“Mother’s in the toilet,” she announced.
“What’s that, Schätzchen? In the toilet, is she?”
Enzian nodded. “Something’s coming out of her mouth.”
There was nothing in his daughter’s voice or expression to account for the dread that gripped Kaspar as he leaped to his feet — but as soon as he caught sight of his wife on the floor, resting her cheek against the bowl of the toilet as if she were drunk, he understood that it was justified. Once, as a boy, watching his grandmother lying on her deathbed, he’d come to feel that her saintly expression was obscene in light of her suffering; now Sonja’s face was lit by that same mild, sepulchral glow. The front of her linen chemise — one of seven she’d bought to bring to the New World — was bisected by a cord of blood and sputum. When he spoke her name she caught him by the wrist.
“I seem to have come down with something, Kaspar. Some kind of a chill.”
Kaspar spoke her name again and knelt beside her. Her grip on his wrist relaxed slightly.
“I’d like to stay here for a while, if you don’t mind. The porcelain is so cool against my cheek.”
When a doctor was summoned — Yitzak Bauer, a childhood friend of the professor’s — he reached a diagnosis before his coat was off. “Tuberculosis,” he announced, in the bored tone of voice physicians reserve for bad news. “There’ll be no Comtesse Celeste anytime soon, I’m afraid. Geronimo and Jesse James will have to wait.”
To the end of his duration, my grandfather would still visibly flinch when he confessed to the relief he’d felt at Bauer’s diagnosis. There was anxiety as well, of course — TB was not to be taken lightly — but at least the condition had developed in Vienna, the medical capital of Europe, and not in some trigger-happy American backwater where the snake-oil peddlers outnumbered the physicians. The more Kaspar considered it, the more convinced he became that this apparent setback was a blessing in disguise. It was true that he’d resigned his post at the university, and that their lease was about to expire; but their account at the Volksbank was surpassingly healthy, and they had plenty of friends in the city. Why change continents, he told himself, when it was so much easier to change one’s mind?
With this thought percolating in his brain, Kaspar set out one August morning — slightly nervous, perhaps, but confident, all things considered — to have lunch with his brother at Trattner’s. He’d spoken with Waldemar directly this time, and the exchange had been cordial in the extreme. He himself had been the one to suggest the location, intending it both as an olive branch and as a harmless joke; his brother had praised their goulash and suggested one o’clock.
Saint Stephen’s Cathedral was tolling the hour when Kaspar arrived, slightly short of breath but otherwise composed. In accordance with C*F*P’s stage directions, Waldemar was sitting at the same marble-topped table as sixteen years previous, sipping from the same fluted cup, attended by the same enticing Serb. Kaspar was amazed to see her and was on the verge of stammering that she hadn’t changed a bit since 1922 when he saw that she was a different Serb entirely. Waldemar smiled as he shook Kaspar’s hand. “We ought to kiss each other on both cheeks, I suppose,” he said with a laugh, though the laugh he gave made very little noise.
“Well!” Kaspar said as his coffee arrived. It arrived without warning, impossibly quickly, which heightened the sense of predestination he’d been gripped by from the instant he’d sat down.
“Well!” echoed Waldemar, apparently as tongue-tied as he was. But that wasn’t right, either — there was nothing tongue-tied about Waldemar. He was simply waiting, serene and all-powerful, for Kaspar to try his first gambit.
“You look different,” said Kaspar, regretting it instantly.
“Fatter, you mean.”
“Not at all!” But of course he was fatter. “I suppose so, yes. But I meant — I meant the rest of it.”
“The rest of it?”
“Your monocle, for example.”
Waldemar nodded. “I’m not wearing my monocle.”
“My wife must have mentioned it,” Kaspar said, then began coughing fiercely. He hadn’t meant to bring her up so soon.
“Ah,” said Waldemar, in a different tone of voice. “Your wife.”
“That’s right,” Kaspar answered. “Sonja Toula. Your sister-in-law.” Then — suddenly, too soon — he was pleading his case, setting prudence and decorum aside, appealing to Waldemar’s sense of conscience and of charity and to various other senses he very much doubted his brother possessed, letting his voice crack like an adolescent’s and the tears run freely down his cheeks in the hope that they might gratify his enemy. It was the longest speech he’d ever made outside a lecture hall, and the most eloquent he’d made in any setting. When he was done his brother nodded amiably, as if in acknowledgment of a well-turned somersault, and made a cryptic gesture to the Serb.
“I can’t extend my protection to Fräulein Silbermann at this time.”
“She’s my wife, Waldemar,” Kaspar hissed. “And I’m not asking you to extend her your protection. I’m asking you to refrain from hauling her off to your chamber of horrors, like you did to poor Felix Ungarsky.”
“That’s true, I suppose,” said Waldemar. “But when all is said and done, Bruderchen—and it will be very soon — it amounts to much the same thing, does it not?”
A silence fell, leisurely and fatal, during which my grandfather gaped at his brother in an excess of astonishment and loathing and his brother sipped the dregs of his mélange.
“What are you saying to me?” Kaspar got out finally. “Are you telling me that we should disappear?”
“That’s for you to decide. I’ve done all that I can.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Waldemar heaved a good-natured sigh. “I got you those exit visas, didn’t I?”
FROM THE MOMENT I left your brownstone, Mrs. Haven, I was a puzzle to my family, a frustration to my coworkers, and an irritant to every passing stranger. I stepped on commuters’ shoe heels and got in the way of tourists’ snapshots and jaywalked as though cars were made of butter. I seated myself in elegant restaurants, studied the menu intently and left without ordering a thing. My boss at the Xanthia — a red-nosed depressive named Susan B. Anthony — encouraged me to confide in her about my substance dependency; Palladian beat me at Risk thirteen times in a row; Van called repeatedly, apparently in the hope of talking business, and each time was forced to hang up in despair. In a word, Mrs. Haven, I’d become insufferable.
The ancient Pythagoreans, poets that they were, claimed that each instant of each day has a life of its own — an independent existence from the mind that perceives it — and by the end of that week I believed them. You and I saw each other when your schedule permitted, which was practically never; in the dead time between — often days at a stretch — I found myself at each successive second’s mercy.
It was the middle of November, cold and grayscale and dismal, but New York had never looked so beautiful. I wandered the city with my hands in my pockets, muttering to myself like a drunk or an adman rehearsing a pitch, both of which — in one sense or another — I was. I made plans for the future on those rambles of mine that can only, in retrospect, be characterized as insane. I was going to finish my history, win some well-endowed prize, then sell the film rights for a modest fortune; I was going to elope with you to some sultry Central American republic — Nicaragua, maybe — and open a backpacker’s hostel; I was going to run for public office (a comptroller of some kind — nothing fancy) with you in a navy pantsuit by my side. I thought of the Husband, on the rare occasions when he came to mind, with a kind of charitable contempt. I’d progressed from coward to megalomaniac in a single afternoon.