“Oh,” she says. She is surprised to realize it does matter. There has been a body all this time. Thomas is truly dead. She tries to stop the tears, but cannot. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It was kind of you.”
“I know it was absurd,” her father says, “but all I could think was if only he would speak, then I could be certain it was him.”
“It’s all right, Father,” she says. “I understand.”
“I’m afraid there’s more,” her father says, and he waits while she collects herself. “He had been dead only a few days.”
She cannot for a moment understand what he is saying, but then she realizes. “How long was he missing before he died?” she asks.
“At least a month.”
“Oh,” she says again, but this time she does not cry. “Oh,” she says again.
Her father never remarried after her mother died during the yellow fever, though surely he could have. How dear he is to her. How hard it must have been to see what he saw.
“What did you do with the body?” she asks as quietly as she can.
“He is buried in my grave,” her father says, and a sob overtakes him. Quickly she drops to her knees at his feet, and leans her cheek against his knee.
“I’m grateful,” she says over and over. “I’m so grateful.” And when she cries it is at the thought that one day she will no longer have him, and it seems as if all that is ahead of her is one grief and then another.
THEY WERE CHILDREN TOGETHER, she and Thomas. And then had come the day, at nine years old, when she received the inward light, the word of God. (Had she really? Still she wonders.) And everyone in the meeting, including Thomas, witnessed it, and afterward, she went with her mother on one mission after another, the child who so early in life received God’s attention, until the day her mother died, and she continued the missions alone, only fourteen years old at the time.
She could not herself remember the moment—not even falling to the floor or coming to in her father’s arms. The closest she could come was the next morning when she woke in her parents’ bed, a place she had never before been. She was alone and it was late morning. Her chores, minor as they were, had been done for her—the breakfast dishes washed, the bedrooms dusted. It was the kind of gentle treatment reserved for the ill, and so she lay in her parents’ bed, afraid, until finally her mother came looking for her, told her how she would accompany her on her next mission. “You’ve been called, just like I was, though much younger,” her mother said. And that had been all the discussion she ever had about what became her life’s work, traveling to other Quaker meetings and testifying, or more often sitting quietly, wondering if God had really entered her, and if he had, why he wouldn’t let her remember.
When she and Thomas met again, years later, when he went to work in her father’s bookshop, where Thomas began his school, he told her what he remembered. “You went bright red, like a hot brick, and you fell to the ground, and you quivered. And your expression, it was . . . I can’t describe it,” he said. “You were a living angel. Everybody said so.”
How strange it seems to her now. How long she believed herself special, until the very moment Thomas disappeared, and she saw how little reason—how little meaning—there was at all.
She misses him. She had lived off Thomas’s belief, it seems, and without him, her belief is gone. It was Thomas who was special—she always understood that; she drew so much from him, from the things he taught the children. His own desire for God’s word, for the inward light, which he never received, had made him stronger, she knows. If only she could learn from him again.
SHE TELLS THE CHILDREN GENTLY: their father is certainly dead, and tomorrow they will visit where he is buried.
It is Margaret who answers first. “But of course he is dead,” she says. “That is how we’ve been speaking to him.”
“Did you think he was alive?” Thomas Jr. says kindly, like the little gentleman he had been eight months ago.
The children have been, it turns out, studying books on death and reincarnation and spirits, ones they somehow snuck out of the shop, and they have been conducting séances on their own in this room.
She wants to tuck the children into their beds, to climb into her own, but when they offer to conduct a séance for her, she does not stop them. They are happy as they show her, Thomas Jr. especially. It is a relief to them, it seems, to call a truce with her. They clear a space on the floor, and the three of them sit. Margaret lights a candle, and Thomas Jr. pulls from his pockets a handkerchief stained with ink, a pen, and a folded piece of paper with his father’s writing on it.
She feels the urge to snatch the objects up and hide them away, to press her lips to them in secret, but she has many of Thomas’s belongings, and not one of them has truly been a comfort to her.
Where had he been the month before he died? How can she remove this new image of him—wandering, beaten, rotten—from her mind?
She almost cries out at the surprise of Thomas Jr.’s touch as he says, “Take my hand, Mother.”
“You don’t have to be frightened,” Margaret says, taking her other hand. “We only raise friendly spirits.”
She is surprised again when it is Margaret who leads, calling out “to the beyond.”
“Margaret is a better conductor,” Thomas Jr. whispers when his mother glances at him.
When her daughter speaks again, it is in a false voice, deep and ridiculous.
She is embarrassed to realize she was hoping to hear Thomas’s voice.
“Who are you?” Thomas Jr. asks, and Margaret replies, “I am the keeper of the dead.”
It is a phrase she recognizes from one of Margaret’s favorite stories. The child is pretending, she thinks.
“Have you seen Father?” Thomas Jr. asks. “Is he well?”
“Yes,” Margaret says. “Very well. He was so pleased to see you. He is so glad you, too, are well.”
“Will you tell him we feel the same?” Thomas Jr. says, his voice tremulous.
“Of course,” his sister says in her false voice.
She stares at Margaret, who glances first at her, then at Thomas Jr., who has his eyes closed and a beatific smile on his face. Her daughter turns back to her and smiles sheepishly. She understands then. Margaret is not playing a game but comforting her older brother in the manner that works best.
It is a chance for conspiracy, she realizes. And yet she snatches her hands away. “Stop it,” she says. “You are making a fool of him,” she says to Margaret, who stares at her open-mouthed. “You are letting her make a fool of you,” she says to Thomas Jr., who looks sullen now. Angry again.
“She’s not ready to believe,” Margaret says to Thomas Jr. “Don’t listen to her—she just isn’t ready to believe.”
Thomas Jr. nods, and the children silently gather their things from the floor. It is as if they pity her.
How could she have done it?
They are compassionate children. They worried so over the orphans who died in the asylum fire some years ago. And more recently over the colored boys who were kidnapped, and believed sold South. They have their father in them, she knows.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You are right. I do not know what to believe.”
Thomas Jr. is folding the piece of paper with his father’s writing on it when she takes it from his hand.
They stand waiting, heads down, while she reads it.
“Where did you get this?”
She looks first at one child, then the other, but neither will look at her.
“It is from one of Father’s journals, isn’t it?”
Thomas had asked her long ago to grant him one privacy, to not read what he did not invite her to, and she had sworn that she wouldn’t. And yet he was gone but two days before she went to his journals, only to find them missing from their shelves.
“We didn’t read it,” Thomas Jr. says. “We just tore out the last page. It was the last thing he wrote.” He sobs then, and in an instant
, little Margaret gathers her brother to her small chest.
She cannot bear to stand outside their circle, and so she clutches them both to her, the page still in her hand.
When they have all calmed themselves, the children bring her the stack of journals they had hidden, and she takes each of them by the hand and kisses them, and then ushers them to bed.
“You know I miss your father,” she says, standing in the doorway between them. “You know it is almost unbearable to me to have lost him. But it would be so much worse to lose you.”
“Can we still have séances?” Thomas Jr. asks, and both children watch her as they wait.
What is the right thing? She wants so much to comfort them. She looks particularly at Margaret, who is studying her with a face of open curiosity.
“Yes,” she says finally, and the children rise out of their beds with joy, directly into her arms.
It is a while before, journals in hand, she searches out her father, to ask him to do what she cannot.
S. DREAMS OF HER ALL NIGHT. Awake or asleep, he cannot stop imagining her. He believes she has bewitched the Turk and the Turk has bewitched him. He knows this is impossible, understands even the mechanical workings of the machine, and yet, against his own will, he believes it. In the night, he lifts his hand out from the bedcovers and turns it over and back again, imagining somewhere the Turk is doing the same. You are at my command, he thinks. He reaches out his hand, feels his fingers unfurl, but what he sees is the Turk’s hand reaching out, touching her cheek, caressing it.
IN THE CITY OF SEVEN HILLS, three seas, and four hundred fountains, there is a story the Turk wishes he could tell, of love.
The beautiful daughter of an ordinary man, Leyla was a child when she met Mejnun, the son of a powerful chief, and they played together without the notice of their parents, until one day Leyla’s mother saw how often they chose each other’s company and was troubled by such intense affection between two so young. She sent Mejnun away, intending for their separation to be brief, a test, but soon Mejnun was appearing outside Leyla’s house at odd hours, not knocking but staring into windows and climbing the wall of the house’s garden just to look over the edge. He was sent away again, and then again, and then told finally to stay away for good.
He fled to the desert, where he wandered.
During this time, Mejnun’s father begged Leyla’s parents to allow the two to marry, but her parents would not marry their daughter to a madman. So Mejnun’s father carried Mejnun out of the desert to be treated, but upon receiving his cure, Mejnun begged God to increase his love and he escaped again to the desert. Again his father found him, brought him home, and again Mejnun sought the desert, the only place large enough to house his love.
Leyla, too, was faithful. She kept to the interiors, walled inside her garden, where she would sing songs of Mejnun’s invention.
In the desert, Mejnun met a crow and asked it to relay the message of his love to his love, and in her garden, Leyla heard Mejnun’s song of love sung by a crow.
In the desert, Mejnun heard the wind and asked it to relay the message of his love to his love, and Leyla, in her garden, heard it.
In the desert, Mejnun met an old woman and asked her to bind him in chains, to pretend they were beggars—to be beggars—so they could approach Leyla’s house unnoticed. But when the old woman did as he asked, and they entered Leyla’s house as beggars, and he glimpsed the object of his love, all Mejnun could do was break his chains and run to the desert, where his love was housed.
Finally Leyla married another, but she would not allow her husband any right but the right to look at her.
When Mejnun’s father died, his tomb was watered with Mejnun’s tears.
When Mejnun’s mother died, roses sprouted from her grave.
Leyla arranged to meet Mejnun in her garden, but he refused to let her see him, and so they each remained hidden, a small distance between them, while Mejnun recited a poem of his love for his love.
“Mejnun,” Leyla said.
But Mejnun would not speak her name.
“Your name is inside of mine,” he said, “like the fruit inside its skin. There it is protected.”
When Leyla’s husband died and Leyla’s time of mourning passed, she arranged to meet Mejnun again. Mejnun entered her room, and they stepped, for the first time, into an embrace, but Mejnun fled again to the desert, calling out behind him that he carried her with him.
His love for her had grown so large it could only be contained by all things.
In the end, Leyla fell ill and died, and upon her tomb, Mejnun died.
But many have dreamt of them together in paradise.
The Turk knows that inside each of us is a black light and a love without end. He wishes he could tell her so.
THE NEXT NIGHT the game resumes, and since she cannot see the opponent she now believes is hidden somewhere, she directs her gaze at the Turk. Straight at his downcast eyes she looks, willing them to turn upward. She believes she is somehow challenging the man in control. (Could he really be inside?) She believes he can see through the Turk’s eyes, but as she stares she is overcome first by a sense of unease and then by a sense of familiarity. The same feeling she would have when she was in one room and could hear Thomas in another.
She shudders, and then she feels her breath rise inside of her, a moment of desire.
Thomas, she thinks, and she looks over her shoulder, only to see Maelzel staring back. Thomas? And then it is as if she can feel him emanating from the machine opposite her.
Have I been playing Thomas? she thinks.
How can she consider such a thing? She is not the kind of person to consider such a thing. And yet she does.
It is the children. They have gotten to her with their stories.
IT IS THE BEGINNING of the night and S. should be fresh, not yet discomfited, but he cannot relieve himself of the feelings of the night before. He is hot already, fevered yet again; his mind is pitched fast against concentration. He is all of the things he formerly told his students not to be: distracted, rushed, and too much in need of winning.
Perhaps in France there is some unchosen life S. can still return to. If he was to expose Maelzel, it would be a sensation. His name would be everywhere, he would be recognized as a great master, the man who beat so many masters, but he would also be known as a cheat and a charlatan. Perhaps there is money in the story, but money has never satisfied him. If only he could tell somebody. He has grown so disdainful of people, of the ease with which they can be fooled.
She is going to beat him; he would like her to know that she beat a master. He would tell her, too, that the Turk wanted her to win.
But how can he tell her both things—that he was the master and the Turk was as well? How can he believe both things?
SHE FINDS HERSELF wanting to laugh. Could the afterlife be something so ridiculous as an eternity inside a machine playing a game against all comers? It hardly seems likely. Perhaps her father, the avid chess player, would enjoy such an eternal existence, but Thomas? No. But perhaps he wanted to reach her—or the children—and this was the only way. Or perhaps—she wants to laugh again—she is losing her sense. Her lack of sleep has affected her rationale.
It is possible she loved Thomas more than she loved God, she realizes. And perhaps this is her punishment. She is to be without both.
But what if she chooses simply to believe? To lay claim to the idea as a fact: Thomas has visited her, and their children, and he has done it out of love and a desire to see them again, to know they are well and surviving.
Why not let that be a comfort to her?
SHE READ ONLY the one page torn from Thomas’s journal. “I know what I hear and yet I know I cannot be hearing it,” he had written. “I know I am sane and yet I feel as if I cannot be. God has spoken to me at last, and yet the things he says. The things I now know. I am the man in the story, whispering to the reeds, ‘King Midas has ass’s ears.’ ”
Her
father read the rest and said only, “I think perhaps Thomas was ill.”
“How well he hid it,” she said, and her father nodded.
“It seems impossible,” she said.
And yet it wasn’t.
S. IS HOT WITH FEVER. His hands are trembling. He thinks that nothing is his own anymore. He cannot control his thoughts, let alone his actions. Perhaps inside of him is another man controlling him, and inside of him another man controlling him, and so on.
“Stop it,” he says aloud, and he believes surely the crowd has heard him, but there is only silence in response.
How would it feel, he wonders, to sit in a chair and play the Turk. To sit opposite him and watch the hand extend, grasp its piece, make its move.
He longs for it.
The audience thinks the Turk is the body and somewhere hidden from sight is the soul; but, S. knows, he has become the body, and the Turk is the soul. Together perhaps he and the Turk are a complete man—but no longer is he such a thing when they are apart. He can no longer hold himself together.
If people were to believe that the Turk’s magic was real, they would burn him, drown him, destroy him. What they want is to choose to believe in something they know is not real. An easy kind of faith. One they can control. S. does not have this comfort any longer.
He looks one last time at the small chessboard. He cannot win unless she makes her own mistake, something she has not done during their several hours of play. He leans his head back against the cabinet interior. He pinches out the candle’s small flame with his thumb and forefinger. He will not make another move, not even to exit. Maelzel shall have to drag him out.
Perhaps she will be the one to rescue him, to pull his head onto her lap, where it will nestle deep in her skirts while he lies with his eyes closed, refusing to look up at her.
He should not have extinguished the candle; instead, he should have used it to light a flame and burn the Turk to cinders. He wishes he could be disassembled and folded into a crate, as the Turk so regularly is.
The Trojan War Museum Page 16