Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears

She had been Googling Furtwangen. She had found this in the notebooks in my flat. How much she had read was beyond the point. I was angry and frightened. My skin went cold and hard as leather.

By the time the spy had returned and placed the parcel on my desk, my world had become quite unreal. I picked up the scalpel with the dot of nail polish. Amanda stood very close, wearing Jo Malone, all in black today, with painted buttons.

Before the inner sheath of packaging was revealed, I turned to her, very conscious of the scalpel in my hand. She stepped back, exactly as I wished.

“Amanda, I checked your computer history.”

“I’ve not been looking at the webcam.”

“You were Googling Furtwangen. Why?”

Her face showed that infuriating expression which might be colloquially translated as “duh.” She said: “Obviously, I wanted to know where it was.”

I casually rested my hand on the bench, but I did not release my grip on the metal handle. “Why?”

“I think they made cuckoo clocks there.”

“Why are you interested in cuckoo clocks?”

If she was going to scratch again, it would be now. I was very foolish to hold the scalpel. I wished, now, too late, to put it down, but I was afraid of that as well. Then I saw, with relief, her eyes were tearing.

“Miss Gehrig, I am so sorry.”

I did not dare soften. “What are you sorry about, Amanda?”

“I know about the notebooks.”

“Which notebooks?”

“Henry Brandling.”

“You mean you have seen them? How could you?”

“I went to Miss Heller. She doesn’t leave until seven.”

It was not until the next day that I had my moment with Miss Heller and Eric Croft and I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that this was true. And although this resulted in me being given full access to the reading room, I got no apology from Heller.

“When people are nice to me, Miss Gehrig, I am always very nice to them. When people are rude and officious then I tend to be a stickler.”

I sat ten feet behind her desk, reading Henry Brandling.

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.