Angels and Exiles (36 page)

Anna’s parents, horrified, had witnessed the scene from the rear of the hall. “Who was this young idiot?” asked Herr Holtz, in a voice that he wanted to shake with anger. Stefan, for an instant, thought to answer him with the exact truth; but he contained himself. “A young apprentice we had just hired on a trial basis, sir. There will be no need to dismiss him, I am sure we will never see him again.”

Three days later came the letter from the son of the Dynast, asking Anna Holtz’s hand in marriage. Stefan saw the young woman drowning in despair; he tried to console her somewhat, but he could not tell her the truth. After Radulf’s second visit, Anna came to him: “Do you know where Pieter Havel lives?”

“Yes, Damoiselle. At the house of the inventor Johann Havel, on the Ligeiastrass. I have the address.”

At teatime that afternoon, Anna paid no attention to what was being said. Her parents did not notice, too busy congratulating her on her imminent wedding.

Suddenly Anna spoke to her mother. “You always wanted what was best for me, didn’t you, Mama?”

“But of course.”

“And you, Papa, do you regret indulging my whims?”

Her father considered her a moment. “You know I don’t, Anna. We are happy for you because we want your happiness, as always.”

“Thank you,” she said, and wiped her eyes and abruptly left the table.

Stefan saw her for the last time as, disguised as a common woman, she descended the stairs that led to the service entrance. When the sky had darkened over the roofs of the high houses, he knew that Anna and Pieter had vanished in the flow of time.

Anna’s absence was discovered the next morning. The servants were questioned harshly. It was rapidly established that the young woman had fled the previous evening, but no one could ascertain her destination. Herr and Damme Holtz ordered one and all to keep absolute silence on the subject, while they set a search in motion.

Toward early afternoon, a man wearing a cape bordered in dynastic crimson came to ask some questions of Anna’s parents, who could not bring themselves to lie to him.

Radulf himself came in the evening. His gaze was that of a man who has just killed. “There is nowhere she can flee,” he said with desperate rage. “The city’s exits are sealed, and my men are patrolling the surrounding lands. I will find her.”

Stefan went to number thirty-seven of the Ligeiastrass the next day. He had left behind a letter of resignation. He bore at his side a purse containing all that was left of Anna’s treasure, along with his savings on seventeen years’ wages.

The door had been smashed in; inside was total chaos. Dozens of heterogeneous objects lay scattered across the floor. Horrified, Stefan called for Johann, who came out of his workshop, wiping his hands dry on a rag.

“Hello, Pieter,” he said in a faint voice. “As you can see, the Dynast’s men came to visit yesterday. They weren’t very happy when they failed to find Anna, but I believe I have convinced them she was nowhere about. No, I’m not hurt: they shook me about, but nothing else. Come.”

He led Stefan into his private workshop, where the time machine still stood proudly, minus its painting. “They tore off some of the ornaments and hit the gears with a hammer, so I had to spend the morning putting everything to rights. Fortunately, it’s a rather sturdy piece of work.” He went to a corner of the room and took up a roll of canvas. “Help me put the painting back in place, will you? That part, I figured I had best put away in safety.”

Stefan helped the inventor put the canvas back in place. “There we are; just like new,” said Johann Havel in a sarcastic tone. “Don’t you want to try it?”

Stefan looked him in the eye. He had understood at last, and the knowledge was bitter. “Do I even have a choice?”

“I don’t know. Believe me, I don’t know.”

“I just want to see her once again,” said Stefan. “Once more, that’s all. So I can remember how happy we were, she and I.”

“Then take your place. This machine was built for no one but you.”

Stefan sat down on the black leather seat and spun the pedals. The mechanism creaked shrilly and began to move. The stars, suns, and comets tied to the periphery of the great horizontal gear passed in front of his eyes again and again, evoking the illusion that the clouds moved in the night sky.

A terrible vertigo seized him. He fell from the machine, to be caught by Johann. The whole room seemed to sway, its walls insubstantial.

“Go now,” said the inventor. “Go and regret nothing.”

Stefan clumsily opened the workshop’s door, went out of the house on the Ligeiastrass. His feet came down in the freshly fallen snow of a winter evening.

He began to walk toward the Fernestrass, where he had once lived with Anna. His vertigo had faded but was not yet gone. He began to shiver; the cold reached through his too-thin clothes.

In front of him, a young woman walked through the snow; she was wrapped up in a worn coat from beneath which her legs emerged, clad in extravagant silk stockings. Her feet were swallowed up by enormous men’s galoshes. As he passed her, Stefan saw she was at the term of her pregnancy. He hesitated and she, seeing that he watched her, gave him the smile of an inexperienced professional.

“Pardon, mein Herr,” she said in a voice she tried to make seductive. “Could you help me get to the Geburtshaus? I feel the baby coming fast. My man’s sick, he had to stay home.”

Stefan took her arm mutely, bearing up a good part of her weight. She began to walk faster. “Remind me, meine Damme,” he asked, “what day is this?”

“December fourteenth,” she said, and Stefan bit his lip till blood flowed.

When they came in, the nurse judged at a glance both the young woman’s state and her social standing. She asked Stefan in a sour tone: “Are you the father?”

“Me? No, certainly not,” said Stefan, and an instant later three men rushed in, carrying Anna Holtz in their arms. He saw Pieter Havel looking at him, without seeing what should have been obvious, so absorbed was he by Anna. Stefan watched her being carried away on a stretcher, her beautiful face twisted in pain, Pieter holding her hand.

He had had his wish. Now the time had come to accomplish the most painful part.

Number thirty-seven of the Ligeiastrass was vacant. On the morning of December fifteenth, Stefan went to see the owner and showed him a purse full of gold: all the money Anna Holtz had taken with her into the past. “I would buy the house from you. Is this enough?”

“Ah—but certainly, Herr . . . ?”

“Havel . . . Johann Havel.”

He moved in that evening. He had a plaque put on the door: “Johann Havel/Inventor.” It would not be a lie for very long.

He would have to learn the principles of gears and levers, the composition of ceramics and the secrets of metals. He knew it would take him nearly twenty years to rebuild the time machine according to his memories, and that meanwhile a thousand and one other things would get built. He did his apprenticeship building a small mechanical elephant, which walked swinging its trunk from side to side.

It took him three years to achieve it, and when at last he held the toy in his hands, he went to the Krug orphanage.

In the long low room where the youngest children played, he bent down to a small boy and smiled. “What’s your name?”

“Pieter.” The boy’s voice betrayed a small measure of fright, and Johann remembered how intimidated he had been by the old man.

“Would you like to come live with me, Pieter? I would be your Papa.”

The boy hesitated, then nodded, and Johann went to sign the official papers. “One question only, meine Damme. The child’s parents . . . ?”

“Our principle is not to reveal this information,” answered the governess. Seeing Johann’s supplicating expression, she relented: “Let us say that his mother’s profession did not allow her to take care of him.”

On the way, Johann first held the boy’s hand. When they had reached the bottom of the street, he squatted down and took a package out of his pocket. “Look what I have for you,” he said. He took the elephant from its nest of paper, turned the key in the mechanism, and set it down. On the sunlight-gilded flagstones, the little elephant walked forward, swinging its trunk. Pieter showed a radiant smile.

“What do you want to call him?” asked the inventor, because he remembered he had to ask the question now.

“Elfy,” said the little boy, without hesitation.

“Then take Elfy with you, and hold tight to him. I’ll carry you to my house.”

He put Pieter on his shoulders and walked up the streets that would lead him to the Ligeiastrass.

He would see Pieter grow up for twelve years, which would pass both too fast and too slowly. With the passage of time, he would build him a whole menagerie of toys, would invent for him a crowd of games. He could not doubt it, for he remembered it all.

In a room of the house on the Ligeiastrass, Johann set up his private workshop, where no one, not even Pieter, had the right to enter. There he began his long labour.

He tried at first to make the ornaments himself, but he failed and had to resort to articles imported from a great city without Neuerland. He ordered a
trompe-l’œil
canvas showing a cloudy night sky from an artist, but it was not the one he needed. He had to run through a dozen painters before he finally obtained the proper canvas. He had to make himself the moulds to cast his gears, to try hundreds of combinations of pulleys and chains, before reaching something satisfying. Through a thousand false leads and dead ends, he rebuilt the time machine. He did not invent it: he merely remembered it.

When Pieter reached the age of sixteen, he left school and looked for work. He finally found a post as a servant in the Achinger household, on the Herbstestrass. “It’s only for a while,” he said to Johann. “But I’ll save up some money, and it will give me good references.” He left the house in which he had spent nearly fifteen years, promising to come visit Johann every Sunday.

Time passed inexorably. In his house on the Ligeiastrass, the old inventor Johann Havel busied himself about his time machine.

One evening in late fall, almost six months after Pieter had found his job, Johann tied the last silk thread, tightened the last screw, and he knew that the machine was finished. He sat down on the black leather seat, spun the pedals a few times. Above his head, the great horizontal gear pivoted on its axis, mimicking the celestial sphere, and the stars, the comets and the moons of shining metal hung to the rim of the gear began to spin. Johann Havel let the movement of the cogs stop by itself, then climbed down from the seat. He felt in the grip of a slight vertigo, as if he had just come out of sleep or was falling into it. The walls of his house seemed to become insubstantial. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on the cool glass of the window a moment, then he went to sit heavily in a faded velvet armchair. Morning sunlight surprised him; he had no awareness of having slept.