“Maybe you feel like you’ve finally come home.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you?”
“No.” My voice was too loud.
Paris smiled.
The conversation had turned. I wanted to disguise my confusion but wasn’t able to gain control of my face. I’m sure my discomfort was obvious.
“You’re coming into focus now,” he said. “I’m beginning to see you. I must have hit a nerve. That’s what I was talking about before—little things, small revelations . . .”
He babbled on. I didn’t really listen, but then he said more loudly, “I think I want to see your hair. Why don’t you take off your hat.”
I turned my head toward him. I had been looking for Ruth in the crowd but didn’t see her. My cheeks were hot. “What?”
“It’s a harmless request. Take off your hat.”
I didn’t answer. The room was so tightly packed with people that we were surrounded. I stood shoulder to shoulder with a woman in a platinum wig—Marilyn Monroe, I guessed—and on the other side of me was a tall man in an ogre mask. A cigarette in a holder stuck out of the opening for his mouth. A woman behind Paris was wearing a wide hoop skirt. He had to move forward, and his knee touched my leg.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “I only want to see your hair.”
“It’s hot in here,” I said.
Paris moved closer to me and put his hand on my arm. I stepped backward, bumping someone. “Watch it!” a woman said. I mumbled “Sorry,” and felt Paris tighten his grip a little. He’s too close, I thought, and took a noisy breath. I looked at his face and then at his fingers around my sleeve.
“You seem annoyed,” he said. “Why?” His eyes were clear blue.
“I don’t understand what you want.”
Paris was inches away. “Iris,” he said. “What’s the big deal? I just asked to see your hair. If you don’t want to show it to me, that’s fine.” He released my arm.
I reached for the hat and took it off. My hair, sweaty and tangled from the confinement, fell down over my shoulders and back. Avoiding his eyes, I looked away and swallowed hard. The gesture provoked some mysterious emotion and I felt my mouth tremble. “I have to get out of here,” I said to him. I turned around and began to push my way through the crowd.
“You have beautiful hair, Iris,” he called after me. “Where are you going?”
“I can’t stay,” I said, more to myself than to him.
I walked through the door, and once in the stairwell, I leaned against the wall, still holding the hat in my hand. What’s wrong with me? I thought. I’ve been stupid. Why did I let him bother me? And what made me take off my hat?
I should have gone back into the party to tell Ruth I was leaving, but I didn’t. I walked down the steps and into the deserted street, hugging myself in the cold night air. The suit was too thin. I looked around me and saw the subway entrance only two blocks away. I walked toward it fast. After a few seconds, I became aware of someone behind me and quickened my pace. Whoever it was matched my speed. I felt my throat tighten. Still, I continued to walk. The entrance was only yards away. I could hear the person breathing. A man, I thought. I broke into a run, using my whole body to propel me forward, and suddenly there was distance between us. I grabbed the railing to the steps underground, and before I sprang down them, I turned my head for an instant and saw someone disappear around the corner. He was small and wore a long black coat, but I glimpsed something white beneath it. Paris, I said to myself. And yet I wasn’t sure. It was dark, and the man was gone before I could get a good look.
In the months that followed, the Halloween encounter with Paris assumed the quality of an apparition. The images I retained from that night were a garish jumble I couldn’t sort out. I put the whole thing out of my mind. My costume was still in the closet, the hat resting on a shelf above the suit. Ruth had said she would return it to her brother but had delayed, insisting it wasn’t urgent. He had lots of things to wear, she said, and I shouldn’t worry. Every once in a while, I would finger the material of the suit, seized by an urge to wear it, but it wasn’t mine, so I let it hang.
• • •
I had other business to think about, particularly my seminar with Professor Rose, which had become the focus of my week. An unaccountable mania for knowledge had overtaken me, and I read day and night, memorizing significant passages, poring over criticism and history. I crammed so much information into my head that when I closed my eyes at night, I saw a printed page before me, and isolated words and phrases from my reading churned in my brain. Sometimes just before I dropped into sleep, I heard little voices speaking to me in cryptic sentences or monosyllabic outbursts. Despite my efforts, I was something less than a model student, subject to passionate eruptions in class and wild excursions into related topics. At home I rehearsed calm deliveries, practiced lowering my voice to make it sound authoritative and cool, but in the heat of the moment, I would always forget. My voice quavered, my heart pounded, my hands shook. I lost control and the words came in torrents. I was serious, all right. What I lacked was method and a scholarly temperament. In early December I read my paper on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education aloud to the class and was so moved by my own words that I felt tears in my eyes during the last paragraph. Yet Professor Rose and the other students were kind. No one laughed. My teacher looked over at me from his seat at the head of the table and said in a big voice, “A little scattered perhaps, Miss Vegan, but a fine piece of work.” Then he returned to his notes. My happiness was great, and when the professor stopped me after class and proposed that I be his research assistant the following semester, I embarrassed myself and gushed. “That would be wonderful,” I said, and clasped my hands together under my chin. Then, embarrassed, I let them drop.
He smiled. I saw the wrinkles around his eyes deepen. “I’m a taskmaster,” he said. “I work my assistants hard. Perhaps you’ll regret it.”
“Oh no,” I said. “Never.”
I began working for him in January, and at first there was nothing unusual about our meetings. He gave me German articles to read and summarize—abstruse, convoluted essays written in a language that baffled me. Every Thursday, he would hand me a sheaf of Xeroxed pages and my heart would sink. Then I would go home and look down at the incomprehensible sentences—clause after clause of dense, alien vocabulary, the verbs lagging far behind—and begin the tedious dissection. Meaning came in bolts. All at once I would discover the sense, identify the shifts in logic, and in the end I took pride in transforming the long, verbose essays into a single page of lucid words. But for the most part, these articles left me cold, and there were times when I couldn’t resist commentary in parentheses, pointing out the flaws in the argument, unfounded leaps of faith, or the pointlessness of the entire thing. Professor Rose was amused by my arrogance and said to me once, “I think you can dispense with the editorializing, Miss Vegan. I am able to draw my own conclusions.” He said this gently, however, and it made me think he didn’t really mind.
In February our real work began. The German novella we translated together became the vehicle for a twist in our relations. Without it, I’m convinced, nothing would have happened. We would have remained as we were, professor and student, locked in the formality of the two roles. The Brutal Boy changed all that, blurring the lines of convention and muting our inhibitions. It took a long time for its effects to be played out fully, but I think they were profound. I don’t mean to blame a work of fiction for my own behavior. That would be stretching the truth. I’m saying that the story was a door to another place, and in the end we chose to open it and cross the threshold.
One Thursday morning, I entered Professor Rose’s office at the appointed hour and found him seated near the window staring outside. He didn’t turn to greet me for several seconds. Instead he spoke to the window. “Do you know the name Johann Krüger, Miss Vegan?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
> He swiveled around in his chair. “Well, you’re not alone. He’s been forgotten.”
“Who is he?” I said.
“A German writer. He published a book of short stories and a novella. It’s the novella I’m interested in—Der Brutale Junge, written in 1936, but it wasn’t published until after his death.”
He squinted at me.
“Yes?” I said.
“He died in a camp.”
“He was Jewish?”
“No, homosexual.”
I looked past Professor Rose and out the window, allowing his words to settle, trying to find a place for at least that single death among millions. I said nothing.
Professor Rose leaned forward in his chair. “He was thirty-two years old when he died.”
I looked at him. He moved his hand toward mine. Then he withdrew it, made a fist, and gently pounded a pile of papers.
“Anyway,” he said. “We’re going to translate this story together. You’ll do it first and then we’ll edit it together.”
He handed me a small green hardcover book. I fingered the letters on its spine. I wanted to linger, to keep talking, but Professor Rose nodded at the door, and I hurried through it without saying goodbye. When I left the building, I noticed that it had started to snow.
I read the story that night in bed. It was written in a clear, simple German that made my dictionary almost unnecessary. The snow, illumined by my bedside lamp, continued to fall outside the window. “Klaus was a good boy,” the story began. “He was ten years old, did well in school, was obedient, kind, and loyal.” I didn’t reflect on meanings then. The story was only itself, a thing apart, but I read without boredom.
Klaus’s father is a successful surgeon, despite the handicap of a club foot. His mother, the narrator writes, is pretty, silly, and devoted to her son. When she speaks of him to her friends, she always says, “Klaus is a good boy, not a shred of nonsense in him.” Poor Klaus, I thought, the nonsense is bound to come. And it does. The child begins to be troubled by cruel fantasies that appear in his head without warning. The descriptions of these sadistic daydreams are rendered with immense care, cataloged one after another in detail. Seeing a helpless old woman on the street, Klaus is overcome by a desire to trip her. While looking in his mother’s sewing box, he thinks of piercing his dog’s eyes with a needle. He loves the dog and can’t imagine why the idea pops into his head. He devises ingenious ways to torment his best friend, Dieter, pulling out his blond hairs one by one, wiggling his kneecap loose, and hanging him upside down from a lamp in his room. His fantasies become a preoccupation, a private indulgence, a world in which ordinary objects become instruments of torture: curtain rods, pillows, vases, cutlery. The delight these notions bring him is offset by a terrible remorse afterward, and he begins to try to ward them off. He prays, recites the multiplication tables and poems he has memorized for school, but none of it does any good. Klaus begins to fear himself, particularly in the evenings after dark. He lies in bed with his hands underneath him, afraid they will act without his permission. After several nights of this, his agitation gets the better of him, and the boy starts roaming. In the beginning he stays in the house, padding through the rooms and corridors when everyone sleeps, touching forbidden objects: his father’s pipe, his mother’s porcelain figurines. His violation is meticulous. He lets his fingers caress all parts of a thing before he returns it to its place. But the enjoyment he gets from these first misdemeanors dulls and, emboldened, he seeks new pleasures. Klaus then commits small acts of domestic sabotage. With a pair of scissors, he cuts a nearly invisible hole in his sheet. He hides several spoons. He ruins a number of his own toys, hiding the decapitated soldiers, wrecked train, and damaged sailboat in his closet. Then one night, the boy leaves the house and once in Krüger’s city, designated only by the letter S., he celebrates his freedom. He is happy just to walk where he should not walk and see what he should not see, finding odd streets and peering through the windows of closed shops and lit saloons. The night is a chaos of sights and smells and sounds, and the child becomes a tiny voyeur of the city’s secrets, a hidden witness to street brawls and soliciting prostitutes. Clad in white pajamas, he darts from one hiding place to another, venturing farther and farther from his own neighborhood. The boy’s nocturnal escapades leave him exhausted and he falls asleep in school and cannot concentrate on his studies, but he is not discovered. On one of his forays he comes across a cat, a ragged, injured alley cat lying near a heap of garbage in a dead end just around the corner from a noisy bar. Klaus bends down to investigate. Reaching for the cat, he tries to stroke it, but the frightened animal scratches him, and the boy has a sudden urge to kill it. In a soft voice he says, “I’m going to hurt you,” and then he strikes it. The creature howls but its damaged leg prevents it from escaping and Klaus grabs it and tries to strangle it. The cat fights for its life, cutting Klaus’s hands and face. The boy thinks he hears the bones of the cat breaking and begins to wail himself. A young woman who has taken her lover around the corner for a kiss sees Klaus squatting over the animal and runs to him, screaming, “What are you doing? You brutal boy! Stop it, now!” The boyfriend grabs Klaus by the shirt, pulling him away from his victim, and the woman crouches over the animal and takes it into her arms. “The poor thing is still alive,” she whispers, and when the man turns to look, Klaus tears out of his grip and runs. Before he reaches home, he is caught in a cloudburst that soaks him to the skin. Without waking his family, he goes to his room, hides the wet pajamas under his bed, and sleeps. The next morning he has a raging fever. The maid finds the wet clothes and shows them to the boy’s puzzled mother, but by this time Klaus is delirious, and a doctor is called. In a fever dream he sees his body burn from the toes up. His legs turn to ashes, leaving two large black spots on the bed. The child begins a confession. My mouth, he thinks, I must tell it before my mouth burns. The mother, who is sitting beside the bed, sees her son sit bolt upright and begin to speak. He confesses all, both the real and the imagined: the dangling Dieter, the hole in the sheet, the blinded dog, the hidden spoons, the cat. His mother doesn’t understand a word. She stares at his cut face and tries to get him to lie down, but he pushes her away. She wipes his forehead with a cold cloth and makes soothing noises. The boy keeps looking at the door. He hears his father coming up the stairs, dragging his foot behind him. The sound beats in his ears, but his father doesn’t appear. Klaus is on fire and he screams the words “brutal boy” over and over until the doctor arrives and sedates him. Klaus sleeps, and when he wakes, his throat is sore but the fever has broken. “Am I alive?” he asks his mother. After she assures him that he is, he sleeps again. Klaus recovers and finds that he is free of the wicked thoughts and has no desire to roam the city. His cure seems absolute. But in the novella’s last scene, Klaus is sitting in the parlor on a Sunday with his parents and several aged relatives. He has endured the rigors of a starched collar and a long church service. He looks at his great-uncle Frederick, a wizened little man with a concave chest and arms and legs like sticks. The old man falls asleep with his mouth open and Klaus begins to daydream. He climbs onto his uncle’s lap and blows air into the gaping mouth until the octogenarian blows up like a balloon and floats over the heads of the company, enormous and weightless Then he bursts. Bones, skin, teeth, fingers, toes, and old tobacoo juice rain down on the party. Klaus smiles and turns his attention to chubby Aunt Lotte, eyeing her big ankles with interest. The story ends with Klaus muttering to himself, “One times two is two. Two times two are four, three times two are six . . .”
I snapped the book shut and looked out my window. The snow had stopped. It’s an odd little work, I thought, slight and strange but good enough to translate, a gruesome comedy really. I began the next morning, searching for English words to mirror the German, and the effort changed the story for me. As I transcribed Klaus’s fantasies, I had an uncanny feeling of intimacy. Brief but vague memories surfaced and then were gone. I was in the Webster Municipal Libr
ary, standing beside another little girl I didn’t know. It was hot. She had a red face. It must have been summer. I wanted to shake her. That was all. I remembered nothing else, but the vision was provocative and brought with it a feeling of mild distress. To the extent that my text grew, the German one disappeared, and I claimed the new narrative. It’s mine, I said to myself, my reinvention. I’m making it. And so I struggled over the sentences, polishing them until they seemed perfect, and I recall that once when I paused from the translation to go to the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and was taken aback, I was grinning like a half-wit. Good God, I thought, you don’t even look like yourself.
By the time I met with Professor Rose again, I had done twenty pages out of ninety-five. When I handed him the manuscript, I had to hide my anticipation. He took the draft and began to read. I examined his expression carefully, looking for the sign of approval I hoped for, but his face was impassive. He turned the page. The room was overheated and I took off my sweater. He turned another page. The corners of his mouth fell. He hates it, I thought. The professor was wearing corduroys and the knees were worn. I looked at those knees and clenched my jaw. Finally he looked up at me.
“You’ve taken liberties,” he said.
“I have?” My disappointment must have been apparent.
“It’s good,” he said quickly, “really very good, but it’s changed.”
“Is it?” I said. “Where?”
Professor Rose gave me a shrewd glance, as if he didn’t believe me. “The tone,” he said. “You’ve missed the tone.”
“The tone! That’s what I was most careful about.” I dug out the little green volume from my bag, opened it to The Brutal Boy, and scanned the first paragraph. I looked up at him. He was smiling.
“Did you like the story, Miss Vegan?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure ‘like’ is the right word. I laughed when I read it, but I found it a little perverse at the same time.”