by John Wray
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 Kas
par 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:
DEBIT
CREDIT
I’m marooned in a desolate bubble of extrachronological space, without company or apparent hope of rescue.
But I’m alive, and I seem to be in fairly decent shape, which contradicts every law of physics I can think of.
I appear to have been singled out, from all the rest of humanity, to sit at this table and brood.
But someone must have put me here, and provided me with these books and writing materials—ergo, someone wants me to complete my history. And that person may also have the means to set me free.
At times, the solitariness of my condition, and the sadness of constant remembering, comes close to driving me insane.
On the other hand, I’m not uncomfortable here—not anymore—and remembering certain events from my life is almost unbearably sweet.
I have nothing to eat, and nothing to drink but a half-empty bottle of Foster’s.
I’m not thirsty.
It’s still extremely hard for me to move, and all of my senses, except the sense of sight, are dulled almost to the point of uselessness.
My life, such as it was, was over long before I woke up here. How can it possibly matter where I am?
That’s as far as I’ve managed to get, Mrs. Haven. I feel less able than ever to reconcile myself to my condition, and I’ve resolved to continue my attempts to determine—both by contemplation and experiment—the nature of this no-man’s-land I’m stuck in. Like the Greek and Etruscan philosopher-detectives who were my great-grandfather’s heroes, creating whole cosmologies out of nothing but their own enthusiasm, the only tools I’ve got are pen and paper. And this body, of course—for whatever this body’s still worth.
I’m not entertaining these notions idly, Mrs. Haven. The question of whether or not time is passing for me, however slowly, has taken on new urgency since my visit to the bathroom. If time is passing—however sluggishly—then I’m still a part of the continuum, and can permit myself some faint hope of escape. If time isn’t passing, I’m probably dead.
In which case, Mrs. Haven, I wish you and the Husband all the best.
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?”