For Dilman, as a child, that rickety hot tailorshop had been the manor hall of a bountiful prince. Sitting cross-legged at Grandpa Schneider’s feet, while the old man repaired his shirts or patched his knickers or black stockings for free, Dilman would listen big-eyed to anecdotes of a faraway duchy named Bialystok in a kingdom named Poland. From Grandpa Schneider he would receive at no cost, and in equal quantities, Jewish aphorisms, licorice sticks, revised stories from Sholem Aleichem and Tolstoi, cinnamon rolls, and capsule biographies of such intellectuals as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Elbert Hubbard, and Arthur Brisbane.
Long years later Dilman had often thought that more than the material deprivation of his youth, the oppression of his race, the goading of his mother, it was the magical goodness and encouragement of that kindly, improbable old tailor that had sent him to books, to schools, to law, to whatever he had become in life. During the hard years much had gone out of Dilman’s memory, or faded into the hinterland of memory, but not Grandpa Schneider. Dilman’s love for the old man was ever there, burning bright.
And that was why, although he had come to the Chantilly Conference tense, prepared to be aggressive, he had been immediately softened by Nikolai Kasatkin, despite the latter’s subsequent bombast. For the faces of the Soviet Premier and the immigrant tailor of cherished memory were almost the same face. Thereafter, Dilman had been unable to be anything but friendly, amiable, and receptive toward Kasatkin, who, himself disarmed, most often responded in kind. If the Chantilly Conference between two of the mammoth powers on earth were a success, and its success one day recorded by learned professors in weighty historical tomes, would there be any mention in any index of “Schneider, Grandpa”? Well, so much for definitive histories, Dilman had thought.
Tonight, observing Premier Kasatkin strutting beside him along the Versailles garden path, Dilman still saw the old tailor’s knobby peasant profile matching the Russian leader’s profile, but he observed more. For all his sixty years, Kasatkin was taller, heavier, more muscular than the one residing in Dilman’s memory. Too, Kasatkin’s silver hair was fuller, his nose more pugged, his bridgework (startling, when he laughed) made of stainless steel and not gold.
Kasatkin had moved his head, caught Dilman’s glance, and smiled. “Yes, you are familiar with this dynastic relic, I see. It is my first visit. Has it changed much since you were here after the Second War?”
Dilman blinked. “How did you know I’d been here before?”
“I have no time for strangers,” Kasatkin said. “I must know of a man before I consent to meet with him.”
“Yes, I came to Versailles, this place, twice, with an attorney friend from Chicago. It was during the liberation period. We were flown over. We were officers, Judge Advocate’s Division of the Army.” He searched off. “As far as I can make out, it hasn’t changed much, though I’m not sure I recognize everything. I knew the way to the Petit Trianon-you know, Louis XV built that little palace for Madame Du Barry, then his son gave it to Marie Antoinette-because my friend, a very learned man, told me a modern-day ghost story about it, which I never forgot. It was one of those things that sticks in your mind.”
Dilman turned toward Kasatkin, as they continued walking. “Have you ever heard about the two lady tourists, English schoolteachers, who came here to do some sightseeing one afternoon in 1901, and about the people they ran into and the objects they saw that did not exist then or now, but did exist over a century before? I mean, those two schoolteachers, walking through the Versailles gardens in 1901, just as we are walking tonight, they somehow walked backward in time and stumbled on Versailles as it had been in 1789.”
Kasatkin was staring at Dilman. “Surely, my friend, you give no belief to that story?”
At once, Dilman felt foolish. Here he was speaking to the hardheaded, materialistic graduate of the Moscow Industrial Academy, the boss of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, the dictator of 280,000,000 people, with whom he had spent nearly a week discussing trade agreements, ballistic missiles, outer space, Baraza, Berlin, India, Brazil, peace and coexistence, and here he was telling him a psychical experience as if it were as real as the issues over which they had debated. Kasatkin must think him mad or drunk or, worse, a moron. Dilman’s instinct was to puncture the tale good-naturedly and change the subject, but his loyalty to Nat Abrahams and to Nat’s intelligence, imagination, curiosity, would not allow such defection. There was nothing to do but go on, commit more of his forces to what had originally been a casual and innocent conversational foray.
“I don’t presume to say whether it’s true or not,” Dilman said. I know only that we are insignificant mortals, not certain of where we came from or where we are going or why we are here. Nor am I certain that all there is of ourselves or the world around us can be comprehended with our five known senses. How can we be sure we know everything?”
Kasatkin’s shrewd eyes twinkled. “We’d better be sure, my friend.” Then he added, chidingly, “Go on, go on with your tall tale. It will give me something to tell my grandchildren when they refuse to sleep. Evidence, my friend-what is the evidence that those school spinsters of yours broke the time barrier and were witnesses to events of the past?”
Rapidly, to get it over with, Dilman went on. “Both those school-teachers-one was named Anne Moberly, the other Jourdain-taught in the city of Oxford. They were intelligent, sober, conservative ladies. When they went on a vacation to France together in 1901, and decided to visit Versailles, they knew next to nothing about Versailles except for the information they had got from the Baedeker they carried with them. During their walk in the gardens, one such as we are making, they came across Frenchmen strangely attired in what appeared to be masquerade costumes. There were officials in green coats and tricornered hats. The Moberly woman thought the scenery unnatural and lifeless, one-dimensional, no breeze, no light and shade, no sense of aliveness. Then, and this is important, they crossed a small, rather rustic bridge over a ravine. And on the lawn, before the Petit Trianon over there, they saw an aristocratic lady in a large straw hat and full skirt, sketching at an easel. Not immediately, but afterward in Paris, they discussed the eerie, haunted quality of their day here, and they decided they had undergone a unique adventure, and secretly they began to research it.”
“A playlet,” said Kasatkin. “Maybe they saw actors in a playlet being put on for them?”
“No, there had been nothing like that. Anyway, they researched for nine years. You know what they found out? There was no ravine and no bridge over it in 1901, even though they had crossed it together. La Motte ’s map of the gardens, done in 1783, did not show the ravine or bridge either. But listen to this-two years after they’d had their adventure-the original map done by Mique, the Queen’s architect, from which La Motte had made an inaccurate copy, was discovered in the chimney of some French house. This original map showed the ravine and bridge that no longer existed. Furthermore, from a portrait done by Wertmuller, and from the journal of the Queen’s dressmaker telling what the Queen wore in the summer of 1789, our two schoolteachers ascertained that the aristocratic lady sketching on the lawn in 1901 was none other than Marie Antoinette herself… There you have it-well, a small part of it-what psychic experts have called the best-authenticated account of Serialism, stumbling backward through time, on record.”