provide relief from the rest of his thought, which rarely brings up anything new.
Whenever he recalls any event involving a horse, for instance, he always asks himself the same question. What happened to all the horses ?
He remembers the smell of them filling the streets, the lines by the river chewing in their nosebags, the constant sound of hoofs and shouting drivers. He thinks of the horses thronging in Berlin, heaving every kind of merchandise.
He does the same calculation every time he thinks of it: one horse for every twenty people, he estimates, making twenty million across Europe at that time, and still their numbers exploding with the population. Then, after the centuries of coexistence, humans turned away from horses, and embraced machines. But he does not remember seeing how the surplus of horses was carried off.
He tries to visualise the volume of twenty million horses. Did we eat them, without knowing ? he asks himself. The question irritates himbecause he has gone countless times through this sequence of thoughts, and he knows it does not produce any answers.
13
U LRICH MOVED BACK into his parents’ house, where he watched his father die of chagrin.
The days were already running out when people could die of such things. Ulrich knows his own will be a modern death, and his death certificate will require a mechanical justification for it: for even at his excessive age, bureaucrats will see his demise as a suspicious error. It is no longer possible to say on a death certificate that a person died of old age.
But Ulrich’s father died of chagrin. He sat in a chair for the better part of a decade, looking out of the window and growing deaf, and squawking, sometimes, with snatches of birdsong. The gap between his breaths became longer and longer, until finally, almost indiscernibly, they ceased.
While he was still alive, Elizaveta would say, ‘All he ever does is sit in that chair and look out of the window.’ It infuriated her to see him so inactive. But after he died she never said anything but, ‘That was the chair he loved.’ Or, ‘How he loved sitting in that chair.’ Or, ‘They are spoiling the view your father loved so much.’
Ulrich had never played music again after his childhood violin was thrown into the fire. But his separation from chemistry was not so perfect. It continued to seep back in, diverting him from his proper life, and prodding him, sometimes, to do puzzling things.
Though life had uprooted him from the pursuit of science, he continued to surround himself with chemical accoutrements, which acted like substitutes for the real thing. He fell into the routine of spending anhour or two after work in a scientific bookshop, which stocked some of the most recent international publications about chemistry. He liked to look through the contents of the German journals – the Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie, the Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie , and Liebigs Annalen – and to pose questions to the shopowner, who knew something about recent developments in the field. Ulrich usually came away with some small purchase or other: manuals for practical experimentation, mostly, and biographies of scientists. These books and papers began to accumulate in every room of the house, filling corners and covering chairs.
‘Are you trying to close up all the gaps?’ his mother asked bitterly, staring at the piles. ‘Make sure I never let down my hair?’
Elizaveta viewed Ulrich’s return home as an admission of failure, and she was no longer indulgent to his whims. In the past, she had supported him whenever her husband had stood in his way, but now she turned on him in just the same way – as if she were trying to preserve the dead man’s memory by taking over his attitudes. She treated Ulrich’s chemistry as if it were a form of onanism that had to be rooted out of him, and she forbade experiments in the house. She
Whenever he recalls any event involving a horse, for instance, he always asks himself the same question. What happened to all the horses ?
He remembers the smell of them filling the streets, the lines by the river chewing in their nosebags, the constant sound of hoofs and shouting drivers. He thinks of the horses thronging in Berlin, heaving every kind of merchandise.
He does the same calculation every time he thinks of it: one horse for every twenty people, he estimates, making twenty million across Europe at that time, and still their numbers exploding with the population. Then, after the centuries of coexistence, humans turned away from horses, and embraced machines. But he does not remember seeing how the surplus of horses was carried off.
He tries to visualise the volume of twenty million horses. Did we eat them, without knowing ? he asks himself. The question irritates himbecause he has gone countless times through this sequence of thoughts, and he knows it does not produce any answers.
13
U LRICH MOVED BACK into his parents’ house, where he watched his father die of chagrin.
The days were already running out when people could die of such things. Ulrich knows his own will be a modern death, and his death certificate will require a mechanical justification for it: for even at his excessive age, bureaucrats will see his demise as a suspicious error. It is no longer possible to say on a death certificate that a person died of old age.
But Ulrich’s father died of chagrin. He sat in a chair for the better part of a decade, looking out of the window and growing deaf, and squawking, sometimes, with snatches of birdsong. The gap between his breaths became longer and longer, until finally, almost indiscernibly, they ceased.
While he was still alive, Elizaveta would say, ‘All he ever does is sit in that chair and look out of the window.’ It infuriated her to see him so inactive. But after he died she never said anything but, ‘That was the chair he loved.’ Or, ‘How he loved sitting in that chair.’ Or, ‘They are spoiling the view your father loved so much.’
Ulrich had never played music again after his childhood violin was thrown into the fire. But his separation from chemistry was not so perfect. It continued to seep back in, diverting him from his proper life, and prodding him, sometimes, to do puzzling things.
Though life had uprooted him from the pursuit of science, he continued to surround himself with chemical accoutrements, which acted like substitutes for the real thing. He fell into the routine of spending anhour or two after work in a scientific bookshop, which stocked some of the most recent international publications about chemistry. He liked to look through the contents of the German journals – the Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie, the Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie , and Liebigs Annalen – and to pose questions to the shopowner, who knew something about recent developments in the field. Ulrich usually came away with some small purchase or other: manuals for practical experimentation, mostly, and biographies of scientists. These books and papers began to accumulate in every room of the house, filling corners and covering chairs.
‘Are you trying to close up all the gaps?’ his mother asked bitterly, staring at the piles. ‘Make sure I never let down my hair?’
Elizaveta viewed Ulrich’s return home as an admission of failure, and she was no longer indulgent to his whims. In the past, she had supported him whenever her husband had stood in his way, but now she turned on him in just the same way – as if she were trying to preserve the dead man’s memory by taking over his attitudes. She treated Ulrich’s chemistry as if it were a form of onanism that had to be rooted out of him, and she forbade experiments in the house. She
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