John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

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Thanks to the vast, choppy lake at its doorstep (and the canal extending like a 363-mile drainpipe out the back), Buffalo was one of the richest cities in the United States, Chicago’s closest rival as the Paris of the Plains. Honeymoons were spent there; songs were written extolling its glamour; a belt of steel plants on the city’s south side (if the wind was right) made for hyperbolic, lilac-tinted sunsets. The Great Depression’s scars were freshly healed — or freshly powdered over, better said — and the attitude of the citizenry was one of fierce, bulldoggish confidence. A greater contrast to Vienna was hard to imagine. Sonja was right about that much , Kaspar thought, if nothing else .

As the months went by, my grandfather’s mourning took on a peculiar cast — one that would have been inconceivable before the concept of spacetime was proposed. If time was (as science now insisted) best understood as a fourth dimension, then it was erroneous to think of past events as having ceased to be. The past, Kaspar reasoned, is most accurately conceived of as a continent we’ve emigrated from, or better still as a kind of archipelago: a series of nearly contiguous islands, self-contained and autonomous, that we’re constantly in the process of forsaking, simply by moving through time. Like all things past, his wife existed in a zone of the continuum that was inaccessible to him now. This by no means meant that she no longer was .

On occasion — after a nightcap or two, or on a day when the twins had been especially good — this way of thinking actually brought him comfort.

He had a great deal to live for, he reminded himself. He could have stayed in Vienna if he’d wanted to die, and saved himself and his girls (not to mention poor Wilhelm) a great deal of trouble. “But they couldn’t snuff us , those goddamn death fetishists,” he’d growl at my father years later, his tongue primed by sweet British sherry. “We Tollivers are too inquisitive to die.”

Buffalo Bill was a “confirmed bachelor”—with all the quirks and predilections that implied in that era — but he insisted on taking his cousin-in-law, on the second and fourth Friday of each month, to Feinberg’s Star Burlesque Revue downtown. Wilhelm showed less interest in the gambolings onstage than if he’d been at a lecture on personal hygiene, but there was no doubt that the place excited him. He seemed intoxicated by the spotlights and the wine-dark velvet seats, by the cackling and the coarse talk of the crowd, and he barely breathed until the houselights came back up. My grandfather (who enjoyed the show for less poetic reasons) wondered what it was that thrilled his cousin-in-law so deeply, but he resisted the urge to inquire. An important clue, however, was provided in the person of the balcony usher, a Polish kid with thick blond curls and eyes the depthless green of Nordsee ice. There always seemed to be some confusion about their seats when they sat in the balcony, and the usher’s help was invariably required. “I’d give anything on earth to look like that,” Wilhelm murmured one evening, watching the boy make his way nimbly back to the aisle. “Anything.” Kaspar struggled to come up with a suitable answer, then quickly realized that none was necessary. His cousin-in-law had been talking to himself.

Feinberg’s had recently begun showing a newsreel on a gilt-edged canvas screen at intermission, both to keep up with the motion-picture houses on Main Street and to give the girls a chance to cool their heels; and it was there, as per C*F*P’s mandate, that the past made clear to Kaspar that it would not be denied. After an animated short starring a beaver and a backward-running clock (“There’s a Hebrew clock like that in Josefstadt — runs counterclockwise. Big deal,” Wilhelm barked into his ear), and a mercifully brief documentary about Veronica Lake’s “dude ranch” in Malibu, the canvas went grainy and dark. A moment later it brightened again, something dour and Wagnerian began droning over the speakers, and a series of smudges slid diagonally across the screen from left to right.

The crowd starting booing, the focus was futzed with, and the smudges resolved into tanks. The booing got louder. The footage, apparently, came from the old town of Prague — from Josefstadt itself, in fact. The Czechs had given the Nazis more trouble than the Austrians had, but not enough to make the slightest difference. Kaspar found himself composing a list, as the tanks rumbled past, of all the sovereign nations between Prague and Buffalo. It was a sizable list, even without taking the ocean into account; but it wasn’t half as long as he’d have liked. He wondered what was happening in Znojmo.

Wilhelm, who’d been watching Kaspar closely, flung an arm around his neck. “Screw it,” he said. “You’re with family, cousin. Bei familie. Those cocksuckers can’t touch us over here.”

Less than six months later, the Patent Clerk would draft his infamous letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him of the likelihood of nuclear fission research in the Third Reich, and urging the development of the atomic bomb.

I’VE CULLED THE NEXT installment of Waldemar von Toula’s saga partly from family lore and partly from my great-uncle’s “research notes,” but I could just as well have used a college textbook. The swastika-slathered paperback I mentioned in my first entry— The Order of the Death’s Head; The Story of Hitler’s SS , by Heinz Höhne (“TWO LETTERS — LIKE THE HISS OF A SNAKE ABOUT TO STRIKE!”) — sits within easy reach, but I’m not in any rush to pick it up. I use the word saga in acknowledgment of the historic scale of Waldemar’s duration, and of the nightmarish enigma of his fate; but it was anything, Mrs. Haven, but heroic.

The irony in the fact that Waldemar, who’d dreamed so fervidly of immortalizing his father’s name in the annals of physical science, should live to see himself immortalized instead, and for the opposite reason — the perversion of his father’s work, and of scientific ethics — was lost on no one in my family, least of all on Waldemar himself. The Black Timekeeper of Czas won a place in posterity considerably more secure than his nephew’s, fifty-seven published novels notwithstanding, or his nieces’, regardless of their tabloid-perfect end; but now I’ve gone achronological again. In spite of the fact that my great-grandfather will spin in his grave like a centrifuge, I’m going to pretend — out of respect for convention — that time moves forward in a smooth, unbroken line. I’m writing this for my sake, Mrs. Haven, not for his.

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The party line on the “Jewish Question” took its final form in the winter of 1942, in a charmless stucco villa on the Wannsee; but it wasn’t until a year later that my great-uncle was summoned to Berlin from Vienna, by overnight train, for an afternoon appointment with the future. A youth-education pamphlet he’d written and published at his own expense (“The Protocols of Darwin: A Young Teuton’s Primer on Natural and Unnatural Selection”) had made the circuit of the party apparatus, eventually landing on the skull-shaped walnut desktop of Reichsführer Himmler himself. Like some schizophrenic shaman in an Amazonian village, treasured as a prophet precisely for his inability to make rational sense of the world, Waldemar had found a place — by accident, appropriately enough — among the party’s guild of racial mystics.

The meeting in Berlin was concise but productive. Waldemar was led without pomp into a high, sunny room where a porridge-faced man in a uniform crackling with starch, who looked deceptively like the Reichsführer-SS, informed him he was being sent to Poland. A facility had been built along the Belarussian border — not much more than a ditch and some concertina wire at present, the man said apologetically — to process deportees; mostly Juden , of course, but also Bolsheviks, rapists, peeping toms, and a trainload of idiots from an asylum in suburban Düsseldorf. He, Standartenführer Waldemar von Toula, had been selected for the post of facility director, on account of his invaluable work in Vienna and his well-known interest in the Great Genetic Struggle. (Mention was made of my great-uncle’s pamphlet at this juncture, but it was unclear whether the Himmler look-alike had read it.) An eastbound express was departing Berlin Ostbahnhof at six that same evening, and Standartenführer von Toula was to be on it, in a private, heated car. Was this acceptable to the Standartenführer?