by John Wray
A few minutes later, looking down from the deck (second class now, not first), another sensation overcame him, one he was even less accustomed to: the intimation, building quietly to a certainty, that what he was seeing was a projection in a vast and secret cinema. Genoa’s cramped, chaotic harbor, its oddly marrow-colored sky, the stevedores hosing detritus off the quay—everything he saw appeared heightened, imbued with morality and portent, a judgment on the easy life he’d known. He was part of the film, perhaps even one of its principal players. But he sensed that it was on its final reel.
Nonsense! he told himself, holding Gentian up to look over the rail. Everyone feels this way at a departure. Nothing’s ending, because there isn’t any film.
“This is happening,” Sonja whispered, gripping him by the elbow. “Isn’t that so, Kasparchen? Tell me, please, that all of this is real.”
“This is happening, Sonja,” he said, and felt the truth of it as a rawness in his throat. “They’re weighing anchor now. We’re shoving off.”
“All right. If you’re sure.”
He turned to regard her as she drew herself up, chin thrown forward like a figurehead, teardrops guttering unnoticed from her crow’s feet to her jaw. What to say to her in such a moment?
“Sonja—”
“Blow a kiss to your opa and oma, Enzian,” Sonja called to their daughter, who was standing apart from them, gazing impassively at the quay below. “When you see them next, you’ll be the Queen of Time and Space, you know. And I’ll be dead.”
Kaspar would never be able to say with certainty, in years to come, whether his wife had truly said those words as he remembered them—but by then, of course, they had already passed into legend. He doubted his ears even at the time, and Enzian was no help to him at all. She continued to look evenly down at the quay, as mature for her age as her mother seemed girlish for hers, holding loosely to the crenellated rail.
* * *
No sooner had the Comtesse left port than Sonja fell backward gracefully—almost eagerly—onto the bright, hissing bed of her illness. Kaspar managed to keep the truth from the captain and the crew for some time, out of fear of being forcibly put ashore (he put the blame for her condition on seasickness, which was rampant everywhere on that decrepit tub), but finally his fear for her prevailed. From Genoa to Viareggio to Naples to Palermo she grew steadily worse, the readiness of her submission somehow shameless; Kaspar, who’d never succumbed to jealousy in thirty years of marriage, found himself now, as his wife slowly left him, behaving like a cuckold in a farce. He attended to her every requirement, taking all of his meals in their stateroom, rarely letting her out of his sight. His attentions grew more oppressive by the day—he sensed this himself—but he was utterly helpless to curb them.
Sonja’s condition worsened in the course of the passage from Spain, as did Kaspar’s own. The ship had an excellent onboard physician (the elegant, somewhat horse-faced Dr. Tildy, formerly of the Prussian cavalry) but Kaspar—who’d welcomed Tildy, on his first visit, with tears of gratitude—soon came to resent his intrusions. His wife was winnowing before his eyes, turning brittle and yellow as a scrap of old newsprint, and he realized now, much too late, that he lacked the grace and fortitude to bear it. Unable to restrain himself, he would ask—would demand to know—how she was feeling half a dozen times an hour. Enzian and Gentian were no help to him, either: they were absorbed in a narrative of their own invention, whispering together for hours on end, looking back and forth between their mother’s bed and the sea beyond the porthole as though there were no difference between them.
Just after dawn, three days out from Gibraltar, Kaspar awoke wide-eyed and alert, as though someone beside him had whispered his name. The same force that roused him brought him onto his feet, accustomed by now to the pitch of the ship, and steered him gently toward the open door. He was aware that he was barefoot—that he was stark naked, in fact—and that the morning was unusually cold. Snow was falling in flurries, although it was still early autumn. He was dimly aware, without finding it strange, that he and his family were alone on the Comtesse Celeste. He glanced down at the twins, side by side on their backs, like two fish in the bottom of a boat. Then he stepped out to join Sonja at the rail.
“There you are,” she said. Her voice was hoarse from disuse. “I’ve been trying to get you up. To talk to me.”
He looked past her at the dishwater-colored ocean, translucent and jagged in the September light, a roiling field of chipped and age-worn china. Sonja was smiling at him, lovely as ever, wrapped in one of her white linen gowns. It put him in mind of something. He was beginning, by small but steady increments, to understand that he should feel surprised—but even that discovery felt familiar. She’d been one lifelong surprise to him, after all.
“I’ve been sick,” she said.
He nodded.
“You’ve been sick, too.”
It was difficult for him to answer. “You’ve been in bed for ten days,” he said. “You’ve had a high fever. I can appreciate your wanting fresh air, my darling, but it might be for the best—”
“Ach! It’s been longer than that,” Sonja said. “I’ve been sick since our first night together.” She raised one slender arm to shade her eyes. “I was in love with you, you see. It ended badly.”
What she said was distressing, and he intended to ask what in God’s name she meant, but he found himself saying something else entirely. “It didn’t end badly,” he said, placing his hand over hers. “We’ve been wonderfully happy. If it’s a sickness, we’ve been fortunate to catch it.”
“All right,” she said, turning her back on the sea. “It’s all right, Kasparchen. Let’s go to the beginning.”
Her body showed clearly through the wave-colored linen, gaunt and frail from the fever, and he knew, in that instant, when and where he’d seen that gown before. It was the same one she’d worn, apple-cheeked and defiant, on the day his earthly fate had been decided. The noise of the sea fell away and the outline of her form began to flicker. The deck and ocean were struck, rolled away like a stage set, and he was back in the tubercular light of the Jandek, the soles of his shoes sticking to the beer-soaked floor, watching a girl of not-quite-seventeen light a cigarette. He murmured her name—he knew this girl well, after all—and she looked up and laughed, surprised to see him there. He straightened in his booth as she came toward him.
* * *
The man who staggered off the train in Buffalo, New York’s Union Station on New Year’s Day 1939, gripping the shoulders of his daughters as if he needed them to walk, was so changed that his wife’s second cousin—the notorious “Buffalo Bill”—passed them by without slowing his step. Wilhelm Knarschitz was a pursy, preoccupied man (“the opposite of any kind of cowboy,” my grandfather wrote in his diary) with the unfortunate habit of chewing on the ends of his mustache. He failed to notice his nieces altogether, on account of the cameo photograph he held stiff-armed in front of him, like a fetish to deflect the evil eye. On his second go-round, Kaspar (who had no picture to go by) made an educated guess and caught his cousin-in-law by the sleeve—which was lucky, since Wilhelm’s fetish was no use to anyone. It was a picture of Sonja at the Washerwomen’s Ball.
“Kaspar, is it? Delightful!” Wilhelm stammered in yankified Yiddish. He took hold of his cousin-in-law by both the elbow and the shoulder, shaking every part of him except his hand. “Professor Kaspar Toula, as I live and perspire!”
“Kaspar Tolliver,” my grandfather corrected him. “We’re Americans now. We’ve put Europe behind us.”
“You have trunks?” demanded Wilhelm. “Of course you have trunks! What we need is a porter.” He squinted up the platform, still oblivious to the presence of the twins. “Where’s that cousin of mine?”
“In the water,” said Enzian.
Wilhelm skipped lightly backward. “Whatever do you mean, dear?” When Enzian didn’t answer, he stared bug-eyed at Kaspar. “Whatever does she mean?”
“In th
e ocean,” Gentian murmured from the far side of the trunk. “The Atlantic. We left her down there.”
There’d been a point in Kaspar’s duration—not too far in the past—when such an exchange would have fascinated him, proof as it was of his daughters’ difference from other children; now he did no more than shrug his shoulders. “I wrote you a letter from New York,” he said, in response to Wilhelm’s flabbergasted look. “Did you read it?”
“Naturally I read it. I’m here to meet you, aren’t I?” Wilhelm hesitated. “Of course, there may have been certain points—”
“I have something to tell you,” said Kaspar. “Sit down on this trunk.”
Wilhelm’s reaction to the news of Sonja’s death was no less singular than the twins’ had been: he sat utterly still for the space of a breath, covering his mouth with two fingers, then smoothed down his pant legs and clenched his eyes shut. Gentian and Enzian studied him the way they studied everything. Kaspar sat down next to him and waited.
By the time Wilhelm’s eyes finally opened, the four of them were alone on the platform. He drew himself up, heaved a decorous sigh, and brushed a single tear from each eye corner.
“In light of what you’ve told me,” he said, “My course of action is clear. I’m prepared to formally adopt the children.”
Kaspar explained to his cousin-in-law that adoption wouldn’t be necessary, given that he himself was still alive, and Wilhelm looked appropriately relieved. In all but a strictly legal sense, however, he did come to adopt Enzian and Gentian—and even, in those precarious first months, Kaspar himself. The promised apartment was set aside in favor of Wilhelm’s comfortable sandstone manse on Voorhees Avenue, and Kaspar’s arithmetical gifts were put to immediate use. Fastidious as Buffalo Bill was in his person—his hair immaculately Brylcreemed, his twill suits never less than einwandfrei—the accounts of Empress Sisi’s Cabinet, his jewelry shop, were the bookkeeping equivalent of smoldering dung. As Providence (or fate, or random chance) would have it, Kaspar had materialized in his cousin-in-law’s life at precisely the moment at which he was most desperately required.
The challenge of transmuting chaos into order—bordering, as it did in the case of Wilhelm’s accounts, on outright alchemy—turned out to be the ideal task to arrest Kaspar’s descent into despair. The twins, for their part, got along with their uncle beautifully, in spite of the fact that he regarded them—when he noticed them at all—with the same benign befuddlement he’d first shown at the station. A Kindermädchen was procured from somewhere (a poker-faced drudge whose German was as unintelligible as her English) and Wilhelm obligingly picked up the tab. His own sainted mother had died the previous year, and he was still mourning her passionately: he never failed to kiss his fingertips and hold them up to heaven when Mutter Knarschitz was mentioned, which caused the twins to snicker with delight.
Buffalo Bill, in other words, was nothing like the character Sonja had dreamed up for him, for which my grandfather was deeply grateful. He was grateful for practically everything, in fact, over the course of that first stunned, defenseless year. In haughtier days, Mrs. Haven, he might have found much to disapprove of in the life he’d fallen into; but Kaspar was a new man now, with a social security number and a name that still rang foreign to his ears, and disapproval was an Old World luxury. A life of some sort was conceivable in this bullish border town; even—with considerably less struggle than he’d feared—a measure of contentment. There was nothing else that he could think to wish for.
* * *
Thanks to the vast, choppy lake at its doorstep (and the canal extending like a 363-mile drainpipe out the back), Buffalo was one of the richest cities in the United States, Chicago’s closest rival as the Paris of the Plains. Honeymoons were spent there; songs were written extolling its glamour; a belt of steel plants on the city’s south side (if the wind was right) made for hyperbolic, lilac-tinted sunsets. The Great Depression’s scars were freshly healed—or freshly powdered over, better said—and the attitude of the citizenry was one of fierce, bulldoggish confidence. A greater contrast to Vienna was hard to imagine. Sonja was right about that much, Kaspar thought, if nothing else.
As the months went by, my grandfather’s mourning took on a peculiar cast—one that would have been inconceivable before the concept of spacetime was proposed. If time was (as science now insisted) best understood as a fourth dimension, then it was erroneous to think of past events as having ceased to be. The past, Kaspar reasoned, is most accurately conceived of as a continent we’ve emigrated from, or better still as a kind of archipelago: a series of nearly contiguous islands, self-contained and autonomous, that we’re constantly in the process of forsaking, simply by moving through time. Like all things past, his wife existed in a zone of the continuum that was inaccessible to him now. This by no means meant that she no longer was.
On occasion—after a nightcap or two, or on a day when the twins had been especially good—this way of thinking actually brought him comfort.
He had a great deal to live for, he reminded himself. He could have stayed in Vienna if he’d wanted to die, and saved himself and his girls (not to mention poor Wilhelm) a great deal of trouble. “But they couldn’t snuff us, those goddamn death fetishists,” he’d growl at my father years later, his tongue primed by sweet British sherry. “We Tollivers are too inquisitive to die.”
Buffalo Bill was a “confirmed bachelor”—with all the quirks and predilections that implied in that era—but he insisted on taking his cousin-in-law, on the second and fourth Friday of each month, to Feinberg’s Star Burlesque Revue downtown. Wilhelm showed less interest in the gambolings onstage than if he’d been at a lecture on personal hygiene, but there was no doubt that the place excited him. He seemed intoxicated by the spotlights and the wine-dark velvet seats, by the cackling and the coarse talk of the crowd, and he barely breathed until the houselights came back up. My grandfather (who enjoyed the show for less poetic reasons) wondered what it was that thrilled his cousin-in-law so deeply, but he resisted the urge to inquire. An important clue, however, was provided in the person of the balcony usher, a Polish kid with thick blond curls and eyes the depthless green of Nordsee ice. There always seemed to be some confusion about their seats when they sat in the balcony, and the usher’s help was invariably required. “I’d give anything on earth to look like that,” Wilhelm murmured one evening, watching the boy make his way nimbly back to the aisle. “Anything.” Kaspar struggled to come up with a suitable answer, then quickly realized that none was necessary. His cousin-in-law had been talking to himself.
Feinberg’s had recently begun showing a newsreel on a gilt-edged canvas screen at intermission, both to keep up with the motion-picture houses on Main Street and to give the girls a chance to cool their heels; and it was there, as per C*F*P’s mandate, that the past made clear to Kaspar that it would not be denied. After an animated short starring a beaver and a backward-running clock (“There’s a Hebrew clock like that in Josefstadt—runs counterclockwise. Big deal,” Wilhelm barked into his ear), and a mercifully brief documentary about Veronica Lake’s “dude ranch” in Malibu, the canvas went grainy and dark. A moment later it brightened again, something dour and Wagnerian began droning over the speakers, and a series of smudges slid diagonally across the screen from left to right.
The crowd starting booing, the focus was futzed with, and the smudges resolved into tanks. The booing got louder. The footage, apparently, came from the old town of Prague—from Josefstadt itself, in fact. The Czechs had given the Nazis more trouble than the Austrians had, but not enough to make the slightest difference. Kaspar found himself composing a list, as the tanks rumbled past, of all the sovereign nations between Prague and Buffalo. It was a sizable list, even without taking the ocean into account; but it wasn’t half as long as he’d have liked. He wondered what was happening in Znojmo.
Wilhelm, who’d been watching Kaspar closely, flung an arm around his neck. “Screw it,” he said. “You’re with family, cou
sin. Bei familie. Those cocksuckers can’t touch us over here.”
Less than six months later, the Patent Clerk would draft his infamous letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him of the likelihood of nuclear fission research in the Third Reich, and urging the development of the atomic bomb.
XIV
I’VE CULLED THE NEXT installment of Waldemar von Toula’s saga partly from family lore and partly from my great-uncle’s “research notes,” but I could just as well have used a college textbook. The swastika-slathered paperback I mentioned in my first entry—The Order of the Death’s Head; The Story of Hitler’s SS, by Heinz Höhne (“TWO LETTERS—LIKE THE HISS OF A SNAKE ABOUT TO STRIKE!”)—sits within easy reach, but I’m not in any rush to pick it up. I use the word saga in acknowledgment of the historic scale of Waldemar’s duration, and of the nightmarish enigma of his fate; but it was anything, Mrs. Haven, but heroic.
The irony in the fact that Waldemar, who’d dreamed so fervidly of immortalizing his father’s name in the annals of physical science, should live to see himself immortalized instead, and for the opposite reason—the perversion of his father’s work, and of scientific ethics—was lost on no one in my family, least of all on Waldemar himself. The Black Timekeeper of Czas won a place in posterity considerably more secure than his nephew’s, fifty-seven published novels notwithstanding, or his nieces’, regardless of their tabloid-perfect end; but now I’ve gone achronological again. In spite of the fact that my great-grandfather will spin in his grave like a centrifuge, I’m going to pretend—out of respect for convention—that time moves forward in a smooth, unbroken line. I’m writing this for my sake, Mrs. Haven, not for his.