68 was marked with a wrapper from a pack of Newport Lights:
TREE MARRIAGE.—Among the Brahmans of the south of India it is the established custom that a younger brother should not marry before an older one. To fulfil this requirement, when there is no satisfactory bride in sight for a senior brother, he is married to a tree, which leaves the younger one at liberty to take a wife.
Mock marriages are also carried out among the Punjab of India, in the case of a widower taking his third wife. It is celebrated with a certain tree or rosebush, and sometimes with a sheep, which is dressed up as a bride and is led by the groom around the sacrificial fire while the real bride reposes nearby.
“I see,” I said slowly, though of course I saw nothing. “How is this a self-help book, exactly?”
“My marriage is like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I married a tree, Walter. That’s what I mean.”
“Has your husband—was he married before? Or are you trying to tell me—”
“Shh, Walter,” you said, pulling me down onto the beanbag in a way that made all talk seem academic.
Less than a year later, when I was as good as dead to you, I read the rest of Fielding’s tawdry little survey—it’s next to me on the floor right now, in fact—and one passage, more than any other, took me back to that first bliss-drenched afternoon:
THE KISS.—In its sensory impulses, the kiss is the most direct prelude and incitement to sexual fulfilment. Surfaced by a tissue of full-blooded, sensitive membranes, moistened by the honey of salivary sweetness, shaped at their loveliest into a curvature that has been likened to Cupid’s bow, the lips seem especially contrived by nature for their role of allurement into the labyrinths of bodily desire. It is for this reason that restraint and discrimination should be the watchword of those who understand the real meaning and importance of the kiss, and who hold in high regard the sacredness of the forces which its casual bestowal may unwittingly release. Proceed with circumspection!
VIII
THE NEXT TWENTY-ODD YEARS, during which the world went loudly and pompously down the pissoir, were the happiest of Kaspar Toula’s life.
His long-departed father, in the course of his inevitable dinnertime rants—on the evils of the automobile, for example, or the cleansing properties of cellulose—had been fond of quoting a Saxon manic-depressive named Friedrich Nietzsche: “All history is the experimental refutation of the so-called moral order of things.” And the brash and pockmarked twentieth century, in all the brutal enthusiasm of its adolescence, seemed to be doing its frenzied best to prove him right.
My grandfather barely had time to finish his studies, make his bid for Sonja’s hand in marriage, and receive his Schwiegervater’s halfhearted blessing before the empire that both his father and his father-in-law so myopically adored began to come apart like sodden paper. The Czechs, the Magyars, the Slovaks, the Serbs and the Croats—all of whom, admittedly, had exhibited signs of petulance before—now seemed more interested in pitching fits in parliament than in basking in their emperor’s esteem. The bacillus of nationalism had infested all but the remotest crannies of the empire by the time the Kaiser’s cousin had his celebrated rendezvous with a Serbian anarchist’s bullet; it had simply been a question of which member of the imperial family was going to have their candle guttered first. (In certain back rooms and furnished cellars of the capital, money had in fact been wagered on this very question.) But no one—not the bookies, not the anarchists, and least of all the imperial family itself—foresaw the conflagration that would follow.
Sonja Toula, née Silbermann, was a fervent backer of the Serbian cause from the start of the war, and stayed true to her colors even when her husband was sent to the front in a uniform that still smelled faintly of the corpse who’d worn it last. By that late date, a fair portion of the civilized world had muddied its spats, and it was clear to every half-wit that the “six weeks’ war” the Kaiser had promised was a fairy story, albeit one that he himself believed. Kaspar served that sad old fool without complaint, and witnessed his due share of horrors, some of which he committed himself. He lost two fingers in the war, and the top of an ear, but he rarely regretted his injuries: they were his only proof that the war, and the empire he’d fought for, had been more than some preadolescent dream. And there were moments, Mrs. Haven, on his very worst days, when not even his missing fingers could convince him.
The citation for bravery he’d won—a weightless nub of nickel-plated tin, for some obscure reason in the shape of a winged horse—was mothballed away and forgotten as soon as the fighting was over. Years later, when the family was hurriedly throwing everything it could into a clutch of pasteboard steamer trunks, the medal would find its way into the hands of his younger daughter, who brought it to him for an explanation. Gentian never forgot her father’s answer. “It’s a pegasus, Schätzchen—an imaginary animal. Papa got it as a present, from a very old man, for defending an imaginary kingdom.”
∞
There were quite a few reasons for Kaspar’s happiness during his twenties and thirties, from his hard-won advancement at the university to the deepening of his understanding of the physical world; but the most obvious, even to Kaspar himself, was the indecorous and overwrought passion he continued to feel for his wife. Practically from birth—or so it seemed to him—he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was doomed to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible. Kaspar had Sonja, after all, and the well-appointed home they’d made together. It seemed lunacy to ask for more than that.
Sonja had grown more deliberate as she came into the fullness of her years, more austere of temperament, more assured of her intelligence and grace. Her political convictions had only deepened as she aged; her smock, however, lay neatly put away in the same cabinet that housed her husband’s medal. Socialists and anarchists and communists—“your ism-ists,” as Kaspar (more or less affectionately) called them—came and went as if the apartment were a well-appointed flophouse, as they’d done since the end of the war; but now they looked and behaved less like revolutionaries than like librarians, or attorneys-at-law, or even patent clerks. And they tipped their hats politely to him as they came and went.
Kaspar had no doubt that half his wife’s protégés loved her desperately, but the fact didn’t bother him—at least not unduly—because he so completely shared their point of view. Sonja’s hold over him had only intensified since their marriage, and it often submerged him so profoundly in its inky, honeyed depths that he found it slightly difficult to breathe. He was as proud of his submission as his countrymen were—or affected to be—of the wounds they’d received in the war.
Waldemar’s existence during these years of free fall, by contrast, is as shrouded and ambiguous as my grandfather’s is faceted and bright. Rumors would reach Sonja from time to time through her network of fellow travelers: inconclusive scraps of information, little better than hearsay, that she took care to keep from her husband. Waldemar had gone to Russia; Waldemar had taken holy orders; Waldemar had been seen late at night, dressed in a woman’s nightgown, shouting curses at the streetcars on the Ring. This was the time of the great housing crisis in the republic, when a host of city dwellers were reduced to living under bridges, or on barges, or in caves dug into railway embankments. In Budapest, thirty-five people were discovered nesting in the trees of Népliget Park, and word reached Sonja that Waldemar was among them. She had no idea which of these reports to believe, so she chose to believe all of them. She hated to be taken by surprise.
This much, at least, is certain: within three weeks of his midnight visit to the Silbermann household, two weeks of learning of the relativity theory, and four days of delivering his doomsday prophecy to his brother, Waldemar had been expelled from the university, been served a notice of eviction from the dragon-headed building, and had slipped away without confiding in a soul.