The Atheist in the Attic Read online

  I was already sitting on my side of the table. He came back, set down the glasses. Mine had the color of pale straw. I looked up.

  He said, “Genever.”

  I assumed his the same.

  Then he went around to his side of the table and lowered himself to his chair with its scrolled arms. “Gottfried, I don’t know how you do it. You seem to keep it all in order. I can’t. I really can’t. You’d think my brain was going. My parents were so much better at this than I am. At least, with all their craziness, they seemed to be. Sometimes I just want to go off to the country—to another country—and live in a cave. Take one of the menservants with me. Peytor? At least I can bear his personality. Though he only knows two languages—one is Walloon or something: nothing that could do anyone in any part of the civilized world any good.”

  “If he’s a nice boy,” I said, “probably you could teach him to be a body servant in a few weeks, a few months.” For all I didn’t know about him, it’s surprising how complete a picture of him I put together.

  Gunter frowned at me, his glass gleaming between his fingers, his brow bedeviled by the light’s low source. “Are you serious?”

  I shrugged. “As serious as you.” I sipped. (How various people in various parts of the world drink the various things they do has always been a fascinating thing to contemplate. A bit of ananas, a bit of juniper, a bit of malt … ? All those tiny tastes in one glass. Gunter is a good sort, a loyal friend. But drinking it, I was reminded of how he used to love practical jokes back in Altfort. Now I think about some of his current attempts to oblige that are almost as annoying.)

  “Have you ever talked to that boy? He’s a charmer—in the way so many country folk are when they get to the city and learn they have nothing to sell but their charm. Over the years, I have talked to him, for an hour there, another hour here. Yes, he’s clever, funny, sometimes a delight. But he’s also … very stupid. Mary already knows what a body servant is about, for a woman or for a man. If I took her off to a cave, I’m sure she’d be as efficient there as she is here. And I’d die of boredom if she was the only other person there.” He took another sip. “Peytor can’t learn. His head is so filled with fancies and foolishness, there’s no room for information. I know it. She knows it. I can stand him as her assistant. She likes him too, as does everyone, and she feels sorry for him and cuts him an unlimited number of second chances. I say he’s her assistant. He’s more her pet—as, frankly, he’s become mine. And, if you actually lived here for any length of time, probably he’d become yours unless your heart is far colder than I assume it to be. Preoccupied? Yes. Hard-hearted? That’s not you, Gottfried. But that’s why she consents to work with him and keep him out of trouble. You don’t have to know that about Peytor. You’re only here for a couple of weeks, every two years or so. You can smile at the advancement he makes, and don’t have to worry over the advancements he doesn’t.” He chuckled. “He’s just right where he is, thanks to Mary and Otto, and Otto—that’s old Otto with the beard, who sleeps in the barn in the back—but thanks to all of them really, both the ones who mostly like him and those who constantly lose patience. We form just the proper emulsion that, when someone like yourself arrives, keeps his better points polished and tends to submerge from sight his bad ones—of which there are a considerable number. Though he’s not a thief or a backbiter, or a practitioner of evils and pernicious magics, now and again he gets accused of all of them. And against all of them, as against the sophistication of the city, his stupidity is his best defense.”

  10.

  Though I was born in Saxony’s capitol, Leipzig, that city is in the rural stretches of my country, so it was in some of the smaller outlying towns that I learned that the great houses often did their laundry over a week or so, twice per year—or some of them in a single year would do it only once. Everyone who has any contact with such a home learns that you do not arrive, unannounced, during laundry week. But the simple propinquity of resources and labor in cities makes it likely that wealthy families who choose to live in Leipzig, not to mention Venice or Amsterdam, find such infrequency impractical and are impelled to wash clothes every six weeks. It turns on how many services as well as how many repairmen and workers are available. It has to do with how many servants live in the house and how many live off grounds as well as how many family members live together, and whether all of them can afford to keep seventy shirts just for daily wear and what appearances are desired and what such standards require in maintenance. In both the town and the country, the poor are notorious for rarely washing when work is oppressive. They want to imitate those better off than they are, so when they can afford to wash, they do. But with the illness and oppression they suffer, all too many of the poor, young and old, not only cease to wash but often go naked—or close enough to it. And sometimes, so do the rich.

  “I put a few grains of the baron’s salts in my glass. He says they bring a man relaxing sleep. Really, he’s an amazing doctor, one step away from a wizard. Do you want to try some?”

  “Oh. Why, no. I’ll forgo that.” So Gunter’s night drink was not the same as mine. But I sleep quite well enough without taking up a new habit, a new addiction.

  Is a poet someone who only wants to describe things, while a philosopher is someone who wants to describe things so that they will reflect and even explain the differences and forces that relate them all and hold them all together?

  Or sometimes tear them apart.

  Is the rarity of washing a hardship because of need or because of habit? And to whom is it a hardship? Or is it an easing of responsibility? And what does it mean—in the city, in the country—when, naked or clothed, I turn on you, tear you apart, and eat you?

  What does it mean about habits?

  Mean to the philosopher?

  To the poet?

  And what does it mean to want to understand this, rather than—or at least before—you condemn it or forgive it?

  11.

  After my first day with Senhor de Spinoza (his family, I know, were merchants from Portugal), I was wondering what he might do with such a toy as I had brought with me. Or, really, would it pave relations more smoothly if I took it on to England and dropped it off at the Royal Society with a note to pass it on to the Great Man himself at Trinity (or, indeed, vice versa)? Still, I was curious what Spinoza might make of the design of my toy, as much as I was curious about Newton or the rumors—

  There was a knock.

  “Yes … ?”

  It was young, fresh-looking, extremely Dutch Peytor. I realized he looked rather better than, of a sudden, I now remembered him from two years ago! (As soon as I’d seen him, I did remember him!) For one thing he wore shoes—wooden ones. And he was of an age at which he might have even gained a final spurt of growth while I’d been away. “Good day.” I smiled. “Seeing you now makes me realize why I didn’t recognize you this morning when you were unloading the carriage. They haven’t graduated you to the house, now—have they?”

  “They let me in,” he said. Blue eyes, a wide mouth, yellow hair that was actually a little darker than in memory. “The last time you were here, I would mostly sneak in.” He looked at me expectantly—and I began to frown because, at that point, I really didn’t know what he was expecting.

  “Yes, boy … ?”

  “Herr Leibniz, I thought … well, I thought you might have something for me … to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Laundry—your personal laundry. Like the last time.”

  “Oh, God in his heaven,” I said. “You remembered that?” But now I was surprised I didn’t. “Usually I hope that someone who encounters my eccentricity in that area will forget it or be good enough to pretend to. No, young man, I don’t. I’ve only been here a day.”

  “Last time”—he looked like a hungry sheep (not sheepish; like a sheep looking around for grass)—“when you snared me out in the garden with the promise of a coin, you brought me to the back door, went up to your
room, and came down again with three sets for me.”

  “That, truly, I don’t remember. But I go through smallclothes so frequently in this house or that house, I lose track.”

  “Well, I remember it was June. Now it’s November.” (I beckoned him in.) “It’s hotter in June.” He did not come in, but stood there uncomfortably. “When it’s hot and one perspires a great deal, you said, you go through three sets in a day. But at this time of year, you can get by with one—or, sometimes you use two if you have a formal dinner. You said that to me.”

  He had a good memory. “I’m eccentric, yes, but I’m not insane. Probably I said you could go through three in a day. But I don’t think I often do. And at this time of year, you can get by with one.” Though it’s true: long years back I’d decided never to have children, since if I passed on my genius, I would certainly have passed on my eccentricity, as I often feared they were the same thing in different contexts. The genius is what people celebrated. The pain is what genius knows alone. “Peytor, come back in a couple of days. The weather has spared you a job. Also, if I remember right, last time I had come from Germany, rather than France, where the servants are much less obliging than you good fellows are here. So wait till I’ve collected a few more.” And, you know, I actually expected he might have wanted something else.

  “Oh,” he said, awed. “Certainly. In a few … days?”

  And in a moment of over-friendliness that has gotten me in trouble more than once, I remembered: “Gunter says he’s sending you to spend spring with your family.”

  Peytor dropped his eyes. “That’s what he wants me to tell people.” (Indiscretion meets indiscretion.) “But I’m going to the baron’s laboratory, out past Utrecht. He’s going to break my leg again to see if he can fix it. I have to spend three months in his smelly cellar, healing. I’m terrified I might not come back. A man died the first time I was there. And his sister is no longer there to help take care of us. I pray for a miracle. Sometimes I want just to run away—and I would, I think, if I had any family to go to. But I don’t. The country frightens me.”

  “Oh …” And with that revelation, the young man had acquired new reasons in my mind for wanting to eat his masters!

  “You may go now.”

  With a bow he backed from the doorway—and I saw his limp, which I had not remembered. (And no one had bothered to tell me.) He closed the door, as a good servant does. The limp made me uncomfortable. (I know how the physically deformed of the servant class can be treated in the German countryside—not to mention in the central cities of the continent.)

  For a moment as I stood there, I wondered if his interest in me was, as we say, physical. (I chuckled.) Or, indeed, was in my smallclothes. (I laughed.) Either case could be taken care of simply enough. If he were interested in my eccentric underthings, he could take them, do what he wanted with them, wash them, return them … As long as I noticed no difference in them, why should it bother me? Servants have being doing that with their masters’ apparel as long as masters have been doing it with servants’. Smallclothes—men’s or women’s—are the kind of thing that, when it changes, quite quickly gains sexual interest, like boots shined with blood-colored polish, or the undercoverings that make feet comfortable in boots, whether clean or clotted with the wearer’s own dirt: in my castle community some one or five of the lords or of the peasantry is likely to like them a little too much. I’ve known poor men who slept with a handkerchief with which the grand lady of the house wiped away her pee, having fished it from the latrine, and a prince who cherished a handful of leaves that a beggar woman threw in the woods as he spied on her, once she swabbed away her own. Those are the forces that hold communities together, as the sniffings and pokings and pawings of puppies keep them from wandering off from their play packs beside the pond to fall into the clutches of cougar, coyote, or some wild man with a rock who thinks roast (or raw) puppy might be succulent. How could it be otherwise with creatures like us? Indeed, I can imagine someone making just that the topic of a grand volume, a grand series of volumes, had they the leisure and time, encyclopedias and pseudoxias.

  And if Peytor thought greater intercourse with me or someone of my class would further his position in life—well, that would be even simpler. Servants and their masters—men and women—have thought so since the time of Francesco Cenci (if not since Hephaestion joined Alexander’s march to conquer the world, or since Theodora danced for Justinian in the markets of Byzantium and took her first step toward the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire). Said the judge when he pronounced Cenci’s conviction for sodomy, “His crime is that he is a grown man doing with other grown men”—the grooms in his stable, mostly hired for the purpose—“what is only acceptable to do with boys,” thus defining a moral structure that controlled both the church and the castle seventy-seven years ago in Rome as much as it controlled the world of Philip of Macedon and his son. And boys—and men—inclined to exploit or violate that structure have been snickering over it and repeating it just as long, back through Francesco’s orgies with his horses, his grooms, his three wives, his sons and his daughter, through the Borgia Popes to Aristotle and Plato both.

  Wait, a knock—

  12.

  I thought it might be a different servant, assigned to check how the first had done in preparing the room for my retiring, for my bed was already turned back when I’d come in. Mary, perhaps? But it was overeager Peytor again (who has once more, just now, half an hour past, departed), for his second visit of the evening. He wanted to know, for sure, when I would have any small-clothes ready for him to wash, and, though he hoped I wouldn’t take this as forward of him, had worked himself up to come back and ask. His double thinking and rethinking seemed to have made him just as nervous as it could make me.

  (Was this about something else? But I’ve encountered enough of that both in high halls and low to make me sure, if only from writing it out, that it wasn’t.)

  Oh, I could talk with the young follow a few moments at the door, as long as he was going to do something so personal as wash my soiled smallclothes.

  And like a youngster too forward at an elder’s smile, he stepped inside—hesitantly. Yes, he limped.

  I wondered if he had been born with it—or acquired it. “Did you start working here as a gardener?”

  “Yes. As an assistant—with Old Otto, outside. But now I’m in the house, with Mary.” For a moment I could have sworn he was threatening me: he was someone from outside who could get in, despite his origin, despite his limp! (Where was Old Otto from … ?)

  “I see,” I said, and made sure that my smile held neither mocking nor condescension. (Did it hold fear … ?)

  From garden to house, since I’d been here last, even though I didn’t remember him … ? Was he ambitious? Or lucky? Or wiser than Gunter had assumed? Or more perverted than I had?

  I tried to feel honestly pleased at his progress since my last visit, but I felt I shouldn’t inquire more into it, should accept and enjoy it as he did. I asked him to come in and sit. He did, and sat carefully on the other side of the writing table from me, its ivory inlay between us, with a rough-edged sheet of blotting paper spread over it. He sat very straight. And I could not make out whether he favored the leg by sticking it out or tried to make it look normal by keeping it back against the rungs. The table between us was in the way.

  We talked of duck eggs gathered from dry nests on the banks and fishermen’s eel baskets along the canals. And, yes, Gunter was right—Peytor was clever but not smart. He could tell his stories, though there wasn’t much to them. Still, I am as interested in servants as I am in the society they serve. But I realized I resented his withholding a means of possible interpretation from me, though it was only the writing table that blocked me. I couldn’t very well ask him to move and let me see his deformity more closely. Though he was a servant, and a servant eager to please …

  And, yes, he was from the countryside—

  And had he lost family and f
riends in ’73? (I felt uncomfortable asking about it because I expected the answer …)

  Waiting for my tongue to form the next question, as he was nearing the end of his response (yes, he had; and I was too concerned with my own fears to see if he seemed sad or angry; though either could be falsely assumed), I was about to ask him if any of his family or friends had been eaten—and found myself appalled at my own forwardness. To ask that of someone from or related to the reddeloos countryside was radeloos!

  And while I deflected us from such topics to less catastrophic ones about the house and the city, my heart banged under my ribs with something like fear. Though why should I fear offending such a good-natured youth? Unless he wasn’t so good-natured. Was he twenty yet? I wasn’t sure. And … why was I afraid? And why even more afraid that he might know my fear … ?

  By now I wanted to know how much of his urge to get to washing my smallclothes was curiosity and how much might lie at the limen of appetite. A worldly man, as I say, I have known such things in both the young and the old, the base and the noble, and—yes—in local genius and local mindlessness both. If his reasons were sexual, I realized I’d feel even better about them than I did about where my fears were taking me—or, really, had already taken me.

  With his big smile, Peytor said, “I’m probably going to get in trouble for this. But this is what I like doing. New things. Interesting things.” His dull yellow hair swung as he stepped forward.

  “That is why this is such a good station for you. You have a master who is—more or less—sympathetic with such desires.”

  For the same reasons, it occurs to me now, it’s a good home for me to stop in as I move through the world. But would it be as a good a home if I were confined to it as Peytor is by society and want? Likewise, would being loose and unsupported in the world, without diplomatic missions or my wealth, connections, three trunks of traveling clothes, and ways to transport and support them, be any good for him?