“Hello, Finckenstein.”
“It’s hot here.”
“You must be used to it by now.”
“Yes, summers in Rome are bad.” He crosses his arms, leans against the stone balusters, and eyes me with a vaguely amused expression.
“I’ve just heard someone’s confession. Imagine, he’s … I mean, what do you do if someone … what happens to the secrets of the confession if … doesn’t matter. Not now. Doesn’t matter.”
“Do you still play with your cube?”
“I’m practicing for the championship.”
“You mean there are still Rubik championships? Do you have some time, shall we go and get something to eat?”
I hesitate. I really don’t want to hear about his career, and his life in air-conditioned rooms, and his rise and success. “Love to.”
“Then come on. An early dinner, something light, it’s hard to get anything done in this weather.” He goes up the marble stairs, and I follow him hesitantly.
“Have you seen Kalm recently?” I ask.
“Still the same. He’ll soon be a bishop, God willing.”
“He’ll be willing.”
“I think so too. He’ll be willing.”
“Do you believe in God?”
He stops. “Martin, I’m the deputy editor in chief of Vatican Radio!”
“And?”
“You’re asking the deputy editor in chief of Vatican Radio if he believes in God?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“No. But if I were asking seriously, what would you say?”
“I’d say it’s not the right question.”
“Why?”
“God is a self-fulfilling concept, a causa sui, because He’s conceivable. I can conceive of Him, and because He’s conceivable, He must exist, anything else would be a contradiction, so I also know that He exists even if I don’t believe in Him. And that’s why I believe in Him. And don’t forget, we act out His existence through the exercise of human love. We do our work. He becomes real through us, but we can only allow Him to become real because He must exist. How can one love human beings if one doesn’t see them as God’s creation, merely some chance form of life: successful zoological specimens, mammals with lousy digestions and back pains? How is one supposed to feel empathy for them? How is one supposed to love the world if it has not been willed into being by Him who is the very essence of Benevolent Will?”
I think about Ron again, it’s more important, I ought to talk about it. But something holds me back, it feels as if I’ve brushed against something greater and more malevolent than I can grasp right now; maybe it would be better to forget about it.
“And what does ‘believe’ mean anyway? The concept is logically hazy, Martin. When you’re sure of a proposition, then you know it. When you think that something might be so, but at the same time you know it maybe isn’t so, then you call that belief. It’s a speculation about probability. Belief means assuming that something is probable, although it might be otherwise. Lack of belief means assuming that something probably isn’t so, even when it absolutely could be so. Is the difference really that big? It’s all a matter of nuance. What’s important is that we do our work.”
We climb step by step. Our tread echoes through the stairwell.
“Did you mean it when you asked?”
“I was just curious.”
“And what do you believe?”
“I believe I should be in Rome too.”
“Yes, that’s an injustice. But you didn’t answer my question.”
We reach the second floor. The statue of a saint with virtuously steepled fingers fixes his eyes on us.
“What question?”
“The question of what you yourself believe.”
I stop, support myself on the banisters, and wait for my heart rate to drop. “I believe we should eat soon.”
Family
People think the dead are preserved somewhere. People think their traces are inscribed on the universe. But it’s not true. What’s gone is gone. What once was is forgotten, and what has been forgotten never returns. I have no memory of my father.
He wrote poems. I haven’t read any of them. He wrote them on scraps of paper, he wrote them at the bottom of menus, and on envelopes, casually, for pleasure. Some he took with him, others he left lying, he kept thinking up new ones, and he knew it was all just a beginning.
It was at the university that he first learned he was a Jew; until then he had thought that kind of thing was as meaningless as a horoscope sign. His mother was Jewish, although she was a nonbeliever. Her grandfather had been a long-bearded trader from Bukovina.
He never went to lectures. A girl he had met through mutual friends said she was prepared to marry him. One afternoon there was a crowd. Men waved flags and their fists, he wanted to get a closer look, but a fellow student pulled on his sleeve and said it would be a better idea to disappear. He thought this was ridiculous. His father had been killed in the war, he was the son of a hero, what could happen?
When I was born, he was working in a factory, he had been expelled from university. The factory made things out of metal; what they were used for, he had no idea. One time two workers took him aside: they knew he was a saboteur, they said, but there was no need for alarm, they would cover for him. When he replied in astonishment that he’d always worked the hardest he could in the factory, they laughed and said they didn’t believe a word, nobody could be that clumsy. On the way home that day, he composed a poem in his head about the droning propellers of a plane whose pilot has nodded off for a moment and is dreaming of an ant climbing a stalk that’s trembling in the wind, which still carries the distant echo of the droning of a plane. Not bad, he thought, it has a rhythm and a simplicity; if things keep on this way, I’ll soon be able to have something printed. When he got home an official letter was waiting for him, asking him coolly to present himself at the railroad station with a change of clothes and a blanket.
Better for you to head for Switzerland, he said to my mother, I’ll follow as soon as I can. There’s an official there who was an admirer of my grandfather’s, he saw him playing Laertes. He’ll help you.
At first she didn’t want to go, but he talked her into it. It couldn’t be all that bad. He’d always had luck until now.
I don’t know what he looked like. There is no photo of his face.
My father’s father wasn’t even twenty. He survived the first year of the war, thousands of hours in churned-up mud, barbed wire, grenades, the whistling in the air, the flying shrapnel. When he got leave from the front and saw his wife and tiny son, they seemed like strangers to him. He survived for another year. During that time he became so accustomed to the idea of his own death that he no longer believed it could actually happen. But then a bullet hit him, boots trampled on him, and out of sheer force of habit he wondered how he would get out of it this time. He suffocated in the filth and never came back.
My father’s grandfather lived for the theater and never got cast in the right roles. Never Hamlet, but Laertes, never Mark Antony, but Cicero, never Romeo, but Mercutio. He never stopped telling his two sons and his two daughters about the sacrifices that must be made for art, but none of the children had any talent. As the years passed, he hoped for King Lear and Prospero. His older son died of the Spanish flu, his younger son married a Jewish girl, which he didn’t like, but he didn’t have the strength to fight it. The older daughter married a teacher, the younger daughter stayed resentfully at home and cooked for him and his wife.
He saw his first film. Pale figures rushed around on a white screen. He didn’t understand what everyone was laughing at, all he saw was ghosts, and the thought that they would now be able to watch people throwing cakes at one another’s faces long after they were actually dead struck him as horrifying. A little man with a mustache, a huge fat man, and a clown with his mouth turned down grotesquely—it’s the end of the world, he thought. It may still seem to exist
, but it’s all an illusion, like these images.
From that day forward he never got out of bed again. Even the outbreak of war left him indifferent. When his son came in uniform to say goodbye, he managed to look as dignified as the situation demanded. After all, he wasn’t an actor for nothing.
My father’s great-grandfather was a doctor, though not a good one. He had only studied medicine because his own father had been a doctor. He had a small practice, a lot of patients died on him, except for those his wife could handle; she was more intelligent than he was. She often knew which cures worked. Then she died on him too. To have someone to look after the children, he married again. The new wife made him sad, and even more patients died.
Whenever he had the opportunity, he told people that when he was a young man, he’d met Napoleon. Actually all he’d seen was a coat billowing out over the rump of a horse, and a hand in a white glove. When he was finally able to settle down again, it occurred to him that perhaps the great commander had killed fewer people than he himself, the bad doctor, had. Then his second wife died too. His final years were completely happy.
The doctor’s father, also a doctor, had the gift of being able to calm the sick while he talked to them. Mostly he could guess what they were suffering from. He busied himself with Mesmer’s experiments and learned how to put a suffering patient into a magnetized sleep. When his son also became a doctor, he was delighted. His daughter would also have liked to study, she was intelligent and gifted, but he had to forbid it. To even things out, he found her a good husband, who worked hard and didn’t hit her. At the age of sixty, he went to bed, breathed out, and never came back.
A bullet cost his father a hand. He was dark-skinned, no one knew why, his mother had brought him up in poverty somewhere, all on her own. He became a soldier, because the recruiters thought a black man would be stronger than a white man. He marched a lot, was sometimes promoted, sired three children along the way, all of them white. Finally a bullet struck him in the back, he choked on his own blood, and never came back.
His father had gone to England, having signed on as a cabin boy for the crossing. He saved a little, and tried his hand at being a trader but didn’t have much luck. Once he fell into conversation with a young Frenchman who was visiting the stock exchange in London in order to write about it. The man was puny and thin, but sly, with eyes that captured everything like lightning and an intellect more powerful than any he’d ever encountered before. If you were like that, he thought, you could do anything, things wouldn’t be so hard and the world so full of resistance. As they said goodbye, he asked the stranger his name. Arouet, he replied, and immediately went on his way, because the man had bored him.
He never got over this encounter. He was tired. He still managed to open a little shop near Fleet Street that sold pitchers, keys, and odds and ends, and marry a woman he didn’t like, and father a child; it seemed to him that the strength for this had not been his but had come from the son, who was striving so uncompromisingly to arrive in the world. When the boy was born, he had dark skin, but he himself was white as snow, and so was his wife, which meant she’d cheated on him. He screamed, she cried, he roared, she swore, he called out to God, she did too, and with the last of his strength he pushed her away. His stomach was already hurting badly as he did this, a month later he was dead and never came back.
His father went to sea. The sadness of his forefathers was deep in him. In Hamburg harbor he lay with a woman whose name he didn’t know, nor she his; he really didn’t like any women, but this one looked like a man, which helped. He signed on as a ship’s cook on a boat headed for India, but it sank three weeks out from port. Fish stranger than any he could have imagined ate his flesh, his bones turned to coral, his hair to sea grass, his eyes to pearls.
His father was dark-skinned. He was the son of a landowner and a maid who came from Trinidad and was as black as night. Nobody paid attention to him as he was growing up, which was perhaps his good fortune, but when he was fifteen his father gave him some money and he left. He didn’t know where he was going, one place seemed just like another, and he had no plans. Time, he thought as he leaned his head against the window of the stagecoach, was strictly an illusion. Others before him had crossed these hills, others would cross them after him, but they remained the same hills and the ground was the same ground. And fundamentally the horses were the same horses, where was the difference? As for people, he thought, the differences really aren’t that great either. Might it be possible that we’re always the same, in ever-changing dreams? Only the names deceive us. Set them aside and you see it right away.
He had himself set down in a small village. The inhabitants found it amazing that he was black, they’d never seen such a thing before. At first he worked as a farrier, then as a horse doctor; he had an instinct for their bodies and what hurt them. A blessing hung over him. The animals trusted him and people didn’t hate him. He married and had seven children; some died at birth, others survived, and to his surprise they were all white. God sends us on mysterious paths, he said to his wife, and we must walk those paths without complaint.
And so he grew old. He was content, the only one in the line of his ancestors ever to be so. One rainy afternoon he sank to his knees in front of the house, looked around with curiosity, closed his eyes, laid his head back as if to listen to the earth beneath him, and never came back.
His father, the landowner, was an alchemist who never succeeded in transforming dross into gold, but this was in no way surprising, since no other alchemist ever did either. He lived in a drafty manor house, sired more than a dozen children with the maids, among them a black girl from Trinidad who could both mesmerize and heal. He never married. He also spent a lot of time contemplating whether he should be Catholic or Protestant. The black girl, on the other hand, thought often of the place from which she came: she remembered its warmth, she remembered rain that was as light as air, she remembered the power of the sun, and she remembered the fragrance of its plants. She tended her dark son, she kissed and hugged him whenever she could, which was not often, for her work was hard, and when he finally set off on his own road, she knew that he would not come back.
Meanwhile the landowner was plagued by trouble with his teeth. One after the other, they fell out, and sometimes the pain drove him to the brink of madness. One clammy morning an abscess in the jaw made him so ill that he had to go to bed. Someone he no longer recognized squashed herbs against his face, and they had a stinging smell. Half an hour later he died of blood poisoning and never came back.
His father was made big by the biggest of all wars. At Lüttich he lost three fingers, outside Antwerp an ear, at Prague a hand, but alas not the one already missing the fingers. But he knew how to plunder, he knew where gold was to be found, and when he’d accrued enough he left service with the Swedish king and bought a manor. He married, sired three children, and shortly thereafter fell victim to a band of marauders. It was a long-drawn-out event, because they had all sorts of things they wanted to try out on him; meanwhile his wife and children hid themselves in the cellar. When the intruders left, he was still alive, but his family could barely recognize him anymore; it took him two days to die. He did come back. Even today, there are nightly sightings of what must be his ghost, wandering through the house and looking exhausted.
His mother was an unusual woman. She had vivid dreams, and sometimes she felt she could see the future, or things that were happening far, far away. If she had been a man, many avenues would have been open to her, and she would have had a destiny. One night she dreamed about a one-eyed, one-legged old man, hidden in a shed. He felt his body grow stiff, he felt a cold hand on his neck, and he laughed as if nothing that interesting had ever happened to him. But before he died, she woke up.
She was interested in many things. She secretly dissected corpses, of which there was an ample supply, given that the war had lasted so long that there were old people who had never known peace. She focused on muscles, fibers,
nerves; in between times she gave her husband five children, of whom three survived birth, but then a roof tile fell on her head. It wasn’t part of God’s plan, no destiny had willed it, it was just that the roofer was incompetent, and she never came back.
Her father had originally been a highwayman. His mother had abandoned him and he was brought up by a farming couple who needed a cheap laborer. They gave him the minimum to eat, and he left as soon as he could.
He hadn’t imagined the forest could go on forever. It had no governing law, and whoever needed to get through it was protected neither by God nor any ruling prince. For a time he robbed travelers and slept in holes in the ground, but one day, unexpectedly, he found himself face-to-face with a witch: a hideous creature that was all hair and warts, one-third woman, one-third man, and one-third tusked hog. She was eating a small, bloody creature, a fawn perhaps, maybe even a human child, he didn’t dare to look. The witch raised her head. Her eyes were poison green, and the pupils a mere dot. He grasped that she had seen into the very heart of his being and that she wouldn’t forget him. He ran and he ran. His breath rattled, branches struck him in the face, first night came and then day. Utterly exhausted, he finally reached a walled city.
Once there he allowed himself to settle down, and he worked as a guardian of houses, properties, and fields. He had nine children, three of whom—all girls—survived. He made friends and earned money and lived as if he’d forgotten the threat over his head. He taught his daughters as if they were sons, and was proud of them. They married and gave him grandchildren. The family was solidly Catholic because the town was solidly Catholic. Every Sunday he went to church and paid the priest for the salvation of his soul. People said there was going to be war, but he didn’t believe it. And one night the witch appeared before him. He saw her quite clearly, although the room was pitch black and she herself was darker than the darkness. They found him the next morning. He never came back.