“I’m finished with the Russians. They treat their workers abominably. You’ve heard of the disturbances in Minsk?”
“The which?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes, still looking past him. “What are you drinking?”
“Pilsner,” he mumbled, indicating the full stein before him. “In the town I come from, in Moravia—”
She turned back to him now with a different expression entirely. “You’re Czech?”
“Of a sort,” he said, choosing his words cautiously. “That is to say, the name Toula is originally from the Czech. It means ‘to wander about,’ apparently. Of course, we speak German in the home, and I’ve been learning English—”
“The Czech language is the most beautiful spoken in Europe,” Sonja said earnestly. “Worlds better than Russian.”
To the best of Kaspar’s knowledge, the Czech and Russian languages were part of the same cozy family; but he had the good sense not to point this out.
Sonja peered over her shoulder again, then took a ladylike sip of his pilsner. “He’s not coming out,” she said. “Thank heaven for that.”
“To whom do you refer?” said Kaspar, as nonchalantly as he could.
“Kappa, the painter. I model for him every second Tuesday.”
“You model for him,” Kaspar repeated. “I see.” Things were coming clear to him at last, but only slowly. “He paints you in the kitchen?”
“Close enough, Herr Toula. He has an atelier back there. Appropriately, it used to be the sausage-curing room.”
“I see,” Kaspar repeated, thinking hard. The notion of Sonja modeling made perfect sense and made no sense at all. It was difficult to conceive of a less suitable vocation for a young lady of standing. He’d met models before in the cafés, of course, but none who weren’t also prostitutes.
Sonja was watching him closely, taking sociable sips of his beer, which did nothing for his clarity of mind. He regained his self-possession by a furious effort of will.
“That would explain your outfit, I suppose.”
Her smile faded. “I beg your pardon?”
“That smock — or whatever you call it — that you have on. The first time we met, you were wearing a wonderful dress, I remember, with a charming blue bustle—”
“The dress you refer to,” Sonja said icily, “took thirty minutes and six hands to get inside of. Its stays were so tight I could barely breathe.” She shut her eyes and emitted a series of gasps, as though the memory alone were enough to suffocate her. “Have you ever watched the women promenading in the Prater, Herr Toula, or along Kärntnerstrasse on a Sunday afternoon? Have you ever taken note of how they move?”
“Oh yes,” said Kaspar, smiling in spite of himself. “They walk with tiny steps, like turtledoves.”
“They walk like cripples,” Sonja hissed. “You’re not one of those cow-eyed romanticizers, are you? Those chastity fetishists? I thought you told me that you were a Czech.”
My grandfather took a deep, pensive draught of his pilsner. Sonja regarded him through narrowed eyes.
“I do come from Moravia,” he said hopefully.
“Don’t be fooled by the ribbons, Herr Toula. The female anatomy is terrifying to man, so he hides it behind a wall of scaffolding. Under each of those dresses you find so bewitching, a body is locked away in quarantine.”
This was a bit much for poor Kaspar, but he was willing to tread water until he sighted land.
“Quarantine,” he repeated. “I see. So you wear that smock on your days off, as well?”
“This ‘smock,’ as you call it, is the rational answer to an irrational society. It was designed by the maestro himself.” When Kaspar said nothing, she added, slightly more tentatively: “When we have the society we deserve, it may be possible to attach a few bows here and there.”
This glimmer of weakness was all the encouragement my grandfather required. He sat forward soberly, every inch the bourgeois kavalier, and took Sonja’s plump, schoolgirlish hand in his. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Fräulein Silbermann. I’m a pickle manufacturer’s son, new to this city, with a head for sums and very little else. But I’m willing to learn, if you’ll consent to show me. I’ll follow anywhere you choose to lead.”
Sonja blinked at him a moment, genuinely startled, then laughed in his face. “Eager to get your spats dirty, Herr Toula? I don’t imagine Papa would approve. He always speaks of you in the most lofty of terms!”
It was at this point — as he described it, later that evening, to his frankly incredulous brother — that Kaspar was visited by genius.
“To hell with your papa.”
The blood left Sonja’s face. “What was that?” she murmured. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”
“Your father is a mediocre scientist, fräulein, and a blowhard besides. I couldn’t care less for his good opinion.” He raised the stein to his lips, downed the last of his pilsner, and set it down between them with a thump. “You might almost call him the Makart of physics.”
“You’re a bum crawler,” Sonja said, wide-eyed. “You’re an ingrate. You’re a hypocrite.”
“I’m a Czech,” my grandfather said simply.
Within the week the two of them were lovers.
I REMEMBER WHEN I first saw you, Mrs. Haven. You were trapped inside a Möbius loop of admirers at an Upper East Side party, backed against the kitchen counter like a convict bracing for the firing squad. You wore your hair short then, in a vaguely hermaphroditic schoolboy cut, and you looked as though you never went outside. A man in a boater said something to you, then repeated it, then repeated it again, and you nodded in a way that reduced him to dust.
I should have taken this as a warning — I understand that now. Instead I took it as a kind of cue.
I was standing in the home entertainment grotto, slack-jawed and helpless, gawking at you through the open kitchen door; you returned my stare calmly for exactly six seconds, then covered your upper lip with your ring finger. A mustache had been drawn between your first and second knuckles in ballpoint pen — a precise, Chaplinesque trapezoid — making you look like a beautiful Hitler. You held it there a moment, keeping your face set and blank, then solemnly tapped the right side of your nose. The air seemed to thicken. A signal was being transmitted, a semaphore of some kind, but I didn’t have a clue what it could mean. Perverse as it seems to me now, the image of you there, hunched stiffly against the counter with that obscene blue mustache pressed against your lips, will remain the most erotic of my life.
The apartment belonged to my cousin, Van Markham, the only member of the Tolliver clan who’d succeeded in adjusting to the times. His living room yawned snazzily before me, an airy product showroom accented by a sprinkling of actual people. I crossed it in a dozen woozy steps. The idea that just a moment earlier I’d been alphabetizing the DVD cases, counting the minutes until I could leave, seemed outlandish to me now, beyond crediting. Creation itself was blowing me a kiss, tossing me my first and only blessing, and all I had to do was let it hit.
The man in the boater was still droning on when I reached you, but now you sat crouched on the floor with your back to the fridge, so that he seemed to be complaining to the freezer. It might have been a suggestive pose, scandalous even, if you hadn’t been so obviously bored. I glanced at him in passing and saw that he’d clenched his eyes shut, like an eight-year-old steeling himself for a spanking. He was a giant of a man, a colossus in seersucker, but I was past the point of no return by then. I knelt down beside you and you gave me a nod and we hid ourselves under the counter. I’d foreseen all this happening — I wouldn’t have had the courage otherwise — but the fact of it was still beyond belief. Not a word had passed between us yet.