The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  ‘You are an intelligent women. We can discuss destiny.’

  With an ironic smile, she said, ‘You first.’

  He gestured towards the grey mountains in the north-west. ‘I was born in Gori. Have you been there? It is a superstitious, backward place. Once a year, the smiths strike their anvils deep into the night. This prevents Amiran from descending to the village from his mountain.’

  ‘Who is Amiran?’

  Soso cleared his throat. For the first time since she had known him, he appeared uncomfortable.

  ‘My father. Let me tell you about him. He was a drunkard who beat me every day and opposed my induction in the seminary. He hated me. He did not care that I was first in my class of rich kids. He beat my mother as much as me. When he left Gori, however, the lesson was learned. She assumed the role of beater and bruised me from head to foot.’

  Saskia said, ‘The Russian verb “to beat” sometimes means “to educate”, comrade.’

  ‘I want to change the subject. Did you read my pamphlet on Darwin and Marx?’

  ‘Actually, I have,’ she said. It would not do to antagonise the Boss, but her direct involvement in the heist had given her a distaste for his wordy, poetic abstractions. ‘I’m surprised you see them as compatible.’

  ‘Why not? Remember Linnaeus, who wrote, “Nature does not make leaps”. Darwin has inked over the pencil sketches of Linnaeus. For him, the process of our development from the simple ancestor to our current form is one of gradual realisation.’

  ‘Adaptation,’ said Saskia, ‘not improvement. There is no distant ideal for an evolutionary process. There is only the random variation of present generation and the non-random method of its selection.’

  ‘That is beside the point. Darwin saw the process as gradual, despite the gaps in the fossil record. It could equally be true, however, that those gaps are not merely the absence of gradual development, but evidence of great leaps.’

  ‘You are forgetting Linnaeus.’

  Excitedly, he said, ‘But what if there come moments of rapid change?’

  ‘Revolution, not evolution?’ Saskia sipped her coffee. ‘That sounds rather like the theory of punctuated equilibria. Flim-flam, comrade.’

  ‘But you agree that the evidence currently fits both interpretations.’

  ‘Currently. Now what of Marx?’

  ‘Marx?’ He opened his arms to the view. ‘Nothing less than everything. A change in the quality of things from one instant to the next. A lost equilibrium, to use your phrase, and the collapse of the world order. You disagree?’

  Saskia did not look away from the smoky rooftops.

  ‘Does that make revolution a natural consequence?’

  ‘Plato teaches us that natural government cannot be democratic, because the crowd is a mob, and a mob is unthinking. And yet when we consider non-democratic alternatives, the issues become equally intractable. Who is selected to govern? Why? And who does the selecting? You, Lynx? Me?’

  ‘You have not answered my question.’ She added, quietly, ‘And you can read what you like in Plato.’

  ‘Do you know why Plato was so-named?’

  ‘Of course,’ Saskia said. She was tiring of his fervour. ‘He was a strong sportsman with an admired musculature.’

  ‘There is always a dialogue between strength and knowledge.’

  ‘Would it be simplistic to say that all the meanings of strength are linked to all meanings of knowledge?’

  ‘How like Socrates you are, Lynx. Ready to question an idea but slow to answer with your own.’ Soso shook his head. ‘There is always a dialogue. I tell you, it will take a strong man to rise above the trappings of the sheep and assume the role of shepherd.’

  ‘Who will that be? You?’

  ‘No,’ said Soso, laughing. ‘Other men. Like my friend in the north. He is the superman.’

  Saskia sighed. ‘Do you remember what I replied when you first asked me about the Tsar?’

  ‘Word for word,’ said Soso. ‘“Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes”. From the Frenchman, Camus, whose work I will seek out presently.’

  ‘What do you say to it?’

  ‘I refer you to Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’. In that story, a cleric, suffering a state of aberration, believes himself to be the King of Spain. That is the fate of all megalomaniacs.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The superman must remain of the people. He must place them first in his thoughts. Even if he is to rise above their pettiness and compel them towards actions they find disagreeable. He must stand on their shoulders.’

  Twenty-five million people will die beneath his boots, she thought. Saskia looked over the rail. The first rocks were sixty feet below. She considered whether she should kill this man. It would be her first true murder. She had shot Cossacks the day before, but they were maimed and dying: that was euthanasia, a topic on which Plato was not silent.

  And yet there was a particular future. She had seen it. Stalin would stand while his contemporaries fell. He would inherit the revolution. How could she stop him? He was as immortal as she was. Nothing could touch him.

  Soso smiled. ‘It is a long way down.’

  Saskia said nothing.

  ‘Does it bother you? Your wrist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Poor Lynx. I, of course, can’t move my left arm at the elbow.’

  ‘Small world.’

  They sipped their coffees. A vulture turned in a thermal.

  ‘One Epiphany in Gori many years ago,’ said Soso, calm once more, ‘there was a great commotion. Mourners entered the village carrying the body of a young boy. People came to stare on Tsarskaya Street. The women muttered that there was a curse on Ekaterina Geladze, who had now lost her boy as well as her husband. Friends of the boy gathered. ‘What happened?’ was the question. Well, they replied, the dead boy had been hit by a runaway phaeton over at the main bridge. Look at his matted, bloodied hair and his pale skin!

  ‘As the procession reached the house of the dead boy, his mother ran out. She was wailing. She picked up the boy and screamed at him. She wept with lost love. But at her tears, which fell upon his cold face, the dead boy woke up. Though he never regained the full use of his arm, he lived.’

  ‘That’s quite a story.’

  ‘Now do you see, Lynx? You cannot kill me.’

  Saskia frowned at him. Her fingers dug into the coffee cup. She decided to replace her serious expression with a smile. ‘Your jokes sometimes escape me.’

  Soso looked behind her.

  She turned as Kamo swung the samovar. It struck her forehead with an absurd, gong-like sound. Blood ran into her eyes and she raised her hand to clear it. Soso and Kamo took a leg each. Saskia twisted but she had no purchase.

  I cannot die.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kamo, as she was flipped.

  She screamed long enough to empty her lungs.

  If I can die, then he can die too.

  Before she could draw air again, her body struck the rocks and shattered.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There is a realm, perhaps only imagined, of many Amber Rooms. Their walls are translucent. Through them, Saskia can see the outlines of still more Amber Rooms, overlapping into infinity. This place is a great building of buildings: a matrix whose Amber Rooms are connected by enfilades in six directions. Saskia is not a person here. Instead, she is a wisp that threads these enfilades. She knows that each Amber Room is a world. On its walls are not allegories of touch, smell, and vision but windows upon landscapes, dreams, and meaning.

  This is not a museum, or a mausoleum, or an ark. Its proper word does not exist in any of the human languages that Saskia knows. This place is an equation. Certainly, it holds the beauty of an equation and the unfolding power of permutation.

  A permutation might be the collective noun for this building of buildings.

  Saskia appears to be alone, but there is another, unnamed something that speaks to her. Curator is not the wor
d; neither is ghost. But it has no substance and it has all knowledge. It has told her that each Amber Room protects—or grips, or preserves, or marks the boundaries of—a reality.

  She drifts on. The instants pass like the erosion of mountains. Millennia might fit between her blinks. Her thoughts are yoked to this slow time, however, and she feels no difference in her being, apart from a distant worry that she has become separated from what it means to be human.

  The tour continues.

  In one Amber Room, Saskia Brandt was born with fair hair. There are six exits here: the four walls, as well as the floor and ceiling. If Saskia were to float upwards and continue through the infinite suite, those other Saskia Brandts would be born with fairer and fairer hair. If Saskia were to float down, the hair of those others would darken.

  Everything is here.

  If this is not an ark, or a museum, or a tomb for reality, what can it be?

  She drifts towards one of the small pictures, surrounded by a broken paving of amber. The artist has rendered a pastoral scene of the steppe. Close, the chimney of a farmhouse grows a lock of smoke. Its flat roof is loaded with fodder. Winter is close. On a far crag, a wolf in silhouette pulls back to howl. How distant is the tang of the Caspian? In this scene, the air would be dry. The poplar leaves are butter-coloured. They are falling in concert with a particular music known only to those who live season to season.

  On the steppe, Saskia thinks, as she floats in a slow barrel turn, there is time to spare.

  The wolf has been rendered mid-howl. Saskia thinks of the elements of this vast, uncountable world. She cannot know them all. She cannot predict them. It is this thought that conjures movement in the image of the steppe and the immensity of its time, small rivers, caravans of traders on battered pathways.

  In the grass, there is a mark no more detailed than the brush-tick that represents a nameless bird in the middle distance.

  But Saskia knows it is her body lying there.

  When she opens her eyes, she understands that the floor is not grass but a parquet of exotic woods, and all her memories of these infinite Amber Rooms are taken from her, not unkindly, by something that is neither creator nor ghost.

  ~

  When Saskia opened her eyes, she was once again in the Amber Room. She must have fallen on the floor. Her cheek throbbed and the base of her skull hurt, but she was otherwise uninjured. Her body recorded nothing of her fall from the balcony of the physical observatory. It was a memory. But she had no doubt that the memory was real. That Saskia had been murdered; somewhere, her body lay broken on rocks.

  Slowly, Saskia gathered her skirt and stood. The room was empty. Its windows showed a night sky over the square and the palace was quiet. Her yellow-tinted glasses were crooked on her nose, and she could discern no use for them in this candle-lit chamber with its spells of darkness and sudden light, so she removed them and tucked them into her collar. The model of Frederick the Great had been pushed over and split in two. She peered into its base, which was hollow and large enough to conceal a man.

  Like the room, it was empty.

  She examined her reflection in one of the mirrors near the door to the staircase. The woman there was familiar, even down to the black scarf and sensible blouse. Gone was the ostentatious Allegory of the Future. She had seen this outfit before, when entering the room for the first time. She had become that reflection. This was not the reality she had left. This was a parallel version.

  In the fragments of wood near the base of the model statue was a business card. Saskia crouched to take it. The card had the appearance of a business card but was too heavy and its surface rather smooth. The typeface was unusual.

  It read:

  Ms Tucholsky, Tutor

  Mathematics; English; Physical Education

  References upon request

  Messages received at Hotel de l’Europe, Nevsky Avenue and Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa

  The card grew hot beneath her thumb. She dropped it. A black outline of her thumbprint lingered on the surface, then vanished. The words on the card scrolled aside. An icon of a clock face appeared and its hands raced clockwise.

  She smiled.

  The icon disappeared.

  ‘Saskia,’ said the card, ‘I am back.’

  His voice tantalised her with a release from the loneliness that only a taste of her own time, the twenty-first century, could bring. She put the card to her lips and closed her eyes.

  ‘Ego,’ she said. ‘My old friend.’

  ‘Saskia, we have just experienced an entanglement event. It forced my shutdown and might have caused you dizziness or loss of consciousness.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘Before we discuss the matter, I must report that there are two men approaching from the main staircase. You need to leave the palace directly. I suggest using the Private Apartments of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna.’

  Saskia unbuttoned her collar and tucked Ego into her bosom. She hurried towards the door set in the wall adjacent to the enfilade. She grasped the handle but the door would not open. Before she could force the lock, the door to the enfilade opened behind her. She skipped across the room and concealed herself in its lee.

  ‘… something inside,’ said a man, perhaps the junior of the two. They had stopped on the threshold.

  ‘Has the alarm been raised?’ said the other. His voice was at once familiar and strange. Saskia was standing with her back to the mirror. She tilted her head to the right, hoping to glimpse the men without revealing her presence.

  ‘I believe so,’ said the junior.

  ‘You believe so?’ The senior’s voice had cooled. It became less familiar. Saskia could not yet see him and did not dare move any further. ‘Why don’t you go and check?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  She listened to the fading footsteps of the junior guard, which were accompanied by the soft rattle of armour. There was no sound from the senior guard other than an impatient sigh expelled through the nose. Saskia leaned over again, but the mirror was too small to reveal the man. Why was he waiting in the doorway? Did he see her? Her cheek throbbed. A dull ache grew at the back of her head; to be sure, someone had struck her there. The injuries to her cheek and the base of her skull were the only impressions, in the absence of memory, that she could use to reconstruct the moments before becoming aware in this version of the Amber Room. What had Ego meant by an entanglement event?

  A flash lit the room. Her first thought was fireworks. The afterglow, however, was white and unaccompanied by the sighs of spectators. She turned towards the mirror on the adjacent wall. By tilting, she could see the reflection of the window that overlooked the square. She demanded answers from her vision and the slice of night reflected there swelled to a grey rectangle flickering with false positive shapes. Within the shapes were two constants: bold lines that described two horses, each with a rider, and all lit in the magnesium of a signal flare. Soso and Kamo were cantering into the night. As Saskia looked, Kamo’s horse tipped into a perfect levade. There was a bundle slung across the withers. This had to be the first Imperial Mail satchel from the Tiflis heist. The other satchel would be draped across Soso’s horse, which was now too far away to discern.

  Saskia thought once more about the events of the evening, here, prior to her arrival. She constructed a likely version: The satchels had been hidden inside the base of the statue. Soso, Kamo and Saskia had gained entry to the Amber Room; the statue had been overturned; Saskia had been knocked unconscious, and her two companions had escaped. And yet it was not certain she had been a companion. She might have intercepted the pair and tried to stop them. In another scenario, she was a hostage.

  Saskia reduced the intensity of her vision. Her perceptual world shrank once more to the confines of the Amber Room. She tensed to see the back of the senior guard—a Hussar. He was crouching, oblivious to her, at the base of the overturned model. The candlelight created pools of shade. Saskia moved through these until she was behind
the man. As she shifted her weight to her right leg and coiled her left, ready to kick his neck in the unprotected gap between his helmet and his back, he turned.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said.

  ‘Ms Tucholsky?’

  ‘Pavel Eduardovitch Nakhimov.’

  She dropped the leg and stood up straight.

  This Pasha was taller than the Pasha she had failed in the original Amber Room. But of all the Amber Rooms, and all the people she might meet in them, why Pasha, here? He wore the full uniform of a Hussar of the Imperial Guard: a white, dolman jacket with gold piping, sable epaulettes, and a bearskin helmet. His whiskers, however, were too thin to complete the impression of masculinity.

  ‘You’re a Hussar,’ she said. There was pride in her voice.

  ‘And you are under arrest,’ he said coldly.

  Saskia put her hands to his cheeks and kissed him three times. ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ She kissed his shocked face again, thinking of the dead boy. ‘So glad.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said, taking her wrists.

  Saskia stared at her hands as Pasha removed them from his cheeks. She looked at the veins and the sudden bumps of her tendons as she rippled her fingers.

  ‘Ms Tucholsky, you will come with me.’

  She ignored him. She made fists, then put her palms together in prayer, watching the whiteness where the fingers pressed. Pasha did not release her.

  ‘Ms Tucholsky?’

  ‘My hands,’ she whispered. ‘How could I not notice until now?’

  ‘Never mind your hands. Ms Tucholsky, there has been a breakin at the palace this evening and we must account for your presence.’

  Saskia decided that her hands were perfect in their symmetry. She looked for the long-forgotten mole on the palm of the left one, not far from the life line. It was there. As, for this body, it had always been.

  Pasha took her upper arm. He leaned into her vision and said, ‘Enough. My corporal witnessed you enter the palace along with two men. Clearly, the three of you quarrelled. They abandoned you here and escaped with stolen property. I was surprised to see you, but when I consider the events of the last few months, everything makes sense.’