Wilderness of Mirrors, page 13
He eyes Tamsin. Vaguely drunk, she sounds sardonic, but not bitter. Nor does he flatter himself that she is acting out for his attention. Esme too has drunk quite a lot but shows few effects of the wine. As they walk from the restaurant to the car, Tamsin tells her mother, “Let Emil drive, Ma. So you can sober up some for the ride into the city.”
Esme has put on the car radio, and a news item holds their attention. An orderly noon demonstration in the administrative district of the City Bowl turned violent without warning, forcing police to cordon off streets where looters and vandals remain. Although the bulletin made no mention of Braeem Shaka, Esme announces, “I’ve been hearing rumors this Braeem Shaka is fronting for drug lords.”
“I don’t think he is.” Tamsin’s voice is flat with suppressed feeling. “He’s many things, but . . .”
“He’s the reason people in Muttie are getting so chippy. Part of it. It’s mad to talk about being owed reparations by Black people. Isn’t it. It’s just absurd. As if it was the Movement that created Partition and separated everyone. I’m going to sound non-PC again, but Black people suffered worst under Partition. It’s not ambiguous. It’s not a victim Olympics. And the idea that Creoles had zero complicity in the system, that’s revisionism.”
Tamsin laughs so hard her face turns redder. Catching her breath, she says, “It’s made you rich, Muttie.”
“Oh, it’s my livelihood for sure. Not denying that. Can’t bloody live here though.”
“Anyway, I’d heard there were talks going on between Kob and Shaka.”
“What talks? What’s to talk about when you’re inciting looting and vandalism.”
Esme leaves Tamsin and Emil before the front gate of the cottage. “Tams, you’re bringing Emil to the book launch, you hear?” Esme kisses her daughter on the nose and receives a clumsy embrace in return. Watching the car move out of sight down the hill, Tamsin mutters, “I owe Dad a visit.”
News of rioting in the city casts a pall over the Scarbrough house, but neither of them is inclined to discuss what it might mean for Shaka. In the cottage, there is no radio or television, and Tamsin goes out to sit in Emil’s car two or three times to hear if there have been any developments before giving it up.
Over the next days, the last in Scarbrough before they return to the city, Errol attempts to ring several times, without success. Emil is thankful the mobile network is so poor.
“Tell me of a time when you felt normal,” Tamsin asks as they sit in the garden absorbing the sun. “As a child, or in your teens even.”
Roused from a light sleep, Emil has no ready answer. He lets a little time pass before venturing a response that does not feel inadequate. “Playing rugby. On the rugby field I felt normal.”
“The elation of running the ball, scoring a try, that sort of thing?”
“No. Or not only that. Also in the changing room, or training. Being with the other members of the team. Camaraderie.”
“I wasn’t friends with the other players,” he confesses to her, later still. “I wasn’t the most popular member of the team, but I was part of it, you know.”
Are he and Tamsin much alike? Will she redeem him, be both the alibi and trigger of his humanity? His worth to her is no clearer now than before. He expected Tamsin to disavow him before her mother, put distance between them. Emil is my assistant. I’m mentoring him. He finds that he quite likes the amorphousness of the relationship.
The cottage retains its utopian squalor. They are squatters, lying about, scarcely stirring from the house. The fugitive mood breaks when the cocaine runs out and Tamsin must wait a day for Ekow to make his delivery.
From the porch, Emil watches as the familiar silver-blue car pulls to a stop in the road. Ekow gets out, unlatches the gate, and mounts the stairs with a bouncing step. His hands are empty but then he is wearing a coat. Emil cannot tell whether the dealer has seen him. His eyes are concealed behind sunglasses. Of course he has. The silence, the mutual refusal to acknowledge the other man, feels foolish. He wants but cannot bring himself to call out to Ekow and dispel the animal feeling. And what is there to say?
He reads: What is the backlash against ‘cancellation’ and political correctness but master morality—a sly co-optation of Nietzschean slave morality that adds manufactured victimhood to the long list of tools the wealthy and influential wield against the powerless.
Tamsin has done a line or two, but she is being oddly self-denying with her package of cocaine in spite of the privations of recent days. She sits now on the edge of the bed absorbing Emil’s scrutiny. Unmoving but for the butterfly-slow blink of eyelashes. The quality of his erections, their persistence, changed when the cocaine ran out and the only thing left to him was zoll. He pulls down his shorts to let her see that he wears her underwear, a lime-green pair that he lifted from her tote bag a day earlier, the feel of them in his hand enough to stiffen him. There had also been a tube of lip balm, a stick of mints, and a dog-eared paperback novel by Gabriel Matzneff. The book confused him. She reads French and German?
His prick, his runner’s thighs have stretched the underwear beyond salvage (the slipperiness of the silk keeps his penis in a state of more or less permanent hardness). Seeing him in her briefs draws no reaction. Her fingers are on him, tracing the nearly healed sandfly weals, but the excitation is all on his side. Very likely, she finds his shallow cross-dressing banal, predictable, although for this too there is no evidence.
If he loves Tamsin, it is for this reason. He has absorbed enough from her—also from Bolling—to recognize the banality of his love, and he has ceased to think of himself as emotionally deficient.
She delves one hand into the waistband, pulling at the elastic. He reclines on the soiled mattress, obedient to her hand. More banality: here is what he has sought—power that does not need to coerce. At last, he’s ready. Now, each time is like this, complaisant, Emil pretending to be only half awake.
Afterward, overstimulated, he wills Tamsin to go to the other room—it is smaller but no less filthy—and sleep. She is being deliberately obtuse; her hip is glued against his. “It’s a common response, postcoital revulsion,” she told him a few nights before, reading his mind as he’d once suspected Bolling did. It was no admonishment. Anyway, she prefers talk to cuddling. Although the back of her hand presses along his throat. Still feeling for fever.
“Esme didn’t want custody of Adam?”
“I think she did, but there were other things going on. Her second book was about to come out, my father was getting into his cows and sheep, and she was having serious doubts about getting up every morning at five to crack ice off paving stones and milk the cows. My father had suddenly become immensely bohemian, and a little reclusive.” This is how the conversations often go, the answers tangential to the question but perhaps more illuminating.
In the morning, they climb the hill to the red dam for a last swim. The heat has been holding steady but the weather is on the point of giving way to squalls.
Perfunctory farewell in the car (in their interaction there is little space for lingering embraces). Tamsin will go out of town for a few days to visit her father. And Emil is back at 9 Noel, the weightless atmosphere of the flats, which he might as well never have left; it is more or less the same, in part because he’s blanking from memory the circumstances of his leaving. The front door is unlocked. Halting in the hallway frowsy with cooking smells and low light, he calls out to Andres, testing his own theory.
“Where you been, Cuz?” Andres replies. “Your parents are arriving any day now.” He does not emerge from the sitting room.
“I know.”
There is no further response from Andres. Is it that Emil may as well not have been absent from his aunt’s house or that he ought not to have returned? He has become a prodigal son: clearly unsettled by life at 9 Noel, trying to escape it but seeming to be incapable of doing so. He is a second Torrance; his cousin surely long dreamed of moving out of his mother’s house before doing so at last.
And yet Emil could return to eGeld. Andres will be fine, whatever comes, or not. Something else has been keeping him in the south. Muttie is a dream, meaningless but also preordained. The same applies of course to eGeld, but eGelders are better collaborators in the fictions of contemporary life: aspiration and opportunity. What Emil has not yet worked out is whether Stadmutter too revolves around a shared delusion, one in opposition to eGeld’s own utopia, or instead around a refusal, perhaps an inability to rally its people around abstractions. In some sense, this is the question Shaka seeks to answer.
In the glassed-off arrivals hall of the regional airport, Tamsin goes directly to her father, her small case jerking and clacking over the tiles. “Pa” is what she had begun to call him as a mischievous nine-year-old. “Robin,” she says now to draw his attention, and then in the child’s voice she had once used to pierce whatever was distracting him, “Pa Robin.”
“Tams.” Her father bends to greet her, all sinew and smelling of iron tools and wood. I will call him Robin.
Squeezed, Tamsin holds back a grunt. “Farm life agrees with you.”
Robin ignores the pull handle of her luggage, hoists it to his shoulder with one arm, and walks off. She sees why. The provincial airport at New Dublin is not designed for pull suitcases. “I hope you brought sweaters?”
There had been rain in the afternoon when she was aloft, and the atmosphere has a loaminess akin to breathing in fertile soil. A windless cool prickles her bare arms. So unlike Stadmutter, which is about six hours due west and south by car. The hinterland has dry, mild winters that are an extension of autumn. Still, she has had to steel herself for the abiding cold in her father’s stone house.
“I have sweaters.” This is their rapport: answers gestated, oftentimes offered days later, a slightly distracted pensiveness, gentle ribbing, blank stares. They are in Robin’s pickup truck, which he calls his everyday car because of its small flatbed and which looks too small for him. He sneers at modern monster trucks with their rear cabs and chrome cylinders. “We’re magpies, Tams,” he will tell her at least once during her visit, meaning humans.
“Nice of you to come visit your dear old dad.”
“I couldn’t bear the idea of you alone, crying into your Christmas lamb.” Your father lives in his own head, Esme had told her once without rancor. It’s you who should be farming, and Robin writing books, she had thought at the time. Would her parents be married still, if it had fallen out so?
Here they are: twenty acres of flatland, mostly pasture, with some land given over for maize and tubers. Part of an inheritance, the land allowed Pa Robin to give up being an ad copywriter and become a gentleman farmer; in spite of a guilt that seems not to have ceased, he’d accepted.
In the half a year since her previous visit, the farm compound—the main house, a converted granary, a cow barn—has undergone changes, many too fine-grained to be evident to Tamsin. An unfamiliar car is in the scrubby yard near the front door, an inexpensive foreign two-door that looks a little like a toy. “Not the sort of car I pictured Brenda driving,” she says, and then frets that she is being snide.
“I’m going to leave the farm to that woman, Tamsin. We all break our backs, but she makes it work. For anyone else, a bequest like that would be a curse, but not Brenda.”
Does Brenda share Robin’s bed? Her father’s monkishness has long seemed eccentric, perhaps even a cover. If it ever came out that Robin was romantically involved with an employee, Esme would claim to have foreseen it in some form or other; the tale of the White farmer and his Black wench would find its way into Esme’s writing.
In a taxi on his way to Bolling’s, Emil reads the piece of paper in his hand, and not for the first time, although he is not precisely trying to memorize the words.
The Teutonic world—Berlin and Wiens—birthed the most exalted cohort of intellectuals the world has yet known: German Jews. I need name merely a few: Wittgenstein, Marx, Einstein, Benjamin, Mahler. Germany’s role in this is only tacitly credited, if ever, and this blinds us from noting a dialectic that should be plain: the intellectual intensity of the German hothouse contained within it the seeds of shattering glass.
He has gnawed over that last sentence: there is something perilous in the image of shattering glass, something that needs explanation. Also, this particular note carries a dark echo of Tamsin’s joke that the three of them—herself, Bolling, Emil—could each have their “own Austrian.”
Bolling seems to intuit Emil’s mood the instant he opens the door to him. Near-imperceptibly, the German withdraws, as if he cannot help himself. But then, Bolling’s modus operandi is to present little to nothing of himself while extracting everything from you.
“Where are you off to?” A roller suitcase, ordinary, sleek, stands in one corner of the salon.
“Just back actually. Hamburg.”
Business? “What’s happened with Shaka? Has he been arrested?”
“Braeem? I don’t think they got him, no. I would have heard from him and I haven’t.” Bolling sits in what must be his favorite chair; Emil though is agitated.
“But why did he go ahead with the march so soon? The talks with the governor were going badly?”
“They seemed to be getting pretty serious. Substantive, you know, but I wasn’t involved day-to-day.”
“You’re not worried? Fifty people arrested?”
“Do you want to sit? I wish he’d talked to me before going ahead. His timing wasn’t great. I also suspect Kob set him up.”
“The governor? How?”
“Nearly a hundred looters? There are always opportunists, spoilers around public demonstrations, but so many is no accident. I think Kob used his contacts, prison gangs, to sabotage the demonstration.”
“Sounds very . . . conspiratorial.”
“I agree. It does sound like a conspiracy theory. But it’s what I’m hearing.”
“They’ve never once mentioned Shaka in the news reports since the march. That seems deliberate. Deprive him of publicity. Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask how much of Shaka’s politics come from you.”
“Depends what you mean by my politics.”
“The . . . fascism-adjacent antimodernism. That stuff.”
“If you’re asking did I stoke Braeem’s nationalist instincts, I didn’t. My politics are very personal. A Haitian-German thing, you could say. Braeem used to talk about a third way, social democracy with free-ish markets. But there’s not much traction around the world right now for the idea of pursuing a universal good. It’s all zero-sum. He understood that. I simply convinced him that ending Partition speeded up identity fission rather than reversing it.”
“Identity what?”
“Widely shared experiences are vanishing. We’re breaking down into ever smaller groups, intersecting and overlapping, maybe, but with nothing—not music, not sports, definitely not news—that cuts across all groups. After Partition, Creoles began looking for new ways to separate themselves from other non-Whites. From Whites too, but not so fiercely. They were already an idiosyncratic people, mixed heritage, Europeanbased language, animist beliefs, and then they’ve marginalized themselves to the point where having a semiautonomous enclave is probably the best way forward.”
“What does your father think?”
“I’m guessing you know his politics. He’s hopeful but he’s not optimistic about integration.” Emil’s answer comes after a slight hesitation. “When he was about eighteen, he met a Black man in his town, which was very unusual during Partition. This man made a lasting impression: he spoke argot perfectly, coming into a Creole town and moving about fearlessly. He was an agent of the Movement during the struggle years, and he brought my father into the Movement. And he continued to do it long after my father moved to eGeld, but very few Creoles were receptive to outreach from the Movement.”
“Braeem—you gave him . . . iboga?”
“He’s very careful about what he accepts from me. And he’s allergic to . . . mysticism. There’s quite a bit of the technocrat in our Braeem.”
“How does it end, with you and Shaka?”
“I don’t know. With us drifting out of one another’s orbit, much as we drifted together.”
Much later in the night, Emil remembers the most pressing reason he came to see Bolling. Careless of whether he’s waking the German, he intones, “Germany made the greatest cadre of intellectuals the world has known.”
“Ja?”
“That last sentence.”
Bolling, lying uncovered near but not next to him in bed, has moved his arm; the crook of his elbow no longer covers his face and muffles his voice. “What is it? The intellectual heat of Germany contained the seeds of breaking glass, something like that? A speculation about the inevitability of what happened in Germany, which was not Britain, not France. Working through the central reason the immensely productive intellectual and commercial flowering of the Jewish minority ended so very fucking badly. In dialectical reasoning, thesis A—that the German-speaking world in the early twentieth century was a great place to be a Jewish intellectual—generates antithesis B: the German-speaking world was incubating not only Jewish genius but the ferocious if not universal backlash to it. To put it more prosaically, a Faustian pact was made. In the case though of Germany and its Jewish intellectuals, which is Faust and which is Mephistopheles?”
“Meaning that German Jews could be seen as the devil, as the side with the most to gain from the bargain?”
“I think there were Jews that perceived great benefit in assimilation, rightly or wrongly. And the German political class also saw great benefit. From an economic standpoint, killing off a class of highly productive people makes no sense. The logic of antiutilitarianism is deeply unsettling for Anglos, particularly Americans. So they continue to fixate on the Nazis. Every few months a new book comes out in New York or London about the Holocaust. The Americans, of course, were only too willing to siphon up German-Jewish scientists who managed to escape.”
