Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  A heaving mass of individuals was swarming around the centre of the arena, yelling and gesticulating. The noise was now deafening, and was accompanied by a stifling stench of beasts, sweat and urine. The crowd, all male, was made up of rough burly types, peasants and louts.

  “Welcome to the Hetzhaus,” said Simonis, pointing to the scene at the centre of the amphitheatre, while Populescu asked someone for information. We moved towards the centre of the show. A group of quarrelsome-looking brutes passed in front of us, greeting Populescu with cheerful coarseness.

  At that moment, peering through the crowd, I finally saw what it was that held the attention of the swarming crowd. In the arena two large cocks were massacring one another with sharp pecks, incited by the spectators’ furious yells, amplified by the echo created in the building’s hollow space. Just then, the larger of the two cockerels firmly seized the other’s neck with its claw, pinned its head to the ground and with its beak pitilessly pecked it. The crowd cheered, spurring the two creatures on – one to kill, the other to die – with equally bestial fervour.

  “So Simonis,” I asked him, “what does ‘spectators or owners’ mean?”

  “Spectators are the ones that come here to bet,” said Simonis, as I watched the bloody spectacle, “owners are the ones that own the animals they bet on.”

  In the meantime Populescu had rejoined us.

  “It’s no use, I can’t find out if the boy is still here or not. We’ll have to look for him. He’s easy to recognise, because he only has one eye, the left – the other is covered by a bandage. He’s a boy aged thirteen, as thin as a rake and almost as tall as me.”

  As Populescu moved away again, greeting strangers to left and right, I asked Simonis: “What does Populescu get up to in the Hetzhaus?”

  “He scrapes together a little cash by cheating mugs with rigged bets. The Hetzhaus was opened a few years ago by two Dutch traders, and is very successful. In Vienna animal fights have been in fashion for over a century, and there are lots of people who live by betting on them. The boy we’re looking for, even if Populescu won’t say so openly, is undoubtedly one of the little tricksters that hang around these places. Now let’s split up, keeping an eye on each other: whichever of us sees the little squinter first must signal to the others.”

  Left on my own, I studied the place. All around, the numerous barred cages held animals of every sort: in addition to cocks, there were dogs, bulls, oxen, wolves, boars and hyenas, and their yelps of angry fear made the place sound like one of the circles of hell. The cages were set out in radial fashion, and from each one the animal inside could be unleashed and led straight to the combat. It was as if some wicked enchanter had transformed Noah’s ark into a place of slaughter. At the entrance, ignoring the yells and yelps, the stink and the blood, a salesman was cheerfully peddling bread, sausages and cheap Schwechat wine.

  Meanwhile the larger cock had finished massacring its rival, which was carried off half-dead from the arena. The owner of the winner picked up his beloved pet and held it high to the jubilant acclaim of the audience. I saw gold and silver coins changing hands, filling the winners’ eyes with joy, and the losers’ with rage.

  At that moment, above the uproar of the gamblers and their beasts, I heard a shout:

  “It’s him!”

  I looked up. Populescu was pointing at a figure moving swiftly and almost invisibly through the forest of legs, arms and rustic faces. I saw him clearly: a pale, thin face, the right eye blindfolded. I tried to intercept him, but taking advantage of the obstacle of a small knot of people the boy managed to dodge past me and to flee towards the exit. We all three chased after him, pushing aside anyone in our path, and just a few seconds later we were in the street. By the time we got outside, as was to be expected, the boy had been swallowed up in the dark. The massive Helmut, who stood on guard at the door, had just glimpsed him darting by.

  “Curse it,” hissed Populescu, his breath steaming in the cold night air.

  “And now?”

  “Zyprian lives a long way off, in the suburb of Wieden,” he answered. “He won’t get back till dawn. He’ll have had to find some place to shelter in. But I know there’s another place he hangs around in, near here, where he sometimes acts as pimp. He won’t expect me to know about it, because it was one of his hustlers that told me about it, and not him. Pennal, curse it, what are you waiting for to get this cart moving?”

  This place looked quite different. We were now in the elegant square of Neuer Markt. In the centre, gleaming amid the half-darkness, stood the monument to Joseph the First, Victor of Landau. A large opulent place of entertainment spilled light not only from its ground-floor windows but also from those on the first floor. Next to the street entrance was a life-size wall painting of a be-turbaned Grand Turk holding, as was the fashion in coffee houses, a steaming cup of coffee and beckoning people in. A number of luxurious carriages were parked nearby, whose owners – noblemen and high court functionaries – were being expensively entertained within the building.

  “This is the Mehlgrube. It’s the most elegant place for anyone looking for nocturnal enjoyment,” said Populescu. “It has the best billiard tables, the best card players, the best music and the best whores in the city. People drink and dance even at this time of night, despite all the rules. The more successful a place is, the greater the laws it can break: there’s all the more money for bribing magistrates.”

  On the upper floor the notes of the orchestra were almost drowned by the laughter and clatter of the dancers. A piece in three-quarters time had just finished, greeted by rapturous applause.

  “Did you hear?” snorted Populescu. “People are no longer happy just to dance Ländler or Langaus: now they all want this strange dance from who knows where, called Walzer, or something similar. And yet doctors say that this waltz is too fast and immoral, it can lead to overheating and illness, and even to early death. If you ask me, in a couple of years people will have forgotten all about it.”

  While Populescu went off in search of Zyprian, Simonis had to answer my questions.

  “Dragomir acts as a factotum for the professional swindlers. While they play cards, he peeks at the hand the dupe is holding, a poor fellow who has no idea he’s playing with two or three tricksters. If they play billiards, he makes sure the victim gets given a cue of poor quality, which is guaranteed to make him lose, or every so often he switches the cue ball with a faulty one, so that the poor sucker’s decisive shots all go wrong.”

  In the meantime Dragomir had returned, looking exultant.

  “I’ve found him. They’re keeping him warm for us.”

  Through a little door that gave onto the road he led us into the cellar, at the bottom of a short staircase. Just one dim lamp illuminated a little room full of wine and beer barrels, where we found the one-eyed boy sitting at a table. He was being watched over by a paunchy fellow, who had dull, half-closed eyes but looked imposing and threatening. He was even larger than the ogre Helmut who had stopped us at the entrance to the Hetzhaus. His arms, I calculated, were as thick as my thighs.

  “He helps me to get my clients to pay up,” Populescu explained, pointing to him with a knowing smile, filling a flagon of wine from one of the small barrels.

  The young Zyprian looked more angry than frightened, and gazed at us with his one eye like a caged animal. He at once assailed Populescu with a stream of abuse; the latter answered him in the same language.

  “He says he won’t talk, and that he doesn’t remember anything,” explained Populescu, draining his flagon. “Earlier he promised to help me. Then he started saying that these things are sacred for the Turks, that you shouldn’t ask too many questions, otherwise their god might get angry and punish us. But I pointed out to him that promises must be kept. Otherwise Klaus will step in,” he said, nodding to the brute next to Zyprian.

  “Among themselves,” Simonis whispered into my ear, “Half-Asiatics are particularly cruel.”

  Zyprian spat on
the ground as a mark of contempt. Populescu gave a sign to Klaus, who gave Zyprian’s left cheek a resounding slap. The impact was so violent that the boy tottered on the chair.

  “Go to hell,” he hissed in German.

  “Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm,” muttered Populescu to himself. “Klaus, again,” he ordered.

  This time three backhanders were delivered. The first made the victim shake again, the second made him lose his balance, and the third knocked him to the floor. Klaus hit without any style, but efficaciously. Zyprian bore up.

  “You’d better leave us for a while,” Populescu said to us. “We’re going to have to use strong measures.”

  I shivered and looked at Simonis, who jerked his head as a sign that we should take Dragomir’s advice. We went and sat down a little way off. A few moments later we heard Zyprian’s first screams, followed by Populescu’s burps, as he knocked back another flagon of beer.

  “Half-Asia,” muttered the Greek, shaking his head.

  “I don’t think that has anything to do with the violence,” I objected. “You talk as if they were the outcasts that live in the Americas: now those really are savages.”

  “These are no better, Signor Master. An old Pontevedrin joke says that a peasant, at the gates of heaven, is offered whatever he wants, on condition that his neighbour, who’s still alive, will get twice as much. ‘Take out one of my eyes,’ answers the peasant with a malicious smile. There, that’s how people in Half-Asia treat each other.”

  From Zyprian’s screams it really did seem that Populescu was giving orders for not just one but both of his eyes to be taken out.

  “Believe me, Signor Master, in those parts men live like wild animals,” the Greek said heatedly. “Don’t be fooled, there’s nothing heavenly or idyllic about the wildness of lands like Pontevedro; it’s a state of utter darkness, of obscure, foggy and bestial crudeness, an eternal cold night, beyond the reach of any ray of civilisation, any warm breath of human love. It’s neither day nor night there, just a strange twilight, possessing neither our culture nor the barbarism of Turan, but a mixture of both: Half-Asia!”

  “That’s enough, for the moment,” we heard Dragomir Populescu order the brute, who had just set his knee on the boy’s stomach and was preparing to hit him again.

  Simonis and I approached. I was shocked by the coldness with which Dragomir Populescu, a student with an unsuspected double life, had set the thug on the poor child. Obviously it was not the first time that our companion had had someone beaten up; only one who belonged to the sordid criminal world, I thought, could deal so casually in violence and bullying. Cheats, tricksters, pimps, spies and fornicators. Simonis was not wrong: although his companions might call themselves students, they were anything but lovers of letters and sciences.

  Zyprian’s resistance seemed to have been broken. The boy was lying on the ground with a blood trickling from his lower lip and a dark ring swelling round his eye even as we watched. He mumbled something under his breath.

  “Louder,” ordered Populescu, pouring his beer over his head.

  Zyprian kept quiet. At another signal from Populescu, Klaus gave him a kick in his ribs.

  The boy moaned and turned on his side.

  “Aren’t we overdoing things?” I interposed.

  “Shhh!” Populescu hissed at me. “Now then, Zyprian, what can you tell us about this Golden Apple? My friends are here for you.”

  Zyprian began talking in his own language again, this time slightly louder. To make his mutterings intelligible, Dragomir translated them simultaneously into Italian, stopping every so often to ask him to repeat words that he had not pronounced clearly on account of his swollen lip.

  “Everyone talks about the Golden Apple, the secret of all power. Everybody is looking for it, but no one knows where it’s ended up. One day in Constantinople the sheik Ak emseddin had an idea: he exercised his gift for visions, and identified the spot where Eyyub, Mahomet’s standard-bearer, who died during the victorious siege of the city, must be buried.”

  “Eyyub!” declared Populescu, turning to us with a look of triumph. “It’s the name pronounced by Dànilo before he died! And so he’s the standard-bearer of Mahomet that my beautiful brunette in the coffee house was telling me about . . .”

  Together with Sultan Mehmed and three men, the story went on, Ak emseddin dug for three days. At last, at a depth of three cubits they found a large green stone, with an inscription in Kufic letters that said: “This is the tomb of Ebû Eyyub El-Ensârî”. Underneath the stone they found the corpse of Eyyub, wrapped in a saffron-coloured shroud. His face was so beautiful and holy that it looked as if he had just died. In his blessed right hand he held a Mühre.”

  “A what?” interrupted Simonis.

  “For men of no understanding,” went on Zyprian’s tale, “it’s just a small spherical object, like the little balls they use to flatten paper. But for anyone kissed by the benediction of true knowledge, it is infinitely more: it’s a stone with magical forces of divine origin.”

  “But is this Mühre the Golden Apple?” I asked.

  “The Mühre is formed in the head of a snake of royal blood,” Zyprian’s muttering tale continued, in Populescu’s translation, “and it is actually solar matter. It is protected by seven layers of skin, which drop off one by one. And so it has to be kept in a dark nook, where no ray of sunlight can enter, and it must be covered in gold. If even a single bead of sunlight enters, the Mühre flees into the heavenly spheres, towards the matter it is related to.”

  This was not all. According to what the poor boy told us, every so often clutching his head in pain, the old emperors of Byzantium, or Constantinople, had a shiny stone on their crown as rulers of the world; this stone had been taken from the chamber of Nebuchadnezzar, the founder of Babylon. It had been given to him by the Magi. Nebuchadnezzar, to defend his conquest magically, had had countless signs drawn throughout his kingdom, in the shape of a snake.

  “This was because the Cosmos-City itself was surrounded by a snake, which imitated the snake that surrounds the whole earth,” explained Zyprian.

  And he recounted that Alexander the Great, when he was searching for the fountain of life in the land of eternal darkness, had placed a splendid stone on the tip of his spear: in the West they said that he had obtained it at the gate of the earthly paradise; in the East, however, the wise men said that Alexander and his vizir Sûrî had reached the City of Copper built by Solomon. This stone then became the Golden Apple.

  “Just a moment, Dragomir, just a moment. I’m getting lost,” I protested, rubbing my eyes, as if seized by a terrible headache.

  “I haven’t changed a single word the brat said,” Populescu defended himself, pouring himself another flagon.

  The boy went on, and explained that Hüma, the bird of paradise, had revealed to Solomon the origins of the precious stone known as Mühre.

  “In the Fourth Heaven there’s a mountain of golden sand, on top of which stands a splendid palace. The dome of this palace consists of the stone rings of all the men of power who governed the world before Adam. After subduing the earth, they yielded to the ambition of wishing to conquer the heavens and become gods. And so the Angel of Death went to meet them and asked for their rings back. In the dome of the heavenly palace the only one missing is the last ring, the one that closes the dome. That’s what the Mühre is formed from.”

  Simonis and I looked at each other in amazement. Zyprian’s revelations led in contrasting and extremely intricate directions.

  “In my opinion, this Mühre is the garnet stone from the statue of the Madonna of St Sophia, as Koloman told us,” remarked Simonis.

  “But it could also be the golden ball that Suleiman had them mount on the bell tower of St Stephen’s, as Jan Janitzki said,” added Populescu.

  “Let’s ask him where Eyyub got the Mühre from,” I said.

  “It was in the centre of the world. Eyyub stole it to hand it over to the future conquerin
g sultan,” was Zyprian’s answer.

  “The centre of the world must be Constantinople,” explained Populescu, “since these are Turkish legends.”

  “And now where is the Mühre?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “And Kasim’s forty thousand? Ask him if he knows about the forty thousand martyrs.”

  The boy unwillingly muttered a few words.

  “He said: the forty thousand martyrs shout on Friday,” translated Dragomir.

  “But Dànilo already told us that before he died,” I said.

  Populescu asked Zyprian again.

  “To be precise, they shout on Friday evening. He knows nothing else.”

  The last answer, which verged on stupidity, was not encouraging.

  “Ask him if the words soli soli soli mean anything to him,” I suggesed.

  Zyprian, who in the meantime had sat down again, wiped the blood from his lip. On hearing the question he shook his head and spat on the ground. Klaus clenched his fist and with a glance sought instructions from Dragomir Populescu, who indicated he should let the boy go.

  “I don’t understand any of it,” remarked Simonis, as we left the cellar and walked towards Penicek’s cart. “A lot of the information tallies, but none of it makes any sense. It’s not clear whether the Golden Apple is this Mühre, and whether the Mühre is the ball of the statue of the Madonna, or of Justinian or Constantine, or the one on the top of St Stephen’s, depending on the various versions. Zyprian says it actually came from the centre of the earth, and even from Alexander the Great, from the Fourth Heaven and from Solomon’s ring. Whatever it is, if this ball of solar matter, as he calls it, was kept in Eyyub’s tomb, the Agha’s phrase ‘we have come alone to the Golden Apple’ makes no sense anymore.”