Mark Twain — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

Well, I had come to Vienna to work, and by work I mean I had come to sit alone in a rented room eleven flights up and answer to a company three thousand miles off that could not have told you, at gunpoint, what continent I was standing on, and I want to say plain out that there is no lonesomeness on this earth so thorough, so double-distilled and aged in the wood, as the lonesomeness of a man typing memos to strangers while the bells of a foreign city bang away outside his window like they were mad at him personally.

So I took to going down to the Café Hofmark of a morning, telling myself it was for the coffee, when it was really because the coffee came with people in the room, even if none of them knew my name or cared to.

The Hofmark was old the way old money is old — quietly, and with the paint worn thin in just the places where the quality had rested their elbows for a hundred years — and against the back wall hung a mirror in a gilt frame that must have watched the whole performance, emperors and revolutions and men like me both, and clean across its face ran a single hairline crack, silvered at the edges, so faint you would miss it unless the light struck a certain slant, and then it jumped out at you like a vein under skin.

I noticed a fellow noticing it too. He was a stooped, dry, professorial article, spectacles perched halfway down a nose built for looking over things rather than through them, and he stood before that mirror of a morning the way other men stand before scripture.

"You are admiring the fracture," he said to me, not asking, the way scholars never ask.

"I was admiring my coffee," I said, "but go on."

He went on. He informed me that the mirror was Biedermeier, that it had survived two empires and one very determined chambermaid, that the crack itself was rumored to date from the night a certain duke shot himself in the room upstairs and the shock of the report ran clean down through the plaster and the glass together — and he delivered every clause of this with the satisfaction of a man laying out medals on a table, one and then the next and the next, empire, chambermaid, duke, shock, plaster, glass, until the plain little scratch in the silver had put on more history than the House of Habsburg.

I said it looked to me like somebody had simply dropped it once, packing.

He looked at me the way you look at a man who has said something indecent at a funeral, and moved off, wounded, to instruct somebody else.

I want to set down here, since this is only the beginning of the business and there is no sense hiding my own foolishness from the record, that I had by this time gone eleven days without speaking my own language to a living soul, and that a man in that condition will manufacture importance out of a cracked mirror or a stray dog or the shape of a cloud, purely for the company of having something to think about that is not his own failing arithmetic of hours billed against hours worked, which I had been padding, some, the way a man pads a mattress he expects to fall on.

It was into this state of affairs that the other one came, the rogue, though I did not know to call him that yet — a broad, sunburnt, cheerful article in a coat too good for the rest of his outfit, who sat himself at my table without being asked, remarked that the coffee here was robbery, ordered two of it anyway, and asked me, easy as Sunday, whether I had heard the true story of the mirror.

"I've heard the duke's version," I said.

"The duke's version," says he, grinning like a man who has found a soft spot in a plank, "is for tourists and professors. You want to hear it from somebody who's actually sold a piece of that glass."

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And there it was — the crack in the mirror not two feet off, the crack in my own solitude wide enough now for any man with a coat and a grin to come climbing through, and I sat there with my heart going a little quick, the way it does when you sense you are about to be made a fool of and cannot, for the life of you, think of one single reason to get up and leave. So I stayed, and he settled himself in like a man who'd been invited, and commenced.
"""

"""
Well, he told it fine. He told it the way a man deals cards he's stacked — easy, unhurried, letting you watch his hands the whole time just to prove there was nothing to hide, when the hiding was the whole trade.
"""

He said his name was Herr Brandt, though he said it the way a man says a name he has tried on before other coats, and he said he had been in glass and mirrors and old silver going on twenty years, buying up estates before the lawyers got to them, and that this particular Biedermeier article had come through his hands once, back when the Hofmark was still private, before it was a coffeehouse at all — and he laid out for me, one item after another, the provenance and the packing crate and the customs stamp and the insurance man who had wept, actually wept, over the crack when they uncrated it in Salzburg, and a Rothschild cousin who had wanted it whole and been refused, and a fire in a warehouse in '61 that had taken the twin of it and left this one, scorched at the frame but whole in the glass, the last of its kind on the Continent — and by the time he got done piling up duke and Rothschild and fire and customs stamp, one on top of the next the way a boy piles blocks to see how high before it goes, the little crack in the silver had swallowed about four European wars and come out the other side looking like the only true thing left standing.

I said, "That's a lot of country for one piece of glass to have crossed."

"Glass has been everywhere men have been fools," he said, "which is to say, everywhere."

Now I want to set it down honest that I did not believe the half of it, any more than I believed the professor's duke, but there is a species of lonesomeness that will pay good money just to be lied to well, the way a starving man will eat a description of a meal if you read it to him slow enough and with enough sauce on the words — and I had gone eleven days, now twelve, without hearing a story told to me in my own tongue for the pure sport of the telling, and I sat there letting him build his cathedral of nonsense course by course, and something in my chest went warm and stupid and grateful the whole while I knew better.

Then he asked would I like to own a piece of it.

Not the mirror, he was careful to say — the mirror stayed, the house wouldn't part with the mirror — but there was a second crack, a hairline sister-crack in a hand glass upstairs from the same estate, same duke, same night, and for forty euros he could let a piece go, chip and all, a genuine article, and did I want it.

I want to record here, since I am keeping this account honest whatever else it is, that I had my hand halfway to my billfold before the arithmetic caught up with me — forty euros, and me a man who'd been padding his own hours against a company that trusted him on nothing but his say-so, cheating soft where he was fixing to cheat me hard, and the two of us no different in the marrow of the thing except that his lie had a coat on it and mine only had a laptop — and that recognition came down on me like cold water, and I put my billfold back.

"I believe I'll pass," I said.

He didn't press it. That was the mark of the man, that he let a fish go without a fuss, already looking past me toward a table of Germans by the window, already composing, I don't doubt, some new provenance to fit their faces.

"Suit yourself," he said, and rose, and was gone to them inside a minute, sunburnt and cheerful as ever, and I sat alone again with my cold coffee and the crack in the mirror doing nothing at all, being exactly what it had always been, a scratch in old silver that a chambermaid could have made in an afternoon of carelessness.

The professor came by once more before I left, sniffed at the empty chair, said something about the vulgarity of commerce intruding on antiquity, and drifted off satisfied with himself.

I went back up my eleven flights and wrote my memos to my strangers, and the bells banged away outside same as ever, and I thought how the two of them, the scholar and the rogue, had between them hung more history on that little crack than the crack could bear, and how I had come within forty euros of doing the same fool thing myself, and there is no moral to it that I can find, except that a man a long way from home will buy almost any story, so long as it is told to him kindly, and in his own language, and he is lonesome enough not to ask the price twice.