The Lost Time Accidents (25 page)

Buffalo Bill, in other words, was nothing like the character Sonja had dreamed up for him, for which my grandfather was deeply grateful. He was grateful for practically everything, in fact, over the course of that first stunned, defenseless year. In haughtier days, Mrs. Haven, he might have found much to disapprove of in the life he’d fallen into; but Kaspar was a new man now, with a social security number and a name that still rang foreign to his ears, and disapproval was an Old World luxury. A life of some sort was conceivable in this bullish border town; even—with considerably less struggle than he’d feared—a measure of contentment. There was nothing else that he could think to wish for.

*   *   *

Thanks to the vast, choppy lake at its doorstep (and the canal extending like a 363-mile drainpipe out the back), Buffalo was one of the richest cities in the United States, Chicago’s closest rival as the Paris of the Plains. Honeymoons were spent there; songs were written extolling its glamour; a belt of steel plants on the city’s south side (if the wind was right) made for hyperbolic, lilac-tinted sunsets. The Great Depression’s scars were freshly healed—or freshly powdered over, better said—and the attitude of the citizenry was one of fierce, bulldoggish confidence. A greater contrast to Vienna was hard to imagine.
Sonja was right about that much
, Kaspar thought,
if nothing else
.

As the months went by, my grandfather’s mourning took on a peculiar cast—one that would have been inconceivable before the concept of spacetime was proposed. If time was (as science now insisted) best understood as a fourth dimension, then it was erroneous to think of past events as having ceased to be. The past, Kaspar reasoned, is most accurately conceived of as a continent we’ve emigrated from, or better still as a kind of archipelago: a series of nearly contiguous islands, self-contained and autonomous, that we’re constantly in the process of forsaking, simply by moving through time. Like all things past, his wife existed in a zone of the continuum that was inaccessible to him now. This by no means meant that she no longer
was
.

On occasion—after a nightcap or two, or on a day when the twins had been especially good—this way of thinking actually brought him comfort.

He had a great deal to live for, he reminded himself. He could have stayed in Vienna if he’d wanted to die, and saved himself and his girls (not to mention poor Wilhelm) a great deal of trouble. “But they couldn’t snuff
us
, those goddamn death fetishists,” he’d growl at my father years later, his tongue primed by sweet British sherry. “We Tollivers are too inquisitive to die.”

Buffalo Bill was a “confirmed bachelor”—with all the quirks and predilections that implied in that era—but he insisted on taking his cousin-in-law, on the second and fourth Friday of each month, to Feinberg’s Star Burlesque Revue downtown. Wilhelm showed less interest in the gambolings onstage than if he’d been at a lecture on personal hygiene, but there was no doubt that the place excited him. He seemed intoxicated by the spotlights and the wine-dark velvet seats, by the cackling and the coarse talk of the crowd, and he barely breathed until the houselights came back up. My grandfather (who enjoyed the show for less poetic reasons) wondered what it was that thrilled his cousin-in-law so deeply, but he resisted the urge to inquire. An important clue, however, was provided in the person of the balcony usher, a Polish kid with thick blond curls and eyes the depthless green of Nordsee ice. There always seemed to be some confusion about their seats when they sat in the balcony, and the usher’s help was invariably required. “I’d give anything on earth to look like that,” Wilhelm murmured one evening, watching the boy make his way nimbly back to the aisle.
“Anything.”
Kaspar struggled to come up with a suitable answer, then quickly realized that none was necessary. His cousin-in-law had been talking to himself.

Feinberg’s had recently begun showing a newsreel on a gilt-edged canvas screen at intermission, both to keep up with the motion-picture houses on Main Street and to give the girls a chance to cool their heels; and it was there, as per C*F*P’s mandate, that the past made clear to Kaspar that it would not be denied. After an animated short starring a beaver and a backward-running clock (“There’s a Hebrew clock like that in Josefstadt—runs counterclockwise. Big deal,” Wilhelm barked into his ear), and a mercifully brief documentary about Veronica Lake’s “dude ranch” in Malibu, the canvas went grainy and dark. A moment later it brightened again, something dour and Wagnerian began droning over the speakers, and a series of smudges slid diagonally across the screen from left to right.

The crowd starting booing, the focus was futzed with, and the smudges resolved into tanks. The booing got louder. The footage, apparently, came from the old town of Prague—from Josefstadt itself, in fact. The Czechs had given the Nazis more trouble than the Austrians had, but not enough to make the slightest difference. Kaspar found himself composing a list, as the tanks rumbled past, of all the sovereign nations between Prague and Buffalo. It was a sizable list, even without taking the ocean into account; but it wasn’t half as long as he’d have liked. He wondered what was happening in Znojmo.

Wilhelm, who’d been watching Kaspar closely, flung an arm around his neck. “Screw it,” he said. “You’re with family, cousin.
Bei familie.
Those cocksuckers can’t touch us over here.”

Less than six months later, the Patent Clerk would draft his infamous letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him of the likelihood of nuclear fission research in the Third Reich, and urging the development of the atomic bomb.

XIV

I’VE CULLED THE NEXT
installment of Waldemar von Toula’s saga partly from family lore and partly from my great-uncle’s “research notes,” but I could just as well have used a college textbook. The swastika-slathered paperback I mentioned in my first entry—
The Order of the Death’s Head; The Story of Hitler’s SS
, by Heinz Höhne (“TWO LETTERS—LIKE THE
HISS
OF A SNAKE ABOUT TO STRIKE!”)—sits within easy reach, but I’m not in any rush to pick it up. I use the word
saga
in acknowledgment of the historic scale of Waldemar’s duration, and of the nightmarish enigma of his fate; but it was anything, Mrs. Haven, but heroic.

The irony in the fact that Waldemar, who’d dreamed so fervidly of immortalizing his father’s name in the annals of physical science, should live to see himself immortalized instead, and for the opposite reason—the perversion of his father’s work, and of scientific ethics—was lost on no one in my family, least of all on Waldemar himself. The Black Timekeeper of Czas won a place in posterity considerably more secure than his nephew’s, fifty-seven published novels notwithstanding, or his nieces’, regardless of their tabloid-perfect end; but now I’ve gone achronological again. In spite of the fact that my great-grandfather will spin in his grave like a centrifuge, I’m going to pretend—out of respect for convention—that time moves forward in a smooth, unbroken line. I’m writing this for my sake, Mrs. Haven, not for his.

*   *   *

The party line on the “Jewish Question” took its final form in the winter of 1942, in a charmless stucco villa on the Wannsee; but it wasn’t until a year later that my great-uncle was summoned to Berlin from Vienna, by overnight train, for an afternoon appointment with the future. A youth-education pamphlet he’d written and published at his own expense (“The Protocols of Darwin: A Young Teuton’s Primer on Natural and Unnatural Selection”) had made the circuit of the party apparatus, eventually landing on the skull-shaped walnut desktop of Reichsführer Himmler himself. Like some schizophrenic shaman in an Amazonian village, treasured as a prophet precisely for his inability to make rational sense of the world, Waldemar had found a place—by accident, appropriately enough—among the party’s guild of racial mystics.

The meeting in Berlin was concise but productive. Waldemar was led without pomp into a high, sunny room where a porridge-faced man in a uniform crackling with starch, who looked deceptively like the Reichsführer-SS, informed him he was being sent to Poland. A facility had been built along the Belarussian border—not much more than a ditch and some concertina wire at present, the man said apologetically—to process deportees; mostly
Juden
, of course, but also Bolsheviks, rapists, peeping toms, and a trainload of idiots from an asylum in suburban Düsseldorf. He, Standartenführer Waldemar von Toula, had been selected for the post of facility director, on account of his invaluable work in Vienna and his well-known interest in the Great Genetic Struggle. (Mention was made of my great-uncle’s pamphlet at this juncture, but it was unclear whether the Himmler look-alike had read it.) An eastbound express was departing Berlin Ostbahnhof at six that same evening, and Standartenführer von Toula was to be on it, in a private, heated car. Was this acceptable to the Standartenführer?

Waldemar nodded soberly, as he’d seen diplomats and statesmen do in films.

Once the Standartenführer assumed his post, it was emphasized, responsibility for the detainees in his custody would be his alone. The facility, recently given the name of Äschenwald but still known locally as Czas, was not (unlike, for example, Theresienstadt or Buchenwald) intended as a
way station
, but as a
terminus.
This distinction was repeated twice. Was the Standartenführer aware of the policy of the Führer, and of the party as an organ of his will, and of the will of the Great Germanic Race, with regard to the Ultimate Answer to the Racial Dilemma?

The Standartenführer submitted, humbly, that he was.

The little man said nothing for a moment. His eyes were pinkish, vestigial, the eyes of a cave-dwelling prawn. The resemblance to the Reichsführer-SS was nearly perfect. His uniform rasped and crackled as he breathed.

“Very good,” he said finally. “I have no doubt, Facility Director von Toula, that you shall do your work well. Your Slavic blood may actually be to your advantage in this case.” He took off his wire-rimmed spectacles and began to polish them with a greasy scrap of silk. “Do you have any questions?”

My great-uncle reflected a moment, biting his lip, then saluted and turned on his heels. He had no questions at all, as it happened: not one. He knew exactly what he had to do.

*   *   *

Few records of the Äschenwald camp have survived: the Waffen-SS set fire to the compound in the war’s final hours, and the Red Army leveled what little remained. The Black Timekeeper might have been blessedly lost to history if not for a forest-green ledger, wrapped first in oilskin, then in fireproof asbestos cloth, found in the cast-iron reservoir of the latrines.

Much has been made of this text, and of what it might mean. Proof as it is of the crimes perpetrated at Czas, the care that was taken to preserve the ledger is generally interpreted as evidence that someone—some never-identified assistant to the facility director, perhaps; someone with access to the most restricted precincts of the camp—wanted the Timekeeper’s crimes to come to light, and must therefore have felt some stirrings of remorse, however primitive. I’d very much like to believe that, Mrs. Haven, but my guess is that Waldemar hid the ledger himself, confident that it would be exhumed and studied. My great-uncle feared nothing, ultimately, as much as the indifference of posterity. He was still a man of science, after all.

*   *   *

Over the years since he’d confessed his ideas to his brother in the garret of the Brown Widow’s villa, the seed of Waldemar’s theory of rotary time—the notion that chronology is an illusion, if not a deliberate lie; that the steady, one-way current we seem to be suspended in is actually a jumble of spherical “chronocosms” that can be moved through in any direction, if some great force manages to knock one’s consciousness out of its preconditioned circuit—had grown progressively more elaborate, attaching itself to random scraps of knowledge in the course of its creator’s wanderings, like a peach pit rolled across a dirty floor. The eugenic theories of Sir Francis Galton were among these bits of litter, as were
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and, of course,
Mein Kampf
; but the single largest and most ponderous addition was the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’s great Gallic rival, the chevalier Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Lamarck, a pioneer in the fields of zoology and genetics, is now best remembered—if he’s remembered at all—for his concept of “soft inheritance,” which was famously exploited (and rapidly eclipsed) by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Lamarck believed that the traits an animal acquires in the course of its life can be transmitted to the next generation, the most notorious example being the neck of the giraffe. His hypothesis—that giraffes strain their necks to reach leaves, stretching them in the process, and that each generation is therefore born with slightly longer necks than the one preceding—sounds like something out of Kipling’s
Just So Stories
now, and science instructors the world over (my own eighth grade biology teacher, Leon J. Forehand, included) know that the chevalier’s theory can always be relied on for a chuckle. My great-uncle, however, saw nothing funny about Lamarck’s ideas at all—and Äschenwald-Czas itself stands as the proof.

Here are the final four entries in Waldemar’s log, as reproduced in Höhne’s ghoulish survey:

12 MARCH 1943, 07:57:07—

Having been dogged & delayed by a legion of Trifles I now finally set forth on the Course proposed in my entry of 23 February. This gap of 19 days (automatically, I find myself doing the arithmetic: 456 wasted hours!) has reduced me to a condition of nervous exhaustion. Such is the vicious Wheel of Circumstance, the
cercle diabolique
the Chevalier describes in his monograph “Trials of the Researcher,” adding that those of a visionary bent, in particular, are liable to be plagued by
les intrusions banales
.