Authors: Benjamin Markovits
The Syme Papers (79 page)
The farmhouse was low and wooden, though backed against the
sky by taller barns. The long drive up to the farm had dissolved
into a stream, and the stones in the road glinted clean and shining
in its current. They cracked and crunched under our wheels, and
we left a path of brown mud behind us. The yard was a black pud
dle with two chickens in it, and a rusted plough and a heap of flat
rocks in a corner for building walls. The hour had just gone two
but the day was dark as suppertime except for the big, bright cloud
over the hill. I knocked with a heavy fist against all the noise.
A tiny staring woman opened the door. ‘Is it te Inglish?’ she
asked.
‘No, Mrs Tyler …’ Sam began.
‘Where has they got to?’
‘No, Mrs Tyler. May we come in? We are all wet as fish out
here.’
‘Henrik!’ she called. ‘They are coming in!’ Her head was cocked
up to see us, like a wren’s. Her nose was red, and she took a hand
kerchief and pinched the end of it. ‘Take off your boots!’ she said.
‘You want tea, I guess, if it’s te Inglish?’
We sat with Mr Tyler around the kitchen table. He sat by the
stove with his boots off and leaned back against the wall with his
feet in wet wool socks against the stove. ‘Ah!’ he said, and snatched
them away and came down in a clatter. He rubbed his toes then
leaned back again carefully and put his feet back on the hot iron. ‘I
just come from the bottom of the hill
‚’
he said. ‘Wet.’
‘We have come on rather odd business, I fear‚’ Sam said.
‘Just say what it is, but all we got right now is chickens
‚’
said the
man.
‘No‚’ Sam said. ‘We don’t want chickens.’
We all sat silent, puzzled how to begin.
‘Leepshen‚’
said Mrs
Tyler from the kettle,
‘haben zee vat im Kopf?’
The kettle whistled
and she brought us tea and we held our red hands around the mugs.
They were Germans, but I kept my tongue, for I did not wish to
explain.
‘I am a scientist‚’ said Sam. ‘A doctor.’
‘Ah
‚’
said Mr Tyler. ‘No doctor.’
‘And I wish …’ Sam said, and began tapping on the table with
his thumb.
‘I am not a doctor!’ said the farmer.
‘Er denkt ick bin ahn Ars oder vat?’
Easy looked shocked.
‘I want to poke a hole in your field to see if there is something
there
‚
’ Sam said quickly.
‘What you looking for?’
‘I just want to make a hole
‚’
said Sam, avoiding the question.
‘What you want to find?’ said Mr Tyler in a big voice.
Sam hesitated. ‘I have an idea the earth is hollow, you see. That
there is nothing there.’ He looked downcast and sheepish.
Mr Tyler looked at his wife.
‘Er denkt da ist gahnit da.’
‘No‚’ he said in Sam’s ear. ‘Is mud. All the way down is mud.’
Easy grew red in the face. ‘This has nothing to do with mud,’ he
said. ‘It is a theory.’
I was suddenly sad and sick at heart and wanted to go.
Then Sam took Mrs Tyler’s hands in his own. ‘Please‚’ he said,
and made a cup of them. ‘It is hard, you see. Nothing can get
through.’ Then he put his little finger in the crack between her
thumbs. ‘But inside there is nothing there.’ Mrs Tyler was shy and
pleased and kept her hands together even when Sam let them go.
‘Do you have an egg?’ he said. She rose quickly and brought him
one and put it on the table, where it made a rolling echo. ‘Can you
break it?’ he said and she laughed. ‘No, but like this
‚’
and he opened
her palm and put it in her fist. She squeezed her eyes as she squeezed
her hand but she could not.
‘Mostly, the ground is like an egg‚’ Sam said. ‘There are no holes
in it and nothing comes out.’ Then he took her hands again and
cupped them. And he smoothed out the dark fingers of her husband’s
big hands and laid them in a cup around her own, ‘Underneath‚’ he
said, ‘there is not one circle, but many. Like an egg around an egg
around an egg, and so on, all turning different ways.’ Husband and
wife sat hands in hands beside him. ‘The circles have holes in them –
but since they don’t overlap, nothing comes out.’ He poked a finger
through a gap in Mr Tyler’s hands and ran into the back of her
hand. ‘But sometimes the holes come together‚’ and he shifted their
hands so their thumbs lay overreach other, then wriggled his small
finger through the gap and tickled Mrs Tyler till she laughed. ‘That
is what will happen at the bottom of your hill.’
‘How do you know?’ said Mr Tyler.
‘Because inside the shells there is a special air – quite unlike what
we breathe. Do you have any salt, Mrs Tyler?’ She got up in a bustle and brought him a small dish of it with a little spoon. ‘When the
holes come together – the air leaks out and burns blue if you light it.
Like this.’ He opened the stove door and threw a pinch on the fire,
which cracked and hissed in blue spurts. Mrs Tyler flinched when
she saw it, then took a whole spoonful and threw it in the oven and
stood back grinning.
‘I know this
‚’
she said. ‘We did this for games on Christmas Day.’
A girl came to the kitchen door with a wooden spoon in her hand.
‘Can I have honey?’ she said.
‘This is business
‚’
said Mrs Tyler.
‘Oh, business‚’ said the girl and went away.
‘What will be when the holes come together?’ said Mrs Tyler.
‘Will we fall in?’
‘I don’t know
‚’
said Sam. ‘That’s what we’d like to discover.’
Husband and wife looked at each other. Not much made sense to
them in this strange land. One more thing could do no harm. Herr
Tyler scratched heftily at his ear and observed the results.
‘Na ja‚’
he said at last. ‘We don’t mind.’
His wife cut in quickly, shyly. ‘We like a show, you see.’
So we came back the next day –
blue and wet after the storm –
and found the chapel. Frau Tyler wrapped herself in her husband’s
greatcoat and carried a stool to the top of the hill. There, as we began
to take our measurements, she sat watching: a curious bundle of cow
hide and thick wool that grew dark when the sun set behind her.
That was Tuesday – the eclipse was two weeks away.
Every morning we set off for Tyler’s Farm, flu’ in hand. Frau
Tyler gave us breakfast, which we gobbled in the dark. Herr Tyler
had found his shoes again and teased us. ‘Did you find gold yester
day?’ he called out, before he closed the back door behind us, bent on
his ordinary tasks. The snow had gone and he was right before. We
found only mud.
77°9’33
”
W by 38
°
22’57” N. We took fallen branches and cut
them down and stuck them in the ground to mark the spot. A sec
ond measures about thirty yards. Then we borrowed rope from Mr
Tyler and tied it around the posts to make a square, thirty yards by
thirty yards. The chapel stood inside it.
At first the size of the ground daunted us, I confess. We could not
possibly dig up nine hundred square yards at the hard foot of a hill.
Unless, of course, we applied the mechanical vigour of the double-
compression piston, that treasure of Sam’s heart – though the puzzle
of how to haul that impossible beast fifteen miles up and down the
hills appeared insoluble. The cordon itself proved to be a great com
fort. Each time we stepped inside
the hole
(as we came to call it,
though it was none) we must raise our foot over a taut line of dirty,
dripping hemp. The square grew fixed in our imaginations: the
ground afoot outside the line and just within seemed seas apart.
Inside the land was magicked and in our thoughts burned blue.
Yet – as Sam repeatedly reminded us – his measurements were
rough
and all our faith in the map of Perry, a surveyor with his eye
fixed on a brighter, warmer star than the heavens possessed, yellow-haired withal and somewhat nearer the ground. I borrowed a sextant
from Mrs Simmons one day and Sam took a sighting at noon. The
numbers tallied near enough, though they told us only the distance
north. None of us cared much for the result, either way, and we did
not check again. Having ventured so deep, we had resigned our
selves to faith.
And trusted to the flu’, for we had never known such fervent and
blue indications. Day after day the lamp burned with a throbbing
flame as clear and bright as dawn. The readings proved strongest at
the heart of the hole, a patch of ground three yards from the chapel
door. The flu’ cast a blue glow at our feet that shimmered and shifted
like the azure flutter of a hummingbird’s wing.
We had reached the middle of March and the air was pricked with
spring – as if the sun could lay its seeds, those first shoots of sum
mer warmth, in that sweet transparency. A letter came from my
father, brimming with extraordinary good news. It seemed
to bless our own enterprise and usher in a season of general prosper
ity by one of those strange
conjunctions
to whose power Sam
attributed all luck.
My dear boy [my father wrote],
I hardly know where to begin, and shall doubtless forget where to
conclude, so drunk on good fortune am I (and a glass or two of
brandy I confess, lifted in honour of our new republic, but I outrun
myself). Two nights ago, I lay on my dank pallet in the Prince’s
cursed, miasmal, rheumatic, calciferous cellar, waiting for the day
of my trial – endlessly delayed, as the fools from Berlin sought to
trace a great web of Liberal menace from that poor spider, your
father, whose only fault had been a curious intellect, a free table, an
attentive ear, and perhaps – there seems no harm in writing it, now
that all’s well – a loose tongue, and, upon occasion, a spirit of gen
erosity not confined shall we say by its own resources.
When morn and even pass undistinguished from each other
(believe me, my boy), days, weeks, months slip unnoticed into the
general sea of time – a great flat gleaming wasteland, unruffled by
nows
and
thens,
an endless becalmed
never
and
for ever,
at
once. (A touch of the headache is ringing at my temple now, a
faint bell, an almost delicious echo of the night’s joy. Excuse, in
short, the
purple
in my prose
–
a happy stain from the flow of
Burgundy in my blood.) I cannot tell you if the clamour awoke
me – if I had been sleeping or daydreaming – or merely thinking,
so little separates these three occupations in the prisoner’s mind –
when the dull rumour of crowds and song and trampling feel met
my ear. Perhaps an hour passed, or only a few minutes. The clam
our grew loud and soft by turns, but louder, and louder in the gen
eral run of time. And I saw, through the keyhole, against the walls
of the corridor outside, the flicker of torchlight in procession.
Certain it is that when the tread of feet echoed along the pas
sage outside my door, when the key jingled on the chain and
scraped into the rusted lock, and began to turn; when the door
swung open – I had the sense of being woken, of rising from a
heavy sleep, that thicks the eyes with remembered clouds of
dreams. I could scarce speak or stand or listen to the kind men,
my confidants and conspirators, who took me by shoulder and
arm and led me out, trembling in heart and step, out, out, along
the dark passages, glittering in the torchlight, and up the narrow
stairs, to the kitchens and thence, issuing, it seemed, like a grow
ing river, to the courtyards thronging with our happy country
men, who sang and danced and drank, to my release. Below us,
along the river, armadas of little burning boats (newspaper hats,
no doubt, upturned) streamed over the water, a pretty scattering
of dying glows, in honour of our new republic, the great state of
Neuburg-on-the-Elbe!
Ushered from the press of drunken happiness towards the Prince’s balcony, I stood in the brisk spring night – so sweet to my liberated nose, long clotted by damp and the chalk of the cellar – to address the crowds, who, to be fair, seemed too much overjoyed by the great events to attend any discourse on their significance, so I contented myself with raising a rabbling cry of ‘Freedom, Faith, Fraternity’, which a chorus of revellers took up, and on the sweet tide of that song I came in triumph down the hill
to my own dear town and my own dear street and the tender
embrace of my own dear daughter again.
Of course, there is a great deal to be done – a great deal of
plain hard
work.
For even liberty – especially liberty, perhaps – requires a certain attention to tedious detail. The widest freedoms depend on
precisions
of the law. A great deal
has
been
done. The Prince, Hespe, a handful of faithful retainers, as I
believe the phrase is, have been locked up – in the very cellars
where I lay so long confined. No harm shall come to them, of
course, barring a fright, and such reprisals as they commit upon one another. I have not slept these two days. I would not sleep, I could not sleep, for the world. I have lain long enough in slumber, at various times, of various kinds – and have never felt so bright and wide awake, almost painfully conscious, indeed, of the passing minutes, and the honour of our opportunities. Tor we have begun to draft – that great thing – a Constitution – sat up late in the palace dining room, over coffee and cognac and cigars, squabbling, quibbling, screaming at one
another; for liberty is almost an
angry
delight, and one cannot
raise republics, fashion parliaments, without a certain
bloodshed
of ideas.
The great thing – our abiding hope – is that our little town
proves too slight for troubling over; that no bully from Berlin or
Vienna will come to restore a throne he hardly knew existed; that
we shall be given leave – to
experiment –
with Freedom; and
might succeed in a small way, where we could not
on the grand scale.
Come home, Son, soon – surely to have a hand in such
beginnings is worth the sacrifice of any speculative enterprise. We
shall talk politics as the evenings stretch away, and awake to find
our lightest thought made Fact.
Your free & loving –
Father