by John Wray
Nothing could have been more in character for Kaspar’s father-in-law than to refuse to acknowledge the mustering clouds. When Sonja confronted him—that same week, over dinner—he denied that the hubbub concerned him at all. “My boys,” he declared, “are entirely too busy for that sort of nonsense. I’ve fielded every conceivable question in the course of my lectures, from the cause of the aurora borealis to the relative merits of pince-nez and monocles; but I’ve never been asked whether Copernicus ate shellfish or matzo.”
Sonja, who’d heard all this before, kissed him sadly on the cheek and changed the subject. The outrage occurred the next morning.
Though his duties at the university were lighter than they’d been in the years of his prime, the professor was still in the habit of arriving at dawn. It afforded him a sharp, childish pleasure to greet his colleagues with a businesslike nod as they shuffled groggily past his office, where he was already hip-deep in the morning’s work; besides, one never knew when a student might drop in to talk. Young men were known to keep irregular hours—young physicists, especially—and he kept his door unlocked accordingly. From time to time, on arriving in the morning, he’d find a hastily scrawled note on his desk, deposited at God knew what small hour of the night. His own son-in-law had been a great one for such notes, he remembered, as had the boy’s brother—that gifted, unfortunate other.
The morning of February 16, 1927, found the professor arriving at the Department of Physics a quarter hour later than usual, having missed his customary trolley by a nose. The floors had been waxed during the night and his boot heels snapped agreeably with each step. His door was two-thirds closed, just as he’d left it, but a pistachio-colored envelope lay squarely on the blotter of his desk. He glanced back down the corridor before stepping inside, savoring the charged, monastic silence. No one else was in sight.
The note inside the envelope differed from those the professor generally received. First, it was unsigned; second, it was all but illegible; and last, it bore no address or signature of any kind. The text—once he’d deciphered its scrawl with the aid of his magnifying lenses—only added to his puzzlement:
THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, A GENTLEMAN ONCE SAID.
WHO WAS THIS GENTLEMAN?
A playing-card-sized scrap of paper had been included in the envelope, in accordance with custom, on which to compose his reply. He found himself sitting stock-still for an extravagant length of time, looking from his pen cup—a potbellied clay vase, meant for tulips or lilies, that Sonja had made as a child—to the uncommonly dusty air above his head. If an answer hovered there he did not see it.
The notes from his boys had taken all manner of guises over the years, but none had ever been presented as a riddle. Later, it would occur to the professor that he hadn’t been able to place the handwriting—though it did seem familiar—and this fact would appear significant; at the time, however, the question of authorship was immaterial. Silbermann relished a brainteaser as much as the next man of science, and eventually, after a great deal of deliberation, the germ of an answer began to take shape. He sat cautiously forward, mindful not to jar his idea loose too soon, and reached for his favorite pen.
Had anyone else been in the building at that hour, they’d have borne witness to a sound coming out of the department chair emeritus’s office unlike any he’d been known to make before. A quarter hour later, when Fräulein Landsmann, his secretary, shuffled past his open door, she found the professor slumped in his armchair, holding his right arm daintily away from his body. It was covered in blood, which gave her a nasty turn—but the blood was not Professor Silbermann’s. Fräulein Landsmann was a practical and clearheaded woman, of Tyrolean sheepherding stock. Once she’d established that the professor was unhurt, she helped him up and led him to the lavatory. He thanked her in an airy voice, praising her goodwill and promptness, then asked her—in the same cordial tone—to dispose of the contents of the pen cup on his desk.
Fräulein Landsmann did as directed, whereupon she was heard by the professor to produce a sound quite like the one he’d made himself. At the bottom of the pen cup, in a heap of clotted blood and cartilage, lay the fetus of a freshly stillborn pig.
* * *
Much was made of this episode, needless to say, in spite of the university’s attempts to keep it quiet. Expressions of youthful high feeling were certainly not unheard of, even in the Department of Physics; but none had yet been so lyrical, so enigmatic, so poetically rich in sign and symbol. In the days and weeks that followed, the significance of the event was passionately debated by students and faculty alike. The choice of pig flesh was perhaps understandable, given Silbermann’s creed; but why a fetus, with its connotations of nativity and promise? Members of the Agglomeration were consulted, as one might call an expert witness in a court proceeding; but to everyone’s surprise—even their own, it appeared—they were as baffled as anyone else. Eventually, some deep thinker pointed out that the fetus in question appeared to have been stillborn, which went some way toward settling the issue: the pig was a totem of waste, of abortion, of a race’s grand potential unfulfilled. The question of authorship, however, persisted. And what to make of the riddle? And why in the professor’s pen cup, of all places?
Kaspar saw little point in coming forward, and Sonja was inclined to agree. They never discussed the details of what had occurred, or why her father had been singled out, or how things could have come to such a pass. They only spoke about what should be done.
Quietly and efficiently, while speculation raged among his own students and colleagues (and an official inquiry into the affront was being indefinitely postponed), Kaspar conducted an investigation of his own. He spent another week at Trattner’s, visited the Bemmelmans villa—which he found boarded up for the winter—and even paid a call on the schoolteacher, Bleichling, who promptly broke down in tears, as though he’d been rehearsing expressly for Kaspar’s visit, and confessed that Herr von Toula had broken off all contact years before. After a full month of searching, Kaspar was forced to admit that he’d found no evidence whatsoever that his brother had returned to Vienna.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not you found evidence,” Sonja said. “We know he was here, because of what happened to Papa.”
Kaspar pointed out to her, as gently as possible, that Waldemar appeared to have accomplices—some shadowy fraternity at his beck and call—and that anyone could have delivered the note. Sonja countered that it made no difference.
“It makes a great deal of difference, Sonja. We need to know who we’re dealing with—how many of them there are and what they’re after. Even I’m not certain what that riddle means.”
“It’s a warning,” she answered. “And it wasn’t intended for Papa, I don’t think. I think it was intended for us.”
“Sonja, what on earth—”
She took his hand and led him to the divan and asked him to sit down beside her. When she was satisfied that he was giving her his full attention, she told him, in a voice he hardly recognized, the details of Waldemar’s long-ago midnight visit. She took care to omit nothing this time—not even how tempted she’d been to do what Waldemar had asked of her, insane though she’d known him to be.
It can be a fascinating thing to be reminded, after years of complacency, that the woman who sleeps beside you might easily, but for the grace of chance and fate and Providence, be sleeping beside someone else. Kaspar had noticed, of course (he remembered it now), how Sonja’s manner had changed when his brother was near, and how intently Waldemar had stared at her at their first meeting. But it came as a shock, one of the most severe of his duration, that his brother’s interest might have been returned.
“Why not go with him?” he mumbled when Sonja was done. “Why not do as he asked, if he tempted you so?”
Sonja waited for him to meet her eye before she answered. “I’ve been tempted by all sorts of things, Kaspar, that I didn’t want.”
Kaspar frowned at her, shaking his head reflexiv
ely. “I see.”
“Do you, my love? Do you really?”
He considered her question. “You didn’t go with him that night—I understand that much. You didn’t go with him. You stayed with me.”
Sonja regarded him curiously for a moment. Then she sat forward and kissed him on the lips. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing else you need to understand.”
* * *
Decades later, in the summers of his North American exile, reclining on his shaded porch on sepia-tinted upstate afternoons—the kind that seem steeped in nostalgia even as they’re happening—my grandfather would occasionally rhapsodize about the night that followed. With characteristic Toula perversity, he and Sonja chose that same evening to perpetuate the Silbermann-Toula line, ratifying their mutual devotion in the names of Darwin and Marx and Jehovah—to say nothing of their elders, who’d long since abandoned all hope.
When it became clear that Sonja was pregnant—and moreover, with twins—the news spread among their wide and heterogenous network of acquaintances with a speed customarily reserved for scandal. She had just turned forty, after all: a shocking age, by the standards of the time, at which to begin having children. Why on earth, it was asked, had they waited so long? Sonja might easily have been a grandmother by then; and not a few eminent Viennese matrons suggested, upon hearing the news, that she ought to have been.
Rumors began to circulate that Sonja was unwell—possibly at death’s door—and even, in certain unprincipled circles, that there were open questions of paternity. It didn’t help matters that the whole business was kept curiously private, as though it were an occasion not of pride but of disgrace. This was Sonja’s express wish, however, heartily endorsed by her husband, and her overjoyed (and not a little dumbfounded) parents weren’t about to contradict her. The twins would be born in a neighborhood clinic, under the care of the family physician, with as little outside meddling as possible. Their birth, it was made clear, was to be regarded as an addition to their parents’ lives first, to their grandparents’ second, and to the city of Vienna’s last of all.
In this way a precedent was set for eccentricity—some would say wrongheadedness, even hubris—that the twins themselves would follow all their lives.
* * *
Sonja and Kaspar passed a sweetly uneventful nine months—receiving no more than a handful of visitors, and those only briefly—during which time the mother-to-be was the picture of Rubenesque health. Dr. Ryslavy, a mustachioed Magyar whose breath smelled of leeks and who clapped my grandfather on the back more often and more heartily than Kaspar would have liked, announced after only four months that Sonja would bear not one but two children, and that she was carrying them unusually high in her womb. According to Ryslavy, this indicated that the twins would be identical, male, and—as he told Kaspar in confidence—“fearsome holy terrors” into the bargain. He was wrong on all counts, Mrs. Haven, but the last.
Aside from Ryslavy’s visits, and the occasional presence of the Silbermanns, the Ringstrasse apartment was as quiet and as cozy as a midwinter chalet. Kaspar’s mother contented herself with sending the couple one postcard from Znojmo per week, which was more than enough for her son. His fantasy of being cast away had finally come to pass, and he made it his sacred duty to enjoy it to the fullest, knowing they’d been given but a few short months’ reprieve. Every now and again he thought of Waldemar’s concept of rotary time—his assertion that progressive time was a sinister, Semitic hoax—and found himself wishing, in spite of all he knew, that it were so.
He attended to his duties grudgingly, neglecting all but the most necessary work, and passed as little time away from home as possible. He’d never taken much interest in the details of domesticity before—the dining table’s waxy patina, the dust along the hem of the curtains, the lingering smell of whitewash in the foyer—but they came, little by little, to intrigue him more profoundly than the greatest enigmas of physics. The minutiae of daily life were enigmas, after all; and wasn’t physics’ highest purpose to explain them?
Four hundred miles to the north, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, the Patent Clerk was beginning his duration-long search for the theory of the unified field.
* * *
Contrary to the boisterous assurances of Dr. Ryslavy, the twins, when at last they arrived, proved a far cry from the promised pair of ruddy, headstrong boys: they were delicate and fair—almost blue-skinned, in fact—and were unabashedly, defiantly female. They were far from identical, either: the firstborn had angular, pinched-looking features (like a tiny schoolmistress! her mother declared), and her sister was downy and round as a quince. Any doubts as to the girls’ paternity were dispelled straightaway—the challenge, in fact, was to detect their mother in them. This was somewhat regrettable, since Sonja, even at forty-one, was a sight to behold, whereas Kaspar was no one’s notion of a beauty. Nevertheless, the birth of his daughters had an effect on my grandfather that he hadn’t foreseen: it arrested his retreat from the world, and even—by small, fixed increments, like the ticking of a timing cog—reversed it.
From his first glimpse of their faces, crimped and wrinkled like a pair of angry fists, Kaspar’s daughters stupefied and humbled him. Not in years—not since the Accidents—had his mind been taken captive so completely. They seemed less like children to him, these beings he’d engendered, than like primates of some other, fiercer order; and though he eventually came to love them more than life, this first impression never fully left him. He’d have died before admitting it to Sonja, but Kaspar’s fascination with his daughters was not the doting that it so resembled. Passionate as it was, his interest in the twins was scientific.
They were a force to be reckoned with, straight out of the womb—Ryslavy had been right about that much. Their response to ex utero Vienna was unequivocal: both of them remained silent, opening their dark blue eyes unnaturally wide, and turned progressively purpler, refusing to breathe for themselves. An injustice had clearly been done them, but whether the guilty party was the obstetrician, the nurse, or their mother herself remained a mystery. “I wasn’t concerned for an instant!” Ryslavy joked once the crisis had passed. “After all, those are two little angels. It wouldn’t have surprised me, Herr Toula, if they’d dispensed with the trouble of breathing altogether!”
“It wouldn’t have surprised me, Dr. Ryslavy,” Kaspar replied, “if they’d somehow turned out to have gills.”
Disquieting as their debut was, both girls were pronounced healthy, and they came home with Sonja soon after. Kaspar and his in-laws received the new mother with deference, and the twins—still unnamed—were installed with great pomp in the master bedroom. No one wondered at the fact that the children remained nameless: it seemed in keeping with their otherworldliness. As Kaspar put it to Sonja that same evening, “None of the names we’ve come up with will do, I’m afraid. They seem—presumptuous, somehow.” Sonja had laughed at first, then nodded in agreement.
The twins’ fractious entry into our atmosphere, Mrs. Haven, proved to be characteristic. They bawled at milk bottles and grimaced at rattles and ate other children for breakfast. Even Sonja, with all her gift for equanimity, was brought to the edge of despair by their tantrums. Mama Silbermann commented—with the best of intentions—that she’d never seen a child who could cry while breast-feeding, let alone two; the professor predicted careers at the bar. Kaspar seemed to be the only human being who could make his daughters smile, and that only by making the most hideous grimaces, or by slapping himself in the face. A full month after their birth, the twins were as nameless as ever.
It was Kaspar, fittingly enough, who finally brought the stalemate to an end. A Slovenian communist had brought Sonja a bouquet of alpine flowers in belated honor of the birth, and my grandfather discovered that the surest way to quiet the twins, at the height of their tantrums, was to twirl a tiny star-shaped gentian above them. Enzian is the name of that flower in Austria, and it struck Kaspar as perfect for the
firstborn of his daughters: not too feminine, not too pretentious, and fittingly peculiar to the ear. Sonja allowed him to convince her (as much out of exhaustion as anything else) and suggested, lover of verse that she was, that their younger daughter be named Gentian, in tribute to William Cullen Bryant’s “To the Fringed Gentian,” a favorite poem of her schooling days. The resulting names managed to sound as awkward in German as they did in English, which is harder to achieve than you might think; but no one ever claimed the twins’ names didn’t suit them.
Professor Silbermann retired the following summer, to the relief of everyone who knew him, and the twins grew more tractable, if no less bizarre. Gradually existence reverted to normal—though Kaspar could never say for certain that he hadn’t simply grown accustomed to the strangeness of the times. Conditions grew grim for the city’s Jews and leftists, then very slightly better, then worse than anybody could recall. Sonja did what she could for her embattled protégés, but her protection wasn’t what it once had been. There was little she could offer them but shelter.
It grew commonplace for Kaspar to come home from the university—or, just as often, to rise in the mornings—to find a rumpled, bearded ism-ist sleeping on the yellow divan in the parlor. He complained to his wife regarding this exactly once. “If you want me to sleep in your house, Herr Toula,” Sonja replied, “then you’ll have to put up with my guests. The girls enjoy them, even if you don’t.” Disgruntled though he was, my grandfather knew there was no point in arguing, especially with regard to the twins: Enzian and Gentian, barely able to walk, delighted in standing next to the divan in pallbearer-ish silence, taking turns seeing how firmly they could tug on the whiskers of each new refugee before he sat up with a yelp of pain.