The Atheist in the Attic

  While I sat and waited, undoing my muffler—no closet that I could see, no cabinets either, nor even a sideboard, and the house (or the hall and at least this room) chill enough so that it seemed reasonable not to have taken my coat—I found myself wondering why I could not remember the name of the first Jew I had visited—though, true, I hadn’t actually met him.

  But, in Gunter’s open carriage, I’d sat in front of his door, looking up at his incised lintel. Finally, a servant had come out to tell me they would be a few minutes more. Would I want to wait inside? Oh, thank you—though it was more for curiosity than need. I wasn’t cold yet. We’d gone in, walking through to his back room—and heard him laughing with Gunter. And because the rather cluttered side room had its own back door ajar, I stepped out into a garden and waited under some surprisingly tall elms over a little table and spent my last three minutes staring up at a wooden lintel with no words on it at all.

  Which only made me think more about the others out front.

  Then the servant, Gunter, and Gunter’s merchant host each joined with the other to apologize to me, while I said, no, no, no, I was fine.

  In the carriage, both before and after the visit, Gunter had mentioned his Jew’s name half a dozen times, and on the trip home even suggested I might be interested in his services and he would introduce me next time, but this time it had just seemed awkward. You know how that is … ? It was as if this other—Spinoza, not yet present—had driven the earlier one, now gone, irrevocably from my thoughts.

  Driving to his house, Gunter had repeated it enough. But it hadn’t been important …

  I heard a creak, and looked up at the wall. It came from the stairs in the hall. Then, he in his dressing gown, the woman pushed open the door for him and walked him in. He leaned on her. (It was that time of year when, if there was no fire, you kept the doors of the rooms closed, at least in a house of such low station.) “You’re visiting our city?” he asked in Latin, as he came forward. “Will you stay long?” As I looked around that bare room, with some pitchers on the table, a basket in the corner, red tiles on the floor, and a crucifix (I could not imagine it his, but it might have been his landlord’s—unless it was to put people off), I felt—if only from the speed at which he moved to the topic of my leaving—he was actually to be a bit of a bore. (Momentarily I remembered Gunter.) Or, at any rate, he had a strange or low notion of politeness. That was not how the refined Descartes had met one at an evening soiree, those old enough to know him said. Hello, there. Hope you like our city. When are you leaving it … ? I mean, really. You can say that and make it sound funny. Or you can say it and make it sound ignorant. But it’s most disturbing when you hear it and can find no signs of what thoughts lie behind it, or what thoughts don’t.

  6.

  Perhaps, twenty-five years ago, a much younger Spinoza had attended a few of Descartes’s talks in the city with a list of questions to ask (so I’d heard from Ollendorf); and during the thirties when the Frenchman had been a resident of Amsterdam, the Jew had written his book. Yes, years back, as a child I’d glimpsed Descartes in his last year in the Stockholm court. No, I could not call him a friend in the way the very young may sometimes be befriended by the old. But I did not have to call him stranger … at least in my circle.

  “Why have you come to see me?” They were not his first words. Still, I wondered if they’d prove happier than a few exchanges of meaningless small talk. Are important questions rendered meaningless because we are not prepared—he, I; teacher, student—for an answer?

  The woman moved a chair nearer to him, then stepped away. “I was going to bring you up to him. But he said, because it was you, he really wanted to come down …” And to the frail man in his robe: “Are you all right, now? Can you take care of yourself?” She looked at me. “If he gets tired, just call upstairs. I can hear pretty much everything.”

  “Why have I come to see you?” I repeated in Hebrew (with such a man, with or without small talk, I assumed honesty was best). “Because with a small amount of work, you have created in me an extraordinary need to … to know you.”

  “True”—he chuckled—“I never thought of myself as overly prolific,” he answered, still in Latin. Then: “I write letters, there’s my treatise on Descartes, which I’ve given some of my friends in manuscript, my Hebrew grammar—” Accepting my offer of respect, he now spoke to me in Hebrew. “I didn’t think I had written enough of anything to influence anyone very deeply.”

  I reached into my wallet and took out the book—which I’d had my binder put between leather covers more than a year ago—and held it out. He reached forward and took it from me, opened it; then, seeing what it was, smiled.

  He raised it a little, leaned down over it. “My Descartes study. My first attempt to write publishable Latin.”

  “Principia philosophiae cartesianae.”

  “Yes, my first book.” He looked up again, smiling. “At the time I was afraid it was going to be my last, too. I’m surprised you have it.” (I read his expression as one of having been pleased he’d made a right choice about the language in which we would hold our interview.) “I only wish my eyes were good enough to reread the text. Right now, I’m putting together two works. There’s the one that grows directly out of this one—the same method, the same rigor, that deals with my own poor ideas of how the world might work. Then I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to do, and will perhaps finish once I’ve finished the other—”

  “Is that your Hebrew grammar? Some of the friends to whom you’d sent copies have showed me one or another of the earlier chapters. I found it fascinating. I think that’s because if you read any textbook three times, even in a language you don’t know at all, at the end of the third time through, it’s surprising how much you will have picked up. Was that your experience as a child?”

  He nodded. “Yes, it was.”

  I went on. “Your Hebrew grammar will be a very good grammar book indeed. Much better than the one I used as a boy, aspiring to wisdom and tradition. It’s clarity and thoroughness are impressive.” I’d put my wallet on the floor against my high-heeled shoe.

  “I’m still surprised you read it.”

  “Why would I not? We are educated men, you and I. I know you know this as well as I do. You read a textbook to learn the topic. But you also read it to learn of the teacher. My tutors considered me a prize student in all three—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I think it’s a talent that goes along with a love of philosophy. I expect it will for a long time—at least I hope so.”

  “I studied Hebrew from the time I was three. And got my prizes, yes. But I didn’t take up Latin till I was sixteen—and on the other side of the city, too. The Gentile side.” He said it ambiguously, as if it were a meaningless distinction, an inaccurate designation. Then he looked sternly at the book he held (it had my name on the cover, since I was the one who’d had it bound). “Sometimes I wonder if my Latin is up to the tasks I’ve taken on with it.”

  “Your Latin,” I told him, “is quite eloquent for the tasks you’ve taken on. It’s muscular, direct, with the virtues of the republican writers rather than the later decadents …” I smiled. “My Latin tutor, and my Greek tutor, and my Hebrew tutor, all three—all five, actually—said I seemed to have a knack for languages. For a few years, they were all the same man. Then they were all different men and several of them at that. Then one again—”

  “At my Hebrew school, I had two for all the years I attended. But we could not study Greek or Latin. It was only when I was fourteen that I realized, from what I’d learned of the world, that I was on my way to being an idiot. So, two years later, I got up the nerve to travel halfway across the city and learn Latin from a generous Dutchman who wanted to bring the world of culture and thought to anyone and everyone who wanted it, poor, Jewish, foreign and unfortunate, energetic or lazy, who thought it might be good to brush up or simply had managed not to learn Latin at all. I remember that study well, now. The old Roman republican wr
iters, once I began to acquire some vocabulary, were the easiest to read. The decadents and euphuists are hard. And I’ve been told more than once my style is rather crabbed.”

  “Your style is easy,” I said, “for one who knows the language. Your thinking is exact and very much your own. But such thinking always has its difficulty—for anyone.”

  “How much of my grammar have you seen?”

  “Two chapters,” I said. “Oldenburg, our friend at the Royal Society across the channel, showed me a section.”

  “To be honest, I’d rather know what you thought of my old study of Descartes than what you thought of my grammar book. You said you read it.”

  “Twice. Parts of it many more times. Clearly Descartes was a man you admired, as do I. When I’d read your highly logical opening comments, I recognized what your final comments went on to confirm with even more rigor and richness than I’d been expecting. Your Descartes was my Descartes. We want to know intelligent people we agree with. We want to find out if we will agree with them about more things than we do already. In that sense, you gave me what I wanted, and even more of it than I felt I had any right to expect.”

  “I’m going to sit here,” he said, got up, moved over, and lowered himself slowly to another hard-backed chair. On his knee, covered with his robe, he closed and opened, closed and opened his hand. “If one looks more comfortable to you, please, take it. Please.”

  I was in a larger, softer chair. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer this one?”

  “No.” He sat straight, not letting himself lean back. (The same bore, I thought, who wanted to know when I was leaving.) “This one is easier both to sit down in and to rise up from. So you must suffer the curse of comfort. It goes with being a young guest.”

  And I relaxed on the cushions and the padded arm under my elbow. “And your new book … ?”

  “—will use the same logical method. I hope it will allow me to cease to think about that book of crisis and the horrendous incidents that followed from it and which ignorant readers still want to believe somehow my book caused, rather than see it as an attempt to proffer an alternative before the world made horrifically manifest the hell my book was forged in.”

  “I have read that one too,” I said. And, indeed, I’d entertained my own doubts as to whether it was a good book or a bad one. I had been foolish enough to bring along a copy and I put my hand on my wallet. But would it be foolish to show him that I had it? Had it been other than a barely disguised shout of ungodly obscenities as so many others had already accused it of being, or a violent hurling of fuel to burn down the world tree and the church and the castle as much as the hovel beside the plowed field, notions that would bring ruin to the village burgher as well as the country vagabond? “Your theological-political treatise.”

  He nodded.

  “If we could look at God differently,” I said, giving him the best of the most generous summaries I’d read of it, “give up our miracles, concentrate on what we do understand in the world and try to increase that understanding, rather than invest all our thinking in what we don’t or can’t or couldn’t understand, we could also start to think about politics differently.”

  “You are so generous in summary,” he said, smiling, “I don’t know if I should even trust you.”

  “I was in another country,” I said. “But I know some of what happened here. And I was here two years ago—”

  “It was published a little bit before we had our rampjaar—not after. But the important part is that we had one.”

  “We heard about that even in Germany.” I smiled. “It’s only ten days away.”

  “That year when the people were redeloos, the government was radeloos, and the surrounding countryside was—”

  “—reddeloos,” I finished.

  “You have some Dutch, then? I’d forgotten you might.”

  “None at all,” I said. “Other than good morning, good night, and where is the water closet, those three are the only ones I trust myself to use.” And calling a smart servant woman my age—I remembered now—old and silly.

  “There are good Dutchmen today of whom you’d believe redeloos, radeloos, and reddeloos are the only words they need to know in the language. And I expect that will be the case for many, many years to come.”

  “Redeloos, radeloos, reddeloos.” Then I translated the words into Hebrew. “They put a very different light on emet veshalom.”

  He repeated them in Latin. “In the rampjaar, the year of the disaster, the people were deranged, the government was desperate, and the countryside totally insane.” He moved a slipper on the waxed and polished boards, moved his hand in the dark folds on his knee. “I think the surrounding countryside, which, bluntly, in this small nation has never been a bastion of sanity and was then, yes, under our growing hardships becoming more and more reddeloos—well, the countryside is where much of the tragedy, including the need for me to write my book and publish it, was forged—”

  “It said it was published in Hamburg. Oldenburg said that was for your own protection.” I was thinking about the homily I had read over the doorway on the Jew’s house the previous morning. (Is lying for your own and others’ protection an act of peacefulness—or is it just a lie?) And, yes, I was thinking of it sadly, and even accusingly—though I had agreed with almost as much of it as I had the Principia philosophiae cartesianae.

  “I had written my Tractatus, published it—anonymously, yes. I wanted it to go out as pure, ungrounded idea, a message of truth with no context at all to distort it.”

  “The way some talk about it suggests it has already broken the pillars and brought the Temple crashing down on our heads.” I paused. “I recall hearing the news, four or five years ago, while I was in Leipzig, at the University Library—two of your own supporters were torn apart in the street by the mob. That must have been hard for you.”

  At that moment I couldn’t tell whether the man before me was here or many years away—and I wondered why, as he was only thirteen years older than I, and four years older than Gunter, right then he looked as if he were an old, old man at least a decade beyond his own years.

  “There have never been many people I dined with, even intermittently, or, indeed, who received me the way I am receiving you. And six years ago, I did it no more frequently than I do now. Only with a slightly clearer head.” He pulled himself up in the chair. “I heard the shouts and I went outside to see what it was. I went as quickly as I could along the streets between me and the jail. I saw the bloody bodies of those two men—strung by their heels like animals outside a butcher shop, naked. In bits and pieces I got a tangled story from those around me. Jan had just come back to the country. His older brother Cornelius had already been imprisoned, and Jan had only been coming to comfort the man. You understand, these are the two people in the country who were working night and day for the betterment of the people, for the government, for the nation. And yes, for the countryside. They were striving for peace with the warring French so that we would not have to waste our youth in battles we could not win—and fighting those idiots who declared war a wondrous thing that, no matter how many men it slaughtered and how many fields it trampled underfoot, made them money nevertheless, and from which they would not spare a guilder for the orphaned families whose deaths had given it to them. But those were not the men tied to the rack and slaughtered.

  “There they were, one headless, one with his hands hacked off, hanging like two mutton carcasses from a gibbet on the raised octagon of stones in front of the jail. In such times, to draw any attention to yourselves at all, whether you are working for good or for ill, is to draw all the love a people can show or all the rage. And one can shift to the other like a breeze on an autumn day. They ate them, you know …” He nodded, as if he questioned whether I heard that.

  I frowned. “Sir … ?”

  “They cut pieces of their bodies off, and gave them to the people, who took them and … ate them.”

  Somehow in the t
hree years since the rampjaar I had not learned this, No one at Gunter’s had mentioned anything to me, the last time I spent a spring month in the city two years back. “Assuming you speak the truth—”

  “I do.”

  “Why in the world would anyone—would anyone, I mean anyone in a civilized city—do that?” I could certainly see why no one in civilized circles outside the Dutch Republic had spoken of it … at least in the circles in which I moved.

  His robe, I noticed, was worn. And though the floor was waxed, had the rugless room been at Gunter’s house, carpenters would have refinished the boards by hand.

  “Why? Because they were poor men and women in the city who had poorer sisters and cousins and parents and grandparents, and their own children out in the country—the reddeloos countryside; and the tales had been coming back for months about how, because there was no food and the water was polluted and the rich were burning stores rather than sharing them with their own workers, those relatives in this outlying town and that one had been reduced to eating one another—”

  My face had begun to crawl over the bones of my skull, pushed by one muscle and another.

  “—and those men and women rioting around the jailhouse wanted, wanted before all else, wanted before humanity, or efficiency, or justice, or compassion to do something, anything that had some legible meaning! And before any criticism had occurred, their desire had become in that day, those hours, the only thing meaningful.” He sighed. “Why do we do anything, make any gesture, grunt or cry or scream, write our treatise on the imperceptible nightly movement of the stars or record the annual crops beside the flooding Necker or the Nile, the tides in the Thames or the movement and twists of a leaf bumping along beside a log at the edge of the Rhine or the Euphrates? Because it happened, and we were struck by it. Or we can think about its happening. And because we can say it or write it, it makes us feel as if we might have been there with someone else.” He chuckled. “Only then do we sit back and figure out how, while we’re at it, we might use that urge to better the world—to do something else besides maniacally and in the most brutal and inflationary way resurrect Hammurabi.