The Executor (10 page)

“There is no telephone here. I hope you shan’t find it inconvenient to use the one in the kitchen.”

I nodded, taking it all in. The door that opened onto the back porch was inset with a leaded window. Most of the panes were clear, but one had been painted. I looked closer: a tiny hunting scene, a man and a dog watching a clearing in the forest, the forequarters and head of a buck visible through the foliage. Its whispers of craftsmanship, of history, enticed me. Through it I saw the pair of rattan chairs, the quince tree, the yard with its thin snow cover. My mind skipped ahead to warmer months; with her permission, I could put up a hammock.... Most of all I relished the silence. I could hear the lightbulbs burning.

“I think a small portable heater might be in order,” she said. “Otherwise I trust it meets your needs.”

I nodded again.

“Very well. Now, if you’ll permit me, I should like to show you one more thing.” She headed back into the hall. “I do believe this shall seal your fate.”

 

 

AS WE MOVED DOWN the other fork, the darkness seemed to congeal, and I touched the wall to steady myself. Up ahead I heard a key in a lock, and then came a gush of warm yellow light. I stepped into a room about thirty-five feet square. Only later would I realize that it had once been several rooms, whose combined space accounted for nearly half the house’s footprint. At the time I was too dazzled by the abundance of riches: a spectacular herringboned floor; a bloodred Persian carpet; a cavernous fireplace outfitted with brass horsehead andirons; a grandfather clock; a globe; an antique rolltop secretary; lamps with brilliantly colored shades; foot-high sculptures in marble and bronze, Athena and Ulysses and others I could not identify; a pair of sumptuous easy chairs; between them, a round table with a leather top and brass nailheads—and above all, books. Thousands of books, the shelves jammed floor to ceiling, making up the most splendid jewel-box library I had ever seen.

“Do come in,” she said.

I wandered about, dazed. Many of the spines had faded. Of those I could read, about half were in German, the rest a mix of English, French, Latin, and Greek. Philosophy, literature, music, science, architecture, history, the shelves labeled and numbered in a spidery hand. In the corner stood an old-fashioned card catalog. This was the only part of the house that wasn’t ice-cold-to protect the paper from drying out, I would learn—and its rich woods and plush fabrics and intimacy enwombed me instantly.

“The work took two years,” she said. “These days I doubt I’d have the patience.”

I stood before the fireplace. The surrounding wall had been left free of shelving, lined instead with a green silk jacquard. The fabric was hardly visible, as most of the space above the mantel was taken up by a painting of a raven perched atop a skull perched atop a stack of books. A twig in its mouth, its head thrown back haughtily, the bird made a somber counterpoint to the lurid parakeets in the living room.

Around the painting hung several dozen photographs. Alma in a summer dress. With her father in a rowboat. Posing on a Viennese thoroughfare, blurry trams and women in high hats. Riding a bicycle. Among friends, six girls gathered around a pot of fondue, a pair of snowshoes hanging on the wall. Faces and places and laughter; a life, framed. I was spellbound. I wanted to ask about every one of them. All I managed to get out, though, was,

“Is that
Heidegger?”

I didn’t need to ask. The old potato-faced sourpuss: I knew it was him. Occupying the better part of a stone archway, hat in hand, and on his left, close enough for their arms to be touching, Alma.

“Indeed. That was a good time for him; he’d lost weight.” She laughed. “Martin never was one for exercise.”

Martin? Where was I? Who was this person? I looked at her, but she just smiled, Sphinx-like.

“So, now, Mr. Geist, my case is made. Whether I have made it successfully is up to you.” She opened her arms. “Do you need a moment to consider your decision?”

 

 

THE GIRLS WERE SAD to see me go. I promised to let them know if I heard about anyone who needed a room (and, I added to myself, was deaf).

“Where are the rest of your things?” Alma asked.

“This is it.”

“Mr. Geist. I hadn’t realized you were a monk.”

“Kyrie eleison.”

“Small c, if you don’t mind.”

On my bed she had laid out a pair of bath towels and a washcloth. “I shall instruct Daciana to change your linens when she comes.”

“Thank you so much.”

“You are quite welcome.”

My clothing fit in the highboy with room to spare. This was a good thing, as the closet turned out to be unusable, taken up by file boxes. As I set up my computer, I realized that I hadn’t bothered to consider whether she had an Internet connection. Of course not. I almost asked if I could get one, then reconsidered. I’d wait until my tenancy was more secure before I started making special requests.

I suppose I should’ve felt uncomfortable with Alma watching me unpack. But it felt like the most natural thing in the world, the two of us together.

“Your dissertation,” she said.

“In all its splendor.” I opened the closet and stuck the manuscript on a high shelf.

“Perhaps I shall read it on the sly,” she said.

“At your own risk. Remember what happened to my first advisor.”

“I would look on that as a mark of skill,” she said. “Rare is the writer who can bring his reader to the threshold of death.”

In response, I reached into the duffel and pulled out half-Nietzsche.

“Oh, Mr. Geist. Oh, how marvelous. I know just the place for it.”

In the library, she cleared space in the center of the mantel.

“Naturally, I shan’t presume. Perhaps you would prefer to keep it nearby.”

“It looks better here.”

“We are decided, then.” She stepped back and together we admired the bookend. “You have impeccable taste. It is hideous.”

“Thank you.”

“Tomorrow I shall give you keys so that you may make copies for yourself. Now, if you will please excuse me, my programs are about to begin.” She paused. “Unless you would care to join me.”

We went upstairs. I counted five doors off the landing, all closed except the last. It was there that we went. I took a rocking chair, and Alma switched on the television set.

Theme music swelled. A title filled the screen.

 

ONE LIFE TO LIVE

 

She settled into her own chair, and, in a very dry voice, said, “Suspend judgment, Mr. Geist.”

I smiled, sat back, made myself at home.

S
oon after I arrived at number forty-nine, the snow began to melt and the house warmed a few degrees, allowing me to walk around without my parka on. I ended up using my space heater sparingly. It worked almost too well, and if I slept with it on, I had to crack the window a few inches to compensate.

Our schedule was simple. An early riser, Alma was always up before me, and by the time I bathed and dressed I would find her sitting at the kitchen table with toast and tea, the radio on softly, tuned to WCRB, Handel or Bizet. We would discuss the headlines or do the crossword together. Games and puzzles, she said, kept her sharp. Her favorites were cryptics, which I’d never done before but took to quickly.

Following breakfast I would head to the library and read for several hours. Some books for the first time and some for the dozenth. Many of them were too fragile to use—she had dozens of first editions, including
Thus Spake Zarathustra
,
Nausea,
and
Being and

Time
—but merely being surrounded by them gave me a sense of peace. This is why I will never own an e-reader: because a row of books is more than a compendium of information. It’s a map of all the places your mind has been, a group of friends standing silently by to comfort you. Cocooned in books, protected by them, I felt safe, and all that had been plaguing me began to fade, my mind sloughing off the clutter of years. I read for the pleasure of reading, rather than to strip-mine for facts. People sometimes describe meditation as “relaxed wakefulness,” which phrase captures the feeling exactly. More often than not I stretched out across the carpet; that I could lie there without nodding off is proof of the quality of the holdings as well as the strength of Alma’s tea.

The one book I could not find was her thesis. I was disappointed, but I had to remember that I’d hidden my own dissertation from her; and with so many other wonderful options, it felt ungrateful to ask for anything more.

At noon I fixed us a simple lunch. Alma would quarter a chocolate bar and speak to me in German, to her the only medium suitable for capturing her youth. Prior to my moving in, we’d done plenty of talking, but always about philosophy, and I savored these pieces of biography, which over time I assembled into a coherent whole.

Born into a family of instrument makers, she had grown up in Vienna’s ninth district, Alsergrund, a ten-minute walk from Freud’s house. Every day her father would bicycle to Ottakring, near the Gürtel, where he oversaw thirty craftsmen in the making of pianos, harps, and harpsichords. Vividly she recalled for me her visits to his workshop: the close, heady smell of varnish; tools percussing; muscular men in shirtsleeves. Her father liked to tinker, and was constantly trying out designs that had nothing to do with his primary business. “The violin in the music room he made for me when I was born,” she said. “He and my mother were both very capable makers and appreciators of things, and theirs was a materialistic romance, highly sensuous in its own way. Accordingly, I distanced myself. It was my nature to be contrary. I suppose that I still am.... Well, the violin came to me freighted with expectations. I think they hoped I would grow up to become a soloist. I never had the talent. Diligence, yes. But my teachers always said that I was excessively technical. I had to get old before I understood what they meant. My sister was far superior.”

“What does she play?”

“Did. The cello. My father built it for her, as well. It was never to be, as whatever small degree of ambition she possessed was quashed when she married.”

From an early age both girls had studied English and French. Alma, showing a gift for languages, had also received instruction in classics, leading to an early fascination with philosophy. In lush detail she described the
Gymnasium
where she took her qualifying exams, the
Kaffeehaus
where she went for pastry and conversation. It was a good time to be young and curious in Vienna. You knew everyone, provided that you came from a certain class and had certain social credentials; the cast of characters she described read like roll call in nerd heaven.

“Have I told you about the time I met Wittgenstein?”

I shook my head.

“His brother Paul—he was a pianist, you know—well, after losing his arm in the War, he commissioned my father to make him a keyboard that would better cater to his impairment. That was the way they were, the Wittgensteins; they bought their way out of problems. He also had Ravel and Strauss write him left-handed concertos.

“Now, this keyboard was supposed to be bi-level, with the higher half of the register here, and the bass below, like so. I don’t believe it was ever built. I do, however, remember Paul visiting our house to discuss the design. The first time he came, my father had me fetch them schnapps, and when I did, Paul pinched me on the cheek.

“On one of these occasions he brought a second man along with him. I was quite struck by this stranger, with his hair sticking up and his eyes spinning in his head. All throughout the meeting he kept getting up and leaving the study to walk around the foyer in circles, rubbing his temples, muttering to himself as though in a trance. I sat at the top of the steps, watching him. He did not seem to see me at all; then, suddenly, he looked in my direction and asked what I was learning in school. You may recall that Wittgenstein once worked as a country schoolmaster. He held rather strong opinions on education, and when I described my curriculum to him, he began to berate me for its incompleteness, as though I had chosen it.”

“How old were you?”

“Oh, no more than five or six. I thought him barbarous. He had no notion of how to talk to people. That was clear to me even then. His brother heard the commotion and came out of the study. ‘Damn it, Ludi,’ he shouted. ‘Leave the poor child alone.’ Well, that did it. Wittgenstein gave me a look—I’d never seen a look of such hate—and he slunk off to the kitchen, where he stayed for the duration of his visit.”

My jaw was hanging open. “My God.”

“Yes,” said Alma. “He was a queer man.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“Oh, it was quite real, I assure you.”

“No, I mean—I know people who would kill to experience that.”

“Then they are stupid. Among the few things worth killing for, let us not count the right to be harassed by an arrogant madman.”

She told me frankly, and without regret, that she had never married, ignoring the pleas of relatives and suitors and setting out to see the world, traveling by boat and propeller plane, jouncing along in decommissioned jeeps driven by toothless, tattooed, rifle-toting men. China, Russia, Egypt ... all places a single woman traveling alone would have a difficult time these days. Back in the fifties? I could scarcely imagine it. She had been shot at in Afghanistan. She had survived a derailment in Punjab. She had been threatened with imprisonment in Burma. She had been in Ghana on the day Nkrumah declared independence, missing the festivities due to a monthlong bout of malaria. “Should you go,” she said, “I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to bring a mosquito net.”

Her journeys brought her, finally, to the United States, which she spent four years exploring. Among other adventures, she had ridden from New York to San Francisco on a motorcycle. Rarely did she stop in one place long enough to make friends. “This is a country more interesting for what one fails to find than what one does find,” she said. In 1963 she came to Cambridge, taking a job teaching German at a private school. Though she had intended to stay no more than a year, somehow—she faltered when she said this—somehow, this place had become her home.