Trust (13 page)

"And Mrs. Vand?" said my governess with a disapproval faintly discernible. "Madam is all right?"

My stepfather looked surprised. "Of course she's all right. She's coming the rest of the way by train.—Meanwhile I have some paperwork to take care of. I may as well do it here as anywhere, since it's on the way."

"On the way where?" I wondered.

"Zürich. We're due there day after tomorrow."

"Is my mother going too?"

"It's up to her," he said, and threw me one of his rare amused visionary smiles: "Do I ever know what shell do? Not until it's too late, you can bet on that."

The men retired to my mother's room, where the concierge had set up half a dozen card tables; and all afternoon the two assistants, light-haired bashful earnest young men, drew meticulous marks on yellow form-sheets, while Enoch, reclining elbow-deep in mimeographed documents as thick as Russian novels, disputed with them in a clatter of alien syllables.

"What language is that?" I asked the Dutchwoman.

"Don't eavesdrop," she chided me, although she was plainly listening herself: the windows were open and the dark and serious voices of the men fell to the garden. We lay in the shade of the eaves on a strip of blue canvas. The Dutchwoman took off her sunglasses—she had been peering into an old stained American picture-weekly in which my sandals had been wrapped. "It is Czech and Rumanian and Polish and Hungarian and German."

"Do they know all those languages?" I marveled.

"They are reading lists of names. —Where are you going?" she broke off. "You are not to bother Mr. Vand!" She snatched after me, but I left her pinching air and faintly calling, and when I gained the threshold of my mother's chamber her cries had grown too dim to matter, or too indifferent.

"Well, come in," said Enoch, absorbed and aloof.

"We heard you in the garden," I began.

The two young men lifted their fountain pens curiously, watching Enoch.

"What are those names?"

Enoch did not reply.

I tried again. "Whose names are you looking at?"

"Everybody's," said the first assistant.

"Europe's," said the second assistant.

"Nobody's," said Enoch. "They are all dead."

"I saw a man shoot himself," I readily offered, "once when I was throwing up. He had only one leg."

Enoch tamely viewed me. "That's better than none."

"But he died," I countered, as though that were some sort of argument "In the road. Anneke saw it too."

"Well, it's what your mother brought you for," he broke out in his businesslike way, folding and unfolding a leaf spotted with black numbers; under the little table his impatient feet turned caustically outward. "In America everybody has two legs. She wanted you to be enriched," he said, clinging to the last word disconsolately; I wondered if it were a bit of mimicry.

In any case it reminded me of my pocket Smugly I felt in there. "Anneke gave me ten francs," I boasted. "I still have three. I bought Coca-Cola."

"As a state of being childhood has nothing to recommend it," Enoch murmured, and lifted, without assurance of comfort, one of those great volumes crowded with death.

"Well, it's temporary," one of his assistants gave out just then.

The air seemed discommoded. Enoch seized the moment "That depends." His big brown head fell forward on his page like a statue tumbling down. His hair had already begun to grow sparsely: it made him look like a Julius Caesar bare of laurel. He creaked around to face his young men as though discovering a pair of intruders—"Go on," he ordered, and set them to work again by the elevation of a single finger.

"Lev Ben-zion Preiserowicz," intoned the first assistant.

"Auschwitz," answered the other.

"Wladzia Bazanowska."

"Belsen."

"Schmul Noach Pincus."

"Buchenwald," came the echo, slow as a thorn.

"Velvel Kupperschmid."

"Dachau," the voice fell like an axe.

"Wolfgang Edmund Landau-Weber."

"Buchenwald," the reader yawned.

"Roza Itte Gottfried."

"Belsen," said Enoch's young assistant, picking at his teeth with an ivory thumbnail.

They went on in this manner unremittingly; I was soon bored. It was like what I imagined prayer to be, full of attack and ebb, flow and useless drain, foolish because clearly nobody heard, neither deaf heaven nor the dry-lipped deafer communicants; it was in short a sad redundant madrigal, droned out for its own sad sake, and all those queer repugnant foreign names, cluttering the air without mercy, seemed pointless, pushy, offensive, aggressive, thrusting themselves unreasonably up for notice: I thought of the flies spraying out from their barrel of filth, whipping wing-noises as savage as the noises of these wingless graceless names. "Itsaak Lazar Chemsky," said the first young man, smoothing his creamy mustard hair, tugging now and then at his constricting too-hot tasteful tie: and "Rivka Czainer," he said, and "Mottel Yarmolinski, Chaya Tscherniknow, Dvora-gittel Langbeiner," he said, "Pesha Teitelbaum, Janek Kedlacki, Sholem Shlomo Pinsky, Yoneh Hillel Yarmuk," he said, and the sun slunk lower into the room while the concierge came and went with coffee cups; and he said "Maishe Lipsky, Dovid Ginsberg, Kalman Dubnitz," and still the list was not exhausted; and the other had his list, but it was even more soporific, the same sounds again and again and again, Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the order varying, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau, now and then an alteration in the tick and swing, Belsen, Maidenek, Auschwitz, Chelmo, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sovibar—tollings like the chorus of some unidentifiable opera of which I could remember the music but not the import—and all the while Enoch sat spitting on his thumb and crackling the hides of those book-thick blotty documents, heaped like masonry, through which he drove his indefatigable pen.

After a time I broke through their chant and counterpoint. "If they are all dead why do you keep their names?"

"To have a record," said the first assistant.

"To arrange for the funerals," said the second assistant.

"For no reason in the world," said Enoch, and peeled from his shoulders a finely-rolled shrug. He blinked at me portentously. "Smoke leaves no records and cinders don't have funerals." It was one of those futuristic or apocalyptic statements which were his habit; his tone diagrammed a moon-surface, pitted and piteous, burning incomprehensibly into eternity. It was a reminder of his perpetual dialogué, of his idolatry even: he was always addressing some image or apparition or muse, perhaps Clio, perhaps some crazed Goddess of the Twentieth Century whom he had given up appeasing, and could only malign.

The others detected his calumny, and, without recognizing it as a sort of worship, supposed it to be the ill-temper of an admirable
eccentricity. It made them shy of him, yet imitative. They were grave and diffident youths, yet not without the sing-song of fancy: they gazed at me full of secret teasing. And they wrinkled their papers with an obliging and casual horror, plainly believing that Enoch apostrophized, if not themselves, then merely Death: and all in the manner of a man possessed of scorn. But Enoch was forty then, immured in careerism and beyond romanticizing death. He did not think (as they did): Lethe. For him it was instead (a thing for them impossible), briskly, brutally: slaughter. He was well past Lethe, and well past Nepenthe, and far past the Styx or Paradise. He took it all as simple butchery, and a demeaning waste of time to poetize. What he put down in those immense ledgers was, I suppose, notations on his creed: perhaps he thought of himself as a scholar-saint, Duns Scotus or maybe Maimonides, feeding data to his goddess as others swing censers or take ashen thumbprints on their brows—he gave her what he could. She might have been, as I have said, History; or, what is more probable, the grim-faced nymph Geopolitica, wearing a girdle of human skin and sandals sinewed and thonged by the sighs of dead philosophers. She might even have been Charity, although that is less plausible. Still, whoever she was, he vilified her roundly; his imprecations were sly but to the point. He cursed her for the smoke and the cinders and the corpses, and pleaded for the Evil Inclination and the Angel of Death jointly to carry her off; but she remained. I wonder how he saw her, whether all gold and Greek and comely, or hideously whorled and coiled with intellect. Howsoever it was, he was himself her cultist, he had succumbed, she owned him absolutely. She had achieved terror, power, majesty, the throne and crown and sceptre and sway and seat of his mind—seizures, above all, of genius. Perhaps he conceived of it all as the old wearisome affair called getting ahead, or making a career, or driving on, or reaching for the topmost rung—whichever phrase the moment favored—and did not meditate on those fabled pursuits, Argonauts after golden fleece, Israelites after Zion, which were like his own. He pursued: the others knew that he pursued, and imagined (as surely my mother imagined) it was promotion, a better classification, more men under him, something reckonable and recognized, that made him pant—in short, the future. And he could not confess for the sake of whom or what he dug down deep in those awesome volumes, sifting their name-burdened and number-laden leaves as soil is spaded and weighted in search of sunken graves and bones time-turned to stone—he could not say or tell. That apparition (image? vision?), succubus barnacled to his brain, was a cunning mist there in my mother's room where Enoch leaned brooding among the paper remnants of the damned: the lists and questionnaires, the numbers and their nemeses; every table spread with the worms' feast; the room a registry and bursary for smoke and cinders. Over it all his goddess hung. If she wore a pair of bucklers for her breasts, they gleamed for him and shimmered sound like struck cymbals; if slow vein-blood drooped like pendants from her gored ears, they seemed to him jewels more gradual than pearls—she formed herself out of the slaughter; the scarves and winds of smoke met to make her hair, the cinders clustered to make her thighs; she was war, death, blood, and spilled the severed limbs of infants from her giant channel in perpetual misbirths; she came up enlightened from that slaughter like a swimmer from the towering water-wall with his glorified face; she came up an angel from that slaughter and the fire-whitened cinders of those names. She came up Europa.

Europa: so my mother was right. She had desired for me the recoupment of Europe, by which she plainly meant conversion; and she had borne me purposefully and hopefully to the scorched plain, all the while swearing to castles and cathedrals, and seizing like a missionary on those improbable doctrines of hers, those feudal sentimentalities of tapestry and cloister, rubric and falcon, shrine and knight's tomb, as though she imagined spells lay inchoate in that old stained soil. She had brought me to see the spires of those places, quick as scimitars, and minarets like overturned goblets, and the domes, windows, and pillars of those exhausted groves; also icons rubbed beyond belief; and moats flushed with mold; and long vaporous seacoasts; and portraits of shallow-necked ancient ladies with small ringed hands; and, by the hundreds, mild madonnas suckling. We were bare and blank, by comparison, at home; we were all steel. So she brought me to those points of germination, in fact to her idea of civilization, as savage as anyone's: and she promised from this fountain of the world (she called it life, she called it Europe) all spectacle, dominion, energy, and honor. And all the while she never smelled death there.

Enoch and Europe: she saw them as one, and in Enoch saw plainly a capacity for spectacle, dominion, energy and honor—and more, a kind of command without speculation, an unbrooding place-oblivion that breathed Europe as though Europe were a gas more natural to him than any air. And all the while she never thought what that gas might be; she saw him dizzied by it, driven by it, claimed and owned by it; and all the while she never thought what that gas might be, dreamed it as some sort of nimbus to praise him, or film to gild or tissue to adorn him, or lens (cloth-of-gold, wing of butterfly) through which he glimpsed rare and secret refractions of the Europe she desired, secret and brilliant incarnations of her illusions. And all the while she never smelled death there, or thought what that gas might be.

But it was deathcamp gas, no nimbus, that plagued his head and drifted round his outstretched arm and nuzzled in the folds of his trouser-cuffs and swarmed from his nostrils to touch those unshrouded tattooed carcasses of his, moving in freight cars over the gassed and blighted continent.

So my mother was both right and wrong: right because, through a romantic but useful perspicacity, she had penetrated the cloud of power that brightly ringed her husband, and guessed how Europe had mastered him; and wrong, at the same time deeply wrong in thinking it was
her
Europe to which he was committed and had given himself over, her Europe of spectacle, dominion, energy and honor, a Europe misted by fame and awe. And all that while my mother did not smell the deathcamp gas. She wondered that Enoch was not a stranger in those places and among those deeds; but she could not smell the deathcamp gas welling from his eyes. She saw him overwhelmed, and thought it was by ambition; she saw him dedicated, and thought it was to his advancement; she saw him absorbed, and thought it was in his career in government. But she did not see the goddess: that Europa who had engulfed him with her pity and her treasons and her murderous griefs, and her thighs of cinders and her hair of smoke, and her long, long fraud of age on age, and her death-choked womb.

It was not merely that the goddess in her dark shapes was invisible, for my mother was used to the invisible; she entertained ariels of her own, and could readily exchange one magic for another, and would have celebrated distress and decay and eery hopelessness (even trading in spectacle, dominion, energy, and honor) if only someone had taken the trouble to point out their withered elegances: she was not blunt to beauty's divers opportunities. It was not, then, that my mother, with all her cunning and all her inspiration, was incapable of seeing or imagining who or what had him in thrall—what violent figure, what vast preoccupation, what preying
belle dame sansi merci
(she was bold enough for these and anything). It was precisely his thralldom that escaped her. No goddess eluded Allegra Vand; she failed rather to catch hold of Enoch himself. She did not suspect the priest and cultist in him: how then could she picture icons round his halls? She did not guess that he worshipped because she did not think him accessible to the devotional impulse. About Enoch she was quite stupid; she was quite mistaken; she blundered into ironies. To amuse himself, he compounded them. She could not take him in, as she had taken in William entire, turning exact assessment into a devouring. Did she wish to re-father me? (Ah, that stark and persistent notion of hers.) Very well; he made bad-mannered noises and hoped the while I would always emulate his example. And did she wish him to strike in me Europe's lovely note? He clangored his lists of the murdered. Did she wish him to be for me what William was not? He obliged her by being profane.—It was clear that she had carried me from the disaffected William to fling me at a misconceived Enoch: from Homo Puritanus, as she supposed it, to Secular Man. And, mocking her error, he went at his secularity with the fanaticism of a preacher bursting into homilies. Then began the grand burlesque of those burgeoning aphorisms: "What Holiness would not undertake," he avowed, damning and deriding William for his finicky lawyerish hesitations concerning my moral education, "Worldliness shall"—and my mother watched in pleased innocence as he thumbed his breast with gusto. And then, rapidly following, he would bellow all those other maxims on the subject which I have already recorded: Upon what Holiness cannot build, When Holiness essays introspection, That moment when Holiness with whatsoever good will ... and further confessions of Homo Profanus, Worldliness Incarnate, Cosmopolitanism Idealized, the Adam of Europe fallen into Paradise. But still my mother did not hear the brittle mirth in those saws and convolutions. And all the while freight-trains scratching on bomb-twisted tracks howled out of the east with a cargo of tatooed corpses for Enoch the Secular Man; and racing from border to border he said aloud to his wife (who thought it very clever of him), "The house of death hath many mansions"; and in the privacy of his intellect he lit centuries and burned history to hallow his intemperate goddess. My mother was deaf to his ironies and did not dream she traveled with a man anointed. In short, she missed the whole sense of his character.