Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 13

IV

KASPAR AND SONJA’S LOVE flowered lushly, Mrs. Haven, as secret liaisons will—but Waldemar had secrets of his own.

The cause of his mysterious sleeping habits and absences from school was, in fact, a middle-aged widow with a rose-colored villa, just as the departmental wags had whispered; but their mutual passion took a form that would have surprised even the most imaginative of gossips. The widow Bemmelmans—Lucrezia, to her intimates—was a fearsome opponent of vice in all its irruptions, from child prostitution to cardsharping to the intemperate consumption of coffee. In his role as her favorite, Kaspar’s brother had taken to spending his evenings at the widow’s side, assisting her in composing a staggering number of articles, letters, and feuilletons, of which the following text (concerning the “waltz king” of Vienna, Johann Strauss) is as good an example as any:

A dangerous power has been put into the hands of this dark man. African and hot-blooded, rabid with life, he exorcises the devil from our bodies; his own limbs no longer belong to him when the thunderstorm of the waltz is let loose. His fiddle-bow dances in his arms, and the tempo animates his feet; bacchantically the young couples waltz—lust in its purest form let loose. No God inhibits them.

Whether lust of any kind—other than a kind of righteous bloodlust—was let loose in their late-night drafting sessions, it was clear enough to Kaspar that the widow Bemmelmans (or the “Brown Widow,” as she would come to be known) had a hold over Waldemar that ran deeper than any shared schoolmarmishness. The precise nature of this hold continued to elude my grandfather, try as he might to divine it; but he was certain that the two of them had some skeleton in the cupboard, and that it was the reason for his brother’s furtiveness. He made a point of telling Waldemar about his affair with Sonja Silbermann in rapturous detail, in the hope of bridging the widening gulf between them, but his brother barely seemed to hear. Kaspar forced himself to take an interest in the widow’s pet crusades, and even went so far as to attend one of her gatherings; this, however, proved an even worse miscalculation. He made the fatal blunder, Mrs. Haven, of bringing his new bonne amie along.

Their romance was barely a month old when Kaspar and Sonja paid their call on the widow Bemmelmans, but already my grandfather’s fitted shirts and fawn-colored suits had been exchanged for a brown linen jacket that looked perpetually slept in, and blue canvas trousers—as shapeless as the dresses back in Znojmo—that he’d bought from a bricklayer’s apprentice. His nervousness at meeting his brother’s benefactress was somewhat offset by Sonja’s surprising decision to wear a delightful saffron sun-dress, but his misgivings returned at the sight of the widow’s footman, a badger-faced giant with a waxed blond mustache, who wore the uniform of a Hungarian hussar.

The widow received them in a ballroom on the villa’s second floor. Waldemar was there, as were half a dozen other young men, arranged about the room in self-consciously romantic poses, like actors in some grim tableau vivant. The widow was the only person seated, on a leopard-skin couch that appeared to take up a third of the room. A pair of sabers lay crossed on the waxed floor before her; it was unclear, at least to Kaspar, whether their function was decorative or sporting. He found himself picturing the widow Bemmelmans, surrounded by her eager coterie, officiating at round-robin tournaments, perhaps even at duels.

“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 under-things 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 Stadt-park 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 whispered, 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.