The Chemistry of Tears

Henry

CARL WAS SUMPER’S GOLDEN shadow, following him up and down the stairs. Sometimes they were both sequestered above the gorge and I would hear, or imagine, amidst the roar of water, fine sharp hammer blows as they pegged away, also small explosions, like stuttering fireworks, gunshot or dry pine catching in the fire. Their door might spring open, slamming rudely against the wall, and next would appear that wheaten-haired child, laughing, hippity hoppity. I confess it hurt my heart. Soon I would observe him from a window, leaping across the fallen stooks, like a lucky hare recovered from the trap, speeding strangely across the harvest stubble, on his way to places I could not pronounce. He was surely an immensely clever little fidget, returning with his oily secrets wrapped in handkerchiefs or rags.

In my German hours I could bear to think of little else but what progress they were making with their secret instruments. Would they not hurry? Could I not push them faster? I was half maddened by the puzzle of their sounds. Was that gunpowder? Was that success? Was that failure? The manufacture involved all my emotions to an exhausting degree.

If I enquired with any subtlety, Sumper would pretend to misunderstand, or he would use his mobile eyebrows to affect a comical astonishment. Worst of all, he made me fear that he was not following my instructions.

Why, he would ask, would an educated Englishman want a cheap and gaudy circus trick?

“Herr Sumper,” I replied—every time I took the bait—“you have accepted the commission and my money too. You know time is of the essence.” And so on.

“But a duck you do not need.” Et cetera.

Then: “I have come all the way to Germany.”

“Who wants to copy Vaucanson? Vaucanson was a fraud. The duck’s digestion did not work. Its anus was not connected to its bowel. Do you understand, Herr Brandling? You love your child and now you are spending money to deceive him.”

Late one morning I was called to drink coffee, a most unusual treat so therefore not a situation in which I expected to be mocked.

“Do tell us, Mr. Brandling, do all English fathers deceive their sons?”

The offensive fellow winked at Carl who twisted his fingers around each other, squirming in his seat to contain his amusement and thus, poor servile boy, betrayed me. As for his mother, she clearly judged me the agent of my own distress. Forgive them all.

I am normally placid—indeed, it is said to be my flaw—yet I am a strong man too. I have a great capacity to suffer. I can eat dirt and carry rocks upon my back, but I could not let Percy suffer through their indolence. What good was a duck if he could not live to see it? Would a father not be more useful for him than a wind-up toy? In my passion I forgot my situation. I pushed away my milky coffee. In my room, I packed what would fit into my walking sac. I “borrowed” one of the stout ash sticks kept in a box by the door. I did not say goodbye, but goodbye was what I meant. I must go home.

Soon thereafter I was greeted by the mistress of the inn. It had been my first impression that she was a comic figure but by now I knew this was in no way true. Never mind, it was for one night, then back to England. The old procuress thought me rich and I did not disabuse her. She gave me her best room and said she would dry my clothes by the kitchen fire.

Rage did not make me reasonable. I thought, I will go home tomorrow. I did not yet consider that I had neither funds nor home to return to. I thought, to hell with everything. I will do what I wish.

I rejected the asparagus and ordered veal stew and dumplings. The first glass of yellow wine arrived wrapped in a pearl-white cloud of condensation. I felt a quite ridiculous confidence. It was really not until the fourth glass that the dark cloud settled on me. Cloud? It was a rock to crush my chest. I had no home to go to. I had had my childish outburst and tomorrow I would have to go crawling back inside my cage.

I was in this miserable condition when the door swung open and a damp wind blew across the room. It was the relentless Sumper, of course, his great wet head shining like a river rock. When he sat at my table I thought, thank heavens, he is sucking up.

He sat sideways, his great legs splayed out, surveying the room.

“There are beings superior to this,” he announced (as the landlady, bending and bobbing deferentially, served his stein). “If there were not superior forms of life to this,” he said, “I would hang myself.”

I thought, is this an apology? He would not look at me. The stein returned to the table and was replaced immediately while the procuress, again, performed her servile dance. I noticed how studiously the habitués avoided looking at us. They understood Sumper had the power to harm. Of my true nature no one had the least idea, particularly not me.

“Don’t be concerned,” he said, still avoiding my eyes, “not one of them speaks English.” He called, “Who speaks English?” and none dared answer.

“There,” he said triumphantly. But he had only proved himself a boor.

“Are these truly human?” he cried in that great booming voice. “Look at them. Tell me your opinion,” he demanded. And finally he turned his chair and I realized there was something shifty in his gaze. Is he frightened he will lose me?

“Come Brandling, what do you think?”

I thought I had put myself in thrall to a most eccentric bully, but I gave him the courtesy of a civil answer, saying that our fellow drinkers looked very human to me, all gathered together in their differences and similarities, the marks of toil on their common people’s hands, the sad erosion of life upon their features. I thought to relate to him certain parts of “The Stigmata of Occupation” wherein the author studies corpses and remarks on the swollen fingers of washerwomen, the particular calluses of metal-workers and coachmen and the similarity of the thumb’s expansion in shoemakers and glass-blowers. He also gives instructions for boiling the skin and nail clippings of suspected copper-workers. A “beautiful blue colour” is a positive sign.

He followed me closely, to an unusual degree.

“So,” said he when I had finished. “That is your opinion?”

“A little more than opinion.”

“Yes, of course, they have stigmata, as you say.” (Was this the first time he agreed with anything I said?) “But do they have souls?” he demanded.

“Yes, like all men.”

There, finally, I saw his mind move elsewhere and of course his interest could never be in “all men,” only in himself.

“This is my birthplace, can you imagine? When I understood my mother had carelessly delivered me into such company, can you understand my rage? But you can fathom none of this,” he said. “You are English.”

I groaned before I knew what I had done.

“You were not born locked up in this dung heap,” he said angrily. “You do not believe in ghosts and hobgoblins and the sacred heart of Jesus. You have travelled. It does not help to be able to identify the stigmata of their occupations. Even when alive, these creatures you see do not travel. They stay here with their hairless thighs, their depressed chests, their fairy stories. They have Puss in Boots but they have no idea the entire universe is changing. They cannot imagine a magic beyond a bean. They have never seen a simple threshing machine. They have not known the Englishmen I knew, the machines I helped make. You have no idea how insulting it is that you should ask me to make this toy. Of course,” he said quickly, “you meant no offence, I understand.”

“All men,” I said, “need money to live.”

“I am not making it for profit,” he said, “but because you love your son.”

“You also have a son,” I blurted. What made me say it, I have no idea. To stop him? To cancel him? In any case, I knew Carl was not his son.

“Are you blind?” he cried. “This boy is no one’s son. He is what these idiots would call an angel. If they knew the truth they would crucify him. Of course the ignorant father dragged him off in the middle of a riot. He might as well have offered up a Dresden bowl, he had no idea of the treasure. The universe is blessed that the child was not really cracked and broken. Beer,” he called, or words to that effect. “You do not want a duck,” he declared.

“You accepted my plan.”

“I am instructed to make something far superior.”

“It is I who instructs you.”

Then suddenly his manner was very soft and gentle. He laid his big hand on top of my arm and grasped it. “Henry,” he said. “We need each other.”

I have met men like this before, fierce, hard, rude, but capable of this swift seductive kindness. When he said our need was mutual I believed it was the truth. His eyes turned soft as silk inside their bony case. He leaned closer and, with that great hand still holding me, spoke softly. “What are you doing with your life? To what use is it put? What higher purpose do you serve?”

He would dominate and use me, so he thought. Alas, I must use him. “Dear Sumper,” I said, “you must make me the duck or I will make you very sorry.”

He stood suddenly. I thought, what now?

He would leave the inn. I with him.

“You are a sad man,” he said as we came out onto the muddy track. “You have suffered a loss.”

I thought, be calm, he cannot know that.

I followed him down off the saddle of the road, down into the clear under-forest. I thought, he is a fraud but I was, quite suddenly, hot all over.

As he walked, he belittled the fairytale collector, saying he was a simpleton who bought whatever stories the peasants invented for him in the winter. They were not real fairy stories at all. He however, he told me, had a twenty-four-carat fairy story. He was thinking he might trade it with the fairytale collector for something useful.

I thought, none of this is true. Also, I have not seen a single piece of clockwork, not an axle or a wheel.

He said, a mother had a little boy of seven years who was so attractive and good that no one could look at him without liking him, and he was dearer to her than anything else in the world. He suddenly died, and she could find no consolation …

I needed him. I let him talk.

“She wept and wept,” he told me. However, not long after he had been buried, the child began to appear every night at the very places he had sat and played while still alive. When the mother cried, he cried as well, but when morning came he had disappeared. The mother could not stop her weeping, and one night he appeared in the white shirt in which he had been put to rest.

To listen was a torture. Had I not been desperate for his services, I would have stopped his ugly mouth.

“He had the little laurel wreath still on his head. He sat down on the bed at her feet and said, ‘Oh, mother, please stop crying, or I will not be able to fall asleep in my coffin, because my burial shirt will not dry out from your tears that keep falling on it.’ This startled the mother, and she stopped crying. The next night the child came once again. He had a small lantern in his hand and said, ‘See, my shirt is almost dry, and I will be able to rest in my grave.’ Then the mother surrendered her grief to God and bore it with patience and peace, and the child did not come again, but slept in his little bed beneath the earth.”

He was cruel and vile. I struck him on his big stone forehead, just beside the eye. He staggered. I kicked him in the groin. He doubled, letting out a girly shriek. Then I am afraid I became careless of my life for I knocked him and kicked his great meat carcass until he made no noise. What a lot of him there was, curled up amongst the mat of fir needles like a broken deer.

I was a fool. He had been my only hope. I returned to the inn and went to sleep.

MY TEMPER WAS RARE and awful, as frightening as a plunging horse that is better shot than fed. It had never helped me, never once. In this case, I was very lucky I had not murdered Sumper.

Next morning I dressed, doing up my buttons with swollen hands, already anticipating the nasty consequence of victory.

The girl brought my breakfast, but I could not eat, knowing only that I had made a mess of everything.

Then Sumper arrived and I was ashamed to see the raw colours of his cheeks, the almost naked bone, the damage I had caused the only person who could save my son.

When I left the inn he followed me wordlessly into the dark fir forest where I smelt my death. I anticipated the type of clearing where such matters are always settled. Low Hall, Furtwangen, it is all the same. Percy, I forsook thee.

We came to open farmland. The sun was reappearing in the western sky. The white charlock, which was obviously as much of a pest in Furtwangen as is its yellow brother in Low Hall, touched the morbid scene with falsely cheerful light.

“Where do we go?” I asked. “Let us get the business done.”

I had cut his lip and caused his moustache to rise crookedly upon his face. When he rested his hand upon my upper arm, he seemed to leer, but I detected in this single act of gentleness his regret for what he was now required to do.

“Look,” said he, pointing to a man and two women emerging from a small church. He went to speak to them and I noted well the broad shoulders and terrifying neck. I had no rage, and therefore not the least will to attack him from behind. I thought, I must run away, no matter what a coward I seem. But then the young man kissed both women and all the poor creatures began to weep. Really, their pain was almost unbearable. The women were hardly able to hold themselves upright. They made their way into the forest, staggering and howling in the most awful way.

The man turned his eyes upon me and all I saw was dark and dry. Then, with a lingering look of hatred, he raised his bundle to his shoulder and walked down the hill.

“A clockmaker,” Herr Sumper announced as he returned. The young man swung his bundle from his back and slammed it angrily against a tree. “Poor chap,” he said and his injured face looked particularly ugly in its sentimentality. “But he fell into the hands of a packer.”

Enough. I had always known that the world was filled with millions and millions of hearts, like gnats and flies, each with its own private grief like this one. But where was my punishment to take place?

I asked, “What is a packer?” but I was more concerned with sizing up his mighty arms.

“It is the packers,” he said, “who buy up clocks from the poor families who make them. The makers must accept whatever mean price they are offered.”

I stopped and put my fists up. “Where are we going, damn you?”

“Damn me?” He grinned at me and slapped my hands aside.

All around me were the signs of good sane Germans who cared for their little plots, carried manure, mould, whatever disgusting thing that was needed. They were industrious. They were humble. They were wilful. They tilled the subsoil, hoed and weeded until they compelled fertility. Why did I have to deal with a maniac? I knew the answer. I was a fool to have forgotten it.

“When I was young,” he said, placing his hand on my shoulder and thereby, while affecting to be companionable, forcing me to walk beside him, “the packers used to make the round of the cottages and collect the clocks themselves. But now the vermin have grown fat. They compel the clockmakers to come calling on them. They keep them waiting. Of course they are mostly inn-keepers,” he added. “The longer they are kept waiting, the more beer they drink and that is all subtracted from the price.

“So the young men are forced to go to England. They leave their mother and their wife behind.”

There, at the bottom of the hill, beside a narrow little stream, I was truly sorry for the swollen brute. “Just like yourself,” I said.

He considered me a moment, as if amused, then turned his attention to the view. “Here is my wife,” he said.

Amongst the many, many fanciful and quite insane things Herr Sumper would later insist on—his ability to cause lightning storms for instance—this small comment has its own peculiar place, for his “wife” appeared to be nothing less than the so-called “dung heap”: Furtwangen, with its lanes exceeding narrow and irregular, with its winding streets, its curious old buildings, its wood-carvings, and its profusion of old-fashioned metal-work. The only flaw in the picture was the obtrusively ugly modern structure, rising high and level, and looking gravelly and prosaic.

“What is that building?” I asked him.

At which point, while I was off my guard, he lurched at me.

I struck his throat.

His eyes bugged.

I spat at him.

He took me in a bear hug so tight he crushed my lungs and forced from me a most unmanly squeak, lifting me up high, turning me clockwise, anticlockwise, then upside down, and back again upon the earth.

“Why,” cried he, as he kissed me on both cheeks, “it is where they make your springs.”

Thus I understood this madman intended—after all that I had said and done—to make the automaton. Then, out of sheer relief, that my sick child would truly live, I slapped his face.