Waldemar in particular was fascinated by the pulpit, and claimed to have a memory of sitting beneath it, on his father’s lap, and celebrating midnight mass at Christmas. Its spherical shape impressed him as deeply significant. Kaspar found the whole notion silly, and had no recollection of the interior of Paměť Cathedral at all; but he felt drawn to the rendering regardless. Being more worldly than his younger brother — more interested in things as things, rather than as symbols — he often found himself struck by the marked similarity, from a structural point of view, between the pulpit and a pissoir.
* * *
If my grandfather found himself less admired by his classmates than Waldemar was — less a figure of hushed speculation — he also found himself distinctly better liked. The snobbery of the Viennese toward outsiders of every persuasion (and especially toward Slavs) passed over his head without ruffling a hair. By the winter of his first year at the university, Kaspar had either won his skeptics over or stepped politely around them, and had become the Physics Department’s unofficial mascot. Unlike his brother, he rarely spoke about his research, and the impression he made seems to have been that of a bon vivant with a boyish enthusiasm for physics. His mathematical ability, as well as his solemn good nature and willingness to perform the most mundane of chores without complaint, endeared him to a number of professors in the department, and by the end of his first term he’d become chief assistant to Ludwig David Silbermann, director of the School of Natural Philosophy: a kindly, perpetually overwhelmed man whose primary qualification for his lofty position seems to have been his persistence in the belief that the emperor had the best interests of his subjects at heart. My grandfather was careful to hide the substance of his own work — his inquiry, thus far fruitless, into the nature of his father’s discovery — from Professor Silbermann, and as a consequence they got on very well.
Between his assisting duties, his studies, and his fondness for Viennese street life, Kaspar had little time to spare for his brother, and by summer he and Waldemar were little more than apartment-mates. Like an underground river, the mystery of the Accidents continued to run beneath the events of their day-to-day lives, connecting them and keeping them in motion; on the surface, however, there was very little trace.
It was probably inevitable that a young man as intoxicated as my grandfather was by the charms of fin de siècle Vienna should eventually be swept up in the moral and cultural civil war that was splitting the city in two; but the circumstances of his recruitment are no less unlikely for that. On a certain ash-gray August afternoon — August 17, to be exact — just prior to his second academic year in the capital, Kaspar found himself in a two-person booth at the Jandek, a café catering to Marxists and artists’ models and syphilitics, nursing a watery mocca and trying not to seem too out of place. He was looking for Waldemar: he had something to tell him. Word had reached him that their mother was ill (she herself would never have written about anything so trivial) and he planned to depart for Znojmo that same evening. His brother had grown even more reclusive of late, and it had been days since Kaspar had laid eyes on him. He’d spent the entire morning beating the departmental bushes, until finally a walleyed Tyrolean named Bilch had let the name Jandek slip, in so conspiratorial a whisper that Kaspar had taken it for some kind of brothel.
My grandfather had no aversion to brothels by his eighteenth year — he’d been to a number himself — but the Jandek made them look like milliner’s shops. His shoe heels were stuck to the floor of his booth, and the whole place was littered with bread crumbs and onions and cigarette ends, and packed to capacity with men who clearly had no other place to go. The shabbiest of them sat shoehorned together in the booth next to his, composing clumsy and obscene couplets about a well-known painter by the name of Hans Makart: they didn’t seem to care much for his paintings. My grandfather, who happened to care for Makart’s paintings a great deal, had just asked for his check when the kitchen doors opened, the smoke seemed to part, and a girl in a nightgown sashayed out into the light.
Kaspar knew the girl well — as well, that is, as one could know a girl of good family in 1905—but it took him a moment to place her. Her name was Sonja Adèle and she was one week shy of seventeen years old. She was also, as chance or fate or Providence would have it, the daughter of Ludwig David Silbermann. They’d eaten dinner in each other’s company perhaps a dozen times, and had had two brief, forgettable conversations; on one occasion he’d helped her to work out a sum. Nothing in any of those prior encounters had prepared him for the girl who stood before him now.
“Fräulein Silbermann!” he called to her as she went by.
She stopped short and spun on her heels — not like a lady at all — and glowered at him through the smoke. “Herr Toula!” she exclaimed, with undisguised amusement. “What on earth brings you here?”
“I could ask the same of you, fräulien.”
“Buy me a glass of kvass and I’ll tell you.”
“Kvass?” Kaspar said, more bewildered than ever.
“It’s a kind of Russian peasant beer, made out of old bread. A house specialty.” She pulled up a stool and sat down. “Do you know how the Russians say ‘Mind your own business?’”
Kaspar shook his head mutely.
“I’ll tell you, Herr Toula, but I’ll have to whisper it.”
He inclined his head toward her, asking himself what could possibly be considered inappropriate in such a place. Her breath against his earlobe made the soles of his feet prickle in their cashmere stockings.
“Вы не проникли, так что не ерзать ваши ягодицы.”
“Ah!” Kaspar said, nodding. “But what does that mean?”
“You’re not being fucked, so don’t wiggle your ass.”
“Ah,” he repeated, bobbing his head absurdly. “I see.” The blood was draining from his face, but there was nothing he could do about that. She was staring at him brashly, her cheeks lightly flushed, biting a corner of her mouth to keep from laughing.
“Ah,” he said a third time, but by then she’d already left him for the boys in the neighboring booth. When the kvass came he drank it himself.
* * *
Kaspar caught the train that same evening (he’d already purchased his ticket) and spent four restless days at his mother’s bedside. When his brother came home on the weekend, he returned to the city immediately, marveling at his lack of family feeling. He spent the next nine afternoons at the Jandek, drinking endless mélanges and repelling all comers, wearing unironed trousers and keeping his hat on indoors. At 15:15 CET on the tenth day, Sonja emerged from the kitchen exactly as she had two weeks before, and this time there was no gang of Makart disparagers to receive her. She came straight to Kaspar’s table, as though his presence there were no more than expected, and sat down without a single word of greeting. She was wearing the same shapeless gown as before, and she scrutinized him just as directly, but there was a disquiet in her manner now, even a hint of appeal. The feeling in Kaspar’s throat as he watched her was the same one he got when he ate chestnuts by mistake. He was mildly allergic to chestnuts.
“Kvass?” he said suavely, beckoning to the waiter.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she answered, glancing over her shoulder.
“I’d assumed — that is to say, I may be mispronouncing—”