The World as I Found It (40 page)

For the time, Russell pinned his hopes on
Forstice
. Ottoline was dying to read it, and he did nothing to dampen her expectations when he told her — and rather conservatively, he felt — that
Forstice
, if not outstanding, was at least quite solidly good. But still, Russell held to his original decision to let the manuscript
breathe
for a month before he or anyone else dipped into it. He was so excited. The truth was, he could hardly remember what he had written.

Ottoline was even more excited when he said that her Lausanne letters had been the inspiration. Sly dog … Could he lure her home with a book? Apparently not. As it was, Russell did not see the radiantly eliminated Ottoline until the second week of September —
two
unconscionable weeks after her return, when she finally got around to inviting him down to Studland.

This time, as part of her own new spirit, Ottoline was entirely frank. Straightaway, she said they would not be alone. But to her surprise he did not cavil or moan. This, he was at pains to show her, was part of
his
new spirit, part of the aftermath of
Forstice
, which he said had given him a more stoical, resigned attitude to life. Expecting little, Russell was gratified to see that he rather enjoyed himself during those three days. At bottom, he knew that his feelings for Ottoline had dimmed, but this, he felt, was to be accepted rather than regretted. He was not unhappy or happy; rather, he told himself, he was
provisionally
happy — content for now to see what life would bring, since life must bring something.

Stoic that he was, he didn't tell Ottoline about his possible cancer, though he did say he had seen the dentist. And she had to admit that his breath
was
better, even if sex was not. For her, the most insurmountable hurdle was still the cold buried mass of his intellect — this, like his views on religion, she would never eliminate. For the life of her, she couldn't see the spiritual change he said he'd undergone. Oh, she could see he was changing, all right — and rapidly. Only he was not changing in quite the ways he thought.

Not long after his return from Studland, Russell was relieved, but not very, to be told that he did not have cancer. He was far more anxious a few days later when
Forstice
returned from the typist and he sat down, with trembling hands, to read what he had wrought. Dwarfs had been set loose in the temple of Art — nothing was as he remembered it. Impatient within ten pages, he was pained after thirty, then wincing as he haplessly skipped from chapter to chapter. At last, deeply chastened, he slipped the manuscript into a drawer and went for a walk, this time not saying a word to anyone and indeed wishing to crawl off somewhere and die.

Several people, including Ottoline, said they liked
Forstice
, but he knew, at bottom, that they were just being kind. Still, Russell would outlive
Forstice
and Wittgenstein; by growing steeply, hugely famous, he would survive them all. This was part of the transformation in him that Ottoline saw that summer. She saw it most clearly the day before he left Studland, while peering down through the viewing lens of her Kodak Graflex camera. Ottoline liked snapping her famous friends and guests — fodder for her photo album and the memoirs to come. She thought it immensely revealing, how a person faced the camera. Whereas some ignored or tolerated the lens, Russell clearly welcomed its intrusion. Canting his head, he would strike a triumphant grimace, his pipe poised like a pin to burst the world's worthless bubbles. And yet the way he would draw his chin into his neck! Like a tortoise sucking into its shell, she thought, as he stared back with those cold, reptilian eyes. Yes, even then Ottoline could see that protective carapace forming. Russell was just becoming generally known, and there, peering down into the milky lens, Ottoline could see how the camera's snout made him puff out his character. She could see him striving to show his best, most brazen side, and not the tentative one floating in that haze of light, shrinking from time's judgments.

Ottoline relished the power the camera gave her over him. There!
Like that!
she would order, and there he would stand, at full attention, trying to summon forth his posterity. Framing him in the jiggling lens, Ottoline would wait for perhaps a second longer than necessary, just to see him frozen there, waiting for the shutter's jaws to snap.

D
EPARTING FROM BERGEN
on the
Sweimfoss
, Wittgenstein had sent Russell a short card.

The
Sweimfoss
was now about a hundred miles up the fjord, anchored for the night in a basin among a nest of mountains. Since they'd left Bergen, three days had passed — or four; in that endless daylight, it was easy to lose track of the time. Moored midway between dawn and dusk, the sky was filled with a deep, golden red darkness, a pooling, whorling red like the heartwood of cedar. Peering up into that static Northern summer light, Wittgenstein had the sense of time suspended, floating in place, then resuming like those hypnotized birds above who, sinking, would suddenly remember to flap their wings.

The
Sweimfoss
was an old, woodburning hauler eighty feet long and low slung in the middle, with a blunt bow that rose like the toe of a wooden shoe. Red cinders flew out her stacks, and oily rust and beads of pitch ran down her white wooden sides. In her hold was the sour, gamy scent of cheese, sour milk, dried halibut, half-cured reindeer hides and other cargo she carried. From the tall steeringhouse aft, the captain would blow his steam whistle as they made their endless stops at lumber camps, villages and outlying farms, where some dawdling boy would lead down a plow horse pulling a sledge to fetch groceries and mail-order tools from this floating post office and commissary.

Wittgenstein wanted a slow, cheap boat where they'd put him to work, and the captain and the mate, who spoke some German, were happy to oblige. Chipping paint. Wiping and oiling the steam engine. Grilling ham and potatoes, salted herrings and easy eggs. It felt so good to be active — healthy, unthinking, physical. Coming around a bend in the fjord, he might see ten miles of glassy water, water sometimes five hundred fathoms deep under a faint gloss of mist. Wittgenstein wished now to be as still and deep as these glacier-carved canyons. Slowly, a peaceful vision sense was floating down over him, an empty-headed gazing, like crossing one's eyes in order to see. Under the four-square light, he would hear the distant thunder of summer avalanches. Looking up, he would see misty flumes pealing down the fjord's sheer rock walls, the water tearing to rags, then to mist that infused his nostrils with the smell of rain. As through clearest crystal, the light streamed through him, with nothing now to impede it. Like a slow rain, the sky was falling, light to air, air to light; like the sound of a single struck key, it left an afterimage that slowly burned on his closed eyelids.
Red sky. Red Wittgenstein
.

It was midnight, and everyone was below asleep. With him on deck the only living thing was a pale brown cow with little knobbed horns who lay kneeling on her forelegs in a bed of straw. She was a sweet, docile bossy with a broad face, long ears and a heavy, four-fingered udder. Earlier, pressing his head against her soft, gurgling flank, Wittgenstein had milked her, thinking about God as the hot milk squirted in the tin bucket,
ploot ploot ploot
. Then as now he had felt the aspect of God. It was the imposition of that single struck key, that sense of being in agreement with the world and at last consigned to it.
Red sky. Red cow. Red Wittgenstein
.

He had been in such a strange mood in these weeks since his father had died: excited, then more subdued, with an unaccountable sense of well-being and happiness. His sister Gretl had not been so sanguine about him — she felt he was much too calm. In fact, she wondered if his father's death had even hit him, or if subconsciously he even believed it. Not believe it? he had asked. In contrast to his feelings at Christmas, Wittgenstein was not angry at his sister for saying this; if anything, he was faintly intrigued. How could he not believe his father was gone? he asked. For weeks, he had watched him waste into a long, dangling ash, eaten up with cancer. As it happened, he was the only one present when the old man finally died.

All that night the dying man had held on, until his family was wrung out with blear weariness. At last there was only Wittgenstein, sitting on a chair beside his father's bed. It was he who went downstairs to tell them it was over, and it was he who then led his mother to the sickroom to see, as it were, what had formed or transformed in that bed, the residue of a life. Approaching the open door, he could see how his mother dreaded what she would find. Why? he wanted to ask. She had already seen the worst. In the space of three months, she had watched her robust husband age thirty years. Why this dread? What was to fear? A few minutes later, when his siblings returned and they all stood mutely by the bed, he found himself wondering what had come over him during those last few minutes. Physically he was standing in the same room as his family, but otherwise he was not part of their world at all. He was forgiven and free, as was his father. Loss there was, but to his surprise there was no longer heat, nor spite, nor anger. What was sorrow? Where did sorrow go after the last spent fumes of a soul? Looking down at his father's wrecked, still warm body, he saw only that a dying man's suffering was over. Was he to be
sorry
for this? The morning sun was on the sill. Shrunk beneath the covers was an animal starved and cannibalized and finally expelled from his own corrupting body.
Sorrow?
Was that the word for this?

No, he thought, the dead don't need the alms of our sorrow. If he was sorry for anyone now, it was for his mother. Frau Wittgenstein gazed helplessly at her children, and then, seeming to think she must say or do something, she suddenly squealed,
I can't
— and covered her mouth with her balled-up handkerchief, ashamed at her outburst. This upset Mining, who clutched her mother and started weeping. The others — Gretl, Paul and Kurt — were distinctly uncomfortable with this scene, which only made them more uneasy about their own contradictory feelings, caught somewhere between
good-bye
and
good riddance
.

As through a glass, Wittgenstein could see their grief in all its guises and shades, its manifold traps. Miserable, guilty, ambivalent, Gretl looked at him as if to say,
And what are you so pleased about?
How was he to explain happiness coincidental with death and not sound callous, unbalanced or vengeful? How to account for this desire to venture out into the free air to watch the light pour like sand through his fingers? An hour before, a debt had been forgiven. The golem had been newly chartered into a whole man. But he couldn't rightfully say this — it would seem crazy, fishy. And not
seem
, either. From Gretl's expression, he could see his behavior
did
seem crazy, but inwardly he was still beaming and did not care.

The preceding two months had not been easy.

From the day Wittgenstein had arrived home, there had been a subtle competition over the sick man, a competition moreover that was largely the sick man's doing. Mining had been the one to care for him, but as his condition grew more severe and compromising, Karl Wittgenstein personally hired two nurses, heavy Slavic women with smooth, dark skin and tightly rolled black hair. Ostensibly, he did this so as not to overburden his wife and children, yet it also gave him a heightened sense of control over not only this uncontrollable disease but his family as well. He would not be hostage to his family's good graces.
He
would remain a sovereign state, with the nurses acting as a buffer between them.

This almost immediately created bad feelings, especially as the nurses appropriated the sick man as their patient, dictating, under the broader fiats of his doctors, meals, sleep schedules, visits. It was uncanny how the nurses would joke, wheedle and even boss him about once the door was closed. Karl Wittgenstein seemed to thrive on it. In the midst of his sickness and his growing helplessness, the two fleshy nurses pampered him in a way he never would have tolerated from Mining or even his wife, who one morning tearfully referred to them as
those prostitutes
. In dictating and enforcing visiting hours, the two nurses also fell into friction with the servants, especially with Herr Stolz, Karl Wittgenstein's personal butler of thirty-four years. The nurses even angered that most unlikely nurse of all, Gretl. Every afternoon, Gretl would bring fresh flowers from her greenhouse. Arriving around four, she would emerge from her car with all the grim vivacity of one on her way to a pressing business appointment. Freud might have lessened Gretl's anger and anxiety, but he needed to do nothing about her psyche, which floated over life like a full-drafted ship, always managing to displace more pain than it carried. Nevertheless, this impending death was a constant drain on her, and she was absolutely furious when the older nurse told her one day that she would have to leave. Can you imagine? she told Wittgenstein. Asking his own daughter to leave! And in that tone! I looked at Father, but of course he just lay there, letting that idiotic
what's-her-name
speak for him. And I thought, You're even managing your own death, aren't you? Even now you must wrest control, mustn't you?