The Puttermesser Papers (28 page)

Remez
is the allusive sense; that which is hinted at or inferred.

Drosh
is the induced sense; an interpretation; that which requires investigation and must be drawn out. A theory, in

short.

Sod
, ah,
sod
: this is the secret meaning.

In Paradise, it must be said at once, only Scriptural languages are spoken. You will recognize Hebrew (of course), Sanskrit, and Arabic. The tongues of other hallowed texts may be less familiar; yet all these sacred tongues are interchangeable—i.e., their speakers are not aware of any differences, whether in their own speech or in the speech of other paradisal denizens. Puttermesser, for instance, imagined she was uttering the syllables of her native New York; in actuality, she was speaking the archaic Hebrew, bold and blunt, of Genesis. —But to continue:

Paradise in its obvious sense
: it is where you find yourself when you die. (Simple!)

In the allusive sense
: there are hints in Paradise of how your life deserves to be judged. Also hints of indifference to all that.

Paradise interpreted
: this Puttermesser is sure to accomplish.

The secret meaning of Paradise
: it resides solely in the pupil of the Eye of God.

Even before her ascent to this place, these formulations were not new to Puttermesser. What chiefly struck her was that
PRDS
in all its branches had nothing to do with any idea of the future: yet wasn't Eden particularly known as the World-to-Come? So here was still another misapprehension: Puttermesser, like all mortals, had erroneously assumed that Paradise
was
the future. It was, she thought, immortality.

But as she wandered through its various neighborhoods, she came on living persons, in full health; she was certain they had not died. There were theaters and concert halls and movie houses and video shops; there were poetry readings. She stopped to listen to one of these: a middle-aged Russian, disheveled, red-haired, out of breath, a trifle irascible. His Old Church Slavonic, recited at a rapid clip, had the explicit inflections of the streets that sidle away from the Nevsky Prospekt. And then (this was perhaps
remez
) Puttermesser understood that all this was what in an earthly vocabulary would be called hallucination. Surely the living were not in Paradise. She looked around for W. H. Auden, who had befriended the Russian poet, and who was unarguably dead. But she saw and heard only the still-alive and lively Russian. There were flowers at his feet; she recognized tulips, red, yellow, and white, and gladioli, and violets, and a patch of tiny impatiens. The trees were
indistinguishable from earthly trees. Everything had an inner fluorescence.

It was plain, then (she had arrived at
drosh
), that Paradise was the place—though it was not exactly a
place
—where she could walk freely inside her imagination, and call up anything she desired. But anything she might call up would inevitably be from the past—what else had she brought with her, if not the record of her own life? Yet if, as she now somehow knew, there was, in fact, no past or future in Paradise—and only a puzzling present, with a flesh-and-blood not-yet-resurrected poet declaiming from a lectern in a flowery realm famously reserved only for the deceased—then what was it she was actually calling up?

The lost, the missing, the wished-for. The unfinished and the unachieved. Not the record of her life as she had lived it, but as she had failed to live it. If she was curious about a poet (and yes, she was curious about the Russian, who, like her own papa, had escaped a ferocious tyranny; and also she was a little bewildered by him, even a little suspicious, because hadn't he once slyly declared for polytheism, or at least against monotheism?)—well, there he suddenly was. She could hear him out; she supposed she could, if she liked, ask him anything at all, and he would have to answer her; he was, after all, a simulacrum, a palpable vision, and wholly subject to her newly celestial will. Whereas—while she lived—he had been a remote figure, inaccessible, distantly lofty and strange. She had felt his exclusions, his hauteur, his rebuff.

But now the whirlwind of her mind could command his presence. His presence or anyone's! She had only to
think
,
and the thought would appear incarnate before her. Ah, delightful! Splendid! It was, in truth, Paradise.

No rebuff could go unrepaired.

At nineteen she had been enormously in love, and was rejected.

The man's name was Emil Hauchvogel. He was twenty-two. He had a beautiful head, molded like a Roman sculpture, and he was a student of philosophy. His voice was blurred, very faintly, by a thread of foreignness pulled along the edge of the vowels; as a child of eleven or twelve he had fled from Hitler's Germany with his parents. In Frankfurt his father had been a well-off wholesaler, and though the family had arrived as impoverished refugees, Emil's father worked his way up and managed to establish himself securely enough in the same business. Emil reflected this paternal striving and success: he had the confident air of a young lord, but not in the sense of easy inheritance. He was trained for ambition.

Emil's college was small, bucolic, venerable, revered. Puttermesser's college, a patient subway ride from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, was urban, mobbed, brash. She too longed for philosophy, but it was too hard for her. Her brain was not subtle enough: desire wasn't capacity. There were questions she could barely grasp the import of, and theories that floated by like so many indefinable cloud-shapes. What did Thrasymachus intend? Was it possible to trust the Nicomachean Ethics? Is pleasure an activity or merely a feeling?

One morning in early January she read a notice on the bulletin board just outside the cafeteria:

NEW ENGLAND WINTER WEEKEND RETREAT

SUBJECT
:
CAN THERE BE MORALITY WITHOUT GOD
?

Puttermesser knew what she thought. An ethical imperative without a divine order to implant and enforce it was unlikely, was no imperative at all. The unheated bus rattled and groaned uphill for miles on a narrow highway between wintry fields. The claws of naked branches were black against the snow. In her old galoshes Puttermesser's feet grew numb. The dozen other students ate their sandwiches or catnapped; now and then they sang; the pompoms on their hats bounced. Wound in scarves, clapping their woolen mittens in time with the singing, the live breath steaming like teakettles from their rounded mouths, patches of red brightening their cheeks, they seemed as remote from metaphysics as their lunch bags and knapsacks. Yet weren't they all heading for Emil Hauchvogel's college to talk of God?

Emil met the bus in the parking lot behind the dormitories. The dorms were mostly empty, he explained: everyone had gone home for New Year's, and the little group of philosophers would have the whole campus nearly to themselves. It wouldn't all be High Thought—in one of the halls there were skis and sleds ready for use. It was instantly clear that Emil was the organizer. Puttermesser got off the bus with cramped legs and a full bladder. Wherever she turned, the ground was white. The low college buildings peeped out of the snow like
miniature Swiss chalets. Puttermesser's citified heart rose in her well-bundled ribs.

First there was toast and vegetarian soup, and then came the sledding. It was already dusk. Puttermesser went on her belly down the long hill, forgetting to steer: she ended half-buried in a snow mound. “That's not the way,” Emil said. He was in charge of everything and everyone. At the top of the hill he eased himself down flat on the sled, and Puttermesser climbed on. The length of her lay against his back and rump and thighs. His legs stuck out well beyond the curve of the runners. The two of them rushed downward like some mythical double creature, or else it was only the wind that rushed; her body resting on Emil's, Puttermesser felt warm, cradled, lazy, even sleepy. The slope seemed infinitely longer than before, the descent dozingly slow. “See?” Emil said when they reached the bottom of the hill. “It's all in the
hands
. You have to control the direction, you can't just go hurling yourself any old way.”

And after that he paid her no attention at all. From a little distance she saw him helping with the straps of a pair of skis. The skier breathed out teakettle steam and had ruddy cheeks under a pompomed wool hat; nevertheless she had not been on the bus. She belonged to Emil's own tribe; she belonged to this superior landscape. Streamers of white-blond bangs swayed under the wool hat. With a fierce and ready shriek she plunged through the blue-black dark, a flying crescent on a falling path.

In the morning all the philosophers, still scarfed and mittened, met in a latticed gazebo. Heaters had been set up in the middle of a ring of benches; icicle spears hung
down from the eaves. The shorter icicles were bunched like bundles of clear fat chandeliers. The sunlight on the snow cut blind streaks across Puttermesser's sight. It was too brilliant, and far too cold, despite the wafting heaters, to sit still. The philosophers from Emil's college—the ones who were at home here, the natives—grouped themselves all together on one side of the gazebo, apart from the philosophers who had come on the bus. “The city mice and the country mice,” Emil objected, and made everyone stand up and change places. As for the cold, he said, the clarity of the air would clarify thought. “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” he said. “That's Kierkegaard,” muttered yesterday's skier.

Then Emil lectured. His thesis was religion and art. At the beginning of all civilizations, art and religion were ineluctably fused: a god was a statue or a painting. The gods spoke through their physical representations. Ra, for instance, the supreme Egyptian deity, expressed himself through a golden disk atop a falcon's head; “my skin is of pure gold,” sang the sun-priests of Ra.

“You see?” Emil said, pacing around the heaters. The sun illumined the pale disks of his eyes; he had turned himself into Ra. How beautiful he was! In the dazzling morning light the skin of his face was of pure gold. “Once the God of the Jews forbade art in religion, then art was released—released forever—to follow its own spoor. Once art was exempted from idol-making, from religious duty, it could see what it wished, it could record what it liked, it could play and cavort and distort—whatever it pleased! And all without obligation to sanctity. Pious obeisance was dismissed—unwanted! Excluded! Art was free to be free!
The Second Commandment had kicked it out of religion! You see?” Emil said again, looking all around; he had a princely pleasure in his own wit.

But was it wit in praise or dispraise? Puttermesser, bewilderment contracting her throat (unless she was starting to catch cold?), could not be sure. Was he mocking the Second Commandment, or lauding it? Was he an atheist or a believer?

“So if art can thrive best in the absence of religion,” Emil concluded, “if in fact there
must not
be any religious connection in order to have a truly autonomous art, then the same applies to morality, doesn't it? Art didn't really become art until it shucked off God. And morality won't really be morality until it too gets rid of God.”

A jumble of city voices protested. “That doesn't follow!” “You haven't proved it about art anyhow!” “Sophistry!”

But all the country philosophers applauded.

Puttermesser was silent. She knew what she thought: she thought Emil was shocking. He was certainly a novelty, but he was more arrogant than novel. He was spontaneously eloquent, but he was too self-aware: he was an egotist. She thought all these things, and felt her own shame, because she had nothing to say, she could invent nothing so startling; she was empty. But how beautiful he was, how vehement, how extraordinary were his mind-passions! He was against God with all the fervor of a mystic; he was a purist; he found even the idea of God to be perfectly useless. And he was a visionary in search of converts against God.

Puttermesser understood she was being shaken with a violent infatuation.

By now all the philosophers had spoken, one by one, each in turn. The gazebo was serious and orderly. Icicles, warmed by the sun, were leaking idle drops from their tips. The dripping sounds fell in a syncopated pattern. Puttermesser sat, a pariah in her muteness; a simpleton.

Emil was standing right in front of her. “You didn't come all this way just to be obstinate? In which case you could at least disclose which view your obstinacy intends to serve,” he said.

Puttermesser could not answer.

“You're obstructing the movement of the meeting.
Say
something.”

She offered miserably, “It's God who makes us good.”

“That's how children think,” Emil said.

The city and the country philosophers sent out their morning smiles. What contempt they had for her!

Emil bent and said quietly into her ear, “You're not being very effective here, are you?”

And this whispered judgment—
you're not being very effective here
—infiltrated Puttermesser's brain with a deadly permanence. It stung; it endured; she remembered it always. He had cut her down, he had belittled her.

A second meeting in the gazebo was called for the afternoon. Emil had supplied everyone with a printed schedule. The philosophers ignored it; instead they went out to the hill to slide and flirt. The two camps were willing enough, by now, to mix freely, and in the sharp light of the horizonless snow Puttermesser could no longer tell who was city and who was country: all those reddened frozen faces, and the smell of damp wool, and teasing spite spiraling
into laughter. God and morality were left unresolved. The laughter rolled up and down the hill. Puttermesser lashed her scarf over her nose and mouth, butted her head into the wind, and trekked out to the gazebo.

Only Emil was there.

“Nobody came,” he said.

But
she
had come; was she nobody?