The Absolute, page 12
Doubts. Doubts. All the same, Abraham Roszl didn’t give in to the delights of idleness. His task: to put bread in the mouths of his family. He closed the business and with the few savings he’d scraped together after forty years of activity, he bought at a discount price an enormous, fantastic, sophisticated mechanical loom with a movable frame, rusting away in the back shop of Itzak Bialik, a money-changer friend. This loom was a self-sacrificing forerunner of the industrial revolution. In the hands of its inventor, Leibuj Peretz, it would easily have turned out all sorts of knitted, woven and blended fabrics at great speed. Cross-stitched pullovers, puzzle rugs, rhomboidal blankets . . . But Peretz had been forced to part with the machine during his life to pay off debts, and out of resentment he’d barely instructed Bialik about the basic techniques for use of the device. By the time the loom reached Abraham Roszl’s hands, there was no longer any instruction manual or oral tradition that could help him decipher his purchase. In short, Andrei’s dreamer of a grandfather was forced to come down from the clouds where the golden beak of Bialik had set him and, having shut himself away in his fish shop, confront the evidence of a mystery. Why had he bought this thing? How had he been convinced he could get any value from it? What planet was he living on?
The glinting metal pieces, sprinkled with oil, were scattered over the great black velvet cloth that was like a beautiful spider in the white shop. Even in their asymmetry, their humble disorder, they found a way to suggest a heartbreaking guilt, which to a sensitive observer would have revealed some all-encompassing augury. But for all practical purposes, this luckless Jew was blind to profane signs. And so, lacking even the slightest information about how a given screw might easily tighten a certain bolt, he started to combine and recombine the tubes, pipes and metal frames, working from his fantasies about how basic elemental phrases might be written in a language whose alphabet he didn’t know, sure that at some moment, after he’d commended himself to G’d enough times, the correct way to put the loom together would appear traced in the air.
Naturally, until the miracle occurred, he had to make a show of all his devotion, patience and resolve, shrewdly exhibiting his determination not to expect total assistance from the divine (the condition necessary for precisely this to take place). For long hours, he stained his hands with the tools, joining short and long circuits and adjusting them to form squares, rectangles, pentagons, isosceles triangles. But there were always extra or missing parts. Also, who could guarantee that a specific piece—say, a hollow tube with one end dented and the other ending in a point—didn’t fulfill a double or even triple function? Not to speak of the rollers, shafts, tommy bars, heddle sticks and other pieces that, out of a love for simplicity, he’d momentarily left aside. By the way, now is the moment to note that if Abraham Roszl had thought of showing the loom to Andrei, either for illustrative ends (“Look what a pretty puzzle, eyngl!”) or as a pathetic testament to his own stupidity, his grandson would have figured out how to put it together in a few hours. But Andrei was only a child, so this didn’t even occur to my grandfather.
The progress of disappointment: a terrible ordeal. Driven by the manic optimism found in all true anxiety, Abraham ended up putting together a shaky construction that held up due less to its structure than to the capricious lattice of threads that crossed it, which got caught on iron, tangled into knots, snarled around bobbins. A metallic grinding bore witness to some kind of functioning. Noise, noise, noise. One can understand why, after a series of attempts, Abraham Roszl preferred to remain alone in silence. After a period of repose and meditation, he disposed of the headache, selling it as scrap metal. Then he opened his business again, turning it into a glass shop.
In the fin-de-siècle Finland that witnessed the upbringing of Andrei Deliuskin, prudent people always walked at the sidewalk’s edge, avoiding passing under balconies where flowerpots hung; and they were especially careful about rattling windows, since sudden differences of temperature (radiant days and icy nights) produced a systole and diastole of the material that tended to end with a rain of broken glass. For this reason, Abraham imagined that he had now dedicated himself to a truly surefire line of work. The inauguration was a success at the small-town level. The attendance was made up of traditional clients of the community, who came out of curiosity to find out how at his age old Roszl had managed to change his gesheft, and pretended to appreciate the marvels of decoration while they played “now you see me, now you don’t” in the elusive plate-glass reflections. Jamke circulated, squeaking affectionate diminutives of recognition as she offered little glasses with slivovitz, and snacks of pletzel stuffed with pastrami, and pickles in vinegar cut into heart shapes . . . Uncomfortable smiles of acquaintances who always meet face to face and have nothing to say to each other. “How young you look, Iankl!” “Mordecai! I’m so happy to see you!” “The same is true for me, Iankl. How’s it going with Leike?” “And how could we be going? On our feet, with her stupid as ever!” Conversations in a low voice: “And that youngster crawling around every corner?” “Shhh. Poor boy. I don’t know if he’ll last long, just see how skinny he is.” “He’ll last next to nothing if someone doesn’t pick him up off the ground. Who is he?” “What? You haven’t met him? He’s the orphan Jenka left, after God took her into His glory.” “What? Jenka died? When? But she was bursting with health!” “What’s this? You don’t know anything! What world are you coming from?” “I don’t stick my nose into everyone else’s life, that’s why I’m always the last to know.” “Well. It happened like this . . .”
The next morning, Abraham put a couple of flowerpots with newly blossomed geraniums outside the door of his shop. His secret hope was that these flowers would be destroyed in the first downpour, that their stems would be burned by the first frost and then annihilated by a solar flare hotter than the Sahara; through the magical effect of sympathy, any variations in the state of this delicate species would point to variations in the average inner nature of all the picture windows of Helsinki, and would therefore mean a boom and spiking profit arrow for his business in glass manufacturing. But once again he had no luck, except of the bad kind; Finland happened to be visited by a spell of warm gentle winds, a bland summer soup that strained into the country and leaked away after an intense season in Spain. The shop was always empty. And this made him think. Solitude always makes one think, if one lacks the talent for distraction. And it’s obvious that this neo-glazier was neither frivolous nor imaginative, which is why in his idle time he could only let himself be carried away by thoughts, jingling with the ominous sound of false coins. For instance: why hadn’t the rabbi come to the shop’s inauguration? Had he been sick? No. They’d seen him brimming with strength, a real oak, just two days later. Had it been mere chance, an oversight? Or a sign of . . . what?
Abraham tried to concentrate his thoughts, to follow a line of logic, but it was impossible. His brain was an uncultured specimen, devasted by the barbarism of superstitions he confused with adherence to the community’s religious traditions. And in addition . . . there were the pieces of glass sitting motionless in his shop, in ordered rows . . . keeping exactly the same distance between themselves . . . like rows of silent assassins.
After spending the day at his workplace, he woke up at night soaked in the sweat of one who’s escaped ghosts.
“But what’s the matter with you, Abrumi?” his wife asked, mopping his back with a cloth.
“I can’t see myself so many times, over and over. I can’t take it anymore!” he said.
“And what’s the problem? Lucky you! Me, I can rest only when looking in the mirror. I don’t know if it’s my own self that appears there, but at least it makes me happy to know someone’s watching me.”
It was a cruel comment, if she’d have understood what he was saying.
“If G’d had wanted to play at repeating himself, he’d have populated the Universe with his images. To open a glass shop is a blasphemous act,” muttered Abraham.
“Are you saying that G’d made the world for us to live in darkness and die of cold? What a head case you are! What’s got you really feeling bad is the sin of not selling. The more pieces of glass you pack up, the smaller the chance that you’ll see yourself reflected. A locale without merchandise. How satisfying would that be? Just imagine the sign: ‘Temporarily out of stock.’”
That season, all the city’s crystal and glass objects seemed to have achieved a state of supreme physical consolidation, as if they would never need replacement. But even if this weren’t the case, even if all of Finland had suddenly experienced an earthquake that left nothing standing, it would have been unlikely for an average person to venture through the door of that dimly lit shop where a trembling Jew sat waiting with a lost gaze. To make his daily situation more bearable, Abraham organized a routine of disappearances and returns, frequently leaving the business and going to a bar to drink and play cards. He’d have preferred the temple, but he considered himself impure. At the bar he studied the game of his future rivals; it relieved him to confirm that every card bore a sign and not a face. One day he summoned up the courage and took a seat at the table. He lost everything left to him, even his business. Not the house, because it was in Jamke’s name. He was found sprawled on the outskirts of the city, his face turned toward the sky, in the uncomfortable position of someone who’s been waiting for a bush to start burning and instead finds himself—all at once—crucified. His eyes were open.
A few days later it was Jamke’s turn.
Andrei was left as the sole and legitimate heir to a disastrous legacy, with Marina Tsvetskaia as his guardian and administrator of assets. The first question that Andrei posed as soon as he could speak, the first that he formulated correctly with both grammar and logic, was: “Who were my parents, and how did they meet and fall in love?” The answer depended on the moment, hour and fickle mood of Marina. In their essence, her stories were versions of the green ogre and blonde princess, the ruler and servant, the magician and frog, the priest and duchess. Andrei didn’t object to these variations in the catalog; it was still the moment that things were being named for the first time. At the end of her tales, Marina would insist: “And they lived happily ever after,” but when Andrei asked her to tell him where they were alive and happily “ever after,” she only pointed upward.
As the worthy grandson of a glazier, Andrei grew up certain that his parents’ happiness was a direct result of their invisibility, as opposed to the sadness of his childhood, defined by the material. From his early years, and with the intellectual resources available to him, he applied himself to considering changes in his weight, stature, density, et cetera in relation to abstract concepts like duration, existence, unhappiness, perception, intangibility . . . Concepts that knowledge of his tradition and inheritance would have enabled him to link to the most abstract of arts, music, but that in his case served only to configure a reserved disposition and a strong inclination toward solitude and thought. During school breaks—he was a good student and didn’t need to study—he sat quietly in a corner of the patio, contemplating the grain of a stunted, diseased tree trunk that everyone ignored, studying the swarm of locusts that competed to devour every leaf and branch. His classmates took his natural self-absorption for arrogance and decided to punish him, assuming he’d be easy prey. One day Andrei found himself in the midst of a round of hands pushing him. “Wipe your nose, snotface,” “faggot,” et cetera. This low behavior infuriated him. Closing his eyes, he charged at everyone. A fury he didn’t know was inside him surged forward with incredible speed, and even helped him strike the target with a few blows. The circle of aggressors widened for a few seconds, then closed in. He ended up knocked out, but with a reputation for bravery. Starting then, the little thugs of the higher grades would pick on him to test their strength; he was the ideal examiner for the bully in short pants. Provoking him was too easy. It was enough to ask: “Who’d your mom sleep with last night?”
After she saw him come back bruised from a few school fights, Marina Tsvetskaia hired Giacomo Lorenzo Straibani, a Piedmontese immigrant who passed himself off as a gymnastics teacher, to design a routine of exercises that would strengthen her foster son. The Straibani Method for Physio-Dynamic Development was no more than a partial and whimsical adaptation of the torture techniques applied during the Visigothic Kingdom, but it helped Andrei to forge his mettle. Truncheons. Weights. Stretches and contractions. Flexes. Imperceptibly, my great-grandfather began to replace the void produced by the absence of Frantisek—a blurry shadow, a faded voice—with the colorful figure of this sympathetic phony showing off swollen biceps. The disciple wanted to look like his maestro and dreamed of flaunting the same handlebar mustache, an identical shiny bald pate, a chest as broad as a tiger cage.
After a few months of exercise, Andrei had developed a solid muscular structure. But neither his momentum nor his devotion for Straibani turned him into one of those languid hedonists who admire themselves in the mirror, tracking the way the tone of their muscular fibers approaches the archetypical perfection of the bulge. He had already experienced the kind of violent emotion the pure ideal of self-contemplation could draw from him (even if it was concealed in the form of body building), and it was this, combined with his primary tendency toward spiritual delight, that later on would result in the synthesis of his adult self. Occasionally he felt something else whose nature and characteristics he couldn’t precisely describe, and which in the course of his repetitions led him to distraction, a loss of rhythm, forgetfulness of the most basic mechanics . . .
“But what’s wrong with you? Inner world or body, pick one!” Straibani griped. “You can’t have both at once. What’s the matter? Am I talking to a human being or a reindeer?”
Andrei didn’t say anything, and so the professore went to look for an answer in the private sitting room that Marina had set up with less taste than imagination in dead Jamke’s sewing area. Answering his question, Marina, ultimately a solitary soul, tried to express her own bewilderment, in between teas and mint pastilles au chocolat:
“What can I say, my dear Giacomo? He’s always been a strange boy. In those days of my sad Russia when I suckled him, he’d cling to my breast with such frenzy it rent my soul asunder, but at the same time, he looked at me with those eyes that . . .”
“That what, Marina . . . ?”
“It’s not right to say this about a child . . . But his eyes saw into me . . . pierced through me . . .”
Soon the gymnastic activity was pure appearance; the moment he arrived, Straibani would disappear behind the chaste taffeta curtains, trembling in wait for him. After each class, Andrei had to get used to going out by himself, walking through the cold around parks, squares, gardens, frozen lakes and museums, watching each drop of his sweat slowly transform into an ovoid stalactite. Little diamonds of his neglect. What did my great-grandfather think about during those outings? Impossible to know. What did Antonella Scuzzi di Straibani think about when, alone in the small earthen-floored kitchen of her Lombardy shack, she had to decipher those letters crammed with sugary promises and far-fetched excuses, in which her Giacomo excused himself for the paltry funds sent, barely enough for the daily pasta of Antonella Junior, Giacometto, Archimbaldo, Vittorio, Emanuelle and Vicenzo . . . ? Did the professore’s wife know that this looping handwriting, crude and full of spelling mistakes, was smudged because of the tears that night after night, in his miserable hovel, under the meager light of an oil lamp, her husband spilled as he named his descendants, as if the magic of evocation could wash away his guilt over having succumbed, repeatedly, to the charms of his fleshy white Russian lover? What did Straibani think about? He could have cut himself on the sharp edges of regret, but the truth is that he never thought about anything. The great tragedy of love is that it rouses even the most lethargic. A generally happy man, for the most part a euphoric idiot, had suddenly been jerked about by the affections . . . One spring contracts, another stretches, and in the end, the metal tires . . .
