John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

The journey by train to Genoa was incongruously festive, as though the family were setting out on a grand tour. The six of them had a first-class compartment to themselves — an indulgence the professor insisted on — and the Alps goose-stepped past, inundating the room with their temperate, vertiginous green, as if the car were a camera obscura for the benefit of the silent, awestruck twins. The Silbermanns sat for hours at the window with Enzian and Gentian between them, pointing out castles and cloisters with proprietary pride. Sonja spoke only rarely, and then in a whisper — and yet she was the center of it all. Kaspar had never seen her look more regal.

They pulled into Genoa at five in the morning, early enough to watch fishmongers with pious faces set out iced trays of whiting and calamari and buckets of spasming eels. The family’s trunks, which had seemed so enormous in their Ringstrasse parlor, looked small and unassuming on the pier. The Comtesse Celeste had been H.M.S. Gloucester until the year before; she’d seen three decades’ service as a coal and livestock transport, and it showed. She was too big for her mooring and too close to the shrimping boats that flanked her, and the pilings bowed and shuddered as she heaved. Kaspar took all this in obliquely, peripherally, as someone drunk or half-asleep might do. Genoa was a caesura to him, a blank interval, unexpected and unknowable and empty. He found himself impatient to keep on.

The professor — who still seemed to think they were on holiday — disappeared with the twins for the better part of an hour, and returned with chocolate stains on his lapel; in keeping with the fever dream in which they’d all become complicit, no one asked where they’d gone off to, let alone what he’d been thinking. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and repacking, making last-minute purchases of everyday items — shaving soap, twine, baking soda — that might not exist in the western hemisphere, and avoiding all but the most necessary talk. The Silbermanns, especially, grew stiller and grayer as the hours went by; but it wasn’t until early that evening, when the Comtesse ’s whistle sounded, that Kaspar guessed the reason for the change.

“You’re not coming,” he said. “You’re not coming with us.”

It was his mother-in-law who answered. “You’ll be back soon enough,” she said brightly, gripping her husband’s blotched and birdlike hand. “You’ll run out of soap and well-made shoes and decent butter. Also, I’ve heard there’s no hygienic paper. They eat and wave hello with their right hands only, and use their left hands to—”

“You’re thinking of the southern states, Mama,” Sonja put in, winking at Kaspar over Frau Silbermann’s bonnet. “Alabama and so on. We’ll make sure to keep to the north.”

Kaspar stared at his wife for a moment, struck dumb by her glib reply. But it was possible that Sonja had missed her mother’s meaning — she’d been so weary and abstracted recently. At times she barely answered to her name.

Everyone fell silent when they arrived at the quay: Kaspar due to his steadily increasing perplexity, the Silbermanns so as not to upset the children, Sonja for reasons known to her alone. The significance of the hour seemed to have dawned on her at last. After the twins had been coddled and kissed she sent them away with their father, to the end of the quay, while she spoke with her parents alone. She was a long time with each of them — her mother, particularly — and when she beckoned Kaspar back to her he found their faces flushed and wet with tears.

“Goodbye to you, Kaspar.” His mother-in-law kissed him fiercely on both cheeks — how often had they touched in twenty years? — then propelled her husband forward.

“Best of luck to you, Toula,” Silbermann croaked, extending a kid-gloved hand with an absurdly dated flourish. Kaspar had always laughed at the old man’s stiffness and remove — had laughed at it openly, in fact, in recent years — so it was with no small embarrassment that he found himself drawn into an embrace. An idea struck him then, fully formed and entire, like a line of sentimental poetry: This man has given me everything that I hold dear.

A few minutes later, looking down from the deck (second class now, not first), another sensation overcame him, one he was even less accustomed to: the intimation, building quietly to a certainty, that what he was seeing was a projection in a vast and secret cinema. Genoa’s cramped, chaotic harbor, its oddly marrow-colored sky, the stevedores hosing detritus off the quay — everything he saw appeared heightened, imbued with morality and portent, a judgment on the easy life he’d known. He was part of the film, perhaps even one of its principal players. But he sensed that it was on its final reel.

Nonsense! he told himself, holding Gentian up to look over the rail. Everyone feels this way at a departure. Nothing’s ending, because there isn’t any film.

“This is happening,” Sonja whispered, gripping him by the elbow. “Isn’t that so, Kasparchen? Tell me, please, that all of this is real.”

“This is happening, Sonja,” he said, and felt the truth of it as a rawness in his throat. “They’re weighing anchor now. We’re shoving off.”

“All right. If you’re sure.”

He turned to regard her as she drew herself up, chin thrown forward like a figurehead, teardrops guttering unnoticed from her crow’s feet to her jaw. What to say to her in such a moment?

“Sonja—”

“Blow a kiss to your opa and oma , Enzian,” Sonja called to their daughter, who was standing apart from them, gazing impassively at the quay below. “When you see them next, you’ll be the Queen of Time and Space, you know. And I’ll be dead.”

Kaspar would never be able to say with certainty, in years to come, whether his wife had truly said those words as he remembered them — but by then, of course, they had already passed into legend. He doubted his ears even at the time, and Enzian was no help to him at all. She continued to look evenly down at the quay, as mature for her age as her mother seemed girlish for hers, holding loosely to the crenellated rail.

* * *

No sooner had the Comtesse left port than Sonja fell backward gracefully — almost eagerly — onto the bright, hissing bed of her illness. Kaspar managed to keep the truth from the captain and the crew for some time, out of fear of being forcibly put ashore (he put the blame for her condition on seasickness, which was rampant everywhere on that decrepit tub), but finally his fear for her prevailed. From Genoa to Viareggio to Naples to Palermo she grew steadily worse, the readiness of her submission somehow shameless; Kaspar, who’d never succumbed to jealousy in thirty years of marriage, found himself now, as his wife slowly left him, behaving like a cuckold in a farce. He attended to her every requirement, taking all of his meals in their stateroom, rarely letting her out of his sight. His attentions grew more oppressive by the day — he sensed this himself — but he was utterly helpless to curb them.

Sonja’s condition worsened in the course of the passage from Spain, as did Kaspar’s own. The ship had an excellent onboard physician (the elegant, somewhat horse-faced Dr. Tildy, formerly of the Prussian cavalry) but Kaspar — who’d welcomed Tildy, on his first visit, with tears of gratitude — soon came to resent his intrusions. His wife was winnowing before his eyes, turning brittle and yellow as a scrap of old newsprint, and he realized now, much too late, that he lacked the grace and fortitude to bear it. Unable to restrain himself, he would ask — would demand to know — how she was feeling half a dozen times an hour. Enzian and Gentian were no help to him, either: they were absorbed in a narrative of their own invention, whispering together for hours on end, looking back and forth between their mother’s bed and the sea beyond the porthole as though there were no difference between them.