The Syme Papers (16 page)

Why
he hanged himself is a difficult question – only slightly connected, I believe, to the business with Syme. I have said that the life of Ferdinand Müller is worthy of its own investigation; so it is. (How many of us can say so much for ourselves, that the eye of history should focus, even for a minute, on us alone?) And it
has
been investigated. A recent paper by Benjamin Karding in
Sozialgeschichte Heute,
titled ‘The coup that never was: Ferdinand Müller and the build-up to the July Revolution’, attempts to establish Müller’s involvement in an underground parliamentary movement, an offshoot of the student Burschenschaften, fixed on similarly liberal and nationalistic goals. Karding argues that Müller did
not
hang himself because he was caught embezzling state money; he hanged himself because of
what the money was for
–
the extent of his revolutionary ambitions (in spite of his repeated denials), which prompted the troops from Berlin to march upon Neuburg at last. But then Karding
would
argue that – for Ferdinand Müller was his great-uncle, many times great.

I called Dr Karding at his home, in the small university town of Neuburg, on the banks of the Elbe. Standing in the tiny kitchen of my flat, I explained who I was and what I was looking for. The phone was propped against the bulk of my shoulder, pressing my hot ear, while one hand (mercifully at ease again) fiddled with a pen, and the other bent apart the blinds to expose a man in a suit with his shoes off, sitting on a bench by the road. A flood of – what, fellow feeling? – surprised me, at the interrupted
loneliness
of my researches, the company I had found in an obscure corner of the 1820s. ‘Some trace of Syme,’ I urged warmly, ‘that’s all. Your
Müller gave him money in 1825 to look into his theories – strange theories, I confess, about a hollow earth.’ How could I explain them without seeming touched by Syme’s madness? ‘Still, curious things, theories,’ I babbled on. ‘And I think
his
may have turned up again …’ A new fear tied my tongue now, of giving up the secret of my prized connection, the line from Wegener to Syme.

‘Samuel
Syme, I believe,’ Karding answered, in the pure watery English of the educated German, and my heart stopped. ‘And his
theory of concentric spheres,
is it not?’ he added, with the satisfied air of a man laying down the ace of trumps. ‘Yes, yes,’ he went on, the ‘s’s hissing slightly through his teeth; as if he could not, even in a foreign tongue, quite repress his fondness for the simple affirmative, for
ja,
ja.
‘I know all about your
Lieutenant
Syme,’ he said, spitting out the word with an ‘f’, after the English fashion. ‘Perhaps, indeed, a little bit more than yourself.’

My heart sank into my stomach, a dull weight, like a swallow of tough meat. The phone nearly slipped from my shoulder, and I caught it with a brief twinge in my wrist. A century of Müllers and another, translated into Kardings, had not robbed the family of their particular turgid, teasing tone. I suddenly thought, nearly two hundred years ago, Sam himself was greeted by just such a ‘yes’, just such a mocking, equivocal
yes.
(I was hot on his heels indeed, if only I could avoid the hole he tumbled in.)

The man in the suit on the bench had finished whatever thought had kept him there, and slowly stooped to pull first one sock, then the other, over his (now dirty) bare feet. ‘If you please’ was all I said, clutching the phone, ‘if you please’ – tricked as it were into the propriety of a foreigner’s accent.

‘I
should be delighted to entertain your curiosity,’
Dr Karding answered in that
sucking
tone of his, enjoying, it seemed, a toothsome private joke,
‘if you would have the goodness to come such a long way.’

Missy Pitt, to speak in the hyperbole of understatement, was not best pleased. ‘Only a day or two,’ I assured her, covering my voice in velvet to soften its passage to her thoughts. ‘I’m flying into Hamburg and taking the train. Dr Karding will collect me at
the station. I’ll see whatever there is to see – and then I’m coming home.’ The word
collect,
carefully chosen to tickle her sense of the English, missed its mark.

‘Dr Bunyon stopped by yesterday,’ she said, adding
‘kindly’
when I sighed – as if Dr Bunyon, like Death, would go to any trouble for a busy friend. (I shudder to think how our little Blue-stocking Society has survived my absence.) ‘He said, if nothing came of this year, there wasn’t any hope, he said, in the fall. Those were his words; and
he
means
well,
Douglas. He said he’d have a word with some of the faculty, to let them keep you on, until you found something else. A year at most. “Tell him to write,” he said, and shook his head. What can I do?’ she added, in those particular soliloquizing tones that suggest someone is calling out from their
wits’ end.

‘The breakthrough is near,’ I insisted. ‘The breakthrough is near.’

My mind was made up, set fast – for once I would not flinch at the brink of success. One cannot struggle through a forest to the gate, and then turn, without attempting the key, without tinkering in the lock, without pushing firmly, pressing the weight of the full soul against the bars. At least, not twice – counting Syme himself as the first instance of our failure, the two of us twinned by a common thought, the agents of a single idea. I would redeem him now.

The breakthrough was very near indeed.

Neuburg was much as I had figured it – a pretty old town in the bend of a river, white roofs in the distance scalloped like the waves of an unsettled sea. The train from Hamburg, a sleek yellow capsule with slanted windows, arrived on the dot – and I stepped out into the nowhere of a platform on a bright July day brimming with light clouds. Dr Karding had informed me that I should recognize him by the fact that he was ‘unnecessarily tall’ – and so he was, the lengthened shadow of a man, thin and stretched, striding to greet me with his hand reached out. I followed him down the steps and into the car park, a dour, thick bulldog trotting at his heels.

He had not mentioned how
young
he was – a callow, long-nosed fellow who squeezed into his untidy VW Bug with astonishing angularity. A rather severe grey-green face, like the shaved countenance
of an El Greco, suggesting also something of the hungry faith of the Old Testament; a nervous wrist, thin and strong, forever tampering with the signal-wires of his fingers. I wondered how much of the blood of Ferdinand Müller was left in him and shuddered at a hint of the noose about his tautened neck, the bulging Adam’s apple.

His taste in music, I supposed, was all his own; for he rolled down the window, squeaking and puffing, and flicked the tape into the mouth of the deck. The dull-aching beat of techno blared across the sunny streets, like darkness audible, boom boom boom, scattering the birds from the lindens along the cobbled road. He smiled at me, wrinkling his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said, answering my thought, for I had not spoken, ‘I’ve only just got my doctorate. On the subject of my great-great-great-uncle, as it happens.’

I began to have second thoughts. And when he lowered the music and enquired after my researches, I voluntereed only the thinnest of sketches; mentioned my interest in scientific false starts, dead ends; the old battles of Neptunists and Plutonists for the heart of the earth; Syme’s place among them – avoiding all mention of Wegener, his library, the catalogue of its contents that survived the bombing, ‘fetching up’ in Tunbridge Wells after the war; those ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’.

Dr Karding in turn described something of Ferdinand Müller: his Napoleonic sympathies, curiously transformed after the victory at Leipzig into a German nationalism (a common enough evolution); formation of the Parliamentary Society on ‘borrowed’ money; its links with other revolutionary groups, from Hamburg to Württemberg; the outbreak of the July Revolution; influence of the Neuburg underground on the disastrous Frankfurter student rebellion of 1834, which adopted much of Müller’s secret constitution, a draft of which was discovered in a mass of papers in the basement of their old family house. ‘That’s where we’re headed now. I suppose, though,’ he added, arching his brows slightly, as one testing the rustle of a card up his sleeve, ‘your
particular of interest
lies in the son, Friedrich.’ He paused a minute, waiting for a cab to turn into a cobbled side-street, then continued,
‘The one who went.’

Again, a sudden caesura – stopped breath, heart, a quiet even in the flow of thoughts, the gap where recognition grows. We turned bumping at last into
our
cobbled side-street, off the Promenade along the river – Fischersallee, an elegant alley of eighteenth-century houses, tall and darkening the narrow lane. Dr Karding eased the Bug over the kerb and cut the engine. ‘Come now,’ he said, unfolding himself like a stepladder and squeezing out of the driver’s seat. ‘Shall I take you on a historical journey, the only one of its kind?’

The house was cool and damp despite the pleasant light heat of the summer day; swathes of sunshine cut into the entrance hall in a beam of dust. We stepped up a narrow staircase on to a brighter landing, then turned into the first door by the opened window. ‘Here he hung,’ Dr Karding said, ducking his head beneath the frame. ‘They have patched up the hole where the hook dug in. You see, it would not have done for me – being too tall. My feet would scrape.
Friedrich
also was built too long for such a death. But Ferdinand was a
little
gentleman. A delightful study, no? Please, sit down.’

I sat on a prim, high-backed chair by the window, high enough to catch the edge of sun drifting over the tiled roofs, glancing over the shadows of the street. ‘Of course, you know something of Friedrich?’ Dr Karding said, sat behind the antique desk in an angle of the room, trying to cross his long legs in the cramped nook between the drawers.

‘Only’, I faltered, oddly ill at ease in front of the young man, ‘that he was sent – sent to investigate Syme. Is there more?’

‘A great deal,’ he said, delicately rubbing his dry hands together, at the nubs of bone in the palm where the fingers begin. ‘Have you any idea why he was sent?’

‘I assumed’, hesitating again, ‘that it was – a job for the boys.’

‘Something of that. Something of that. Also, it made things a touch easier at first for Ferdinand to take a little off the top. Only at first, as it happened. There was more – a slight contretemps with the Prince gave the
push.
Friedrich tutored the boy for a while, you know. Quite harmless – only Friedrich had certain … predilections, I suppose, which, for his part, the Prince seemed to share. To a point.’

Dr Karding considered a minute. There is something
ageless
about the weather in an old house; the sun falls in untouched, it seems, by the century at hand, indifferent to eras and revolutions.

‘Of course, Friedrich in his way was
technically
quite brilliant.’ (This word being a particular favourite of the Germans, and loosens their tongues astonishingly – they will quite happily attribute a wealth of merits
technically
that would appal them without this curious qualification.) ‘Well-suited
intellectually
at least to “borrow” what he could from Syme and carry it home. If there was virtue in it, of course.’

‘Just as I suspected,’ I muttered, keeping my end up.

‘Have you read Friedrich’s books?
The Romantic Science? The
Philosophy of the Senses?’
Dr Karding asked, crossing his legs at last (to a mighty rumble of drawers and the scrape of wooden feet on wooden boards) and leaning back, head propped in the nest of his hands.

My end fell promptly down. No, I had read nothing by the man sent to investigate Syme, not even the suggestively titled
Romantic
Science.
‘I had been’, as Newton cried, ‘a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’ Part of the tide was about to come in.

‘Friedrich made quite a name for himself in the end,’ continued Dr Karding (the very picture of this distant great-uncle as it happens, long and thin, the shadow of a man at sunset), ‘in Berlin society, at the salon of Rahel Varnhagen, among others; and later in Paris. Played his part in precipitating what he called “the sensual revolution” – at least, he liked to think so. But I suspect that most of what he found, in Paris at least, was there already. In his way, though, he came out the best of all of them. The best of them all. Now rather neglected, I’m afraid; though perhaps his memoirs might
put that
right,
is that not the phrase? They may interest you, I think.’

There, in the little study where Ferdinand hanged himself, his grandson (many times great!) spread over the antique desk – the flowing corners richly curled, the slender legs austerely straightened‚
the delicate little feet daintily propped on the old floorboards – a sheaf of papers, yellowing, brittle with age, as though the rough sheets had been lightly
crisped
in the fire of time. Across the first of them, a flourish of Gothic script,
Erinnerungen an
Syme,
and then a muddle and scribble of dates below, crossed out, corrected, until the year 1861 proved triumphant (the year of his death), beside the name,
Friedrich Müller
.

I did not come home in a ‘day or two’; in fact, only a scramble and lay-over in Reykjavik allowed me to beat the start of term in September. The manuscript was in something of a state, as the English say, which tends to mean
no state at all:
a hodgepodge of visions and revisions, corrections and amendments, the tedious working and reworking of an internal argument Friedrich thrashed out with himself, incapable of conclusion, only evolution, like a strand of DNA, from generation to generation, or decade to decade. Dr Karding –
Benyameen,
as I came to know him, the ‘
j
’
gentled, deflected into half a yawn, the ‘i’ lengthened and squeezed into sweetness, after the German fashion – and I battled through the muddle, lifting one thought to the next, much as we might have stumbled through mud, a leg at a time. I slept on the sitting-room sofa, an antique orange affair on tender feet, curled like paws into the rug, my own feet tucked into each other, the cushions too short to accommodate them. And in some sense this posture persisted through the days: my brain bent on a continual thought, too tight to stretch forth on easy limbs and walk free.