Adam Sachs - Inherited Disorders - Stories, Parables & Problems

A last request, a bitter family quarrel, the scent of burnt art: the public would be captivated, more so than the audience at any of his staged dramas. Real emotions would be generated, and his customary themes — fathers and sons, the incompatible obligations of family and art — would be articulated. After seven years, a press release would reveal that this feud over the last play was itself the last play, a tragedy for three actors entitled Last Wishes . He chose an epigraph from Ecclesiastes: “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool?”

Having prepared everything, the playwright swallowed a cyanide pill and died. When his sons entered his study and found two piles, one labeled “to burn” and one labeled “to publish,” they instantly, wordlessly, and harmoniously burned both piles, prodding and poking and jabbing at the ashes with their father’s fire iron until there was nothing left. Then they went off to pursue quiet, private lives.

The playwright faded from public memory, and seven years later when a press release declared that “all of this over the past seven years” had constituted his last and greatest work, no one understood what “all of this” referred to, and the claim was met with confusion, derision, and pity.

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My friend Theo’s father, a professor of urban planning, suffered a massive stroke, after which he could utter only the two words Theo and infrastructure. For the last month of his life, these were the only words out of the father’s mouth. Theo, who had always felt that he was a terrible disappointment to his father, was deeply moved that his name was on his dying father’s lips. He took it as a sign that his father had finally forgiven and accepted him.

Years later, whenever we discuss these events, we simply pass over the fact that his father was saying not only Theo , but also infrastructure .

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On the River Havel, near Wannsee, a talented young lawyer who was also a promising Expressionist poet fell through the ice and drowned. His inconsolable father and his very anguished friends both agreed that a statue ought to be erected on the banks of the Havel in his memory, but they could not agree on its design. Should the statue represent him in his capacity as a lawyer, as his father wished, or in his capacity as an Expressionist poet, as his friends wanted? In the end, they compromised. They commissioned and erected a statue of the young man — Heym — holding forth over the Havel; whether he was reciting a poem or presenting a legal argument was left to the spectator.

When, however, the friends convened at that tragic bend in the Havel on the second anniversary of Heym’s death, they found that his father had installed, fifteen feet in front of the statue, in the middle of the river, a second statue, of a judge on his bench. This effectively closed off the possibility that the Heym statue was reciting a poem, and left no doubt that he was presenting a legal argument.

The friends, all of them Expressionist poets, were outraged. They rowed into the river and tried to topple the judge statue, then to vandalize it, but the thing was made of granite and virtually indestructible. Finally, they decided to pool their meager funds and commission three new statues: two figures seated six feet from the Heym statue, clearly poetry fans, listening raptly, and immediately behind them, back-to-back with them, an elderly lawyer addressing the statue of the judge. Now it appeared the Heym statue was reciting a poem to a small but avid audience, while nearby, in the shallows of the Havel, some lawyer was addressing a judge about an unrelated legal matter.

These granite statues were similarly unmovable and unbreakable. All the father could do now was install a statue of a poet between the first statue and the two seated poetry fans, so the poetry fans seemed to be listening to that poet, not to his son, as well as a statue of a stout woman and a dog between the new lawyer statue and the judge, so the lawyer seemed to be addressing not the judge but his stout wife and his loyal dog. On the pedestal of the judge’s statue he had an engraver chisel, “Order in the courtroom! Counselor Heym, please proceed”—thus implying that the son’s oral argument had been interrupted by the impromptu poetry reading and the sudden meeting-up of the elderly lawyer with his wife and dog.

After much deliberation, the friends commissioned a statue of a courtroom functionary looking at the judge while pointing at Heym with one hand and the elderly lawyer with the other hand, with an engraving on his pedestal reading, “Which Heym? They’re both named Heym.” But almost instantly Heym’s father installed a statue of a second functionary pointing at the elderly lawyer, with an engraving reading, “No, his name is Wurmbacher .” With that, the now-penniless Expressionist poets had to accept defeat. Heym’s father’s wealth was inexhaustible, they realized. And he was willing to spend all of it to determine his son’s legacy.

Everyone involved in this story died and was more or less forgotten. But in the 1970s a circle of conceptual artists in Berlin — of which David Bowie was for a time on the periphery — rediscovered this emotional, illogical assemblage of granite statuary. It became a site of pilgrimage. When, in 1992, the German government announced that it would be razed to make way for a bridge over the Havel that would ultimately connect Berlin and Hannover by high-speed rail, a number of artists protested. These ten senseless and unsightly statues were part of the legacy of German modernism, they said. But the statues were torn down nevertheless, and today one can reach Hannover from Berlin in an hour and a half, a fact for which even the artists are grateful.

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One winter evening in 1905, on a street corner in Moscow, a radical who was carrying a bomb toward his tsarist father’s home happened to bump into an acquaintance, a painter who was carrying a Symbolist painting toward his realist father’s studio. On the far corner they spotted, purely by chance, a philosopher friend who was carrying an idealist manifesto toward his materialist father’s office. The radical planned to kill his father, the Symbolist to surpass his father, and the idealist to refute his father. But when the radical, kneeling in his father’s bathroom, armed his bomb, it went off prematurely and he killed himself instead. What happened to the other two is unknown.

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY LULU LIU

ADAM EHRLICH SACHS studied atmospheric science at Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon . His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1 , and McSweeney’s . He lives with his wife in Massachusetts.