In Babylon. Marcel Moring
at the bed and saw the little boy sitting there and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Zeno lay in his own bed against the opposite wall, sound asleep.
‘Happens from time to time,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘They’ll think up a name for it some day. No doubt that joker from Vienna could explain it.’
‘Calling Freud a joker is not only unfair, it disclaims the great strides he made in …’
‘Oh, Magnus, shut up.’
‘Sorry.’
Here I was, in my room, surrounded by the things that made up my universe, the airplane with the rubber-band wind-up motor that my father had built, the Mickey Mouse alarm clock with radioactive hands, two fossilized sea urchins, a cupboard full of books, and a map of the world on which I kept track of the Allies’ progress with tiny flags, here I was and I was twice myself and in the company of ancestors who had been dead for three centuries.
‘We can go about this in two ways,’ said Uncle Chaim. He was fiddling with the copper tube that had fallen from his eye. It rolled between his thumb and forefinger, from top to bottom and back to the top and when it was on top it spun round on its axis and rolled back down again. Warm yellow patches of light shot across its surface, liquid stars that seemed to float between his fingers. ‘We decide on what this is and you tell us what you think of it, or we forget the explanation and pretend this is all perfectly normal.’
‘Uncle,’ said Magnus, ‘I don’t want to interfere …’
‘Have you ever noticed, Nathan, that people who are about to interfere always begin by saying that they don’t want to interfere?’
‘… but perhaps it would be a good idea if we first told the boy how we got here to begin with.’
Uncle Chaim tilted his head to one side and looked at me expectantly.
I shrugged.
‘Do you think you’ve gone mad?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Do you think that other people will think this is normal?’
I shook my head.
‘Then that’s that,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Have you seen this?’
I stepped forward and saw, for the first time, what he had been working on when I awoke. In the palm of his left hand lay an open pocket watch. I came closer and looked at the jumble of cogs. A wisp of wire, fine as a hair, was sticking up through the spokes of a tiny slender wheel.
‘Overwound. Always the same. Scared to lose their grip on time, so they wind up their watches like they’re wringing out the laundry.’
Magnus bent over Uncle Chaim’s hand. ‘An anachronism,’ he said. ‘This is a waistcoat-pocket watch, late nineteenth century.’
Uncle Chaim turned to me and said, ‘Magnus is very particular about these things.’
‘Anachism …’
‘Anachronism,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s when something turns up in the wrong time …’
‘Like us,’ said Uncle Chaim.
‘For example,’ said Magnus irritably, ‘if you read a story about the eighteenth century, and there’s a car in it.’
‘Anachronism,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Magnus. ‘And in a way, we are too, just as Uncle Chaim said.’
‘It all depends on how you look at it,’ said Uncle Chaim.
‘Why are you here?’
Uncle Chaim snapped shut the hand holding the watch. He stretched his face into a broad grimace. ‘Well,’ he said.
‘To help,’ Magnus said.
‘Bah,’ said Uncle Chaim.
‘To tell you how it all began and …’
‘Hm,’ said Uncle Chaim.
‘We were there when Herman was a boy, too,’ said Magnus.
‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Don’t talk to me about Herman.’
‘But Herman didn’t want us.’
‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘only believes that things exist if you can pinch them.’
Magnus laughed. ‘Your Uncle Herman,’ he said, ‘believes what he thinks, but he doesn’t think what he believes.’
Uncle Chaim shook his head.
‘Isn’t that true?’ said Magnus.
‘What?’
‘That Herman only believes what he thinks but doesn’t think what he believes …’
Uncle Chaim opened his hand and looked at the watch. ‘I’m not so philosophical,’ he said. He turned to me, the ‘me’ that was standing before him, not the little boy on the bed who sat, his hands on the sheets, staring straight ahead. ‘We’re here because we’re here.’
‘Ah. Old Testament!’
Uncle Chaim spread his fingers. The watch leaked out in copper-coloured droplets. ‘What do you mean, Old Testament?’
‘That’s what God calls Himself: I’m here because I’m here.’
‘Magnus. Nephew. God calls Himself something very different – I am that I am. Which can also mean: I’m here because I’m here. Or: I am who I am.’
‘Yes, Magnus.’ He shook his hand. The last few drops of the melted watch splattered about.
‘Talk about anachronisms,’ Magnus said to me, nodding towards Uncle Chaim’s hand.
‘We’d better hurry, Nephew. It’s nearly daylight. Nathan?’
I looked at him with, I would say now, the candour of a child with an overactive imagination. Uncle Chaim smiled and laid his hand on my hair.
Magnus came closer. ‘What did you want to say, Nuncle?’
Uncle Chaim kept looking at me. I saw his eyes grow small, then large and gentle. He shook his head. ‘What a life,’ I heard him mumble, ‘what a world.’ Magnus stood beside him, nodding gravely. Uncle Chaim sighed and stared down at the floor. Just as I was about to follow his gaze to see what he saw there, he straightened up and his face turned into the crumpled wad that it had been before, all grins and wrinkles.
‘You know what we do with firstborn sons, don’t you?’
I frowned.
‘Firstborn sons belong to God, says the Torah. That you know. You’ve read it.’
I nodded.
‘But parents can keep their children by redeeming them. The father pays five shekels, five silver rijksdaalers. His debt is settled, he no longer has to part with his firstborn son.’
‘In our family,’ said Magnus, looking appropriately solemn, ‘that has never happened. In our family, it’s become traditional not to settle the debt to God.’
‘Probably,’ Uncle Chaim took his hand off my head and stared somewhere into the half-light of the room, ‘one of our forefathers was just too stingy, or he forgot, or, even more likely, he was too stubborn. A stubborn family, that’s what we are, Nathan. The sort of Jews that say: Yes, but …’
‘Whatever the case, we don’t do it,’ said Magnus, ‘and that means that we, firstborn sons of the house of Hollander …’
‘Levi, we’re Levites as well, priests …’
‘… that the firstborn sons of the house of Hollander belong neither to themselves nor to their family.’
‘They belong …’ Uncle