Читать книгу A Reunion of Ghosts - Judith Mitchell Claire - Страница 13

The Franco-Prussian Wars have ended. The unification of the German Empire is complete. The Second Reich has begun, though of course the real power remains with Prussia. The former Prussian king, Wilhelm I, is emperor. The former Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, is chancellor.

When affairs of the empire bring Bismarck to Breslau, the widower Heinrich Lorenz Alter leaves his dye factory to stand among the throngs waiting to see the champion of iron and blood emerge from his carriage, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high as if he’s a figure in a portrait by an artist enamored of the golden mean. As Bismarck passes, the crowd heaves like an unfettered bosom in a bodice ripper. Much of the attraction in coming to see Bismarck is being a part of this impassioned heaving, this surging forward—this element of danger, the possibility that one may be caught in a lustful stampede, may be knocked to the ground and literally perish from love of king and country.

The first time he brings his motherless son with him, Heinrich hoists the boy onto his shoulders. The child perches there stolidly, expertly. He’s a sober two-year-old who’s been left to the care of redoubtable nurses with quick tempers and paddles and switches. He’s well trained in the art of keeping still. Even when Bismarck arrives and a roar takes over the square as the crowd buffets Heinrich, the boy makes no sound. Heinrich has to twist his neck, look up at his son to make sure the boy isn’t frightened. When he does, he sees tears, but they are tears of joy; Heinrich’s certain of that. “Two years old,” Heinrich writes to his youngest brother, Rudi, the only member of the family he still speaks to. “Two years old, and such depth of feeling for his country.”

“You’re raising him well,” Rudi replies dutifully, “and under such difficult circumstances.”

Heinrich revels in Rudi’s praise. It’s true, he thinks. He has raised the boy well. There’s a small photograph of the dead mother, Line Alter Alter, in an oval frame on the boy’s bedroom dresser; the child is tasked with kissing it each night before getting beneath the blankets. But what dominates the nursery is the portrait of Bismarck that hangs on the wall facing the bed. It’s the same portrait that currently hangs over the toilet in our Riverside Drive apartment. The generations before ours hung it in the foyer, the centerpiece of an arrangement of old photographs and paintings. As soon as we could, we moved it.

The tragedy of unrequited love for the blond beast, Einstein will someday call the love that Jews like Heinrich Alter (and later, Lenz Alter too) harbored for Germany, but Heinrich Alter calls it patriotism. He calls it Heimat. Being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith. He’s determined that his child will embrace this faith too. Even the boy’s name is meant to play its part. Heinrich Lorenz Alter chose the name himself, no female sensibility involved, although he believes Line would have approved. The boy is called Lenz, but his full name is Lorenz Otto Alter. Lorenz to remind him of Heinrich. Otto to remind him of Bismarck. Alter—it implies age and wisdom, and who, Heinrich argues, is older and wiser than God?

No mother, but three fathers. This is what Heinrich tells the baby long before words have any meaning to it. Leaning over the cradle, his palm cupping the crown of the small head, Heinrich croons manifestos in lieu of lullabies. “Three fathers,” Heinrich says. “Me, Bismarck, God.” Lenz’s job is to disappoint none of them.

Meanwhile, across town, Zindel Emanuel is also teaching his children about Bismarck. When military parades pass by, he takes his two oldest girls, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, out onto the second-floor balcony. “You remember all the speeches about iron and blood?” he asks Rose and Lily, who stand on their toes and peer over the balustrade. “Well, those rifles the soldiers are holding—that’s what Bismarck meant when he said iron. And you see that sleeve pinned to that soldier’s shoulder—or there, the patch over that guy’s eye? That was the blood. You’ll notice, though, that while the iron’s still held high, the blood’s been washed away.”

He lifts them, one at a time, so they can more easily take note of the weapons and prettified gore.

“They love talking about blood,” Zindel Emanuel says. “It stirs the passions of the sheep. But they’ll never let the sheep see the blood. Sheep love talk of blood, but they faint dead away at the sight of it.”

“Baaa,” Lily calls to the soldiers below. The ones directly beneath the balcony look up, laugh, wave to her.

Emanuel’s wife joins them, new baby in her arms. “Lily,” she says. “Don’t make barnyard noises at the infantry.” She gives her husband a look that’s both reproving and affectionate. “Maybe we should try one more time to get you a son. You’re training these girls to behave like little boys. Yelling at people in the streets. Thinking all the time about politics.”

Emanuel takes the infant from its mother. Iris Emanuel is overwrapped in linen and lace; she looks like nothing more than a small, smiling doll’s head. “This was supposed to be my boy,” he says.

Iris beams at him, at the clouds, at the soldiers, at whatever her eyes land on. When she grows up, her father thinks, she will look like the goddess Isis: dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes. This doesn’t please him. He has no intention of raising an Isis, a goddess of domesticity, of weaving, of the moon. And he’s concerned about those blue eyes, so unusually pale. A curse in some cultures, the least sensitive of his acquaintances say. “They’ll darken,” his wife says defensively—though time will prove her wrong—but that’s not what bothers Zindel Emanuel. He’s unfazed by curses, he’s not superstitious. He doesn’t believe in mythology, not the myths of Egypt though he knows them all, not the myths of his own people—the Jews. Not even the myths of the Prussians. He enjoys pointing out that despite the infantry uniform the chancellor wears, Otto von Bismarck was merely a reservist. He never served a day in the active military. He neither carried iron into battle nor shed a drop of blood—or at least not a drop of his own blood.

No, what Zindel Emanuel dislikes about the toddler’s pale blue eyes is the attention they’re already commanding. He doesn’t want this girl to be admired for her appearance. He has high hopes for Iris, a disappointment by virtue of her sex, true, but a child who, he has already determined, will disappoint him in no other way. There’s something about her—how alert she is, how lively, her arms and legs churning even in her sleep as if she’s climbing or building something—that has convinced him she’ll be the person he’s already imagined.

“No more babies,” he assures his wife. “I’m going to work with the materials you’ve given me.” He lifts the little girl so she, too, can see the parade. He busses her on her cheek, his wife on the forehead, and, Iris still in his arms, leaves the balcony for the warmth of the house. The two older girls follow him: his acolytes, his ducklings.

Alone now, his wife looks down at the victorious soldiers parading by. They fall into two categories: the hobbled and maimed, and the unscathed and ashamed. Such a relief, she thinks, not to have sons.