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 Time-keeper’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 harelipped 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
