The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online

friends all feared. “If you expect me to turn it over, you are quite mistaken.”
    “No.” He tapped the verso. “It is this I show you. This is the dream you are living in the middle of.”
    For the first time I looked into his eyes. They were a very dark brown and one could almost call them black. I was not afraid of him, but he was certainly a beast both fierce and strange. “This is a picture of Karlsruhe,” I said.

    “In English that would mean Karl’s Rest. You see that of course. But what you cannot see is the Karl who dreamed Karlsruhe. That is, Karl III Wilhelm, Markgraf von Baden-Durlach. He fell asleep and had a dream, and what he dreamed is what you see on the back of this card. So what do you observe?”
    “Clearly it is in the form of a circle.”
    “Clearly, Mr. Brandling. A wheel in fact.”
    I thought again, how in the devil does he know my name? Fromthe awful jumble of his leather book he plucked an ill-used sheet, a kind of catalogue, of clockwork wheels and gears.
    “You are not a clockmaker,” I said—the hands upon the table were too large to decently tie boot laces.
    “Why on earth did you speak to that idiot Hartmann? You come to the home of the wheel, and you talk to that dull bourgeois little shopkeeper. Do you not know where on earth you are?”
    I thought, perhaps they all address each other in this tone.
    “You want a cuckoo clock.” He almost sneered.
    “No,” I said but he was insisting I consider an engraving of clock wheels, all the time staring with that senseless excitement you see in the eyes of people who have lost their wits. He had a theory, I understood. If you were from Karlsruhe you had spokes and metal rims.
    “Have you ever seen a running machine?”
    “A machine that runs?” (My goodness, I thought, that would be really something.)
    “For God’s sake, drink, no of course not. If such a machine were to be invented, where would the most propitious place be?”
    “You will say that it is Karlsruhe.”
    “Here,” he cried, plucking one more item from his collection, and offering it with his enormous hand—a card like the ones manufacturers sometimes slip inside their tins of pipe tobacco. “Study it,” he commanded. “You spend too much money on your tailor and not enough on books.”
    It was a coloured engraving of a fellow with a two-wheeled contraption.
    “This is Herr Drais of Karlsruhe.” He tapped the fellow’s head with fingernails as square and dirty as a gardener’s.
    I said, “Why are you showing me this?”
    “It is named after him. It is a Drais.”
    “Why are you showing me this damned Drais?”
    “So you will not die of duck,” he said, and threw back his headand roared with laughter. I shoved his papers back at him, but he had one more to give.

    “And what is this?” I demanded.
    “How should I know everything?”
    “Then why should you give it to me?”
    “In trust.”
    “In trust for what?”
    “If I have your plans,” he said, “it is only fair that you have mine.”
    “You do not have my plans,” I said. “And do not call me Brandling.”
    In return he folded his arms across his broad chest and revealed the white clean line of his teeth beneath his big moustache.
    “Excuse me,” I said. “I have an appointment.”
    “Then you must go.”
    He made no attempt to say farewell, but sat there very placidly poking his great big nose into his strong drink. A few moments later, having found my way along the dark and twisting corridor to my room, I discovered my plans were missing.
    I beheld the likeness of my poor dear boy, the sloe eyes, the residual sadness, and knew it was a crime to have left him. I rushed backdown the stairs. I had a mind to take the butter knife and stab the scoundrel in his staring eyes. But of course you can see already what had happened. As usual I was the last one to understand. Yes, I found the parlour now deserted, no sign of what had happened, nothing but two empty cognac glasses and,