“Sigismund, is it? An excellent name for a son!”
“Very kind of you, Herr von Toula.” Again Bleichling hesitated. “In actuality, however, Sigismund is a terrier.” He let out a titter. “A Scottish terrier, to be exact, with the whitest undercoat you’ve ever—”
“It happens this Saturday,” Waldemar snapped. “Have your men assembled by eighteen o’clock.”
“This Saturday? The day after tomorrow? I’m afraid that I wouldn’t — I can’t — that is, I couldn’t possibly—”
Waldemar held up a hand. “I’ve been informed, Herr Bleichling, that I may not be at liberty by this time next week. A warrant for my arrest has reached this city from Budapest, where I was active for some years on the party’s behalf.”
Bleichling squirmed and gulped air. “I’ve heard about what you did in Budapest.”
“Have you, Herr Bleichling? Then tell me. When you heard of it, how did it make you feel?”
“I couldn’t — I didn’t—” The life drained from his face. “Good heavens, sir, I didn’t mean to suggest—”
Waldemar eased his heavy body forward. “I’ll tell you how it made me feel, brother. It made me feel wide awake. It made me feel the breeze of our glorious future on my skin.”
By now the back of Kaspar’s neck had gone puckered and hot, as though the hairs on his nape were being plucked, and his tongue felt like a breaded chicken cutlet. The thought that less than a minute earlier he’d been tempted to sit down at his brother’s table — to sit down and ask him, humbly, for forgiveness—was suddenly both appalling and absurd. When the waitress appeared at his shoulder, silently and without the slightest warning, it was all that he could do to keep from vaulting from his seat.
“I’m quite well,” he squawked, though the Serb hadn’t spoken. “I was on my way out, in fact. I’m late for an appointment—”
“I can’t allow you to do that, sir.”
Kaspar felt the air catch in his throat. “Why not, for God’s sake?”
“You haven’t paid.”
“Of course!” he said, nearly shouting with relief. “Forgive me. Of course. If you’d be so kind—”
“Sixteen hundred kronen.”
As he counted out the money, marveling at the steadiness of his hands, Kaspar heard — echoingly, as if across an empty ballroom — the sound of chairs being pushed back, and of his brother’s voice whispering a series of commands. He let his eyes close, then felt a hand gripping his elbow: but it was only the waitress, the inscrutable Serb, offering to help him out onto the street. Before he could respond to her his brother and Herr Bleichling were beside him.
“Excuse me!” said Bleichling, insinuating himself deftly between Kaspar and the girl. He was even smaller than he’d first appeared, and his freckled, hairless crown reflected the lamplight like a piece of lacquered crockery — but an instant later Kaspar had forgotten Bleichling completely, because Waldemar stood in his place.
He patted the Serb on the rump as he passed, as if she were in his exclusive service, and she swiveled her ample hips to give him room. He smiled at her, producing a coin between his thumb and middle finger — at which point his gray eyes came to rest on Kaspar.
“You may keep the change, Jelena.”
“Hvala ti, Herr von Toula. God be with you.”
“Bless you, my child.”
Through the whole of this exchange his brother’s flat, unblinking eyes took Kaspar’s measure, ticking from feature to feature, appraising him with a mild but steady interest. He’s trying to place me, Kaspar thought incredulously. He’s trying to remember where we’ve met. Have I changed to such a degree? Has he stricken me from his memory so completely? Even as he asked himself these questions, however, Kaspar saw the opacity of those eyes for what it was, and reminded himself that he was looking at a madman.
“Umbrella,” said Waldemar.
“Pardon?”
“Your umbrella, sir. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to withdraw it.”
Kaspar looked down warily, suspecting a trick, to find the tip of his umbrella — which he’d entirely forgotten he was holding — pinning Waldemar’s coat to the floor. Another sign, this time unmistakable: the moment had arrived for disclosure, for confrontation, for a reckoning long overdue. It’s your brother, Herr von Toula. Explain to me, if you have a moment, the fundamental points of your philosophy. Tell me what you did in Budapest.
“I’m frightfully sorry,” he said, stepping backward.
“No harm done, brother,” Waldemar answered, receding before Kaspar’s eyes like a mirage.
* * *
No act of terror took place that Saturday, or the next Saturday either, insofar as Kaspar could discover. He’d gone straight to the police from Trattner’s, but the officers had struck him as oddly abstracted, and on subsequent visits they’d made no effort to conceal their lack of interest. Israelites, they informed him, were regularly involved in all manner of trouble. Gustav Bleichling, by contrast, was a grammar school teacher — he taught at the same school as Moses Eichberg, in fact — and was respected by both his colleagues and his pupils. “He’s a teacher of literature,” one of the gendarmes explained, as though this fact alone were proof that he was harmless. As for Waldemar Toula, he’d reportedly left the city for parts unknown, and in any case the department had been informed of no warrants from Budapest. My grandfather had no choice, ultimately, but to let the matter drop.
X
WALDEMAR’S SECOND VANISHING ACT was even more accomplished than his first — so much so that Kaspar found himself wondering, as the twenties sped by, whether their encounter at Trattner’s had happened at all. But he knew it had happened, farfetched though it seemed. He had the change in himself to corroborate the memory — and also the change in his wife.
The asylum Kaspar and Sonja had created was as dear to him as ever, Mrs. Haven, but his faith in it was permanently cracked. He was no longer complacent, no longer confident that his indifference to history would protect him or those he loved against its whims. And Sonja herself — whose trust in their separate peace had never been as sturdy as her husband’s — now took steps to prepare for the worst. She was in an excellent position to appreciate the degenerating social climate, and not only by virtue of her intimacy with anarchists, Bolsheviks, and assorted other enemies of the state: her own father, the illustrious and redoubtable Ludwig David Silbermann, Ph.D., provided her with as cautionary a tale as any alarmist could ask for.
* * *
It’s one of the paradoxes of history, Mrs. Haven, that the world’s universities, those stiff-lipped incubators of the Enlightenment, have occasionally thrown their vestal gates wide open to its opposite. Since the end of the war, in moderate but slowly growing numbers, eminent members of the University of Vienna’s faculty — most, if not all, of them perfectly sane — had begun to speak openly about the Semitic infiltration of the student body, which was “out of all proportion” to the city as a whole. This grumbling was aped by the students themselves, who amplified and distilled it in predictably postpubescent ways. It was a matter of a few brief months, once that happened, until the Movement — as it now called itself — grew bold enough to act on its beliefs.
Professor Silbermann’s troubles began with a leaflet. On a drab Monday morning in early October, a new student club — the euphoniously named Native Agglomeration of the Primary University — deposited a modest sheaf of letterpressed pages in the Mensa, addressed to “Aryan scholars” of the Department of Physics, suggesting that “a general wish be taken into account, out of a sense of civics, to list all current professors of Semitic heritage by name.” The students in question — no more than a dozen in all — were mild-mannered to the point of meekness, and few members of the faculty, Jewish or otherwise, took their faltering attempt at pamphleteering seriously.