The Lost Time Accidents (57 page)

“A gherkin from the land of Znaim

Is mightier than the Hand of Time;

Its savory brine, at first so sour

Grows sweeter with each Passing Hour.”

I glanced at you when I was done, to see whether the spell was having any effect—but you looked lost to the world, Mrs. Haven, or at least lost to me. Some flywheel had shifted; some cog had been thrown. You didn’t seem to see the men in the trench coats, or perhaps you were making an elaborate show of not seeing them. Maybe that in itself was proof of some sort of conspiracy. But you’d never looked more beautiful to me.

“What are you thinking about, Mrs. Haven?”

Slowly—unwillingly, it seemed—your eyes met mine. “If you really want to know, Walter, I’m not feeling so great about myself.”

“He doesn’t need you. You told me that, remember? He’ll barely even notice that you’re gone.”

You smiled abstractedly and shrugged your shoulders. “I wasn’t thinking about him.”

“Is it me, then? Were you thinking about me?”

A blank moment passed. “Of course not,” you said. But I’d already gotten my answer.

“Listen to me, Mrs. Haven. I know you think I’m leading you on some kind of goose chase across Central Europe—maybe even that I’ve lost my mind—but I’ve got to get my family behind me. Can you understand that? I want the past to be
past
: to stop spinning in circles, to stop sucking me in, to let me make my own goddamn decisions. I’m in love with you, Mrs. Haven, and I want to start over.” I took in a breath. “For the first time that I can remember, I have a feeling that the future might be—”

“I don’t want to
talk
right now,” you said, pressing your hands to your face. “Not about your family, not about your goose chase, and most of all—for God’s sake!—not about the future.” You let your hands fall and turned to the window. “Could you leave me alone until dinner?”

I bobbed my head jerkily, digging my nails into the armrests of my seat. “Of course I can do that.”

“Thank you, Walter.”

It was cold in the car, cold enough to see your breath, and your woolen skirt crackled like a Tesla coil each time you rearranged your legs. You rearranged your legs often—for my benefit, perhaps, or for the benefit of the men across the aisle—and the counterclockwise spirals on your vintage patterned stockings emphasized your haunches in a way that made my forehead start to cramp. You steadfastly refused to meet my eye. The trees outside the window blurred and bowed.

“Gentlemens and ladies!” the intercom warbled. “We regret to inform you the restaurant car is now open.”

“At least they’re honest about it,” you said, getting up.

*   *   *

The restaurant car was populated by hollow-eyed businessmen and little old ladies who looked pickled in aspic and spleen. The men in trench coats were there, hunched together at the starboard center table; we seated ourselves hard to port. I tried to commit their features to memory—in the event of a future investigation by Interpol—while you squinted down at the greasy plastic menu as if you could make it appetizing by sheer force of will. You must have succeeded, because you ordered a bowl of
česnečka
—Czech garlic soup—for each of us.

“Česnečka,”
I said after a time. “I wouldn’t have thought—”

“They don’t seem to have any bourbon. How do you say ‘bourbon’ in Czech?”

The last time you’d ordered a bourbon had been on the airplane, after I’d explained the details of my plan. I knew what bourbon signified.

“Mrs. Haven,” I said, attempting to keep my voice steady. “Are you starting to have second thoughts?”

You smiled at me and took my hand in yours. “I had second thoughts the moment we met, Walter. That’s how I ended up here.”

If the happiness this gave me was short-lived, Mrs. Haven, it was also very close to absolute. I reminded myself that you’d abandoned home and country—not to mention your personal safety—to be sitting with me in that joyless dining car. As always when I considered this fact, I felt that a mistake had been made: the most glorious and historic mistake since our ancestors descended from the trees.

Our soup came and we ate it dutifully. It tasted of cabbage and socks.

“This is the slowest train I’ve ever been on,” you said between spoonfuls. “The Sensational Gatsby would have loved it.”

“I didn’t realize the Husband was a train buff,” I said, with what I hoped was a nonchalant air. “I’d have thought jet packs and hovercraft were more his thing.”

“He has a set of guidelines that he follows,” you said, watching the farmhouses and wheat fields gliding by. “He believes that time passes faster when you’re having fun.”

I hesitated, trying and failing to read your expression. You gazed out the window impassively.

“Most people think that,” I said. “About time passing, I mean.”

“They
think
it, maybe. But they don’t arrange their lives around the concept.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Richard is trying to decelerate time, Walter, by any means at his disposal.” You set down your spoon. “The most effective method he’s found, so far, is what he calls ‘autosuggestive psychostasis.’”

“I’m not familiar with that term.”

“He spends his days trying to achieve total boredom.”

I gave an awkward half smile at that, certain now that you were pulling my leg. Even as I did so, however, I remembered those static, empty days before I’d won you back, and how the hours had advanced with sublime, psychotropic precision.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mrs. Haven—”

“I’d be happy to.”

“—but your husband buys and sells companies and cuts ribbons at galas and zips around the planet in a private jet. If he’s trying to live a boring life, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it.”

That made you smile a little, and I allowed myself to feel I’d won a modest victory; but the smile you gave seemed meant for someone else.

“The jet’s a time-share, Walter. But you’re right about one thing. This trip of ours would do the trick much better.”

*   *   *

Znojmo was damp and gray and alcoholic-looking when we pulled in, the way towns look in Czech New Wave films from the sixties. The Himmler twins stayed put in the restaurant car, sipping somnolently from steins of Pilsner Urquell; I watched them as the Divis rolled away. Time was moving slowly on that train indeed.

The platform, by contrast, seemed to empty instantaneously. The only person in sight by the time we’d gotten our bearings was a stooped teenager with a gigantic Saint Bernard in a seeing-eye harness. The dog was circling the boy—counterclockwise, of course—and the boy had no choice but to follow suit.

“Look at that kid, Mrs. Haven.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or burst out crying. You were halfway along the platform already, tilting your head to look up at the sky. “Come on, Walter!” you called. “It’s beginning to rain.” And it was.

We spent that next week in the Hotel Zrada on Republiky Square, living in high style on the UCS’s dime, littering the honeymoon suite with room-service trays and bottles of prosecco and sundry other forms of recreational debris, any of which would have looked right at home in Genny’s Archive. Our sideboard was soon populated by sweating mason jars of local gherkins: the riddle of my great-grandfather’s brining-room discovery couldn’t have interested you less, as far as I could tell, but brining itself seemed to fascinate you. While I dithered around town with a dated Czech phrase book and a list of addresses scavenged from century-old journals, you devoted yourself to the history of the pickle trade, spending hours in the kitchens of button-eyed
babička
s, lamenting the post–Cold War rise of the Polish
okurka
and parsing the mysteries of dill. You got around your lack of Czech in a way I never would have thought of: by refusing to acknowledge its existence. Within the week you were friends with half the grandmothers in town, it seemed, while I was no further along than I’d been in New York. I won’t deny it, Mrs. Haven—I was envious. There’s only so much
Znojemské
okurky
a person can eat, no matter how his forebears made their living.

It was your interest in pickling, appropriately enough, that led us to Ottokar’s secret. After eight days of begging admission to every storehouse and factory and cellar my family had owned, I was ready to consign both my quest and my history—and even the Accidents themselves—to the far side of their own event horizon. Our suite at the Zrada was a pigsty by then: you’d hung the provided
DO NOT MOLEST
sign on the door handle when we checked in (“Present company excluded,” you’d whispered into my ear) and the cleaning staff had heeded it devoutly. It smelled of sex in those rooms for the first several days; later in the week, when things had soured between us, it smelled of old sex; finally even that faded, and it smelled of dirty sheets and pickled cabbage. A feeling of stagnation had set in between us, of fidgety pseudocalm, that scared me worse than any squabble could have done. Never before had we had so much time to observe each other, carbuncles and all, and I think we were both surprised by what we found. You had a way of running your tongue over your back teeth, for example, as though searching for food, and you tended to sulk over trifles. Worse yet, I found myself—especially since our disastrous audience with the Kraut—progressively less able to amuse you. Not to say that you seemed bored, Mrs. Haven: you were conspicuously, demonstratively chipper. But I began to pack my suitcase anyway.

“You want to leave already, Walter? We’re just getting settled.”

“I’ve done everything I can here. I give up.”

What I didn’t tell you—due to some obscure suspicion, perhaps, but more likely simply out of injured pride—was that I was beginning to have doubts about my mission. Even if I somehow managed to get my hands on Ottokar’s notes, what would they help me accomplish? How exactly would they enable me to find the Timekeeper, and what did I suppose would happen if I did? He was a mass murderer, after all, and I was a caretaker at an old folks’ home. I was dangerously out of my depth. Sobriety, if you want to call it that, was returning to my overheated brain.

If we’d left Znojmo then—right away, that same night—I might even have made a full recovery.

“It’s been a bad week, Walter.” You nodded to yourself. “I’ve been up all night thinking about it. Maybe coming here was a mistake.”

“Coming where? To Znojmo?”

“To Europe.”

I stared down into my suitcase, unable to speak. The problem, of course, was that a part of me agreed. You saw as much and smiled at me forlornly.

“Do you remember
euphasia
, that word we invented? The feeling you get, coming out of a theater, that the movie you’ve been watching is still going on—still playing everywhere around you—even though it’s actually over?” You nodded to yourself. “I think we might both have
euphasia
now.”

I set down the shirt I was folding. “Mrs. Haven—”

“But here’s the problem. I’ve staked my future on you, Walter, maybe even my life. And there’s no going back from that. Not ever.” You bit your lip for a moment. “I still don’t understand what you came here to find—”

Just then, so fleetingly it barely registered, I felt a slight twinge of suspicion. You were playing the part of the innocent so well—a thousand times better than I could have managed. The performance called attention to itself.

“I’ve told you,” I said. “The missing pages to my great-grandfather’s notebook. The ones that explain—that I hope will explain—what he meant by the Lost Time Accidents. But I’m starting to doubt—”

“If
that’s
what you’re after, why waste time with the Toulas? You told me his mistress was the last one to see him alive. Marta Svoboda, wasn’t it? The wife of the butcher?”

I rolled my eyes in frustration. “I’ve been to see all the Svobodas in Znojmo, Mrs. Haven. No one knows what I’m talking about.”

“Is that all?” You cocked your head at me. “You can’t find any of Marta’s relatives?”

“That’s all. And since I can’t find her relatives, I’m sure you’ll agree—”

“Your mistake was looking for
Svobodas
,” you said matter-of-factly. “Marta only had one child—a daughter. That daughter married into the Hargovas, who own the electronics shop on Kollárova Street. Their son is the custodian of the Václav Prokop Divis house. Does that name ring a bell?”

I said nothing for at least half a minute. “Václav Prokop—”

“That poor cross-eyed priest who invented the lightning rod. The train we came here on was named after him.”

“I know who he
was
, Mrs. Haven. What I don’t understand—”

“Adéla Hargova is the sweet old granny who gave me those boiled eggs in vinegar.” You pointed at a jar on the sideboard. “The one with the limp and the little mustache. She also happens to be Marta Svoboda’s granddaughter.”

I let out a slow breath. “Have you told her about me? About what I’m here for?”

“I’ve told everybody what you’re here for. How else could I have found all this out?”

“Could you take—” I was stammering again. “Could you take me to her?”

The smile you gave me was so conspiratorial, so self-understood, that I sensed there might be some hope for us yet.

*   *   *

Adéla Hargova lived in a bright, dreary flat that smelled faintly of beer, on the third floor of a housing complex that must already have looked decrepit the year it was built. Everything about the place was defiantly Soviet bloc, including Boromir, the man of the house. He ignored us completely—some arcane, ultraviolent sporting event was on TV—which was probably all for the best. We sat with Adéla in her curtainless kitchen, sipping wonderfully peppery oolong tea, eating
okurky
and fresh-baked bread with raisins in it. Our hostess scrutinized me darkly.

“You are Toula?”

“Not exactly, Mrs. Hargova.” I smiled. “But
dost blízko.
Close enough.”

“Who are you?”

Her expression was scornful, inclining toward anger, but for once in my duration I was ready. I laid three photographs on the table: a playing-card-sized daguerreotype of my great-grandfather, a snapshot of Kaspar and Waldemar at Belvedere Palace in Vienna, and a Polaroid of Orson dandling me on his knee. She glared at each in turn, then back at me. The look on her face remained grim.