The Lost Time Accidents (4 page)

“Esteemed Frau Svoboda, kindly listen to me now. For the past seven years, as you may or may not know, our father has been engaged in a series of experimental inquiries into the physical nature of time.” He stared at her until she bobbed her head. “Until recently, my brother and myself had been allowed to assist him in his research; a few months ago, however, he forbade us to set foot in his laboratory. From the comments he made—the merest of hints, really—we know he was on the cusp of a major discovery: a new understanding, not just of the nature of time, but of the possibility of motion—
free
motion—within it.” Waldemar sucked in a breath. “Given what has happened, you can see what an unfortunate decision it was to exclude us from his work. On the morning of his death—or so this note would seem to imply—our father finally achieved the breakthrough he’d been seeking.” He glared into her eyes as he said this, neither wavering nor blinking, like a mesmerist or a vampire or a prophet. “Can you appreciate what this means, Frau Svoboda? Most people couldn’t—not for the life of them. But I have no doubt whatsoever that you can.”

Marta glanced away from him then, but only for an instant. “Why did he forbid you from entering his laboratory?”

“He wanted us to concentrate on our schoolwork,” Kaspar said, reddening. “Over the last few years, our marks—”

“He’d become suspicious of everyone,” Waldemar interrupted. “He spent all his time in that damned cave of his. Our poor mother—”

“What we came here to ask you, Frau Svoboda, is this: Might you have those three pages? Might they be in this house?”

Looking from one boy to the other, basking in the glow of their combined attention, Marta wanted nothing so much as to provide them with the purpose they so craved. She came close to inventing some clue, fabricating some relic, if only to keep them sitting at her counter. But the boys were too clever to be taken in by any trick of hers. The younger one, especially, seemed to dissect her with those chalky eyes of his, as if she were no more than a sack of fat and gristle. She permitted herself to think about Ottokar for a moment, and about what he’d told her of his conflict with time, a struggle he’d often predicted would end in his death. If he’d shut his boys out, as they claimed, then he must have had cause. For this reason—and for other, less defensible ones—she let her head hang and said nothing.

There was, in fact, something she wasn’t telling the boys, something that would have spared them and their future wives and children years of grief; but Marta had no gift of precognition.
Their innocence is what makes them beautiful
, she said to herself.
Let them hold on to their innocence awhile.

“I’m sorry, boys,” she said at last. “There’s nothing I can give you.”

Kaspar was already on his feet, murmuring apologies for having imposed; but Waldemar stayed as he was. Those eyes of his, disconcerting at the best of times, now slid from feature to feature of her wide and cheerful face as though searching for a way to pry it open. The shop had never felt so hideously still.

“You’re lying, Frau Svoboda,” Waldemar said slowly. “You’re lying to us, you sausage-chewing sow.”

Even Kaspar seemed startled by the venom in his brother’s voice: he stepped hurriedly to the counter and pulled him up out of his chair. Waldemar put up no resistance, letting his older brother trundle him backward, his eyes resting on her like chips of gray slate. Marta stayed as she was. She felt incapable of movement. Nothing Waldemar did later, she writes in her journal, came as a surprise to her after that visit. Four decades on, when the long war had ended and the camps had been emptied and word of the Timekeeper’s experiments began to trickle back to Námestí Svobody, Marta would be the only one in town who wasn’t shocked. She’d known ever since that visit, she declared to whoever would listen. She’d seen the future in the blankness of those eyes.

“I understand you, Frau Svoboda,” Waldemar said. “I understand how you think. But that isn’t the same as forgiveness.”

“Don’t listen to him, please,” Kaspar stammered, hauling his brother out into the street. “I have no idea what he’s jabbering about.”

Marta knew quite well, but she said nothing.

III

I CAN’T GO
any farther, Mrs. Haven, without a tip of the hat to Michelson and Morley. They’re not Tollivers, per se, but they’re just as instrumental to this history. We’d never have met without them, you and I.

Albert Abraham Michelson was a broad-shouldered, obsessively tidy Jew from the Kingdom of Prussia—by way of Virginia City, Nevada—whose career was defined by a lifelong obsession with light. The
speed
of light was Michelson’s particular passion, and his quest to quantify it brought him, of all places, to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met Edward Morley, the bucktoothed instructor of chemistry whose name would soon be linked with his forever. Michelson had invented a machine called an interferometer, a childishly simple and mind-bogglingly expensive contraption whose only purpose—as its creator liked to put it—was to measure the immeasurable. In a nutshell, Michelson’s invention was a system of pipes and mirrors that split a beam of sunlight, sent the two halves down tubes of varying lengths, then measured the difference between these two journeys as a series of pale and dark smudges. This might not sound so impressive, but it changed our understanding of light—and of time, and of the universe itself—forever.

More amazingly still, Mrs. Haven, Michelson and Morley’s machine did all of the above by accident.

In 1887, in the basement of a dormitory on the grounds of Case Western Reserve University, the two men built an immense interferometer out of glass and lead pipe, mounting the apparatus on a platform of marble, then floating that platform, in turn, in a pool of quicksilver, to insulate it from vibration. Michelson expected the speed of light to vary slightly, depending on whether the beam in question was traveling with the earth’s rotation or against it. To a passenger on a moving train, he reasoned, the apparent speed of a stampeding buffalo depends on which way the buffalo happens to be heading; why should light behave any differently? According to Michelson’s calculations, rays traveling counter to the earth’s spin should appear to be moving 108,000 kilometers per hour faster than those traveling with it. On May 27, conditions being perfect, the experiment was duly carried out. Light was measured traveling toward, and from, every point of the compass.

When the results were tabulated, its speed proved to be equal in every direction.

The experiment was a disappointment, even a failure; but it was the most spectacular failure in scientific history. The results, at first glance so drab, would eventually overturn a conception of the universe that had gone unquestioned since the Enlightenment. Two centuries earlier, Isaac Newton had managed to predict the courses of the planets through the heavens with astonishing accuracy, basing his work on the assumption—obvious to anyone with sense—that space and time were absolute. But there was no way of reconciling Newton’s laws with the results obtained in Cleveland. In order for the speed of light to appear the same under all circumstances, no matter how fast the observer himself might be traveling, some part of Newton’s system had to give.

Theories were put forward, of course, once the world had gotten over its astonishment: over the next few decades, attempts were made to explain the result in terms of ballistics, friction in the ether, experimental error, and whatever else the rear guard could dream up. The wildest theory of all came from a Dutch physicist named Hendrik Lorentz, who claimed that moving objects actually
shrink
along their lines of motion, so that, while light might in fact travel more slowly under certain circumstances, it also travels a shorter distance: in other words, that space is anything but absolute.

Lorentz’s theory—not surprisingly—was widely ridiculed, until it was determined to be true.

Such was the state of the scientific world, Mrs. Haven, at the time of my great-grandfather’s discovery. It was an era of chaos and confusion and nearly limitless possibility: a kind of panicked conceptual goldrush. The year 1903 had been typically revolutionary for the new century, having already yielded the gas turbine, electrostatic fume precipitation, razor blades and reinforced concrete; in Manhattan, a subterranean railway had just been opened from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Streets, and in a picturesque backwater of Switzerland—as far from Manhattan, in virtually every sense, as possible—a patent clerk with delusions of grandeur was beginning work on a paper entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which would introduce a concept he termed “special relativity.” Ottokar couldn’t have known all this, of course, but he’d clearly caught the fever of the age. And in Kaspar and Waldemar, his like-minded sons, this fever would eventually develop into a systemic infection: what came to be referred to, in our family, as the Syndrome.

Both boys immersed themselves in Ottokar’s notes, and—when these proved insufficient—in physics and mechanics textbooks ordered from Vienna by expedited mail; both showed a talent for their studies, and both applied to the university, when the time came, in the empire’s capital, some ninety kilometers distant. Their mother, a monochromatic, long-suffering woman who’d lived exclusively for her children since their birth, ushered them out of her life with the requisite mixture of pride and despair. Her sons returned to Znojmo only rarely after departing for Vienna: they felt relieved to be leaving the family—such as it was—behind them, and in any case their studies claimed them utterly. They showed an interest in every branch of the natural sciences, from chemistry to comparative zoology, but there was no question as to what was driving them. The Accidents had swallowed them alive.

In 1904, Toula & Sons Salutary Gherkins was sold to a well-heeled competitor, which surprised almost no one, though there are those who date the decline of the Moravian pickle industry from that moment. The money from the sale of the company, though less than expected, was more than enough to establish the boys in Vienna. They took rooms in a recently completed building in the Seventh District, in the poetically named Mondscheingasse—“Moonshine Lane”—a few minutes’ walk from the imperial stables. The house itself, though quaint in comparison with the radically plain style currently storming the city, struck them as the pinnacle of daring. Two colossal plaster lions presided over its entrance, their hare-lipped faces somehow more pathetic than ferocious; a pair of goosenecked dragons, in turn, kept an anxious watch over the lions. The dragons’ necks were affectionately intertwined, forming between them—whether by accident or design—a lateral figure eight, the mathematical symbol of infinity. This entranced Waldemar, though Kaspar was more impressed by the brilliant yellow paint, the view east toward the Opera, and the smell of fresh dung from the stables in the evenings, when the emperor’s horses were locked in their stalls for the night.

Both brothers studied the city around them, frankly and down to the slightest detail, with all the abandon of yokels freshly sprung from yokelhood. The girls especially, Kaspar notes in his diary, were a revelation. Ladies back in Znojmo were essentially potatoes, and they clothed themselves, appropriately enough, in formless, plain potato sacks; their Viennese counterparts flounced along the Ringstrasse encased in fabrics so opulent, so demonstrative, that their exhibition in broad daylight stopped a hair’s breadth short of bona fide perversion. To my grandfather’s bumpkinish eyes, the entire Kärntnerstrasse on a Saturday evening was transformed into a single vast seraglio. Men accompanied the women, of course—fidgety, purse-faced men, dressed in generic black or graphite-colored suits—but they might as well have been lapdogs, or pigeons, or even heaps of moldy winter pears. So much beauty and wealth and urbanity, so languidly displayed, never failed to make Kaspar feel insignificant, even piddling; but this feeling only heightened his excitement. All his consequence still lay before him.

Waldemar saw things differently. He was as fascinated by the capital as his brother, but even then, at the age of not-quite-seventeen, the immanent revolutionary in him recognized the city’s pomp for what it was: a garish, fetid flower, sprouting brightly from the slack jaws of a corpse. That was how he described it to his brother, at least, on those rare occasions when Kaspar consented to listen. The glitter and gaiety of Vienna, that “pearl in the crown of the Germanic world,” as the Führer himself would one day call it, were no more to him than the rictus on the face of a cadaver.

Waldemar came to disapprove of his older brother’s new habits—his drunken nights, his dalliances, his cabinet full of buckskin brogues in subtly differing shades—and he made no secret of his point of view. He chose to remain at an elegant remove from the life of the city, spending his evenings in studious seclusion, filling a growing pile of hardbound ledgers with his cramped and canting script, and relaxing before bedtime by scouring the gaps between slats in the floor with a fork expressly altered for that purpose. His aloofness only heightened his mystique at the university, where he was making a name for himself as a student of extraordinary promise. He left the apartment each morning just after sunrise and returned at eight every evening, punctual as a timing cog; but not even Kaspar knew where he spent his afternoons. There were rumors of a rose-colored villa along the Danube Canal, and of an older woman, possibly the wife of a professor; women in particular seemed eager to credit Waldemar with a voluptuous parallel life. Kaspar would have been delighted, of course, but he could only roll his eyes at the idea. “My brother is a religious fanatic,” he was fond of telling callers to their flat. “He hasn’t chosen a religion yet, to the best of my knowledge, but I have no doubt it will be a tidy one.”

He was to remember this quip of his in later years, and marvel—more than a little grimly—at his foresight.

Different though the brothers were, their first year of independence passed in relative harmony, if only because of their mutual obsession. Kaspar’s talent lay in mathematics, while Waldemar, romantic that he was, felt most comfortable in the giddy heights of theory; but both were in search of a skeleton key, either mathematical or hermeneutic, to their dead father’s chamber of secrets. A photograph of the brining-room laboratory hung tacked to the door of the newly installed water closet at Mondscheingasse, alongside a rendering by Waldemar of the pulpit mentioned in Ottokar’s note, which was unique in the empire (if not in the world) for having the form of a globe: