A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
laugh, wave to her.
Emanuel’s wife joins them, new baby in her arms. “Lily,” she says. “Don’t make barnyard noises at the infantry.” She gives her husband a look that’s both reproving and affectionate. “Maybe we should try one more time to get you a son. You’re training these girls to behave like little boys. Yelling at people in the streets. Thinking all the time about politics.”
Emanuel takes the infant from its mother. Iris Emanuel is overwrapped in linen and lace; she looks like nothing more than a small, smiling doll’s head. “This was supposed to be my boy,” he says.
Iris beams at him, at the clouds, at the soldiers, at whatever her eyes land on. When she grows up, her father thinks, she will look like the goddess Isis: dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes. This doesn’t please him. He has no intention of raising an Isis, a goddess of domesticity, of weaving, of the moon. And he’s concerned about those blue eyes, so unusually pale. A curse in some cultures, the least sensitive of his acquaintances say. “They’ll darken,” his wife says defensively—though time will prove her wrong—but that’s not what bothers Zindel Emanuel. He’s unfazed by curses, he’s not superstitious. He doesn’t believe in mythology, not the myths of Egypt though he knows them all, not the myths of his own people—the Jews. Not even the myths of the Prussians. He enjoys pointing out that despite the infantry uniform the chancellor wears, Otto von Bismarck was merely a reservist. He never served a day in the active military. He neither carried iron into battle nor shed a drop of blood—or at least not a drop of his own blood.
No, what Zindel Emanuel dislikes about the toddler’s pale blue eyes is the attention they’re already commanding. He doesn’t want this girl to be admired for her appearance. He has high hopes for Iris, a disappointment by virtue of her sex, true, but a child who, he has already determined, will disappoint him in no other way. There’s something about her—how alert she is, how lively, her arms and legs churning even in her sleep as if she’s climbing or building something—that has convinced him she’ll be the person he’s already imagined.
“No more babies,” he assures his wife. “I’m going to work with the materials you’ve given me.” He lifts the little girl so she, too, can see the parade. He busses her on her cheek, his wife on the forehead, and, Iris still in his arms, leaves the balcony for the warmth of the house. The two older girls follow him: his acolytes, his ducklings.
Alone now, his wife looks down at the victorious soldiers parading by. They fall into two categories: the hobbled and maimed, and the unscathed and ashamed. Such a relief, she thinks, not to have sons.
1874
Heinrich Lorenz Alter’s dye factory is the most successful in western Europe. The dark blue of the Prussian infantry’s uniforms? The forest green worn by the Jaegers? The Prussian blue of Bismarck’s own tunic? The dyes for the cloth come from the Alter Dye Works. And if Heinrich has made the military’s uniforms rich, the military has returned the favor.
When Heinrich speaks of his exquisite dyes, it’s with tenderness, with genuine love. Mention his spring green, that precise shade of lettuce upon its first fragile leafing, and Heinrich’s suddenly as effusive as Keats encountering an old vase. Ask about his scarlet, and he’ll tell you it’s more vibrant than a cardinal’s feathered belly. Bring up Alter indigo, and he’ll describe it the way other men might their mistresses, praising her unparalleled beauty to people who smile and nod and glance at the nearest clock.
Because Heinrich wants Lenz, his son and sole heir, to begin working at the factory as soon as he completes his basic education, Lenz’s training begins early. “Never too young to start developing an eye for color,” Heinrich writes Rudi, “especially with a boy who seems already to have a natural aptitude for nothing.”
This has been a revelation: the number of things that Lenz, now five, is bad at. He’s clumsy with balls and bats, he’s slow at his letters, he still needs assistance in tying his shoelaces, and though he’s eager to spend time with other children, he seems to put them off. The once silent little boy has become a blabbermouth. He stands too close, tells long, tedious stories about war, his favorite subject. He’s fascinated by war. He corners little girls at birthday parties and expounds upon the campaigns of Napoleon.
“I’m going to be a general,” he tells his father.
A Jewish general. Heinrich winces. He pats the boy’s shoulder. He says, “You’ll be the general of Alter Dye Works. You’ll dress the generals in the military. You’ll give them the pride they need to win wars for Germany.”
Lenz may be socially awkward and dull and only five, but he knows when he’s being patronized. He also knows how he feels about the factory. All his biographers agree: from a very young age he dismissed the idea of taking it over. Still, that particular battle between father and son is more than a decade in the future. Now, his father not yet realizing it’s a waste of time, Lenz’s training takes place on the streets of Breslau. Every evening before dinner Heinrich insists that Lenz accompany him on a constitutional, and every evening Lenz, knowing what’s coming, sulks and grumbles, but ultimately obeys.
We have a photograph of him at that age. He’s the most mournful little boy we’ve ever seen, his tremendous noggin home to large dark eyes and lips that are pursed as if he had been about to cry when someone—Heinrich, probably, although maybe it was the photographer—ordered him not to move a muscle. And so he stands miserably and rigidly next to the ornate wooden chair that these days lives in our foyer (where it’s laden, sometimes to the point of tipping over, with our handbags and jackets and winter scarves and, back in the day when Vee still wore a wig, that luxuriant prosthesis slung on one of the uprights). In the photograph, though, only a boy’s beribboned boater lies on the chair’s seat.
The boy himself wears a child’s version of an infantry uniform, the brass buttons oversize, the collar flat, the trousers cuffed over knee-high boots. His hair is severely parted close to his right ear. He holds a rifle as if it’s a walking stick, its butt on the ground, its muzzle pointed at the ceiling.
And here’s another photograph of the young Lenz Alter, this one with his uncle, Rudi. According to the fat biography of Lenz Alter on our living room bookshelf (Lenz Alter: Deutsch, Jude, Heiliger, Sünder), Rudi Alter was a homosexual, malarial dwarf—that’s a quote—with delicate features and charm to spare, and we have to admit the description is supported by the photo, where Rudi, not much taller than Lenz, is matinee-idol handsome with kohl-rimmed eyes and the ornate and waxed facial hair of the times—the handlebar mustache, the scalloped muttonchops—not quite concealing a sweet smile. He also possesses a pair of sculpted, fine eyebrows.
This photograph must have been taken during one of Rudi’s brief visits home, because his work as a trade consulate keeps him mostly in Asia. In 1874 he’s Germany’s trade representative to Japan. This means that Rudi is either so competent and charming that he’s overcome what we assume must have been his government’s reluctance to have a quote unquote homosexual malarial dwarf represent it, or it means that the German government in the late nineteenth century was far less uptight than our own is today. We suspect the former is the truth, that Rudi’s charm overcame prejudice, but that could be because we have a collective crush on him. We love that in this photograph, he and his small nephew are both dressed in identical kimonos. We love that Rudi’s kimono is accessorized with several long strand of pearls.
Rudi is the person responsible for the dye factory’s indigo. He’s the one who negotiates the exclusive deals between Heinrich and the best ai farmers in Japan, the one who has arranged for hundreds of cases of sake to accompany the ai leaves as they’re transported from Hokkaido Province to Breslau in the damp holds of ships. That’s the heart of the recipe for Alter indigo: imported ai leaves and imported sake with some imported wheat bran tossed in. Heinrich also throws in some domestic lye because he doesn’t have it in him to turn his back on western techniques entirely. The mixture is then stirred for several days by the factory’s workers, those immigrants and day workers from Poland wielding wooden rakes also imported from Japan until the dye bath is the color of a fresh bruise and