Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 11

II

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER DIED without recovering consciousness, Mrs. Haven, and the notes he’d let fall in the street were forgotten in the drama of his passing. In any event, only one person might have been able to appreciate the full significance of those pages, and she was prevented by propriety from coming forward. Marta Svoboda’s “testimony” was given in no court of law: even if Bachling had been in violation of the primitive traffic regulations of the age, his negligible speed would have been enough to put him in the clear. Frau Svoboda’s questioning, such as it was, was carried out by Ottokar’s sons, Kaspar and Waldemar, heirs to both their father’s business and his love of Fenchelwurst.

The liaison between Ottokar and Marta had by no means been a secret, and all eyes (except, perhaps, my great-grandmother’s) were on her in the days and weeks that followed; but she proved a disappointment to her neighbors. When the butcher shop opened the next day, she was behind the counter as always—slightly tighter-lipped than usual, perhaps, but otherwise composed. None of her customers made so bold as to invite her to unburden herself, and she did absolutely nothing to encourage them.

She showed less reticence, however, when Waldemar and Kaspar came to call.

∞

My grandfather and his brother were in their teens at the time of the accident, a year or so shy of manhood, and were often mistaken for twins. Waldemar was slightly taller than his older brother, with an elegant, straight-backed way of propelling himself through the world; Kaspar—my grandfather—was a dark, quiet boy, businesslike for his age, with the set jaw and good-natured suspiciousness of the emigrant he would one day become. Waldemar was his mother’s favorite, Kaspar his father’s. Though less fetching than his younger brother, and decidedly less brash, it was on Kaspar’s broad back that the hopes of the family rested. There was a reasonableness about him that was missing in Waldemar: his lack of imagination, it was felt, was precisely the corrective to his father’s excesses that Toula & Sons was in need of. On the morning of June 26, however, the pickle trade couldn’t have been farther from either boy’s thoughts. They walked the six blocks to Frau Svoboda’s shop shoulder to shoulder, talking in grave and self-important whispers, and rapped in tandem on its yellow door.

Circumference aside, Marta Svoboda made for an unlikely butcher’s wife: she was a soft-spoken woman, always impeccably dressed, with a fondness for light opera and an aversion to the smell of uncooked meat. (It may well have been her sense of herself as somehow out of place—miscast by a world that knew her poorly—that had made her susceptible to my great-grandfather’s charms.) She was well read, and a diligent diarist: most of what I’ve learned about that time came from her journals. Her entry for June 26, for example, exactly two weeks after Ottokar’s death and seven days after his funeral, gives me the first picture I have of my grandfather as a young man, and of his soon-to-be-infamous brother.

At just before noon—the hour of their accustomed rendezvous—Marta distinctly heard Ottokar’s knock at her door, and crept downstairs into the shop; she was in the depths of her grief, sleeping painfully little, and for a moment she feared for her sanity. The silhouette she saw through the frosted glass was Ottokar’s as well, and she might easily have fled back upstairs if she hadn’t noticed another behind it, slightly taller and with less of a slump. Marta had exchanged barely a word with the Toula boys since they’d been toddlers, and the thought of talking to them now frightened her worse than any phantom could have done; but she unbolted the shop door regardless.

“Good afternoon, Frau Svoboda,” the shorter one said. He seemed at a loss as to whether to bow or to extend his hand. The younger one stared at her coldly.

“Good day,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level, but in spite of everything it came out badly. It sounded as if she were correcting him.

“My name is Kaspar Toula,” said the boy, as if Marta had no way of knowing, which struck her as very polite. His mourning suit fit him badly and he looked miserable in it. He was the image of his father—only shorter, and stouter, and somewhat more matter-of-fact—and it almost hurt her eyes to look at him. His brother cut a more elegant figure, Marta noted in her journal: he looked, she wrote, “as if he’d been born wearing black.” She invited them in, though Waldemar still hadn’t spoken, and told them to sit at the counter while she fetched them a treat. They were little more than children, after all.

When she returned with a plate of cold sulze they were still standing exactly as she’d left them, in the middle of the shop with their hats in their hands, blinking at the cuts of meat around them like a pair of truant schoolboys at the zoo. They’re trying to understand their father, she thought. Trying to understand what brought him here. It was clear to her then that they knew everything, and to her surprise the fact of it relaxed her. She waited until they’d sat down to eat before pouring a glass of beer for each of them, then a snifter of elderberry schnapps for herself, and asking them to what she owed the pleasure.

Again it was Kaspar who spoke. “Fräulein Svoboda,” he mumbled, then immediately turned a ghastly shade of purple. “Frau Svoboda,” he corrected himself, staring fixedly at a button of her blouse.

“Yes?”

“You were a bonne amie of our departed father?”

It was less a question, really, than a statement of the case. Marta saw no reason to deny it.

“All right,” said Kaspar, visibly relieved. “Very good.” He nodded and stuffed his mouth with bread and sulze. Marta sipped from her snifter and smiled at him comfortably, unafraid now. At one point she turned her smile on Waldemar, who’d touched neither his beer nor his food, but he shut his eyes until she looked away. He takes after his mother, she said to herself. I wonder how Resa is coping.

“Frau Svoboda,” Kaspar repeated, apparently on solid ground again, “what did you and my father talk about, when he paid you—well, when he paid you his calls?”

Marta replied that they’d talked about all and sundry, or—as she put it in her journal—“everything and nothing much at all.”

“I see,” said Kaspar, looking sideways at his brother. “Frau Svoboda,” he said a third time, gripping his beer stein like a bannister.

“Yes, Herr Toula? What is it?”

“Frau Svoboda—”

“Did he talk about his work?” Waldemar blurted out. It was the first time he’d spoken. “Did he mention the Lost Time Accidents to you?”

Marta looked back and forth between their sweet, impatient faces. “He was a great one for chitchat, your poor father was. I can’t say for certain. I lost track of him now and again.”

“I told you,” Waldemar murmured, with a bitterness that took Marta aback. “I told you so.” But Kaspar ignored him.

“Frau Svoboda—was my father in a state of excitement? The last time that he called on you, I mean.”

Marta sat back heavily and clucked, and the boy blushed even more violently than before. “I beg your pardon,” he stammered. “What I’d intended—”

“What my brother means to ask is this,” Waldemar cut in. “Was Herr Toula agitated about something in particular? Had anything of special interest happened on that day?”

Marta allowed that it had.

“Well, what was it?” said Waldemar. “Why the devil won’t you answer plainly?”

Kaspar silenced his brother with a look, then addressed his father’s mistress in a clear, unhurried voice that made him seem much older than he was.

“When our father was undressed at the hospital, Frau Svoboda, a scrap of paper was found in his pocket—a message of sorts, on which your name appears. Would you care to inspect it?”

She replied that she would, and a sheet of blue octavo paper, folded neatly in four, was spread before her on the grease-stained counter.

MARTA DARLING! DARE I DALLY? BEARS BOORS &BOHEMIANS BEDEVIL THESE LATERAL LABORS.LUCKILY, AN “ANSWER” SHALL ARISE. TIME CAN BEMEASURED ONLY IN ITS PASSING. BY *CHANCE* &*FATE* & *PROVIDENCE* EDEN’S ENEMIES EXCHEQUER &EXPIRE.

AS THE SOUL GROWS TOWARD ETERNAL LIFE, ITREMEMBERS LESS & LESS. CHRONOLOGY CRUSHESCHRISTIANS. A MISTRESS—PRAISE C*F*P!—ISMELLIFLUOUS. FOOLS FROM FUTURE’S FETIDFIEFDOMS FOLLOW FREELY IN MY FOOTSTEPS.BACKWARDS TIME IS IMPOSSIBLE, FORWARDS TIME ISABSURD. TRUTH TOLD TACTLESSLY TAKES COURAGE,LITTLE DUMPLING. TRUTH TOLD CUNNINGLY TAKESFENCHELWURST & TEA.

THE PULPIT FOR PREACHERS IN PAMĚT’ CATHEDRAL.DARLING MARTA! DO YOU FOLLOW ME? THEN SPIN MECOUNTERCLOCKWISE. PLACE YOURSELF PAST EVERYPRIMITIVE PROSCRIPTION. SILENCE, SYCOPHANTS! &LISTEN TO ME CLOSELY. JAN SKÜS IS THE NAME OF AFRIEND I ONCE MET, & SKÜS JAN IS A FRIEND I’LL MEETTWICE. SPACE & TIME AFFECT ALL, ARE AFFECTEDBY ALL. EACH FOOL CARRIES HIS OWN HOURGLASSINSIDE HIM.

TODAY IT HAS HAPPENED. TWELVE JUNE NINETEENHUNDRED & THREE ANNO DOMINI. TAKE THISLETTER—PRECIOUS DUMPLING!—& EXHIBIT NOMERCY. I’LL BE BACK FOR IT SOON. TODAY IT HASHAPPENED. TODAY IT HAS HAPPENED. THE LOST TIMEACCIDENTS. THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS. THE LOSTTIME ACCIDENTS. HAVE MERCY ON US ALL.

OTTOKAR GOTTFRIEDENS TOULA,TOULA & SONS SALUTARY GHERKINS, S.M.ZNOJMO, MORAVIA.

“Note the number in the bottom left-hand corner,” said Kaspar. “Page number four, do you see? It follows that there must also exist—or have existed—additional pages, numbered one through three.”

Knowing Ottokar—having known him, Marta reminded herself—she didn’t necessarily think the rules of logic could be relied on; but she didn’t see much point in disagreeing.

“We also have reason to believe—from certain statements of our father’s, in the days before his passing—that one of those missing pages contains an algebraic proof. It is this proof—not any personal or sentimental information—that is of interest to my brother and myself.”

Marta smiled and acknowledged that such a proof, if it existed, would indeed be of interest.

Waldemar, who’d been so sullen and withdrawn, did something now that flabbergasted her: he sat stiffly forward, like a suitor on the verge of a proposal, and took her damp pink hand in both of his.

“Esteemed Frau Svoboda, kindly listen to me now. For the past seven years, as you may or may not know, our father has been engaged in a series of experimental inquiries into the physical nature of time.” He stared at her until she bobbed her head. “Until recently, my brother and myself had been allowed to assist him in his research; a few months ago, however, he forbade us to set foot in his laboratory. From the comments he made—the merest of hints, really—we know he was on the cusp of a major discovery: a new understanding, not just of the nature of time, but of the possibility of motion—free motion—within it.” Waldemar sucked in a breath. “Given what has happened, you can see what an unfortunate decision it was to exclude us from his work. On the morning of his death—or so this note would seem to imply—our father finally achieved the breakthrough he’d been seeking.” He glared into her eyes as he said this, neither wavering nor blinking, like a mesmerist or a vampire or a prophet. “Can you appreciate what this means, Frau Svoboda? Most people couldn’t—not for the life of them. But I have no doubt whatsoever that you can.”

Marta glanced away from him then, but only for an instant. “Why did he forbid you from entering his laboratory?”

“He wanted us to concentrate on our schoolwork,” Kaspar said, reddening. “Over the last few years, our marks—”

“He’d become suspicious of everyone,” Waldemar interrupted. “He spent all his time in that damned cave of his. Our poor mother—”

“What we came here to ask you, Frau Svoboda, is this: Might you have those three pages? Might they be in this house?”

Looking from one boy to the other, basking in the glow of their combined attention, Marta wanted nothing so much as to provide them with the purpose they so craved. She came close to inventing some clue, fabricating some relic, if only to keep them sitting at her counter. But the boys were too clever to be taken in by any trick of hers. The younger one, especially, seemed to dissect her with those chalky eyes of his, as if she were no more than a sack of fat and gristle. She permitted herself to think about Ottokar for a moment, and about what he’d told her of his conflict with time, a struggle he’d often predicted would end in his death. If he’d shut his boys out, as they claimed, then he must have had cause. For this reason—and for other, less defensible ones—she let her head hang and said nothing.

There was, in fact, something she wasn’t telling the boys, something that would have spared them and their future wives and children years of grief; but Marta had no gift of precognition. Their innocence is what makes them beautiful, she said to herself. Let them hold on to their innocence awhile.

“I’m sorry, boys,” she said at last. “There’s nothing I can give you.”

Kaspar was already on his feet, murmuring apologies for having imposed; but Waldemar stayed as he was. Those eyes of his, disconcerting at the best of times, now slid from feature to feature of her wide and cheerful face as though searching for a way to pry it open. The shop had never felt so hideously still.

“You’re lying, Frau Svoboda,” Waldemar said slowly. “You’re lying to us, you sausage-chewing sow.”

Even Kaspar seemed startled by the venom in his brother’s voice: he stepped hurriedly to the counter and pulled him up out of his chair. Waldemar put up no resistance, letting his older brother trundle him backward, his eyes resting on her like chips of gray slate. Marta stayed as she was. She felt incapable of movement. Nothing Waldemar did later, she writes in her journal, came as a surprise to her after that visit. Four decades on, when the long war had ended and the camps had been emptied and word of the Time-keeper’s experiments began to trickle back to Námestí Svobody, Marta would be the only one in town who wasn’t shocked. She’d known ever since that visit, she declared to whoever would listen. She’d seen the future in the blankness of those eyes.

“I understand you, Frau Svoboda,” Waldemar said. “I understand how you think. But that isn’t the same as forgiveness.”

“Don’t listen to him, please,” Kaspar stammered, hauling his brother out into the street. “I have no idea what he’s jabbering about.”

Marta knew quite well, but she said nothing.