, eyes half closed.

I looked at him. He had slapped my wrist once; then had come the easy, abject tear.
You are Hans Ulrich
, he had said to me, returning to himself through me. I thought of Johnny, accusing me of believing, when he could no longer believe. Even Miss Pridden, who would not dare her own image in her aunt’s mirror, had not been too timid to dangle her faded trinkets, her postcard X before me, to see herself—not me—in me. And now my uncle. If I attracted the ambuscaded ones of this world, was it because they felt safe with me, already seeing that I was fated to be one of them? Or was it because they saw that I, only the listener, was nothing, was already less than they?

“
Mach schnell
,” said Demuth. “The
Kaffee-klatsch
is almost over. Stand up.
Steh auf
! Recite now the poem.”

I stood up. For some time now I had been taller than he. This was the first time I felt it. “I am not Hans Ulrich,” I said. “I am
not
Hans Ulrich!”

He looked up, eyes wide, shaken back into focusing on me, shaken out of that inward stare they all have, the confiders—the self-lost look of a man threading a needle a mile and a half away. “But of co—I did not mean …” He stared at his lap. “I am tedious, hmmm. I have bored you. I am sorry … Perhaps you are right to feel … this is a stupid way to learn.” He smoothed one hand, its aging plumpness, over the crown of his head in the familiar gesture, but this time it was slow, wandering, and lingered doubtfully on the ridge that he was so proud of, as if he wondered how the ridge came there. “Perhaps you are right … one should remember only for oneself, hmmm?” He shrugged, and with it his face lightened. A gesture could always lift him. Perhaps it was bravery. Or the incurable optimism of those who can cure their spirits with long walks. “So we will manage without him, hmmm? And soon anyway, the books …”

“Send them back,” I said.

“Back?” He blinked.

“When the books come. Send them back.”

“You … do not wish any longer to … ?”

“No.”

He said nothing, but leaned forward, staring intently, as if he saw something. Dusk was settling in the room, in first one corner, then the other, like a returning old hound dog lapsing down with a sigh, recording its master with steady, faithful eyes.

“I must be going,” I said. “There’s no late bus in summer.”

“You will not come tomorrow?” He was still hunched in his chair.

I shifted my feet, not answering. I was to be asked that question often later on, often by women. I could never explain to them that my leaving had nothing to do with them as women.

“Listen!” he said. “I have to tell you the truth. You have been beyond me for a long time now. With the books. But we could still talk. There are things—” He bit his lip. “I have lived longer. That should count for something.”

This is what the old always say, I thought. For their own good, not ours. He had already told me otherwise. Each man remembers for himself.

“All right then,” he said. “
I
am Hans Ulrich! And I remember many things. I could tell you … a life is worth something. Then you would be ahead of the gamble, hmmm … why should you have to wait to acquire?” He glanced at the dresser, at the thin packets of chocolate stacked there like a gambler’s cards.

“I will come again … sometime,” I said. This is the lie that no one believes.

“
Moment
!” he said. “Listen, for instance …” He began to talk very rapidly. “At home we were from Schwaben—the grandfather and the grandmother.
Schwäbisch
, that is the comic dialect of Germany. No matter what you say, how serious, it sounds
annh-annh
, like sheep talking. My mother was not their daughter—she was a
Norddeutscher
, from Hanover—and she was ashamed of them. They were a funny couple to look at too, he very small and she very tall and bony—
der Spazierstock und der Kloss
, my mother used to say—the walking stick and the dumpling. And they were not very smart, but they were very fond of one another, and always talking in their old
Schwäbisch
sayings,
annh-annh
together. When Americans came to the house, my mother would hide the two of them, or not introduce them. They always kept very still—they knew how they were and what was required.”

He stopped for a moment, swallowed, then went on. “At my graduation party they were in the kitchen; I was ashamed too, and the principal was coming. But in the middle of it, the parlor door opens, and there is my grandmother. She does not want to come in, but my grandfather pushes her. She is wearing a hat with a feather. He is in his striped suit from the boat. He goes up to the American principal and says in German, “This is the grandmother, Herr Direktor.” My mother comes up behind them, very red, but before she can say anything, my grandfather screws up his eyes, opens his mouth wide in her face, and there comes out
baa-aa
like a sheep, in his
Schwäbisch.
” Demuth took a deep breath, leaning forward. “
Jederma-ann ist etwas von jedem Ma-ann
!” he bawled suddenly, and the words sprang from his mouth as if they had been waiting for years on his tongue, in a long, yeasty cry—a sheep’s bawl.

He looked at me then, startled, the way one person looks at another when a faraway cry is heard late at night. “
Verstehts du
?” he whispered, glancing guiltily at the open door. “Did you understand? ‘Everybody is a little bit every—’? You understood what he said?” He shrugged. “But it was altogether so funny … no one could help laughing.” He was silent for a minute. Then one hand crept toward his crown, stopped halfway. “But the funniest of all …
nicht
?” he said. “That now I, Hans Ulrich … am the principal?”

It was getting dark outside his window. In the shadowy room each corner had its faithful hound. Through the window came the mnemonic odor of night, dark river carrying its pearls to the diver, stealing forward even to this backwater room, to him, waiting outside his window for me.

“I must go,” I said.

He sat hunched in his chair, not moving. I had never seen him so still, palms on knees, head bent on rigid torso, all his seesawing suspended, as if he were tired of weighing himself at last. “
Listen
,” he said. “Only listen …”

No, I thought. To none of you, any longer. I must remember for myself. And if I listened to others, it would be for my own ends, reminding myself always that if ever I were to speak, that is the way others would listen to me. This was the lesson that was not in German. Out of all that he thought he had taught me, this remained. Perhaps I should have told him so. A life is worth something. But I moved toward the door.

“
Moment
!” he said. “I think … now would be the time … yes, now …” He had not stirred. So people sit sometimes, holding themselves down in space, when they know how little their weight is. “If you would like now … to call me
du
?” he whispered.

But I was already outside the door.

R
UTH TELEPHONED TONIGHT. THAT
likelihood has always been in the back of my mind these three weeks, or the chance that we might meet on the long daily walks I have been taking, partly in preparation for the evening’s task—movement, either in a vehicle or on my own two legs always stimulates thought, reminiscence—and partly because I am physically neither sedentary nor a solitary. All has been silent here. I am supposed to be away. But I miss exertion and I miss people, who are the food of thought. And since she and I live so near, I have formed the habit of taking a bus first to some other part of the town and walking there, often to the West Side, along the Hudson’s mock-regal streets, once or twice to Harlem, and once—on a Sunday so sun-calmed and sociable that I came almost to the point of breaking off my evening’s tryst—to the empty, lavender caverns of Trinity and Wall.

The East Side is no use to me; it is the present, and it contains Ruth, that gentle woman who is nevertheless my present danger. Even on those other odd streets, I often look behind me now, something I have never done before, although I of necessity know well the attraction of watching others from behind. Curious, I suppose, that although I have never ruled out the eventuality that one of my own ilk, someone who had accumulated knowledge of me elsewhere, might use it to enter my life, I have never feared it. I should recognize the breed at once. And our way is not literally to shadow but to knit hearsay with accident.

With Ruth it is different. It is not for nothing that the lover is called the follower. Even the world knows, laughing and condoning, the fantastic research of which the lover is capable, the wildly unfortuitous meetings on a corner, the hegiras that some have made halfway across the earth in order to be able to say to a certain face in a hotel vestibule, or to a voice on a blessedly local telephone exchange, “Fancy both of us being here!” So, now and then in my walks, I look behind me, although I know that if she follows me, she does it with love.

In her eyes, the way I have acted toward her must be unforgivable. Or almost so, for I know well their endless forgiveness—women. They all have it, not only those like Ruth, warm and intelligent and chaste in the mind, where chastity should be, but the slut also, as the sentimentalists know, and even, as they often overlook, the woman enameled by money or eroded by a profession. Even the spinster has it, waiting for some man who has not yet arrived. If they are women they have it, a deep, self-paralyzing sea of trust, an endless remission for some man’s sins. And one seeks them for it almost as much as for their sex, although one may say this only privately in this country, where the sexual emotion must not deviate too far into any other, lest one fail to recognize what it is, or of which sex it is. I have therefore never enjoyed conscious brutality toward them. I have been guilty only of that other sort, committed by either side—the inescapable brutality of loving less than one is loved. And aware of this, have been even more careful to be kind, to observe that ritual tenderness which often reassures them more than love. But with Ruth I did not do this. For the first time I was brutal in the other sense. What I did was to sleep with her and not see her again.