John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

The electricity was out in the lobby, and the windows were covered in cardboard and tape. At the fourth-floor landing they found themselves confronted by a massive jet-black door, apparently freshly installed: it was out of all proportion to the stairwell, Ursula thought — much too grandiose for that decrepit building — though perhaps the fever was affecting her judgment.

“Here we are,” Orson said softly, as though afraid of being overheard. From somewhere — possibly far away — came the sound of running water.

“Do you hear that?” said Ursula, whispering without knowing why.

He laid his ear to the door. “What time have you got?”

“Quarter to three.”

“They’ll be taking their afternoon bath.”

The baby squawked; Ursula gave it a jiggle. “They take their baths together?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He gave her an odd smile, motioned for her to step back, then slammed the heels of both his palms against the door. The resulting boom set the whole building trembling and the baby caterwauling and Orson cursing and clutching his wrist. The door hummed like a gong. She touched it with her fingertips and found that it was made of some kind of metal, smooth and cold to the touch. She was about to ask Orson about it when a weatherbeaten gentleman with a yellowish afro and a debonair manner appeared on the landing below and suggested, in a high, cultured voice, that they go right to hell. “Is that you, Mr. Buckram?” Orson called down to him.

The man gave Orson the finger. Soon afterward the bolts began to turn.

However violent my debut may have seemed to my aunts — they hadn’t been expecting our visit until the next morning, according to Gentian, and it was only the sound of my crying that had kept them from alerting the police — their own entrance into my duration was notably mild. I seem to remember it, Mrs. Haven, though I couldn’t possibly remember it. The great door swings inward, making no sound at all, and the sisters are standing behind it, shoulder to shoulder, small and frail against the yawning dark behind them. A tense silence falls, which Ursula breaks by holding up the baby for inspection. They examine it dubiously (my mother’s choice of words, Mrs. Haven, not mine). She can’t quite decide, as they poke at her son, whether or not she ought to feel offended. Gentian turns to Enzian, who gives a brisk nod.

“Waldemar,” Enzian announces.

It seems to Ursula suddenly — but again, she’s exhausted and feverish — that she’s known all along which name the sisters would choose, and also that she would put up no resistance. Orson embraces each of them in turn, solemnly but with feeling, as though they were Russian functionaries at a banquet. Ursula realizes, dimly, that she’s being escorted back downstairs. Now she’s offended — no, perhaps not offended; bewildered, perplexed — but her husband appears not to notice. Go to sleep, he tells her, making a manger of sorts in the Buick’s backseat. We’ll be in Buffalo by midnight, all three of us. You and me and little Waldemar.

* * *

Half my childhood was gone when I next saw my aunts, and by then the name had warped and shrunk to fit me. It would be years before I learned its full significance — before I was taken quietly aside, by my mother, on my seventeenth birthday, and told exactly what Äschenwald, that pretty word, meant to the rest of the world — and by that point, of course, it was too late. Or so I was led to believe.

My mother was never especially interested in helping me fit in — she considered it an expression of Austrian pride to speak German to me in public places, and dressed me in a style that a college girlfriend, flipping through a photo album years later, dubbed “Hitler Youth casual”—but even she realized that the name Waldemar was more than my skinny shoulders could support. “Waldy” was Ursula’s invention, and I’m grateful to her, though her insistence on pronouncing it the Austrian way (“VAL-dee”) tended to defeat the nickname’s purpose. Fortunately I had a gift for deflecting attention: I was remarkably unremarkable, Mrs. Haven, as I’ve mentioned before. By June 18, 1978, when my father and I climbed the General Lee’s stairwell together for the second time, I’d been punched, bitten, knocked over and peed on no more than most seven-year-olds, which I take a certain pride in even now. I was reasonably well adjusted for my age, and tended not to take things much to heart, especially when grown-ups said or did them. This made me a mild but steady disappointment to my parents, especially at parent-teacher conferences — but it proved to be a crucial skill in dealing with my aunts.

This time Orson knocked politely, both out of consideration for his knuckles and for the door of the apartment, to which the intervening years had not been gentle. It hung askew on its hinges, as though the building had somehow shifted out of plumb, and the gaps this produced (of which there were a few) were plugged with soggy-looking wads of newsprint. My father had been in lecture mode on the long drive downstate — without actually explaining the point of our visit, which remained a mystery — but now he was silent and grim. As I listened to the sound of slippered footfalls and of deadbolts being thrown, I was seized by the suspicion that I was about to be sold into white slavery, or forced to take a trigonometry exam, or cooked slowly in a child-sized witch’s cauldron.

The last bolt was thrown and the black door swung open and a lady peered out from behind it. She had a harried look, and she wasn’t much taller than Orson, but she seemed to gaze down on us from on high. I knew she was one of my aunts, of course, but I didn’t know which. If I’d been allowed to read my father’s books, I’d have recognized her right away — she could only have been Empress Eng Xan, the Obsidian Priestess, villainess of the Chyldwyrld trilogy.

“You’re here,” said the woman. She said it in German: “Ihr seid da.” Her accent — equal parts Austrian and Yankee and Yiddish — was no more curious than anything else about her. “Where’s the other one hiding?”

“If by ‘the other one,’ you mean Ursula, my wife,” my father answered in English, “she’d have liked nothing better than to drive for eight hours to wait out here on your landing again, but she’s visiting her mother in Vienna. Are you going to let us in this time?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, as if she suspected us of subterfuge (and in fact my mother was very much at home in Cheektowaga, already in bed, with a paperback and a glass of iced Lillet); then she took in a sharp, girlish breath that made her seem decades younger, and receded smoothly — ceremonially, it seemed to me — into the gloom. A second woman appeared, blushing and grinning and rubbing her plump hands together, but in that first dazzled instant I paid her no mind. The hall we stepped into was fitted with shelves of every conceivable description, some extravagantly filigreed, some obviously homemade, and each devoted to a single object. Many of the items in question were familiar — a teakettle, a bowling ball, a snow globe enclosing a miniature Chrysler Building — but some were completely obscure. There must have been nearly a thousand such shelves, ranging in size from the width of my palm to the length of my arm, running along both walls as far as I could see. The blushing woman kissed my father on both cheeks without saying a word. Then she took my hand and led me down the hall.

“Do you like what you see, Waldemar?” she asked in an odd voice, both boisterous and shy.

“It’s Waldy,” I corrected her.

“ Is it, now?” Behind her smile she was watching me closely. “Do you like what you see, Waldy?”