Jules Verne — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

At seventeen minutes past four, by the tarnished clock above the counter of the Café Import in the ninth district of Vienna, on the eleventh of March, the thermometer nailed beside the door read four degrees Celsius, and Mr. Edward Harlow, formerly of the University of Manchester, sat before his fourth espresso, still logged into a videoconference three thousand kilometers distant, whose muted window blinked in the corner of his screen like a lighthouse no ship would ever answer.

He had come to Vienna eleven months before, retained by a London publishing house to edit manuscripts he never saw delivered by hand, paid in a currency he rarely touched, addressed by colleagues whose faces he knew only at the resolution of four hundred and eighty lines, flickering, compressed, and often frozen mid-syllable. His rent was one thousand and forty euros a month; his working hours, by contract, eight; his conversations, by count kept without his willing it, perhaps eleven words spoken aloud on an average day, most of them to waiters. It was a species of exile invented by no geographer, requiring no passport stamp, productive of no scurvy, and yet, Harlow had begun to suspect, no less capable of wasting a man than the polar dark had wasted whalers a century before him.

The café itself dated, by the brass plaque beside its door, from 1841; its furnishings had survived two empires, one republic, and a fire in 1902 that had blackened the eastern wall without touching, curiously, the mirror behind the bar. This mirror measured some six feet in height by four in width, framed in walnut carved with acanthus leaves, its silvering fogged at the corners into a bloom the color of tarnished pewter. Harlow had studied it, in his idle hours, as a naturalist studies a specimen: noting the beveled edge, two centimeters wide; the four brass brackets, tarnished to the color of dried tobacco, that held it fast to the wall; and, running from the lower left corner to a point some eighteen inches above it, a single hairline fracture, no wider at any point than a human hair, yet unbroken in its course, as though drawn by a diamond stylus guided by a steady and patient hand.

It was Conseil-like pedantry, he admitted to himself, that made him return each afternoon to measure that fracture anew with his thumbnail, as if it might have lengthened in the night; but a man three thousand kilometers from any face that loved him will find his devotions where he can, and Harlow had made of the crack in an old mirror a kind of correspondence, silent, exact, and undemanding of reply.

It was on the fourth visit that he found his solitude interrupted.

"You have been counting it," said a voice, in English inflected faintly with something Adriatic, "for eleven days. I have watched you do it."

The speaker was a man of perhaps forty years, dressed with a shabbiness too deliberate to be poverty, in a coat whose elbows had been patched with a leather too fine for the cloth it mended. He introduced himself as Herr Vasics, though he offered no Christian name, and seated himself across from Harlow without invitation, ordering, in the same breath, a Sachertorte and a glass of Tokaji, neither of which he had any evident means to pay for.

"The mirror is worth attention," Vasics continued, tapping the table with two fingers, "for it is not, as the plaque would have you believe, of 1841 at all. The frame, yes. The glass, no. The glass was replaced in 1956, after the troubles, by a man who could not match the original silvering, and who therefore left, in his haste or his honesty, a seam where old met new. What you have been counting, my scholarly friend, is not damage. It is a suture."

Harlow set down his cup. The claim wanted verification and he possessed, by training if not by present employment, the instinct of measurement; but he possessed also, freshly excited by eleven months of silence, an appetite for any voice that addressed him by more than a barista's formula. He did not yet know that Vasics dealt, as certain men do, exclusively in the space between what is true and what is merely convincing, and that the fracture in the glass, examined closely enough, would prove to run not through one story but through several, each one offered to a different customer at a different hour, priced according to the credulity of the listener.

He knew only that the crack had, for the first time in eleven days, acquired a voice other than his own, and that this was, whatever its later cost, a beginning.

It began, as such things do, with something as unremarkable as a glass of wine. The waiter, a man named Pospisil who had served the Café Import for eleven years and its predecessor establishment for six before that, set down the Tokaji with the particular indifference of a man who has stopped counting the fictions told across his tables. Harlow noticed the gesture and filed it, as he filed everything now, among his private catalogue of evidence.

"You spoke of 1956," he said to Vasics, "and of troubles. I should like the date more exactly, if you have it, and the name of the glazier."

Vasics smiled with the unhurried confidence of a man who has never yet been asked a question he could not answer, though not always with the same answer twice. "Franz Hutter," he said. "A Moravian, working out of a shop on the Taborstrasse, no longer standing. He matched the bevel but not the silvering, for silver nitrate in those years came irregularly, and a man took what the ration allowed him." He lifted the Tokaji and drank a third of it before adding, as if the detail cost him nothing, "The pane cracked under the boot heel of a Soviet officer, in a dispute over a chess wager. This café keeps no record of the matter. Such records were not, in those years, kept."

It was a good story; Harlow granted it that much, in the manner of a man grading an essay he suspects of plagiarism without yet having located the source. But the trained eye, once set to measuring, does not easily surrender the habit, and something in the phrase keeps no record rang, to a former editor of manuscripts, precisely as false notes ring to a tuner: not loudly, but exactly.

He rose, crossed to the counter, and asked Pospisil, in German rather more halting than his English, whether the café kept any ledger from the year in question. Pospisil, without particular surprise, produced from beneath the register a drawer that stuck at two-thirds of its travel, and from the drawer a folder bound in string gone the color of weak tea. Within it lay an invoice, dated the fourteenth of September, 1956, made out to one Franz Hutter, glazier, of the Taborstrasse, for the replacement of one mirror-pane, dimensions six feet by four, cause of breakage recorded in a clerk's neat hand as Eisblock, Lieferung — an ice block, delivered.

An ice block. Not a boot heel, not a chess wager, not a Soviet officer's temper; a delivery of ice, mishandled by a boy whose name the ledger did not preserve, striking the lower left corner of a pane already old, already tired, and starting a fracture that ran, over the following weeks of settling plaster and shifting frame, some eighteen inches toward the ceiling before it stopped of its own accord and had stopped there since.

Harlow returned to the table and set the invoice, face up, beside the Sachertorte.

Vasics read it without haste, finished his Tokaji, and said, "Ice. Well. It is a less romantic seam than mine, but a seam nonetheless, and I did not lie about the suture, only about its cause." He said this the way a man excuses a poor cast of the dice, and signaled Pospisil for the bill with a lightness that suggested he had, in fact, expected discovery all along and priced it into his afternoon. When the reckoning came he patted his coat with the theatrical futility of a man searching pockets he knows to be empty, sighed once, and rose, remarking only that a scholar's company was, on balance, cheaper than a con man's dignity, before he let himself out into the four-degree afternoon without a further word, leaving behind an unfinished torte and a debt of eleven euros forty, which Harlow, after a moment's calculation of what eleven months of silence were worth against eleven euros forty, paid without complaint.

He went back to the mirror once more before he left. He set his thumbnail to the fracture's beginning and traced it, as he had eleven times before, to its terminus eighteen inches above; the measurement had not changed, would not change, was fixed now in an invoice as it was fixed in the glass, true beneath whatever story a hungry man might drape across it. There was, he thought, a kind of comfort merely in a fact that stayed still.

He closed the laptop for the first time in eleven months without waiting for the meeting to end, gathered his coat, and stepped out past the thermometer, which by then read three.

The Ringstrasse lay before him, lit at intervals of perhaps forty yards by lamps he did not trouble to count, and he walked its length toward his apartment slowly, aware that he had spoken, that afternoon, some four hundred words aloud to another human being, more than in any ten days preceding it combined; a debt of eleven euros forty against four hundred words was, he decided, no bad exchange, and he went home content to have paid it.