The Lost Time Accidents (15 page)

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: