by John Wray
* * *
If my grandfather found himself less admired by his classmates than Waldemar was—less a figure of hushed speculation—he also found himself distinctly better liked. The snobbery of the Viennese toward outsiders of every persuasion (and especially toward Slavs) passed over his head without ruffling a hair. By the winter of his first year at the university, Kaspar had either won his skeptics over or stepped politely around them, and had become the Physics Department’s unofficial mascot. Unlike his brother, he rarely spoke about his research, and the impression he made seems to have been that of a bon vivant with a boyish enthusiasm for physics. His mathematical ability, as well as his solemn good nature and willingness to perform the most mundane of chores without complaint, endeared him to a number of professors in the department, and by the end of his first term he’d become chief assistant to Ludwig David Silbermann, director of the School of Natural Philosophy: a kindly, perpetually overwhelmed man whose primary qualification for his lofty position seems to have been his persistence in the belief that the emperor had the best interests of his subjects at heart. My grandfather was careful to hide the substance of his own work—his inquiry, thus far fruitless, into the nature of his father’s discovery—from Professor Silbermann, and as a consequence they got on very well.
Between his assisting duties, his studies, and his fondness for Viennese street life, Kaspar had little time to spare for his brother, and by summer he and Waldemar were little more than apartment-mates. Like an underground river, the mystery of the Accidents continued to run beneath the events of their day-to-day lives, connecting them and keeping them in motion; on the surface, however, there was very little trace.
It was probably inevitable that a young man as intoxicated as my grandfather was by the charms of fin de siècle Vienna should eventually be swept up in the moral and cultural civil war that was splitting the city in two; but the circumstances of his recruitment are no less unlikely for that. On a certain ash-gray August afternoon—August 17, to be exact—just prior to his second academic year in the capital, Kaspar found himself in a two-person booth at the Jandek, a café catering to Marxists and artists’ models and syphilitics, nursing a watery mocca and trying not to seem too out of place. He was looking for Waldemar: he had something to tell him. Word had reached him that their mother was ill (she herself would never have written about anything so trivial) and he planned to depart for Znojmo that same evening. His brother had grown even more reclusive of late, and it had been days since Kaspar had laid eyes on him. He’d spent the entire morning beating the departmental bushes, until finally a walleyed Tyrolean named Bilch had let the name Jandek slip, in so conspiratorial a whisper that Kaspar had taken it for some kind of brothel.
My grandfather had no aversion to brothels by his eighteenth year—he’d been to a number himself—but the Jandek made them look like milliner’s shops. His shoe heels were stuck to the floor of his booth, and the whole place was littered with bread crumbs and onions and cigarette ends, and packed to capacity with men who clearly had no other place to go. The shabbiest of them sat shoehorned together in the booth next to his, composing clumsy and obscene couplets about a well-known painter by the name of Hans Makart: they didn’t seem to care much for his paintings. My grandfather, who happened to care for Makart’s paintings a great deal, had just asked for his check when the kitchen doors opened, the smoke seemed to part, and a girl in a nightgown sashayed out into the light.
Kaspar knew the girl well—as well, that is, as one could know a girl of good family in 1905—but it took him a moment to place her. Her name was Sonja Adèle and she was one week shy of seventeen years old. She was also, as chance or fate or Providence would have it, the daughter of Ludwig David Silbermann. They’d eaten dinner in each other’s company perhaps a dozen times, and had had two brief, forgettable conversations; on one occasion he’d helped her to work out a sum. Nothing in any of those prior encounters had prepared him for the girl who stood before him now.
“Fräulein Silbermann!” he called to her as she went by.
She stopped short and spun on her heels—not like a lady at all—and glowered at him through the smoke. “Herr Toula!” she exclaimed, with undisguised amusement. “What on earth brings you here?”
“I could ask the same of you, fräulien.”
“Buy me a glass of kvass and I’ll tell you.”
“Kvass?” Kaspar said, more bewildered than ever.
“It’s a kind of Russian peasant beer, made out of old bread. A house specialty.” She pulled up a stool and sat down. “Do you know how the Russians say ‘Mind your own business?’”
Kaspar shook his head mutely.
“I’ll tell you, Herr Toula, but I’ll have to whisper it.”
He inclined his head toward her, asking himself what could possibly be considered inappropriate in such a place. Her breath against his earlobe made the soles of his feet prickle in their cashmere stockings.
“Вы не проникли, так что не ерзать ваши ягодицы.”
“Ah!” Kaspar said, nodding. “But what does that mean?”
“You’re not being fucked, so don’t wiggle your ass.”
“Ah,” he repeated, bobbing his head absurdly. “I see.” The blood was draining from his face, but there was nothing he could do about that. She was staring at him brashly, her cheeks lightly flushed, biting a corner of her mouth to keep from laughing.
“Ah,” he said a third time, but by then she’d already left him for the boys in the neighboring booth. When the kvass came he drank it himself.
* * *
Kaspar caught the train that same evening (he’d already purchased his ticket) and spent four restless days at his mother’s bedside. When his brother came home on the weekend, he returned to the city immediately, marveling at his lack of family feeling. He spent the next nine afternoons at the Jandek, drinking endless mélanges and repelling all comers, wearing unironed trousers and keeping his hat on indoors. At 15:15 CET on the tenth day, Sonja emerged from the kitchen exactly as she had two weeks before, and this time there was no gang of Makart disparagers to receive her. She came straight to Kaspar’s table, as though his presence there were no more than expected, and sat down without a single word of greeting. She was wearing the same shapeless gown as before, and she scrutinized him just as directly, but there was a disquiet in her manner now, even a hint of appeal. The feeling in Kaspar’s throat as he watched her was the same one he got when he ate chestnuts by mistake. He was mildly allergic to chestnuts.
“Kvass?” he said suavely, beckoning to the waiter.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she answered, glancing over her shoulder.
“I’d assumed—that is to say, I may be mispronouncing—”
“I’m finished with the Russians. They treat their workers abominably. You’ve heard of the disturbances in Minsk?”
“The which?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes, still looking past him. “What are you drinking?”
“Pilsner,” he mumbled, indicating the full stein before him. “In the town I come from, in Moravia—”
She turned back to him now with a different expression entirely. “You’re Czech?”
“Of a sort,” he said, choosing his words cautiously. “That is to say, the name Toula is originally from the Czech. It means ‘to wander about,’ apparently. Of course, we speak German in the home, and I’ve been learning English—”
“The Czech language is the most beautiful spoken in Europe,” Sonja said earnestly. “Worlds better than Russian.”
To the best of Kaspar’s knowledge, the Czech and Russian languages were part of the same cozy family; but he had the good sense not to point this out.
Sonja peered over her shoulder again, then took a ladylike sip of his pilsner. “He’s not coming out,” she said. “Thank heaven for that.”
“To whom do you refer?” said Kaspar, as nonchalantly a
s he could.
“Kappa, the painter. I model for him every second Tuesday.”
“You model for him,” Kaspar repeated. “I see.” Things were coming clear to him at last, but only slowly. “He paints you in the kitchen?”
“Close enough, Herr Toula. He has an atelier back there. Appropriately, it used to be the sausage-curing room.”
“I see,” Kaspar repeated, thinking hard. The notion of Sonja modeling made perfect sense and made no sense at all. It was difficult to conceive of a less suitable vocation for a young lady of standing. He’d met models before in the cafés, of course, but none who weren’t also prostitutes.
Sonja was watching him closely, taking sociable sips of his beer, which did nothing for his clarity of mind. He regained his self-possession by a furious effort of will.
“That would explain your outfit, I suppose.”
Her smile faded. “I beg your pardon?”
“That smock—or whatever you call it—that you have on. The first time we met, you were wearing a wonderful dress, I remember, with a charming blue bustle—”
“The dress you refer to,” Sonja said icily, “took thirty minutes and six hands to get inside of. Its stays were so tight I could barely breathe.” She shut her eyes and emitted a series of gasps, as though the memory alone were enough to suffocate her. “Have you ever watched the women promenading in the Prater, Herr Toula, or along Kärntnerstrasse on a Sunday afternoon? Have you ever taken note of how they move?”
“Oh yes,” said Kaspar, smiling in spite of himself. “They walk with tiny steps, like turtledoves.”
“They walk like cripples,” Sonja hissed. “You’re not one of those cow-eyed romanticizers, are you? Those chastity fetishists? I thought you told me that you were a Czech.”
My grandfather took a deep, pensive draught of his pilsner. Sonja regarded him through narrowed eyes.
“I do come from Moravia,” he said hopefully.
“Don’t be fooled by the ribbons, Herr Toula. The female anatomy is terrifying to man, so he hides it behind a wall of scaffolding. Under each of those dresses you find so bewitching, a body is locked away in quarantine.”
This was a bit much for poor Kaspar, but he was willing to tread water until he sighted land.
“Quarantine,” he repeated. “I see. So you wear that smock on your days off, as well?”
“This ‘smock,’ as you call it, is the rational answer to an irrational society. It was designed by the maestro himself.” When Kaspar said nothing, she added, slightly more tentatively: “When we have the society we deserve, it may be possible to attach a few bows here and there.”
This glimmer of weakness was all the encouragement my grandfather required. He sat forward soberly, every inch the bourgeois kavalier, and took Sonja’s plump, schoolgirlish hand in his. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Fräulein Silbermann. I’m a pickle manufacturer’s son, new to this city, with a head for sums and very little else. But I’m willing to learn, if you’ll consent to show me. I’ll follow anywhere you choose to lead.”
Sonja blinked at him a moment, genuinely startled, then laughed in his face. “Eager to get your spats dirty, Herr Toula? I don’t imagine Papa would approve. He always speaks of you in the most lofty of terms!”
It was at this point—as he described it, later that evening, to his frankly incredulous brother—that Kaspar was visited by genius.
“To hell with your papa.”
The blood left Sonja’s face. “What was that?” she murmured. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”
“Your father is a mediocre scientist, fräulein, and a blowhard besides. I couldn’t care less for his good opinion.” He raised the stein to his lips, downed the last of his pilsner, and set it down between them with a thump. “You might almost call him the Makart of physics.”
“You’re a bum crawler,” Sonja said, wide-eyed. “You’re an ingrate. You’re a hypocrite.”
“I’m a Czech,” my grandfather said simply.
Within the week the two of them were lovers.
I REMEMBER WHEN I first saw you, Mrs. Haven. You were trapped inside a Möbius loop of admirers at an Upper East Side party, backed against the kitchen counter like a convict bracing for the firing squad. You wore your hair short then, in a vaguely hermaphroditic schoolboy cut, and you looked as though you never went outside. A man in a boater said something to you, then repeated it, then repeated it again, and you nodded in a way that reduced him to dust.
I should have taken this as a warning—I understand that now. Instead I took it as a kind of cue.
I was standing in the home entertainment grotto, slack-jawed and helpless, gawking at you through the open kitchen door; you returned my stare calmly for exactly six seconds, then covered your upper lip with your ring finger. A mustache had been drawn between your first and second knuckles in ballpoint pen—a precise, Chaplinesque trapezoid—making you look like a beautiful Hitler. You held it there a moment, keeping your face set and blank, then solemnly tapped the right side of your nose. The air seemed to thicken. A signal was being transmitted, a semaphore of some kind, but I didn’t have a clue what it could mean. Perverse as it seems to me now, the image of you there, hunched stiffly against the counter with that obscene blue mustache pressed against your lips, will remain the most erotic of my life.
The apartment belonged to my cousin, Van Markham, the only member of the Tolliver clan who’d succeeded in adjusting to the times. His living room yawned snazzily before me, an airy product showroom accented by a sprinkling of actual people. I crossed it in a dozen woozy steps. The idea that just a moment earlier I’d been alphabetizing the DVD cases, counting the minutes until I could leave, seemed outlandish to me now, beyond crediting. Creation itself was blowing me a kiss, tossing me my first and only blessing, and all I had to do was let it hit.
The man in the boater was still droning on when I reached you, but now you sat crouched on the floor with your back to the fridge, so that he seemed to be complaining to the freezer. It might have been a suggestive pose, scandalous even, if you hadn’t been so obviously bored. I glanced at him in passing and saw that he’d clenched his eyes shut, like an eight-year-old steeling himself for a spanking. He was a giant of a man, a colossus in seersucker, but I was past the point of no return by then. I knelt down beside you and you gave me a nod and we hid ourselves under the counter. I’d foreseen all this happening—I wouldn’t have had the courage otherwise—but the fact of it was still beyond belief. Not a word had passed between us yet.
“I’m Walter,” I said finally.
“You look uncomfortable, Walter.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not usually this limber.”
You smiled at that. “I’m Mrs. Richard Haven.”
You saw the shock register on my face—you must have seen it—but you didn’t let on. You might as well have been married to Godzilla, or to Moses, or to some medium-sized Central American republic. By now, as you read this, you know the significance the name Haven holds for my family; perhaps you even knew or guessed it then. I should have stood up instantly and sprinted for the door. Instead I shook your hand, and said—if only to say something, to make some kind of noise, to keep you there with me under the counter—that you didn’t look like Mrs. Anything.
“That’s kind of you, Walter. I guess I’m well preserved.”
“How old are you?”
You waggled a finger, then sighed. “Oh, what the hell. I’m twenty-eight.”
I bobbed my head dumbly. In the light of the kitchen your skin looked synthetic. I felt an odd sort of pain as I watched you, a seasick alertness: the sense of something massive rushing toward me. For an instant I wondered whether I might be the victim of some elaborate prank, and studied the legs of the people around us, trying to identify them by their socks—I remember one pair in particular, striped red and blue and white, like barber poles—then realized I didn’t give a damn. You were still holding my hand in both of yours.
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“He’s gone,” you said. “That’s something.”
“Who’s gone?”
“You know who. The Sensational Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby, I think you mean.”
You shook your head. “I’m married to him, Walter. I should know.”
The weariness in your voice was both an invitation and a warning, and I felt the helpless jealousy then that only someone else’s past can trigger. The years that lay behind your weariness, with all their hope and risk and disappointment, were utterly out of my reach: as long as time ran forward, I would never see or touch or understand them. But the knowledge was pale and drab with you beside me.
“Whose party is this?”
Your question caught me by surprise, if only because you seemed so perfectly at ease under the counter. I noticed for the first time that you spoke with the hint of a lisp.
“Don’t you know Van?”
“Eh?”
“Van Markham.” I pointed into the living room. “The man in the gabardine shorts.”
You made a pinched sort of face, as though trying to make out something far away.
“Go easy on him, Mrs. Haven. He isn’t as bad as he looks.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“For the sake of full disclosure, he’s my cousin.”
“That explains you,” you said vaguely. You seemed to be thinking about something else already.
“What do you mean, that explains me?”
“Your being here, that’s all. At this kind of a party.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. You yawned and looked past me and I felt the first stirrings of panic.
“What’s your last name, Walter? Is it Markham, too?”
“Tompkins,” I answered at once. “Walter Tompkins.” The lie was out before I’d weighed its pros and cons, before I’d asked myself why: it was as automatic as ducking a punch. But of course I knew why. You’d just told me you were R. P. Haven’s wife.
“Nice kitchen he’s got here, this cousin of yours.”