John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

NOW WOULD BE the point in this history, Mrs. Haven, to recount the details of my grandfather’s role in the Viennese resistance: the first Ungarsky-brokered contact, the meetings in shuttered rooms and city parks, and the progressively more desperate acts of sabotage; then the inevitable imprisonment and torture, deportation in an unmarked railway car, and death in some sun-dappled Polish forest.

You won’t find any of that in this history, however, because none of it ever took place.

To be fair, Kaspar had his family to think of, and the Viennese resistance — valiant though it undoubtedly was — chiefly confined itself to tax evasion. Contrary to his own opinion, my grandfather was no simple coward, as his visit to the Gestapo HQ proves; but he was no longer young, and patriotism turned his stomach, and Waldemar’s triumphant return had changed him permanently. His brother’s madness was now the state religion, after all, with the weight of Greater Germany behind it. The grotesqueness of this notion — of this fact , he reminded himself — fastened itself to his mind like a leech after his visit to the Bundesverkehrsamt, and he could find no rational way to overcome it.

It was Sonja — to everyone’s surprise but her husband’s — who first suggested that they emigrate. She felt none of the mixed emotions Kaspar suffered under, labored under none of his confusion: she wasted no time trying to make sense of what was happening. And it was pointless for Kaspar to try to persuade her that his brother posed no genuine danger, at least not to them. He no longer believed it himself.

Once the decision was made, Sonja brooked no delay. Kaspar watched helplessly, struggling to stifle his panic, as she dismantled their asylum brick by brick. Not for her the classic refugee’s dilemma of what to take and what to leave behind: the house and everything in it was a relic of a bygone age, and Sonja wasn’t given to nostalgia. The most valuable furniture — the yellow divan included — was put up for auction in Vienna’s Dorotheum; the rest was given to friends and acquaintances and neighbors, until the family was eating off newsprint and sleeping on blankets laid out on the floor. Kaspar was far from alone in believing her actions extreme — even Ungarsky entreated her to reconsider — but he knew better than to hope to change her mind.

By the time the ism -ists began to disappear — quietly and without any fuss, as though they’d been called away on pressing foreign business — the Toulas were in possession of a complete set of exit visas from the German Reich. Buffalo Bill had cabled to assure them of his patronage (including, among other things, a furnished one-bedroom apartment on a street called Chippewa, which Sonja thought sounded delightful), and passage had been booked on the Comtesse Celeste , a midsized steamer out of Genoa. “Every minute spent here is a minute we’ve lost,” she’d exclaim when she caught Kaspar dragging his feet. “A brand-new life awaits us on the prairie!”

The prairie was never far from Sonja’s thoughts in those last weeks. She assumed — reasonably enough — that the city of their destination, fabled gateway to the Middle West, had been named in honor of its herds of bison. She imagined Buffalo as a kind of all-purpose boomtown, a sequestered San Francisco on a sapphire-colored lake, where cattle were driven down Main Street, captains of industry rubbed shoulders with emancipated slaves, and an honest man could die a millionaire. Though my grandfather had his doubts on a number of these points, he decided, as a kavalier , to keep them to himself. The prospect of emigration remained fantastical to him, unreal and unlikely; but no more so than any other prospect did. She’ll be disappointed soon enough , Kaspar thought. There isn’t any hurry .

* * *

Three days before their planned departure, Kaspar was sitting on a pillow in the gutted parlor, contemplating an oval of brighter paper where a mirror had once hung, when Enzian appeared in the doorway. She regarded him briefly with her lusterless eyes — almost as if she were considering his feelings — before delivering the news she’d come to tell.

“Mother’s in the toilet,” she announced.

“What’s that, Schätzchen ? In the toilet, is she?”

Enzian nodded. “Something’s coming out of her mouth.”

There was nothing in his daughter’s voice or expression to account for the dread that gripped Kaspar as he leaped to his feet — but as soon as he caught sight of his wife on the floor, resting her cheek against the bowl of the toilet as if she were drunk, he understood that it was justified. Once, as a boy, watching his grandmother lying on her deathbed, he’d come to feel that her saintly expression was obscene in light of her suffering; now Sonja’s face was lit by that same mild, sepulchral glow. The front of her linen chemise — one of seven she’d bought to bring to the New World — was bisected by a cord of blood and sputum. When he spoke her name she caught him by the wrist.

“I seem to have come down with something, Kaspar. Some kind of a chill.”

Kaspar spoke her name again and knelt beside her. Her grip on his wrist relaxed slightly.

“I’d like to stay here for a while, if you don’t mind. The porcelain is so cool against my cheek.”

When a doctor was summoned — Yitzak Bauer, a childhood friend of the professor’s — he reached a diagnosis before his coat was off. “Tuberculosis,” he announced, in the bored tone of voice physicians reserve for bad news. “There’ll be no Comtesse Celeste anytime soon, I’m afraid. Geronimo and Jesse James will have to wait.”

To the end of his duration, my grandfather would still visibly flinch when he confessed to the relief he’d felt at Bauer’s diagnosis. There was anxiety as well, of course — TB was not to be taken lightly — but at least the condition had developed in Vienna, the medical capital of Europe, and not in some trigger-happy American backwater where the snake-oil peddlers outnumbered the physicians. The more Kaspar considered it, the more convinced he became that this apparent setback was a blessing in disguise. It was true that he’d resigned his post at the university, and that their lease was about to expire; but their account at the Volksbank was surpassingly healthy, and they had plenty of friends in the city. Why change continents, he told himself, when it was so much easier to change one’s mind?

With this thought percolating in his brain, Kaspar set out one August morning — slightly nervous, perhaps, but confident, all things considered — to have lunch with his brother at Trattner’s. He’d spoken with Waldemar directly this time, and the exchange had been cordial in the extreme. He himself had been the one to suggest the location, intending it both as an olive branch and as a harmless joke; his brother had praised their goulash and suggested one o’clock.

Saint Stephen’s Cathedral was tolling the hour when Kaspar arrived, slightly short of breath but otherwise composed. In accordance with C*F*P’s stage directions, Waldemar was sitting at the same marble-topped table as sixteen years previous, sipping from the same fluted cup, attended by the same enticing Serb. Kaspar was amazed to see her and was on the verge of stammering that she hadn’t changed a bit since 1922 when he saw that she was a different Serb entirely. Waldemar smiled as he shook Kaspar’s hand. “We ought to kiss each other on both cheeks, I suppose,” he said with a laugh, though the laugh he gave made very little noise.

“Well!” Kaspar said as his coffee arrived. It arrived without warning, impossibly quickly, which heightened the sense of predestination he’d been gripped by from the instant he’d sat down.