John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

If we’d left Znojmo then — right away, that same night — I might even have made a full recovery.

“It’s been a bad week, Walter.” You nodded to yourself. “I’ve been up all night thinking about it. Maybe coming here was a mistake.”

“Coming where? To Znojmo?”

“To Europe.”

I stared down into my suitcase, unable to speak. The problem, of course, was that a part of me agreed. You saw as much and smiled at me forlornly.

“Do you remember euphasia , that word we invented? The feeling you get, coming out of a theater, that the movie you’ve been watching is still going on — still playing everywhere around you — even though it’s actually over?” You nodded to yourself. “I think we might both have euphasia now.”

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.