John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

But no sooner had Kaspar had this thought than he suppressed it. A tremor ran through his body, drawing him away from his brother’s desk, and he made no attempt to resist. By eight o’clock the next morning, the sum of Waldemar’s earthly possessions was sitting on the street in a battered gray trunk, and by evening it was gathering dust in a corner of Professor Silbermann’s cellar, where it would remain until Waldemar — in a black Daimler coupe, with two men whose attire matched the Daimler beautifully — came back from the dead to collect it.

Silbermann himself, who’d never exhibited much interest in Waldemar while he’d been one of his students, made an elaborate show of solicitude when Kaspar arrived with the trunk, going so far as to take him by the hand. “Madness is a hazard of our profession,” he said gravely. “Especially among our most gifted.” Misunderstanding Kaspar’s pained smile, he attempted a joke, one that rang rather too true for comfort: “You and I, my dear boy, may thank our stars that we run no such risk!”

* * *

A quote from Kubler comes to mind when I consider my grandfather in the period that followed — the bland, complacent decades of his prime:

Why should actuality forever escape our grasp?

The universe has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events, but also the speed of our perceptions. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and the ash of that cosmic storm which we call the Present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.

Actuality did indeed prove elusive to Kaspar at the start of his twenties, as it tends to do for persons in a state of bliss. His bliss was not entirely free of shadow, however. Waldemar had passed out of Kaspar’s world, and practically out of his awareness; but my grandfather would always view his brother’s disappearance as the fulcrum point between his youth and his adulthood. Time had advanced slowly until that apalling night, as it does for the young, whose days are spent in expectation of something they can never fully name. Now, with Waldemar gone, Kaspar seemed to fall headfirst into each day, in a kind of perpetually overwhelmed and dreamlike wonder. The years between his brother’s departure and his homecoming would eventually come to seem of no greater longevity, no more cumulative weight, than certain consecrated moments of his childhood: the day of the cicada, for example, whose every instant glittered in his recollection.

These were Kaspar’s most substantial years, and by far his most contented; but it seemed to him that they were passed in trivialities, in an infinite succession of agreeable, judicious actions (grading student essays, putting up wallpaper, watching his wife reading, listening with closed eyes from the couch as she talked politics with her ism -ists in the parlor) all of which, taken together, formed a portrait of Kaspar Toula in tiny colored dots, like a sketch by some self-satisfied impressionist. By his thirtieth birthday he felt subtly corrupt, as willingly opiated as Sonja’s precious proletariat, with nothing to blame but the remarkable ease of his love, and the security he’d worked for so unwaveringly.

On certain rare nights, when these intimations of decadence were at their most acute, he found himself leafing through the few notes on his father’s work that his brother had left behind. With each passing year, however, they seemed more naïve, more distant from what he’d come to understand as science. My grandfather had always been too practical — too orthodox — to subscribe to his brother’s mystical exegesis of Ottokar’s note: his opinion was that the note was gibberish, pure and simple. He’d abandoned research almost completely after special relativity, and had eked out a career for himself as a lecturer in “classical” physics, taking care to stop well short of Michelson and Morley. His father may have been a fallen idol to him — as a scientist and husband, certainly, and perhaps even as a father — but Kaspar was still, in those early years of the century, determined to place no other gods before him.

For the Patent Clerk, meanwhile, these were the decades of triumph. In 1913, just before the war began, he was brought to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, where, reverently sheltered from the devastion sweeping Europe, he did some of his most radical and elegant work. A year into the war, he completed his general theory of relativity, which posits that neither time nor space are constant. In 1919, with the war barely over and both the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in ruins, a series of British observations during a solar eclipse confirmed relativity’s prediction that the gravitational pull of the sun would cause light rays to bend, silencing the last remaining skeptics — aside from those who resisted the theory simply because its author was a Jew, or because he was a German, or because he was incomparably more gifted than they were.

An acquaintance of Sonja’s from her Café Jandek days published a poem — bluntly entitled “Vienna”—that caused quite a stir in the city:

Vienna, in ruins, is weeping.

Vienna, you ancient, coldhearted whore …

A scrofulous panderer to this world …

Now famished, you whimper,

So heavily does your wickedness weigh:

An empire frittered away.

Sonja read the poem aloud in bed one evening, her regal face suffused with high emotion; her husband remained unaffected. Many dear friends had died, it was true, but so had several people he’d despised. What use was there in rage and histrionics? The bullet that had so neatly clipped away the top of his left ear had gone on to bisect the brain of a man named Metterling, whose fifteen-year-old fiancée had thrown herself into the Danube on hearing the news. This chain of events troubled Kaspar occasionally, especially when he’d been drinking; but most of the time it failed to hold his interest. On his evenings at home — and they were all spent at home now, unless Sonja had a meeting or a rally to attend — he found it easy to convince himself that the city outside his door was an illusion.

In that dim, spectral city, anti-Semitism seemed suddenly pandemic, more rabid than it had been in centuries, which struck him as the finest joke of all. The posturers of the United Germanic Front, with their foam-flecked lips, their fists full of pamphlets, and their watch chains with little silver pendants (like upside-down crucifixes, if you didn’t look too closely) symbolizing a hanged Jew, put my grandfather in mind of children playing preacher when he heard their diatribes; and it took a concerted effort not to hear them lately, since they felt no need to keep their voices down. Just a few steps from the duck pond in the Stadtpark where he’d pledged his love to Sonja, the battered body of a boy from the neighborhood shul was discovered, his gullet stuffed with pages torn out of a Torah; when the blame was placed — after the most cursory of inquiries — on “unidentified Slavic vagrants,” not a soul in that great Hauptstadt was surprised.

A few months later, when Kaspar read, in an editorial in a respected paper, a prominent critic’s suicide described as “the only reasonable response to the dilemma of his Jewish nature,” he laughed, as he would have done at any piece of vaudeville. His wife saw considerably less to laugh at; but he did his best to put her fears to rest. “This world is a loony bin, Schätzchen ,” he told her. “Luckily for us, our front door happens to be one of its exits.” He knew that this motto of his made her uneasy — that it could be interpreted in two very different ways — but he found himself unwilling to forgo it. The truth, whether he’d have admitted it or not, was that he said it as a spell to ward off demons.