John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Rumors began to circulate that Sonja was unwell — possibly at death’s door — and even, in certain unprincipled circles, that there were open questions of paternity. It didn’t help matters that the whole business was kept curiously private , as though it were an occasion not of pride but of disgrace. This was Sonja’s express wish, however, heartily endorsed by her husband, and her overjoyed (and not a little dumbfounded) parents weren’t about to contradict her. The twins would be born in a neighborhood clinic, under the care of the family physician, with as little outside meddling as possible. Their birth, it was made clear, was to be regarded as an addition to their parents’ lives first, to their grandparents’ second, and to the city of Vienna’s last of all.

In this way a precedent was set for eccentricity — some would say wrongheadedness, even hubris — that the twins themselves would follow all their lives.

* * *

Sonja and Kaspar passed a sweetly uneventful nine months — receiving no more than a handful of visitors, and those only briefly — during which time the mother-to-be was the picture of Rubenesque health. Dr. Ryslavy, a mustachioed Magyar whose breath smelled of leeks and who clapped my grandfather on the back more often and more heartily than Kaspar would have liked, announced after only four months that Sonja would bear not one but two children, and that she was carrying them unusually high in her womb. According to Ryslavy, this indicated that the twins would be identical, male, and — as he told Kaspar in confidence—“fearsome holy terrors” into the bargain. He was wrong on all counts, Mrs. Haven, but the last.

Aside from Ryslavy’s visits, and the occasional presence of the Silbermanns, the Ringstrasse apartment was as quiet and as cozy as a midwinter chalet. Kaspar’s mother contented herself with sending the couple one postcard from Znojmo per week, which was more than enough for her son. His fantasy of being cast away had finally come to pass, and he made it his sacred duty to enjoy it to the fullest, knowing they’d been given but a few short months’ reprieve. Every now and again he thought of Waldemar’s concept of rotary time — his assertion that progressive time was a sinister, Semitic hoax — and found himself wishing, in spite of all he knew, that it were so.

He attended to his duties grudgingly, neglecting all but the most necessary work, and passed as little time away from home as possible. He’d never taken much interest in the details of domesticity before — the dining table’s waxy patina, the dust along the hem of the curtains, the lingering smell of whitewash in the foyer — but they came, little by little, to intrigue him more profoundly than the greatest enigmas of physics. The minutiae of daily life were enigmas, after all; and wasn’t physics’ highest purpose to explain them?

Four hundred miles to the north, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, the Patent Clerk was beginning his duration-long search for the theory of the unified field.

* * *

Contrary to the boisterous assurances of Dr. Ryslavy, the twins, when at last they arrived, proved a far cry from the promised pair of ruddy, headstrong boys: they were delicate and fair — almost blue-skinned, in fact — and were unabashedly, defiantly female. They were far from identical, either: the firstborn had angular, pinched-looking features ( like a tiny schoolmistress! her mother declared), and her sister was downy and round as a quince. Any doubts as to the girls’ paternity were dispelled straightaway — the challenge, in fact, was to detect their mother in them. This was somewhat regrettable, since Sonja, even at forty-one, was a sight to behold, whereas Kaspar was no one’s notion of a beauty. Nevertheless, the birth of his daughters had an effect on my grandfather that he hadn’t foreseen: it arrested his retreat from the world, and even — by small, fixed increments, like the ticking of a timing cog — reversed it.

From his first glimpse of their faces, crimped and wrinkled like a pair of angry fists, Kaspar’s daughters stupefied and humbled him. Not in years — not since the Accidents — had his mind been taken captive so completely. They seemed less like children to him, these beings he’d engendered, than like primates of some other, fiercer order; and though he eventually came to love them more than life, this first impression never fully left him. He’d have died before admitting it to Sonja, but Kaspar’s fascination with his daughters was not the doting that it so resembled. Passionate as it was, his interest in the twins was scientific.

They were a force to be reckoned with, straight out of the womb — Ryslavy had been right about that much. Their response to ex utero Vienna was unequivocal: both of them remained silent, opening their dark blue eyes unnaturally wide, and turned progressively purpler, refusing to breathe for themselves. An injustice had clearly been done them, but whether the guilty party was the obstetrician, the nurse, or their mother herself remained a mystery. “I wasn’t concerned for an instant!” Ryslavy joked once the crisis had passed. “After all, those are two little angels. It wouldn’t have surprised me, Herr Toula, if they’d dispensed with the trouble of breathing altogether!”

“It wouldn’t have surprised me , Dr. Ryslavy,” Kaspar replied, “if they’d somehow turned out to have gills.”

Disquieting as their debut was, both girls were pronounced healthy, and they came home with Sonja soon after. Kaspar and his in-laws received the new mother with deference, and the twins — still unnamed — were installed with great pomp in the master bedroom. No one wondered at the fact that the children remained nameless: it seemed in keeping with their otherworldliness. As Kaspar put it to Sonja that same evening, “None of the names we’ve come up with will do, I’m afraid. They seem— presumptuous , somehow.” Sonja had laughed at first, then nodded in agreement.

The twins’ fractious entry into our atmosphere, Mrs. Haven, proved to be characteristic. They bawled at milk bottles and grimaced at rattles and ate other children for breakfast. Even Sonja, with all her gift for equanimity, was brought to the edge of despair by their tantrums. Mama Silbermann commented — with the best of intentions — that she’d never seen a child who could cry while breast-feeding, let alone two ; the professor predicted careers at the bar. Kaspar seemed to be the only human being who could make his daughters smile, and that only by making the most hideous grimaces, or by slapping himself in the face. A full month after their birth, the twins were as nameless as ever.

It was Kaspar, fittingly enough, who finally brought the stalemate to an end. A Slovenian communist had brought Sonja a bouquet of alpine flowers in belated honor of the birth, and my grandfather discovered that the surest way to quiet the twins, at the height of their tantrums, was to twirl a tiny star-shaped gentian above them. Enzian is the name of that flower in Austria, and it struck Kaspar as perfect for the firstborn of his daughters: not too feminine, not too pretentious, and fittingly peculiar to the ear. Sonja allowed him to convince her (as much out of exhaustion as anything else) and suggested, lover of verse that she was, that their younger daughter be named Gentian, in tribute to William Cullen Bryant’s “To the Fringed Gentian,” a favorite poem of her schooling days. The resulting names managed to sound as awkward in German as they did in English, which is harder to achieve than you might think; but no one ever claimed the twins’ names didn’t suit them.

Professor Silbermann retired the following summer, to the relief of everyone who knew him, and the twins grew more tractable, if no less bizarre. Gradually existence reverted to normal — though Kaspar could never say for certain that he hadn’t simply grown accustomed to the strangeness of the times. Conditions grew grim for the city’s Jews and leftists, then very slightly better, then worse than anybody could recall. Sonja did what she could for her embattled protégés, but her protection wasn’t what it once had been. There was little she could offer them but shelter.