Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 18

IX

THE GREAT WAR—or the World War, or the War to End All Wars, as many otherwise perfectly reasonable people insisted on calling it—was a memory, and a dim one at that, before Kaspar heard his brother’s name again. It’s perhaps the greatest evidence of Sonja’s love for her husband that she kept him in ignorance for so many years, shielding him from the rumors that circulated from time to time regarding Waldemar; but her vigilance, extraordinary as it was, could reach only so far.

Kaspar was buying tea—Ostfriesen BOP, Sonja’s favorite—at a shop owned and run by his father-in-law’s cousin when a little gentleman appeared at his elbow, clutching his long snow-white beard like a fairy-tale gnome, and beamed up at him as though they were old friends. They weren’t old friends, as it happened, and the Brothers Grimm–ish charm of the encounter was complicated by the fact that the gentleman was bleeding from the nose. The situation gave off altogether too much actuality for my grandfather’s liking; he overcame his reluctance, however, and inquired of the gnome, in his most civil tone of voice, whether he might somehow be of service.

“You don’t know me, of course,” the gnome replied, dabbing at his nose with the tip of his wondrous beard.

“I’d be happy to know you, I’m sure. My name is Kaspar Toula.”

“Ach! I know who you are, Professor.”

“Then you have me at a disadvantage, Herr—”

“Eichberg, Professor. Moses Eichberg.” The man smiled again, then drew the torn sleeve of his coat across his mouth. “Your wife was one of my students, at the Volksschule.” He nodded amiably. “I taught Sonja her sums.”

“Of course!” said Kaspar, feeling the color rise to his cheeks. “I remember you well, now that I’ve had a moment. Sonja always speaks in the warmest possible—”

“Pardon my interrupting, Professor, but I’m wondering whether you can do anything about this.” Mildly, almost bashfully, Eichberg indicated his nose.

My grandfather gaped down at the man, utterly at a loss. He had the sensation that reality was about to engulf him—to suck him greedily into its vortex—and it took all his self-control to keep from bolting. “I see you’ve had an accident—”

“An accident?” Eichberg gave a guffaw. “Yes, Professor! You’re quite right. An accident of history, perhaps. An accident of the times in which we live.”

“Are you in need of a doctor?”

“A doctor?” Eichberg repeated, as though the thought had never crossed his mind.

“Come now, Herr Eichberg,” Kaspar said, beginning to lose patience. “I live just around the corner, as you may know, and I’m late getting home to my wife. You may accompany me, if you wish, and Sonja—or perhaps Professor Silbermann, her father—”

“Neither of them could be of help to me,” Eichberg said, giving his peculiar laugh again. “It was your wife who directed me here to this shop.” He glanced down at his coat. “I’d come to see you specifically, you understand.”

“Me specifically? But I’m not a physician. Are you sure—”

“It’s the UGF, you see,” Eichberg said gently, as if Kaspar’s confusion had moved him to pity. “They did this to me. I was leaving the school—”

“The UGF?” My grandfather thought hard for a moment. “Do you mean the United Germanic Front?”

Eichberg drew himself up proudly. “I much prefer to leave that name unspoken.”

“I can understand that, Herr Eichberg, and I sympathize,” said Kaspar, looking around him uneasily. The clientele of his cousin-in-law’s shop was comprised almost exclusively of Ashkenazim, and the customary cacophony of gossip and complaint had ceased completely. Even Moishe himself—who generally abused his customers in a droning nasal monotone from the instant he opened for business—now stood with his mouth hanging open, blinking at his in-law in dismay.

“I can certainly understand your position, Herr Eichberg,” Kaspar said again, doing his best to strike a note of civic decency. “Furthermore, I can appreciate why I—as a gentile of a certain standing, and the husband of a favorite former student—might come to mind as a go-between in this very unfortunate matter.” (Here Eichberg made to interrupt, but my grandfather silenced him with an admonitory finger.) “I fear, however, that the United Germanic Front is likely to view me as something of a traitor to its cause. Given my familial connections—of which you must be aware, having come, as you say, from my very own house—”

“Your familial connections?” said Eichberg, grinning queerly at the other customers. To Kaspar’s disbelief and horror, a number of them returned his grin, and one—a matron with bushy gray eyebrows—actually let out a snort. “It’s precisely because of those connections, Professor Toula, that I stand before you.”

Kaspar felt himself recoil slightly, overcome by a feeling of guilt and foreboding that he could in no way account for. “What on earth are you alluding to?”

“Are you not,” Eichberg went on, no longer smiling, “the brother of Waldemar von Toula?”

∞

After the conversation with Eichberg—which lasted nearly an hour—Kaspar staggered home to Sonja like a man who’d been hit by a Daimler. His wife was waiting on the parlor divan, a piping pot of Ostfriesen BOP beside her, as though she’d foreseen his arrival down to the smallest detail: his light-headedness, his thirst, and his desperate desire for some scrap of evidence, however piddling, that the life he’d so painstakingly contrived was stable enough to withstand this latest shock. Sonja was at the zenith of what Kaspar would later refer to as her “Athena phase,” a period during which nothing could disturb her equanimity. He flopped down beside her as she dispensed the cream, then the tea, then a single lump of nut-brown sugar each.

“What is it, Kasparchen? What has Waldemar done?”

For some reason her question annoyed him. “Didn’t Eichberg tell you? You’re the one who told him where to find me.”

Sonja looked at him then—looked him straight in the eye—and he felt an emotion so foreign to him that it was only much later, with the benefit of hindsight, that he was able to call it by its proper name. At the time it felt less like shame than nausea.

“Waldemar’s mixed up with the United Germanic Front,” he heard himself reply. “He’s been involved with them for quite some time, apparently.” He then found himself describing the party’s platform to his wife, though she knew it better than he did himself: the unification of all German-speaking peoples, the restoration of the monarchy, the severing of ties to Rome and the Catholic Church, and the purging of “Israelite influence” from the government and the economy and the culture as a whole. “God only knows what led them to poor Moses Eichberg, of all people. He thinks it may have been someone at his school—a student with a grudge, or possibly even a colleague.” He squinted bleakly down into his teacup. “At any rate, word somehow reached those drooling fanatics that Eichberg had said we should all count our blessings that the empire had been consigned to the ash heap of history, or some such foolishness. They were waiting for him this afternoon—a whole gang of them, more than a dozen—outside the school. They took him by the heels and dragged him, face-first, the length of Sechskrüglgasse. He asked where they were taking him and they answered ‘to keep an appointment.’ When they let him go he was in front of Trattner’s coffeehouse—the one with the leaded glass window, do you remember?”

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 in 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.”