He was still positioning and repositioning stones when he felt the nausea and dizziness strike him. In a matter of minutes he’d passed out.
Holger Neumann had been born in Trier in 1805, which made him thirty-six now. He was the only child of an attorney with a small local practice, and he’d been rather spoiled early on. His father had been something of a wimp at home, and it was his mother who dominated almost everything either one of them said or did. He’d gone to good schools and received a solid middle-class education, but, despite his father’s hopes, he found the law did not appeal to him. College had interested him for a while, but after his mother’s death while in his third year, it no longer seemed interesting or important, and he hadn’t gone back after the funeral.
His father seemed to shrivel a bit each day after his wife’s death, and just lost the will to live, or so they said. He followed her in less than two years. Holger was surprised to discover that there was a substantial estate, grown even fatter when he sold the family’s house and his father’s office. It was not enough for champagne and the Grand Tour, but as long as he was quite modest in his lifestyle, it was sufficient to support him.
He’d gotten to Bonn, Cologne, Berlin, even Paris, although he found the French intolerable and his inability to learn their language impossible. At the moment he was, in fact, back home for one of his annual conferences with the bank that managed his money. He was living in Cologne, so it wasn’t much of a trip, taking odd jobs here and there as the spirit and his needs above the annuity dictated, but he was now trying to decide where to move on to. He required a major city, but one in which he could keep a certain amount of anonymity. He was tempted by Austria, and particularly by Vienna, which had an open atmosphere like Paris but also spoke the correct tongue.
He was a pure blond with large, soft blue eyes and a complexion so fair that he appeared far younger than his years. If, in fact, things had been different, he might well have gone far in any profession he chose, but he did not have that freedom. Position meant being a public person, and he could not afford that luxury.
He had simply never been able to get close to, or feel anything for, any woman except his mother. All other women had seemed rather boring and shallow, and certainly unappealing sexually. From his earliest sexual awakenings, Neumann had been attracted to young men.
In a town like Trier that meant total suppression, but in the open atmosphere of Heidelberg things had been different. Within a year he’d discovered that there were others like himself, and that revelation hit him with tremendous force. It had, in fact, been a graduate assistant assigned to help him with the exams who had spotted in him what he thought he had so completely concealed. Through him, he’d discovered a secret society, a brotherhood of sons, that had made life turn on its head. Still, there was fear, constant fear, of being exposed.
It was that constant level of near-panic among the brotherhood, all of whom were looking to successful careers, that convinced him that he was wasting his time with that sort of academic pursuit. He simply could not live with the fear that he would lose a professorship or judgeship or some other high post in one moment of loose guard. Still, all of the German states were to one degree or another police states, which tolerated this sort of behavior only on the lowest of levels. That, in fact, was why he was now thinking of moving on. Austria was no Paris, but it was far looser and more tolerant—perhaps because, as it was often said, it was less competently run—than anywhere else he’d been.
He awakened in the small hotel room, dressed, and went down first to the communal toilet in the rear, then across the street for breakfast. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day.
Time is a creative bastard, he thought while eating a pastry and drinking some strong Turkish coffeee. First a thirteen-year-old dying orphan, now a gay man forced by his time and place to be a wastrel.
Ron Moosic wondered who and what Roberto Sandoval was now.
On a hunch, he spent the morning doing some surreptitious checking, and found the name of Marx with ease. In fact, he remembered the family now, although only vaguely. He’d never had much use for Jews, even if the family were all converts. Jews might fake conversions to make life easier for them, but they were still born with the blood.
Moosic was shocked to find “himself thinking those thoughts, but he understood that this was common thinking at the time. If only they knew where it would finally lead, he reflected sourly.
Still, it was rather easy then to find the Marx household, and just as easy, through casual conversation with locals he knew from his youth, to discover that their son Karl, now Herr Doktor Marx, was home for a while. There was gossip that he and his mother did not get along, though, and he was thinking of moving to either Bonn or Cologne, depending on how easily he could establish himself in either city. He was hoping to obtain some sort of position before marrying his fiancee, a local girl, Jenny Westphalen.
Things worked out so well he almost swore it was planned that way. At least, he couldn’t have planned it better himself. In the town bookstore, where he was drawn partly out of curiosity and partly out of boredom, he met a man looking through the magazines and papers. He was originally attracted to him because he was a young, somewhat handsome fellow with a short-cropped brown beard. Moosic thought he looked the very image of the young, thin Orson Welles of Citizen Kane. But when the man looked up and he saw those eyes, he knew who this man had to be.
Karl Marx was not the Moses-like patriarch of 1875, but he had those penetrating, electrifying eyes. They introduced themselves, and soon Marx and Neumann, not Moosic, were talking away about socialism, Hegelism, communism, and revolutionary movements in Europe. Marx seemed even more oppressed by the small town of his birth than was Neumann, and was delighted to find a kindred outsider, a native who hated the place but had more than a bit of education. Neumann’s ingrained distaste for Jews in general and the Marxes in particular faded under the direct contact, particularly when Marx unexpectedly cracked a very anti-Semitic joke.
Karl Marx was absolutely fascinating, a riveting speaker who seemed to know very much about almost every subject imaginable. His brilliance was enhanced, rather than tempered, by his unsuppressed emotionalism. Neither his Neumann nor Moosic self could resist the energy and intellect; both were in fast agreement that this was indeed the most brilliant and electrifying intellect they had ever met. It was for Moosic to additionally understand that the old man he’d seen so very briefly still had much of this power. It made him feel a great deal of regret he couldn’t have known him longer, and it added to his guilt as to having shortened that man’s life.
Neumann, quite naturally, was instantly madly infatuated with Marx, but frustratingly so. He knew, even without Moosic, that Marx was solidly conservative in his sex life and totally in love with and devoted to a single woman. It didn’t maner in the end; Neumann could fantasize and not act or reveal himself because he feared that if Marx knew, he would never see the younger man again. Just to be talking to him, around him, near him, was enough for now.
Moosic watched the flow of Neumann-thoughts and saw where it would lead. This sort of futile passion could easily end in suicide—which might well be time’s easy out all along.