“Goodbye to you, Kaspar.” His mother-in-law kissed him fiercely on both cheeks — how often had they touched in twenty years? — then propelled her husband forward.
“Best of luck to you, Toula,” Silbermann croaked, extending a kid-gloved hand with an absurdly dated flourish. Kaspar had always laughed at the old man’s stiffness and remove — had laughed at it openly, in fact, in recent years — so it was with no small embarrassment that he found himself drawn into an embrace. An idea struck him then, fully formed and entire, like a line of sentimental poetry: This man has given me everything that I hold dear.
A few minutes later, looking down from the deck (second class now, not first), another sensation overcame him, one he was even less accustomed to: the intimation, building quietly to a certainty, that what he was seeing was a projection in a vast and secret cinema. Genoa’s cramped, chaotic harbor, its oddly marrow-colored sky, the stevedores hosing detritus off the quay — everything he saw appeared heightened, imbued with morality and portent, a judgment on the easy life he’d known. He was part of the film, perhaps even one of its principal players. But he sensed that it was on its final reel.
Nonsense! he told himself, holding Gentian up to look over the rail. Everyone feels this way at a departure. Nothing’s ending, because there isn’t any film.
“This is happening,” Sonja whispered, gripping him by the elbow. “Isn’t that so, Kasparchen? Tell me, please, that all of this is real.”
“This is happening, Sonja,” he said, and felt the truth of it as a rawness in his throat. “They’re weighing anchor now. We’re shoving off.”
“All right. If you’re sure.”
He turned to regard her as she drew herself up, chin thrown forward like a figurehead, teardrops guttering unnoticed from her crow’s feet to her jaw. What to say to her in such a moment?
“Sonja—”
“Blow a kiss to your opa and oma, Enzian,” Sonja called to their daughter, who was standing apart from them, gazing impassively at the quay below. “When you see them next, you’ll be the Queen of Time and Space, you know. And I’ll be dead.”
Kaspar would never be able to say with certainty, in years to come, whether his wife had truly said those words as he remembered them — but by then, of course, they had already passed into legend. He doubted his ears even at the time, and Enzian was no help to him at all. She continued to look evenly down at the quay, as mature for her age as her mother seemed girlish for hers, holding loosely to the crenellated rail.
* * *
No sooner had the Comtesse left port than Sonja fell backward gracefully — almost eagerly — onto the bright, hissing bed of her illness. Kaspar managed to keep the truth from the captain and the crew for some time, out of fear of being forcibly put ashore (he put the blame for her condition on seasickness, which was rampant everywhere on that decrepit tub), but finally his fear for her prevailed. From Genoa to Viareggio to Naples to Palermo she grew steadily worse, the readiness of her submission somehow shameless; Kaspar, who’d never succumbed to jealousy in thirty years of marriage, found himself now, as his wife slowly left him, behaving like a cuckold in a farce. He attended to her every requirement, taking all of his meals in their stateroom, rarely letting her out of his sight. His attentions grew more oppressive by the day — he sensed this himself — but he was utterly helpless to curb them.
Sonja’s condition worsened in the course of the passage from Spain, as did Kaspar’s own. The ship had an excellent onboard physician (the elegant, somewhat horse-faced Dr. Tildy, formerly of the Prussian cavalry) but Kaspar — who’d welcomed Tildy, on his first visit, with tears of gratitude — soon came to resent his intrusions. His wife was winnowing before his eyes, turning brittle and yellow as a scrap of old newsprint, and he realized now, much too late, that he lacked the grace and fortitude to bear it. Unable to restrain himself, he would ask — would demand to know — how she was feeling half a dozen times an hour. Enzian and Gentian were no help to him, either: they were absorbed in a narrative of their own invention, whispering together for hours on end, looking back and forth between their mother’s bed and the sea beyond the porthole as though there were no difference between them.
Just after dawn, three days out from Gibraltar, Kaspar awoke wide-eyed and alert, as though someone beside him had whispered his name. The same force that roused him brought him onto his feet, accustomed by now to the pitch of the ship, and steered him gently toward the open door. He was aware that he was barefoot — that he was stark naked, in fact — and that the morning was unusually cold. Snow was falling in flurries, although it was still early autumn. He was dimly aware, without finding it strange, that he and his family were alone on the Comtesse Celeste. He glanced down at the twins, side by side on their backs, like two fish in the bottom of a boat. Then he stepped out to join Sonja at the rail.
“There you are,” she said. Her voice was hoarse from disuse. “I’ve been trying to get you up. To talk to me.”
He looked past her at the dishwater-colored ocean, translucent and jagged in the September light, a roiling field of chipped and age-worn china. Sonja was smiling at him, lovely as ever, wrapped in one of her white linen gowns. It put him in mind of something. He was beginning, by small but steady increments, to understand that he should feel surprised — but even that discovery felt familiar. She’d been one lifelong surprise to him, after all.
“I’ve been sick,” she said.
He nodded.
“You’ve been sick, too.”
It was difficult for him to answer. “You’ve been in bed for ten days,” he said. “You’ve had a high fever. I can appreciate your wanting fresh air, my darling, but it might be for the best—”
“Ach! It’s been longer than that,” Sonja said. “I’ve been sick since our first night together.” She raised one slender arm to shade her eyes. “I was in love with you, you see. It ended badly.”
What she said was distressing, and he intended to ask what in God’s name she meant, but he found himself saying something else entirely. “It didn’t end badly,” he said, placing his hand over hers. “We’ve been wonderfully happy. If it’s a sickness, we’ve been fortunate to catch it.”
“All right,” she said, turning her back on the sea. “It’s all right, Kasparchen. Let’s go to the beginning.”
Her body showed clearly through the wave-colored linen, gaunt and frail from the fever, and he knew, in that instant, when and where he’d seen that gown before. It was the same one she’d worn, apple-cheeked and defiant, on the day his earthly fate had been decided. The noise of the sea fell away and the outline of her form began to flicker. The deck and ocean were struck, rolled away like a stage set, and he was back in the tubercular light of the Jandek, the soles of his shoes sticking to the beer-soaked floor, watching a girl of not-quite-seventeen light a cigarette. He murmured her name — he knew this girl well, after all — and she looked up and laughed, surprised to see him there. He straightened in his booth as she came toward him.
* * *
The man who staggered off the train in Buffalo, New York’s Union Station on New Year’s Day 1939, gripping the shoulders of his daughters as if he needed them to walk, was so changed that his wife’s second cousin — the notorious “Buffalo Bill”—passed them by without slowing his step. Wilhelm Knarschitz was a pursy, preoccupied man (“the opposite of any kind of cowboy,” my grandfather wrote in his diary) with the unfortunate habit of chewing on the ends of his mustache. He failed to notice his nieces altogether, on account of the cameo photograph he held stiff-armed in front of him, like a fetish to deflect the evil eye. On his second go-round, Kaspar (who had no picture to go by) made an educated guess and caught his cousin-in-law by the sleeve — which was lucky, since Wilhelm’s fetish was no use to anyone. It was a picture of Sonja at the Washerwomen’s Ball.