John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“I can certainly understand your position, Herr Eichberg,” Kaspar said again, doing his best to strike a note of civic decency. “Furthermore, I can appreciate why I — as a gentile of a certain standing, and the husband of a favorite former student — might come to mind as a go-between in this very unfortunate matter.” (Here Eichberg made to interrupt, but my grandfather silenced him with an admonitory finger.) “I fear, however, that the United Germanic Front is likely to view me as something of a traitor to its cause. Given my familial connections — of which you must be aware, having come, as you say, from my very own house—”

“Your familial connections?” said Eichberg, grinning queerly at the other customers. To Kaspar’s disbelief and horror, a number of them returned his grin, and one — a matron with bushy gray eyebrows — actually let out a snort. “It’s precisely because of those connections, Professor Toula, that I stand before you.”

Kaspar felt himself recoil slightly, overcome by a feeling of guilt and foreboding that he could in no way account for. “What on earth are you alluding to?”

“Are you not,” Eichberg went on, no longer smiling, “the brother of Waldemar von Toula?”

* * *

After the conversation with Eichberg — which lasted nearly an hour — Kaspar staggered home to Sonja like a man who’d been hit by a Daimler. His wife was waiting on the parlor divan, a piping pot of Ostfriesen BOP beside her, as though she’d foreseen his arrival down to the smallest detail: his light-headedness, his thirst, and his desperate desire for some scrap of evidence, however piddling, that the life he’d so painstakingly contrived was stable enough to withstand this latest shock. Sonja was at the zenith of what Kaspar would later refer to as her “Athena phase,” a period during which nothing could disturb her equanimity. He flopped down beside her as she dispensed the cream, then the tea, then a single lump of nut-brown sugar each.

“What is it, Kasparchen? What has Waldemar done?”

For some reason her question annoyed him. “Didn’t Eichberg tell you? You’re the one who told him where to find me.”

Sonja looked at him then — looked him straight in the eye — and he felt an emotion so foreign to him that it was only much later, with the benefit of hindsight, that he was able to call it by its proper name. At the time it felt less like shame than nausea.

“Waldemar’s mixed up with the United Germanic Front,” he heard himself reply. “He’s been involved with them for quite some time, apparently.” He then found himself describing the party’s platform to his wife, though she knew it better than he did himself: the unification of all German-speaking peoples, the restoration of the monarchy, the severing of ties to Rome and the Catholic Church, and the purging of “Israelite influence” from the government and the economy and the culture as a whole. “God only knows what led them to poor Moses Eichberg, of all people. He thinks it may have been someone at his school — a student with a grudge, or possibly even a colleague.” He squinted bleakly down into his teacup. “At any rate, word somehow reached those drooling fanatics that Eichberg had said we should all count our blessings that the empire had been consigned to the ash heap of history, or some such foolishness. They were waiting for him this afternoon — a whole gang of them, more than a dozen — outside the school. They took him by the heels and dragged him, face-first, the length of Sechskrüglgasse. He asked where they were taking him and they answered ‘to keep an appointment.’ When they let him go he was in front of Trattner’s coffeehouse — the one with the leaded glass window, do you remember?”

Sonja nodded. “We once ate some strudel there.”

“That’s right,” said Kaspar, hesitating a moment. “They make strudel exactly the way my mother used to make it, back in Znaim.”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing, really. Eichberg looked through the glass and saw Waldemar sitting inside.”

She smiled at him. “You call that nothing?”

“One of them said, ‘Moses Eichberg: Waldemar von Toula. Stand up straight. Tip your hat to His Lordship.’ Waldemar watched him through the glass for a moment, then turned back to his coffee. Eichberg had the impression that his face — Eichberg’s, I mean — was being committed to memory. Then they told him he was free to go.”

“That’s all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

She sat back on the sofa. “You’ll have to go and find him, I suppose.”

“Excuse me?”

She let out a sigh. “He’ll be expecting you. He may even have done this thing because of you. Because of us.”

“I can’t understand it,” said Kaspar. “The UGF are reactionaries of the lowest order. And what’s this von Toula nonsense? Has he gotten himself knighted?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, in this day and age.”

“I can’t imagine what I could possibly say to him. Not after all of this.”

His wife sipped her tea. “But you’ll go to him, won’t you?”

For the first time in a great while he looked at her sharply. “Why the hell do you want me to see him so badly? Do you honestly think it will do any good?”

Sonja said nothing.

“You know me, Schätzchen ,” he murmured, cursing the adolescent quaver in his voice. “You know the type of character I am.”

“I know the type of character you’ve become.”

She said it affectionately, mildly, the way a mother might speak to an obstinate child. And his response was a child’s as well, taking his cue from her, as he’d done for nearly twenty carefree years.

“I can’t go to him, anyhow. I have no idea where he spends his time.”

“That’s true,” agreed Sonja. “But you might begin at Trattner’s coffeehouse.”

* * *

Thus began perhaps the strangest week of my grandfather’s duration — one that reminded him, unpleasantly, of his vigil at the Jandek years before. Each day at noon he found himself standing in front of Trattner’s gargantuan window, peering in through its varicolored glass, then making his way cautiously inside — suffering the scrutiny of the regulars, who made no effort to conceal their curiosity — and finding a seat in the darkest available nook. Trattner’s was a more reputable establishment than the Jandek, but Kaspar felt no more at ease at its immaculately polished marble tables than he had in the Jandek’s stained and threadbare booths. He felt incongruous in that hushed bourgeois temple, every inch the Czech from the provinces, a feeling he’d thought to have outgrown years before. His sole source of solace was the waitress, a dumpling-cheeked Serb barely out of her teens, whose haunches shook like aspic as she crossed the gleaming floor.

On day eight of his vigil a greasy blue mist hung in coils, refusing to congeal into a drizzle, and the people who passed Trattner’s window wore identical crestfallen looks, as though their umbrellas were conspiring against them. One heavyset man — about Kaspar’s age, with a close-cropped head and a pinched, nearsighted expression — stopped just outside the glass, calmly closed his umbrella, and handed it to a needy passerby. What a remarkable gesture , Kaspar thought absently. I approve of that fellow . By then the man was inside Trattner’s, halfway to the nearest vacant table, with the morning paper in his right hand and a comically large meerschaum in his left. It wasn’t until he placed his order with the Serb that Kaspar recognized him. That voice could belong to no other.

“A large mocca , at room temperature, with a small cube of unsalted butter,” said Waldemar crisply. “A bowl of goulash, cold, with a pumpernickel roll cut into fourths. Two fingers’ worth of anise-flavored brandy, lightly peppered.” The Serb nodded as he marched through his preposterous order, showing no surprise at any of it. He was shabbily dressed, but his shabbiness had something affected about it, even genteel. He’s putting on airs, Kaspar thought. And he’s doing it well.