Reinhardt's Garden

Mark Haber

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781566895705
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

At the turn of the twentieth century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American jungle—"not lost, mind you, but retired." Jacov's narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov's obsession seems increasingly unlikely.From Croatia to Germany, Hungary to Russia, and finally to the Americas, Jacov and his companions grapple with the limits of art, colonialism, and escapism in this antic debut where dark satire and skewed history converge.

REINHARDT’S GARDEN1907The Río de la Plata is a corpulent snake, mused Ulrich; it nestles around your neck, it strangles you for your wallet or wedding band, anything of value, he said; whoever escapes alive? Ulrich said this to no one, not expecting a reply, at least not from me, since I could hardly understand a word he said, my brain coated in the gauze of the fever or disease or whatever it was I’d been afflicted with, and I was certain I was dying, I had to be dying, because the tremors, the aches, my burning flesh, none of it boded well for recovery. Inherently Ulrich understood this, and I suspected he was talking to me out of camaraderie, sensing my advance toward the land of the dead, and being a sensitive type beneath it all, he wanted to give my soul the solace of another voice. Already we’d buried ten men, native guides as well as whites, but this wasn’t a typical malady; I felt the universe inside my skull, felt the shifting latitudes of the world as it trembled through space. And not five feet away sat Jacov, oblivious, licking the nub of a pencil, scribbling in his notebook, busy with his treatise on melancholy, his life’s work, claiming only yesterday that he was closer than he’d ever been, closer to the essence of melancholy, the foundation of melancholy, the seed of melancholy, assuring anyone who would listen that he would be the first important name to emerge from Knin, that village that lay crouched in the Dalmatian hinterland like a frightened child. Jacov, who not three days earlier had insisted he’d seen it with his own eyes. Melancholy? I’d inquired. No, you imbecile, the source. And after smoking a glut of cigarettes, he proceeded to measure the base of a rubber tree where five Indians sat listlessly on their haunches awaiting instructions. They’d begun to suspect Jacov of madness weeks before when he’d ordered three Guaraní Indians to circle the camp as we slept, one clockwise, two counter. The Guaraní hated him especially and had stopped attempting to hide it, letting their displeasure be known in subtle but intentional acts: misplacing gun powder or jerky or dry socks, dipping the tips of their poisoned spears in water, thus diluting them and making them less effective, even halting the mules the moment we made any progress. To Jacov, who suspected treason everywhere, this only confirmed his suspicions. Half delirious, I considered Jacov and his life’s work, which had found me tramping behind him for the latter half of my youth, eleven years if I counted correctly; eleven years of taking dictation, eleven years of nodding agreement with ideas beyond the scope of my comprehension, from Croatia to Hungary, Germany to Russia, and now the Americas, lost in the lower groin of this hateful jungle. I cursed Jacov’s perfect health, something he would boast about when any of us, including the natives, showed the slightest hint of an ailment: a cough in the hand, a twitching eye, a complaining stomach; Jacov pounced on this, perhaps searched for it, not only to parade his perfect constitution (showing a lack of common decency and ruthless self-pride) but also to celebrate the outstanding condition of his own body, thus mocking the burden others faced with their everyday infirmities. People are weak and filled with treachery, he lamented, a vomitous lot, an abhorrent lot; then, intoxicated by his own vitriol, he scanned the brows of the present assemblage: Mestizo, Guaraní, and more than a few of indeterminate origin. And me, he concluded, pointing sadly at himself, I must count myself among them. He abhorred society as well as the individual and took great pains to make his stance known, yet Jacov had made melancholy his life’s work, striving to help a species he detested largely due to the unsung depths of his soul, insisting his desire to improve his fellow man was simply a reflection of his own character, what he likened to a wellspring of benevolence. Back in Stuttgart, where I’d officially begun to serve as his factotum, he would rant about the sick joke of human progress. Humanity and their delusions, he complained, people and their notions of enlightenment; well, Yasnaya Polyana has certainly cured me of that! Indeed it had. After Russia and that shameful mess with Tolstoy and his followers, it was clear Jacov would have to go his own way. What was there to do but change continents, he concluded, exchange Europe for the Americas? Let’s go see the jungle, he proclaimed, sniffing a line of cocaine from a tray placed precariously on the arm of his settee. Europe is a graveyard, he said, a plot of black earth, a field of dead ends and bad endings and no-turning-backs, he intoned. Besides, we must find Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, the lost philosopher of melancholy who resides, I last heard, in the jungles of Colombia or perhaps Brazil, in any event, the Americas, all this spoken with the nonchalance of a madman, as if the Americas were the suburb of some middling city. Yes, he urged, looking into my now-trembling eyes, melancholia is to be found in the shrewd words of Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, in his divine works and sacred texts, his philosophic essays, and, of course, in speaking to him in person, beholding him in the flesh, considering the certitude of his beliefs face-to-face and most certainly not in the mediocrity of this continent. Let’s see the jungle, where, I suspect, melancholy, like the vines themselves, runs verdant and slapdash across the landscape. Inside I laughed, for Europe, I felt, was the birthplace of melancholy or, if not the birthplace, at least the place where melancholy was perfected, where melancholy flourished, where melancholy found the most agency and thus became more vigorous and substantial; who else could lay claim to the saddest, most endless winters? Where but Europe was characterized by vast landscapes punctuated by graves, imbued by a desolation matched only by the most maudlin skies in the world? And why did my anxiety rise whenever Jacov snorted his beloved cocaine? Why did the drug affect me as if by osmosis? And I trembled at the enormous still lifes across his walls, the Goya towering in the adjoining room, the only painting, he claimed, that ever approached the turmoil of his soul. I then gazed at four paintings that had captivated me ever since Jacov acquired them on a trip to Holland, paintings that lured my unconscious with their thick streaks of lustrous blue and stark red: a series titled Trembling of the Soul, soldiers depicted in a barren field up to their knees in snow, the men symbolizing agents of death or perhaps the brevity of life or maybe the yawning chasm of an existence devoid of meaning, Jacov wasn’t sure, but all four paintings spoke to one another and only succeeded, in fact, when placed together, as useless separated, he insisted, as a man’s top half would be were it separated from his lower. Jacov was so enraptured he purchased the entire series, as well as a triptych of naked Romanian gypsies, all packed and sent to his castle in Stuttgart, occupied in his absence by one-legged Sonja, a retired prostitute, an ex-lover of Jacov’s, and an invaluable housekeeper, the only person, in fact, he trusted enough to care for his estate since Jacov demanded all sorts of eccentric cleaning routines based in large part on his desire for seclusion, his paranoia to germs, and his obsession with dust, not its eradication, but its preservation, dust being emblematic of melancholy and the harbinger perhaps of a deeper, more divine melancholy that would be closer to reaching the pure path of unfettered melancholy, which would be akin to finding a new planet. Jacov worshipped dust, he once confessed; I stand at the altar of dust, he said; dust is not only divine, he affirmed, it’s more important than the soil itself. Jacov could expound for hours on dust: how dust is the most significant element in the universe, not millions of isolated particles, like most believe, but something wholly of itself, as singular and unified as fog. A home laden with dust, he explained, invites melancholy at its leisure; it doesn’t insist or make demands but beckons, he said, and the soul is encouraged to reflect on darker, more substantial notions since the dust, in a window, for example, creates a film that distorts the natural world. Just as melancholy darkens one’s worldview, he continued, not to alter reality but to transpose reality, to elevate reality, to improve reality, dust does the same. All those philosophical imposters, as Jacov called them, those vulgar and insignificant nonentities, he stewed, who consider melancholy an affliction of the soul, those same shallow cretins also see dust as an affliction; they demand it be swept up, eradicated, forgotten. Defending himself from imagined slights, Jacov paced the study and tugged at his smock; why wouldn’t I examine something as miraculous as dust, he pondered, something that returns as soon as you’ve gotten rid of it, which, of course, you haven’t since nothing could be more perverse, nothing more idiotic, nothing more revolting than the belief you’ve eradicated dust. Nothing is as dogged, in fact, as unimpeachable, in fact, as thoroughly ubiquitous, in fact, as dust. Dust and melancholy. And thus, Jacov spent a considerable amount of time studying the relationship between dust and melancholy and then melancholy and dust, over two years in fact, where dust was studied for weeks at a time and then melancholia. The third chapter of his treatise was dedicated to dust, examining how the melancholic spirit, though appearing fragile, was as vigorous as the particles we breathe and incur and invite inside our lives. I, of course, hadn’t read that chapter, just as I hadn’t read a single typed page of the masterwork he had me transcribe, mostly because he hadn’t begun to type his monument to melancholy, being, as he liked to say, in the fomenting stage or the fostering stage or, if he was feeling especially frivolous, the seducing stage, although I was certain, when complete, his work would change the world, for I had observed Jacov scribbling in those notebooks for years, an expression of religious fervor traced across his pale, balding skull, too exultant, too radiant, too ecstatic not to be appreciated as a man with the highest erudition and not unlike a famous sculpture I’d once been shown of Seneca, whose existence I would’ve been wholly ignorant of had Jacov not relished comparing himself to the ancient seer. For more than a decade I’d transcribed the words of a man of the highest intellectual order, a man who, with an almost saintly calling, berated and exclaimed and expounded the most original and subtle ideas on that most elusive of emotions: melancholy, not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either, an enigmatic realm without inscription because, as Jacov put it, it was too glorious. Its relegation to a half feeling, a bastard feeling, a diluted feeling, was the root of Jacov’s exasperation. Melancholy, he once told me in the gravest of tones, is the single most important thing in the world; none of us realizes it, but melancholy is the engine of human progress. His notebooks had grown in number, of course, from a single shelf to a wall to a venerable library that required outside storage that Jacov obtained with Ulrich’s help, Ulrich knowing all sorts of people in the German underworld, lawful and criminal alike, and since Ulrich had a particular affection for estate ownership and the act of proprietorship, which, he frequently asserted, was the only asset a man could trust, procuring different properties for the safekeeping of Jacov’s masterwork, at least for Ulrich, was child’s play. Before leaving for South America, Jacov had spent weeks separating his journals to store them in countless vacant apartments and depots throughout Berlin, Salzburg, and even the Stuttgart estate, where Sonja with her one leg would protect them as she hobbled about collecting the dust; this system would not only keep his work from the hands of jealous scholars, he believed, but it would also make it more difficult, were they found, to piece them together. The most important books, the nucleus of his studies, the Origin Books, as he called them, stayed on his person at all times; these were the dictations I had made since becoming his secretary, abridged of course, but the essence of his masterwork; thus, two weeks later, once his works had been separated and locked away in various cities, Warsaw, Odessa, and Berlin among them, our travel arrangements to Montevideo were secured aboard the SS Unerschrocken, a voyage that introduced me to a world of torment and misery no human, I feel, has ever faced. There is seasickness and then there is the border of death, the indiscernible line the optimistic cling to and the suicidal yearn to cross. Fatigued by life, the elderly see this boundary and welcome it; to me it appeared as the lurching horizon of the Atlantic, rising up and down like the designs of a lunatic, unfettered and deranged, an ocean that demanded I vomit my soul across a third of the planet, a feeling I thought I had escaped until this cursed fever announced itself, first with chills, then with panic, and finally with difficulty breathing; now, lying on the floor of the jungle, I hear Jacov cursing at the guides to put me onto the stretcher, for we were heading back to Montevideo, not as a retreat, mind you, not as a withdrawal, he insisted, merely an opportunity to acquire medicine, as the natives don’t frighten me and never have. We shall return to Montevideo, he demanded, not to escape impending attack, which, as some of you have implied, is all but assured, but to assuage the symptoms of my assistant. I felt no solace in this, for our landing in the city was not unlike observing your own reflection in the mirror after surviving a violent accident; it was a city of sorts, with all the familiar hallmarks indicative of a place where people decide, likely from exasperation or surrender, to simply stop, but with the shanties at the harbor, the vulgar and chaotic Spanish that seemed not spoken but bellowed, the low crop of hillocks in the foggy distance, even the ships floating atop the brown, murky water, it was, as Jacov exclaimed, a provincial shithole, a sweaty horse’s ass. Not the ass of a prized horse or a half-decent horse or even the ass of a horse that could plow the fields with any regularity; no, it was the ass of a decrepit and mediocre horse, the ass of a horse seconds from being put down. The captain of the ship, an Uruguayan, overheard these remarks and took offense. Forgive me, Jacov replied, but shall we compare the city we left, Bremen, a romantic city, a historical city, a city with breadth, to this? You were with us as we departed, correct? You saw what I saw and this, Jacov now sweeping his hand across the horizon, how do you explain this? I gazed at the meager huts, the abysmal plazas clustered together like children on their first day of school, nervous and ill-prepared. Things didn’t improve on land. Álvaro Diego Astillero, the officer assigned to assist us in hiring native guides, translators, and mules for our journey, was sweating through his uniform, although, admittedly, his grasp of German was impressive. He greeted us on the patio of a wooden structure that was covered in mosquito netting, a necessary precaution, he explained, due to a recent outbreak of dengue fever, although, he quickly assured us, it’s nothing to be too concerned about. After offering us drinks of maté, he inquired about our field of study. Plants? He asked. Geography? He enjoined. The Indians? We shook our heads to all three. Melancholy, answered Jacov, spitting on the floor. Álvaro, a man in his early thirties with ink-black hair smoothed back with either pomade or sweat, was worried by this answer. It is, as Jacov has constantly proven, a frightening word, an off-putting word, a word ill at ease amid the rest of a sentence. Melancholy, which doesn’t say anything but hints at everything, trenchant enough to make the greatest of men, Jacov for example, abandon all sorts of sundry life choices to dedicate their souls to the study and understanding and perhaps, when all is said and done, the grasping of this singular anguish. A person stricken with melancholy isn’t stricken by grief or depression, Jacov often mused, feelings that emerge from concrete and palpable incidents like the loss of a limb or loved one, or a long, hard-fought illness. No, he insisted, melancholy is a state of mind tied inexorably to a person’s capricious nature; as such, all the great artists and philosophers and musicians, in fact, the greatest historical examples, like his beloved Wagner, have suffered, withstood, and thus grown stronger and more singular from melancholia. A melancholic, at least inwardly, doesn’t love his own brooding nature, Jacov insisted, but must accept it as one accepts having red hair or a cleft palate. Álvaro, sweat escaping his khaki uniform, understood this on some level, for he looked past the mosquito netting and sighed. Was he, Jacov queried, perhaps a melancholic himself? Álvaro either didn’t understand the question or wanted to change the subject, trying to sell us on the delights of Montevideo, the charming taverns and the evening cockfights. Jacov was skeptical and I was useless, still tilting from ninety days at sea, ninety days that rattled my soul to its core; never before had my equilibrium been so perfectly banished; it was as though I were standing atop an ever-rotating globe, and I couldn’t get it to stop. Pitching across the Atlantic, I felt as if I was heaving toward my annihilation. Jacov often joined me in my cabin as I beseeched God to finish his work and take me, to release me from this mortal coil, which merely made Jacov laugh, hovering above as if he were performing an exorcism, insisting I go farther, insisting I was closer than I’d ever been to pure melancholy, insisting the pinnacle, the crown, the mantle of melancholy, was mine for the taking. As the ship plunged and the world listed, Jacov insisted I was a prisoner of my own soul, that my fear of suffering was irrational; I must, he said, grieve the younger years that were now behind me and accept the misery of existence. I vomited instead. Luckily, since stepping onto land, I’d felt the earth slow by half, and now all of us took turns silently peering through the netting. The dusty streets promised very little, and Jacov, looking impatient, his Origin Books bulging beneath his vest, inquired as to Ulrich’s whereabouts. At the quay with our trunks, I told him. Jacov clicked his tongue and Álvaro, sweating more profusely, gazing uneasily at Jacov’s hunched composure, suggested it wise we bring a priest into the interior, which was met with a cackle from Jacov. For what? Jacov asked. We don’t need a priest nor God, so long as I have these, he said, scratching his vest where the Origin Books lay sequestered like ancient scrolls, and, taking a more active interest in Álvaro, Jacov suddenly pressed him on his ancestral and national makeup. Uruguayan? he asked. Argentine? I see your eyes are green, ancestors from Europe, perhaps? A little Dutch or English in you? Again Álvaro looked confused, perhaps offended, for it was likely unusual, indeed rude, to ask a man you’ve just met about lineage, but to Jacov, this was all that mattered, and it formed the foundation of some of his most important decisions. I, for example, was his right-hand man and Ulrich his left not due to any extraordinary talents on either of our parts but because Jacov had trouble trusting a German like Ulrich as much as a fellow Croatian like myself; my innate understanding of melancholy, he asserted, though unspoken and reticent, was deeper and more profound than a German’s, since a German’s melancholy existed within the confines of a German mind and a German heart, which all belonged, of course, to a German soul. A German, Jacov claimed, has the constant desire to overcome his melancholy or confront his melancholy or, at some level, devour his melancholy, which is nonsense and ridiculous and why Germans will never fully accept the breadth of a melancholic soul. A Hungarian is the next best melancholic after a Croatian, he would famously say, for we all know there is no one on earth next to a Croat who understands or intuits or grasps melancholy more than a Hungarian, yet a Croatian remains superior since a Croat contains melancholy not only in their heart but in the very fiber of their being, and even at their happiest, most celebratory occasions, a Croat will halt, slapped and muted by their melancholic nature, by the sudden reminder that all is futile, and living with a conscience constitutes a merciless barrier to happiness, which is, of course, the pervasive and unassailable wall of existence, and though a Hungarian is very close to a Croatian, the Hungarian remains a notch or two lower, for I have seen, Jacov contended, perfectly miserable Hungarians lose themselves at baptisms and weddings, even celebrating the victories of their favorite football clubs, whichever preposterous club it may be, yes, suddenly forgetting themselves and the miserable lot that is life and genuinely enjoying themselves, and in the end, this disqualifies them entirely. Bosnians are prudent melancholics, he offered, practicing melancholics, he added, responsible melancholics, he concluded, but not even close to the second-place Hungarian melancholic, who, at twilight, when the diminutive light struck their brow at the most auspicious angle, was one of the most beautiful visions Jacov had ever witnessed. A Jewish melancholy was a subject all its own, he stated, and something he refused to examine, for a Jew’s suffering was a schism, a crevasse, an endless riddle he would only consider navigating once his experiences had matured. A Russian was a downright brilliant melancholic but was in love with his own melancholia so that it was sentimental and embarrassing for anyone to witness and became pure theater, practically a pantomime of real melancholy since pure, unmolested melancholy doesn’t produce tears or exhibit theatrics, and it certainly doesn’t make demands on another. Melancholy, he professed, is a hymn, a falling leaf, a frozen stream in the still dead of winter. Melancholy is the song of the nightingale and the wordless harmony of a meadow, he said, now clutching his chest. These sentiments, spoken in rapid and fervent German, which Álvaro certainly couldn’t grasp, resembled the same words I’d heard on first meeting Jacov eleven years earlier. I recalled his deep, resonant voice trembling across the upper deck of the Holstooraf Sanatorium and Spa, where I’d been sequestered for a course of treatment for my lungs, the upper deck where so many came to bathe and delight in the warm August sun suspended in the afternoon as if supplicated by the clusters of pale, plump tourists. I climbed the wooden stairs in search of that very sun only to hear the Croatian accent so familiar to my ears, an accent lambasting all those pseudo-melancholies that crammed the spa, all those mealy melancholies, he barked, those counterfeit melancholies, he cried, swarming like fat eels. To him it was nauseating. I’m nauseated, he said, observing you taking a cure, rippling in your bathing suits with no shame, with no sense of decency or respect for those around you, bathing suits, he later said, that exposed the mediocrities they were, for how could a soul grapple with their melancholic nature while rubbing oils all over their overfed bodies, bodies, he indicated, that contained melancholies far weaker and less notable than his. Duller too, and, quite frankly, he said, less heroic and spiritual than his own distinguished sadness. Abhorrent melancholies, he shouted, heinous melancholies, he barked, egregious melancholies that sullied his truer and more virtuous melancholy, his holiest of all melancholies, downright ruining...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Reinhardt’s Garden
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press