The Chemistry of Tears

Henry

NOW THAT THE FURTWANGEN weather is so cold, the old sawmill by the river seems to suffer as much as we who dwell there—slates fracturing, nails wrenching themselves free, the whole cuckoo construction seeming to shiver in the winds which have begun to blow violently between the dark cliffs of the gorge. Frau Helga runs back and forth between her home and the inn (I assume it is the inn) driven by something, not clockwork, but a tight spring certainly, a locked action beyond any possibility of change. She returns to pack her trunk, each time the same, so carefully, folding her threadbare dresses as if they were ball gowns. Then—like a customs agent (that is, in a fury) Sumper unpacks, each time more violently. She runs to the inn. She returns. She weeps.

Herr Sumper has suffered a black eye, the cause and occasion of which are mysteries to me.

Frau Helga seems to be still in a financial negotiation with the owner of the inn. Is this about the swan? I do not know. I hear her conversation with Sumper very clearly. It is mechanically amplified by the chute leading to the workshop.

“She has always looked out for me,” she says. “She will get a good price.”

“She is a brothel-keeper,” Sumper says.

I think, does she plan to spend this on the swan?

She shouts at him in German, rapping her fist against a wall, a door, the floor for all I know. It is not impossible that she is lying prostrate at his feet.

“You are free.” I hear him, even while the windows rattle in their sashes. He says, “Free as a fish in the sea.” He says that she may depart any moment she chooses and he will, as the man of honour she knows him to be, deliver Carl back to Karlsruhe as soon as the swan is made.

Then wailing in German in her fright. The Lord knows what it means.

He says the new draught horse is not for her use. He will pay for her to travel by coach.

M. Arnaud is expected any hour to produce the beak. Will the brothel-keeper pay him? Is he paid already? I imagine him, standing alone in the middle of the forest, cloaked in black, half bird, half man. What child would not be frightened of that beak?

The colossal automaton I so desperately summoned forth is assembled on a heavy cart in the so-called summer workshop in the freezing cold. I cannot pay for it. Sumper and the boy continue working around the inconvenience of the cart wheels.

I will have my swan. I will take him home. The draught horse will be backed up the long low ramp. From here my machine shall be carried out into the light of day, like a saint in a procession.

Sumper continues to call the lithe and buxom Frau Helga “The idiot woman.”

Again and again, Frau Helga insists she had no choice as “Herr Brandling failed his obligation.”

No one asks me for a shekel.

Sumper, again and again: she has “sealed her own fate” by letting the Catholics see his “private business.”

I now suspect the black eye is related to the automaton. They are wasting Percy’s time. Arguments take place in the river workshop and the summer workshop to which I am not privy. The discord continues around the dinner table, through the night, echoing in the gorge, as inescapable as the damp, as relentless as the river. We are all afraid, I warrant.

I think of my English boy every minute. There is not the slightest attempt to shield the German boy from the adult opinions, and sometimes I suspect—because both of them continue, even when most unforgivably abusive, to speak in English—that the scenes are a sort of Punch and Judy enacted to deceive me or to blame me for the injury I have caused them all. But what can I do? My brother bought stocks in the Bank of Ohio.

“He is a child,” Frau Helga says. Of Carl.

He is a strange one—his intent dark eyes flicking from one he loves to one he worships. I cannot be held responsible for the damage done to him.

His mother ladles out the potatoes which she mashes so brutally but which, with the addition of salt and butter, make the most delicious meal I have ever known. She serves furiously—splat!—and her nostrils contract in passion. There is an angry burn like a knife blade along her lower arm.

“I need Carl to finish,” Sumper says. I think, where will the money come from? Blood floods the boy’s face. With his bright wide eyes and his wheaten hair he might be a choir boy in our village church.

The thick man’s appetite is never gratified, his thirst never slaked. He drinks, he eats, he makes the law. “When the boy is finished here, he will return to the city of the wheel and do what he is born to do.”

How could I have not understood his strangeness the first day at the inn—the map of Karlsruhe, the Baron with the Drais? Frau Helga says now that his mind is broken and she hates him, but later I hear them thumping in the night, dragging at each other like wild creatures, snorting and panting like the partners of a crime. Dare I admit—I would sell my soul for less.

In the morning I am shaken awake. Sumper has shaved, smooth as rock, and gleaming. His eyes are pebbles in a stream.

What he wishes me to understand, before the day’s work begins, is that all this is exactly as Albert Cruickshank had foretold.

He lays his hand against my cheek. Who would not shrink from him? He repeats that Cruickshank had predicted my arrival in Germany and my particular role in Sumper’s life. My eyes are stuck with sleep but his are clear, without the tiniest ripple of doubt.

This is one more lie. I have everything recorded exactly, as he told it—he has not seen Cruickshank since he set out for Buckingham Palace on that rainy night. At that time there was no talk of me. How could there be? Then he was deported and finally returned to Furtwangen from which place he despatched the ledger of drowned people to his former master. He received in return the blasphemous automaton with a “charming note” which indicated Sumper might now need the laughter more than Cruickshank.

If there had been some “prophecy” I would have noted it, just as I have noted all the other symptoms.

But Sumper, as from the start, is slippery as a Rhine fish. “I cannot tell you everything that ever occurred.” He opens the shutters, raises the windows to admit the howling wind. “No, I am not relating what Cruickshank WROTE to me but rather what HE SAID. Please pay attention to what I am telling you. When I left for Buckingham Palace the Genius already saw what my fate would be. I imagined I would save the Engine, but he knew the truth. At the moment, when I shook his hand, he said do not despair, another Englishman will come along. Only later did his words come back to me. I might lose him, but another Englishman would come along.”

I rise and stand with my back to the window to keep the storm at bay. He pushes himself towards me, eyes too close, too insistent.

He says: “Do you not remember how I sat waiting for you in Frau Beck’s inn? You did not know it yet, but I already had your foolish plans.”

“Herr Sumper,” I say, “this is not sensible. Mr. Cruickshank never knew me, nor could he know my circumstances, or the character of my wife, or the sickness of my son, or the artists overrunning our home. To speak in his own language, Mr. Cruickshank had insufficient data.”

“Henry, you have not the least idea of what that great brain thought. How could you?”

I am two inches taller but when I look into those jet black eyes I am but a snivelling beast. I pray that he will release me soon.

It is clear now that Frau Helga has let the villagers see the laughing Jesus. It is my fault that she sold it, but is the price enough for my own purpose? Certainly I saw Frau Helga counting money in the stable. I saw the fair down on her arms. Once I dreamed I might kiss her. Long ago.

I was at the stream washing, naked, teetering on razor shale which can amputate your toes. When Sumper touched my shoulder I jumped in fright. My private parts shrivelled like gizzards in a stockpot. He was armoured in his leather apron, a beak in his hand, but I did not know that then.

He said, “You will have been responsible for something far finer than you could ever conceive.”

“I wanted only a duck.”

“You were not born to have a duck. You were born to bring a Wonder to the world.”

And then he turned away and left me in my nakedness.

That night the mother threw the mashed potatoes across the floor. “You have no right to steal my son.” There was more of it, all very distressing, particularly to watch the Holy Child wring his hands, his long warty white fingers. In the lamp light his chin looked long, his knees high and these fingers entwining like a nest of baby eels.

“I have not come so far to hurt this boy,” said Sumper. “He is a Genius.”

“You shall not hurt him,” she said. Yet she surely knew what dangerous situation she had created at the inn where they had presumably witnessed Jesus rolling across the floor and laughing. “He is just a little boy.”

“He is a Genius,” repeated Sumper. “Here,” he said, “read this.” And from the pouch of his apron he produced the ebony beak on the underside of which I saw there was silver script inset in the coal-black wood.

“I cannot read.” She drew back from it. “You know I cannot.”

So he thrust the object to me.

Those awful eyes were upon me, waiting for me to understand the meaning.

I am a dunce, I thought, a total dunderhead.

“Quite,” I said. “Exactly.”