Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 17

VIII

THE NEXT TWENTY-ODD YEARS, during which the world went loudly and pompously down the pissoir, were the happiest of Kaspar Toula’s life.

His long-departed father, in the course of his inevitable dinnertime rants—on the evils of the automobile, for example, or the cleansing properties of cellulose—had been fond of quoting a Saxon manic-depressive named Friedrich Nietzsche: “All history is the experimental refutation of the so-called moral order of things.” And the brash and pockmarked twentieth century, in all the brutal enthusiasm of its adolescence, seemed to be doing its frenzied best to prove him right.

My grandfather barely had time to finish his studies, make his bid for Sonja’s hand in marriage, and receive his Schwiegervater’s halfhearted blessing before the empire that both his father and his father-in-law so myopically adored began to come apart like sodden paper. The Czechs, the Magyars, the Slovaks, the Serbs and the Croats—all of whom, admittedly, had exhibited signs of petulance before—now seemed more interested in pitching fits in parliament than in basking in their emperor’s esteem. The bacillus of nationalism had infested all but the remotest crannies of the empire by the time the Kaiser’s cousin had his celebrated rendezvous with a Serbian anarchist’s bullet; it had simply been a question of which member of the imperial family was going to have their candle guttered first. (In certain back rooms and furnished cellars of the capital, money had in fact been wagered on this very question.) But no one—not the bookies, not the anarchists, and least of all the imperial family itself—foresaw the conflagration that would follow.

Sonja Toula, née Silbermann, was a fervent backer of the Serbian cause from the start of the war, and stayed true to her colors even when her husband was sent to the front in a uniform that still smelled faintly of the corpse who’d worn it last. By that late date, a fair portion of the civilized world had muddied its spats, and it was clear to every half-wit that the “six weeks’ war” the Kaiser had promised was a fairy story, albeit one that he himself believed. Kaspar served that sad old fool without complaint, and witnessed his due share of horrors, some of which he committed himself. He lost two fingers in the war, and the top of an ear, but he rarely regretted his injuries: they were his only proof that the war, and the empire he’d fought for, had been more than some preadolescent dream. And there were moments, Mrs. Haven, on his very worst days, when not even his missing fingers could convince him.

The citation for bravery he’d won—a weightless nub of nickel-plated tin, for some obscure reason in the shape of a winged horse—was mothballed away and forgotten as soon as the fighting was over. Years later, when the family was hurriedly throwing everything it could into a clutch of pasteboard steamer trunks, the medal would find its way into the hands of his younger daughter, who brought it to him for an explanation. Gentian never forgot her father’s answer. “It’s a pegasus, Schätzchen—an imaginary animal. Papa got it as a present, from a very old man, for defending an imaginary kingdom.”

∞

There were quite a few reasons for Kaspar’s happiness during his twenties and thirties, from his hard-won advancement at the university to the deepening of his understanding of the physical world; but the most obvious, even to Kaspar himself, was the indecorous and overwrought passion he continued to feel for his wife. Practically from birth—or so it seemed to him—he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was doomed to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible. Kaspar had Sonja, after all, and the well-appointed home they’d made together. It seemed lunacy to ask for more than that.

Sonja had grown more deliberate as she came into the fullness of her years, more austere of temperament, more assured of her intelligence and grace. Her political convictions had only deepened as she aged; her smock, however, lay neatly put away in the same cabinet that housed her husband’s medal. Socialists and anarchists and communists—“your ism-ists,” as Kaspar (more or less affectionately) called them—came and went as if the apartment were a well-appointed flophouse, as they’d done since the end of the war; but now they looked and behaved less like revolutionaries than like librarians, or attorneys-at-law, or even patent clerks. And they tipped their hats politely to him as they came and went.

Kaspar had no doubt that half his wife’s protégés loved her desperately, but the fact didn’t bother him—at least not unduly—because he so completely shared their point of view. Sonja’s hold over him had only intensified since their marriage, and it often submerged him so profoundly in its inky, honeyed depths that he found it slightly difficult to breathe. He was as proud of his submission as his countrymen were—or affected to be—of the wounds they’d received in the war.

Waldemar’s existence during these years of free fall, by contrast, is as shrouded and ambiguous as my grandfather’s is faceted and bright. Rumors would reach Sonja from time to time through her network of fellow travelers: inconclusive scraps of information, little better than hearsay, that she took care to keep from her husband. Waldemar had gone to Russia; Waldemar had taken holy orders; Waldemar had been seen late at night, dressed in a woman’s nightgown, shouting curses at the streetcars on the Ring. This was the time of the great housing crisis in the republic, when a host of city dwellers were reduced to living under bridges, or on barges, or in caves dug into railway embankments. In Budapest, thirty-five people were discovered nesting in the trees of Népliget Park, and word reached Sonja that Waldemar was among them. She had no idea which of these reports to believe, so she chose to believe all of them. She hated to be taken by surprise.

This much, at least, is certain: within three weeks of his midnight visit to the Silbermann household, two weeks of learning of the relativity theory, and four days of delivering his doomsday prophecy to his brother, Waldemar had been expelled from the university, been served a notice of eviction from the dragon-headed building, and had slipped away without confiding in a soul. Kaspar had asked no one what Waldemar had done to bring about these twin expulsions, though he himself was suddenly homeless, as well: he’d resigned himself to severing what few ancient ties still bound them. Each time he asked after his brother and was met with blank, suspicious stares, he permitted himself a small sigh of relief.

It was only as he was sorting through his brother’s meager handful of belongings, the night before their eviction was enforced, that Kaspar truly grasped that Waldemar was gone. His brother had left his modest library behind, and his spectacles, and his only decent suit of evening clothes. His handwritten copy of Ottokar’s notes, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found; and neither, when it occurred to Kaspar to check his own bedroom, was the copy he’d made for himself. He had forfeited the right to search for the answer to their departed father’s riddle, it appeared, at least in Waldemar’s opinion. And to his own profound astonishment, Mrs. Haven, Kaspar found himself agreeing with this verdict.

The Accidents had destroyed both his father and his brother, after all—men with far greater gifts than his own. How could he help but take that as a warning? As he attempted to bring order to Waldemar’s papers, Kaspar realized that he’d long since begun to wonder, in some sequestered annex of his mind, whether the problem of time in physics might not be akin to the problem the sun posed for the early astronomers: it was ever-present along the margins of sight, radiant and vast, but to stare at it too long meant certain blindness.

He remained his father’s son, however, and he’d barely had this idea before he carried it further. Those early astronomers had found a means of studying the sun indirectly, by fashioning reflecting telescopes. Might the same technique work for the study of time? Perhaps Waldemar’s undoing had lain less in his ideas, mad as they seemed, than in the straightforward way he’d approached them. Perhaps the solution was to advance more obliquely: to resist looking time in the eye, to avoid pondering the imponderable, and instead to watch its shadow on the wall. Perhaps the answer was as simple as a mirror.

But no sooner had Kaspar had this thought than he suppressed it. A tremor ran through his body, drawing him away from his brother’s desk, and he made no attempt to resist. By eight o’clock the next morning, the sum of Waldemar’s earthly possessions was sitting on the street in a battered gray trunk, and by evening it was gathering dust in a corner of Professor Silbermann’s cellar, where it would remain until Waldemar—in a black Daimler coupe, with two men whose attire matched the Daimler beautifully—came back from the dead to collect it.

Silbermann himself, who’d never exhibited much interest in Waldemar while he’d been one of his students, made an elaborate show of solicitude when Kaspar arrived with the trunk, going so far as to take him by the hand. “Madness is a hazard of our profession,” he said gravely. “Especially among our most gifted.” Misunderstanding Kaspar’s pained smile, he attempted a joke, one that rang rather too true for comfort: “You and I, my dear boy, may thank our stars that we run no such risk!”

∞

A quote from Kubler comes to mind when I consider my grandfather in the period that followed—the bland, complacent decades of his prime:

Why should actuality forever escape our grasp?

The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and the ash of that cosmic storm which we call the Present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.

Actuality did indeed prove elusive to Kaspar at the start of his twenties, as it tends to do for persons in a state of bliss. His bliss was not entirely free of shadow, however. Waldemar had passed out of Kaspar’s world, and practically out of his awareness; but my grandfather would always view his brother’s disappearance as the fulcrum point between his youth and his adulthood. Time had advanced slowly until that apalling night, as it does for the young, whose days are spent in expectation of something they can never fully name. Now, with Waldemar gone, Kaspar seemed to fall headfirst into each day, in a kind of perpetually overwhelmed and dreamlike wonder. The years between his brother’s departure and his homecoming would eventually come to seem of no greater longevity, no more cumulative weight, than certain consecrated moments of his childhood: the day of the cicada, for example, whose every instant glittered in his recollection.

These were Kaspar’s most substantial years, and by far his most contented; but it seemed to him that they were passed in trivialities, in an infinite succession of agreeable, judicious actions (grading student essays, putting up wallpaper, watching his wife reading, listening with closed eyes from the couch as she talked politics with her ism-ists in the parlor) all of which, taken together, formed a portrait of Kaspar Toula in tiny colored dots, like a sketch by some self-satisfied impressionist. By his thirtieth birthday he felt subtly corrupt, as willingly opiated as Sonja’s precious proletariat, with nothing to blame but the remarkable ease of his love, and the security he’d worked for so unwaveringly.

On certain rare nights, when these intimations of decadence were at their most acute, he found himself leafing through the few notes on his father’s work that his brother had left behind. With each passing year, however, they seemed more naïve, more distant from what he’d come to understand as science. My grandfather had always been too practical—too orthodox—to subscribe to his brother’s mystical exegesis of Ottokar’s note: his opinion was that the note was gibberish, pure and simple. He’d abandoned research almost completely after special relativity, and had eked out a career for himself as a lecturer in “classical” physics, taking care to stop well short of Michelson and Morley. His father may have been a fallen idol to him—as a scientist and husband, certainly, and perhaps even as a father—but Kaspar was still, in those early years of the century, determined to place no other gods before him.

For the Patent Clerk, meanwhile, these were the decades of triumph. In 1913, just before the war began, he was brought to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, where, reverently sheltered from the devastion sweeping Europe, he did some of his most radical and elegant work. A year into the war, he completed his general theory of relativity, which posits that neither time nor space are constant. In 1919, with the war barely over and both the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in ruins, a series of British observations during a solar eclipse confirmed relativity’s prediction that the gravitational pull of the sun would cause light rays to bend, silencing the last remaining skeptics—aside from those who resisted the theory simply because its author was a Jew, or because he was a German, or because he was incomparably more gifted than they were.

An acquaintance of Sonja’s from her Café Jandek days published a poem—bluntly entitled “Vienna”—that caused quite a stir in the city:

Vienna, in ruins, is weeping.

Vienna, you ancient, coldhearted whore . . .

A scrofulous panderer to this world . . .

Now famished, you whimper,

So heavily does your wickedness weigh:

An empire frittered away.

Sonja read the poem aloud in bed one evening, her regal face suffused with high emotion; her husband remained unaffected. Many dear friends had died, it was true, but so had several people he’d despised. What use was there in rage and histrionics? The bullet that had so neatly clipped away the top of his left ear had gone on to bisect the brain of a man named Metterling, whose fifteen-year-old fiancée had thrown herself into the Danube on hearing the news. This chain of events troubled Kaspar occasionally, especially when he’d been drinking; but most of the time it failed to hold his interest. On his evenings at home—and they were all spent at home now, unless Sonja had a meeting or a rally to attend—he found it easy to convince himself that the city outside his door was an illusion.

In that dim, spectral city, anti-Semitism seemed suddenly pandemic, more rabid than it had been in centuries, which struck him as the finest joke of all. The posturers of the United Germanic Front, with their foam-flecked lips, their fists full of pamphlets, and their watch chains with little silver pendants (like upside-down crucifixes, if you didn’t look too closely) symbolizing a hanged Jew, put my grandfather in mind of children playing preacher when he heard their diatribes; and it took a concerted effort not to hear them lately, since they felt no need to keep their voices down. Just a few steps from the duck pond in the Stadtpark where he’d pledged his love to Sonja, the battered body of a boy from the neighborhood shul was discovered, his gullet stuffed with pages torn out of a Torah; when the blame was placed—after the most cursory of inquiries—on “unidentified Slavic vagrants,” not a soul in that great Hauptstadt was surprised.

A few months later, when Kaspar read, in an editorial in a respected paper, a prominent critic’s suicide described as “the only reasonable response to the dilemma of his Jewish nature,” he laughed, as he would have done at any piece of vaudeville. His wife saw considerably less to laugh at; but he did his best to put her fears to rest. “This world is a loony bin, Schätzchen,” he told her. “Luckily for us, our front door happens to be one of its exits.” He knew that this motto of his made her uneasy—that it could be interpreted in two very different ways—but he found himself unwilling to forgo it. The truth, whether he’d have admitted it or not, was that he said it as a spell to ward off demons.

It would have been perfectly appropriate, given all of the above, if Kaspar had become one of those disillusioned fantasists who daydreamed of escape to the New World; but he labored under no such bold delusions. Although his wife was a devotee of Blake’s “America, a Prophecy,” occasionally reciting the lines

On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions

Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:

I see a serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love;

In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru—

Kaspar had little doubt that America, given half a chance, would eat them both alive. Blake might well have sung the praises of its eagles and its serpents, but what Blake had actually known about the New World, my grandfather suspected, could have fit into a thimbleful of gin. Hans Wittgenstein had run off to America to escape his father’s strictures, and Sonja’s own cousin Wilhelm, a recent émigré to New York State, was now known—for reasons obscure—as “Buffalo Bill” Knarschitz, and was reputed to be thriving; but Kaspar remained affably unmoved. “We’re Austrians, Schätzchen,” he said more than once, after his wife had gone on at length—as she often did, of late—about the U.S.A. as the new socialist frontier. “We’re simply Austrians now, no more and no less, and it won’t help to pretend we’re Cherokees. Besides which, my love, all your family’s here. What would the Silbermanns become without Vienna? What would Vienna become, for that matter, without the Silbermanns?”

Monday, 09:05 EST

Since the episode in the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, I’ve been trying to take stock of my situation as objectively and calmly as I can. What follows is my attempt to draw up an impartial reckoning, like a chartered public accountant, of the chances I’ve been given versus those I’ve been denied:

DEBIT	CREDIT
I’m marooned in a desolate bubble of extrachronological space, without company or apparent hope of rescue.	But I’m alive, and I seem to be in fairly decent shape, which contradicts every law of physics I can think of.
I appear to have been singled out, from all the rest of humanity, to sit at this table and brood.	But someone must have put me here, and provided me with these books and writing materials—ergo, someone wants me to complete my history. And that person may also have the means to set me free.
At times, the solitariness of my condition, and the sadness of constant remembering, comes close to driving me insane.	On the other hand, I’m not uncomfortable here—not anymore—and remembering certain events from my life is almost unbearably sweet.
I have nothing to eat, and nothing to drink but a half-empty bottle of Foster’s.	I’m not thirsty.
It’s still extremely hard for me to move, and all of my senses, except the sense of sight, are dulled almost to the point of uselessness.	My life, such as it was, was over long before I woke up here. How can it possibly matter where I am?

That’s as far as I’ve managed to get, Mrs. Haven. I feel less able than ever to reconcile myself to my condition, and I’ve resolved to continue my attempts to determine—both by contemplation and experiment—the nature of this no-man’s-land I’m stuck in. Like the Greek and Etruscan philosopher-detectives who were my great-grandfather’s heroes, creating whole cosmologies out of nothing but their own enthusiasm, the only tools I’ve got are pen and paper. And this body, of course—for whatever this body’s still worth.

I’m not entertaining these notions idly, Mrs. Haven. The question of whether or not time is passing for me, however slowly, has taken on new urgency since my visit to the bathroom. If time is passing—however sluggishly—then I’m still a part of the continuum, and can permit myself some faint hope of escape. If time isn’t passing, I’m probably dead.

In which case, Mrs. Haven, I wish you and the Husband all the best.