The Lost Time Accidents Page 13

  Sonja nodded. “We once ate some strudel there.”

  “That’s right,” said Kaspar, hesitating a moment. “They make strudel exactly the way my mother used to make it, back in Znaim.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Nothing, really. Eichberg looked through the glass and saw Waldemar sitting inside.”

  She smiled at him. “You call that nothing?”

  “One of them said, ‘Moses Eichberg: Waldemar von Toula. Stand up straight. Tip your hat to His Lordship.’ Waldemar watched him through the glass for a moment, then turned back to his coffee. Eichberg had the impression that his face—Eichberg’s, I mean—was being committed to memory. Then they told him he was free to go.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  She sat back on the sofa. “You’ll have to go and find him, I suppose.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She let out a sigh. “He’ll be expecting you. He may even have done this thing because of you. Because of us.”

  “I can’t understand it,” said Kaspar. “The UGF are reactionaries of the lowest order. And what’s this von Toula nonsense? Has he gotten himself knighted?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, in this day and age.”

  “I can’t imagine what I could possibly say to him. Not after all of this.”

  His wife sipped her tea. “But you’ll go to him, won’t you?”

  For the first time in a great while he looked at her sharply. “Why the hell do you want me to see him so badly? Do you honestly think it will do any good?”

  Sonja said nothing.

  “You know me, Schätzchen,” he murmured, cursing the adolescent quaver in his voice. “You know the type of character I am.”

  “I know the type of character you’ve become.”

  She said it affectionately, mildly, the way a mother might speak to an obstinate child. And his response was a child’s as well, taking his cue from her, as he’d done for nearly twenty carefree years.

  “I can’t go to him, anyhow. I have no idea where he spends his time.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Sonja. “But you might begin at Trattner’s coffeehouse.”

  * * *

  Thus began perhaps the strangest week of my grandfather’s duration—one that reminded him, unpleasantly, of his vigil at the Jandek years before. Each day at noon he found himself standing in front of Trattner’s gargantuan window, peering in through its varicolored glass, then making his way cautiously inside—suffering the scrutiny of the regulars, who made no effort to conceal their curiosity—and finding a seat in the darkest available nook. Trattner’s was a more reputable establishment than the Jandek, but Kaspar felt no more at ease at its immaculately polished marble tables than he had in the Jandek’s stained and threadbare booths. He felt incongruous in that hushed bourgeois temple, every inch the Czech from the provinces, a feeling he’d thought to have outgrown years before. His sole source of solace was the waitress, a dumpling-cheeked Serb barely out of her teens, whose haunches shook like aspic as she crossed the gleaming floor.

  On day eight of his vigil a greasy blue mist hung in coils, refusing to congeal into a drizzle, and the people who passed Trattner’s window wore identical crestfallen looks, as though their umbrellas were conspiring against them. One heavyset man—about Kaspar’s age, with a close-cropped head and a pinched, nearsighted expression—stopped just outside the glass, calmly closed his umbrella, and handed it to a needy passerby. What a remarkable gesture, Kaspar thought absently. I approve of that fellow. By then the man was inside Trattner’s, halfway to the nearest vacant table, with the morning paper in his right hand and a comically large meerschaum in his left. It wasn’t until he placed his order with the Serb that Kaspar recognized him. That voice could belong to no other.

  “A large mocca, at room temperature, with a small cube of unsalted butter,” said Waldemar crisply. “A bowl of goulash, cold, with a pumpernickel roll cut into fourths. Two fingers’ worth of anise-flavored brandy, lightly peppered.” The Serb nodded as he marched through his preposterous order, showing no surprise at any of it. He was shabbily dressed, but his shabbiness had something affected about it, even genteel. He’s putting on airs, Kaspar thought. And he’s doing it well.

  Waldemar sat straight-backed in his chair, his eyes nearly closed, while the waitress waddled off to place his order. She returned straightaway with the mocca and brandy, setting her tray down circumspectly, so as not to disturb the great man’s reverie.

  Kaspar marveled at his brother’s aplomb, at his consummate lack of self-consciousness, at his world-weary poise; he couldn’t entirely suppress a twinge of envy. It made little difference, suddenly, whether or not the source of that remarkable self-assurance lay in madness: he himself had never been waited on half so well. To think that I’ve been pitying him all these years, Kaspar said to himself. Actually pitying him! While he’s likely been pitying me!

  This notion was almost enough to bring my grandfather to his estranged brother’s table; almost, Mrs. Haven, but not quite. The habit of aloofness—of cowardice, better said—was too deeply ingrained by that time. He kept still, barely sipping his mélange, doing his best to blend in with the upholstery. For the moment it was best to watch and listen.

  Waldemar, meanwhile, was scribbling on a roll of butcher’s paper that he’d pulled out of the lining of his coat. He was scribbling on this roll—which hung nearly to the floor—not with a pen or a pencil, but with a toothed wheel of brass that looked to have been pried loose from a clock. It made no marks on the paper that Kaspar could see; but his brother reviewed his writing carefully, occasionally crossing out what he had written.

  He’s working on the Accidents, Kaspar thought suddenly. He’s been working on them all these many years. The thought dizzied him to the point of vertigo, and moved him to a sympathy far more potent than his pity had been; but it also made him regret the series of seemingly inconsequential decisions that now appeared, in retrospect, to have shaped the whole of his adult experience.

  Over the previous decade—tacitly at first, but with growing conviction—my grandfather had come to acknowledge the importance of relativity. He had done so because the theory had compelled him to, of course, but also because he found it elegant and fashionable; and not least (he saw now, with the ruthless clarity of hindsight) because such an allegiance asked of him—demanded of him, in fact—that he break with his past and family forever. Sitting in his velvet booth at Trattner’s, confronted with his long-lost brother’s fidelity to the grail of their youth, Kaspar found himself wondering whether his commitment to reason, to objectivity, and to the scientific method—his commitment to sanity, in other words—might not, at bottom, be an act of treason.

  * * *

  From an article in the Science section of The New York Times that I came across on my last visit to the bathroom (why my aunts kept such prodigous amounts of newsprint next to the toilet, Mrs. Haven, I hesitate to guess), I’ve learned some interesting facts about the phenomenon of reflection, a number of which apply to my grandfather’s condition as he eavesdropped on his brother. “When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they’re doing,” claims a psychologist with the felicitous name of G. V. Bodenhausen. “Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings.” Your reflection is a representative of your superego, in other words: an inquisitor dressed in your clothes. And Kaspar, in his sixteen-page diary entry for Thursday, November 14, 1922, likens spying on Waldemar to catching sight of his own face, grotesquely distorted, in a half-empty cup of mélange.

  He also notes—in a hurried little postscript, as if the fact were of no consequence—that the Patent Clerk has won the Nobel Prize.

  * * *

  “Herr Toula!” came a voice from over Kaspar’s shoulder. He spun i
n his seat involuntarily, forcing his face into a smile—but the man in question shuffled blithely past him.

  “Pardon my lateness, Herr Toula. The trams at this hour—”

  “Von Toula,” Waldemar interrupted, breaking into the same queer laughter, dry as ashes, that Kaspar had found so disquieting in the widow’s attic all those years before. “As for the trams, Herr Bleichling, suffice it to say that it’s a fallen world.”

  “It certainly is, sir! Beautifully put.”

  “Be seated, Herr Bleichling. Let’s proceed to the matter at hand.”

  “The matter at hand?”

  “Am I not being clear?”

  “Not—that is to say, you are, of course,” the man stammered. “Do you mean—are you suggesting that we discuss it here in public? That is to say, within earshot—”

  “My enemies know where to find me, Herr Bleichling. I make no secret of my whereabouts. Let them come and arrest me, if they care to; let them stone me in the street, or burn me alive in Saint Stephen’s Square. Let them do their worst to us! Don’t you agree?”

  “Well—” said Bleichling, shifting unhappily in his chair. “Well, Herr Toula—Herr von Toula, I beg your pardon—I do have my wife to think of, and my daughter Elfriede, and little Sigismund—”

  “Sigismund, is it? An excellent name for a son!”

  “Very kind of you, Herr von Toula.” Again Bleichling hesitated. “In actuality, however, Sigismund is a terrier.” He let out a titter. “A Scottish terrier, to be exact, with the whitest undercoat you’ve ever—”

  “It happens this Saturday,” Waldemar snapped. “Have your men assembled by eighteen o’clock.”

  “This Saturday? The day after tomorrow? I’m afraid that I wouldn’t—I can’t—that is, I couldn’t possibly—”

  Waldemar held up a hand. “I’ve been informed, Herr Bleichling, that I may not be at liberty by this time next week. A warrant for my arrest has reached this city from Budapest, where I was active for some years on the party’s behalf.”

  Bleichling squirmed and gulped air. “I’ve heard about what you did in Budapest.”

  “Have you, Herr Bleichling? Then tell me. When you heard of it, how did it make you feel?”

  “I couldn’t—I didn’t—” The life drained from his face. “Good heavens, sir, I didn’t mean to suggest—”

  Waldemar eased his heavy body forward. “I’ll tell you how it made me feel, brother. It made me feel wide awake. It made me feel the breeze of our glorious future on my skin.”

  By now the back of Kaspar’s neck had gone puckered and hot, as though the hairs on his nape were being plucked, and his tongue felt like a breaded chicken cutlet. The thought that less than a minute earlier he’d been tempted to sit down at his brother’s table—to sit down and ask him, humbly, for forgiveness—was suddenly both appalling and absurd. When the waitress appeared at his shoulder, silently and without the slightest warning, it was all that he could do to keep from vaulting from his seat.

  “I’m quite well,” he squawked, though the Serb hadn’t spoken. “I was on my way out, in fact. I’m late for an appointment—”

  “I can’t allow you to do that, sir.”

  Kaspar felt the air catch in his throat. “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “You haven’t paid.”

  “Of course!” he said, nearly shouting with relief. “Forgive me. Of course. If you’d be so kind—”

  “Sixteen hundred kronen.”

  As he counted out the money, marveling at the steadiness of his hands, Kaspar heard—echoingly, as if across an empty ballroom—the sound of chairs being pushed back, and of his brother’s voice whispering a series of commands. He let his eyes close, then felt a hand gripping his elbow: but it was only the waitress, the inscrutable Serb, offering to help him out onto the street. Before he could respond to her his brother and Herr Bleichling were beside him.

  “Excuse me!” said Bleichling, insinuating himself deftly between Kaspar and the girl. He was even smaller than he’d first appeared, and his freckled, hairless crown reflected the lamplight like a piece of lacquered crockery—but an instant later Kaspar had forgotten Bleichling completely, because Waldemar stood in his place.

  He patted the Serb on the rump as he passed, as if she were in his exclusive service, and she swiveled her ample hips to give him room. He smiled at her, producing a coin between his thumb and middle finger—at which point his gray eyes came to rest on Kaspar.

  “You may keep the change, Jelena.”

  “Hvala ti, Herr von Toula. God be with you.”

  “Bless you, my child.”

  Through the whole of this exchange his brother’s flat, unblinking eyes took Kaspar’s measure, ticking from feature to feature, appraising him with a mild but steady interest. He’s trying to place me, Kaspar thought incredulously. He’s trying to remember where we’ve met. Have I changed to such a degree? Has he stricken me from his memory so completely? Even as he asked himself these questions, however, Kaspar saw the opacity of those eyes for what it was, and reminded himself that he was looking at a madman.

  “Umbrella,” said Waldemar.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your umbrella, sir. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to withdraw it.”

  Kaspar looked down warily, suspecting a trick, to find the tip of his umbrella—which he’d entirely forgotten he was holding—pinning Waldemar’s coat to the floor. Another sign, this time unmistakable: the moment had arrived for disclosure, for confrontation, for a reckoning long overdue. It’s your brother, Herr von Toula. Explain to me, if you have a moment, the fundamental points of your philosophy. Tell me what you did in Budapest.

  “I’m frightfully sorry,” he said, stepping backward.

  “No harm done, brother,” Waldemar answered, receding before Kaspar’s eyes like a mirage.

  * * *

  No act of terror took place that Saturday, or the next Saturday either, insofar as Kaspar could discover. He’d gone straight to the police from Trattner’s, but the officers had struck him as oddly abstracted, and on subsequent visits they’d made no effort to conceal their lack of interest. Israelites, they informed him, were regularly involved in all manner of trouble. Gustav Bleichling, by contrast, was a grammar school teacher—he taught at the same school as Moses Eichberg, in fact—and was respected by both his colleagues and his pupils. “He’s a teacher of literature,” one of the gendarmes explained, as though this fact alone were proof that he was harmless. As for Waldemar Toula, he’d reportedly left the city for parts unknown, and in any case the department had been informed of no warrants from Budapest. My grandfather had no choice, ultimately, but to let the matter drop.

  X

  WALDEMAR’S SECOND VANISHING ACT was even more accomplished than his first—so much so that Kaspar found himself wondering, as the twenties sped by, whether their encounter at Trattner’s had happened at all. But he knew it had happened, farfetched though it seemed. He had the change in himself to corroborate the memory—and also the change in his wife.

  The asylum Kaspar and Sonja had created was as dear to him as ever, Mrs. Haven, but his faith in it was permanently cracked. He was no longer complacent, no longer confident that his indifference to history would protect him or those he loved against its whims. And Sonja herself—whose trust in their separate peace had never been as sturdy as her husband’s—now took steps to prepare for the worst. She was in an excellent position to appreciate the degenerating social climate, and not only by virtue of her intimacy with anarchists, Bolsheviks, and assorted other enemies of the state: her own father, the illustrious and redoubtable Ludwig David Silbermann, Ph.D., provided her with as cautionary a tale as any alarmist could ask for.

  * * *

  It’s one of the paradoxes of history, Mrs. Haven, that the world’s universities, those stiff-lipped incubators of the Enlightenment, have occasionally thrown their vestal gates wide open to its opposite. Since the end of the war, in moderate but slowly growing numbers,
eminent members of the University of Vienna’s faculty—most, if not all, of them perfectly sane—had begun to speak openly about the Semitic infiltration of the student body, which was “out of all proportion” to the city as a whole. This grumbling was aped by the students themselves, who amplified and distilled it in predictably postpubescent ways. It was a matter of a few brief months, once that happened, until the Movement—as it now called itself—grew bold enough to act on its beliefs.

  Professor Silbermann’s troubles began with a leaflet. On a drab Monday morning in early October, a new student club—the euphoniously named Native Agglomeration of the Primary University—deposited a modest sheaf of letterpressed pages in the Mensa, addressed to “Aryan scholars” of the Department of Physics, suggesting that “a general wish be taken into account, out of a sense of civics, to list all current professors of Semitic heritage by name.” The students in question—no more than a dozen in all—were mild-mannered to the point of meekness, and few members of the faculty, Jewish or otherwise, took their faltering attempt at pamphleteering seriously.

  Needless to say, Mrs. Haven, this would prove a mistake.

  The first name on the list was Moritz Schlick, lecturer in applied physics, who soon found it impossible to discharge his duties. The fact that Professor Schlick wasn’t Jewish at all, but the son of a defrocked priest from Salzburg, was taken by the student body—and even by some of his colleagues, once momentum had built—as one of the more damning points of evidence against him. Vienna’s beloved former mayor Karl Lueger had once famously declared, “I’ll decide for myself who’s a Jew and who isn’t!” and the university humbly took its cue from him. Within a month Schlick had resigned.