Cassandra Voices

Author: Sarah Johnson

  • The Perpetual Villa

    “Il y a longtemps,” I repeated. “A long time ago.” My French felt clumsier every minute.

    Renard Busquet, leading me through the pearl-gray dimness of the silent east wing, let his own native Poitevin French drop like a thin stream of Vouvray wine. “A long time… Tell me again how your honored ancestor sat in the back lawn.”

    “It was in 1871,” I recounted. (Busquet twisted the glass knob of the glass-paned door without a sound, and held it open for me, smiling amiably.) “―In 1871, my great-great-grandfather, Florian Busquet, was nineteen. He had made up his mind; he would not remain in Poitier, as his brothers and fathers, everyone in his family, had done from the time the family first received its arms from Charles VIII; he would go to America. He knew no trade; he had nothing but the small sum his father (your great-great-grandfather, recall, Monsieur) would settle on him; nothing but those francs and his own youth and boundless optimism.”

    Renard led the way across a pavement of terra-cotta-colored bricks. I had never seen such bricks, let alone been in France; and yet the remarkably clean, peach-hued bricks, tightly fitted without a weed or even traces of moss in between, gave me a fleeting sense of familiarity. “―It was evening,” I continued. “The evening of his last day at Villa Busquet, where he, and his father before him, and his father, were born and raised… dinner was over, and the family were sitting on rattan chairs on the back lawn. My great-great-grandfather’s older brother, the heir, Phillippe… always sat with his legs crossed; my great-great-grandfather remembered clearly every detail of the scene, the last time he saw his family, in the setting of their beautiful home. Phillippe sat with his legs crossed. The rattan table…”

    Renard gestured with an unhurried hand to the rattan chairs set on the uneven grass. “Take a chair, take a chair. Ah yes, Phillippe sat with his hands crossed, and the table…”

    He, the current heir of Busquet, sat down and crossed his legs. “Do go on!”

    “My grandfather was seated nearest to the terrace,” I said. “Then a funny thing happened. The dog… a little foxhound with plumy ears and tail, which they called Charlot, came around the corner of the house, just over there. He was carrying…”

    A small, energetic shape rounded the corner of the conservatory. A foxhound pelted gaily toward us, its feathery ears and tail waving; it bounded up to Renard’s legs, and―horrors!―it was carrying a very large, bloody rat.

    “Charlot!” scolded Renard. “Put that down, at once! Get away with you, ridiculous animal!”

    I could not have moved if Charlot had shoved the rat in my face.

    As Charlot slunk off with his quarry, the slim Poitevin, seated in the rattan chair with his legs crossed, invited mildly, “You were saying?”

    “Charlot was carrying a rat,” I managed, after a moment. “The ancient Charlot. In 1871. He carried a rat up to my great-great-uncle Phillippe, who was sitting with crossed legs, just there―”

    “I am told it is a family trait,” said Renard; he did not uncross his comfortable limbs. “Every foxhound here is called Charlot.”

    I did not tell him the rest of that scene, which my great-great-grandfather had remembered and recounted nostalgically so many times. What need was there to describe the rattan table with a plate of biscuits, the uneven turf and emerald-colored short grass, the myrtle trees and the cuckoos, or Phillippe’s graceful, deliberate figure―when they were all before me?

    I had thought all my life that I understood why Florian Busquet had left the Old World; but now I felt at my core his nauseous urgency, to escape the vacuum, the place without time.

    I had thought all my life that I understood why Phillipe Busquet had remained in the Old World; but now I felt at my core the overpowering seduction of the place without time.

    My cousin smiled amiably, and I was motionless in my chair, pulled in half.

    Feature Image: an Arcachon villa or Arcachonnaise.

  • Winter When Thy Face is Hid

    I was so tired, Tuesday night. Don’t sleep well when I get that tired. I have obsessive dreams and wake up later than usual. And sleeping in always makes my head hurt. I was clumsy tired, where you bump into things; and getting into bed, I whacked it. The big clunky picture frame hanging over my headboard.

    I like the picture a lot. That’s why I put it there. Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, it looks so cold and ancient, a somber blackish sky, intrepid hunters with their intrepid dogs, and the polder lakes below dotted by tiny skaters. On hot August nights I switch on the lamp, look at it, and feel cold enough to sleep.

    But Tuesday night, hanging there, that painting wasn’t a positive presence. I hit my head on it. Which hurt until I fell asleep. And in my sleep, how aware I was of this thing dangling! Over me. Waiting to drop, and in the process, dash my brains out. Quite a long time ago, while I was away from home, a wooden bracket, bearing a ceramic vase, tumbled on to my sleeping head, and that incident is probably what made me so preoccupied by the painting. Much later, in a dopey semi-consciousness, I began groping at the wall above my head, trying to protect myself from the picture’s pointy frame.

    Of course, I only managed to whack it again, so hard it swung wildly on the nail, and suddenly I was wide awake. Something cold had fallen on my neck.

    I pawed the wet substance off: crystalline, frigid, and unmistakable. Put some in my mouth. Snow. In a sealed bedroom. In May. Wallowing upright, I clutched the side of my neck where the last tiny flakes were with every instant turning to water, and reached for the lamp. In its gift of sight, I looked left, right, up, and down, finding no possible source for the little flurry, until I became aware of an icy draught behind my shoulders.

    Twisting round, I discovered, with a glee I only hope to feel again at Resurrection, that the draught was puffing out of the Brueghel picture.

    The inner edges of the frame were furred with hoarfrost, and on the carved outer face of the lower frame, slush fused into bright drops from the room’s warmth, remnants of the snow-flinging disturbance that had awakened me. I was now aware of a curious low, broken whistling that I mistook at first for wind. Then a sharp little bark undeceived me. It was in miniature, the far-off baying of those hunting dogs. The three dark figures of hunters, against white snow, moved with hampered steps, leaving profound footprints, to the brow of a steep foreground hill, and in their descent slowly disappeared, followed by their entire pack of restless dogs, whose howls and deep barks diminished. The party left only churned, dirty snow. My gaze sought other figures, distant peasants around a bonfire in the left mid-ground; they moved rhythmically, poking at the blaze, sometimes pausing to hold hands toward it. I could just hear their minute voices in sporadic, unintelligible exchanges, by leaning very near the frame. On the far-removed polder lakes, skaters rotated, flailed, traversed the slate-grey ice in total silence.

    My first wild yearning was to climb into it. This proved undoable: the cold breathing from the frame was so intense, it had me goose-fleshed in my underwear; and its frame was too small to admit me, unless I broke it. Somehow, I feared losing the whole scene if I did that. My second instinct was to tell some other human what was happening, make someone else believe it, so that I could. There was no second thought as to whom I would tell: my high-school art instructor, Dick Carey.

    Enthusiastic, but an astute reasoner, good-natured enough to answer the phone in the middle of the night, he was batty about the Flemish Masters, and also the man who had introduced me to Bruegel. I still had his number. Feeling for it in my jeans, I pulled my cell phone from a pocket.

    “Hello?” He didn’t sound sleepy at all. Probably up reading art criticism at this unearthly hour.

    “Hi, Mr. Carey?” (I’ll never have the gall to call him Dick.) “I’m sorry to disturb you so late. Something weird has happened. With a Bruegel painting.” There, now I had him. He didn’t interrupt me once as I described the phenomenon.

    “Mr. Carey, did this… I’m not pulling your leg. Have I ever pulled your leg before? Is this happening? Is this real?”

    I heard that little rumble in his chest. Anyone who’s ever been in his classes knows that that rumble means an avalanche is coming, an avalanche of rock-like reasoning and information. I held the phone tight to my head, feeling glad. And warmer.

    “You wonder if that can be happening. You’re not the only one of us who’s wondered! You’re questioning empirically what I’ve questioned in the abstract for decades. But you’re the only one still wondering. Listen. Bruegel was a realist, a representationalist. I’ve always respected them most, always will. Shakespeare said the purpose of art is to show reality to itself, “Hold up the very mirror,” of reality. He did it so well, his work is still blurring the line between representation and reality, people are still literally living his work in order to touch and understand life itself! Now, Bruegel… he’s a kind of Shakespeare, I’ve always maintained that. Not just because they were contemporaries. The work of a realist, listen, is to reproduce life, more accurately, and more accurately, and always more accurately. The mistake of art criticism is to suppose the process endless, with infinite space for improvement. But, technically, it has to be finite. That’s what I figured out. There is an end to that quest, anyone can see, the goal is reality itself. Now, if such huge strides can be made toward that goal, like the stride between say, late Medieval manuscript illuminations, and Bruegel, think about that contrast! Do you realize that the stride between Bruegel and reality itself, is smaller?”

    I felt quivery and shaky, the more so because this thing behind my back was still exhaling below-zero air at me. “Why… Why is it happening to me?”

    “Ha! Because… If you were a Polynesian who’d never seen either snow or people in full clothes, would you believe Hunters in the Snow depicts something real? Probably not. Recognizing realism in art has a huge component of belief. Now you, you’ve lived with that painting for years, you say, and it’s become internalized with you, love is the first part of belief… and now, in a state of impaired consciousness, you encounter it again, and wham, your defenses are down, you believe, and Bruegel, the last person to believe it, finally has a successor, an understander, and his vision is seen.”

    “Th-thanks,” I breathed. “Mr. Carey… if you’ll excuse me, I want to be alone with it.”

    “I understand. Wish I was you. It’s alright. I’ll see Bruegel one day.”

    But when I was alone, I was afraid to turn around and face it again.

    Every waft of cold on my back was joy. How could this be! How marvelous!

    … But why was I so happy? What did this mean, for me, or anyone? A great barrier had been crossed. But what barrier? And was its crossing a good thing?

    What barrier, but that mankind had never been able to create before, only manipulate the already-created. Now a man with a marten-hair brush had removed a thought from his head, and look, the thought was real; not an imagined form transferred to preexisting objects, but the imagined objects, themselves, stood in the round.

    Previously, only God could do that.

    ‘Well, they used to say angels were the only rational creatures that fly, and now people can fly,’ I said to myself. ‘That was a good thing. And this is a good thing.’

    But this was a different thing.

    ‘A barrier is broken. The realists, in every form of art, have been trying to break it since time began. Now it’s broken, and… what does it mean? Are we any nearer to the fulfillment of every wish?’

    But wishes could be divided, I thought, into two types—wishes that were part of maintaining life in the body, and wishes for the thing that made life worthwhile. Wishes to live, and when alive, wishes for love. And no earthly love could ever meet all those wishes, that was why people became religious. And this thing behind me, spewing cold air, was not a direct path to the end of all wishes, but a round path going nowhere: because it did not go to the God they say is love, but bypassed him. Man could create.

    I pulled the blanket over my head, to protect myself from that kind of cold.

    I woke up late, and my head hurt from sleeping in. Behind me on the wall was a somber, dingy old print of a flat painting, with flyspecks on the snow. I grabbed the cell phone and looked through Recent Calls.

    No outgoing call to Dick Carey last night. Of course not. Carey had been dead five years.

    Te Deum Laudamus.

    Featured Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Hunters in the Snow

  • Vendev’s Contest

    Taking advantage of their last night in the city, Boris and Semyon went to a theatre, something neither of them had done since childhood. But as luck would have it, at some point during the show, Boris’s wallet was stolen. He was upset, and more so when the police officers exchanged glances before giving him little hope of its recovery.

    “You see, Sir, we understand that Vendev was working the crowd last night, and Vendev can’t be caught. He is the cleverest thief who has ever operated in Belarus. Sometimes he works the same place for a week, but no one sees the slightest movement in the crowd when someone shouts ‘Stop thief!’ We’ve had dozens of reports and the leisure to compare them. He works alone and only in one place at a time, stealing a maximum of three wallets an hour. As for physical descriptions, he might be anything from a choirboy to Rurik the Varangian. All we know is his name…if that. His name is rumored about with a strange story of the reason that he steals…”

    The two men from Cosen were not comforted. Next morning, Boris couldn’t bring himself to take his train. Instead, he returned to the Pearl Theatre and sat on the terrace of an adjacent café. It was obvious he would not get his wallet back like that, so he must have been merely mourning it, like the simple-hearted fellow he was. A pure and harmless, even touching ritual. One which Semyon did not savor.

    Semyon was the cleverer of the two. Anyone could see that in a glance at those quicker eyes flickering from his expressive face. Impatient with Boris’s ruminative slowness, you could see him there licking and sniffing, as if smelling the humid soil back in Cosen. He was eager to get that train out of this larcenous, immoral town and begin the fall plowing. But Boris could not sense all the strange city things now tickling Semyon’s nose.

    The well-proportioned man in nondescript brown who sauntered out of the café had pleasant brown eyes, and seemed in his late twenties. Upon seeing Boris, he stared as if seeing an old friend, then strode to their table, taking a chair very near indeed to Semyon.

    “Good morning, my fine fellows! So seldom you get up from the farm! From the north, are we?”

    Semyon did not care to be so acutely read by a stranger, and stiffly replied, “From Cosen, Pán Stranger.” Though nearly on Semyon’s lap, the man addressed his conversation to Boris alone.

    “You are from Cosen! A sweet place, Cosen. But shabby. The manufacture? Why, nothing, Sir. Nothing at all!”

    Boris’s pride in Cosen was equal only to his ignorance of everywhere else. “It is not necessary for Cosen to manufacture,” he maintained loudly with a sweet, ingenuous smile. “Cosen is, as everyone knows, engaged in trade. And while Königsberg is boasted for its trade,” he compared his village to a great Baltic port with utter naivete, “A greater variety of food is eaten at all times of the year by people in Cosen than by those in Königsberg.”

    Semyon fidgeted uneasily, increasingly sure that the stranger was not smiling so broadly with Boris, but at him.

    “And you caught the show last night,” continued the young man in a fashion which was nothing short of uncanny. “How did you like it? What sort of performance?”

    “Oh, Madame Yelisaveta Can-Shay,” returned Boris, smiling to Slavicly mangle her name in what he considered a rendering both cultivated and French. “She does all sorts of things. First she acted a skeet,” he tried to say ‘skit,’ “Which I did not understand at all, but Semyon, there, found it funny. Then she danced with a little dog, looking exactly like a priest’s beard on legs…”

    “Madame, or the dog?” offered the young man, causing Boris an attack of laughter that rattled the table.c

    “And then, behind a screen, she moved puppets which looked like tiny people. And talked for them! She didn’t sound a bit like herself. It was miraculous! Afterwards, the theatre director himself walked out on stage, in a splendid suit, looking like a bridegroom! He thanked her, and we clapped like mad. Semyon and I, I mean, for the others were so shy. These city people! And the director seemed to want an encore very much, so I shouted ‘Encore!’ I was the only one, so it was very fortunate I was there, or the director and Panny Can-shay might have felt so badly. She sang Encore for us, which is a song. And that was all.”

    The young man seemed simply overcome by this gallantry towards Madame Canché, and rose to embrace Boris. For the first time since his arrival, Semyon could move his left arm.

    “But it was all dreadful and we should never have come,” said Semyon bitterly, while the young man showed no more partiality for the previous seat set against his ribs, and sat equidistant between the men, “Because Boris’s wallet was stolen and the police don’t think it will be recovered.”

    “Stolen by Vendev!” exclaimed the young man with enthusiasm, leaning forward with brightened eyes. “He was in the Pearl last night. I read it in the paper. By reports, he took six wallets and a lady’s Lyon silk handbag.”

    “The scoundrel!” cried Semyon, his thin knees involuntarily jerking.

    To which the young man sighed deeply. “Do you know nothing of Vendev?”

    “Oh, the police told us everything.” Perhaps it was that note of childish arrogance in Semyon’s voice, but the young man’s full attention, once all Boris’s, was now his. “They say no one ever sees him, that he takes three wallets an hour, that he looks like a choirboy or Rurik the Vavavian, and something odd about him paying a debt to God.”

    “That’s it!” The young man slapped the table. “That’s Vendev. Listen. You mustn’t call him a scoundrel. It’s the strangest story. Many years ago, Vendev, who was an honest man then, made a bet with God. He expected to win, but lost. Don’t ask me what the bet was, because I don’t know. He had to pay the debt with stolen money. Perhaps because he was too poor. Perhaps those were the terms of his penance. He became the finest of pickpockets, and labors year after year, straining to pay his debt and be free. To be an honest man once again. That is Vendev.”

    The young man looked keenly round on his audience, especially Semyon, waiting to see if either pure-hearted Christian peasant would contest the vile theology and viler blasphemy of the tale. But Boris stared, full of wonder and…good land! There were tears in his eyes! While Semyon’s inexpertly controlled face clearly betrayed that though he found the story revolting, Semyon was afraid to criticize a city gentleman’s morals for fear of being called ignorant and out-of-step with the times. The young man’s smile widened in triumph, and as timid Semyon smiled back despite ignorance of the joke, the young man seemed about to be reduced to helpless laughter!

    Then it happened: Semyon’s hand had been automatically seeking his wallet every quarter of an hour for the past eleven, and did so now. It crawled over the rusty woolen vest like an eager crab to caress his pocket, and froze in disbelieving horror before it felt again, fumbling and pinching. A look like death by poison spread over Semyon’s lined face. The young man appeared to see nothing and twitched Boris’s lapel playfully, asking whether he were married. Semyon’s face had grown hard, his stare on the young man’s back like that of a hunter at a fearsome but cornered bear.

    But the young man knew that Semyon’s ideas of how to deal with a thief were as hard, as rigid and formulaic, as his stare. The young man crossed his legs comfortably and laughed when Boris said that yes he was, praise the Lord, married. A thief must know, better than anyone, the little signs that betray a man, for he has more to lose, and Vendev knew that Semyon, even if he could manage to conceive of a thief who did not immediately dart away, was incapable of calling ‘Stop Thief!’ on a sitting man. He would be equally incapable of announcing a thief with any other cry than the time-honored ‘Stop Thief!’ Just as he was incapable of buttoning down his waistcoat in the new fashion, but felt compelled to button it up to his chin. Vendev knew that for as long as he, Vendev, sat on the chair, he was as safe as if in France, and that he could sit in a chair indefinitely. Whereas if the two hardworking farmers tried to sit on chairs in broad daylight, on a weekday, for more than an hour, they would either die or explode.

    Vendev took out a cigarette, which he then lit and enjoyed at leisure, savoring that first bouquet of smoke, a conscience that had been trained not to bother him, and the pleasant weight of Semyon’s wallet. Won the gentleman’s way. In a contest of wits.

  • Candidate for the Roberts Prize

    It was an honour to be elected. I was on the faculty at Inchfield, and seized the opportunity to work under specialist in topologic geometry, Professor Knowlton. Five years later, I was working on a level nearly lateral to his, which earned me the invitation to an informal gathering in his garden. This is where he and a select few would deliberate over nominees for the prestigious Roberts Prize in Mathematics, and who would be awarded its substantial cash prize. Seeing as that year, it was Knowlton’s privilege to judge.

    Having been to Knowlton’s house before once or twice, I’d a cursory acquaintance with his unkempt hedges, substantial brick residence, and an older son who had since entered a foreign university. Knowlton seldom mentioned his younger son, who was mentally deficient.

    We settled at a mosaic table on a piazza, near enough to the French doors that Mrs. Knowlton could handily supply us with coffee and its accompaniments. As I anticipated, Dr. Fuller kicked off the meeting by hammering his preference for a member of his own staff. And though the lad in question had been nominated by someone else, we were gratified when Morris, whose field is probability, grilled Fuller. “Yes, yes, of course he’s all those things, but isn’t he also in fact, your godson?”

    The laughter that ensued provided Sorensen an opportunity to introduce his own protégé, an emeritus in Arizona whose research with Euler circuits had thus far attracted only local attention. Sorensen’s a sucker for obscure underdogs. For example, from an array of composers that including Sorensen, no more than six other human beings have ever heard of, like one would a boutonnière, he’ll select his current favorite. He amuses me so much, that I was quite preoccupied when from around the corner came Knowlton’s younger son, to sidle up behind me.

    Slight, and fair haired, Donald was perhaps sixteen at the time. I suppose he chose me because I was the youngest at the table, and because I always greeted him with a smile. He touched my collar and whispered loudly, “Mis’er Irving, come with me. I want to show you something.”

    “Later, Donald” I murmured. But his expression, eager to the point of pain, got me off my chair, and excusing myself. However the frowning Knowlton was quick to chastise his son. “Donny, go away. Mr. Irving and I are talking.”

    Donald displayed a particular kind of fear, hurt, and anger which alarmed me. His expression reminded me of a childhood playmate whose father drank. But for the moment reassured by the bland face of Prof. Knowlton, I followed Donald.

    The boy led me back around the corner he’d come from, and via a side-door, in to the house. He then took me up a flight of stairs to his room, which, bare of the expected zoological, mechanical, or academic clutter, was very tidy. And taking from under his bed, a battered spiral notebook, he passed it to me.

    I leafed through the early pages full of penciled numbers, by no means neat, but not illegible. Some basic problems in addition and subtraction. But impatient, he snatched the book and thumbing deeply into it, then handed it back, pointing to an area on the left-hand page. Obedient, I looked only to find before me, his wobbly notation of the Fibonacci Sequence. That plaything of the best minds in each century, encrypted by Nature in cauliflowers and pine cones—1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…

    Smiling I pointed to the sequence, and when Imurmured its terms, his own face spread with corresponding joy. “Yes, one an’ two, then two an’ three, then three an’ five…”

    Noting that his written sequence ended at 89, I pointed to the last terms. “Fifty-five and eighty-nine?” Blinking, he grimaced, and pressing fingers, which twitched, to his jaw, he retreated.  I waited while, with his skull in both hands, he sat on the smooth white bed.

    “A hun’red and forty-four!”

    I tried to smile, suddenly aching that this devoted mathematician should have to strain so hard to take the first steps of the science. He was still frowning and holding his head, as I continued to leaf through the later pages.

    “A hun’red and forty-four, Mis’er Irving, is twelve twelves,” said Donald. Dismounting from the  bed, he took the book, for the purpose of indicating another sequence: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25…

    Again, I was arrested by the point where the sequence stopped.

    “Fourteen times fourteen?” I murmured, almost at once regretting that I had. Retrieving the book, with a fresh frown, he retreated to the bed, and began drawing little squares and dotting them. I bent over him to see and realized that he was solving the problem through a crude yet ingenious system of incremental multiplication, similar to a written abacus, which I could only imagine he had invented himself. He seemed to have no notion of the usefulness of place value and columnar operations.

    “A hun’red and ninety-six,” he produced at last, straightening.

    “Who taught you to do this?”

    He blinked.

    “Donald, did your mother teach you to add fourteen fourteens like that?”

    “No.”

    “The one, two, three, five, eight, did your mother teach you that? Did anyone teach you that?”

    “No.”

    “Would you like to have someone teach you about numbers?”

    “No,” said Donald.

    “Have they tried?”

    “My math is different,” said Donald.

    I’’m not proud of it, but to be sure that Fuller wasn’t getting anywhere with his prodigy I needed to go back downstairs, and that’s where I went.

    Though Knowlton’s sarcastic appraisal lowered my estimation later, Gening, a statistician for whom I had the greatest respect in those days, was holding the floor when I arrived. In fact, as he laid out the merits of a statistician in Washington, it occurred to me that he possessed all those qualifications himself, only more so. Statistic analysis has never been my strength, and I have, perhaps exaggerated, respect for people who master standard deviation at an earlier age than I did.

    When Donald came up behind me again, his hand touched my collar just at the same moment that Knowlton snapped, “Donald!” Out-of-place against a noble old hawthorn hedge, the boy was wilting before my eyes, which prompted me to rise and, once more, follow him.

    Donald did not take me upstairs, but only out of earshot. “Mis’er Irving,” he said, “You di’n’t stay for what I wanted to tell you. Daddy’s judging the Roberts Prize for math. I want to enter wit’out him knowing. I can’t enter if he knows, you know. It wouldn’t be fair to the others.”

    “Donald, you have to be nominated, you see. That’s what those other mathematicians are here for today, to help your daddy pick somebody good out of the ones that have already been nominated.”

    “But they haven’t picked yet, have they?”

    “Well, no.”

    “Then couldn’t you nominate me, Mis’er Irving?”

    At this moment Ivy, the Knowltons’ maid, came in. “Mr. Irving, Mr. Knowlton begs you not to pay any mind to Donald. He’s been moody all week. Mr. Knowlton’s specially anxious to have your thoughts on the selection.”

    I hadn’t known how much I’d been hoping to hear this until it presented itself.

    “Certainly, Ivy. I’m coming.”

    I had my own definite idea about a candidate, but wouldn’t have brought it up without this encouragement. Silently thankful for Donald’s interruption, I took my iron-filigree chair and began.

    “What seems to me,” and gazing at each face, I saw how my sententious tone caught them by surprise, but they remained attentive to me, “is that we’ve an almost equal array of accomplishments before us. Who can say which achievement will really mean more to the science, and to progress. Which will really find its most useful expression, in the future? Burkhardt’s circuits? Pauley’s conchoidal surfaces? Who can tell? What we can estimate now, right here, is the human contribution, the dedication, the labor, that a particular candidate puts into their field. Begin with the expenditure of time. I happen to know that Tillson, for example…”

    Every face turned to the French doors, behind which were sounds of struggle, Ivy’s breathless protests, and Donald’s urgent, partly muffled exclamations.

    “Ivy! What’s the boy doing?” demanded Knowlton with an expression of stern distaste.

    “Oh, he won’t… won’t… stay inside like you asked,” she answered.

    “Donald!” barked Knowlton. “Stay inside, for heaven’s sake. Give me half an hour!… Ivy, tell him I’ll walk with him after…” and raising his watch,“three, we’ll go to the duck pond at three o’clock.”

    “No!” Donald’s protest was clearly audible. “I have one thing to say to Mis’er Irving, one thing! Mis’er Irving don’t mind, ask him, he don’t!”

    “Donald,” Knowlton’s voice adopted a tone I would not have defied as a boy, “Mr. Irving does mind. He is here on business. No, Irvie, please,” as I must have started to get up and go to the boy. “Donald, this isn’t like you. Why don’t you go upstairs and draw in your sketchbook for awhile?”

    The inner rumpus subsided. Ivy must have persuaded Donald to go upstairs. Frightened that my little opportunity would be lost, I frantically tried to pick up my thread, but picked up something quite unconnected, as in my nervousness, I blurted it out.

    “Knowlton, who teaches Donald his mathematics?”

    The broad, avuncular face was caught with surprise. “Donald? No one! They tried, years ago. Kate tried so hard back then. Hired a specially trained teacher from the elementary school. A tutor from the staff at her own girls’ college, stewed over the times tables with him herself for hours. It was no use. I doubt he can do more than addition on his fingers. We gave up when he turned twelve.”

    I stared into the mosaic tabletop,  as I felt my face became bright red. It must have been the sun on my neck that let me feel it. Looking up, I saw what none of the others could. Donald leaning out of a second-floor window, and waving his notebook. He pointed at me, then at himself. and nodded.

    “Mr. Irving,” Benedict’s smooth, cultured diction interrupted, “You were speaking of a ‘human contribution.’ Permit me to remind you that the true measure of the human contribution of a mathematician is his contribution to humans. The significance of discovery, be it scientific, mathematical, or any sort, lies exactly in the degree to which it can be appreciated and put to use by the human community. That is the purpose of the Roberts Prize. It is a social recognition, paid in hard social and economic currency, awarded in a structured scientific community.”

    I was distracted by Donald disappearing into the window and slamming it shut.

    “So that,” I rejoined weakly, “if one had to deliberate awarding either Newton or Leibnitz a prize for the discovery of calculus? The criterion wouldn’t be who had worked longer, or harder, or more independently. But only who published, got it out there, for human consumption, first.”

    Benedict seemed taken aback, but soon replied,“Isn’t that, Irving, the only honest way?”

    “But suppose we found a lost medieval manuscript that described calculus. One that had been lost since it was made, that had never done a soul any good. Would it be a scientific achievement?”

    Knowlton, of all of them, seemed readiest to agree. “Benedict! Think, man! A medieval Newton!”

    I looked up and saw a light, that pensive face regarding me through the window. The head that independently endeavored in a science which I suppose had been a source of torment to him. The head which produced that little system of symbolic multiplication, by a labor I simply couldn’t imagine.

    “No,” conceded Knowlton, laying his hands on the mosaic tabletop. “You’re right, Benny. It’s a social enterprise. Art is in the eye of the beholder.” He turned to Fuller. “Tell me again about the algorithm Beckridge used.”

    “Bother the Roberts Prize,” I grumbled. And it is then, that I left my chair.

  • The Ninth Rose

    In an undisclosed year, Decency took something marvelous away from me, and by extension away from you. Away from… I want to say, everybody. Decency took it, and left me…decency.

    Decency now obliges me to make fiction of this, and set it far away and long ago, but how I want to blast that for the sake of its long debt to me, Seifert!* Hmm, Decency. Alright, then.

    Long ago and far away, in an Eastern European country called…

    (My own Soviet-bloc memento, from a time when we spoke in parables, is a little mental collection of those fictional Eastern European countries. Syldavia. Borduria. Rovenia. But I’m not going to use any of those; I’ve sworn off that, as you’ll see.)

    In an Eastern European republic, called Padobron, at a pivotal juncture for me, when I was celebrating the derring-do of my expulsion from the Narodna Misočana Technical University (expulsion had become a countercultural badge of honor) the question of how to get a job was just beginning to grow on me, someone called Jaromir Seifel published something good. Something which everyone said was good, but which betrayed his true greatness by being first, published over-the-table by a state-owned press, and second, not as great as he was.

    Small, in every way, our coterie was one of young people thrown together for being delivered by the same midwife, or confirmed in the same parish, or expelled for exhibiting the same cheek, or stuck in the same tavern-corner because they have the same feeble ideas of looking grown-up at twenty, but who believe that they’ve coalesced at the draw of stars and gods, through possessing a similar gallantry, genius, and destiny.

    That May, my peers, whose dreams were to either reform or undermine collectivism, if not get a job within it, attributed to me a certain dashing, because of my expulsion, and because I wrote things, copied them by hand, and circulated them as if they were dangerous, like an authentic counterculture. I think the writing and the expulsion melded in their minds (though I was not, in fact, expelled for writing, but because of an uncle’s alleged black-market prosperity) and that they accorded me a position among them, rather like Seifel’s among the real writers and agitators. Seifel’s must have been the one because, though I had never mentioned him, when his Eight Roses appeared, Miroslav Kinsky and Petra Raha both told me separately that they thought I should read it, that I would like it. I learned later that neither of them had read it.

    Well, what do you think I did? I bought The Eight Roses. I carried it quite proudly under my arm, with the spine showing nicely. I was only sorry it was so narrow; people might have to stop me, stoop, and stare to read it. Well, I was a little sorry, too, that the cover was such a hideous pink, like unhealthy skin. But I carried it, first to the “Golden Shield,” where I could casually let it be seen by two comrades in a corner, drinking a cheap wine our self-conscious slang referred to as ‘rope,’ and then home, for I was honest enough to read alone.

    I read it. I was prepared, you know, to adore it, and I did. To the very last page, until, I saw what it might have been.

    I don’t know how to talk about this. Love was never my strong point; I once described a man I was besotted with by saying, “In his striped sweater he looked like a large Easter egg,” and thought I was being poetic. When I want to talk about what happened in the blank space under the last words on the last page of Seifel’s The Eight Roses, my pen becomes enormous and my brain feels like the sort of thing you would serve in thin slices on a canapé tray. But allons! Seifel would be equal to this, so I will. On the page…

    Oh, it was bigger than Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, deeper than Meung’s Romance of the Rose, more universal than Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; more romantic than Keats, tougher than Kafka, more acute than Tolstoy. I didn’t know all those names then, but I knew a thing that I knew was greater than all of them; since then I have known those names and something of what they are, but I have never known the thing of which I speak. I felt it then, and what I felt most certainly about it was that it was real. However clumsy, I would get it on the paper, it was real: what The Eight Roses would have been if Satan had never fallen. Don’t misunderstand me: I still adored The Eight Roses, and that’s why this thing was so big.

    The thing was The Eight Roses, it was what would burst out of The Eight Roses if I could somehow slit the chrysalis. The huge joke was that Seifel had never known it was there. That was as plain as the sun; for if Seifel had known it was there, he would never have written the thin little state-approved thing with its hideous pink cover. Seifel was a genius, everybody knew that; he could have pulled it off. But he had dashed off this Eight Roses thing on table-napkins, probably, and sold it to the National Scholastic and Aesthetic Press, probably to pay his rent, and was probably flirting with his housekeeper while he scribbled the last chapter with his left hand. Even the title was botched. If he had written it two inches further into his peripheral vision, he would have noticed that good poetics, numerology, theology, plot dynamics, or even floristry would have made it either seven or nine roses. But no. He had eight.

    I was stunned, goosepimpled, teary, prayerful with my gift. I wanted to kiss Seifel’s hands and put my wet face against his knees. I wanted him to lay his hand on my head and bless me, like Haydn blessing young Beethoven. He would see, he alone would see now, before it had pages and flesh, the great soul of my conception; he would laugh and be glad, though he had only been its modeler, that someone would bring the true Eight Roses into the world. I felt that Jaromir Seifel must have a rich, deep laugh, and a kindly, rounded face, lined from a thousand smiles. My writing hand curled. Before I knew what I was doing, I had piled ink, pens, my ragged notebooks on the tea table I used as a desk. The cleanest notebook was folded open before me, and I had written the date. Then…

    Something was wrong, but not nearly so wrong as what was right; an inexorable force moved my hand to the left margin, my pen formed I,n, space, f,i,v,e…

    The wrong thing, pain and roar, rose in my hand to snatch that first line from me. I wrote laboriously, shoving on my pen like Tepl’s Plowman of Bohemia.

    “In five hundred lifetimes Mařek Klubaš would never see again what he saw now.”

    The sensation was as if the bare lightbulb had fallen from its socket and exploded on the floor. I leaned forward, crouching over that single line like some terrible wound. For I posessed that greater Eight Roses, but the world could only have it at the price of my crime. This line was the identical line with which Seifel opened his Eight Roses. And this was not the only line of mine that would be identical with his. The first. The fifth. The eighth. The whole third paragraph… For Seifel was a genius, and even his garbage was partly immortal. This would be no wholly original cousin to Seifel’s book; the daughter could never be less than half her mother. That date I had dashed onto the top-right of the page got tattooed backwards across my hot, sticky cheek.

    When I was upset, I had an unfortunate habit of pinching and rolling the skin on my upper arms, which left them blotched and bruised purple that night. As I lay on the floor with my feet on the bed, Barbora, my chaste, almost viceless, older sister, who was working at one of the electric plants then, came home and cooked something. She tried to get me downstairs to eat what she had prepared, and vaguely I remember that she entered my room very late, on one of her raids for my cigarettes, which she despised. Rooting through my handbag and both coats, she might have frisked me too, for all I did about it. I must have known when she fell asleep because later I remember suffering and even rationalizing out loud a bit.

    So sure was I that Seifel would more than forgive me, I even wanted to give him the manuscript and beg him to publish it under his own name; I knew his upright soul wouldn’t do that, and although my huge, Beethoven-sort of ideas earlier would have considered joint publishing a condescension on my part, with the novel so much nearer now, in my fingertips, I was suddenly humble and realistic, and afraid that Seifel, the great Seifel, wouldn’t let his name stand by mine on anything. I was ready to write the thing and ask questions later, but both times I sat up at the tea table again, where that wrong thing, painful and roaring, stood between me and my Eight Roses. Seifel’s words would come next—only two words—and then mine, but I couldn’t write those two. I said them over and over. I said that second line to myself; it was beautiful when it first came to me, but I gave it a touch of assonance, switched a synonym, moved a verb, and it was even more beautiful. I chanted it to myself, under my breath, and the third sentence tripped after it like an obedient little sister; but I had to stop, because those three together broke my heart and I would have died

    I sat Seifel in the broken swivel-chair opposite my bed, and said I wanted to approach this individually, head to head. We were alone with eons of space around us. What would it mean, if I took his clay pinch-pot ? Such a nice one! The best a pinch-pot could be—and made an Attic vase of it? Love! Miracle! Fate! Of course Seifel could see that. He was so understanding. He winked at me. Individual, elemental, primal, me and Seifel. There was nothing wrong at all. The sweat dried on my temples. We had been born for this, he in 1901 and I in ’38, so that he could write a little outline called The Eight Roses and I could make of it a lifegiving epic called, The Nine Roses. We would undermine Totalitarianism and fire noble, honest brains to seize the hour and steer democracy, social justice, and agrarian abundance. We would finally say what the haunted eyes of frescoed saints had wished the stuffy priests could. People would one day forget us, but humanity would ever be drawn into nobler lines. Again my face wanted to press Seifel’s knees.

    I was at the tea table.

    Pain. Roar. Wrong.

    Seifel and I were not alone with humanity. Something that was never quite humanity gazed reproachfully on us, with their own just claims…the artists. For centuries, emaciated savantes had trudged penniless back to their shabby lodging houses because some plump profiteer was turning out penny broadsides of their intellectual property, pocketing everything with full blessing of the inept Law. What I found pain and wrong, was their long deferred hope of just protection. If even one copy of this epic, and even my inebriation knew it would cost something to print a tome of the size this would be, changed hands for a koruna, and Seifel, the most deserving artist of Padobron, would be robbed; his deep, thoughtful eyes—oh! I could see the tired, pathetic lines around them—would still smile on my work, would lose every pinprick of reproach in a selfless, true artist’s rejoicing at my victory, but I would be damnable. I may have knelt by his swivel-chair to ask his forgiveness; I don’t remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

    Then, I could only go to him, Pán Jaromir Siefel of…wait, where did he live? Torný Street? And ask permission; like a hopelessly infatuated ragpicker going to ask for a Duchess’ hand. I could have bawled. The Duchess, of course, fully deserved my humiliation and my absurd, mad courtship, but I could not bear the inevitable rejection. Gallantry was hard and could bear it, but Love was soft and couldn’t. Too much was at stake for grandeur.

    Maybe I did bawl; I don’t know.

    Wouldn’t he give me full permission? In original and onionskin, signed and filed with the Department of Trades Protection? If I begged and orated, if I showed him five pages of prospective…? I was ashamed to fall back on this, but I was a girl, if a plain one, and very young; perhaps he would feel some gallantry—Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?

    Would he? What if he really had written it for his rent, and I came along, offering to outwrite and outsell him with his own book? What if he felt he couldn’t afford to split royalties on its improved revision? Or what if he only believed I would ruin it ? Thought me a…

    Starstruck, egotistical, talentless, deluded…

    Nineteen-year-old.

    I was a nineteen-year-old. Oh, pain!

    Unfortunately for that sickly pink book, my eyes fell on it at exactly that moment. How I hated it. Not what was in it. I hated Seifel, at the top of his career (I felt then that anyone who could publish articles in the Brava was at the top of his career), daring to dash off something so beneath his abilities and its own potential, to unload it on a literate, intelligent population, cased in airtight legal protections to keep earnest, less-endowed artists from ever achieving with it, what its semi-occasional flashes of genius taught them to love and long for. Oh, I hated his complacency. I hated his flirting with that fat housekeeper, I hated his hand paying the rent, I hated the half-koruna I had paid for the pink heartbreak.

    I held it between my two hands. Never before or after was The Nine Roses so near me. Again it’s hard to talk about what The Nine Roses was, perhaps because the pain or longing was so acute that it is unconsciously suppressed. I know that one of the principal characters was a woman. I think she was to have been very important, and I know that she was only, in the vaguest way, suggested by ‘Marie Kepys’ in The Eight Roses, that she was profoundly, fundamentally different, not opposite, just so different that they must have been born in different spectrums of light. But for all that, I can’t remember anything about that woman. I know her name was Karoline Svít, that her hair was yellow, she was twenty-six years old, had ancestry in the mountains of northeast Padobron. That one side of her lower lip looked larger than the other, and that when she was nervous, she would blink a lot; but what she was—oh, it was stupendously human and yet inexplicable, unpredictable, something that blasted Determinism to bits, and yet, I don’t remember a thing.

    Another character was deterministic, kind of a foil, who would be involved in a tragic devolution of some sort—obviously he was Heinrich Räder from Eight Roses, and I have to admit now, even with that neurotic curtain drawn across the shining glory of The Nine Roses, that he may have been its weakness, because I was too young to write tragedy well. But I am not sure of that. I’m surer, even now, of the greatness of that Nine Roses than of anything I’ve learned about writing since, which is a lot, at least compared to what I knew then.

    It wasn’t Seifel across from me in the swivel chair then, it was humanity, posterity, and Art. Not the artists, but Art, with her own peremptory, maybe holy, demands, which were not the demands of the artists at all. Art sat in the swivel chair and smiled at me, her own old, youthful, smirking, blessing smile; my shoulder muscles finally released. I smiled too, with my head hanging to one side. The Nine Roses was not mine, had never been; it belonged to Art, loaned to me by her inscrutable purposes, and it was my part only to act, beatify the world, and disappear. The disappearing part especially soothed me. It seemed perfectly fitting and reasonable, just then, that if I produced the miracle and then disappeared, there would be no crime; I didn’t wonder how I would disappear…a galloping consumption, I suppose? An open manhole? This death-wish absolved me, to the extent that absolution is a psychological event, and I returned to the tea table.

    I wrote only that second line, and not all of it, in its entirety. It was not a roaring, painful wrongness that stopped me; it was quiet, weakening my pen-hand. I turned around.

    I was a bad Catholic then, a worse one later, and a poor one now; but God was in the swivel chair, and He was with the artists, the law, and the blasted State. I felt my own fists against my eyes.

    You may have noticed that a good deal of that night is unclear to my memory, but the next part, unfortunately, is not. I was so tired and so…, I put the pen down, closed the notebook, stood, pushed my stool in, and pulled the light-cord. That was the end of The Nine Roses.

    On pensive nights sometimes, I used to try to bring it back. Especially May nights like that one. More than once I walked into the Golden Shield with that hideous pink book under my arm, stood around, wandered back to our east-bank apartment, read the whole thing in one sitting, and stared at that last page, for minutes, more minutes, and then finally, a few more minutes. I don’t really know why I tried, knowing all along that it would never… Well, I used to wonder how the copyright would expire, cutting some unconscious inhibition that was keeping The Nine Roses from me. I even calculated its life-expectancy more than once; after the Berne Convention, it was based on Seifel’s plus fifty years… and he lived to be quite old. I’m even surprised I’ve outlived him. I don’t begrudge him for it.

    In the seventies, I began to hope someone would find nine roses in eight, in some other century when Seifel’s work would be as free as air. But slowly I realized that the only person who would ever find it, was the one who found it that May night. What I saw was so tightly bound to what I was, to going in the Golden Shield, to my expulsion, to Miroslav and Petra, and the exact figure that Seifel was in Padobronsky culture just then, and the exact thoughts that went through my head reading his book, and the exact sickly pink shade of the cover of that particular edition. Perhaps someone reading some other genius’s potboiler will be gifted with an analogously grand reproduction. There are lots of those books about. As for The Eight Roses, I saw a used copy for sale in London a few years ago. Not in English; it was never translated, and it surprised me tremendously. Its copyright will undoubtedly outlive its sales. I think it’s out of print, unless a passage in that new Seifel anthology counts.

    If this story comes to you just when a similar prospect is facing you, (and how can I forbid such a miraculous coincidence, when it has happened to me?) how shall I advise you? I could hardly urge, Write! I, who backed down, cringing and purehearted, from the stare of God that night.

    But I know God now, Seifel better, the law and what the law is for. The only thing I don’t know better is an epic novel called The Nine Roses.

    I regretted it for decades. I still do! But something different is precious to me now, as precious as the best Art was to me then. Perhaps not as precious! for I shall never feel so strongly again. Perhaps more precious than my estimates are : less storm and more truth. What I cherish now is the nineteen-year-old that pulled the light cord and went to bed, walking carefully around the broken swivel chair. Perhaps I understand God better, as I am more like Him.

    For surely only He, who alone besides myself knew The Nine Roses, would say, “The girl is better than the book.” In that moment I chose to make art of myself. Was it worthwhile, for the sake of one night’s low-grade, possibly naïve morality, to give up what I still, only I!, know to have been so great? To throw away what so plainly told me it was bigger than the Nibelung, for a simple, few minutes’ act of elementary acceptance and approval? To forego a thousand master strokes in oil, for a single blunt stroke at human spirit?

    Again and again I cannot answer it, as an artist. But an artist did not sit last in my swivel-chair.

    Tonight, it is with a wonderous joy, I feel again something like that last page of Eight Roses. Not very like, for I do not feel in such storms now. But wonder, excitement, a glimpse of something better behind something good. That perhaps…

    Oh, it is hard to write, my pen is enormous, and my brain is like…

    Yes, that God, who sat in my swivel chair that night, holds a small, ugly, loved, but utterly unrealized work under His arm; that he will one day slit it and release the real…

    I cannot say. He alone knows what it will be.

    *Jaroslav Seifert was a writer, around whom revolved a competitive literary scene, made up of young people moving within the 1950s Czech counterculture.