Solimeos, page 12
I didn’t think of him as a bad man or as a good man. He simply was not present, immunized from emotion by the logic of his work, by his obsession. Humbled by his intellect, I could not follow. When I tried, I was not stepping in his footsteps but on his toes. He could bear no competition. Utterly alone, my father struggled at the edge of tightening, enlightening circles, to Sirius, to an unknown universe.
He set about to educate me as his shadow. I translated hieroglyphics, ancient alphabets, scratchings, runes. If I leapt ahead in a lesson or an idea, he would burst out in fury or stomp out of the room. My lessons were fraught with dread. I would never be good enough. I didn’t think he was teaching me so much as cloning himself so he would have someone to work with. I thought it was a selfish act. But everything he did was selfish.
“Alright, Axel,” he would start, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, from serious to Sirius. Where to begin? It is as circular as the orbits. First, I must suggest the real Exodus was not from Egypt to Canaan but from Sirius to Earth. The desert they crossed was space, their spiral path unwinding the original egg of creation, the path of consciousness. Its path is still in the neck of the cello. That is its geometry: the seashell spiral neck of the cello, which gives forth the sound of the numbers of creation through the shape of a woman…the hole in the center of the instrument, under the bridge. Pluck. That word again, that oc. A fecundating word, if ever. Og, oc, uc, fuck, ugh, ouch. You will never look at a cello innocently again.”
One night—three months after Luba’s disappearance—Dietrich banged on the jalousies of my room. He was on the balcony connecting our bedrooms. “Naga in Hindu and in Mayan means ‘snake.’ Write that down. How did the Hindu word get to South America? How did the South American word get to India? Come into my study and take notes. I’m ready to lecture.”
“It’s late—after midnight. I was sleeping.”
“What if I forget this? You can sleep in the morning.”
My father rubbed his hands together and addressed the Royal Society. I suppose if I could make believe I was kissing Luba, he could make believe he was at Oxford in a great room, wearing a gold chalice and a white robe, with an overhead projector and a long wand. That’s what I saw. “Gentlemen, with reference to one-legged gods. Please recall Yahweh on the Masada coin with his snake foot….”
What finally alleviated some of Dietrich’s anxiety about losing a thought, missing a connection, forgetting, God forbid, one of his Royal Society lectures, was the installation of five even larger ceiling fans in his study. He had me order cartons and cartons of white silk labels, marking pens and yarn.
When at last one morning Dr. Hermann called to report the cargo plane from Miami had arrived, we abandoned breakfast and raced to Dr. Hermann’s airstrip.
Dietrich drove a transformed l936 white Cadillac convertible. Civilization was creeping ever closer. After Dr. Hermann’s Kupis had cleared a road through the forest, Dietrich acquired the clunky Cadillac and converted it into a Gasogeno: a vehicle fueled by charcoal. He had attached an old charcoal burner to the rear and pipes to the engine. I’m not certain it was his idea, this boiler on the rear end, but my father treated it as if he had invented it and was enormously proud of solving the problem of gasoline shortages and expense on the river. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that well.
Dietrich was ecstatic on the drive. “Now the real work begins,” he shouted over the engine of the car. Slamming his foot down on the gas pedal in his zeal to begin his life’s work, we sped down jungle roads. His life’s work would become my life’s work. I would be labeling silk strips and tying his yarns into immense patterns forever. I shifted in my seat.
We drove onto Dr. Hermann’s airstrip. The Miami plane was on the runway, unloading. Dietrich dug into my shoulder and held me until we parked in the shade of the plane’s wing. Jubilant, he leapt out to claim his yarns, marking pens, and silks and, remarkably, Luba’s Hebrew National kosher hot dogs and Eskimo Pie ice cream in dry ice.
“Are those for her? When is she coming back?”
He shrugged, ripped my heart out. “She ordered the ice cream and hot dogs before she left. I forgot to cancel the order.” I got the impression that giving me pain gave him power.
Alienated by Luba’s absence, I felt increasingly disaffected with my father. One day in his study, I dared to announce to him, “I have a lecture. Will you listen?”
“To you?”
“I always listen to you.”
“Do you mind if I do my push-ups while I listen?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Alright then, lecture.” And instead of push-ups, he lifted his fists to his chest, dancing around me, shadowboxing in my face. “Go on. Gentlemen…”
“Gentlemen, there are two languages.” I wanted to punch him in the face but forced myself on as he circled and twirled and feinted and came too close, threatening. Uppercut, right hook, lunge, squat, hop. I so wanted to punch him; he wanted to shut me up. “One for the people and one for the kings. All the earth was one speech and one language. That makes two. Because the noble written alphabet came from the stars. Because the stars are fixed, and the orientation of the earth periodically reverses, every place read the stars and saw the same constellations, making up the same names and stories, making up the alphabet. The moon moved through the constellations and wrote the alphabet.” I could hit him. I could trip him. I was on the roof and I was right. “And the clusters of letters and animals in the zodiac, like the letters K, L, and M, appear everywhere, the same zodiac. Because it all comes from the stars.”
“That’s it?” He dropped into a desk chair.
I was so angry I could barely breathe.
For my insolence, I was punished with the longest lecture he’d ever had me record for him. It was so long my mind and my hand were paralyzed, to say nothing of my heart. I hated him. I would understand much later in life that Dietrich despised me because what he had to struggle for word by word I understood without work, without walking his endless paths. Snap. Understood. Stars. I was the one with the Ouija Board.
I learned to avoid conflict by keeping my mouth shut. I was his shadow no more.
His mind floated to the ceiling, his thoughts captured in the wools and silken labels on his fans.
A gleaming ironwood ladder was installed in his study, upon whose platform two iron German eagles served as grips. He rolled his ladder about the room, climbed it, arranging or rearranging the words and connections. “Seminal, Axel. These words inseminate each other, descend from each other.” He would reach into his quivering wooly heaven, pluck a word, add a word, tie one word to another. When he touched one hanging word, the entire ceiling trembled. There were so many lengths of yarn and snippets of labels, one could barely see the dark beams of the ceiling.
I was often sent scrambling up the ladder to find a word, to add a word, to attach wool. I sat for hours with a large-eyed needle, sewing wool onto the labels before Dietrich marked them and I hung them into the trembling, quivering heaven of words.
“Go there, to the Egyptian fan. There is an ancient connection between the Egyptian and the Mayan. You see S, B, and K? Crocodile in both languages.” Dietrich strode around the room, his head in some vast and distant arena, hands folded behind his back, vowels broadening into High English, voice deepening, even more pompous. “Lecture now, Axel. Sharpen your pencils.”
“Dietrich, it’s past lunchtime. That’s four times Maria has rung the gongs. Can we please stop to eat lunch?” He was making progress, but I needed to eat.
“Lunch. Yes, lunch. Someday, Axel, I won’t be lecturing in the wilderness to imbeciles.” I was sure he meant me.
The spiderweb of ceiling words grew denser, more intricate, more complex. Climbing the ladder, armed with his broomstick, he had me push him around the room under his ceiling of words, around and around, dizzy and crazy, spinning.
Sometimes I pushed him in large circles, sometimes in tight circles, sometimes in Mobius strips. He preferred to be pushed around on the ladder in the figure eight. “Stop! Go to Nox, aah. Nox. Add obnoxious. Now tox, toxic, all Og, Oc, ox, octave, eight, Oxford. All go back to Oc. Good. If Oc is the God, then not-Oc, noxious is the invisible power.” Dietrich’s mind must have resembled that ceiling: One clue burst into five more and each of them again produced more and more connections.
“It’s alive, Axel. Language has the same reproductive structure as life. Reproduce, mutate, all of it. Look at that: ten words on purple silk. Hermann would give his eyeteeth for these. He’ll never get them. He wants an alphabet. Oh, we’ll give him one, but he won’t know what to do with it. It will take Hermann’s people years. If ever. History is forgotten. Politics shapes lives. Friends become enemies, enemies friends. It will happen.”
One day we heard Cecilia sniffling outside the door of Dietrich’s study.
“Axel, send her away,” said my father. “I can’t think with that little cur around.”
I was on the ladder, tying new words. “What do you want, Cissy?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled through the door in her tiniest voice. Eight years old but she still acted like a baby.
“Then go away,” Dietrich said.
I climbed down, opened the door, and took her small hand. “Do you want to come in?” I asked. The door locked behind me.
“I want to ride the ladder.”
“Just don’t let her touch anything,” Dietrich said.
“I’ll watch her.”
I finished tying his words on fans as Cissy walked around his room, her hands stuck deep in her apron pockets. I did not like the way she was smiling. Watching her wander Dietrich’s library, I realized there was nothing absentminded about her. There was something fanged about her smile. Her hands were safely in her pockets. Her face was unreadable.
“Now, ladies and gentleman, honorable colleagues,” Dietrich continued. He bumped into Cissy. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to get a ride on the ladder. Axel said I could.”
“Shh, Cissy, he’s lecturing.” Cissy stood silently beside me, tugging my sleeve. “Okay, if you climb the ladder, I’ll push you.”
I helped her onto the ladder, held her hand while I gently pushed the ladder. “Now you point, and I’ll push you in that direction.” She sat on the platform, gripping the eagles as I rolled her around the room. Her eyes were wide. She pointed to the window, then to the central fan. I rolled her there. She looked up into the brain of words, the tethers and ties of language—indeed, of consciousness.
“Axel, I need these pencils sharpened,” called Dietrich. “Mus, messiah, mistake, mess, music, mushroom, mister, sister, Ishtar, mystery, history, hiss…snake.”
Volker, our barn man in Germany, always told me bad things happen in threes. If a cow died or a dog ate her puppies, I would wait in alarm for the next disaster. Interesting word: dis-aster, a problem in the stars. Luba’s leaving was the first disaster. I braced myself for the second and third disasters. But perhaps things don’t happen in threes; things just happen, and we think in threes because of the fairy tales we were raised with. And then and then and then.
The pencil sharpener was in a closet. When I came from the closet with a clutch of sharpened pencils, Cissy was on the ladder, blowing on and fingering the labels of the Mus fan, smiling her fanged smile as they fluttered.
Mus, muse, amuse, misdemeanor, mis, music.
My back turned, I heard Cecilia scratch a kitchen match against the grip of the eagle on the ladder and light the Mus fan on fire. It took me a beat too long to register that this was the second disaster. I smelled the sulfur of the matchstick and the smoke of the flames. And then. And then I heard Maria frantically ringing the breakfast gongs although it was well past morning.
And then.
Number three: Dr. Hermann was outside the study door, calling in: “Knock, knock, who’s there? Spinach. Gott im Himmel. I smell smoke. Ach du liebe. Open the door!” The outside was locked. Volker may have been correct about threes: Luba, Cecilia, Dr. Hermann. And then.
Oblivious to Cecilia, Dietrich thought only of Dr. Hermann. “Hermann must not see the purple words.” My father grabbed my arm, pointing above our heads to the ten purple words—his treasured originals. I hit the wall switch that turned on the rotating ceiling fans. This caused the fires to spread. It danced on the ceiling.
“Open the door, Baron. I said open—”
I opened the door for Dr. Hermann as the ceiling fans circled, flaming chandeliers above our heads, crackling.
I yelled, “Get water, Dr. Hermann! Get help.”
He ran off, shouting for water. Cissy jumped off the ladder and fled the room while we stomped on the wriggling fire. Dietrich pissed on the burning labels. I followed suit.
He zipped up his pants and stood in front of his smoke-filled room, considered the scorched ceiling, the embers of red and white threads on the floor, curled like worms, said very clearly, “I will no longer put up with the intrusion of madness in my home!”
The pilot Grevaldo and two barn men arrived with buckets of water, Maria with a rolling pin and a pistol. My father’s work was destroyed.
Dr. Hermann stomped up the stairs. “What about the words, Dietrich?”
When his answer came, his voice struggled for strength. “We begin again. I know the direction now. It should take less time.” And he would say no more until Dr. Hermann left.
Soon after his departure, Cecilia came out of my bedroom, slid against the wall, and crept downstairs into Maria’s arms.
“Twisted mind to match a twisted body!” Dietrich shouted after her from the doorway to his study. He turned to me. “She is as vindictive as her mother and as insane as Wolf. Occam’s razor, Axel. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”
“You care more about your words than your own child!”
He snapped to attention, walked to the window, swung around to me. “Cecilia is not my child. She is my brother’s child. Wolf’s child.”
Cissy might have been Uncle Wolf’s daughter, but she was of the same twisted cloth as Dietrich. A man who doesn’t care is more dangerous than one who does.
My mother’s curse pounded in my heart, in my heat: Maybe you should remind yourself who your father really is, who you will become.
The floor was carpeted with flickering ashes, and the beams and ceiling fans were stripped of his words. Dietrich stomped around the room. “We’ll get this cleaned up straightaway and begin again. But you remember much of this, and you still have your notes, don’t you? Go to your room and write down everything you remember. We will begin again in the morning. This time we can be more certain of our connections. Take the ruler back to Maria. Ruler.” His face froze. “Solomon knew the measurements of the universe and built his temples accordingly. The ruler.”
Nothing further was said about Cissy. I left the study as if I weren’t in a hurry.
A few days later, kicking and screaming in an epic tantrum, my sister Cecilia was taken to the convent in O Linda, to tend to river orphans and be an orphan herself. Within weeks, Uncle Wolf accessed his Nazi riches and had the convent restored. Dietrich installed the Madonna on a new altar and paid for a dozen new mattresses.
Cecilia was, we hoped, happy, but I doubted it. Happiness was not in her.
Later, as she grew, she sometimes came to visit our housekeeper Maria and Also Maria, still small-boned, thin, sullen, empty. I would find the Marias in the kitchen teaching Cecilia how to darn socks, how to knit, how to fine-stitch and crochet.
As the years passed, she began to look more and more like our mother: small, bird-like, intense, with blinking eyes. When she visited Maria, Cecilia would look up at me with a blank face. I left gifts for her: chocolate bars and hair ribbons for her braids. She took them but said nothing. Maria and Cecilia ate from a large wooden bowl filled with a slurry of tapioca and Pepsi-Cola. Cecilia wore strange, loose dresses and aprons sewed by someone in the convent. She became gnome-like and secretive. She was no longer like us, if she had ever been.
“Now Jesus loves her,” Maria assured me.
We were sad, relieved, confused. We were safer away from each other. But I had no place to escape to. After Luba’s disappearance, Cecilia’s was even more disconcerting.
How I longed to find another self, a braver self. I envied Cecilia that at least she had escaped, that someone loved her, even if it was only the distant Jesus.
I wanted to find another self, or my own self. From my bedroom late at night, I heard Dietrich whistling Strauss and lecturing to the Royal Society. The wooly heaven of fans in his study would be reinstalled. Nothing troubled him.
Chapter Twelve
It had taken an unusually long time, but, from weak roots, I had sprouted into a tall exemplar of Aryan manhood. My father approved of the parts of me that resembled his younger self, but he hated my braid—now down to the small of my back.
At Willi’s request, which could not be easily refused, once a week I dressed in white pants and a white shirt, climbed into the motorboat with Grevaldo, and headed downriver to O Linda to visit with Willi’s daughter, Margaret. Willi—our erstwhile spymaster and with whom she lived; in some undefined way, her father—would send Margaret and me from his pawnshop to visit in the dark recesses of the Hideaway just next door.
Sometimes Mohammed asked us to sweep the floors or count liquor bottles. He told us tall tales of the forest. He stank of turtle oil. He ate countless fish fried in the stuff, as well as formidable amounts of olives from the great glass jar on the bar. Even though he offered me a handful, he himself was so dirty, I knew better than to eat any.
One melancholy day when Luba was still away, as Margaret counted bottles, Mohammed gave me a beer; then, instead of into the olive jar, he shoved his hand between my legs, squeezed, smiled. “Well, Young Baron, so now you are a big Baron. Manhood has arrived.” He released my privates, leaned on the bar, “Listen to me. Stay away from your father’s woman. Don’t touch her. Don’t go near her. You hear me?”
