This photograph must have been taken during one of Rudi’s brief visits home, because his work as a trade consulate keeps him mostly in Asia. In 1874 he’s Germany’s trade representative to Japan. This means that Rudi is either so competent and charming that he’s overcome what we assume must have been his government’s reluctance to have a quote unquote homosexual malarial dwarf represent it, or it means that the German government in the late nineteenth century was far less uptight than our own is today. We suspect the former is the truth, that Rudi’s charm overcame prejudice, but that could be because we have a collective crush on him. We love that in this photograph, he and his small nephew are both dressed in identical kimonos. We love that Rudi’s kimono is accessorized with several long strand of pearls.
Rudi is the person responsible for the dye factory’s indigo. He’s the one who negotiates the exclusive deals between Heinrich and the best ai farmers in Japan, the one who has arranged for hundreds of cases of sake to accompany the ai leaves as they’re transported from Hokkaido Province to Breslau in the damp holds of ships. That’s the heart of the recipe for Alter indigo: imported ai leaves and imported sake with some imported wheat bran tossed in. Heinrich also throws in some domestic lye because he doesn’t have it in him to turn his back on western techniques entirely. The mixture is then stirred for several days by the factory’s workers, those immigrants and day workers from Poland wielding wooden rakes also imported from Japan until the dye bath is the color of a fresh bruise and its fumes turn the sclerae of the workers’ eyes crimson.
That there’s nothing like Alter indigo anywhere else on the continent is one of the dominant themes accompanying the father and son’s constitutionals. “Look,” Heinrich says, loud, rudely pointing. “Do you see that worker’s uniform? That indigo is close to ours, but not as complex.”
Or, “Look at the eye of that peacock feather in that woman’s hat. That’s close to our indigo but not as rich.”
Or look at the blueberries on that vine or the violas in that field or the arc in that rainbow. Close but not as pure, not as perfect, not as poignant.
Every night, not only their neighbors’ clothes but nature herself are judged and found lacking.
Lenz is found lacking too. His mind wanders. He’s more interested in the dyeing process than the colors the process produces. He likes to imagine the moment when roots and petals and the carapaces of insects magically turn into cerulean or chartreuse or the vermilion that Uncle Rudi mixes with beeswax and daubs on his cheeks just above his muttonchops, brushes onto his lips just below his mustache. This — the process, not the cosmetics — holds a degree of fascination for the little boy. But his father’s lectures are those of an artist, not a manufacturer. His father carries on about aesthetics, about the general populace’s inability to distinguish muddy colors from crisp colors, their failure to appreciate natural colors, with their variations, their own personalities, from the monotony of the new chemically made dyes. Even at eight Lenz knows he’s part of that general populace. He’s inferior. He’s undiscerning.
Then — it’s still 1874—comes the afternoon in early May when Rudi Alter — he’s still in Japan — decides to take a walk through a park that, like the park across the street from our apartment, runs along the river of a port city. We imagine the Japanese park filled with bamboo fountains and cherry trees and miniature red maples, the latter pretty much the same height as Rudi. In our imagination he’s wearing native dress, but his own native dress. A suit, a straw hat.
He’s climbing a hill when he feels a poke in the back. He turns, smiling, expecting to see a colleague playfully jabbing at him with the tip of an umbrella. Instead he finds himself grinning foolishly at a young Japanese nationalist brandishing an antique Samurai sword.
From the autopsy report:
Wound 1: scalp entirely pierced through
Wound 7: carotid artery completely severed
Wound 11: entire elbow joint completely severed
It goes on. Twenty-two wounds in all. Twenty-two fully pierced or completely severed pieces of Rudi Alter.
The nationalist says that the gods came to him in a dream. They sent him to the park to kill the first foreigner he ran into. That turned out to be Rudi. The nationalist saw him from behind, took in the European garb, perhaps the scant height as well, and the gods said yes, go ahead. They said what are you waiting for? The young assassin has composed a poem about the whole thing, which he recites from memory at the police station. He recites it again at his trial. He’s declared insane. They behead him anyway.
At the foot of the path where Rudi died — a young man of thirty-three — the port city erects a granite monument shaped like a giant headstone. On its base the words Our Brother are engraved in German. Our is misspelled.
On the day that Rudi Alter dies in Japan, the temperature drops dramatically in Breslau. People stop strangers in the streets to comment on it. “This is the kind of weather that causes influenza,” they inform one another. They say, “This morning I had to take off my jacket, I was so hot, and now I’m wearing it buttoned to my chin and I’m still chilled to the bone.”
By the time Heinrich and Lenz leave the house for their mandatory evening stroll, the sky over Breslau is the sleek gray of an iced-over lake and the streets are shadowed in wintry violets. Because it’s so cold, Lenz is less amazed than he should be when several snowflakes waft down and alight on his father’s outstretched palm.
“Look closely,” says Heinrich. “Each one different,” but by the time Lenz looks, the snowflakes have melted. Heinrich wipes his wet hand on his trousers. He cranes his neck, searching for more drifting flakes. There aren’t any. It’s May, after all.
What there is, though, is an inky slash along the horizon that makes Heinrich’s heart lurch. He points to the slash with such energy he feels the gesture in his shoulder socket.
“Look!” he cries. “Look. Lenz, do you see that? There! Now, that — that’s ours!”
The color of the slash between earth and sky is rich and complex, pure and poignant. It’s the precise shade Newton observed on the day he understood that the spectrum contained not six colors, as everyone believed, but seven, and this color, this purple-blue, the one too long overlooked.
In a moment Lenz will also see the ribbon of indigo, but for now he completely misunderstands. He thinks his father is pointing to the entire sky. “That’s ours,” his father has declared, and Lenz believes his father means the whole canopy, the boundless firmament, every square inch of the heavens. For a fleeting, confusing, yet immensely gratifying and possibly life-changing instant, Lenz Alter believes his father has declared himself heaven’s landlord.
And here is Lenz, son and sole heir.
Death in childbirth. Evisceration among the cherry trees. Typos on your tombstone. These were the stories our mother told us. Bedtime stories, we called them, though we were talking her bedtime, not ours. The three of us tended to stay up long after she went to sleep. But though she turned in shortly after dinner, she slept in fits and starts, as we often do now, and she’d wake up throughout the night and sometimes she’d shout our names, and we’d leave our beds or, more likely, whatever late-night movie we were watching in the living room and troop in. By then she’d be sitting up, cigarette already lit. We’d take our positions at the end of her mattress, Lady in the middle, the younger ones on either side of her, Vee a smaller version of Lady, Delph a smaller version of Vee. “The nesting dolls,” our mother called us, and we could tell she found this off-putting rather than cute.