by John Wray
“I heard you went to Budapest. There were rumors—”
Waldemar silenced her with a wave of his hand. “I’d spent most of my duration searching for the key to my father’s discovery in the language of numbers—but the secret, when it finally came, was delivered in everyday words. In fact, my dear fräulein, it arrived in the form of a joke. May I share it with you?”
Half a dozen answers, Sonja later told Kaspar, revolved in her mind like horses on a carousel; but Waldemar had no need of a reply.
“Listen closely now, fräulein. The phenomenon my father discovered, and to which he gave the somewhat fanciful name the ‘Lost Time Accidents,’ is nothing enigmatic or arcane: no new star in the sky, no fifth dimension, no perpetual-motion machine. Time’s most fundamental quality, after all, is that it should be continually lost to us. Is that not so?” He leaned in close to her—so close that the smell of marzipan eclipsed all others. “That being the case, my dear Sonja, the ultimate Lost Time Accident is death.”
* * *
Kaspar’s immediate reaction upon coming home and learning what had happened was to take up his coat from the banister—the very same spot, Sonja noted, where Waldemar’s jacket had hung—and return the compliment without delay. His brother had left no card, no telephone number, no clue as to his whereabouts, but for once my grandfather was resolute. Perplexing as Waldemar’s visit had been, the malice behind it was as clear as Bohemian glass.
The SS, in those first heady days of the Anschluss, hadn’t yet commandeered the Italianate hotel on Morzinplatz that would serve as its den for the next seven years: its interim quarters, when at last Kaspar found them, turned out to be decidedly less grand. A cast-iron stair led up the rear wall of the Bundesverkehrsamt—the Viennese equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles—to a spacious but badly lit warren of rooms, already stuffed to the rafters with stacks of mildewed files and plywood crates. The disorder of the place ought to have reassured my grandfather, but somehow it had the opposite effect. Anything might happen in a system this entropic, he found himself thinking. A person—or at least that person’s dossier—might easily disappear without a trace.
Within weeks of Kaspar’s visit, the nerve center of the Gestapo would be transormed into an occult fortress, sequestered behind its bureaucratic façade like a tarantula hidden in a filing cabinet; but on that particular afternoon—March 19, 1938, day seven of the post-Austrian era—Kaspar entered magically unchallenged. Young men in squeaking boots and fastidiously creased uniforms brushed past him in the hallway, neither returning his greeting nor meeting his eye. No one asked him his business until he arrived at a broad, skylit foyer at the labyrinth’s center, empty save for a row of undersized chairs and a desk that looked pilfered from a headmaster’s office. A bald and rat-faced goblin slouched behind it, collating stacks of curling mimeographs. It wasn’t until the goblin glanced up from his paperwork, however—after what seemed a full hour—that Kaspar was able to place him. He was none other than Gustav Bleichling, proud owner of Sigismund the terrier.
“Good afternoon,” said Kaspar curtly.
“You have the wrong floor,” Bleichling answered, still shuffling his papers. “The Motor Vehicle Department—”
“We’ve met before, sir, if I’m not mistaken. The first time was at Trattner’s kaffeehaus.”
The mention of Trattner’s had a curious effect on Bleichling. He sat bolt upright, as if he’d been poked in the ribs, and raised his right arm in a cramped, defensive motion; just as quickly, however, he recalled where he was, and transformed the gesture into a salute. “You’ll have to pardon me, comrade. Those were thrilling days—superlative days!—but occasionally a face or two escapes me. I recall you now, of course. Sieg Heil.”
“My name is Kaspar Toula. I’ve come to see my brother.”
Bleichling’s right arm sank slowly, seemingly of its own accord, and came to rest against the cluttered desktop. “You couldn’t see him now,” he said inflectionlessly. “If you’d be so kind as to write down your address—”
“Why can’t I see him now? Is he not here?”
Bleichling hesitated. “He’s asleep.”
“It’s four in the afternoon, Herr Bleichling.”
A smile stole over Bleichling’s soggy features. “You haven’t seen your brother in quite some time, Herr Toula. He may have habits you are not familiar with.” He glanced slyly over his shoulder, toward a small metal door, half-hidden behind a row of cabinets. “It’s his custom to rest after an interrogation session, especially a long and fruitful one. He puts so much into his work, you see.”
Kaspar returned Bleichling’s insipid stare, unsure how to respond. He couldn’t imagine why the little man should share information so freely—and with him, of all people—unless he was simply a fool. The timing of Waldemar’s movements didn’t correspond to what Bleichling was telling him, either. Not unless he’d gone directly—
“What’s the name of the suspect?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The man my brother was questioning. Tell me his name.”
Bleichling’s smile sharpened. “My apologies, Herr Toula! I assumed he was the reason that you’d come. A natural assumption, given the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Why, that he arrived here from your own residence, of course. He took pains to make clear that he wasn’t your butler.”
* * *
Sonja was waiting at the street door when Kaspar brought Ungarsky home, so that he was momentarily convinced that his wife possessed the gift of second sight; but he soon realized that she’d been standing in that exact spot, straight-backed and expectant, the entire time he’d been away. The twins watched impassively from the mezzanine balcony as their father and mother conjured a phantom out of the hired car’s backseat. The phantom wore nothing but his socks and underclothes, and his face—once rakishly whiskered—was naked and pale. He moved haltingly and stiffly, straining his shorn gray head forward, like a newborn pigeon knocked out of its nest.
Once they’d brought him upstairs, Ungarsky allowed himself to be laid lengthwise across the divan, then craned his neck to scan the floor around him. When he’d found what he was looking for, he sighed contentedly and let his eyes fall closed. “Praise Jesus,” he whispered. “Those damn wingtips cost me a fortune.”
He said nothing more until morning, when Sonja brought him a tray of ladyfingers and a cup of weak black tea. The entire family was in attendance, maidservants included. Ungarsky sipped his tea gratefully, looking only at Sonja, then fumbled feebly at his undershirt. He’d slept in his clothes—he’d begged not to be touched—and Sonja had let him be, ragged and foul-smelling though he was. But now a sight was disclosed that brought gasps from the children: a cruciform bruise, sharp and black as a stencil, extending from his breastbone to his belly.
The twins were whisked out of the room at once; Mama Silbermann—who’d fallen into a swoon—was revived with ammonium carbonate. Scissors were fetched from the kitchen. Kaspar cut the undershirt free, muttering and perspiring like a surgeon; Ungarsky, for his part, observed the proceedings at a slight but definite remove, as though the injury were no concern of his. Sonja began to suspect, as she gripped his slack hand, that their guest no longer had his wits about him. But when he spoke his voice was sure and calm.
“They took me to a room with a chair in it. A straight-backed armchair with a slotted steel base. Very modern. Nothing else in there, not even a table. A narrow green door, like the door to a closet. Sometimes I could hear the other one—Kalk—talking outside the door. I couldn’t make out what he said. It doesn’t matter.” Ungarsky hesitated. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
“It doesn’t matter, Felix,” Sonja whispered.
“What happened then?” said Kaspar, keeping his voice as deliberate as he could manage. Ungarsky’s shirt lay pinned beneath him now, revealing the wound in all its grisly glory. It looked like the beginning of a blueprint, or a crudely
scrawled target, or a butcher’s X traced on a hunk of meat.
“He stood me up against the wall. He was watching me closely, squinting and scratching his chin, as if I were some sort of bug that he’d caught. Idiot that I am, I told him so.”
“Ach! Felix,” said Sonja.
“Kalk came in with a man I hadn’t seen before, carrying a razor and a basin of hot water. He told me to get on my knees and tip my head back as far as I could. I nearly wet myself with fright, but Kalk explained that the Standartenführer wanted a better look at my face. The man was a barber—and a skilled one, as you see.” Ungarsky held up his chin. “I’ve never had a more accomplished shave.”
He waited a moment, as if to hear the family’s opinion. No one in the parlor said a word.
“The Standartenführer thanked the barber, closed his eyes until Kalk had escorted him out, then turned to me. ‘I hate being made to wait, Herr Ungarsky,’ he said. ‘I suffer, among other things, from a condition known as expectandophobia. Can you guess what that condition is?’ I shook my head. ‘Expectandophobia, Herr Ungarsky, is a morbid fear of being made to wait.’ He laughed at that, and I did my best to laugh with him, which sent him into full-blown hysterics. Then he told me to lie down.”
At this point Frau Silbermann was ushered out of the room by the professor. Ungarsky lay back on the couch and watched them go.
“There was nothing in the room but that chair, as I’ve said. Once I was laid flat on the floor he dragged it over. Then he asked me a question—the only serious one he asked in all that time.”
“What did he ask?” said Kaspar.
“I didn’t understand at first, so he repeated it. ‘Did you know, Herr Ungarsky, that the laws of physics, from the standpoint of mathematics, acknowledge no difference between future and past?’ When I told him I didn’t, he nodded at me in a friendly way. ‘The question was a rhetorical one,’ he said. Then he set the chair on my chest and sat down on it.”
Sonja let out a muted groan and looked at Kaspar. Ungarsky went on, his voice formal and bright, like someone reading from the morning paper.
“‘I’m going to keep you in this room for exactly forty-three minutes,’ the Standartenführer told me. I asked him what would happen after that, and he said—” Ungarsky turned to Kaspar. “You’re not going to credit this, Herr Toula, but I swear that it’s true.”
“Don’t worry about me, Felix. Tell us what he said.”
“‘In forty-three minutes,’ the Standartenführer told me, ‘my brother will arrive, and Scharführer Bleichling—whom you met on your way in, I believe—will deliver you into his care.’”
All eyes went to Kaspar, but Kaspar kept still. He kept still because his brain was turning cartwheels in his skull. Sonja urged Ungarsky to go on.
“‘When that comes to pass,’ the Standartenführer said, ‘I want you to relay a message for me. Would you do me that kindness?’ I had no breath to answer but he didn’t seem to mind. ‘Unlike the laws of mathematics, the laws I represent—the laws whose envoy I am—distinguish past from future very plainly. The last twenty years have belonged to my brother; the future, by contrast, is ours. I shared something of my “lost time” theory with my sister-in-law this afternoon; but a theory without proof is merely talk. Someday soon I hope to give a demonstration.’ The Standartenführer shifted his weight in the chair as he said this, and watched me as I fought to catch my breath. ‘Do you think you can remember all that, Herr Ungarsky? I have no doubt you can.’ He took out his watch. ‘We have forty more minutes to practice.’”
XII
NOW WOULD BE the point in this history, Mrs. Haven, to recount the details of my grandfather’s role in the Viennese resistance: the first Ungarsky-brokered contact, the meetings in shuttered rooms and city parks, and the progressively more desperate acts of sabotage; then the inevitable imprisonment and torture, deportation in an unmarked railway car, and death in some sun-dappled Polish forest.
You won’t find any of that in this history, however, because none of it ever took place.
To be fair, Kaspar had his family to think of, and the Viennese resistance—valiant though it undoubtedly was—chiefly confined itself to tax evasion. Contrary to his own opinion, my grandfather was no simple coward, as his visit to the Gestapo HQ proves; but he was no longer young, and patriotism turned his stomach, and Waldemar’s triumphant return had changed him permanently. His brother’s madness was now the state religion, after all, with the weight of Greater Germany behind it. The grotesqueness of this notion—of this fact, he reminded himself—fastened itself to his mind like a leech after his visit to the Bundesverkehrsamt, and he could find no rational way to overcome it.
It was Sonja—to everyone’s surprise but her husband’s—who first suggested that they emigrate. She felt none of the mixed emotions Kaspar suffered under, labored under none of his confusion: she wasted no time trying to make sense of what was happening. And it was pointless for Kaspar to try to persuade her that his brother posed no genuine danger, at least not to them. He no longer believed it himself.
Once the decision was made, Sonja brooked no delay. Kaspar watched helplessly, struggling to stifle his panic, as she dismantled their asylum brick by brick. Not for her the classic refugee’s dilemma of what to take and what to leave behind: the house and everything in it was a relic of a bygone age, and Sonja wasn’t given to nostalgia. The most valuable furniture—the yellow divan included—was put up for auction in Vienna’s Dorotheum; the rest was given to friends and acquaintances and neighbors, until the family was eating off newsprint and sleeping on blankets laid out on the floor. Kaspar was far from alone in believing her actions extreme—even Ungarsky entreated her to reconsider—but he knew better than to hope to change her mind.
By the time the ism-ists began to disappear—quietly and without any fuss, as though they’d been called away on pressing foreign business—the Toulas were in possession of a complete set of exit visas from the German Reich. Buffalo Bill had cabled to assure them of his patronage (including, among other things, a furnished one-bedroom apartment on a street called Chippewa, which Sonja thought sounded delightful), and passage had been booked on the Comtesse Celeste, a midsized steamer out of Genoa. “Every minute spent here is a minute we’ve lost,” she’d exclaim when she caught Kaspar dragging his feet. “A brand-new life awaits us on the prairie!”
The prairie was never far from Sonja’s thoughts in those last weeks. She assumed—reasonably enough—that the city of their destination, fabled gateway to the Middle West, had been named in honor of its herds of bison. She imagined Buffalo as a kind of all-purpose boomtown, a sequestered San Francisco on a sapphire-colored lake, where cattle were driven down Main Street, captains of industry rubbed shoulders with emancipated slaves, and an honest man could die a millionaire. Though my grandfather had his doubts on a number of these points, he decided, as a kavalier, to keep them to himself. The prospect of emigration remained fantastical to him, unreal and unlikely; but no more so than any other prospect did. She’ll be disappointed soon enough, Kaspar thought. There isn’t any hurry.
* * *
Three days before their planned departure, Kaspar was sitting on a pillow in the gutted parlor, contemplating an oval of brighter paper where a mirror had once hung, when Enzian appeared in the doorway. She regarded him briefly with her lusterless eyes—almost as if she were considering his feelings—before delivering the news she’d come to tell.
“Mother’s in the toilet,” she announced.
“What’s that, Schätzchen? In the toilet, is she?”
Enzian nodded. “Something’s coming out of her mouth.”
There was nothing in his daughter’s voice or expression to account for the dread that gripped Kaspar as he leaped to his feet—but as soon as he caught sight of his wife on the floor, resting her cheek against the bowl of the toilet as if she were drunk, he understood that it was justified. Once, as a boy, watching his grandmother lying on her deathbed, he’d come
to feel that her saintly expression was obscene in light of her suffering; now Sonja’s face was lit by that same mild, sepulchral glow. The front of her linen chemise—one of seven she’d bought to bring to the New World—was bisected by a cord of blood and sputum. When he spoke her name she caught him by the wrist.
“I seem to have come down with something, Kaspar. Some kind of a chill.”
Kaspar spoke her name again and knelt beside her. Her grip on his wrist relaxed slightly.
“I’d like to stay here for a while, if you don’t mind. The porcelain is so cool against my cheek.”
When a doctor was summoned—Yitzak Bauer, a childhood friend of the professor’s—he reached a diagnosis before his coat was off. “Tuberculosis,” he announced, in the bored tone of voice physicians reserve for bad news. “There’ll be no Comtesse Celeste anytime soon, I’m afraid. Geronimo and Jesse James will have to wait.”
To the end of his duration, my grandfather would still visibly flinch when he confessed to the relief he’d felt at Bauer’s diagnosis. There was anxiety as well, of course—TB was not to be taken lightly—but at least the condition had developed in Vienna, the medical capital of Europe, and not in some trigger-happy American backwater where the snake-oil peddlers outnumbered the physicians. The more Kaspar considered it, the more convinced he became that this apparent setback was a blessing in disguise. It was true that he’d resigned his post at the university, and that their lease was about to expire; but their account at the Volksbank was surpassingly healthy, and they had plenty of friends in the city. Why change continents, he told himself, when it was so much easier to change one’s mind?
With this thought percolating in his brain, Kaspar set out one August morning—slightly nervous, perhaps, but confident, all things considered—to have lunch with his brother at Trattner’s. He’d spoken with Waldemar directly this time, and the exchange had been cordial in the extreme. He himself had been the one to suggest the location, intending it both as an olive branch and as a harmless joke; his brother had praised their goulash and suggested one o’clock.