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:
Waldemar in particular was fascinated by the pulpit, and claimed to have a memory of sitting beneath it, on his father’s lap, and celebrating midnight mass at Christmas. Its spherical shape impressed him as deeply significant. Kaspar found the whole notion silly, and had no recollection of the interior of Paměť Cathedral at all; but he felt drawn to the rendering regardless. Being more worldly than his younger brother—more interested in things as things, rather than as symbols—he often found himself struck by the marked similarity, from a structural point of view, between the pulpit and a pissoir.
∞
If my grandfather found himself less admired by his classmates than Waldemar was—less a figure of hushed speculation—he also found himself distinctly better liked. The snobbery of the Viennese toward outsiders of every persuasion (and especially toward Slavs) passed over his head without ruffling a hair. By the winter of his first year at the university, Kaspar had either won his skeptics over or stepped politely around them, and had become the Physics Department’s unofficial mascot. Unlike his brother, he rarely spoke about his research, and the impression he made seems to have been that of a bon vivant with a boyish enthusiasm for physics. His mathematical ability, as well as his solemn good nature and willingness to perform the most mundane of chores without complaint, endeared him to a number of professors in the department, and by the end of his first term he’d become chief assistant to Ludwig David Silbermann, director of the School of Natural Philosophy: a kindly, perpetually overwhelmed man whose primary qualification for his lofty position seems to have been his persistence in the belief that the emperor had the best interests of his subjects at heart. My grandfather was careful to hide the substance of his own work—his inquiry, thus far fruitless, into the nature of his father’s discovery—from Professor Silbermann, and as a consequence they got on very well.
Between his assisting duties, his studies, and his fondness for Viennese street life, Kaspar had little time to spare for his brother, and by summer he and Waldemar were little more than apartment-mates. Like an underground river, the mystery of the Accidents continued to run beneath the events of their day-to-day lives, connecting them and keeping them in motion; on the surface, however, there was very little trace.
It was probably inevitable that a young man as intoxicated as my grandfather was by the charms of fin de siècle Vienna should eventually be swept up in the moral and cultural civil war that was splitting the city in two; but the circumstances of his recruitment are no less unlikely for that. On a certain ash-gray August afternoon—August 17, to be exact—just prior to his second academic year in the capital, Kaspar found himself in a two-person booth at the Jandek, a café catering to Marxists and artists’ models and syphilitics, nursing a watery mocca and trying not to seem too out of place. He was looking for Waldemar: he had something to tell him. Word had reached him that their mother was ill (she herself would never have written about anything so trivial) and he planned to depart for Znojmo that same evening. His brother had grown even more reclusive of late, and it had been days since Kaspar had laid eyes on him. He’d spent the entire morning beating the departmental bushes, until finally a walleyed Tyrolean named Bilch had let the name Jandek slip, in so conspiratorial a whisper that Kaspar had taken it for some kind of brothel.
My grandfather had no aversion to brothels by his eighteenth year—he’d been to a number himself—but the Jandek made them look like milliner’s shops. His shoe heels were stuck to the floor of his booth, and the whole place was littered with bread crumbs and onions and cigarette ends, and packed to capacity with men who clearly had no other place to go. The shabbiest of them sat shoehorned together in the booth next to his, composing clumsy and obscene couplets about a well-known painter by the name of Hans Makart: they didn’t seem to care much for his paintings. My grandfather, who happened to care for Makart’s paintings a great deal, had just asked for his check when the kitchen doors opened, the smoke seemed to part, and a girl in a nightgown sashayed out into the light.
Kaspar knew the girl well—as well, that is, as one could know a girl of good family in 1905—but it took him a moment to place her. Her name was Sonja Adèle and she was one week shy of seventeen years old. She was also, as chance or fate or Providence would have it, the daughter of Ludwig David Silbermann. They’d eaten dinner in each other’s company perhaps a dozen times, and had had two brief, forgettable conversations; on one occasion he’d helped her to work out a sum. Nothing in any of those prior encounters had prepared him for the girl who stood before him now.
“Fräulein Silbermann!” he called to her as she went
