A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
A lot of blood, yes, but just from a single cut on the side of his left nostril. Nothing deep, nothing dangerous, although it did seem a fragile nose, all that excess purple flesh. It seemed as though it might hurt were someone even to touch it gently. Certainly it had made her wince to look at it.
The only way to avoid looking at it now was to leave. He was yelling about calling a policeman. There was something ridiculous in that—not a cop, not the police, but a policeman, like a small child with great faith in all public servants.
“Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll see whose side he takes,” and she turned and flounced off. She did—she flounced. Entitled and superior. A mean, spoiled brat. She who was none of those things, not ever.
Over the Puddle Styx, up the stairs, onto the train. Even now she wants to say that this was when she first began to grasp the enormity of what she’d done, but that would be a lie. She’d known what she was doing as she was doing it. Stop it, she’d thought as she raised her arm. Walk away, she’d thought as she threw the green tool. What the fuck are you doing? she inquired of herself as she slithered under the gate.
She hadn’t stopped, though. Hadn’t walked away. Thoughts versus feelings, and the winner had been feelings. A huge upset. No one would have predicted it.
But as the euphoria of her fury wore off, Lady became aware of a terrible pain inside her, sharp and systemic, as if she’d swallowed the millions of screws in the store and they were now scraping her organs as they tumbled through her bloodstream. She knew the reason for the pain. The entire encounter had been a test, and she’d failed, and she was hurting inside over that failure—because no matter what that man had done, no matter how badly he’d behaved, no matter how much of an asshole he’d been, she should have been kind. She’d seen the numbers. She’d known his life. Our family had played a part in that life, that living death.
And what had she done? She’d thrown the screwdriver.
To this day, whenever Lady thinks of the hardware store owner—and she thinks of him more often than you’d imagine—she feels the same shame, the same painful scraping of threaded metal through her body. She has to stop what she’s doing. She closes her eyes. She focuses on her breath. She inhales. She exhales. She tries to envision the store owner, wherever he is—dead, she supposes, given that the store is long gone, and he was an old man even in 1976—and when she has conjured him, she does her best to bathe him in love or as close to love as a sinner like Lady can manage.
But back then, as the train carrying Lady home tunneled underground, she felt no love for anyone. She felt only the pain. She was mortified, and she didn’t use the word casually. You didn’t have to be a Latin scholar to figure out its derivation. She wanted right then and there to mort.
1868
The American Civil War is three years over. Abraham Lincoln is three years dead. Jesse and Frank James have just joined the Cole Younger gang. And in the city of Breslau, in the Kingdom of Prussia, a pair of first cousins have fallen in love and eloped.
When the cousins return home and announce what they’ve done, the groom’s father and bride’s uncle declare the union unnatural. The bride’s father and groom’s uncle pour themselves stiff drinks. The mother-aunts embrace and sob.
“What kind of child do you think a marriage like this will produce?” the fathers and mothers, the aunts and uncles, demand.
We think it’s sad that the bride never gets to say, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a Nobel Prize–winning kind of child.” She never gets to say it because she dies nine months later while giving birth to the future laureate. From the first, his head is exceedingly large.
1871
The Franco-Prussian Wars have ended. The unification of the German Empire is complete. The Second Reich has begun, though of course the real power remains with Prussia. The former Prussian king, Wilhelm I, is emperor. The former Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, is chancellor.
When affairs of the empire bring Bismarck to Breslau, the widower Heinrich Lorenz Alter leaves his dye factory to stand among the throngs waiting to see the champion of iron and blood emerge from his carriage, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high as if he’s a figure in a portrait by an artist enamored of the golden mean. As Bismarck passes, the crowd heaves like an unfettered bosom in a bodice ripper. Much of the attraction in coming to see Bismarck is being a part of this impassioned heaving, this surging forward—this element of danger, the possibility that one may be caught in a lustful stampede, may be knocked to the ground and literally perish from love of king and country.
The first time he brings his motherless son with him, Heinrich hoists the boy onto his shoulders. The child perches there stolidly, expertly. He’s a sober two-year-old who’s been left to the care of redoubtable nurses with quick tempers and paddles and switches. He’s well trained in the art of keeping still. Even when Bismarck arrives and a roar takes over the square as the crowd buffets Heinrich, the boy makes no sound. Heinrich has to twist his neck, look up at his son to make sure the boy isn’t frightened. When he does, he sees tears, but they are tears of joy; Heinrich’s certain of that. “Two years old,” Heinrich writes to his youngest brother, Rudi, the only member of the family he still speaks to. “Two years old, and such depth of feeling for his country.”
“You’re raising him well,” Rudi replies dutifully, “and under such difficult circumstances.”
Heinrich revels in Rudi’s praise. It’s true, he thinks. He has raised the boy well. There’s a small photograph of the dead mother, Line Alter Alter, in an oval frame on the boy’s bedroom dresser; the child is tasked with kissing it each night before getting beneath the blankets. But what dominates the nursery is the portrait of Bismarck that hangs on the wall facing the bed. It’s the same portrait that currently hangs over the toilet in our Riverside Drive apartment. The generations before ours hung it in the foyer, the centerpiece of an arrangement of old photographs and paintings. As soon as we could, we moved it.
The tragedy of unrequited love for the blond beast, Einstein will someday call the love that Jews like Heinrich Alter (and later, Lenz Alter too) harbored for Germany, but Heinrich Alter calls it patriotism. He calls it Heimat. Being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith. He’s determined that his child will embrace this faith too. Even the boy’s name is meant to play its part. Heinrich Lorenz Alter chose the name himself, no female sensibility involved, although he believes Line would have approved. The boy is called Lenz, but his full name is Lorenz Otto Alter. Lorenz to remind him of Heinrich. Otto to remind him of Bismarck. Alter—it implies age and wisdom, and who, Heinrich argues, is older and wiser than God?
No mother, but three fathers. This is what Heinrich tells the baby long before words have any meaning to it. Leaning over the cradle, his palm cupping the crown of the small head, Heinrich croons manifestos in lieu of lullabies. “Three fathers,” Heinrich says. “Me, Bismarck, God.” Lenz’s job is to disappoint none of them.
Meanwhile, across town, Zindel Emanuel is also teaching his children about Bismarck. When military parades pass by, he takes his two oldest girls, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, out onto the second-floor balcony. “You remember all the speeches about iron and blood?” he asks Rose and Lily, who stand on their toes and peer over the balustrade. “Well, those rifles the soldiers are holding—that’s what Bismarck meant when he said iron. And you see that sleeve pinned to that soldier’s shoulder—or there, the patch over that guy’s eye? That was the blood. You’ll notice, though, that while the iron’s still held high, the blood’s been washed away.”
He lifts them, one at a time, so they can more easily take note of the weapons and prettified gore.
“They love talking about blood,” Zindel Emanuel says. “It stirs the passions of the sheep. But they’ll never let the sheep see the blood. Sheep