Free Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick Page B

they had given him a house for his family and an office and a part-time secretary, and when it was incumbent on him, despite all their generosity, to leave, they were again generous, and presented him with the very typewriter the part-time secretary had used: it was his to carry away.
    Here was a man—this severe paterfamilias, this formidable scholar of the Karaites!—who had barely spoken a syllable to me or even, as far as I could tell, of me, for nearly a month, since the day I had clumsily disorganized his library. And this looming large man, with his great ugly hands clapped on the body of a hapless half-obsolete typewriter, was numbering his losses in the full cry of inconsolable lamentation. He had, in effect, no wife, and though he had all those children, they were only children, and one no more than a baby. As for Anneliese, he said, her young shoulders were burdened enough, and though capable in two languages—unlike you, Fräulein—she was without capacity in relation to this accursed machine, this devil's contrivance, and what was he to do, how to proceed with his work if it could not be properly recorded? What was to become of his work?
    The helpless hand on the typewriter curled into a hard white bloodless fist: Anneliese's fist. They were remarkably alike: she had inherited his big frame and his burning fury over Outer Darkness. But the daughter was colder than the father. Out of Mitwisser's twice-dyed eyes, dyed by some physiological thaumaturgy to the bluest depth of topaz, there fell, as I stood watching, a thin and horrible stream of tears.
    The fright of it—the revered scholar, the severe paterfamilias, undone by a devilish contrivance fit for a junkyard—made me stammer. "To-tomorrow," I brought out, "I'll look for a, for a place where they sell these things. A ribbon, and paper, and some carbon sheets if you like." But I was certain that "carbon" came to him as no more pertinent to his purpose than if I had uttered "coal mine." He was a man used to service in all things large and small; he had already told me so, and I had observed it for myself.
    He did not dismiss me. I ran. I ran to my bed; my tongue was a dry rag in my mouth. He had frightened me, I was in a chill of shock, my fear amazed me with its headlong insistence, it was beyond volition, it took me over, it pinched and shook me. He had opened—to me!—his violation, his rending. They had torn him—like wild beasts, they had torn him. They had thrown him out, he had escaped with his life, with all of their lives; and they had severed him from the Karaites, who were as dear to him as his children. For the sake of the Karaites—to repair the breach—he journeyed every day to the Reading Room, where they lay concealed in tomes kept under lock and key, untouched for generations perhaps, who could tell? When he returned in the evening his fingertips were black with old dust and, no doubt, new inferences. The Karaites—his mind's inhabitants—were as dear to him as Anneliese or Willi or Gert or Heinz or Waltraut; and surely dearer than his Elsa, whom he had banished from his sheets.
    There she was, his Elsa, across the room, asleep, her secretive face to the wall, the wife who was no wife.
    He had wept! And how was I to get some money? I had promised to buy a ribbon, paper, carbons—what else would that miserable fossil of a machine require? Well, finally the reason for my employment was exposed: I was to be the caretaker of a cast-off typewriter. I could not ask Professor Mitwisser for money; it was the shame of that dilapidated instrument, his dependence on it, his dependence on so unformed a creature as myself, that had crushed him. The machine had made him weep—him to whom the salons of Berlin had once bowed! My pockets were empty. I had spent my last dollar on chocolate bars. I was afraid to approach Anneliese, even on behalf of her father: she was adamant, it was forbidden, she was not to speak to me of money. And I was not to