“Waldemar,” Enzian announces.
It seems to Ursula suddenly — but again, she’s exhausted and feverish — that she’s known all along which name the sisters would choose, and also that she would put up no resistance. Orson embraces each of them in turn, solemnly but with feeling, as though they were Russian functionaries at a banquet. Ursula realizes, dimly, that she’s being escorted back downstairs. Now she’s offended — no, perhaps not offended; bewildered, perplexed — but her husband appears not to notice. Go to sleep, he tells her, making a manger of sorts in the Buick’s backseat. We’ll be in Buffalo by midnight, all three of us. You and me and little Waldemar.
* * *
Half my childhood was gone when I next saw my aunts, and by then the name had warped and shrunk to fit me. It would be years before I learned its full significance — before I was taken quietly aside, by my mother, on my seventeenth birthday, and told exactly what Äschenwald, that pretty word, meant to the rest of the world — and by that point, of course, it was too late. Or so I was led to believe.
My mother was never especially interested in helping me fit in — she considered it an expression of Austrian pride to speak German to me in public places, and dressed me in a style that a college girlfriend, flipping through a photo album years later, dubbed “Hitler Youth casual”—but even she realized that the name Waldemar was more than my skinny shoulders could support. “Waldy” was Ursula’s invention, and I’m grateful to her, though her insistence on pronouncing it the Austrian way (“VAL-dee”) tended to defeat the nickname’s purpose. Fortunately I had a gift for deflecting attention: I was remarkably unremarkable, Mrs. Haven, as I’ve mentioned before. By June 18, 1978, when my father and I climbed the General Lee’s stairwell together for the second time, I’d been punched, bitten, knocked over and peed on no more than most seven-year-olds, which I take a certain pride in even now. I was reasonably well adjusted for my age, and tended not to take things much to heart, especially when grown-ups said or did them. This made me a mild but steady disappointment to my parents, especially at parent-teacher conferences — but it proved to be a crucial skill in dealing with my aunts.
This time Orson knocked politely, both out of consideration for his knuckles and for the door of the apartment, to which the intervening years had not been gentle. It hung askew on its hinges, as though the building had somehow shifted out of plumb, and the gaps this produced (of which there were a few) were plugged with soggy-looking wads of newsprint. My father had been in lecture mode on the long drive downstate — without actually explaining the point of our visit, which remained a mystery — but now he was silent and grim. As I listened to the sound of slippered footfalls and of deadbolts being thrown, I was seized by the suspicion that I was about to be sold into white slavery, or forced to take a trigonometry exam, or cooked slowly in a child-sized witch’s cauldron.
The last bolt was thrown and the black door swung open and a lady peered out from behind it. She had a harried look, and she wasn’t much taller than Orson, but she seemed to gaze down on us from on high. I knew she was one of my aunts, of course, but I didn’t know which. If I’d been allowed to read my father’s books, I’d have recognized her right away — she could only have been Empress Eng Xan, the Obsidian Priestess, villainess of the Chyldwyrld trilogy.
“You’re here,” said the woman. She said it in German: “Ihr seid da.” Her accent — equal parts Austrian and Yankee and Yiddish — was no more curious than anything else about her. “Where’s the other one hiding?”
“If by ‘the other one,’ you mean Ursula, my wife,” my father answered in English, “she’d have liked nothing better than to drive for eight hours to wait out here on your landing again, but she’s visiting her mother in Vienna. Are you going to let us in this time?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, as if she suspected us of subterfuge (and in fact my mother was very much at home in Cheektowaga, already in bed, with a paperback and a glass of iced Lillet); then she took in a sharp, girlish breath that made her seem decades younger, and receded smoothly — ceremonially, it seemed to me — into the gloom. A second woman appeared, blushing and grinning and rubbing her plump hands together, but in that first dazzled instant I paid her no mind. The hall we stepped into was fitted with shelves of every conceivable description, some extravagantly filigreed, some obviously homemade, and each devoted to a single object. Many of the items in question were familiar — a teakettle, a bowling ball, a snow globe enclosing a miniature Chrysler Building — but some were completely obscure. There must have been nearly a thousand such shelves, ranging in size from the width of my palm to the length of my arm, running along both walls as far as I could see. The blushing woman kissed my father on both cheeks without saying a word. Then she took my hand and led me down the hall.
“Do you like what you see, Waldemar?” she asked in an odd voice, both boisterous and shy.
“It’s Waldy,” I corrected her.
“Is it, now?” Behind her smile she was watching me closely. “Do you like what you see, Waldy?”
“What is all this stuff?”
“I thought you’d never ask! It’s an archive.”
I was old enough to know that people were supposed to collect expensive things, or rare things, or things that fit together in some way; these looked as though they’d been scavenged at the Cheektowaga landfill. A fencing mask, a Dixie Cup, a credit card, an upside-down jar with the shell of a bug underneath it: any object takes on authority, of a kind, when singled out and given pride of place. But the sheer quantity of items on display, and the contrast of their battered condition to the customized perfection of the shelves, repelled interpretation like an antimagnet. It was my first physical encounter with paradox, Mrs. Haven, and it made me feel hollow and weak. My aunts’ apartment was now a museum of sorts — I understood that much — but a museum whose only curator, as far as I could see, was chance.
“What kind of an archive?” I asked her at last.
“The Archive of Accidents. That’s what my sister calls it. It’s beautiful, wouldn’t you say?”
I frowned at her. “Accidents? What do you mean?”
“I have to keep myself amused,” she said, lowering her voice. “My sister has her work, you know, and I have mine.”
No one had ever spoken to me as an adult before, and it thrilled me almost as much as it confused me. I had no idea what to say next.
“I find things, Waldy,” she went on. “I notice things, and occasionally I take them.” She giggled. “Every man-made thing can be thought of as a work of art, you know. You’re familiar with The Shape of Time, by Kubler?”
I opened my mouth to speak. No sound emerged.
“No? Then let me read a bit to you.” She reached blindly behind her and plucked the book down from a shelf, like a conjuror producing a bouquet.
“I’ll begin, as the mock turtle advises, at the beginning.
“‘Let us suppose that the idea of Art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of Art. In effect, the only tokens of history continually available to our senses are the desirable things made by men.’”