Against the Day (123 page)

“Perhaps
they hide from visitors they do not know,” Günther shrugged. “How could
anyone’s nerves here remain unafflicted?”

From
time to time, where there was light, it was possible to make out spacious
murals, almost photographically precise, their colors unmodified by the daily interior
purifications, depicting events in the recent history of mathematics, such as
Knipfel’s
Discovery of the Weierstrass Functions
and the recently
installed
Professor Frege at Jena upon Receiving Russell’s Letter Concerning
the Set of All Sets That Are Not Members of Themselves
of von Imbiss, which
exhibited
parallax effects
as one walked past, with such background
figures as Sofia Kovalevskaia or a mischievously hydrophobic Bertrand Russell
actually entering and departing the scene, depending on the viewer’s position
and velocity. “Poor Frege,” said Günther, “just about to publish his book on
arithmetic, and this happens—here he is basically saying
‘
Kot!
’
which
is
German for ‘How much will it cost me to revise these pages?’ You see the way he
appears to be striking himself on the forehead, which the artist has cleverly
indicated with the little radiating streaks of green and magenta
. . . .
”

Signs
directed them down into a corridor vaulted with iron trusses, which led to a
series of panoramas of quite stupefying clarity known to convince even the most
skeptical of visitors, who might find themselves surrounded 360 degrees by a
view of ancient Crotona in Magna Grecia, beneath the precipitously darkening
sky of an approaching storm, with robed and barefoot Pythagorean disciples, in
some spiritual transport whose illumination was mimicked here by the
fluorescence of gasmantles soaked in certain radioactive salts
. . .
or seeming to have entered the very
lecture hall at the Sorbonne where Hilbert on that historic August morning in
1900 was presenting the International Congress with his list of the celebrated
“Paris problems” he hoped to see solved in the new century—yes, here was
Hilbert beyond a doubt, Panama hat on his head, somehow optically presented as
threedimensional and even more lifelike than a figure in a wax museum, even to
the thousands of drops of sweat running down everybody’s face
. . . .

According
to the design philosophy of the day, between the observer at the center of a
panorama and the cylindrical wall on which the scene was projected, lay a
zone
of dual nature,
wherein must be correctly arranged a number of “real
objects” appropriate to the setting—chairs and desks, Doric columns whole
and damaged—though these could not strictly be termed
entirely
real,
rather part “real” and part “pictorial,” or let us say “fictional,” this
assortment of hybrid objects being designed to “gradually blend in” with
distance until

the curving wall and a final
condition of pure image. “So,” Günther declared, “one is thrust into the
Cantorian paradise of the
Mengenlehre,
with one rather sizable set of
points in space being continuously replaced by another, smoothly losing their
‘reality’ as a function of radius. The observer curious enough to cross this
space—were it not, it appears, forbidden—would be slowly removed
from his fourdimensional environs and taken out into a timeless region
. . . .
”

“You
will want to go that way, Kit,” Yashmeen said, indicating a sign that read
zu den quaternionen
.

Of
course, of course, no business of Kit’s, they obviously needed some time
together, departure in the air, things to say
.
. . .
Released, Kit descended dark stairways uncomfortably steep even
for the moderately fit—as if modeled after some ancient gatheringplace,
such as the Colosseum in Rome, stained with Imperial intention, promises of
struggle, punishment, blood sacrifice— and stood at last before a rubber
curtain, waiting, until it was mysteriously drawn aside and he found himself
injected into overamplified Nernst light at the verge of white explosion, and
there he was, undeniably at the canalside in Dublin sixty years ago as Hamilton
received the Quaternions from an extrapersonal source nearly embodied in this
very light, the Brougham Bridge receding away in perfect perspective, the
figure of Mrs. Hamilton gazing on in gentle consternation, Hamilton himself in
the act of carving into the bridge his renowned formulae with a pocketknife
part real and part imaginary, a “complex” knife one might say, though a “real”
reproduction of it was on view in a nearby gallery dedicated to famous “props”
in the general mathematical drama, pieces of chalk, halffinished cups of
coffee, even a
thoroughly crumpled handkerchief,
said to have belonged
to Sofia Kovalevskaia and dating from Weierstrass’s time in Berlin, an example
of Lebesgue’s notorious “surface devoid of tangent planes,” an eccentric
distant cousin of the family of functions, everywhere continuous and nowhere
differentiable, with which Weierstrass, in 1872, had inaugurated the great
Crisis that continued to preoccupy mathematics even to the present—there
in its own freestanding display case, under a hemisphere of glass, illuminated
from somewhere below, preserved in a constantly renewed atmosphere of pure
nitrogen. How did this handkerchief get into its tangentless condition?
Repeatedly wadded up in a tightened fist? Opened, cried and noseblown into,
squeezed again back into a tight ball? Was it a record, a chemical memoir, of
some extraordinary passage between the kindly professor and the student with
the eloquent eyes? From wherever she had been, Yashmeen had reappeared to take
Kit’s arm and gaze for a while at the forlorn relic.

   
“She
was always my inspiration, you know.”

   
“All
jake with you and the Teutonic god there?”

“He’s
very sad. He said he will miss you. He wants to tell you himself, I think.” She
wandered off as Günther, his eyes gleaming in the shadow of his hatbrim,
approached Kit with a look of deep, though not fathomless, discontent. He was
enroute to Mexico to manage one of the family coffee plantations. His father
had been adamant, his uncles were looking forward to his arrival.

   
“Practically
my neck of the woods,” Kit said. “If you get up to Denver—”

“It
is our strange German vertigo, everything in motion, like water draining down
the sink, this unacknowledged tropism of the German spirit toward all
manifestations of the Mexican, wherever they may occur. The Kaiser now seeks in
Mexico the same opportunities for mischief toward the U.S. as Napoleon III
before him
. . .
no doubt I have some
blind pathetic little part to play.”

“Günni, you seem kind of, I don’t
know, short on that old selfconfidence today—”

“You were right, you know. That day
of our duel. I have been only another
Rosinenkacker
on holiday, lost in
his banal illusions. I must now bid farewell to the life I might have had, and
take up again the stony road, a pilgrim on a penitential journey. No more
mathematics for von Quassel. It is a worldline I shall, after all, never
travel.”

   
“Günni,
I was a little harsh, I think.”

“You
will be kind to her.” With a, you might say, Germanic emphasis on “will” that
Kit didn’t know how seriously to take.

“I’m
her road partner for a week or so, that’s really all it is. Then, so they tell
me, other forces come into play.”

“
Ach,
das Schicksal.
From
chloral to coffee,” Günther brooded. “The antipodal journey from one end of
human consciousness to its opposite.”

   
“Fate
is trying to tell you something,” Kit speculated.

“Fate
does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper
path.”

They
moved along in regret and reluctance, feeling through the ponderous stone
envelope the afternoon as it deepened. Back in town waited another evening in
its coercive penultimacy, and yet none could quite suggest detaching from these
corridors commemorative of the persons they had once imagined themselves to be
. . .
who, each of them, had chosen to
submit to the possibility of reaching that terrible ecstasy known to result
from unmediated observation of the beautiful. Were their impending departures
not only from programs of mathematical study but indeed from further hope of
finding someday that headlong embrace?

“Children.”
The voice could not be located, it was everywhere in the corridors. “The Museum
is closing now. The next time you visit, it might not be exactly where it
stands today.”

   
“Why
not?” Yashmeen could not refrain ~fom asking, though she knew.

“Because
the cornerstone of the building is not a cube but its fourdimensional analogy,
a tesseract. Certain of these corridors lead to other times, times, moreover,
you might wish too strongly to reclaim, and become lost in the perplexity of
the attempt.”

   
“How
do you know?” said Günther. “Who are you?”

   
“You
know who I am.”

rank had sworn that once he was out of Mexico he was out,
that his

unfinished business in northamerica would have first claim on
him.

Mexican politics was not his business, even if he could keep
the

forces and matériel straight in his mind, which was seldom.
So of course here

he was, right back in the ol’ caldo tlalpeño.

He was working out of Tampico, not
far outside of which began a zone running all the way to the U.S. frontier,
where runners of contraband operated freely. He had met up again with Ewball
Oust, who had shifted his interests from rural Anarchism to arms procurement,
and soon he and Frank were moving modest consignments of war matériel, mostly
on a cashandcarry basis.

One night eating supper down on Calle
Rivera near the market, they fell into conversation with a German traveler, a
coffee grower with an estate in Chiapas and a dueling scar on his right cheek,
shaped like a tilde. In Mexico he had become known as “El Atildado,” also used
to describe a man of flawless personal toilette, a gift Günther von Quassel had
also been blessed with. When they exchanged business cards and he saw Frank’s
name, his eyebrows went up.
“I knew a Kit
Traverse at Göttingen.”

   
“My
baby brother, I’ll bet.”

   
“We
nearly fought a duel once.”

   
“Kit
give you that?” nodding at Günther’s cheek.

“It did not get that far. We settled
it peaceably. Your brother actually frightened me too much.”

   
“You’re
sure this was Kit.”

   
Günther
told Frank how Scarsdale Vibe and his deputies had obliged Kit

to leave Göttingen.

“Well maybe that’s a blessing,” Frank
too morose to believe it, really. “Those damn people.”

“He is a resourceful young man. He
will prevail.” Günther had with him a patent Thermos flask full of hot coffee.
“If you would do me the honor,” offering some. “A new variety. Gigantic
Bohnen.
We call it Maragogype.”

“Thanks. Course, I’ve always been an
Arbuckle’s man myself,” Frank noting the closest thing yet to a flinch cross
the
cafetalero
’s
face.

“But—they put waxes,” Günther
taking an aggrieved tone. “Resins from, from
trees,
I believe.”

“Grew up on it, the frontier wife’s
friend, why, since I was a tiny one it’s always been Arbuckle’s for me.”

“
Ach,
how you have degraded your sense of
taste. But you seem young, still. Perhaps there is time to correct this
disorder.”

“All kiddin aside,” Frank sipping,
“it’s mighty good coffee. You know your business.”