Apples and Pears Read online

  One of the Rebbe’s disciples, a lanky young man with long sidelocks beautifully curled and oiled, hastens from the Hotel National. He has a bottle cradled in his arms. He is taking it to a mineral spring to have it filled. The Rebbe wants soda water. He hums as he walks, this disciple, the lively tune Uforatzto, a happy march that expresses his joy in being sent for a bottle of soda water for the Rebbe.

  The Rebbe’s carriage with its tasseled red velvet window curtains comes for him at half past seven every evening, when the shadows have gone blue. He drives to the forest. His court walks behind. One of them carries his silver cane, another an open umbrella, out to his side. It is not for him, but for the Rebbe, should it rain. Another carries a shawl folded on a cushion, in case the Rebbe feels a chill. And one carries the wellbred chair.

  It is, by the common reckoning, the year 1916. The armies of the gentiles are slaughtering each other all over the world.

  Somewhere along the leafy road the Rebbe will stop the carriage and get out. His court will assemble behind him. He is going to observe, and meditate upon, the beauty of nature, which, created by the Master of the Universe and Lord of All, is full of instruction.

  On this particular July evening a fellow guest at the Hotel National has asked and been given permission to walk in the Rebbe’s following. He is a young lawyer in the insurance business in Prague, Herr Doktor Franz Kafka. Like all the rest, he must keep his distance, and always be behind the Rebbe. Should the Rebbe suddenly turn and face them, they must quickly run around so as to be behind him. And back around again should he turn again.

  The Rebbe, a man of great learning, is neither short nor tall, neither fat nor thin. Wide in the hips, he yet moves with a liquid grace, like a seal in water. He will overflow the slender chair if with a vague ripple of fingers he commands it to be placed so that he can sit on it. Then his followers will range themselves behind him, the secretary leaning a little to catch his every word, the shawl bearer at the ready, should the Rebbe raise his hands toward his shoulders. The secretary takes down what he says in a ledger. These remarks will be studied, later. They will question him about them. The Rebbe means great things by remarks which seem at first to be casual. He asks questions which are traps for their ignorance. The entourage does not always read his gestures correctly. If he has to put into words what he means by an open hand, or raised eyes, or an abrupt halt, he will add a reprimand. Hasidim is it you call yourselves? he will say. Or is it oafs maybe? For brains I’m thinking it’s noodles you have.

  If he asks for the soda water, they’ve had it. The one chosen to fetch it had gone to the Rudolph Spring. It was the opinion of everyone he asked that it was further along this road, that road, another road. And it never was. He’d passed it, or it was another three minutes just around to the left. Around to the right. The Rudolph Spring, the Rudolph Spring, could that be its name? Some answers as to its whereabouts were in foreign languages and a waste of time. Some, sad to say, paid no attention at all to the frantic disciple of the Rebbe from Belz, hard to believe, but true. Moreover, it began to rain. Finally, a man told the disciple that all the mineral springs close at seven. How could a spring be closed? he asked, running off in the direction pointed out. The Rudolph Spring was indeed closed, as he could see long before he got there. The green latticed doors were shut, and a sign reading CLOSED hung on them. Oi veh! He rattled the doors, and knocked, and shouted that the Rebbe from Belz had sent him for soda water. All they had to do was fill his bottle and take his money, the work of a moment. All of life, it occurred to him, is one disappointment after another, and he was about to weep when a stroller suggested that he make haste and run to the Ambrosius Spring, which closed a little later than the others. This he did. The Ambrosius was open, by the mercy of God. There were women inside washing glasses. But when he asked them to fill his bottle, the women said that they were through with their work for the day. They should stay open for everybody who can’t remember the long hours they were there filling bottles yet? Is the Rebbe from Belz different already? He should learn better how business is conducted in Marienbad.

  Who will write the history of despair?

  Dr Kafka waits at the steps of the Hotel National for the Rebbe and his following. In Prague Dr Kafka was famous among his friends for the oxlike patience with which he waited. Once, waiting in the street outside a small Parisian theatre Dr Kafka and a donkey had made friends. He was waiting to buy a ticket to Carmen, the donkey was waiting to go on in Act II. They both had big ears, Dr Kafka and the donkey. They were both patient by nature, both shy. Waiting is an act of great purity. Something is being accomplished, in a regular and steady way, by doing nothing at all.

  First the Rebbe arrived, and then the carriage. So the Rebbe had to wait a little, too. He had a long beard, beautifully white, and very long sidelocks. These are symbols of sound doctrine and piety. The longer your locks, it is said, the greater the respect you get from the Rebbe. All boys with long side-locks he called handsome and smart. One of his eyes, blind, was as blank as if it had been of glass. One side of his mouth was paralyzed, so that at his most solemn he seemed to be smiling ironically, with a witty and forgiving understanding of the world. His silk kaftan was worn open, held in place by a broad oriental belt. His hat was tall, and of fur. His stockings and knee britches were white, like his beard.

  The Rebbe, walking at a plump pace, savors nature in the woods. So Chinese dukes must walk of an evening, stopping to smell an hibiscus, casually reciting a couplet that sounds like notes on a zither, about another hibiscus centuries before, an hibiscus in a classical poem which had made the poet think of a noble woman, a jade owl, and a warrior’s ghost on the frontiers maintained against the barbarian hordes.

  One of the Rebbe’s legs is gimp, perhaps only sore from sitting all day at the Torah. When he gets down from his carriage he has a good cough. Then he sets out, looking. When he stops, the entourage stops, and Dr Kafka behind them. If he turns, they swing with him, like a school of fish behind their pilot. He points out things, such as details of buildings in the woods, which they all strain to see. Is that a tile roof? he asks. They consult. Yes, one says, we think you are right, O Rebbe. It is a tile roof. Where does that path go? No one knows. What kind of tree is that? One thinks that it is a pine, another a fir, another a spruce.

  They come to the Zander Institute high on a stone embankment and with a garden in front of it, and an iron fence around it. The Rebbe is interested in the Institute, and in its garden. What kind of garden, he asks, is it? One of the entourage, whose name Dr Kafka catches as Schlesinger, runs up to the fence, elbows out, head thrown back. He really does not look at the garden, but turns as soon as he has reached its gate, and runs down again, knees high, feet plopping. It is, he says breathlessly, the garden of the Zander Institute. Just so, says the Rebbe. Is it a private garden? They consult in whispers. Yes, says their spokesman, it is a private garden. The Rebbe stares at the garden, rocking on his heels. It is, he says, an attractive garden, and the secretary takes this remark down in his ledger.

  Their walk brings them to the New Bath House. The Rebbe has someone read the name of it. He strolls behind it, and finds a ditch into which the water from the bathhouse drains. He traces the pipes with his silver cane. The water must come from there, he says, pointing high, and run down to here, and then into here. They all follow his gestures, nodding. They try to make sense of pipes which connect with other pipes. The New Bath House is in a modern style of architecture, and obviously looks strange to the Rebbe. He notices that the ground floor has its windows in the arches of an arcade. At the top of each arch is an animal’s head in painted porcelain. What, he asks, is the meaning of that? No one knows. It is, one ventures, a custom. Why? asks the Rebbe. It is the opinion that the animal heads are a whim of the designer, and have no meaning. Mere ornament. This makes the Rebbe say, Ah! He walks from window to window along the arcade, giving each his full attention. He comes around to the front of the building. Looking up a
t the golden lettering in an Art Nouveau alphabet, he reads again New Bath House. Why, he asks, is it so named? Because, someone says, it is a new bathhouse. The Rebbe pays no attention to this remark. It is, he says instead, a handsome, a fine, an admirable building. Good lines it has, and well-pondered proportions. The secretary writes this down. Look! he cries. When the rain falls on the roof, it flows into the gutter along the edge there, do you see, and then into the pipes that come down the corners of the building, and then into this stone gutter all around, from which it goes to the same ditch in back where all the pipes are from the baths. They walk around the building, discovering the complete system of the drainpipes. The Rebbe is delighted, he rubs his hands together. He makes one of the entourage repeat the plan of the pipes, as if he were examining him. He gets it right, with some correction along the way, and the Rebbe gives him a kind of blessing with his hands. Wonderful! he says. These pipes are wonderful.

  Who will write the history of affection?

  They come to an apple orchard, which the Rebbe admires, and to a pear orchard, which he also admires. O the goodness of the Master of the Universe, he says, to have created apples and pears.

  The chair held aloft by its bearer, Dr Kafka notices, has now defined what art is as distinct from nature, for its pattern of flowers and leaves looks tawdry and artificial and seriously out of place against the green and rustling leaves of apple and pear trees. He is tempted to put this into words, as a casual remark which one of the entourage just might pass on to the Rebbe, but he reconsiders how whimsical and perhaps mad it would sound. Besides, no word must be spoken except at the command of the Rebbe.

  Instead, he prays. Have mercy on me, O God. I am sinful in every corner of my being. The gifts thou has given me are not contemptible. My talent is a small one, and even that I have wasted. It is precisely when a work is about to mature, to fulfill its promise, that we mortals realize that we have thrown our time away, have squandered our energies. It is absurd, I know, for one insignificant creature to cry that it is alive, and does not want to be hurled into the dark along with the lost. It is the life in me that speaks, not me, though I speak with it, selfishly, in its ridiculous longing to stay alive, and partake of its presumptuous joy in being.

  APPLES AND PEARS:

  HET EREWHONISCH SCHETSBOEK

  MESSIDOR–VENDÉMIAIRE 1981

  Joop Zoetemelk Gagne le Maillot Jaune

  12 MESSIDOR

  The mountain ash, or rowan, Virgil’s ornus but not Ovid’s fraxinus, is by family a rose and by ancient rumor a birch.

  It all goes back, this complex friendship, to the year Picasso died, while I was finishing De Boventonen van Stilleven and beginning the commentary on Fourier, and to Paris the July Joop Zoetemelk won the Tour de France. Its plangencies cross philosophy at angles one might, with luck, trace. Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Période Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.

  Mimes on the Plateau Beaubourg. Two trim boys in jeans and sweaters, barefoot, surrounded by a ring of international uitschot. Very exclusive, this unwashed sect of wanderers who call themselves students and are called students by a world that has long ago given up calling things by their names. Have heard that diseases turn up amongst them that have not been diagnosed since the thirteenth century. The Nazis were less arrogant than this meesterras. The mimes acted to the music of a guitar and harmonica. Faces covered by blind white masks held on at the chin, male, as regular and general of feature as a department-store mannequin. They mimed some agon of challenge and rivalry, circling each other with menacing and boasting gestures, two samurai in a sword dance. They leaned toward each other, wide-legged, nose to nose. Leapt back. Drew hands up thighs from knees to hips. One smoothed a cupped hand over a feigned protrusion of fly. The other snapped his legs together, bounced on his toes three steps back, flowed into a stance with his feet wide apart, unbuttoned his jeans, drew their zipper down. Foxred pubic clump, no underwear. Antagonist stalked toward him. Zipped up as he drew close. Antagonist in turn unzipped, ook onderbroekjeloos. Moved their masks away from their faces to meet nose to nose. Then back on their faces again, slowly. Padded around each other like wrestlers crouched to grapple. The first unzipped his jeans again, dreamily, as if absentmindedly, in slow motion. They danced a seesaw jig, as the guitar had changed over to a jouncing peasant quickstep. A wonderful strangeness in the conjunction of the white expressionless masks, the joligheid of the music, the bared pelvic nakedness. God knows what the mime meant to the spooky faces watching it warily, as expressionless as the masks, flat handsome eyes looking through wire-rim specs and from under barbarian hair, faces from Stuttgart, Ohio, Liverpool, San Francisco, Stockholm. Suddenly the mimes fell apart, shed their jeans in a swift agile gesture, tossed them to each other, and drew them on again, all in the shaking of a sheep’s tail except for zipping up, which they did with dreamlike slowness. Finale. Masks off, they were simply sullen French youngsters knap, modern, wereldwijs.

  The nineteenth century disappeared along the road beyond Orly to Choisy-le-Roi. It passed through Paris on a bicycle, Zola in knickerbockers, panama, pince-nez. It rode on a sealed train across Germany, Lenin at the window. It marched through Doncières at dawn as a military band. It painted hayricks at Giverny. It was Röntgen looking at a black skeleton standing inside the living body, it was Proust wrapped in blankets watching a frieze of girls on a beach in Brittany, Semmelweis urging us to wash our hands. It sent children into the mines, it sang gorgeous hymns in church. It blossomed, rang like a telephone, danced the Chicken Reel in the camps at Ladysmith, turned Europe black. Rossini cried that Mozart was very God. It loaded every possibility with promise for the new century. It danced the tango, screamed at Sarajevo, and died at Passchendaele.

  Naderhand, what could there be? Walking in the Cimitière Montparnasse this morning, among the graves of the Jews of the Deportation, I came across the phrase la barbarie nazie on a tombstone. I took a sprig of privet blossom, in an aspirin bottle, and put it on Sartre’s grave: which would seem to be the style for votive offerings there, flowers snitched from other graves by international riffraff, a child’s drawing in a jam jar, a dornick inscribed in Chinese. No stone as yet, many faded wreaths. Der Heer hebbe zijn ziel.

  French boy about nineteen reading Proust in the seat across from me on the train into Paris, pale blond hair in feathery disarray. Scruffy jeans, the crotch of which he fondled with attentive fingers every so often, wrinkled shirt, handsome large eyes as alert as a sailor’s on watch. He read awhile, watched awhile the villages and fields streaming past the window. A big smile for me whenever our eyes met.

  Coffee at the Balzac on the Friedland. The mimes at the Beaubourg were Piet and me after the war, in the woods hollow back of the park, having kicked a ball around to our satisfaction, and talked our fill on a ramble, busily idle, retreating and advancing in the one strategy. The broad tip of his snub nose stippled orange and brown, irides the same strong blue of his pupils, upper lip ridged into a prowlet beneath the philtrum: I didn’t know that I thought him beautiful. What dried the roof of my mouth was the spirited way he disregarded tacitly sanctioned distances. Forearms on my shoulders, he’d talk forehead touching forehead. Green of the woods hollow, the smell of leafmold and water, Piet’s speculative bel guardo, my timid scrootch of shoulders, foot dragged in the grass.

  Een quaggaridder, twelve, the yellow rundle of his hair runched and flopping, is the imp of Fourier’s imagination, a peuter whose breezy good nature is fused with his body as synergetically as water and light in a leaf. He and his kind, tomboy and ardent friend, bonded with difficult animals and with each other, were to be, how tragic the tense, the radiant source of the community’s energy. His counterpart, sister or anima, was the spunky saucy little girl whose type was organized into the Bands, mounted on ponies, policing manners, gardens, and grammar.

  13 MESSIDOR

  Silence, restlessne
ss of the sea, seabirds, wind sweet in the trees, radio, flute. In the glitter of the sea and the shine of fog I find my things, and enjoy long deep northern afternoons.

  De werktafel: Chambered Nautilus balanced on a glass, nautilus pompilius linné, its marmalade and cream tabby markings radial from a center where the spiral begins its flourishing spin, its ingeschapen coil sealed off deep in the throat of the outspanning by a hymen of pearl. Its dorsal convexity down the long axis, both front and profile, has the dop’s ripe foreswell set and stress of a trim slipje. Chosen by Kaatje, bought by Bruno, wrapped in tissue and boxed by Saartje and Hans five times and dithering before they got it right, delivered by ambush, damp kisses, monkey hugs. Good thoughts from good things, said Saartje, is how it works. Art is you look at a beautiful picture and the beauty of it goes inside and spreads around and makes you beautiful. An innocent wink from Bruno. Hans developed the argument into trouble. Papa, he said, says Saartje is beautiful barebottomed but I say she looks like a newt. She’s prettier in jumper and jeans.

  And a spray of golden samphire in a Colman’s English Mustard pot, the mature petals a richer yellow than the buds. They grow among the rocks near the sea in buttery, lemony clumps and seams. Three Arplijk pebbles, four paperclips, two acorns, and a stray button in a saucer. Postcard with a Red-Throated Loon, a watercolor by Isaac Sprague (1811–1895), a bird dressed in fine modulations of white and grey. A speckled strip runs neatly from the top of its head down the back of its neck to spatter out on the shoulders and fleck away underwing. There is a crimson brushstroke on its bosom. From Sander: Johan de Muynck, chin over handlebars full sprint, eyes down the road, niftier colors, bike and togs, than Sven Nilsson, and a Greek partridge in borage, and a silvery sooty moth, and Hansje pulling off his voetbalhemd as high as his shoulders, toes I’ve never painted better. Wait till you see. That it’s my best painting is the thing to say, and I’ll praise whatever you’ve written hemelhoog. Een kus.