John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Excuse me!” said Bleichling, insinuating himself deftly between Kaspar and the girl. He was even smaller than he’d first appeared, and his freckled, hairless crown reflected the lamplight like a piece of lacquered crockery — but an instant later Kaspar had forgotten Bleichling completely, because Waldemar stood in his place.

He patted the Serb on the rump as he passed, as if she were in his exclusive service, and she swiveled her ample hips to give him room. He smiled at her, producing a coin between his thumb and middle finger — at which point his gray eyes came to rest on Kaspar.

“You may keep the change, Jelena.”

“ Hvala ti , Herr von Toula. God be with you.”

“Bless you, my child.”

Through the whole of this exchange his brother’s flat, unblinking eyes took Kaspar’s measure, ticking from feature to feature, appraising him with a mild but steady interest. He’s trying to place me, Kaspar thought incredulously. He’s trying to remember where we’ve met. Have I changed to such a degree? Has he stricken me from his memory so completely? Even as he asked himself these questions, however, Kaspar saw the opacity of those eyes for what it was, and reminded himself that he was looking at a madman.

“Umbrella,” said Waldemar.

“Pardon?”

“Your umbrella, sir. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to withdraw it.”

Kaspar looked down warily, suspecting a trick, to find the tip of his umbrella — which he’d entirely forgotten he was holding — pinning Waldemar’s coat to the floor. Another sign, this time unmistakable: the moment had arrived for disclosure, for confrontation, for a reckoning long overdue. It’s your brother, Herr von Toula. Explain to me, if you have a moment, the fundamental points of your philosophy. Tell me what you did in Budapest.

“I’m frightfully sorry,” he said, stepping backward.

“No harm done, brother,” Waldemar answered, receding before Kaspar’s eyes like a mirage.

* * *

No act of terror took place that Saturday, or the next Saturday either, insofar as Kaspar could discover. He’d gone straight to the police from Trattner’s, but the officers had struck him as oddly abstracted, and on subsequent visits they’d made no effort to conceal their lack of interest. Israelites, they informed him, were regularly involved in all manner of trouble. Gustav Bleichling, by contrast, was a grammar school teacher — he taught at the same school as Moses Eichberg, in fact — and was respected by both his colleagues and his pupils. “He’s a teacher of literature ,” one of the gendarmes explained, as though this fact alone were proof that he was harmless. As for Waldemar Toula, he’d reportedly left the city for parts unknown, and in any case the department had been informed of no warrants from Budapest. My grandfather had no choice, ultimately, but to let the matter drop.

WALDEMAR’S SECOND VANISHING ACT was even more accomplished than his first — so much so that Kaspar found himself wondering, as the twenties sped by, whether their encounter at Trattner’s had happened at all. But he knew it had happened, farfetched though it seemed. He had the change in himself to corroborate the memory — and also the change in his wife.

The asylum Kaspar and Sonja had created was as dear to him as ever, Mrs. Haven, but his faith in it was permanently cracked. He was no longer complacent, no longer confident that his indifference to history would protect him or those he loved against its whims. And Sonja herself — whose trust in their separate peace had never been as sturdy as her husband’s — now took steps to prepare for the worst. She was in an excellent position to appreciate the degenerating social climate, and not only by virtue of her intimacy with anarchists, Bolsheviks, and assorted other enemies of the state: her own father, the illustrious and redoubtable Ludwig David Silbermann, Ph.D., provided her with as cautionary a tale as any alarmist could ask for.

* * *

It’s one of the paradoxes of history, Mrs. Haven, that the world’s universities, those stiff-lipped incubators of the Enlightenment, have occasionally thrown their vestal gates wide open to its opposite. Since the end of the war, in moderate but slowly growing numbers, eminent members of the University of Vienna’s faculty — most, if not all, of them perfectly sane — had begun to speak openly about the Semitic infiltration of the student body, which was “out of all proportion” to the city as a whole. This grumbling was aped by the students themselves, who amplified and distilled it in predictably postpubescent ways. It was a matter of a few brief months, once that happened, until the Movement — as it now called itself — grew bold enough to act on its beliefs.

Professor Silbermann’s troubles began with a leaflet. On a drab Monday morning in early October, a new student club — the euphoniously named Native Agglomeration of the Primary University — deposited a modest sheaf of letterpressed pages in the Mensa , addressed to “Aryan scholars” of the Department of Physics, suggesting that “a general wish be taken into account, out of a sense of civics, to list all current professors of Semitic heritage by name.” The students in question — no more than a dozen in all — were mild-mannered to the point of meekness, and few members of the faculty, Jewish or otherwise, took their faltering attempt at pamphleteering seriously.

Needless to say, Mrs. Haven, this would prove a mistake.

The first name on the list was Moritz Schlick, lecturer in applied physics, who soon found it impossible to discharge his duties. The fact that Professor Schlick wasn’t Jewish at all, but the son of a defrocked priest from Salzburg, was taken by the student body — and even by some of his colleagues, once momentum had built — as one of the more damning points of evidence against him. Vienna’s beloved former mayor Karl Lueger had once famously declared, “I’ll decide for myself who’s a Jew and who isn’t!” and the university humbly took its cue from him. Within a month Schlick had resigned.

Nothing could have been more in character for Kaspar’s father-in-law than to refuse to acknowledge the mustering clouds. When Sonja confronted him — that same week, over dinner — he denied that the hubbub concerned him at all. “ My boys,” he declared, “are entirely too busy for that sort of nonsense. I’ve fielded every conceivable question in the course of my lectures, from the cause of the aurora borealis to the relative merits of pince-nez and monocles; but I’ve never been asked whether Copernicus ate shellfish or matzo.”

Sonja, who’d heard all this before, kissed him sadly on the cheek and changed the subject. The outrage occurred the next morning.

Though his duties at the university were lighter than they’d been in the years of his prime, the professor was still in the habit of arriving at dawn. It afforded him a sharp, childish pleasure to greet his colleagues with a businesslike nod as they shuffled groggily past his office, where he was already hip-deep in the morning’s work; besides, one never knew when a student might drop in to talk. Young men were known to keep irregular hours — young physicists, especially — and he kept his door unlocked accordingly. From time to time, on arriving in the morning, he’d find a hastily scrawled note on his desk, deposited at God knew what small hour of the night. His own son-in-law had been a great one for such notes, he remembered, as had the boy’s brother — that gifted, unfortunate other.

The morning of February 16, 1927, found the professor arriving at the Department of Physics a quarter hour later than usual, having missed his customary trolley by a nose. The floors had been waxed during the night and his boot heels snapped agreeably with each step. His door was two-thirds closed, just as he’d left it, but a pistachio-colored envelope lay squarely on the blotter of his desk. He glanced back down the corridor before stepping inside, savoring the charged, monastic silence. No one else was in sight.