John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

The note inside the envelope differed from those the professor generally received. First, it was unsigned; second, it was all but illegible; and last, it bore no address or signature of any kind. The text — once he’d deciphered its scrawl with the aid of his magnifying lenses — only added to his puzzlement:

THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, A GENTLEMAN ONCE SAID.

WHO WAS THIS GENTLEMAN?

A playing-card-sized scrap of paper had been included in the envelope, in accordance with custom, on which to compose his reply. He found himself sitting stock-still for an extravagant length of time, looking from his pen cup — a potbellied clay vase, meant for tulips or lilies, that Sonja had made as a child — to the uncommonly dusty air above his head. If an answer hovered there he did not see it.

The notes from his boys had taken all manner of guises over the years, but none had ever been presented as a riddle. Later, it would occur to the professor that he hadn’t been able to place the handwriting — though it did seem familiar — and this fact would appear significant; at the time, however, the question of authorship was immaterial. Silbermann relished a brainteaser as much as the next man of science, and eventually, after a great deal of deliberation, the germ of an answer began to take shape. He sat cautiously forward, mindful not to jar his idea loose too soon, and reached for his favorite pen.

Had anyone else been in the building at that hour, they’d have borne witness to a sound coming out of the department chair emeritus’s office unlike any he’d been known to make before. A quarter hour later, when Fräulein Landsmann, his secretary, shuffled past his open door, she found the professor slumped in his armchair, holding his right arm daintily away from his body. It was covered in blood, which gave her a nasty turn — but the blood was not Professor Silbermann’s. Fräulein Landsmann was a practical and clearheaded woman, of Tyrolean sheepherding stock. Once she’d established that the professor was unhurt, she helped him up and led him to the lavatory. He thanked her in an airy voice, praising her goodwill and promptness, then asked her — in the same cordial tone — to dispose of the contents of the pen cup on his desk.

Fräulein Landsmann did as directed, whereupon she was heard by the professor to produce a sound quite like the one he’d made himself. At the bottom of the pen cup, in a heap of clotted blood and cartilage, lay the fetus of a freshly stillborn pig.

* * *

Much was made of this episode, needless to say, in spite of the university’s attempts to keep it quiet. Expressions of youthful high feeling were certainly not unheard of, even in the Department of Physics; but none had yet been so lyrical, so enigmatic, so poetically rich in sign and symbol. In the days and weeks that followed, the significance of the event was passionately debated by students and faculty alike. The choice of pig flesh was perhaps understandable, given Silbermann’s creed; but why a fetus, with its connotations of nativity and promise? Members of the Agglomeration were consulted, as one might call an expert witness in a court proceeding; but to everyone’s surprise — even their own, it appeared — they were as baffled as anyone else. Eventually, some deep thinker pointed out that the fetus in question appeared to have been stillborn, which went some way toward settling the issue: the pig was a totem of waste, of abortion, of a race’s grand potential unfulfilled. The question of authorship, however, persisted. And what to make of the riddle? And why in the professor’s pen cup , of all places?

Kaspar saw little point in coming forward, and Sonja was inclined to agree. They never discussed the details of what had occurred, or why her father had been singled out, or how things could have come to such a pass. They only spoke about what should be done.

Quietly and efficiently, while speculation raged among his own students and colleagues (and an official inquiry into the affront was being indefinitely postponed), Kaspar conducted an investigation of his own. He spent another week at Trattner’s, visited the Bemmelmans villa — which he found boarded up for the winter — and even paid a call on the schoolteacher, Bleichling, who promptly broke down in tears, as though he’d been rehearsing expressly for Kaspar’s visit, and confessed that Herr von Toula had broken off all contact years before. After a full month of searching, Kaspar was forced to admit that he’d found no evidence whatsoever that his brother had returned to Vienna.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not you found evidence,” Sonja said. “We know he was here, because of what happened to Papa.”

Kaspar pointed out to her, as gently as possible, that Waldemar appeared to have accomplices — some shadowy fraternity at his beck and call — and that anyone could have delivered the note. Sonja countered that it made no difference.

“It makes a great deal of difference, Sonja. We need to know who we’re dealing with — how many of them there are and what they’re after. Even I’m not certain what that riddle means.”

“It’s a warning,” she answered. “And it wasn’t intended for Papa, I don’t think. I think it was intended for us.”

“Sonja, what on earth—”

She took his hand and led him to the divan and asked him to sit down beside her. When she was satisfied that he was giving her his full attention, she told him, in a voice he hardly recognized, the details of Waldemar’s long-ago midnight visit. She took care to omit nothing this time — not even how tempted she’d been to do what Waldemar had asked of her, insane though she’d known him to be.

It can be a fascinating thing to be reminded, after years of complacency, that the woman who sleeps beside you might easily, but for the grace of chance and fate and Providence, be sleeping beside someone else. Kaspar had noticed, of course (he remembered it now), how Sonja’s manner had changed when his brother was near, and how intently Waldemar had stared at her at their first meeting. But it came as a shock, one of the most severe of his duration, that his brother’s interest might have been returned.

“Why not go with him?” he mumbled when Sonja was done. “Why not do as he asked, if he tempted you so?”

Sonja waited for him to meet her eye before she answered. “I’ve been tempted by all sorts of things, Kaspar, that I didn’t want.”

Kaspar frowned at her, shaking his head reflexively. “I see.”

“Do you, my love? Do you really?”

He considered her question. “You didn’t go with him that night — I understand that much. You didn’t go with him. You stayed with me.”

Sonja regarded him curiously for a moment. Then she sat forward and kissed him on the lips. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing else you need to understand.”

* * *

Decades later, in the summers of his North American exile, reclining on his shaded porch on sepia-tinted upstate afternoons — the kind that seem steeped in nostalgia even as they’re happening — my grandfather would occasionally rhapsodize about the night that followed. With characteristic Toula perversity, he and Sonja chose that same evening to perpetuate the Silbermann-Toula line, ratifying their mutual devotion in the names of Darwin and Marx and Jehovah — to say nothing of their elders, who’d long since abandoned all hope.

When it became clear that Sonja was pregnant — and moreover, with twins —the news spread among their wide and heterogenous network of acquaintances with a speed customarily reserved for scandal. She had just turned forty, after all: a shocking age, by the standards of the time, at which to begin having children. Why on earth, it was asked, had they waited so long? Sonja might easily have been a grandmother by then; and not a few eminent Viennese matrons suggested, upon hearing the news, that she ought to have been.