by John Wray
I set down the shirt I was folding. “Mrs. Haven—”
“But here’s the problem. I’ve staked my future on you, Walter, maybe even my life. And there’s no going back from that. Not ever.” You bit your lip for a moment. “I still don’t understand what you came here to find—”
Just then, so fleetingly it barely registered, I felt a slight twinge of suspicion. You were playing the part of the innocent so well—a thousand times better than I could have managed. The performance called attention to itself.
“I’ve told you,” I said. “The missing pages to my great-grandfather’s notebook. The ones that explain—that I hope will explain—what he meant by the Lost Time Accidents. But I’m starting to doubt—”
“If that’s what you’re after, why waste time with the Toulas? You told me his mistress was the last one to see him alive. Marta Svoboda, wasn’t it? The wife of the butcher?”
I rolled my eyes in frustration. “I’ve been to see all the Svobodas in Znojmo, Mrs. Haven. No one knows what I’m talking about.”
“Is that all?” You cocked your head at me. “You can’t find any of Marta’s relatives?”
“That’s all. And since I can’t find her relatives, I’m sure you’ll agree—”
“Your mistake was looking for Svobodas,” you said matter-of-factly. “Marta only had one child—a daughter. That daughter married into the Hargovas, who own the electronics shop on Kollárova Street. Their son is the custodian of the Václav Prokop Divis house. Does that name ring a bell?”
I said nothing for at least half a minute. “Václav Prokop—”
“That poor cross-eyed priest who invented the lightning rod. The train we came here on was named after him.”
“I know who he was, Mrs. Haven. What I don’t understand—”
“Adéla Hargova is the sweet old granny who gave me those boiled eggs in vinegar.” You pointed at a jar on the sideboard. “The one with the limp and the little mustache. She also happens to be Marta Svoboda’s granddaughter.”
I let out a slow breath. “Have you told her about me? About what I’m here for?”
“I’ve told everybody what you’re here for. How else could I have found all this out?”
“Could you take—” I was stammering again. “Could you take me to her?”
The smile you gave me was so conspiratorial, so self-understood, that I sensed there might be some hope for us yet.
* * *
Adéla Hargova lived in a bright, dreary flat that smelled faintly of beer, on the third floor of a housing complex that must already have looked decrepit the year it was built. Everything about the place was defiantly Soviet bloc, including Boromir, the man of the house. He ignored us completely—some arcane, ultraviolent sporting event was on TV—which was probably all for the best. We sat with Adéla in her curtainless kitchen, sipping wonderfully peppery oolong tea, eating okurky and fresh-baked bread with raisins in it. Our hostess scrutinized me darkly.
“You are Toula?”
“Not exactly, Mrs. Hargova.” I smiled. “But dost blízko. Close enough.”
“Who are you?”
Her expression was scornful, inclining toward anger, but for once in my duration I was ready. I laid three photographs on the table: a playing-card-sized daguerreotype of my great-grandfather, a snapshot of Kaspar and Waldemar at Belvedere Palace in Vienna, and a Polaroid of Orson dandling me on his knee. She glared at each in turn, then back at me. The look on her face remained grim.
“You are Toula?” she repeated.
“Yes, Mrs. Hargova,” you cut in, taking her hand. “Waldemar Tolliver, son of Orson, son of Kaspar, son of Ottokar. Syn Ottokar Gottfriedens Toula.”
“I know the man,” she said. “All of us know. Passport, prosím.”
I gave her my passport—thanking chance and fate and Providence that I’d remembered to bring it along—and she inspected it as thoroughly as any border guard. Then she leaned back in her threadbare, potato-shaped armchair and knocked twice on the flimsy wall behind her.
“Coming out for our guests, Artur,” she singsonged. “Bringing also the box.”
A chair was pushed back on the far side of the wall, a pocket door opened, and the blind boy from the station shuffled out. You looked as startled to see him as I was.
“This is Artur,” Adéla announced. “Artur is historik in our home.”
Artur squinted at us through his chalk-pebble eyes. He was a handsome-enough boy, if a little dough-faced; but there was something pinched about him, even sly. Though we were unrelated, as far as I knew, I saw a hint of Waldemar in his elegant, affectless features. I held tightly to the creaking stool beneath me. I was within grasping distance of the Accidents: closer than any Toula had been in more than eighty years. I could feel it, Mrs. Haven, in my fingers and my teeth. The conclusion of our long, recursive quest was close at hand.
“You’re here for the papers, I expect,” Artur said, in English far more polished than his mother’s.
“That’s right, Artur,” I heard you reply. “Thank you for preserving them for us.”
“We did nothing for you,” he said quickly. “We did this for the family—our family.” His grip on the box tightened. “We did this for history.”
“Artur says to me—always—these are science pages,” his mother put in. “Scientists will come to ask, he says. Technicians. I am always thinking these are poems.” She beamed at him, then glowered back at us. She really was a wonderful old biddy.
“Which is the scientist?” Artur demanded.
“Walter is, of course. Just look at him!” You gripped my knee under the table.
“What will happen with these pages, Mr. Walter? You are meaning to employ them for research? To publish? To win the Nobel?”
I looked from the son to the mother. The air in the kitchen had gone thick and damp. The question had never been put to me before—not so directly—but it was easy to answer. I had only one answer to give.
“I’m not looking to use them at all, Artur—not in the way that you mean. The contents of that box are an end for me, not a beginning. That’s what an answer is, isn’t it? The end of a question?” I coughed into my fist, stalling for time, aware of the micrometer-thin ice I was skating on. “If those pages have a purpose at all, it’s to put the past behind me. To put a hundred-year-old ghost—a starověký fantóm—to rest.”
Silence fell for a moment.
“The end?” Artur said.
I nodded.
“All right, then—the end.” He broke into a grin, as though I’d delivered some password, and held the box toward me. “I wish you luck with this.”
I mumbled my thanks in Czech—the phrase book was coming in handy at last—and took the box from him. Its lightness surprised me. I seemed to feel a faint subsonic thrum.
“Go on, Walter,” you said. “Open it.”
It was a typical teenage boy’s treasure chest—crows’ feathers, spent shotgun cartridges, dated Czechoslovakian coins—except for three sheets of foolscap at the very bottom, slightly too wide for the box, covered in precise courant script. The first two pages were journal entries; the third looked to be a single formula, so dense as to be almost indecipherable. I’d have to find a mathematician to make sense of it, I realized, and possibly a handwriting specialist. I was getting ahead of myself, Mrs. Haven, but I couldn’t help that. It was all that I could do to keep from shouting.
“It was wonderful of you—both of you—to have guarded these papers,” I murmured. “My family has been searching for my great-grandfather’s notes since the day of his death. We thought that they’d vanished forever.”
“He told Marta—our Marta—that men would be coming,” Adéla Hargova said. “Coming after the papers. He told her not to give them.” She grew suddenly shy. “That is the story I know.”
“And she hid them. Bless her for that. She knew they were important.”
“Ah! I’m not sure about that.”
“What do you me
an, Mrs. Hargova?”
“He told her to burn them,” Artur said, smiling strangely.
“Burn them?”
He nodded. “Or throw them away.”
* * *
As soon as we stepped outside I saw the mover. He was standing at the entrance to Masarykovo Square, dressed in a well-cut gray suit, holding his hands out, palms upward, as if checking for rain. It was the man who’d been carrying the clipboard in my cousin’s apartment, the one the other movers deferred to: the man they all called Little Brother. The square was unusually crowded—it was Saturday, a market day—but he stood out as if he were spotlit. I felt surprise, I remember, but only a flutter. It was as if I’d agreed to meet him there, at that particular juncture of spacetime, then forgotten we had an appointment. He of course showed no surprise at all.
I waited until we were halfway across the square to tell you. You took my hand and gripped it.
“You were right, Walter. We should have left yesterday.”
“Do you recognize him?”
“It’s you they’re here for—you and Ottokar’s papers. Not me.” You let go of my hand. “It’s all right. We can lose him.”
“Lose him? How would we—”
“There’s just one of him—at least so far—and two of us. We’ll have to split up.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if it’s you they want?”
You shook your head. “They’ve been waiting for this to happen, Walter. Waiting for you to come here for those notes.”
I stopped short and turned you to face me. We were at the edge of the square, screened from view by a row of stalls selling iridescent raincoats; I couldn’t see Little Brother, but I knew he was close. The sun came out then, shining into your eyes, and I watched your pupils narrow into pinpricks.
“How long have you known about this, Mrs. Haven?”
“There’s no time for that, Walter—do you understand? Meet me in an hour at the Václav Prokop Divis house. I’ll get us a car.”
You spun on your heels—your square, well-calloused heels that fit so perfectly into my palms—and hurried off down Kollárova Street. Just that morning you’d treated my search for my great-grandfather’s papers with amused condescension; now you’d told me with perfect matter-of-factness that your husband’s goons had followed us to Europe for no other reason. You’d looked pained to have to say it, even angry. But that may have been due to the sun.
“Mrs. Haven!”
“Yes, Walter? What is it?”
You came back to me eagerly, as though you knew we’d never meet again, and wanted one last look, however ill-advised, to recollect me by. I still choose to believe that was the reason.
“Take the notes, Hildy.”
“The notes?” you said, frowning. “I don’t understand.”
“If that man follows me, it’s the notes that he wants. But if he follows you—if you’re the reason he’s here—then the notes aren’t important. And either way they’re safer in your hands.”
You made as if to say something, then closed your eyes and gave the slightest nod. I undid the top two buttons of the jacket you’d bought in Vienna and slid the pages inside, then pulled your body close to mine and kissed you. It was my best attempt at a heroic gesture, my last turn in the spotlight, and I’m proud to say I took my time about it. That kiss enabled me to recover my nerve, Mrs. Haven, the way an overdone flourish helps a second-rate actor remember his line. By the time you’d disappeared around the corner of Kollárova Street I was ready for the worst that might befall.
I slipped out past the raincoats, back into the open, and waited calmly there for Little Brother. He came into view almost instantly, no longer feigning indifference, fixing his creased pink smoker’s eyes on mine. He was moving like an old man, silently and smoothly, in that terrible, deliberate tai chi way of his. He could have moved faster, I’m sure, but he chose to go slowly. He was giving me a sporting shot—the chance to make my break—and I didn’t wait around to ask him why.
You’d taken Kollárova Street south, so I headed due west, down Lazebnická Street toward the river. You’d been right, Mrs. Haven. It was me he was after. The thing to do now was give him the slip and get to the Divis house without attracting notice. I forced myself to think. We bought our breakfast houskas from a baker on Antonínská Street, less than half a block away. If I ducked into his shop before Little Brother rounded the corner, and begged him, as a loyal customer, to let me through into the courtyard—
“Hello, Waldy.”
I recognized that honeyed voice at once. It belonged to a man in a corduroy blazer and cheap-looking loafers, leaning against a pockmarked stucco wall, leafing casually through the local paper. Which had to mean that he’d known, well before I knew myself, that I’d come running up the street at just that hour.
He studied me at his leisure, paying particular attention to my eyes, as though taking note of how the years had changed me. I could find no anger or ill will in his expression—I could locate no emotion there at all. I remembered what you’d told me on the train up from Vienna: your husband cultivated boredom to impede his sense of time. And I became aware, as I stood frozen in place—excruciatingly aware, but in a far-off sort of way—that panic seemed to have the same effect.
“No cause for alarm, pal,” he said sleepily. “I’m not going to cut your cock off with a rusty pair of scissors. I’m not even going to punch you in the nose.”
I took a half step backward, slipping slightly on the cobblestones, and asked him why not.
“Do you need me to say it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Because you’ve rendered me—and the Church of Synchronology, and the entire human race—an invaluable service. A service that only you, Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, son of Orson, grandson of Kaspar, great-grandson of Ottokar, could have performed. We’ve been trying to get our hands on that theorem for years.”
I mumbled something to the effect that I thought he’d put his Iterant days behind him—that he was a financier now. He smiled wistfully.
“It’s a fallen world, Waldy. I’ve had to adapt. The public respects a businessman considerably more than a philosopher in the current age, never mind a prophet.” He folded his newspaper neatly down the middle. “But thanks to you, pal, public opinion is going to matter less to us—much less—than it has previously. We’ll have other means of bringing folks around.”
“By traveling into the past and changing things, you mean. By manipulating history.”
He gave a tuneless whistle.
“Listen to me, Haven. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain to you about the grandmother—”
“Let’s not presume, Waldy. Let’s not get impatient. We’ll have to review those calculations first.”
“Why not use Enzie’s exclusion bin? That’s what you’ve been after all along, isn’t it?”
His smile tightened slightly. “We overestimated your aunt’s abilities, I’m afraid. She may not have chosen to share this with you, Waldy, but that contraption of hers never worked. Not even a little.”
“Is that right?” I said, thinking of the hours I’d spent in that dark nowhere place and of the series of visions I’d seen. Enzie had told Haven one lie, at least. There was reason for hope.
Haven shook his head. “You saw for yourself that Enzian’s ‘bin’ was no more than a painted packing crate. We’ve since determined that anything—any confined space at all—can be used, if it falls within certain parameters.” He grinned at that, as if he’d made a joke. “What exactly those parameters might be—the ideal, specific ratio—has eluded all of us so far, your daffy aunts included. But it didn’t elude old Ottokar.” He let out a sigh. “What an extraordinary man he must have been.”
“It didn’t elude him? How could you know that?”
The slyness crept back into Haven’s face. “Your great-grandfather made one successful jump forward, remained for three-quarters of an hour, then returned to the instant and location of his death. We have reason to
believe that he manifested himself at this very corner, in fact, at twelve forty-seven CET on June eighth, 1970.”
My head felt hot and light and full of noise. “What ‘reason to believe’ could you possibly have?”
“Enzian told us. She was very clear-cut.”
“But how could she have known?”
“Isn’t that obvious, Waldy? Because she was there.”
I said nothing to that.
Haven regarded me fondly. “See if you can follow me, pal. Ottokar was walking home from his mistress’s house—in a postcoital daze, I’m assuming—when a man who could have been his doppelgänger passed him on the street. Seconds later, before he could act, he saw this same man run down by a car. Your great-grandfather slipped in among the crowd that had formed around the accident, and realized, to his amazement, that the man on the ground was himself. Not only that, but the victim was dressed in the clothes that he himself had on, with an identical mustard stain on the lapel. Ottokar realized at once what this event signified. It meant that he had, as he’d suspected and hoped, hit on the secret of chrononavigation that very morning in his workshop. But far more than that: it proved that he would manage to break free of the chronostream, not at some point in the future, but on that very day. How else could his body occupy the same t-coordinate twice, in precisely the same suit of clothes?”
“Hold on a second. I don’t see how—”
“Ottokar rushed back to his cellar and lost no time in putting what he’d learned into practice, first using his sons’ pet cicada as a trial subject, then experimenting directly on himself. He was not as astonished by his rapid success as he might otherwise have been: he’d seen the proof with his own eyes, after all, less than an hour before. When the moment came—and it came quickly—to put his discovery to the ultimate test, he boldly cut the chronologic ties that bound him. Thus began an extended, random odyssey through the chronosphere: not unlike that of the protagonist of ‘Everywhen,’ my personal favorite among your father’s works.”
“A hack job,” I managed to stammer. Haven shrugged and continued.