But then, in the course of a month’s feverish work, my great-uncle strayed even farther. If the speed of light was unchanging, as Michelson and Morley insisted, then time and space would clearly have to bend; but a spherical universe alone wasn’t enough to account for the interferometer’s readings. The distortions in space and time would have to be local — measurable in a few cubic feet in the basement of a Midwestern university — and the act of measurement itself would have to summon those distortions into being.
This last notion, in particular, led Waldemar to suspect that he had forfeited his place among the sane. He was speculating wildly now, almost hysterically: this new work felt less like science to him than like philosophy, or poetry, or some strain of wordless, polyrhythmic song. He was drifting into twilight, Mrs. Haven, but the glories that awaited him there were beautiful — so beautiful that he regretted nothing. There was power in severing the umbilical cord of precedent: the power of complete supremacy. Finally, after more than a year of hurling himself against the walls of consensus reality, he could feel those walls starting to give.
In the ensuing weeks, emboldened by his progress, Waldemar scuttled his last remaining scraps of orthodoxy. He found himself utterly alone, in a singularity of his own making, falling away from everyone he’d ever known or cared for. There was no turning back any longer, no bread-crumb trail, no lifeline to the past. He was wholly at the mercy of the future.
If the cosmos as a whole is subject to mysterious forces that warp it into the shape of a globe, Waldemar reasoned, shouldn’t those forces have the same effect on smaller amounts of matter, given the right set of conditions? The fact that the world as we experience it doesn’t seem filled with countless bubbles of spacetime — essentially tiny, autonomous universes, as he was coming to believe — is no argument against the possibility. We don’t see the world around us as constructed of microscopic particles, after all, yet no one has contested the atomic model in a century.
The idea of the observer having an impact on observed phenomena would eventually find expression in Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, of course — but this was two decades earlier, Mrs. Haven, and Waldemar went Heisenberg one better. What was the act of inquiry into the nature of time, he asked himself, but an expression of human consciousness: in fact, the highest form of that expression? What else could be the catalyst, therefore — the source of the impulse that made spacetime buckle — but the concerted action of the human brain?
At last, after weeks of exquisite agony, he appreciated Augustine’s genius. More than that: he saw its implications burst into flower around him in explosions of pure mental color. It was the defining moment of his life, and Waldemar knew it, though he had no idea as yet where it would lead him. The foundational postulate had been established: the great and reckless leap from the salons of bourgeois reason into the primeval fissure from which true genius oozes. It burned his former self away, it stripped him of his ego without mercy, but he was eager for the sacrifice. He’d have traded the world for this one crumb of insight: that time and space themselves are in transit, subject to a motion both pliable and absolute, and that man can influence said motion by an act of focused, virtuosic will.
It was this last hypothesis, Mrs. Haven, that held the seed of Waldemar’s damnation.
The mathematics didn’t fit, not yet, but that would come. He had his entire duration to make the mathematics fit. He desired no fame for himself, no glory, no material compensation; the envy of his rivals would suffice. That and the fact that he, Waldemar Toula, second son of Ottokar Gottfriedens, had redeemed his father’s Lebenswerk from oblivion.
* * *
At virtually the same time, working after hours in his office in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was writing a paper. Calm where my great-uncle was euphoric, complacent where he was shrill, taking measured steps through a landscape Waldemar glided over on wings made out of candle wax and spit, the rumple-headed Jew with the “dark, soulful eyes” was putting the finishing touches to his Viennese colleague’s destruction. He was about to provide the answer to the apparent paradox posed by Michelson and Morley, and his answer, once proven, would extinguish all others. Science brooks no dissent, Mrs. Haven; not over the course of time. Soon the case would be closed. Waldemar’s work — and, by extension, his father’s — would vanish into the vacuum of obsolete ideas.
The “Patent Clerk,” as he came to be referred to in my family, had never heard of my great-uncle, any more than Waldemar had ever heard of him; but like Newton and Leibniz, like Darwin and Wallace, these two young German-speaking eccentrics were closing in on the same territory at virtually the identical moment. The fact that Waldemar overshot the mark disastrously, arcing like a comet over the (relatively) stable ground on which Einstein stood, did nothing to lessen the sting of his rival’s conquest of the scientific mainstream. 1905 would go down in history as Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the year in which, at the age of not quite twenty-seven, without so much as a university degree, he hit on the preposterously, childishly, almost insultingly simple formula E = mc2, which describes the universal relationship between energy and matter.
It would prove to be a magical year for my great-uncle as well, but the magic in his case was black as pitch. His father had met his end in the form of a watch salesman’s Daimler, a death that was not without a certain gentle irony; Waldemar’s nemesis, by contrast, was neither a man nor a machine, but an idea. That idea’s name was special relativity, Mrs. Haven, and there was nothing gentle about it whatsoever. As obscure as it was — and as innocuous as its author appeared — it had the power to annihilate the world.
VI
LESS THAN A WEEK after the disastrous evening at the villa Bemmelmans, Sonja Silbermann was roused out of a greedy, slovenly sleep — the sleep of a woman in love — by the sound of gravel glancing off her bedroom shutters. She put on the sternest face she could muster and stepped to the window, expecting to find Kaspar outside; before she’d undone its catch, however, she remembered that Kaspar was away, visiting his mother in that little town in Moravia whose name she could never remember. She blinked groggily out at the street, taking care to keep back from the light, and wondered which of her past errors of judgment had chosen that particular night to pay a call. To the right, a row of chestnut trees curved downhill toward Schwarzenbergplatz; to the left, her father’s cherished Bugatti touring sedan hulked like a battleship under its waxed canvas cover. It was Heimo, she decided, stifling a yawn; Heimo or possibly Karl. Karl had always been the surreptitious sort.
She was about to close the shutters and crawl back into bed when she caught sight of a figure at the edge of the trees. Only one boy she knew held himself so correctly, so proudly, as though the Kaiser might ride by at any moment. She opened the window noiselessly, with a practiced hand, and whispered to him that she’d be right out.