The Syme Papers Read online

  The little princedom was not the only thing growing rich. For the good minister, so zealous for the honour of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, so assiduous on its behalf – initiating in his tenure dozens of state schemes, from the university to the mines, and setting in progress the miracle of engineering that would eventually produce, almost forty years after his death, the Nord-Ostsee Canal – had begun to lick the fingers stuck in all those pies. Thank God, in a way, that he did. For perhaps I should never have known a thing about Ferdinand Müller had he not hanged himself from ‘a hook above his study door’ a little over a year after composing the turgid, oddly teasing letter that promised such hope to Syme (and such hope to me).

  Why he hanged himself is a difficult question – only slightly connected, I believe, to the business with Syme. I have said that the life of Ferdinand Müller is worthy of its own investigation; so it is. (How many of us can say so much for ourselves, that the eye of history should focus, even for a minute, on us alone?) And it has been investigated. A recent paper by Benjamin Karding in Sozialgeschichte Heute, titled ‘The coup that never was: Ferdinand Müller and the build-up to the July Revolution’, attempts to establish Müller’s involvement in an underground parliamentary movement, an offshoot of the student Burschenschaften, fixed on similarly liberal and nationalistic goals. Karding argues that Müller did not hang himself because he was caught embezzling state money; he hanged himself because of what the money was for – the extent of his revolutionary ambitions (in spite of his repeated denials), which prompted the troops from Berlin to march upon Neuburg at last. But then Karding would argue that – for Ferdinand Müller was his great-uncle, many times great.

  I called Dr Karding at his home, in the small university town of Neuburg, on the banks of the Elbe. Standing in the tiny kitchen of my flat, I explained who I was and what I was looking for. The phone was propped against the bulk of my shoulder, pressing my hot ear, while one hand (mercifully at ease again) fiddled with a pen, and the other bent apart the blinds to expose a man in a suit with his shoes off, sitting on a bench by the road. A flood of – what, fellow feeling? – surprised me, at the interrupted loneliness of my researches, the company I had found in an obscure corner of the 1820s. ‘Some trace of Syme,’ I urged warmly, ‘that’s all. Your Müller gave him money in 1825 to look into his theories – strange theories, I confess, about a hollow earth.’ How could I explain them without seeming touched by Syme’s madness? ‘Still, curious things, theories,’ I babbled on. ‘And I think his may have turned up again …’ A new fear tied my tongue now, of giving up the secret of my prized connection, the line from Wegener to Syme.

  ‘Samuel Syme, I believe,’ Karding answered, in the pure watery English of the educated German, and my heart stopped. ‘And his theory of concentric spheres, is it not?’ he added, with the satisfied air of a man laying down the ace of trumps. ‘Yes, yes,’ he went on, the ‘s’s hissing slightly through his teeth; as if he could not, even in a foreign tongue, quite repress his fondness for the simple affirmative, for ja, ja. ‘I know all about your Lieutenant Syme,’ he said, spitting out the word with an ‘f’, after the English fashion. ‘Perhaps, indeed, a little bit more than yourself.’

  My heart sank into my stomach, a dull weight, like a swallow of tough meat. The phone nearly slipped from my shoulder, and I caught it with a brief twinge in my wrist. A century of Müllers and another, translated into Kardings, had not robbed the family of their particular turgid, teasing tone. I suddenly thought, nearly two hundred years ago, Sam himself was greeted by just such a ‘yes’, just such a mocking, equivocal yes. (I was hot on his heels indeed, if only I could avoid the hole he tumbled in.)

  The man in the suit on the bench had finished whatever thought had kept him there, and slowly stooped to pull first one sock, then the other, over his (now dirty) bare feet. ‘If you please’ was all I said, clutching the phone, ‘if you please’ – tricked as it were into the propriety of a foreigner’s accent.

  ‘I should be delighted to entertain your curiosity,’ Dr Karding answered in that sucking tone of his, enjoying, it seemed, a toothsome private joke, ‘if you would have the goodness to come such a long way.’

  *

  Missy Pitt, to speak in the hyperbole of understatement, was not best pleased. ‘Only a day or two,’ I assured her, covering my voice in velvet to soften its passage to her thoughts. ‘I’m flying into Hamburg and taking the train. Dr Karding will collect me at the station. I’ll see whatever there is to see – and then I’m coming home.’ The word collect, carefully chosen to tickle her sense of the English, missed its mark.

  ‘Dr Bunyon stopped by yesterday,’ she said, adding ‘kindly’ when I sighed – as if Dr Bunyon, like Death, would go to any trouble for a busy friend. (I shudder to think how our little Blue-stocking Society has survived my absence.) ‘He said, if nothing came of this year, there wasn’t any hope, he said, in the fall. Those were his words; and he means well, Douglas. He said he’d have a word with some of the faculty, to let them keep you on, until you found something else. A year at most. “Tell him to write,” he said, and shook his head. What can I do?’ she added, in those particular soliloquizing tones that suggest someone is calling out from their wits’ end.

  ‘The breakthrough is near,’ I insisted. ‘The breakthrough is near.’

  My mind was made up, set fast – for once I would not flinch at the brink of success. One cannot struggle through a forest to the gate, and then turn, without attempting the key, without tinkering in the lock, without pushing firmly, pressing the weight of the full soul against the bars. At least, not twice – counting Syme himself as the first instance of our failure, the two of us twinned by a common thought, the agents of a single idea. I would redeem him now.

  The breakthrough was very near indeed.

  *

  Neuburg was much as I had figured it – a pretty old town in the bend of a river, white roofs in the distance scalloped like the waves of an unsettled sea. The train from Hamburg, a sleek yellow capsule with slanted windows, arrived on the dot – and I stepped out into the nowhere of a platform on a bright July day brimming with light clouds. Dr Karding had informed me that I should recognize him by the fact that he was ‘unnecessarily tall’ – and so he was, the lengthened shadow of a man, thin and stretched, striding to greet me with his hand reached out. I followed him down the steps and into the car park, a dour, thick bulldog trotting at his heels.

  He had not mentioned how young he was – a callow, long-nosed fellow who squeezed into his untidy VW Bug with astonishing angularity. A rather severe grey-green face, like the shaved countenance of an El Greco, suggesting also something of the hungry faith of the Old Testament; a nervous wrist, thin and strong, forever tampering with the signal-wires of his fingers. I wondered how much of the blood of Ferdinand Müller was left in him and shuddered at a hint of the noose about his tautened neck, the bulging Adam’s apple.

  His taste in music, I supposed, was all his own; for he rolled down the window, squeaking and puffing, and flicked the tape into the mouth of the deck. The dull-aching beat of techno blared across the sunny streets, like darkness audible, boom boom boom, scattering the birds from the lindens along the cobbled road. He smiled at me, wrinkling his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said, answering my thought, for I had not spoken, ‘I’ve only just got my doctorate. On the subject of my great-great-great-uncle, as it happens.’

  I began to have second thoughts. And when he lowered the music and enquired after my researches, I voluntereed only the thinnest of sketches; mentioned my interest in scientific false starts, dead ends; the old battles of Neptunists and Plutonists for the heart of the earth; Syme’s place among them – avoiding all mention of Wegener, his library, the catalogue of its contents that survived the bombing, ‘fetching up’ in Tunbridge Wells after the war; those ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’.

  Dr Karding in turn described something of Ferdinand Müller: his Napoleonic sympathies, curiousl
y transformed after the victory at Leipzig into a German nationalism (a common enough evolution); formation of the Parliamentary Society on ‘borrowed’ money; its links with other revolutionary groups, from Hamburg to Württemberg; the outbreak of the July Revolution; influence of the Neuburg underground on the disastrous Frankfurter student rebellion of 1834, which adopted much of Müller’s secret constitution, a draft of which was discovered in a mass of papers in the basement of their old family house. ‘That’s where we’re headed now. I suppose, though,’ he added, arching his brows slightly, as one testing the rustle of a card up his sleeve, ‘your particular of interest lies in the son, Friedrich.’ He paused a minute, waiting for a cab to turn into a cobbled side-street, then continued, ‘The one who went.’

  Again, a sudden caesura – stopped breath, heart, a quiet even in the flow of thoughts, the gap where recognition grows. We turned bumping at last into our cobbled side-street, off the Promenade along the river – Fischersallee, an elegant alley of eighteenth-century houses, tall and darkening the narrow lane. Dr Karding eased the Bug over the kerb and cut the engine. ‘Come now,’ he said, unfolding himself like a stepladder and squeezing out of the driver’s seat. ‘Shall I take you on a historical journey, the only one of its kind?’

  The house was cool and damp despite the pleasant light heat of the summer day; swathes of sunshine cut into the entrance hall in a beam of dust. We stepped up a narrow staircase on to a brighter landing, then turned into the first door by the opened window. ‘Here he hung,’ Dr Karding said, ducking his head beneath the frame. ‘They have patched up the hole where the hook dug in. You see, it would not have done for me – being too tall. My feet would scrape. Friedrich also was built too long for such a death. But Ferdinand was a little gentleman. A delightful study, no? Please, sit down.’

  I sat on a prim, high-backed chair by the window, high enough to catch the edge of sun drifting over the tiled roofs, glancing over the shadows of the street. ‘Of course, you know something of Friedrich?’ Dr Karding said, sat behind the antique desk in an angle of the room, trying to cross his long legs in the cramped nook between the drawers.

  ‘Only’, I faltered, oddly ill at ease in front of the young man, ‘that he was sent – sent to investigate Syme. Is there more?’

  ‘A great deal,’ he said, delicately rubbing his dry hands together, at the nubs of bone in the palm where the fingers begin. ‘Have you any idea why he was sent?’

  ‘I assumed’, hesitating again, ‘that it was – a job for the boys.’

  ‘Something of that. Something of that. Also, it made things a touch easier at first for Ferdinand to take a little off the top. Only at first, as it happened. There was more – a slight contretemps with the Prince gave the push. Friedrich tutored the boy for a while, you know. Quite harmless – only Friedrich had certain … predilections, I suppose, which, for his part, the Prince seemed to share. To a point.’

  Dr Karding considered a minute. There is something ageless about the weather in an old house; the sun falls in untouched, it seems, by the century at hand, indifferent to eras and revolutions.

  ‘Of course, Friedrich in his way was technically quite brilliant.’ (This word being a particular favourite of the Germans, and loosens their tongues astonishingly – they will quite happily attribute a wealth of merits technically that would appal them without this curious qualification.) ‘Well-suited intellectually at least to “borrow” what he could from Syme and carry it home. If there was virtue in it, of course.’

  ‘Just as I suspected,’ I muttered, keeping my end up.

  ‘Have you read Friedrich’s books? The Romantic Science? The Philosophy of the Senses?’ Dr Karding asked, crossing his legs at last (to a mighty rumble of drawers and the scrape of wooden feet on wooden boards) and leaning back, head propped in the nest of his hands.

  My end fell promptly down. No, I had read nothing by the man sent to investigate Syme, not even the suggestively titled Romantic Science. ‘I had been’, as Newton cried, ‘a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’ Part of the tide was about to come in.

  ‘Friedrich made quite a name for himself in the end,’ continued Dr Karding (the very picture of this distant great-uncle as it happens, long and thin, the shadow of a man at sunset), ‘in Berlin society, at the salon of Rahel Varnhagen, among others; and later in Paris. Played his part in precipitating what he called “the sensual revolution” – at least, he liked to think so. But I suspect that most of what he found, in Paris at least, was there already. In his way, though, he came out the best of all of them. The best of them all. Now rather neglected, I’m afraid; though perhaps his memoirs might put that right, is that not the phrase? They may interest you, I think.’

  There, in the little study where Ferdinand hanged himself, his grandson (many times great!) spread over the antique desk – the flowing corners richly curled, the slender legs austerely straightened‚ the delicate little feet daintily propped on the old floorboards – a sheaf of papers, yellowing, brittle with age, as though the rough sheets had been lightly crisped in the fire of time. Across the first of them, a flourish of Gothic script, Erinnerungen an Syme, and then a muddle and scribble of dates below, crossed out, corrected, until the year 1861 proved triumphant (the year of his death), beside the name, Friedrich Müller.

  *

  I did not come home in a ‘day or two’; in fact, only a scramble and lay-over in Reykjavik allowed me to beat the start of term in September. The manuscript was in something of a state, as the English say, which tends to mean no state at all: a hodgepodge of visions and revisions, corrections and amendments, the tedious working and reworking of an internal argument Friedrich thrashed out with himself, incapable of conclusion, only evolution, like a strand of DNA, from generation to generation, or decade to decade. Dr Karding – Benyameen, as I came to know him, the ‘j’ gentled, deflected into half a yawn, the ‘i’ lengthened and squeezed into sweetness, after the German fashion – and I battled through the muddle, lifting one thought to the next, much as we might have stumbled through mud, a leg at a time. I slept on the sitting-room sofa, an antique orange affair on tender feet, curled like paws into the rug, my own feet tucked into each other, the cushions too short to accommodate them. And in some sense this posture persisted through the days: my brain bent on a continual thought, too tight to stretch forth on easy limbs and walk free.

  The house soon stank of sleep – we all stank of sleep, the odour of life in stasis, unrefreshed, bent for ever on a single object – an odd fact, indeed, considering how little we slept. Two round cups of steaming coffee were required each morning to prop our wedged eyes open, by some sympathy, it seemed, with the ‘O’ of the mug’s rim. Our lives had been confined to the prisons of our minds, the bars formed of the neglected pages of Friedrich’s manuscript – only the key to them could release us at last into the world. And yet, and yet … we both had a sense, Benjamin and I, sleeping on scattered pages, waking to work at them afresh, breaking off only to spoon half-heated tins of ravioli into mouths that seemed almost to have forgotten their primary purposes, devoted as they were to the secondary function of language – we both had the sense of life deeply lived, of time burning brightly in the crucible of our skulls, of true vocation. We seemed to shed at last our bodies, useless lumps – or rather, recline upon them idly, as we might on sacks. We lived on the flame, while the dull, hot wax of the candle accumulated at the bottom – upon our bottoms. Even young Dr Karding, ladder of bones that he seemed, developed a derrière – overfed by canned pasta and that peculiarity of the English I had acquired over the year, baked beans on toast, washed down by milky tea.

  I almost grew accustomed to Benjamin’s techno banging through the house, setting on edge the thin, old glass of the windows till they fairly pinged their displeasure. The aching beat of it suggested after a time the echo of a mech
anical heart, in a hollow space, pumping lava blood through rocky arteries. I imagined the iron and nickel crowns of Syme’s imagination revolving to such enormous rhythms, the true music of the spheres, vast and technical and indifferent, grindingly ugly and yet alluring, like devastation. And under its spell we worked, pawing and poring over a dead man’s memories, comparing, correcting, collating, translating – deepening by our following steps the path of his life, till it broadened into a road, till it led, smoother and plainer by the day, to Alfred Wegener.

  The manuscript, as I said, suffered from the confusions of its author’s life. (Above all, this is a record of lives lived, not simply thoughts thought.) In the first place, Müller composed ‘on the trot’ (as the English have it), and his papers bore the marks of makeshift accommodations: spilt ink, coffee stains, even sea stains rendered parts of the text nearly unintelligible. Those final excited scratchings, scribbled overleaf on the last few pages, record his chance meeting with Peter Wegener (uncle of Alfred, a man of many parts, but fewer scruples) and bear evidence of his increasing physical distress. Müller’s hand had changed greatly over the years: the free-flowing ink of his youth had hardened into the crabbed joints and messy, irregular lines of sick old age. He suffered, Benjamin believed, from a cancer of the colon – a weakness hereditary to the family – and had travelled in some haste and discomfort from Paris when he ran into Peter. Müller had come home to die.

  Peter Wegener himself plays a crucial if mediate role in the story (a conduit of history). He was, as Charles Lamb ventured of Coleridge, a great borrower of books; and it is a curious irony of fate that he has left his final mark on the world by bequeathing one of them (though pilfered), upon his death, to his brother: the New Platonist itself, as Friedrich Müller’s manuscript conclusively proves, together with the conjunction of dates that mark its entry into the library on Friedrichsgracht. I should like, at some point, to undertake a history (and this, I promise, shall be the final revision of my academic ambitions) of the odysseys of manuscripts: the idle preoccupation that led T.E. Lawrence to neglect the single copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the seat of a train and the cold night that led Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution to be fed to the cottage fire. I shall count the wet day that brought Peter Wegener and Friedrich Müller into the comfort of a tavern fire as among the luckier chances of history – an incident in which the cottage fire redeems itself somewhat from its consumption of Carlyle’s masterpiece.