SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED, there were “lamentable conflicts” so Leon left. What that might have been was unclear from this peculiar, tortuous, defensive letter. Steiner’s fawning words were coded, laden with ambiguity, open to interpretation. Inge Trott asked whether I wanted to know what she thought the letter meant. Yes, I would. She offered the thought that the letter might be taken to indicate that a question had been raised as to the paternity of the child, the “child who stands alone.” It was a curious expression, Inge said. The choice of words caused a thought to enter her mind, because she was conscious that in those days information of such a nature—that the child may have a different father—was not a matter that could have been communicated explicitly.
I reviewed the letter with our German neighbor, who tidied up the translation. She agreed with Inge that the reference to the “child who stands alone” is “tricky,” certainly ambiguous. She didn’t accept, however, that it necessarily referred to an issue of paternity. A German teacher at my son’s school offered to read the letter. He tended toward the view of my neighbor, rather than that of Inge, but was not willing to offer an interpretation of his own.
Another neighbor, a writer of novels who had recently been awarded the Goethe Prize for his facility with German, indicated another view. “Rum indeed,” he wrote in a handwritten letter posted through our front door. The term Seelenarzt might be “pejorative,” or perhaps “self-ironic.” From the style of the letter, he concluded that Herr Steiner was most likely “a semi-intellectual” or just a “dismal and tortuous writer.” What the writer might have actually been saying—with a sort of vindictive triumphalism—was unclear. “I have a feeling he is shoving it to Herr Buchholz in a big way, but with Herr B. not with us, what is he shoving?” This neighbor suggested the letter be shown to a specialist in German linguistics. I found two, and unable to decide which to opt for, I sent the letter to both.
Linguist No. 1 said that the letter was “strange,” with its grammatical errors, incomplete sentences, numerous mistakes of punctuation. Herr Steiner seemed to have a “language deficit,” he said, and went a step further, offering a specific prognosis. “It reads like the text of someone with a milder form of Wernicke’s aphasia,” a language disorder caused by damage to the left side of the brain. Or it might be that Herr Steiner had simply been compelled to write under enormous pressures—the times were difficult in Vienna, after all—so that great chunks of thought were churned out and “hastily thrown onto paper.” “I do not see any implications about the child’s origin,” this linguist concluded, beyond the presence of “family trouble during which the child’s father left the family.”
Linguist No. 2 was a little more generous to Herr Steiner. At first, he thought that the references to the wife and child might refer to a single person, one “with two personas.” Then he showed the letter to his wife, who disagreed (she tends to have more experience in the comprehension of subtle meanings, he explained). The wife shared the instinct of Inge Trott, that the reference to “the child who stands alone” was intentionally subtle, that it might mean that the father was a person “unknown,” or that Herr Steiner simply didn’t “want to declare himself.”
The views were inconclusive. They offered hints, but no more, that Leon left Vienna in circumstances of considerable tension and conflict. These might (or might not) have been occasioned by questions as to the child’s paternity.
That Leon might not be my biological grandfather was not a thought that had ever occurred to me. It seemed a most unlikely possibility. At one level, it wasn’t disturbing; because he acted and felt like my grandfather, he was my grandfather, irrespective of any biological consideration. Yet the implications for others, for my mother in particular, were more difficult to countenance. This was unexpectedly delicate.