The Lost Time Accidents Read online

  “Willkommen, children,” the widow said langorously, extending her arms. “It always heartens us to see new faces.” Sonja curtsied prettily, doing an excellent job of disguising her bemusement; Kaspar hesitated, attempting to catch Waldemar’s eye, then took the nearest of the widow’s hands and kissed it. She was frailer than he’d pictured her, long since gone androgynous with age; her sharp velvet collar and white, shrublike eyebrows gave her the look of a clean-shaven Bismarck. She stiffened momentarily when he brought her fingers to his lips, then surprised him by clamping her hand on his forearm and pulling herself up from the couch. “It’s time for dinner, Herr Toula,” she said, extending her left hand absently to Sonja. “Kindly escort this ancient piece of crockery down the hall.” The honor guard broke rank—grudgingly, it seemed to Kaspar—to let the three of them pass. His brother was the very last to follow.

  * * *

  Dinner was surprisingly opulent, given the austerity of the house: trout-filled potato dumplings, sweetbreads in aspic, beef tongue, bitter gherkins, and a succulent Kalbsbraten, followed by a tray of flavored ices. Kaspar was confident—almost certain, in fact—that the gherkins were his family’s own, but he took care not to embarrass his brother. After the requisite pleasantries, the talk turned to the widow’s most recent campaign: abolishing the Washerwomen’s Ball.

  “The Washerwomen’s Ball?” Kaspar said. “I’m not sure what that is. Perhaps Fräulein Silbermann—”

  “My brother spends all of his time at the university,” Waldemar cut in, to all appearances embarrassed already.

  “As well he should!” said the widow. “It’s to your credit, Herr Toula, that you’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s a filthy extravagance,” one of her courtiers chirped. “The women wear rags on their heads—women of the best families—and their underthings only, which means—in most cases—that their most intimate garments, by which I mean to say, if you’ll excuse the term, their knickers—”

  “It’s a kind of masquerade,” said the widow, silencing the boy with a glance. “The gentry of this city, out of a mixture of lasciviousness and boredom, dress up as their inferiors, and behave accordingly. It’s a way of getting past their inhibitions.”

  “You sound postively Freudian, Frau Bemmelmans,” said Sonja.

  Slowly and ratchetingly, with an almost audible creak, the widow’s head revolved in her direction. “I beg your pardon, fräulein,” she said dryly. “I’m an adherent of no party or religion. My views are my own.”

  “I applaud that, Frau Bemmelmans. But I was referring to the teachings of Dr. Freud, a physician in the Ninth District, who specializes in bourgeois hysteria. He and his disciples believe that our actions are guided by a second self: an animus, so to speak, hidden from the conscious mind—”

  “That sounds like a religion to me,” the widow said, snapping her head back into place. “I’ve never heard such idiotic prattle.”

  Sonja gave a high-pitched, brittle laugh. Kaspar had heard this particular laugh before—on a number of occasions, in fact—and he knew enough to take it as a warning. “I see your point, Frau Bemmelmans,” he said quickly. “I think what Fräulein Silbermann means, however, is that—”

  “I went to the Washerwomen’s Ball last year,” said Sonja. “I rather enjoyed myself. It helped me to get past my inhibitions.”

  “Is that so,” said the widow. “How interesting.”

  “I think what Fräulein Silbermann means,” Kaspar put in, laughing weakly, “is simply that—”

  “Oh yes,” Sonja singsonged. “I felt just like the purest child of nature.” She sighed prettily and took Kaspar’s hand. “Didn’t I, honeypot?”

  “Sonja,” Kaspar stuttered, doing his best not to redden. “I really don’t—”

  “And afterward Kaspar took me home and gave me a thorough, uninhibited buggering. It really was extravagantly filthy.”

  No one spoke for a medium-sized eternity. All eyes—Sonja’s included—were fixed on the widow. Now would be the moment for those sabers to come out, Kaspar thought. But the widow, when she finally replied, was more decorous and genial than ever.

  “By all reports the balls are colorful affairs—one can see how they might magnetize the young. Citizens of all breeds and pedigrees intermingle freely there, or so I understand.” She turned her mannish face toward the assembled gallants, allowing the entire room to bask in her goodwill. “I’m told the Israelites, especially, lend a feral sort of spice to the proceedings.”

  The specifics of Sonja’s reply are not recorded in my grandfather’s entry for the fourth of October, but it sufficed to bar her—and Kaspar as well—from the villa indefinitely. What my grandfather does describe, however—and in great detail, as if he knew that it would prove significant—was Waldemar’s response to Sonja’s antics. While the ardent young men around him rolled their eyes and gnashed their teeth, Waldemar sat straight-backed in his chair, as still as the bust of Schubert on the mantelpiece behind him. There was something in his eyes, however—or behind his eyes, Kaspar wrote, crossing out the preceding phrase—that gave the lie to his debonair manner. He was looking at Sonja more closely than Kaspar had seen him look at anything.

  But even that’s not right, my grandfather corrected himself. Not entirely.

  I can sense his hesitation at this point in the narrative, Mrs. Haven—I can feel him pausing, pencil in hand, as a memory wriggles up into the light. He’d seen that same expression four years earlier, he remembered, in the brining-room laboratory in Znojmo. He and his brother had discovered a nest of cicadas in a tree in the town square, and their father, in the spirit of scientific instruction, had dropped one of them into an empty beaker. “Cicadas can be spirited little devils, but their metabolic rate is remarkably slow,” he’d explained to his sons, covering the beaker’s mouth with a chipped china saucer. “They can go without food for a very long while. Shall we determine just how long a while that is?”

  After a dozen panicked circuits of its enclosure, the cicada had stopped moving, and Kaspar had quickly lost interest; but Waldemar’s reaction had been just the opposite. Over the following weeks, his brother had passed progressively longer stretches of time staring down into the beaker, his eyes blank, his mouth slightly open, his body as fixed as the cicada’s own. He’d begun to neglect what few duties he had, and Kaspar had seen to them in his stead, waiting patiently for someone to notice. Finally, at the close of an afternoon on which his brother had spent more than an hour in his customary trance, Kaspar had snatched up the beaker, inverted it with a flourish, and slammed it down against the oilcloth-covered bench. Waldemar had let out a groan, as though he’d just been given devastating news; but when he looked up at Kaspar he was smiling with unmistakable relief. “I didn’t know how to stop,” he’d said in a faltering voice.

  Kaspar had told him to think nothing of it, then glanced down at the cicada—still trapped under the upended beaker—and asked him what should happen to his pet. To his astonishment, his brother had turned away without another glance. “It makes no difference now,” he’d said. “You can go ahead and crush it, if you like.”

  Half a century later, looking back on his youth from the safety and comfort of a screened-in veranda in upstate New York, my grandfather would recognize this episode for the milestone it was: an inconspicuous wedge—no greater than the V of two spread fingers—from which the rest of their durations would diverge.

  * * *

  Strolling home from the widow’s villa, Sonja was flushed and euphoric, calling Kaspar all manner of names, both affectionate and insulting, and cutting capers in her saffron-colored dress. By the duck pond in the Stadtpark she announced that she loved him, then turned and vomited into the filthy green water, as if to fix the moment in his mind.

  “I feel the same,” Kaspar said, helping her back to her feet. “I adore you, Fräulein Silbermann.”

  She nodded thoughtfully and took him by the collar. “Your mustache is regrettable,” she wh
ispered, wrinkling her nose at the smell of her own breath.

  Though they had slept together several times already, the night of the widow’s party expunged all precedents. Sonja seemed to grow younger as the act progressed, but also less opaque, more knowable to him; the fact that Kaspar knew what would happen—and even, approximately, in what order—did nothing to dull the shock and gratitude he felt. As her climax approached, her playfulness fell away and she took his hands emphatically in hers. The ritual never varied: they might approach their mutual destination from any direction they chose, but the final pitch was as deliberate as the dismantling of a bomb. Positioning Kaspar behind her, Sonja would bring his left hand to her mouth and sink her square front teeth into his palm; his right index finger, when the moment arrived, was guided, gently but unambiguously, to a spot he’d otherwise have blushed to touch.

  He couldn’t have said with any accuracy how long it all lasted—his sense of time abandoned him completely during sex, a fact that embarrassed him only slightly less than the act itself—but when they fell back exhausted he felt magically aged, as though the years she’d shed had settled on his chest. This was by no means an unwelcome feeling: the heaviness in his limbs struck him as akin to what a cannibal must feel after gorging himself on an especially worthy foe. Sonja slept all through the night without the slightest change in her position. More than once, glancing over at her limp, snow-white body, Kaspar found himself imagining that he’d killed her.

  He awoke to find her flat on her belly with her legs and arms splayed, as though she’d fallen from some great height onto his bed. He stood upright on the mattress, steadying himself against the flaking ceiling, and brought his right foot gently down against her rump. He’d expected her to be in a foul mood, drunk as she’d been, but she began to smile before her eyes came open. He made coffee on the burner, enough for two cups exactly, then forgot them on the countertop and crawled back into bed. She was wide awake now. She hadn’t forgotten what she’d said to him by the duck pond, to his amazement, or what his answer had been. They sat cross-legged on the bed, looking down into the shaded golden courtyard, speaking only when the need to speak arose. After an absurdly long silence—so long he’d have begun to squirm in anyone else’s company—she yawned and asked him where his brother was.

  “Not here,” he said, surprised by the question. “I have no idea where he spends his nights.”

  It had never crossed Kaspar’s mind to view his brother as a rival, in spite of his unquestionable elegance, simply because Waldemar had never shown the least interest in sex; but something in her manner gave him pause. Before he was entirely aware of it—and certainly before he’d weighed the pros and cons—he was describing how Waldemar had stared at her the night before.

  “I’m accustomed to being stared at, Kasparchen,” Sonja said with a shrug. “That’s one of the reasons I go about town in a sack.”

  Kaspar hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said finally, “when my brother stares at a woman, that it means exactly what you think it means.”

  “Oh! I’m quite sure it does,” Sonja answered, with just the faintest hint of coquetry.

  The only means Kaspar saw to make his meaning clear was to recount the episode of the cicada. Sonja listened intently, never once interrupting, and by the end of it her complacency was gone. He relaxed somewhat then, confident that he’d communicated whatever it was—he couldn’t have put a name to it, precisely—that had troubled him so much the night before.

  “That story gives me the horrors,” said Sonja.

  “Then you see what I mean? Waldemar can’t be thought of as an ordinary—”

  “Imagine being trapped under glass,” Sonja murmured, her eyes strangely dim. “Imagine being swept up by some enormous, foreign power, torn free of the world, then set down in a place where nothing happens—absolutely nothing. You can see the world go by, and you can try to recollect how it once was; but you have no function in it any longer.” She shook her head. “How would you know that time was even passing?”

  Her response to the anecdote struck Kaspar as childish at first; but the last question she’d posed—if you were set apart from the world, compeletely sequestered, how could you detect that time was passing?—refused to leave him in peace. Worst of all, when he was alone again in that dusty, airless garret, his brother’s face persisted in his thoughts, superimposing itself over everything he looked at or imagined, until the cicada and Sonja’s naked body and Waldemar’s dispassionate mortician’s stare combined into a hideous chimera that filled his mind to the exclusion of all else. Anything was preferable to dwelling on that grotesque composite: even scientific work, however futile. Even the invocation of the dead.

  Which was how, without fully realizing it himself, my grandfather began to hunt the Accidents again.

  V

  WALDEMAR HAD EXPECTED time to move more quickly once he’d put Znojmo behind him, but to his surprise the opposite was true. Each instant was now distinct from those before and after, bite-sized and luminous, like a pearl on an invisible, indivisible wire. Vienna rattled and bustled and pirouetted around him, but he felt himself to be in no great hurry—though it wasn’t until the end of his first year at the university, reading the work of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, that he understood why. Lorentz had discovered, to his and the whole world’s astonishment, that time moves more slowly for a body in motion. And it often seemed to Waldemar, since he’d escaped the constraints of his childhood, that his body had never fully come to rest.

  Unlike his brother, no event steered my great-uncle’s attention back to the Accidents, for the simple reason that they’d never left his thoughts. His father’s cryptic discovery and sudden death had conspired to give Waldemar a sense of significance he’d never otherwise have had, and he took pains to be deserving of his fate. Occasionally the thought would make him shiver, like a pang of self-consciousness in a crowded theater: Without the Accidents, I’d be no different than any other man. The notion thrilled and frightened him in equal measure. By “Accidents,” he meant two distinct but intertwined events: both Ottokar’s discovery and the encounter with Progress, in the form of Herr Bachling’s Daimler, that had snuffed his father’s brilliance just as it was poised to set the world alight.

  Waldemar saw his coming of age—his entire existence, in fact—as a series of momentous collisions; but those two were set apart from the rest, kept sacrosanct and pure. Not even Kaspar grasped how much they signified. Waldemar had made a close study of his brother after their father’s death, but Kaspar seemed to be the same person afterward that he’d been before. He was haunted by the Accidents, of course—how could he not have been?—but he showed no gratitude for their occurrence. When this realization set in, Waldemar’s disappointment was bitter; and though he kept his outward manner cordial, he was careful to keep his ideas to himself.

  He was sorry to do so, desperately sorry, because his thoughts grew more electric by the day. He could feel the secret of the Accidents flutter against his brain stem as he went about his work—especially when he was busy with something trivial, such as drafting a letter for the widow Bemmelmans—and on certain evenings, as he nodded off at his desk at the university, it beat against his awareness like a moth against a paper window-shade. Waldemar copied Ottokar’s riddle into a series of notebooks, just as Kaspar had done, taking pains to match his father’s scrawl exactly. He chanted it under his breath on streetcars and benches and barstools, like a madman or an Israelite at prayer, and it never failed to pacify his nerves.

  The Michelson-Morley experiment weighed on Waldemar’s mind. How in God’s name could the speed of light be absolute—a constant? Only time and space could have that magic property. Isaac Newton, the greatest intellect in human history, had unlocked the mechanics of the entire solar system based on this self-evident fact, and had solved the mysteries of gravitation; in light of the Michelson-Morley result, however, Newton’s laws had come to seem outmoded, even quaint. How was this poss
ible? Waldemar longed to ask Kaspar—to ask his opinion, to have an ally again, to break free of the glass dome that seemed to have been lowered over him since coming to Vienna—but the truth was that he feared his brother’s answer. How could it be that nothing—no force in the universe, not even the spinning of a planet on its axis—either added to light’s velocity or reduced it?

  Each time he arrived at this precipice, Waldemar compelled himself to catch his conceptual breath. He could feel his neurons pickling whenever he dwelt on its implications, as though the fat his cerebrum floated in were gradually being transmuted into brine. This nauseated him at first—it made his entire body clench—but in time he taught himself to like the feeling. And once he’d begun to relish the sensation, once it had stopped sickening him, something shifted inside his skull, like a delirious child turning in a sweat-sodden bed, and his father’s text began to offer up its secrets.

  What frustrated Waldemar most about Ottokar’s note was that it hovered so coyly between sense and nonsense, refusing to hold still from one line to the next. Sentences of gobbledygook were folded over and under familiar citations—like strata of dough in a strudel—and others that were clearly drawn from classical sources, whose origins might potentially be traced. And then there were the references (surely not arbitrary?) to mistresses and married life and sex. After dozens of failed attempts to crack the code, Waldemar decided to invert his strategy: he would begin on solid ground, by considering the citations, then work his way slowly out into the jabber.

  Time can be measured only in its passing had been a favored axiom of Ottokar’s, often cited after long and fruitless mornings in the laboratory. Waldemar had heard it so often, in fact, that he’d never bothered to inquire where it came from, and it was only at the close of a long and increasingly despondent week at the Imperial Library that he found it at last, in the fourteenth chapter of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.