John Wray: The Lost Time Accidents

Theories were put forward, of course, once the world had gotten over its astonishment: over the next few decades, attempts were made to explain the result in terms of ballistics, friction in the ether, experimental error, and whatever else the rear guard could dream up. The wildest theory of all came from a Dutch physicist named Hendrik Lorentz, who claimed that moving objects actually shrink along their lines of motion, so that, while light might in fact travel more slowly under certain circumstances, it also travels a shorter distance: in other words, that space is anything but absolute.

Lorentz’s theory — not surprisingly — was widely ridiculed, until it was determined to be true.

Such was the state of the scientific world, Mrs. Haven, at the time of my great-grandfather’s discovery. It was an era of chaos and confusion and nearly limitless possibility: a kind of panicked conceptual goldrush. The year 1903 had been typically revolutionary for the new century, having already yielded the gas turbine, electrostatic fume precipitation, razor blades and reinforced concrete; in Manhattan, a subterranean railway had just been opened from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Streets, and in a picturesque backwater of Switzerland — as far from Manhattan, in virtually every sense, as possible — a patent clerk with delusions of grandeur was beginning work on a paper entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which would introduce a concept he termed “special relativity.” Ottokar couldn’t have known all this, of course, but he’d clearly caught the fever of the age. And in Kaspar and Waldemar, his like-minded sons, this fever would eventually develop into a systemic infection: what came to be referred to, in our family, as the Syndrome.

Both boys immersed themselves in Ottokar’s notes, and — when these proved insufficient — in physics and mechanics textbooks ordered from Vienna by expedited mail; both showed a talent for their studies, and both applied to the university, when the time came, in the empire’s capital, some ninety kilometers distant. Their mother, a monochromatic, long-suffering woman who’d lived exclusively for her children since their birth, ushered them out of her life with the requisite mixture of pride and despair. Her sons returned to Znojmo only rarely after departing for Vienna: they felt relieved to be leaving the family — such as it was — behind them, and in any case their studies claimed them utterly. They showed an interest in every branch of the natural sciences, from chemistry to comparative zoology, but there was no question as to what was driving them. The Accidents had swallowed them alive.

In 1904, Toula & Sons Salutary Gherkins was sold to a well-heeled competitor, which surprised almost no one, though there are those who date the decline of the Moravian pickle industry from that moment. The money from the sale of the company, though less than expected, was more than enough to establish the boys in Vienna. They took rooms in a recently completed building in the Seventh District, in the poetically named Mondscheingasse—“Moonshine Lane”—a few minutes’ walk from the imperial stables. The house itself, though quaint in comparison with the radically plain style currently storming the city, struck them as the pinnacle of daring. Two colossal plaster lions presided over its entrance, their hare-lipped faces somehow more pathetic than ferocious; a pair of goosenecked dragons, in turn, kept an anxious watch over the lions. The dragons’ necks were affectionately intertwined, forming between them — whether by accident or design — a lateral figure eight, the mathematical symbol of infinity. This entranced Waldemar, though Kaspar was more impressed by the brilliant yellow paint, the view east toward the Opera, and the smell of fresh dung from the stables in the evenings, when the emperor’s horses were locked in their stalls for the night.

Both brothers studied the city around them, frankly and down to the slightest detail, with all the abandon of yokels freshly sprung from yokelhood. The girls especially, Kaspar notes in his diary, were a revelation. Ladies back in Znojmo were essentially potatoes, and they clothed themselves, appropriately enough, in formless, plain potato sacks; their Viennese counterparts flounced along the Ringstrasse encased in fabrics so opulent, so demonstrative, that their exhibition in broad daylight stopped a hair’s breadth short of bona fide perversion. To my grandfather’s bumpkinish eyes, the entire Kärntnerstrasse on a Saturday evening was transformed into a single vast seraglio. Men accompanied the women, of course — fidgety, purse-faced men, dressed in generic black or graphite-colored suits — but they might as well have been lapdogs, or pigeons, or even heaps of moldy winter pears. So much beauty and wealth and urbanity, so languidly displayed, never failed to make Kaspar feel insignificant, even piddling; but this feeling only heightened his excitement. All his consequence still lay before him.

Waldemar saw things differently. He was as fascinated by the capital as his brother, but even then, at the age of not-quite-seventeen, the immanent revolutionary in him recognized the city’s pomp for what it was: a garish, fetid flower, sprouting brightly from the slack jaws of a corpse. That was how he described it to his brother, at least, on those rare occasions when Kaspar consented to listen. The glitter and gaiety of Vienna, that “pearl in the crown of the Germanic world,” as the Führer himself would one day call it, were no more to him than the rictus on the face of a cadaver.

Waldemar came to disapprove of his older brother’s new habits — his drunken nights, his dalliances, his cabinet full of buckskin brogues in subtly differing shades — and he made no secret of his point of view. He chose to remain at an elegant remove from the life of the city, spending his evenings in studious seclusion, filling a growing pile of hardbound ledgers with his cramped and canting script, and relaxing before bedtime by scouring the gaps between slats in the floor with a fork expressly altered for that purpose. His aloofness only heightened his mystique at the university, where he was making a name for himself as a student of extraordinary promise. He left the apartment each morning just after sunrise and returned at eight every evening, punctual as a timing cog; but not even Kaspar knew where he spent his afternoons. There were rumors of a rose-colored villa along the Danube Canal, and of an older woman, possibly the wife of a professor; women in particular seemed eager to credit Waldemar with a voluptuous parallel life. Kaspar would have been delighted, of course, but he could only roll his eyes at the idea. “My brother is a religious fanatic,” he was fond of telling callers to their flat. “He hasn’t chosen a religion yet, to the best of my knowledge, but I have no doubt it will be a tidy one.”

He was to remember this quip of his in later years, and marvel — more than a little grimly — at his foresight.

Different though the brothers were, their first year of independence passed in relative harmony, if only because of their mutual obsession. Kaspar’s talent lay in mathematics, while Waldemar, romantic that he was, felt most comfortable in the giddy heights of theory; but both were in search of a skeleton key, either mathematical or hermeneutic, to their dead father’s chamber of secrets. A photograph of the brining-room laboratory hung tacked to the door of the newly installed water closet at Mondscheingasse, alongside a rendering by Waldemar of the pulpit mentioned in Ottokar’s note, which was unique in the empire (if not in the world) for having the form of a globe: