stepped forward stiffly, automatically, like a mechanical toy, and drew in a whistling breath. It was the greatest moment of his duration to date, and the most terrifying. An eccentric young prodigy from the provinces, heretofore unknown, who’d developed a preposterous new theory. The ceiling seemed to bow toward him, its gilded fretwork low enough to touch; the rushing in his ears might have been the music of chronology itself. Wittgenstein and Borofsky sat as if trapped in amber, their mouths slightly open, their eyes round as coins. The floor was now Kaspar’s and he took it boldly. What he had to say was perfectly straightforward.
“I know the man of whom you’re speaking,” he repeated. “I’m privileged to inform you, gentlemen, that he is my brother.”
His words fell on the men like a blow. The look on their faces was hard to interpret, but it might very well have been awe. Their cigars hung slackly from their gaping mouths.
At last Silbermann spoke. “A small misunderstanding, I’m afraid.”
“What in blazes?” Wittgenstein got out at last. “Who is this person, Ludwig? Is he out of his wits?”
“My name is Kaspar Toula, sir. Waldemar Toula, as I’ve already mentioned—”
“Boy,” Borofsky said calmly, “the man we are discussing is a former student of mine at the Technical University in Zürich. Not your brother, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
“But the theory you describe,” Kaspar said, fighting for breath. “It must surely derive from the Accidents—I mean to say, the Lost—”
“It does nothing of the sort,” said Silbermann. “It’s a theory, not yet published, which Professor Borofsky refers to as ‘special relativity.’ ”
“I see,” answered Kaspar, though his voice made no sound. “I see that now. Yes, of course. Thank you kindly.” He bowed to all three men, who continued to goggle in astonishment, then promptly made his excuses to the sisters Wittgenstein, and to Sonja, and to everyone else he met on his way to the landing, then left as quickly as his shaking legs would take him. Before his feet had touched the pavement he was running.
∞
Kaspar ran across Karlsplatz—as good as empty at that hour—then down past the Graben, with its grandly priapic monument to the plague, and out Rotenthurmstrasse to the bile-colored canal without pausing for breath. Time moved lethargically, thickening into a soup, the way it often did when he was frightened. At Ferdinandstrasse he spun clownishly on his heels, skidding slightly, and made for Valeriestrasse with all possible speed. He thought passingly of Sonja, and of the embarrassment he’d caused her. Sonja will be just fine, he said to himself, and of course it was true.
His brother was a different matter. The thought of Waldemar getting word of the new theory from anyone else’s lips made Kaspar go dizzy with panic. He couldn’t predict what would happen, couldn’t picture Waldemar’s reaction even dimly, and that blankness was more dreadful than any image could have been. He simply couldn’t form the least idea.
He’d expected to find the villa’s gates locked when he arrived, or at least locked to him; but the hussar let him enter without comment. He found the widow in the unlit parlor, barely visible in the gloom, sitting straight-backed and dour with her hands in her lap. She was waiting for someone, or in attendance on someone, and for a moment Kaspar wondered who it was.
“Good evening, Frau Bemmelmans. Pardon my—”
“He’s upstairs.”
“Where exactly, madame?”
“Upstairs,” the widow said, already looking away.
∞
Kaspar heard Waldemar before he saw him—heard him holding forth in reasoned, deliberate tones, as if explaining something subtle to a child. He followed the sound up three flights of stairs to an unpainted door, turned the handle and let himself in, as if he were at home in that godforsaken place.
He found himself in a high-ceilinged study whose fleur-de-lis wall-paper hung in great tattered folds over the tops of three wardrobes. Through a second door he saw the foot of an unmade cot with a pair of freshly blackened boots beside it. He heard no voice now. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. It was best to rehearse what he would say before he said it: his comportment could go some way toward lessening the shock. It remained unclear, after all, what this upstart in Bern had achieved. The proper choice of words, a certain lightness of delivery, a considered rhetorical approach—
“You look funny down there,” came a voice from behind him. “You look like a cicada in a jar.”
Kaspar turned his head slowly. He knew where the voice was coming from, though a part of him refused to credit it.
“There’s a rumor going around,” said the voice. “I imagine you’ve heard.”
Kaspar raised his eyes unwillingly to the gap between the ceiling and the top of the nearest wardrobe, where the paper was slackest. His brother sat clutching his knees to his chest beneath a dangling fold, nearly hidden behind it, as though sheltering there from the rain. His head was bent to one side, as if his neck were broken; the toes of his bare feet held tightly to the wardrobe’s beveled lip. He looked down at Kaspar without apparent interest.
Kaspar chose his words carefully. “I did hear something. It seems that some Swiss bureaucrat—in Bern, of all places—has developed a theory—”
“Ach!” said Waldemar, coughing into his fist. “I know all about that. I was referring to the rumor that I’ve gone insane.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Kaspar managed to answer.
“You will.”
“I promise you, Waldemar, I’ll do whatever I can—”
“That’s kind of you, Kaspar, but you needn’t bother.” Waldemar smiled. “I started the rumor myself.”
“Did you?” stammered Kaspar, though he knew better than to expect an intelligible answer. Waldemar shrugged his shoulders, rustling the paper behind him and raising a thin cloud of dust.
“Come down from there, Waldemar. Will you do that for me?”
“It perturbs you to see me at this altitude, of course,” Waldemar said blithely. “It’s not too comfortable for me, either, as you can imagine. But there’s a protocol I’m following.” He gave a slight shudder. “Time passes more slowly up here, first of all. The farther from the surface of the earth, the lower the frequency of light waves; and the lower the frequency of light waves, the longer it takes time to pass.”
Kaspar shook his head. “You’re mistaken about that. Altitude should have the opposite—”
“Tssk! You’d know as much yourself, if you’d been keeping up with your schoolwork.” Waldemar’s lips gave a twitch. “But we both know you’ve been otherwise engaged.”
Kaspar stared up at his brother and said nothing.
“I’ll tell you something else, since you’ve come all this way. Would you like me to tell it?”
“I’m listening.”
“That Swiss clerk of yours is a shit-eating Jew.”
Kaspar had forced himself, on the way to the villa, to imagine every possible reaction Waldemar might have to the news, no matter how unnerving—his brother’s outburst, therefore, came as no surprise. It came as a relief, in fact, being appropriate to the spirit of the times. Anti-Semitism hung in the air like smoke in those years, like the musk of the horse-drawn fiakers, and the Viennese inhaled it with each breath; not even the Jews themselves were free of it. Kaspar had been aware of die Judenfrage even before leaving Znojmo, but since the start of his affair with Sonja he’d begun to see it everywhere he looked. Waldemar’s racial paranoia didn’t set him apart: just the opposite. It was the best available