Thomas laughs artificially.
“Well, I was wrong. Everyone was wrong. As far as I know, no one has managed to get gold out of it, though there have been rumors. And yet there is something a great deal more certain than hundreds of experiments in retorts, all those nigredos and conniunctios. This new alchemy is bold and skillful investing, trusting your inner voice, just as it goes in the alchemy lab—you try things out, you take certain risks . . .”
“Things ended badly for us once already,” says Jacob, sitting down on a fallen tree trunk, ruining with the tip of his walking stick the path of some traveling ants. He raises his voice: “You have to help us now.”
Thomas stands before Jacob. He is wearing silk stockings. Tight dark green trousers cling to his slim hips.
“I have to tell you something, Uncle,” he says after a moment. “You have generated quite a bit of intrigue among my companions. You will no longer obtain any support from the emperor, but you will get it from them. Your mission here is finished. The emperor has advisers who are biased against you, that is clear. I have heard people speaking of you as though you were some charlatan, have heard them unjustly equating you with those confidence men who are eternally at royal courts. Your credit line in Vienna is cut, and I cannot give you any support at this particular moment either, as I have my own great financial ambitions and would prefer for us not to be linked.”
Jacob gets up and brings his face close to Thomas’s. His eyes darken.
“You’re ashamed of me now.”
Jacob heads back, walking quickly, Thomas following him uncomfortably, trying to explain:
“I have never been ashamed of you and will never be. Between us there is a generational difference; if I had been born when you were, then perhaps I would be attempting to be just like you. But now other laws prevail. What you say, I would like to do. You keep waiting for mystical signs, for some sort of confederacy of the ba?akaben, while it seems to me that man can be liberated much more simply and not in mystical spheres, but here, on earth.”
Eva looks at her father fearfully, certain that Thomas’s impudence will provoke paroxysms of rage. But Jacob is calm, walks leaning forward, eyes on his feet. Thomas trots after him.
“A person must be shown that he has an influence on his life and on the whole world. When he stomps, thrones will tremble. You say: The law must be broken in secret, in our bedchambers, while we pretend externally that we have followed it. Breaking the law in bedrooms and boudoirs!” Thomas senses he has gone too far in the direction of criticizing his uncle, and his tone of voice softens a bit. “I say that it’s the other way around: the law, if it is unjust and if it brings people misfortune, needs to be changed, we must act in the open, boldly, making no compromises.”
“A person often doesn’t even realize his misfortune,” Jacob says calmly into his shoes.
His calm evidently emboldens Thomas, for now he runs out in front of Jacob and continues to pontificate, walking backward:
“Then he must be made aware of it and dragged into action, instead of us just dancing around in circles, singing songs and waving our arms.” Eva is certain that now Jacob will strike Thomas von Sch?nfeld in the face, but he doesn’t even pause.
“Do you think anything can be rebuilt from the ground up?” Jacob asks him, continuing to look down at his feet.
Thomas stops, shocked, and raises his voice.
“But those are your words, your teachings!”
When in the evening von Sch?nfeld prepares to return to Vienna, Jacob draws him in and hugs him. He whispers something into his ear. Thomas’s face lights up, and he clears his throat. Eva, standing next to her father, is not sure whether she has heard correctly what he said. It seems to her that it was: “I trust you implicitly.” And that he also used the word “son.”
Several months later, a package arrives from Vienna. It is brought by a courier dressed in black. It contains letters assuring their safe passage, and among them, news from Thomas:
. . . My brothers, whose influence is great, have found a certain person of angelic goodness, the prince of a separate little state, who would receive you with the entire court intact. His is an impressive castle on the River Main, near Frankfurt, and he will put it at your disposal, should you consent to adapt it to your needs. This is a change in the right direction—west, farther from the war that the emperor, albeit reluctantly, has declared upon Turkey. It will be better for you all to roll up your tents and move to this new place. Consider what I write you here in the greatest confidence.
Your wholeheartedly devoted
Thomas von Sch?nfeld
Eva, reading this letter, which her father has shown her, says in shock:
“How did he do it?”
Her father, buttoned all the way up despite the heat from the fireplace, sits with his eyes closed. Eva notices he needs the barber already. He has rested his bare feet on the soft, upholstered stool, and Eva sees the varicose veins that color his skin blue. She is suddenly overwhelmed by terrible exhaustion, and it is all the same to her now what happens to them next.
“I find this city so disgusting now,” she complains. She looks through the window at the empty courtyard, which has just emerged, with some difficulty, from under the dirty snow, exposing the garbage. Eva sees someone’s abandoned glove. “I just find it disgusting. I cannot look upon it any longer.”
“Silence,” says her father.
On the evening before their departure, a delegation of Brünn townspeople comes to the emptied court of the Franks. Since there are no longer any furnishings, they are received standing. Jacob goes out to them leaning upon young Czerniawski, with Eva standing beside him. The burghers bring farewell gifts—a crate of the finest Moravian wine for “the lord baron” and a silver platter with a view of the city engraved on it and the inscription: “Farewell friends of Brünn, from its residents.”
Jacob looks touched—they are all touched, and in the townspeople there is also some sense of guilt, since it is now known that those on their way out are leaving a significant sum for alms and for the city councillors.