A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
else on the continent is one of the dominant themes accompanying the father and son’s constitutionals. “Look,” Heinrich says, loud, rudely pointing. “Do you see that worker’s uniform? That indigo is close to ours, but not as complex.”
Or, “Look at the eye of that peacock feather in that woman’s hat. That’s close to our indigo but not as rich.”
Or look at the blueberries on that vine or the violas in that field or the arc in that rainbow. Close but not as pure, not as perfect, not as poignant.
Every night, not only their neighbors’ clothes but nature herself are judged and found lacking.
Lenz is found lacking too. His mind wanders. He’s more interested in the dyeing process than the colors the process produces. He likes to imagine the moment when roots and petals and the carapaces of insects magically turn into cerulean or chartreuse or the vermilion that Uncle Rudi mixes with beeswax and daubs on his cheeks just above his muttonchops, brushes onto his lips just below his mustache. This—the process, not the cosmetics—holds a degree of fascination for the little boy. But his father’s lectures are those of an artist, not a manufacturer. His father carries on about aesthetics, about the general populace’s inability to distinguish muddy colors from crisp colors, their failure to appreciate natural colors, with their variations, their own personalities, from the monotony of the new chemically made dyes. Even at eight Lenz knows he’s part of that general populace. He’s inferior. He’s undiscerning.
Then—it’s still 1874—comes the afternoon in early May when Rudi Alter—he’s still in Japan—decides to take a walk through a park that, like the park across the street from our apartment, runs along the river of a port city. We imagine the Japanese park filled with bamboo fountains and cherry trees and miniature red maples, the latter pretty much the same height as Rudi. In our imagination he’s wearing native dress, but his own native dress. A suit, a straw hat.
He’s climbing a hill when he feels a poke in the back. He turns, smiling, expecting to see a colleague playfully jabbing at him with the tip of an umbrella. Instead he finds himself grinning foolishly at a young Japanese nationalist brandishing an antique Samurai sword.
From the autopsy report:
Wound 1: scalp entirely pierced through
Wound 7: carotid artery completely severed
Wound 11: entire elbow joint completely severed
It goes on. Twenty-two wounds in all. Twenty-two fully pierced or completely severed pieces of Rudi Alter.
The nationalist says that the gods came to him in a dream. They sent him to the park to kill the first foreigner he ran into. That turned out to be Rudi. The nationalist saw him from behind, took in the European garb, perhaps the scant height as well, and the gods said yes, go ahead. They said what are you waiting for? The young assassin has composed a poem about the whole thing, which he recites from memory at the police station. He recites it again at his trial. He’s declared insane. They behead him anyway.
At the foot of the path where Rudi died—a young man of thirty-three—the port city erects a granite monument shaped like a giant headstone. On its base the words Our Brother are engraved in German. Our is misspelled.
On the day that Rudi Alter dies in Japan, the temperature drops dramatically in Breslau. People stop strangers in the streets to comment on it. “This is the kind of weather that causes influenza,” they inform one another. They say, “This morning I had to take off my jacket, I was so hot, and now I’m wearing it buttoned to my chin and I’m still chilled to the bone.”
By the time Heinrich and Lenz leave the house for their mandatory evening stroll, the sky over Breslau is the sleek gray of an iced-over lake and the streets are shadowed in wintry violets. Because it’s so cold, Lenz is less amazed than he should be when several snowflakes waft down and alight on his father’s outstretched palm.
“Look closely,” says Heinrich. “Each one different,” but by the time Lenz looks, the snowflakes have melted. Heinrich wipes his wet hand on his trousers. He cranes his neck, searching for more drifting flakes. There aren’t any. It’s May, after all.
What there is, though, is an inky slash along the horizon that makes Heinrich’s heart lurch. He points to the slash with such energy he feels the gesture in his shoulder socket.
“Look!” he cries. “Look. Lenz, do you see that? There! Now, that—that’s ours!”
The color of the slash between earth and sky is rich and complex, pure and poignant. It’s the precise shade Newton observed on the day he understood that the spectrum contained not six colors, as everyone believed, but seven, and this color, this purple-blue, the one too long overlooked.
In a moment Lenz will also see the ribbon of indigo, but for now he completely misunderstands. He thinks his father is pointing to the entire sky. “That’s ours,” his father has declared, and Lenz believes his father means the whole canopy, the boundless firmament, every square inch of the heavens. For a fleeting, confusing, yet immensely gratifying and possibly life-changing instant, Lenz Alter believes his father has declared himself heaven’s landlord.
And here is Lenz, son and sole heir.
Death in childbirth. Evisceration among the cherry trees. Typos on your tombstone. These were the stories our mother told us. Bedtime stories, we called them, though we were talking her bedtime, not ours. The three of us tended to stay up long after she went to sleep. But though she turned in shortly after dinner, she slept in fits and starts, as we often do now, and she’d wake up throughout the night and sometimes she’d shout our names, and we’d leave our beds or, more likely, whatever late-night movie we were watching in the living room and troop in. By then she’d be sitting up, cigarette already lit. We’d take our positions at the end of her mattress, Lady in the middle, the younger ones on either side of her, Vee a smaller version of Lady, Delph a smaller version of Vee. “The nesting dolls,” our mother called us, and we could tell she found this off-putting rather than cute.
Even we found it a little unnerving to look at each other. So that’s what I looked like when I lost my front teeth. So that’s what I’ll look like when I’ve entered adolescence. And yet this resemblance was also the only reliable and reassuring thing in our lives. There was the sense that we would always have each other. There was, to be honest, a never-articulated belief that we actually were each other, just at different stages of a single life. When our mother called us for bedtime stories and we arranged ourselves at her blanketed feet, each of us heavy-lidded, Vee and Delph lolling their heads against Lady’s arms, we must have looked on the outside as we felt on the inside: a single creature, strange and many-limbed, and in desperate need of a good night’s rest.
Of all the stories our mother told us when we were girls, the story about Lenz and the snowflakes and the sky was our favorite. We were children ourselves; we empathized with a little boy’s failure to understand an adult’s message. We got why his misapprehension was cute and silly, but we also got why it was wonderful, why his was a glorious way to see the world: not reduced to one of its component colors, but broad and encompassing and mystical, and the whole thing revolving around little old you.
As time went on, though, when we requested this story our mother began adding new details. When Heinrich and Lenz left home, they were led through the city streets by an eerie light that was an iridescent silver like mother-of-pearl. When Heinrich looked up, it was because a clap of thunder or shooting star or roaring voice had called his attention to the horizon.
In these new versions, on the day Heinrich caught the snowflakes in his palm, he understood at once that they weren’t snowflakes. (Snowflakes in May, our mother said. Did you actually believe that?) He knew immediately that they were Rudi Alter’s essence, fragments of Rudi’s very soul making their way to his brother on that day: Rudi’s deathday. Heinrich Alter had no way of knowing his brother was dead at the time he saw that indigo slash. But, said our mother, Heinrich Alter knew.
Eventually even the punch line was no longer a punch line, Lenz’s conclusion no