In War Times (14 page)

Nearby, in a box of jumbled books he rummaged through to perhaps find something rare for Howie—not that he had any idea what that might be—he found a large art book of Kandinsky prints. Remembering Wink’s mention of Kandinsky in relation to modern music, he picked that up as well. He also took a book of translated Chinese poetry, filled with references to rain, rivers, mountains, and longing, because the lines he scanned resonated with his seeming distance from Keenan.

He returned to the main level, and walked across the ends of aisles until he again saw the man at his post, part of his bowed head and his desk lit by a small, contained disk of light. Again, the man did not look up as he approached.

“Excuse me. Do you want to see what I have?”

His head jerked up. “What? Oh, yes.” Edwards fussed around and pulled out another ledger book and carefully logged Sam’s finds. Sam had a dizzying vision of Edwards’s mind, no more and no less full than this warehouse, knowing exactly which object was where, a precise map of pure things, removed from their context, awaiting some kind of transformation.

“That will do. Good night.” Edwards waved his hand and then used it to turn a ledger page. Sam was dismissed.

When Sam stepped out onto the street, blackout reigned. The damp air smelled of smoke.

Sam headed toward their regular meeting place, a favorite pub, hoping Wink would be finished with his gathering expedition. Despite the scent of fires, the buildings he passed were intact; the Germans were still targeting the Docklands, although a lucky bomb had fallen on Buckingham Palace. Lucky for the royals, actually. It made them seem less isolated, more like all the other suffering Brits.

But after several long blocks, he decided that he must be lost, and turned to retrace his steps.

And then, someone was walking next to him. Right next to him, closer than a stranger would. “Hello,” she said, and he recognized Hadntz’s voice.

She wore a dark, heavy coat, a black hat, and boots, and thus was almost invisible. “Come with me,” she said and linked her arm through his. Then he realized that someone was next to Hadntz; he saw a pale oval face floating at Hadntz’s shoulder.

“Is this him?” The voice was that of a girl. An impatient, disdainful girl.

“Yes,” replied Hadntz. “Let’s go now.”

“How did you find me?” asked Sam.

Hadntz was silent for a while. On the corner they passed a blacked-out pub—not the one he’d been headed for—from which music and conversation emanated. Finally, she said, “It was not easy. Think of a method analogous to your radar.”

“Radar?”

“Of a sort.” They walked quickly, and he automatically kept note of the streets they turned onto, and how many blocks they went before turning. A few cars crept past, headlights dim through tiny holes cut in material covering them.

He said, “We’ve been trying—”

“I know.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

Finally they came to a neighborhood of tall, separate homes—mansions, in his vernacular—made over into small hotels and guest houses. She turned onto a sidewalk punctuated by the dark shapes of a formal yard gone ragged and they climbed broad steps to a veranda. Paint flaked off on his hand when he grasped the banister.

Dusting off his hands as Hadntz pushed open the green door, he walked into what may have been originally a ballroom. Floor-to-ceiling windows, draped with blankets, were set in a vast expanse of faded, peeling floral wallpaper. Children darted about, squealing and laughing. Small groups of adults on odd sofas and chairs pushed into scattered groups engaged in lively conversation, but he heard no English words. Most of their clothing was foreign; worn yet elegant, the clothing of war, of refugees, of travelers who moved with no settling place in sight. A small coal fire in an ornate stove contributed an acrid undertone, but not much heat where he stood.

Hadntz flung her scarf over a hatrack festooned with winter gear; rubber boots waited in empty pairs on the floor. He kept his own coat, but helped Hadntz out of hers and hung it up.

The girl’s curly black hair fell, gloriously long, down her back as she divested herself of a black coat and a sheared-wool hat that looked Russian. She glared at Sam. Hadntz spoke sharply to her in a language that flowed like music. She replied just as sharply, flung her coat on the floor, and walked away, her back straight as a plumb line. Then she stopped, returned, hung up her coat, and left again without a look at either of them.

“My lovely niece, Katya.” Hadntz managed to convey irritation and pride in the same tone.

“Not your daughter?”

“No.” Hadntz’s reply was weary. “I have not yet found her.” She greeted the crowd in the main room. “I’d like to introduce a colleague of mine. Sam Dance.” Nods and polite murmurs lasted a few seconds.

Then an old woman jerked out of reverie and beckoned Sam close. She smelled of talcum powder and spoke a few words in Romany. Hadntz smiled gently and stroked the old woman’s hair, a pensive look on her face.

“What did she say?”

Hadntz hesitated, then said, “She wants to know if you’re the one who’s going to save us.”

“What?”

The woman closed her eyes. Her head nodded forward.

“She’s lost everyone. Follow me.”

Hadntz led him down a flight of stairs at the back of the house. “The kitchen is in the basement, which works well for us. We are able to stuff ourselves while we are bombed.” Down a short corridor with irregular stone walls that might have been built centuries earlier, she pushed through a swinging door.

They entered a cavernous room. The electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling had a makeshift look; the gas sconces on the wall had probably been there for a century. A vast slab of pink marble in the center of the room held several candelabras with unmatched candles and two clean, gigantic pots. Odd tables and chairs were scattered about. The drainboard overflowed with an assortment of clean dishes, knives, pots, and pans. Onions and potatoes filled huge baskets. A deep niche held wrapped cheeses and jugs of cream. The stew bubbling on the hob was fragrant with smells he could not place. Hadntz asked, “Will you have supper with me?”

“I’d love to.”

She took two flowered bowls from the open shelves. “Goulash. Which means everything we could get with our ration cards in one big pot.” She ladled goulash into the bowls and set them with bread on one of the tables, then lit a candle.

The goulash was delicious—worlds better than Army slop.

Hadntz’s face was deeply shadowed in the flickering candlelight. Within their cocoon of silence, Sam had the sensation of being completely removed from his own time, neatly cut out and re-inserted in hers, which radiated quiet but intense depths. It was like a very strong memory of someplace he had never been, or had forgotten, until now, as if he might be reliving this room and the words they spoke.

She said, “You are working on it?”

“Yes. I’ve told my friend, Allen Winklemeyer, about all this. He’s read your paper, and he’s helping to create the…device?”

She nodded. “I see now.”

“See what?”

“Winklemeyer is the new factor that I’ve been trying to account for.”

“I needed some other input.”

“Of course,” she said. “I should have realized that. Don’t worry. But after this—no one else must know.” She put down her spoon, reached into her dress, and extracted a small tube from her bosom. “Microfilm. You may keep it.”

Sam suddenly had a sense that this might be his only chance to ask questions, and that he had no time to waste. “Look. How do you know that DNA carries genetic information? And that bit about life in clay. How did you come up with that?”

She tapped the microfilm canister on the table with some impatience. “Right now, we have no time to discuss it fully. I’ve tried to answer some questions you may have in this. I have made some important modifications. For instance, I included a paper titled “Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance-Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types.” It was published last year by Oswald, Colin, and Maclyn—a very important paper which shows that DNA carries genetic information. And I recently visited my friend Schopenhauer. He’s preparing some lectures on the connection between physics and biology, to be given in Glasgow. He is calling the series ‘What is Life?’”

“But the shape—”

“I admit that there is information in here that is not presently proven, not widely known. I include more of my own papers. With the war, it has been impossible to publish. It is all considered secret information. You won’t find any papers about the atomic bomb. Yet you seemed to believe that it was possible when I told you about it.”

“All right.” Sam took the canister. “Do you have a way to look at it now?”

“I have the original papers.” She got a notebook from her large bag and returned to the table, shoving her bowl aside. They bent their heads over it as she paged through it. He glimpsed equations that looked fascinating.

“What is this
X
?”

“It’s what I’m working on. A model of time as it relates to our consciousness and our consciousness as relates to our genes.”

He raised his eyebrows in question.

She said, “We were just talking about them. Genes are the nucleic acids through which everything about us is expressed. I theorize that these tiny segments are turned off and on at particular times by inner and outer forces. They control our physical bodies, including our mind, our brain. I believe that the physical shape of these genes are mirrored by the structure of time. In other words, the force we call time, which extends from this point equally in all directions, can also be expressed as this double-helix model, and events are turned off or on according to the way subatomic particles interact with that which we call consciousness.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin, leaving a smear of red lipstick on the smooth, well-worn white cloth. “I do not know what we are, really. Some kind of monster, it seems, right now. I have seen things that beggar the imagination. Things too terrible to speak of.

“But—well, here it is. Subatomic particles communicate with one another. They seem to be able to influence one another from great distances because they are actually the same particle. Time is an illusion that we all share, because we are actually a single microorganism. But within that which we call time are forces which we may be able to manipulate by manipulating our DNA. It determines how whatever time is ordered.

“Let us say that pain and suffering can be minimized. What is the order that we can put into ourselves so that we might avert, or minimize, that pain and suffering? What is this disease of humanity called war? What is the sulfa drug that can kill whatever infects our minds and causes war, at the atomic level? For us, time is biology; biology, time. What if we can inoculate
this
time with a bit of the time that is causing the disease, and thus resist it? What if the part of us, the time of us, that survives this cure, is the part that is the least evil? Can we thereby create an era in which we prosper? A time in which we do not suffer? A time in which we continue to explore and to learn? A time in which we travel the universe, a time in which we
understand
time, and ourselves, and all of nature, and yet continue to move toward an ever-changing model of perfection, of happiness?”

She tapped the paper with a long red fingernail. “That is why I have written this. Think about the beams we are using now. The Germans follow a radio beam to London. They have to stay on that beam. Our own radio beams—microwave beams—emit energy that bounces off of the German planes, and we interpret that information through the motions of photons on a screen. If we are the tower—if our consciousness is an interaction with matter and our DNA is the receiving dish—can we send out a ‘ping’ to another point in time, which is not ‘the future’ but contiguous with now, and receive communication in return? Correct our course by inserting the antibody of a particular mode of behavior? Evolve a new sense so we can ‘see’ where we are going, see where a particular path might take us and avoid it?” She sighed. “We tried to do that after the Great War, which seemed for a time to have inoculated us against another. Hitler used that abhorrence to his advantage, though. Why couldn’t the German people have ignored him? Why couldn’t he have died in that war? Would another Hitler have arisen instead? Are these forces inevitable, or are they manipulable? I have put this theory into a language that those of many nationalities share, the language of mathematics. I—”

The air raid siren sounded, like the cry of a great beast rising from vast depths.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the door. “Hurry! We must help the old people and children downstairs. I have to find Katya. She has taken to trying to watch the city burn from the roof. She laughs as the bombs fall. She doesn’t seem to understand that one could fall here. Or maybe, since she has lost her mother and father and brothers, she is hoping for that.”

Sam shouldered his duffel bag and they ascended the stairs through a steady stream of people making their way down.

“No Katya. No Katya,” she muttered. “Have you seen Katya?” she asked several people they passed, and continued upward.

When they reached the main room, she put an elderly gentleman into Sam’s keeping. Sam shepherded him to the stairway, then realized he was too frail to descend without help. He supported him from the front, holding on to his thin waist with both hands, so as not to block the entire stairway. After the toothless old man was seated Sam rushed upstairs.

The house shook from a nearby impact.

A feeling like that of leaves rustling in the wind, touching one another repeatedly, settled upon him. He was in a reverie of summertime Puzzle River, the walk through the forest, still deep then, still mysterious with all that was unknown, in childhood, and then the final run toward the bluffs behind Keenan. Keenan was always ahead.

“Wake up, Yank.” The rude light in his face pulled him from brilliant joy, this knowledge of Keenan’s presence. He opened his eyes and shut them against the glare of a torch.