Unspeakable Things (15 page)

The Rat nodded, and the two adults locked eyes for a moment.

“But perhaps, my dear lady, you might come back again yourself?” suggested Felix. “I would like to show you all I have been doing.” For the doorbell was ringing, and Felix padded quickly out of the room, Schatzie in tow. “Come in,” they heard him say.

Anna seized Maria’s hand in hers, adjusted her coat, and walked toward the front door. “We must not keep you,” she said. “I know how good you have been to Ilse and the children.”

Felix bowed his head modestly. “Will you do me the favor of dining with me, my Countess?” he asked.

The Rat nodded. “With pleasure.”

“Perhaps this Sunday next?”

“There is nothing on my calendar,” replied Anna. “It will be good to sit with an old friend again.”

Felix started to close the door gently behind them as they left. But just before the door closed completely, he suddenly cocked his head and, catching Maria’s eye, grimaced, raising one eyebrow, and stuck out his tongue. It happened so quickly that only Maria noticed. “Bad girl,” he hissed. “Uncle Felix will be watching you.”

A veil of shame flushed over Maria’s body and she cringed, clinging to Anna’s hand. She felt something in her chest that closed; something that might be called “heartbreak.” But why? She didn’t understand. Hatred for the Rat came over her. She understood in the gaze between Felix and Anna that her doctor preferred another. “They look at each other like two sick cows,” she told herself, despising them both. She didn’t know how two sick cows might regard each other, but she liked that disdainful phrase, “Like two sick cows!” Maria had come, in a way that even she knew was perverse, to crave her visits with Doctor Felix. Now she saw her power was nothing compared with the power of Anna’s eager face. Maria felt hot all over. “I am dead,” she whispered to herself fiercely. The more she said that, the more her body betrayed her. She felt nothing, she told herself, nothing at all. It was only the grown-ups who pretended to be alive, walking around and laughing. The stupid grown-ups. “I am dead,” she told herself. And the sensation of those words, repeated, was delicious.

A
month later, Herbert leaned over the table and took the hands of his son David in his stubby, gnarled ones.

David was tired and rumpled and impatient. This time, he hadn’t slept well on the overnight train from Washington and had gone immediately to the Automat from the station. Herbert waited, regarding his son with both affection and a surprising distance, as if he hadn’t recognized in this man the boy he had been.

“We found this,” David said, “in a letter.” From his pocket he carefully pulled a wrinkled page, then smoothed it out under the greenish cafeteria light.

Herbert leaned forward. There was something oddly familiar about the crumpled page with the small spidery markings upon it.

“Look at it, Father. Do you not recognize it?”

Herbert looked more closely. Then, peering at David for affirmation, he looked again. “But it is my writing.”

“Yes,” David replied. “Read it. What does it say, your mixture of Esperanto and chess?”

“So that’s what happened to it,” Herbert said. “I was wondering what had happened to the rest of the game. Maybe I had mailed it. But then I never got an answer.”

“I recognized it immediately when they handed it to me to decipher,” said David. “But then I thought, ‘What is it doing here? Why here? And what is he telling us?’ ”

“ ‘He’?” asked Herbert. He had not imagined that all his correspondence would be intercepted.

David brushed aside the comment. “And then I saw it was my father, up to his old tricks again. A chess game. A flirtation with a lady, is it not so?”

Herbert smiled, not bothering to hide his crafty delight. “Of course. It was my move. The famous Spinkz opening.”

“And then I thought,” continued David, “ ‘Why does he write in Esperanto? Why now? There’s only one lady in the world who might still be interested in Esperanto.’ ” He sat back, proud of his own cleverness.

But at this, Herbert protested, laying his hand upon the arm of his impetuous and wrongly informed son. “No, David, there are many. And, you will see, soon there will be many more. It is a world language. You will see. Like chess. A universal language for mankind.”

“Father,” said David, cutting in impatiently. He had heard this all so many times before. What did the old man know? Look at the state of things right now. Why did his father, his irritating, idealistic father, so insist on clinging to his idealism despite all evidence to the contrary? David swallowed his impatience. Let the old men carry on; the young would make the changes.

But Herbert would not be quiet. Toward his son, he poured all the humanitarian ire. Also, he was fueled by the humiliation of having his mail intercepted. And by his son, of all people. “To have been so careless, so confident,” he thought but did not say. His mind raced. Had there been anything implicating in the letter?

David regarded him, authority in his reddened, watery eyes. He was tired. “Father, please. We do not have time.”

“Time, David? If we do not have time for language, then we do not have time for the human race.”

“Yes, that’s exactly the point,” said David in an irritated voice. “There is no more time.”

“Always time for chess,” mumbled Herbert. “There is always time for chess, David. There is always time for a language like Esperanto, which will allow us to communicate with one another. Think of the Tower of Babel. Do you want a world like that?”

“We have a world like that,” groaned David. “Old man,” he thought. But instead, he said, “Father, I know. And,” he added slyly, “there will always be time for the ladies, no?”

“Exactly.” Herbert leaned back and beamed. A truce! “Now, dear boy, tell me where you got my little Spinkz move? You know, it was meant to reach the Rat.”

“Yes,” said David, “I managed to figure that out. But,” he continued, smiling at the old man, “you had all of Washington going out of its mind, trying to crack your code.”

“And did they?” asked Herbert.

“Well,” said David, “I was surprised. And you will be, too, when you hear how this paper came to me. But the code, no.”

David, hunched in his basement cubicle in Washington, had been shocked when the letter first appeared on his desk. “This is your specialty, old boy,” his boss had said. Almost immediately, David had recognized the chess, the Esperanto, his father’s writing. Then, of course, he had realized that the paper was meant for the Rat, his father’s cousin, the mad White Russian Countess. The king protecting the queen. The Spinkz move.

“It was that Spinkz move that gave me a hint,” David explained.

Herbert smiled. “Well, I didn’t know exactly what the next move would be,” he bragged. “I had to sacrifice the castle, the knights, everything. That was inevitable, but not before she had taken her turn at the board.”

“And if she hadn’t?” David asked.

“Well, my dear boy, you know this is just an exercise. I do it to keep myself sharp. In the end, chess is a game one plays against oneself.”

David laughed. He shook his head. The fox trying to hide.

“Don’t you remember?”

“Of course.” David remembered the chess game under the linden trees in summer. How many times he had cried with frustration. And yet, he had loved the game. Loved spending time with his father. “But I never won, not even once,” he reproved Herbert.

“Ah, dear boy.” Herbert sighed. “I know. Your mother used to scold me. ‘Humor the child,’ she said. ‘Let him win.’ But I thought you would never learn the game properly if I babied you.”

David did not agree with that philosophy. He had resented his father’s hardness with him.

“Now chess,” reminisced Herbert, “that was something your brother would never play.”

David heard his father’s stern voice in the garden. “Pay attention,” Herbert said as David frowned, looking away from the chessboard. The air smelled sweet, the branches swayed in a slight breeze, and the notes of Chopin floated out the garden doors; inside, perhaps tea was being prepared. With delicious mouthful-size cakes. “What kind of cakes?” David wondered. “The little chocolate ones with whipped cream? Or maybe the ones with the raspberries?” Cakes and music and perfume wafted toward David in his mind, all borne under a silver cover. “Pay attention, David,” Herbert warned in a strangely soft voice. He looked at the boy with piercing attention.

David forced himself to focus on what was, he saw, already a hopeless position.

“There is still time,” Herbert warned from under the linden trees.
Time, time, time,
the first notes of Beethoven’s
Appassionata
wafted, each note carrying its own weight toward David’s hungry ears. “Pay attention, my boy.”

What were the trees saying? What was the music saying? David looked at the squiggly figures, black and white, on the board in the garden. What was his father trying to tell him? In the background, the sounds of the tea service, and the sounds, farther away, of shouting, of cries, of each held breath, each breath of beauty, turning desperate. “Pay attention.”

David forced himself to return to the board, to return his gaze to the dark figures. What were they supposed to be telling him? Herbert drew on his pipe. In the distance, the shouts of terror, the sounds of beatings, a crowd being captured, herded somewhere. But for that sweet moment—sweet, how sweet, David realized in retrospect—he fastened his gaze on the board. “Try,” murmured Herbert.

“Try, dearest boy, to understand.” David hunched his shoulders. “Take your time,” counseled Herbert.

Time stood still in the garden, the late light of the autumn afternoon filtered through the linden trees, and Adeline’s clear voice wafted through the doors onto the terrace. “The lindens, the lindens,” she sang. And the joyous, girlish spirit of Michael, like a wraith, buried its face in her skirts, overcome by the unbearable beauty of the afternoon.

“Take your time. Your opponent will always wait,” Herbert whispered, his little eyes concealed in hooded elfin calm. Beyond the garden, in the streets of the city, in the secret squares, and even at the railroad station, the commotion was already mounting. If David could only understand the game, perhaps he could hold it all safe, at least for now. “It’s your move, dear child,” reminded Herbert.

David grasped the figure of a pawn and tentatively, then more firmly moved the black figure two steps ahead. He slumped back.

“Good.” Herbert approved.

Now, across the table, framed by the clangor of the steamy Automat, Herbert regarded his son through half-closed eyes. He waited. He could wait forever if necessary.

David shifted, exasperated. “So of course we wondered how your letter had happened to find its way to my office.”

Herbert waited. How tedious, all this chasing about.

“But it is only normal. All letters must be opened,” David said. Far away, he heard Adeline singing, her raucous fingers drumming on the counterpane.

David continued. “And then we put it together. Your contacts, somewhat unexpected. An agreement you made. Shipments from Germany; your letters intercepted. Spies in New York and Berlin. The Rat in that latest exchange. Safe passage. ‘In exchange for what?’ we wondered. We were able to trace it.”

Herbert raised one hand. “I don’t want to know. Better not to know. Secrets, David, should remain secret. Better to know as little as possible.”

David was determined to continue, pressing forward insistently. “We traced it to a certain person. A certain family friend. So-called. A trusted one. Be careful.” David hesitated. How could he hurt his father more than Herbert had already suffered?

“Yes?” asked Herbert rather indifferently.

“A friend well known to the family,” muttered David. Then, with a kind of malicious, darting pleasure, he leaned forward. “A certain doctor.”

To his surprise, his father did not seem in the least dismayed. “Is it true?” was all he asked his son mildly. David nodded, feeling deflated, deprived of his moment of triumph. He had hoped to shock his father, or at least surprise him. But the old man betrayed nothing.

“So…,” Herbert said, half-closing his eyes again, sinking into his own reverie. David realized his father was exhausted and saw Herbert’s age upon his face. The thin winged shoulders, the faded overcoat, the sagging, wrinkled demeanor—but wait, wasn’t that deceptive? Even as David watched, Herbert seemed to gather his coat about him, seemed to gather force. And, still immobile, it was as if a faint pulsation of light surrounded Herbert’s creased dilapidation.

Herbert muttered to himself, then deliberately changed the subject. “Have you seen your mother yet?” He looked his son directly in the eyes.

David sighed with exasperation. He had traveled all night on the train to bring his little moment of triumph, dropping the letter like a bone at his father’s feet, wanting approval, wanting to be noticed. Wanting to hear, “Very good, my son. You have done well.” Wanting to be acknowledged. Instead, he felt his weariness: small, useless, stupid. The old man probably knew it all along anyway. Why had he bothered? Would he ever be free of this family? Hopelessness swept over him. Couldn’t his father ever let him rest?

Herbert called the waitress for two more cups of coffee. He leaned toward David. Herbert allowed his son to see into his opaque weariness, the sunken eyes, the brows curving downward in immense fatigue. Then, as David watched, the eyes took on their keen liquidity again, small, red-rimmed, and piercing. “Felix, did you say?” he questioned, looking intently into David’s face. Like a blow, like a wake-up call, David felt the force of his father’s personality upon him once again. He straightened, invigorated.

“Very good, my David,” Herbert said approvingly. And the small boy, reaching for the first move of the first pawn, glowed.

“Does anyone else know?” asked Herbert.

“No,” David said. “I wanted to talk with you first.”

“Ah.” Both men sat now in companionable silence, drinking their coffee.

“I am not surprised,” said Herbert softly. It always seemed too easy. Deals made in secret with anonymous persons. Too simple for the Countess to get out. “Yes, it fits,” mused Herbert. He wondered how Felix had gotten his hands on his letter to Anna. But that was not important now. “Did Felix read Esperanto? Probably,” thought Herbert.

“We know he has been receiving shipments from Europe,” David said thoughtfully. Both men looked at each other. Of course. “The net will be closing now.”

“Ah yes, checkmate.”

“But not right away. We must be patient.”

Herbert nodded, his eyes fully closed now.