“Something shifted while we were asleep,” you said. “I don’t know what, exactly, but something’s different. Our equilibrium seems to be shot.”
If I’d known you at all, I’d have taken this pronouncement in stride, maybe even agreed; since I didn’t, I panicked.
“I don’t believe in this.”
You looked startled. “In what?”
“In anything.” I waved my arms peevishly. “I don’t believe in anything that’s happened.”
Why in God’s name, Mrs. Haven, did I say such a thing? To throw you off balance? To keep my need for you from swallowing me whole? Whatever the reason, the result was terrifying. You rose from the bed with exaggerated calm and did up the leather toggles of your coat. Your face was as white and empty as a plate.
“I’d be a fool to believe in all this, Walter, if you don’t. Wouldn’t I?”
“Please sit down, Mrs. Haven. Don’t go just yet.”
“I’ll be gone in a minute,” you said, searching the floor for your hat. “There’s something that I want to tell you first.”
“Mrs. Haven, if you’d just—”
“The day you followed me home, I showed you what the Husband had done to my little clubhouse — with the Klimts and so on. Do you remember?”
“Of course I—”
“I told you we’d been fighting, but you never asked me why.” You smiled. “You must not have believed in what was happening then, either.”
That brought me out of bed at last. “You have to understand, Mrs. Haven, nothing’s ever prepared me — what I mean is, where I come from—”
“Where exactly do you come from, Mr. Tompkins?”
“I don’t have any clothes on. If you’ll give me the chance—”
“We’d been fighting about you, Walter. I told the Husband that I was leaving him, that I’d met someone else, and he reacted in the way you might expect. He asked me — as anyone would, who’s been given that sort of news — whether I was absolutely sure.” You picked your hat up from the floor. “I wonder if you can guess how I replied.”
I opened my mouth, met your withering look, and felt my answer curdle in my throat.
“No?” you said, stepping out onto the landing. “I’m sorry to hear that, Walter. Maybe it will come to you in time.”
XIII
THERE’S A PAINTING at the Met by Giancarlo Beppino, some forgotten also-ran of the Venetian Rennaissance, that comes to mind whenever I try to picture Kaspar and Sonja’s exodus. An unassuming little oil in a badly lit niche—Joseph and Mary’s Flight into Egypt—it twitches to eager life for anyone willing to stop. An underfed Joseph leads two gaunt, walleyed mules down a gulch; a fat, insipid virgin sits sidesaddle on the second mule’s back, holding a toddler under her arm like the Sunday edition of The Wall Street Journal. In the middle distance, for no apparent reason, an angel is whacking at a rosebush with a stick.
The figures themselves bear no likeness to my star-crossed kin: Sonja was desperately ill by then, and my grandfather, in the sole surviving snapshot from that time, has the oxlike expression of a more classical Joseph, a man prepared for certain disappointment. More important than any of the figures, however — chubby Mary included — are the slick, greasy clouds Beppino packs his sky with: shadowless masses, hideously compacted, glistening in the nauseous light of that landscape like marrow smeared across a crust of bread. To me, Mrs. Haven, those diseased-looking clouds have always seemed the color of insanity, and the sky above Vienna, whenever I imagine that most ominous of summers, is practically bursting with them.
* * *
Kaspar went home from Trattner’s on foot, grateful for the reprieve, storing away the sights and sounds and smells of the city for future reference; no sooner had he arrived home, however, than he announced to his family that they’d be leaving for America that same afternoon. His daughters were too young to fully grasp the import of the news, and his in-laws were too old, perhaps, or too astonished; Sonja was overjoyed, as he’d known she would be. She emerged from her room fully dressed and expectant, as if she’d foreseen his sudden change of heart; she looked clearheaded and rested, better than she’d seemed in months. Kaspar had expected her to ask the reason for his decision — for its abruptness, if nothing else — but she confined herself to questions of logistics. Her equanimity, which had always been a comfort, now unnerved him. He wondered, not for the first time, whether his wife had the slightest idea what lay in store for them; then he reminded himself that it no longer mattered. The choice — such as it was — had been made for them.
The journey by train to Genoa was incongruously festive, as though the family were setting out on a grand tour. The six of them had a first-class compartment to themselves — an indulgence the professor insisted on — and the Alps goose-stepped past, inundating the room with their temperate, vertiginous green, as if the car were a camera obscura for the benefit of the silent, awestruck twins. The Silbermanns sat for hours at the window with Enzian and Gentian between them, pointing out castles and cloisters with proprietary pride. Sonja spoke only rarely, and then in a whisper — and yet she was the center of it all. Kaspar had never seen her look more regal.
They pulled into Genoa at five in the morning, early enough to watch fishmongers with pious faces set out iced trays of whiting and calamari and buckets of spasming eels. The family’s trunks, which had seemed so enormous in their Ringstrasse parlor, looked small and unassuming on the pier. The Comtesse Celeste had been H.M.S. Gloucester until the year before; she’d seen three decades’ service as a coal and livestock transport, and it showed. She was too big for her mooring and too close to the shrimping boats that flanked her, and the pilings bowed and shuddered as she heaved. Kaspar took all this in obliquely, peripherally, as someone drunk or half-asleep might do. Genoa was a caesura to him, a blank interval, unexpected and unknowable and empty. He found himself impatient to keep on.
The professor — who still seemed to think they were on holiday — disappeared with the twins for the better part of an hour, and returned with chocolate stains on his lapel; in keeping with the fever dream in which they’d all become complicit, no one asked where they’d gone off to, let alone what he’d been thinking. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and repacking, making last-minute purchases of everyday items — shaving soap, twine, baking soda — that might not exist in the western hemisphere, and avoiding all but the most necessary talk. The Silbermanns, especially, grew stiller and grayer as the hours went by; but it wasn’t until early that evening, when the Comtesse’s whistle sounded, that Kaspar guessed the reason for the change.
“You’re not coming,” he said. “You’re not coming with us.”
It was his mother-in-law who answered. “You’ll be back soon enough,” she said brightly, gripping her husband’s blotched and birdlike hand. “You’ll run out of soap and well-made shoes and decent butter. Also, I’ve heard there’s no hygienic paper. They eat and wave hello with their right hands only, and use their left hands to—”
“You’re thinking of the southern states, Mama,” Sonja put in, winking at Kaspar over Frau Silbermann’s bonnet. “Alabama and so on. We’ll make sure to keep to the north.”
Kaspar stared at his wife for a moment, struck dumb by her glib reply. But it was possible that Sonja had missed her mother’s meaning — she’d been so weary and abstracted recently. At times she barely answered to her name.
Everyone fell silent when they arrived at the quay: Kaspar due to his steadily increasing perplexity, the Silbermanns so as not to upset the children, Sonja for reasons known to her alone. The significance of the hour seemed to have dawned on her at last. After the twins had been coddled and kissed she sent them away with their father, to the end of the quay, while she spoke with her parents alone. She was a long time with each of them — her mother, particularly — and when she beckoned Kaspar back to her he found their faces flushed and wet with tears.