A Perfect Vacuum (20 page)

The nurse, however, had four different suitors; all four sought her hand in marriage, whereas between her and Kouska there was nothing concrete except for the postcards he had sent her from captivity, and the postcards in themselves, smudged with the stamps of the military censor, could not have been expected to kindle in her heart any lasting feeling. But her first serious suitor was a certain Hamuras, a pilot who did not fly because he always got a hernia when he moved the airplane's rudder bar with his feet, and this because the rudder bars in the airplanes of those days were hard to move—it was, after all, a very primitive era in aviation. Now, Hamuras had been operated on once, but without success, for the hernia recurred, recurred because the doctor performing the operation had made a mistake in the catgut sutures; and the nurse was ashamed to wed the sort of flier who, instead of flying, spent his time either sitting in the reception room of the hospital or searching the newspaper ads for places to obtain a genuine prewar truss, since Hamuras figured that such a truss would enable him to fly after all; on account of the war, however, a good truss was unobtainable.

One should note that at this juncture Professor Kouska's “to be or not to be” ties in with the history of aviation in general, and with the airplane models used by the Austro-Hungarian Army in particular. Specifically, the birth of Professor Kouska was positively influenced by the fact that in 1911 the Austro-Hungarian government acquired a franchise to build monoplanes whose rudder bars were difficult to operate, planes that were to be manufactured by a plant in Wiener-Neustadt, and this in fact took place. Now, in the course of the bidding, the French firm Antoinette competed with this plant and its franchise (coming from an American firm, Farman), and the French firm had a good chance, because Major General Prchl, of the Imperial Crown Commissariat, would have turned the scales in favor of the French model, because he had a French mistress, the governess of his children, and on account of this secretly loved all things French; that, of course, would have altered the distribution of chance, since the French machine was a biplane with sweptback ailerons and a rudder blade that had an easily movable control bar, so the bar would not have caused Hamuras his problem, owing to which the nurse might have married him after all. Granted, the biplane had a hard-to-work
exhaust hammer,
and Hamuras had rather delicate shoulders; he even suffered from what is called
Schreibkrampf,
which gave him difficulty signing his name (his full name ran Adolf Alfred von Messen-Weydeneck zu Oryola und Münne-sacks, Baron Hamuras). So, then, even without the hernia Hamuras
could
have, by reason of his weak arms, lost his appeal in the eyes of the nurse.

But there popped up in the governess's path a certain two-bit tenor from an operetta, with remarkable speed he gave her a baby, Lieutenant General Prchl drove her from his door, lost his affection for all things French, and the army stayed with the Farman franchise held by the company from Wiener-Neustadt. The tenor the governess met at the Ring when she went there with General Prchl's oldest daughters—the youngest had the whooping cough, so they were trying to keep the healthy children away from the sick one—and if it had not been for that whooping cough brought in by that acquaintance of the Prchls' cook, a man who carried coffee to a smoking room and was wont to drop in on the Prchls in the morning, that is, drop in on their cook, there would have been no illness, no taking of the children to the Ring, no meeting the tenor, no infidelity; and thereby Antoinette would have won out in the bidding after all. But Hamuras was jilted, married the daughter of a purveyor by appointment to His Majesty the King, and had three children by her, one of which he had without the hernia.

There was nothing wrong with the nurse's second suitor, Captain Miśnia, but he went to the Italian front and came down with rheumatism (this was in the winter, in the Alps). As for the cause of his demise, accounts differ; the Captain was taking a steam bath, a .22-caliber shell hit the building, the Captain went flying out naked straight into the snow, the snow took care of his rheumatism, they say, but he got pneumonia. However, had Professor Fleming discovered his penicillin not in 1941 but, say, in 1910, then Miśnia would have been pulled out of the pneumonia and returned to Prague as a convalescent, and the chances of Professor Kouska's coming into the world would have been, by that, greatly diminished. And so the calendar of discoveries in the field of antibacterial drugs played a large role in the rise of B. Kouska.

The third suitor was a respectable wholesale dealer, but the young lady did not care for him. The fourth was about to marry her for certain, but it did not work out on account of a beer. This last beau had enormous debts and hoped to pay them off out of the dowry; he also had an unusually checkered past. The family went, along with the young lady and her suitor, to a Red Cross raffle, but Hungarian veal birds were served for lunch, and the father of the young lady developed a terrific thirst, so he left the pavilion where they all were listening to the military band and had a mug of beer on draft, in the course of which he ran into an old schoolmate who was just then leaving the raffle grounds, and had it not been for the beer, they would certainly not have come together; this schoolmate knew, through his sister-in-law, the entire past of the young lady's suitor and was not averse to telling her father everything and in full detail. It appears he also embellished a little here and there; in any event, the father returned most agitated, and the engagement, having been all but made official, fell irretrievably to pieces. Yet had the father not eaten Hungarian veal birds, he would not have felt a thirst, would not have stepped out for a beer, would not have met his old schoolmate, would not have learned of the debts of the suitor; the engagement would have gone through, and, seeing it would have been an engagement in wartime, the wedding also would have followed in short order. An excessive amount of paprika in the veal birds on May 19, 1916, thus saved the life of Professor B. Kouska.

As for Kouska the surgeon, he returned from captivity in the rank of battalion doctor and proceeded to enter the lists of courtship. Evil tongues informed him of the suitors, and particularly of the late Captain Miśnia, R.I.P., who presumably had achieved a more-than-passing acquaintance with the young lady, though at the same time she had been answering the postcards from the prisoner of war. Being by nature fairly impetuous, the surgeon Kouska was prepared to break off the engagement already made, particularly since he had received several letters which the young lady had written to Miśnia (God knows how they ended up in the hands of a malicious person in Prague), along with an anonymous letter explaining how he, Kouska, had been serving the young lady as a fifth wheel, that is, kept in reserve as a stand-by. The breaking off of the engagement did not come about, due to a conversation the surgeon had with his grandfather, who had really been a father to him from childhood because the surgeon's own father, a profligate and ne'er-do-well, had not raised him at all. The grandfather was an old man of unusually progressive views, and he considered that a young girl's head was easily turned, especially when the turner wore a uniform and pleaded the soldier's death that could befall him at any moment.

Kouska thus married the young lady. If, however, he had had a grandfather of other persuasions, or if the old liberal had passed away before his eightieth year, the marriage most certainly would not have taken place. The grandfather, it is true, led an exceedingly healthy mode of life and rigorously took the water cure prescribed by Father Kneipp; but to what extent the ice-cold shower each morning, lengthening the grandfather's life, increased the chances of Professor B. Kouska's coming into the world, it is impossible to determine. The father of surgeon Kouska, a disciple of misogyny, would definitely not have interceded in behalf of the maligned maiden; but he had no influence over his son from the time when, having made the acquaintance of Mr. Serge Mdivani, he became the latter's secretary, went with him to Monte Carlo, and came back believing in a system of breaking the bank in roulette shown him by a certain widow-countess; thanks to this system he lost his entire fortune, was placed under custody, and had to give up his son to the care of his own father. Yet had the surgeon's father not succumbed to the demon of gambling,
his
father would then not have disowned him, and—again—the coming to pass of Professor Kouska would not have come to pass.

The factor that tipped the scales in favor of the Professor's birth was Mr. Serge
vel
Sergius Mdivani. Sick of his estate in Bosnia, and of his wife and mother-in-law, he engaged Kouska (the surgeon's father) as his secretary and took off with him for the waters, because Kouska the father knew languages and was a man of the world, whereas Mdivani, notwithstanding his first name, knew no language besides Croatian. But had Mr. Mdivani in his youth been better looked after by
his
father, then instead of chasing after the chambermaids he would have studied his languages, would not have needed a translator, would not have taken the father of Kouska to the waters, the latter would not have returned from Monte Carlo as a gambler, and thereupon would not have been cursed and cast out by his father, who, not taking the surgeon under his wing as a child, would not have instilled liberal principles in him, the surgeon would have broken off with the young lady, and—once more—Professor Benedykt Kouska would not have made his appearance in this world. Now, Mr. Mdivani's father was not disposed to keep an eye on the progress of his son's education when the latter was supposed to be studying languages, because this son, by his looks, reminded him of a certain dignitary of the church concerning whom Mr. Mdivani Sr. harbored the suspicion that he, the dignitary, was the true father of little Sergius. Feeling, therefore, a subconscious dislike for little Sergius, he neglected him; as a result of this neglect Sergius did not learn, as he should have, his languages.

The question of the identity of the boy's father was in fact complicated, because even the mother of little Sergius was not certain whether he was the son of her husband or of the parish priest, and she did not know for sure whose son he was because she believed in stares that affected the unborn. She believed in stares that affected the unborn because her authority in all things was her Gypsy grandmother. We are now speaking, it should be noted, of the relation between the grandmother of the mother of little Sergius Mdivani and the chances of the birth of Professor Benedykt Kouska. Mdivani was born in the year 1861, his mother in 1832, and the Gypsy grandmother in 1798. So, then, matters that transpired in Bosnia and Herzegovina toward the close of the eighteenth century—in other words, 130 years before the birth of Professor Kouska—exerted a very real influence on the probability distribution of his coming into the world. But neither did the Gypsy grandmother appear in a void. She did not wish to marry an Orthodox Croat, particularly since at that time all Yugoslavia was under the Turkish Yoke, and marriage to a giaour would bode no good for her. But the Gypsy maid had an uncle much older than she; he had fought under Napoleon; it was said that he had taken part in the retreat of the Grand Army from the environs of Moscow. In any case, from his soldiering under the Emperor of the French he returned home with the conviction that interdenominational differences were of no great matter, for he had had a close look at the differences of war, therefore he encouraged his niece to marry the Croat, for, though a giaour, it was a good and comely youth. In marrying the Croat, the grandmother on Mr. Mdivani's mother's side thus increased the chances of Professor Kouska's birth. As for the uncle, he would not have fought under Napoleon had he not been living during the Italian campaign in the region of the Apennines, whither he was sent by his master, a sheep farmer, with a consignment of sheepskin coats. He was waylaid by a mounted patrol of the Imperial Guard and given the choice of enlisting or becoming a camp follower; he preferred to bear arms. Now, if the Gypsy uncle's master had not raised sheep, or if, raising them, he had not made sheepskin coats, for which there was a demand in Italy, and if he had not sent this uncle to Italy with the coats, then the mounted patrol would not have seized the Gypsy uncle, whereupon, not fighting his way across Europe, this uncle, his conservative opinions intact, would not have encouraged his niece to marry the Croat. And therewith the mother of little Sergius, having no Gypsy grandmother and consequently not believing in stares that affected the unborn, would not have thought that merely from watching the parish priest spread his arms as he sang in a bass at the altar one could bear a son—the spit and image of the priest; and so, her conscience completely clear, she would not have feared her husband, she would have defended herself against the charges of infidelity, the husband, no longer seeing evil in the looks of little Sergius, would have minded the boy's education, Sergius would have learned his languages, would not have needed anyone as a translator, whereat the father of Kouska the surgeon would not have gone off with him to the waters, would not have become a gambler and a wastrel, would (being a misogynist) have urged his surgeon son to throw over the young lady for her dalliance with the late Captain Miśnia, R.I.P., as a result of which there would have been, again, no Professor B. Kouska in the world.

But now observe. So far we have examined the probability spectrum of the birth of Professor Kouska on the assumption that both his facultative parents existed, and we reduced the probability of that birth only by introducing very small, perfectly credible changes in the behavior of the father or mother of Professor Kouska, changes brought about by the actions of third parties (General Samsonov, the Gypsy grandmother, the mother of Mdivani, Baron Hamuras, the French governess of Major General Prchl, Emperor Francis Joseph I, the Archduke Ferdinand, the Wright brothers, the surgeon for the Baron's hernia, Marika's otorhinolaryngologist, etc.). But surely the very same type of analysis can be applied to the chances of the coming into the world of the young lady who as a nurse married the surgeon Kouska, or for that matter to the surgeon himself. Billions, trillions of circumstances had to occur as they did occur for the young lady to come into the world and for the future surgeon Kouska to come into the world. And in analogous fashion, innumerable multitudes of occurrences conditioned the coming into the world of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. It would seem to require no argumentation that, for example, had the tailor Ylastimil Kouska, born in 1673, not come into the world, there could not have been, by virtue of that, his son, or his grandson, or his great-grandson, or thus the great-grandfather of Kouska the surgeon, or thus Kouska the surgeon himself, or indeed Professor Benedykt.