In that dim, spectral city, anti-Semitism seemed suddenly pandemic, more rabid than it had been in centuries, which struck him as the finest joke of all. The posturers of the United Germanic Front, with their foam-flecked lips, their fists full of pamphlets, and their watch chains with little silver pendants (like upside-down crucifixes, if you didn’t look too closely) symbolizing a hanged Jew, put my grandfather in mind of children playing preacher when he heard their diatribes; and it took a concerted effort not to hear them lately, since they felt no need to keep their voices down. Just a few steps from the duck pond in the Stadtpark where he’d pledged his love to Sonja, the battered body of a boy from the neighborhood shul was discovered, his gullet stuffed with pages torn out of a Torah; when the blame was placed — after the most cursory of inquiries — on “unidentified Slavic vagrants,” not a soul in that great Hauptstadt was surprised.
A few months later, when Kaspar read, in an editorial in a respected paper, a prominent critic’s suicide described as “the only reasonable response to the dilemma of his Jewish nature,” he laughed, as he would have done at any piece of vaudeville. His wife saw considerably less to laugh at; but he did his best to put her fears to rest. “This world is a loony bin, Schätzchen,” he told her. “Luckily for us, our front door happens to be one of its exits.” He knew that this motto of his made her uneasy — that it could be interpreted in two very different ways — but he found himself unwilling to forgo it. The truth, whether he’d have admitted it or not, was that he said it as a spell to ward off demons.
It would have been perfectly appropriate, given all of the above, if Kaspar had become one of those disillusioned fantasists who daydreamed of escape to the New World; but he labored under no such bold delusions. Although his wife was a devotee of Blake’s “America, a Prophecy,” occasionally reciting the lines
On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions
Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:
I see a serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love;
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru—
Kaspar had little doubt that America, given half a chance, would eat them both alive. Blake might well have sung the praises of its eagles and its serpents, but what Blake had actually known about the New World, my grandfather suspected, could have fit into a thimbleful of gin. Hans Wittgenstein had run off to America to escape his father’s strictures, and Sonja’s own cousin Wilhelm, a recent émigré to New York State, was now known — for reasons obscure — as “Buffalo Bill” Knarschitz, and was reputed to be thriving; but Kaspar remained affably unmoved. “We’re Austrians, Schätzchen,” he said more than once, after his wife had gone on at length — as she often did, of late — about the U.S.A. as the new socialist frontier. “We’re simply Austrians now, no more and no less, and it won’t help to pretend we’re Cherokees. Besides which, my love, all your family’s here. What would the Silbermanns become without Vienna? What would Vienna become, for that matter, without the Silbermanns?”
Monday, 09:05 EST
Since the episode in the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, I’ve been trying to take stock of my situation as objectively and calmly as I can. What follows is my attempt to draw up an impartial reckoning, like a chartered public accountant, of the chances I’ve been given versus those I’ve been denied:
DEBIT
CREDIT
I’m marooned in a desolate bubble of extrachronological space, without company or apparent hope of rescue.
But I’m alive, and I seem to be in fairly decent shape, which contradicts every law of physics I can think of.
I appear to have been singled out, from all the rest of humanity, to sit at this table and brood.
But someone must have put me here, and provided me with these books and writing materials — ergo, someone wants me to complete my history. And that person may also have the means to set me free.
At times, the solitariness of my condition, and the sadness of constant remembering, comes close to driving me insane.
On the other hand, I’m not uncomfortable here — not anymore — and remembering certain events from my life is almost unbearably sweet.
I have nothing to eat, and nothing to drink but a half-empty bottle of Foster’s.
I’m not thirsty.
It’s still extremely hard for me to move, and all of my senses, except the sense of sight, are dulled almost to the point of uselessness.
My life, such as it was, was over long before I woke up here. How can it possibly matter where I am?
That’s as far as I’ve managed to get, Mrs. Haven. I feel less able than ever to reconcile myself to my condition, and I’ve resolved to continue my attempts to determine — both by contemplation and experiment — the nature of this no-man’s-land I’m stuck in. Like the Greek and Etruscan philosopher-detectives who were my great-grandfather’s heroes, creating whole cosmologies out of nothing but their own enthusiasm, the only tools I’ve got are pen and paper. And this body, of course — for whatever this body’s still worth.
I’m not entertaining these notions idly, Mrs. Haven. The question of whether or not time is passing for me, however slowly, has taken on new urgency since my visit to the bathroom. If time is passing — however sluggishly — then I’m still a part of the continuum, and can permit myself some faint hope of escape. If time isn’t passing, I’m probably dead.
In which case, Mrs. Haven, I wish you and the Husband all the best.
IX
THE GREAT WAR — or the World War, or the War to End All Wars, as many otherwise perfectly reasonable people insisted on calling it — was a memory, and a dim one at that, before Kaspar heard his brother’s name again. It’s perhaps the greatest evidence of Sonja’s love for her husband that she kept him in ignorance for so many years, shielding him from the rumors that circulated from time to time regarding Waldemar; but her vigilance, extraordinary as it was, could reach only so far.
Kaspar was buying tea — Ostfriesen BOP, Sonja’s favorite — at a shop owned and run by his father-in-law’s cousin when a little gentleman appeared at his elbow, clutching his long snow-white beard like a fairy-tale gnome, and beamed up at him as though they were old friends. They weren’t old friends, as it happened, and the Brothers Grimm — ish charm of the encounter was complicated by the fact that the gentleman was bleeding from the nose. The situation gave off altogether too much actuality for my grandfather’s liking; he overcame his reluctance, however, and inquired of the gnome, in his most civil tone of voice, whether he might somehow be of service.
“You don’t know me, of course,” the gnome replied, dabbing at his nose with the tip of his wondrous beard.
“I’d be happy to know you, I’m sure. My name is Kaspar Toula.”
“Ach! I know who you are, Professor.”
“Then you have me at a disadvantage, Herr—”
“Eichberg, Professor. Moses Eichberg.” The man smiled again, then drew the torn sleeve of his coat across his mouth. “Your wife was one of my students, at the Volksschule.” He nodded amiably. “I taught Sonja her sums.”