“He stood me up against the wall. He was watching me closely, squinting and scratching his chin, as if I were some sort of bug that he’d caught. Idiot that I am, I told him so.”
“Ach! Felix,” said Sonja.
“Kalk came in with a man I hadn’t seen before, carrying a razor and a basin of hot water. He told me to get on my knees and tip my head back as far as I could. I nearly wet myself with fright, but Kalk explained that the Standartenführer wanted a better look at my face. The man was a barber — and a skilled one, as you see.” Ungarsky held up his chin. “I’ve never had a more accomplished shave.”
He waited a moment, as if to hear the family’s opinion. No one in the parlor said a word.
“The Standartenführer thanked the barber, closed his eyes until Kalk had escorted him out, then turned to me. ‘I hate being made to wait, Herr Ungarsky,’ he said. ‘I suffer, among other things, from a condition known as expectandophobia. Can you guess what that condition is?’ I shook my head. ‘Expectandophobia, Herr Ungarsky, is a morbid fear of being made to wait.’ He laughed at that, and I did my best to laugh with him, which sent him into full-blown hysterics. Then he told me to lie down.”
At this point Frau Silbermann was ushered out of the room by the professor. Ungarsky lay back on the couch and watched them go.
“There was nothing in the room but that chair, as I’ve said. Once I was laid flat on the floor he dragged it over. Then he asked me a question — the only serious one he asked in all that time.”
“What did he ask?” said Kaspar.
“I didn’t understand at first, so he repeated it. ‘Did you know, Herr Ungarsky, that the laws of physics, from the standpoint of mathematics, acknowledge no difference between future and past?’ When I told him I didn’t, he nodded at me in a friendly way. ‘The question was a rhetorical one,’ he said. Then he set the chair on my chest and sat down on it.”
Sonja let out a muted groan and looked at Kaspar. Ungarsky went on, his voice formal and bright, like someone reading from the morning paper.
“‘I’m going to keep you in this room for exactly forty-three minutes,’ the Standartenführer told me. I asked him what would happen after that, and he said—” Ungarsky turned to Kaspar. “You’re not going to credit this, Herr Toula, but I swear that it’s true.”
“Don’t worry about me, Felix. Tell us what he said.”
“‘In forty-three minutes,’ the Standartenführer told me, ‘my brother will arrive, and Scharführer Bleichling — whom you met on your way in, I believe — will deliver you into his care.’”
All eyes went to Kaspar, but Kaspar kept still. He kept still because his brain was turning cartwheels in his skull. Sonja urged Ungarsky to go on.
“‘When that comes to pass,’ the Standartenführer said, ‘I want you to relay a message for me. Would you do me that kindness?’ I had no breath to answer but he didn’t seem to mind. ‘Unlike the laws of mathematics, the laws I represent — the laws whose envoy I am — distinguish past from future very plainly. The last twenty years have belonged to my brother; the future, by contrast, is ours. I shared something of my “lost time” theory with my sister-in-law this afternoon; but a theory without proof is merely talk. Someday soon I hope to give a demonstration.’ The Standartenführer shifted his weight in the chair as he said this, and watched me as I fought to catch my breath. ‘Do you think you can remember all that, Herr Ungarsky? I have no doubt you can.’ He took out his watch. ‘We have forty more minutes to practice.’”
XII
NOW WOULD BE the point in this history, Mrs. Haven, to recount the details of my grandfather’s role in the Viennese resistance: the first Ungarsky-brokered contact, the meetings in shuttered rooms and city parks, and the progressively more desperate acts of sabotage; then the inevitable imprisonment and torture, deportation in an unmarked railway car, and death in some sun-dappled Polish forest.
You won’t find any of that in this history, however, because none of it ever took place.
To be fair, Kaspar had his family to think of, and the Viennese resistance — valiant though it undoubtedly was — chiefly confined itself to tax evasion. Contrary to his own opinion, my grandfather was no simple coward, as his visit to the Gestapo HQ proves; but he was no longer young, and patriotism turned his stomach, and Waldemar’s triumphant return had changed him permanently. His brother’s madness was now the state religion, after all, with the weight of Greater Germany behind it. The grotesqueness of this notion — of this fact, he reminded himself — fastened itself to his mind like a leech after his visit to the Bundesverkehrsamt, and he could find no rational way to overcome it.
It was Sonja — to everyone’s surprise but her husband’s — who first suggested that they emigrate. She felt none of the mixed emotions Kaspar suffered under, labored under none of his confusion: she wasted no time trying to make sense of what was happening. And it was pointless for Kaspar to try to persuade her that his brother posed no genuine danger, at least not to them. He no longer believed it himself.
Once the decision was made, Sonja brooked no delay. Kaspar watched helplessly, struggling to stifle his panic, as she dismantled their asylum brick by brick. Not for her the classic refugee’s dilemma of what to take and what to leave behind: the house and everything in it was a relic of a bygone age, and Sonja wasn’t given to nostalgia. The most valuable furniture — the yellow divan included — was put up for auction in Vienna’s Dorotheum; the rest was given to friends and acquaintances and neighbors, until the family was eating off newsprint and sleeping on blankets laid out on the floor. Kaspar was far from alone in believing her actions extreme — even Ungarsky entreated her to reconsider — but he knew better than to hope to change her mind.
By the time the ism-ists began to disappear — quietly and without any fuss, as though they’d been called away on pressing foreign business — the Toulas were in possession of a complete set of exit visas from the German Reich. Buffalo Bill had cabled to assure them of his patronage (including, among other things, a furnished one-bedroom apartment on a street called Chippewa, which Sonja thought sounded delightful), and passage had been booked on the Comtesse Celeste, a midsized steamer out of Genoa. “Every minute spent here is a minute we’ve lost,” she’d exclaim when she caught Kaspar dragging his feet. “A brand-new life awaits us on the prairie!”
The prairie was never far from Sonja’s thoughts in those last weeks. She assumed — reasonably enough — that the city of their destination, fabled gateway to the Middle West, had been named in honor of its herds of bison. She imagined Buffalo as a kind of all-purpose boomtown, a sequestered San Francisco on a sapphire-colored lake, where cattle were driven down Main Street, captains of industry rubbed shoulders with emancipated slaves, and an honest man could die a millionaire. Though my grandfather had his doubts on a number of these points, he decided, as a kavalier, to keep them to himself. The prospect of emigration remained fantastical to him, unreal and unlikely; but no more so than any other prospect did. She’ll be disappointed soon enough, Kaspar thought. There isn’t any hurry.
* * *
Three days before their planned departure, Kaspar was sitting on a pillow in the gutted parlor, contemplating an oval of brighter paper where a mirror had once hung, when Enzian appeared in the doorway. She regarded him briefly with her lusterless eyes — almost as if she were considering his feelings — before delivering the news she’d come to tell.