Ch. 5 Phosophorus

Book I, Phosphorus Summary

In 1968, Jakob and Bella enter a soundless, colorful dream. A river flows to the music of Brahms. When Bella disappears, the dream turns nightmarish and Jakob feels wrong about being married to Alex and living in a foreign land. He feels as though he has disappeared and Bella is searching for him. He recalls Bella's practicing and playing with adult passions.

Jakob meets Alex at a fine music library in the park where he listens to composers systematically by alphabet. She is an energetic woman who is adept at punning. Raised by her physician father on stories of the British military and word wit, she develops a passion for listening to music. Acting sophisticated, Alex is awkwardly innocent and seems to promise Jakob freedom. It takes five years for their attraction to end, but the signs show early. Jakob feels insecure around her Marxist friends and she has trouble dealing with his shyness. She is restless when they visit the Salmans but seems to enjoy the security of marriage, especially not having to cook. Two years into the marriage, Jakob's nightmares return, spoiling their sex life.
Jakob muses about how the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas is honest about designating unknown regions. History is less frank, forcing one to remember what it covers up as if it were a watermark leaking through. He recalls Bella practicing her fingering and telling stories about Brahms. Jakob and their mother memorize the fragments that she practices, but when she plays the whole piece through, Jakob gets lost.
Returning to history and memory, Jakob contrasts history as the Totenbuch of the concentration camps and memory as the Memorbucher of the synagogue. The former is amoral and the latter moral. History and memory share time and space and every moment is really two moments. Examples are how the Nazis and the Lublin scholars view the destruction of holy books, how Nazis and mothers in Lódz react to the soldiers "catching" infants on their bayonets, and how a woman in Birkenau carries a photograph of her husband and daughter under her tongue in order not to be separated from them.
Jakob cannot resist reading the horrors of history because he needs to know where Bella actually dies. He had hoped that marrying Alex would bring light to his life, but it pushes him down into the mud. He is obsessed not with the details of where Holocaust victims come from, what they do or is done to them, but whether they are silent or speak, keep their eyes open or closed at the precise moment of death. He wonders how this relates to the gradual instant of geology. Jakob sees in Alex's belongings and behaviors parallels to memories of Bella, whose remembered music helps him recover better than the touch of Alex's body. Nothing releases the dreamer.
In the gradual erosion of the cliffs on which his friends, the Truppers, have built their house, Alex also perceives that every moment is two moments, just as in 1942, Jews hide in the painted caves of Lascaux and listen to Mozart, while at Auschwitz a prison orchestra accompanies the doomed. Caves are temples. The ground speaks - through Oracles at Delphi and holy mass graves. Germans turn humans into objects just as physicists are turning matter into energy. When Alex turns on lights, Jakob's memories and stories slip away. He feels that she is brainwashing and wants him to begin anew. When she leaves him, everyone thinks that she is at fault, but Jakob knows it is his fault. He has lost desire. He hears Bella tapping their secret goodnight code through the wall and recalls Bella telling him a terrible story about Brahms falling in love with Clara Schumann, wife of the composer whom Brahms adores. Brahms never marries and is so distraught when she dies that he barely makes it to the end of her burial. Jakob cannot imagine the trauma of Jews whose lives are cut off, left unfinished.
In July, Alex respects Jakob enough to declare that she can stand no more. He assumes that she has met someone else. She notes that she will remove all trace of herself, everything that means nothing to him already, because he is ungrateful. Mama and Papa leave thirty-two tins of food and promise to return before he has eaten the last one. He has four books, which he repeatedly reads. He is not to step outside the door. He obeys, even when the food runs out and he gets lightheaded. He hears music outside and considers floating up through a crack. Jakob cannot move a muscle throughout July.

Book I, Phosphorus Analysis
The fifth chapter introduces and dispatches Jakob's first wife, Alex. The action has jumped forward to 1968. They are radically different personalities and each approaches the one thing that unites them, the love of music, differently. Alex is carefree, frivolous, and attracted to Marxism. Jakob, who has seen ideologies go bad in practice, is uncomfortable. Music makes him draw comparisons to lost Bella, his nightmares return, and they drift apart. He appreciates Alex's honesty in calling it quits. He blames her for nothing and does not withhold from the reader how badly he treats her as his depression deepens. At the end of the chapter, he is totally dysfunctional, leaving the reader to wonder - indeed, worry - about his future.
Bella's musical focus earlier is Beethoven and in particular his Moonlight Sonata. He is mentioned again, in connection with mysterious love letters to an "Immortal Beloved", whose identity is debated in musicological literature. The phrase here is used merely to heighten the poetic atmosphere. Bella is shown also to have concentrated much of her practice time, which is described in detail on Johannes Brahms' Intermezzo No. 2. Much attention is given to Bella's care over orchestration notes. Bella also tells the sad story of Brahms' unrequited love for his friend's wife.
Jakob has earlier stated several times how he exists during World War II outside the experience of his people. He has several times shown how the Jews are forced to hide in ways that resemble benign activities, and here cites several more, almost in passing. Jakob's obsession with the Holocaust continues to grow, particularly because he does not know his sister Bella's precise fate. He fixates on the precise moment of death and what the victims do. Athos's teachings about geology provide a parallel, as the painfully slow processes whereby wood becomes stone, peat becomes coal, and limestone becomes marble eventually come to a culmination. He calls it a "gradual instant", like death.
Jakob draws parallels involving archeology and music. Jews are shown hiding in the famed caves of Lascaux in southern France, listening to Mozart. The caves contain Paleolithic paintings of animal hunts. Parallel with this, at Auschwitz, a prison orchestra accompanies the doomed to the gas chambers and ovens. The selection process at the primary death camp is described in more detail later. Jakob draws a parallel between the Oracles at Delphi speaking from a grotto - a hole in the ground - and the bodily voices calling out from the mass graves. He has already described how these holes in the ground are sanctified and sanctifying. Jakob mentions how the Nazis turn humans into objects to justify their treatment of the Jews, but does not develop the theme until later. Instead, he parallels this with physicists turning matter into energy in this same period. A brick's worth of uranium releasing its power in nuclear fission would destroy whole cities. He then masterfully notes that the Nazis thrown regular bricks during Kristallnacht, the staged demonstration that initiates the terror against the Jews. These concatenated passages are quite powerful.