The Grasshopper King Read online

  “I say,” said Pfaffenrot.

  “By rights he ought to have expired with his hand-fantasies of world conquest. He is like a toad sick with constipation who boils himself in his own reeking fluids. He ought to be eaten from the feet up by wasps. His mind is gone and replaced by a chamberpot in the shape of a human head, which is filled with a vile soup of sweat, rotten meat, and worthless notes. He is to be pitied by idiots and pilloried by besotted dwarves. The Dutch ought to burn his house down and sprinkle the ashes with lye. Hail the Emperor!”

  Well, what do you think? After all these years I remember every word! I was shocked! Even merry Pfaffenrot couldn’t manage a laugh!

  The next thing I heard was Henderson running out of the room, and the Emperor shouting for the guards. I burst out of my hiding spot; but I couldn’t catch up with Henderson. Neither could the guards. So that was the end of the poet’s visit to House Doorn! And I the last of all the boys still alive to tell about it! Lucky your letter found me when it did!

  Well, anyway, I’ll finish! Soon enough the trouble in Germany became worse. But, you know, Pfaffenrot was always saying from then on just what Henderson had said; that Britain should only wait and let Hitler come to his own grief. And I suppose he was saying that same thing to his employers in London too. Well, I don’t want to be the one to say that Henderson’s poor advice kept the Nazis around long enough to start all their trouble! You, an educated man, know better than me: things have all kinds of causes! I’m an old dullard! I’m only telling you these things I’ve seen!

  Now I’m still not quite done. By chance I ran across Henderson one more time, in Berlin, in 1940. By then I am sorry to say had I fallen a little distance in the world—so I was quite excited to see a reminder of happier times! And you know, Henderson had not changed a bit! In fact, he still wore the rag-coat the girls had made for him! It turned out he was about to move to London; apparently something he had written had made angry the Nazis. Well, there’s old Henderson, always getting in trouble with his talking! I couldn’t resist having a little fun with him!

  “Well, Mr. Henderson,” said I, “you certainly did have it wrong about politics!”

  He gave me a queer look. “It was you worthless Germans who were wrong,” he said. “So it’s you who will wake up with a bloody throat. Not I. I will be gone.”

  Well, as usual, I didn’t know what he meant! But I think he was right about being gone—that was the last time I saw him! If he is dead or living I don’t know! Maybe you can tell me!

  Look how long now I’ve gone on! Well, we old men are all alike that way. I’m sure you know so! I hope this will be of some help to you. But don’t thank me! It’s my sister you ought to thank—for never throwing anything away!

  I am yours!

  Karl-Heinz Sethius

  CHAPTER 6

  THE IMPLICATIONS

  “That’s the end,” Ellen said, and for a confused moment I thought she was still reading; that Sethius was assuring us we hadn’t lost a page. But of course she was speaking for herself. She folded the letter up and slid it back into the blue envelope. There was silence, the heavy kind that follows a loud, startling sound, or a tremor. I found myself waiting for an aftershock; but there was none. The four of us were there in our places, just as we had been, and the earth was still.

  “So Mister Sunrise started World War Two,” Julia said. “Who would have thought?”

  No one answered her. During the course of the letter I had turned to stare at Higgs, hoping for some reaction; I’d even brought out my Henderson Society steno pad. The silence nagged at me like slight hunger or an itchy eye. I bombarded Higgs with telepathic messages: Come on. No time like the present. Go for it.

  Julia tried again: “Imagine, him finding that flyer after thirty years.”

  “It’s some coincidence,” Ellen said. Then, carefully: “Don’t you think, Stanley?”

  “Yes,” Julia said, “isn’t it strange?”

  Suddenly I was swept up with anger at Higgs. Why wouldn’t he speak? Why not now, with this scholarly windfall in front of him? When would he ever have a better chance?

  But there he sat, silent, and confronted with his smooth and even gaze my anger dwindled to nothing. I was left with a heartful of wan resignation. The moment was fixed: our situation there, Higgs’s and Julia’s, Ellen’s and mine, was suddenly imbued in my mind with an aura of domestic permanence, the aura that marriage has in Victorian novels, or the curses of the gods in Greek plays. We four were a tableau. Nothing from outside could touch us. The world beyond our basement, that realm of coincidences, of Henderson, of college, of countries and armies, seemed phantasmic now, a conjecture, utterly unconvincing.

  “It’s really something,” I said. And it was something, I told myself: what had happened, what we’d learned, even if Higgs wouldn’t admit it. Maybe, I thought dizzily, it was everything.

  Then Higgs stood up. Ellen and Julia gasped. I fumbled for my steno pad. But he was only getting the box of tournament cards. Higgs looked over the topmost card, placed it on the board, and sat down again. Then he picked a red piece from the stack on the table with the eagerness and delicacy of a glutton selecting a bonbon, and set it down, with a click, on the square the card dictated. A black piece, a second click; and another red man, a third. Click. Click. Click. It was the sound of empty chambers, of a Russian roulettist three times fortunate. I began to consider the implications of what Sethius had told us; and Julia, whose turn it was, sat down to play.

  The implications! It was not just the explanation of Henderson’s time in Holland, not even the effect Henderson might have had on the outbreak of the war. No—what excited me, what made me distracted and light-headed with ambition, was not the answers in the letter, but the prospect of a whole new line of questions. Higgs, starting from the barest evidence, had brought to light Henderson’s influence on the world’s literary heroes. Now I would do the same for politics and states. How could no one have thought of it before? Berlin under Weimar was the crossroads of Europe, the petri dish of the Allied experiment: and there, and then, was Henderson, the blood of dukes in his veins, the uproar of Bolshevism in his past, and the beloved, despised figure of Kaiser Wilhelm in the secret spaces of his heart. He must have been an incarnate League of Nations—a human bickering. Who better than he to set the course of governments? I could already see the shape of what I’d find: one by one the yellowed headlines of Le Figaro, the Times of London and of New York, would reveal the workings of Henderson’s hand, his hidden counsels. Next to him, Rasputin would come out as a harmlessly eccentric old clergyman. Madame Mao would be an ordinary henpecker. Whole countries, it would transpire, had been struck down by his off-hand remarks, and thousands slaughtered according to one or another of his fancies. I could see no limit to what might be explained. What I had in mind was no less than a new, more sensible history.

  By this time I’d lost my taste for my nightly ritual of estrangement from Julia. Turning away from her no longer flattered my continence; or the flattery had grown too old and repetitive to please me. It was easier to stay at my desk until she was asleep; then I flicked off the lamp and lowered myself gingerly to the mattress, like a wayward husband. No creak, no rattle betrayed my lonely hitting of the hay. Flat on my back, arms at my side, I took my four hours of sleep.

  I needed—had time for—no more. Before I hammered the twentieth century into its new shape, I had to verify the story that Sethius had told; and that would not be easy.

  I gathered what documentation I could: memoirs of various German dandies; Dutch tourist guides; hundreds of ancient, spotted letters, cracking along the creases; the logbooks of the Amersfoort precinct; endless dull histories of Her Majesty’s Intelligence. I felt like a movie Indian, padding silently through the pathless waste of words, searching for the one weathered footprint, half filled in with mud, that would give my prey away. My orderly habits deserted me. Up half the night, I worked in fits and starts; sometimes pacing feverishly, som
etimes staring out the window, trying to pick out the squat skyline of Chandler City, pitch dark against the almost-pitch dark of the sky. I blotted the sweat from my forehead with endless processions of tissue. My acne, psychosomatically, returned. The floor of my room was stalagmited with tottering stacks of books, letters, quartos, maps, and strewn with crumpled drifts of wax paper: the accumulated wrappers of my egg salad sandwiches. By that time I was eating eight or nine a night. And behind me, Julia slept, perfectly still, curled on her side with the covers pulled over her head; she was a long, Z-shaped mound among the blankets, like earthworks.

  I found out a few things. From the Kaiserin’s diaries I learned that Kaiser Wilhelm had, in fact, been in a terrible temper throughout September 1932, snubbing nobles, insulting their wives, sending his supper back night after night. Hermione did not record the cause of her husband’s distress; but it seemed clear from her language that she knew exactly what had brought it on. The Kaiser had indeed held a dinner party on the tenth of April of that year, and it had indeed been raining. The layout of the house was as Sethius had described it. And the Kaiserin’s dog was named Arno.

  Baron Pfaffenrot, too, was actual, although Sethius’s estimation of him as a spy turned out to be overblown. At best, he’d been a gossip on retainer. But he’d dined with the Conservative MP Leo Amery on October 2, sharing his new opinion on the Hitler question. He’d met, too, with Arthur Henderson, Labour’s tribune of disarmament, and—yes—Henderson’s third cousin; and when Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, it was Arthur Henderson, months from his deathbed, who’d expressed in a privately-circulated editorial the prevailing opinion that Japan, not Fascism, was the real threat to England; and that Britain, by rearming, “would cut off her own nose”—surely an echo of Henderson’s own assessment. And England did not rearm; and Mussolini took Abyssinia unopposed; and everyone knows what happened after that.

  That was where I stood: the circumstantial evidence perfect, and perfectly circumstantial. I could find no contemporary testimony to Henderson’s presence in Holland. Nor did Sethius show up on the books. The letter, to a critical eye, could still have been a hoax; one had only to postulate a hoaxer as diligent in his research as I was. As for myself, I had not a doubt that the letter was genuine; but, I was forced to concede, I was anything but an unbiased observer. The letter, if verified, would make my reputation. If it were fake I would be a laughingstock. And there—as I said—I stood.

  Until: at three-thirty in the morning of September 19, my fingers clumsy from a night spent fruitlessly unfolding and refolding facsimiles of Imperial correspondence, I plucked an egg salad sandwich from my bag, my eyes still focused on the sheet before me (some soapmerchant’s petty wheedle, his Majesty’s sympathetic but unhelpful reply) and, as I unrolled it from its wrapping, lost my grip. I fumbled, made a futile stab; but the sandwich plummeted into the raft of papers at my feet. When I retrieved my snack, a page came along with it: a poem of Henderson’s that McTaggett had given me to read some weeks ago. I peeled the poem off the sandwich. The leaking mayonnaise had left a broad, shiny stain on the page, a stain shaped suspiciously like a hand; and the outstretched finger of that hand was resting on a stanza just two words long; and the two words were “red whistle.”

  Red whistle—rote Pfiff—Pfaffenrot.

  The poem was called “Sudetenland, My Mother.” It was a late work, only recently discovered, dating from just before Henderson’s move to London. The poem had not yet yielded to analysis, which was why McTaggett had given it to me. I’d looked it over and found it impenetrable. In the excitement surrounding the Sethius letter, I’d forgotten all about it.

  The stained section read, “Examine the// red whistle// of the tea-cur which chews at its own entrail/ My uncle has lost his hat and chamberpot; it/ is my fault.” The tea-cur was England; this was one of Henderson’s favorite kennings. McTaggett had suggested that the “red whistle” was the dog’s penis; but the Gravinic word for “dog” Henderson used to describe his parents’ countrymen suggested a contemptible absence of sexual characteristics, whether female or male. The sense of the passage, McTaggett had conceded, remained unclear.

  But no longer. The red whistle was none other than the spying Baron; the rise of the Nazis (i.e., the passing of the “hat” from the Kaiser, or “uncle”) had left him consumed with guilt, a guilt which, in some sense, was Henderson’s own. It was all obvious now. Scattered throughout the rest of the poem I could see the rest of Sethius’s story. There was the storm, the dog, there a “spasmatic servant boy” that must have been my informant himself. I stood up from my chair, reeling with the onset of understanding, wanting desperately to have it all set down somewhere, publicized; I swayed like a Pentecostal, there in my circle of lamplight, transported by joy and the responsibility of being the only one who knew.

  “I win,” I said aloud, trying out the sound of it. Julia stirred and tugged the sheet down a bit, uncovering her still-closed eyes. She mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I knelt by the bed.

  “I’ve got it,” I told her.

  “Yes,” she said; to somebody, I thought, in a dream.

  “I’m going to be famous.”

  Her eyes opened a little.

  “Hi, there,” she said.

  “Hi,” I repeated; vaulted into bed, pulled the covers over me.

  “Sleepy.”

  “Sleepy,” I agreed.

  And amazingly, I was. My moment of exultation was through now and I was left perfectly, serenely, exhausted. I turned my body toward Julia’s back and let one arm drape over her sweat-damp shoulder. She moved neither away from nor toward me, which was as I wanted it. I pressed my face into the pillow and twisted myself deeper into the sheets. I felt capable of racing through two weeks’ sleep in the three hours before morning; and in the dim light of my desklamp, my arm thrown over Julia’s warmness, I got down to the business of rest.

  Events proceeded quickly. I showed McTaggett my discovery, and through him the word diffused within days to the strewn Gravinicists of the world. Daily I received flattering, inquisitive letters from my colleagues—so they called themselves now! I let them stack up on my desk. McTaggett assured me that upon the publication of my paper the department would grant me my degree at once. Even my parents were impressed. We were welcome, my mother told me, to stay with them if we wanted to save some money—an offer previously extended only on the condition that I give up my academic ambitions and resume my old station at the fry-o-lator.

  And Julia—Julia accepted the reestablishment of my affections without a protest, with, in fact, a fierce and cattish enthusiasm that startled me anew each evening. My petulant self-denial dropped off me like a snakeskin. I was a red, sensitive, brand-new thing.

  “Isn’t that better?” she asked me. She’d put her bra back on and was standing in the window’s orange light, looking out at the not-much-out-there; I was resting, out of breath, against the bathroom door.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  Such a pleasure to hand over the keys.

  “That’s good to hear,” she said, not turning around.

  “You’re right,” I told her. “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.”

  Now and then I forced myself to recall that all my success was the result of a simple stroke of luck. Sethius’s letter might have come on someone else’s watch, or it might never have come at all, or I might have been more sure-handed with my sandwich. But the letter had come, and to me. My future was assured; once my paper was done I could quit my job with Higgs; and in my private reckoning it seemed to me that the whole sorry story of my benighted youth had come, against all odds, to an entirely satisfactory conclusion.

  But it was not the conclusion. One morning, a few weeks after my discovery, I opened the door to Higgs’s house only to be hit full on by a man hurtling out. His momentum knocked me backwards; my heel struck the scalloped edge of the front walk and the two of us plunged into the bushes.

  I was stun
ned for a moment, there inside the hedge, until the stringent odor of the snapped branches tugged me back into full awareness. I could hear Julia’s voice, from out on the walk: “Sammy? What happened?” But all I could see was the spiny network of branches, and my skinny assailant, heaped atop my chest in the green darkness. Shaped like an arrow. It was Treech.

  “Sorry,” he said, managing to lift his face up a little. “One second.” Then he slumped back down, out of wind.

  Into the thicket came Julia’s hands; she took me by the wrists and dragged the two of us back into the light. Treech leaned on me woozily. I clapped my chest for breath. The two of us hung together like a just-finished relay team.

  “Sorry,” Treech repeated, panting. “Just going . . . on my way.”

  But this time he wasn’t talking to me. Ellen had come out of the house, still in her slippers. In one hand she was clutching a crumpled sheet of paper, and in the other she held a serrated stone dagger, thrust out in front of her, its tip shaking with the shaking of her hand.

  “You. Get. Out. Of. Here,” she said through gritted teeth, punctuating each word with a downward chop of the knife. I had long since disavowed the idea that Ellen was really dangerous; but now, her face emotionless, her skin flushed, her hands clenched so tightly that her tendons stood out up to her elbows, she seemed fully capable of reviving the dagger’s long-dormant career as an agent of human sacrifice. I wished Treech would let go of me. I felt like a hostage.

  We stood frozen, a diorama. Ellen’s housedress flapped in the feeble breeze. A pigeon was pecking spitefully at something in the lawn. I became acutely conscious of the scratches I had incurred in my fall; I thought I could feel each tiny pain as a distinct sensation, requesting individual attention, a cold compress, a prod. But under the circumstances it seemed best to hold still.

  “What is this?” Julia said. And at the sound of her voice Ellen softened a little. Her face became less masklike, her grip a little looser. The dagger drooped from her hand like a rejected flower. She seemed to consider; then she held out the crumpled paper to Julia.