Tourmaline

by Paul Park

  He brought Peter to his feet. And when he swayed and almost fell, Turkkan put his big arm around him. "Come," he said. "Come here."

  He led him out of the dark room and into a gallery of rose-colored stone or stucco, hung with painted miniatures along the inner wall. Two feet thick at least, the outer wall was pierced with unglazed windows that stretched from floor to ceiling but were only a few inches wide. After a few steps Turkkan's solicitude had changed into impatience; he clamped Peter by the neck and hurried him along so quickly that it was as if a jerky, silent film of courtyard life were being shown along the left-hand wall, framed by the slitted windows. The yard was full of soldiers lighting fires and stretching out their tents. Savory smoke blew into the gallery and into the red sky. It was the dinner hour.

  The chain between Peter's ankles slapped along the tiles. He had to take mincing little steps. "Come," said Aristophanes Turkkan. "You see I do not lie to you—this house is full of soldiers. They will shoot you if I give the word. I myself will shoot you." He gave Peter's neck a friendly squeeze.

  "Where am I?"

  "You are in my house! My personal house—for one night you are my guest. I am not afraid of you. Tomorrow you are off to Trebizond with the other prisoners and your name will be Peter Gross. Tonight you will want nothing, I promise you!"

  "But my name is Peter Gross," Peter murmured. Now that he thought about it, he had no idea how to undo the damage he had caused by taking a false name, or even if it made sense to try. Peter Gross, apparently, had been convincted of the murder underneath the bridge.

  They had reached the end of the long gallery. Now they came through several small antechambers and into a larger room that was full of rich and delicious smells. There were windows above Peter's head along the walls, and from the vault hung a row of slow fans. Below them in the center of the floor, a low table was surrounded by pillows, and on it burned a dim electric light. The bulb was covered with a perforated shade so that the light made a pattern on the surface of the table. It shone unevenly on bottles and covered dishes. The carpet was soft under Peter's bare feet.

  Besides, it was de Graz that Turkkan wanted to entertain, de Graz he had invited into his house. Peter Gross would have been in Trebizond by now. So already he was ahead; when he sat, pressed into a cushion by Turkkan's strong hand, the small-linked chain between his wrists coiled into his lap, and he looked down.

  For the first time he noticed the clothes he was wearing, a pumpkin-colored pair of pajamas. He had not seen them in the Eski Seray, where even the condemned prisoners had been dressed in their own clothes. But he assumed the pajamas were some kind of prison uniform—his spirits, which had been restored by the girls' perfume and the pungent food, now wavered. The chain slipped and coiled in his lap. It dragged on the cushions as he crossed his legs.

  But he couldn't stay miserable when he was so hungry. Who knew what the future kept for him? He'd given up predicting a long time ago. In the meantime savory smells came from the dishes, made of rose-colored porcelain. Aristophanes Turkkan was lifting the covers and sniffing at the steam, though Peter noticed there was only one plate, only one knife and fork. "Eat, my friend!" Turkkan said. "Eat! Here there is honey lamb, rice with dried grapes and almonds, yes, but first—hot towels!" These he uncovered from a large pot, and as he wiped his own red face and hands he recited a short prayer in a language Peter didn't recognize. Perhaps it was Hebrew.

  "Let me serve you with my hands, for old sakes!"

  Peter ate and drank. At first he took small bites. The food was spicy, and the more he ate, the more ravenous he became. He ate until his cheeks ached from chewing, and the cadi served him delightedly. The chain clinked as Peter moved his hands.

  The old man sat back in the pillows. When Peter lifted up his long spoon to start on a dish of yoghurt and cinnamon, Turkkan spoke. "Tell me, my friend. Now you must tell me the truth. Not for that damned drug, but its own sake. Is this some fantasy of darkness, that you appear before me? Are you a devil, as they say? Or have you come again from the fountain of youth? Tell me what has washed away your memory, so you remember nothing of these things. Tell me how we must explain this at long last?"

  How could he explain? Peter wiped his lips. Forget Turkkan—how could he explain this even to himself? Dc Graz lived inside of him. Sometimes Peter kept him quiet and contained. Sometimes he prowled free. Any time, Peter supposed, when instinct might take over, which was another reason not to trust yourself.

  Peter's father sometimes quoted an old radio show: "'What evil lurks in the heart of men?" Reassured now by the memory, Peter smiled. He put down his cup and washed his fingers in a glass bowl. He dried his hands on a linen towel. Then he found himself staring at a row of cabinets that lined one side of the room. Glass-fronted, they were full of bones.

  "You laugh at me!" Turkkan cried, suddenly delighted, laughing, too. "Bah, it is ridiculous. Bah, we are men of action, you and I. These mysteries are not for us. Old graybeards talking."

  Now his eyes followed Peter's eyes. "I see you looking at my collection. Please, it is the interest of an old man. You also are interested in archeological remains?"

  Peter didn't answer, and Turkkan leapt up. "Let me show you the pride of my collection! Of course they want to take it away and bury it. What ignorance—but I am an officer of the courts! Let them try!"

  Now he had opened one of the glass cabinets and lit a lamp. Peter came to join him, and found himself looking at many rows of fossilized bones. Some were small, some large. All were carefully labeled in delicate handwriting, drawn in black ink upon the bones themselves.

  "My daughters help me," Turkkan said proudly. "You see they have been educated in taxonomy abroad. Let me show you this new thing, of which it is a question of a battle in the courts."

  They squatted down, and Peter found himself peering at a single, long, enormous tibia, stretching the width of two cabinets. "We have legends in this country," Turkkan continued. "Graybearded scholars come and look and say this s the leg of Goliath the Philistine. Others scratch their beards and say it is the leg of Hector of Troy. You see they have a scholarly difference of opinion! All these bones, it is the same. They are heroes or giants, and must be taken away and buried with honor—what a loss to science! When in fact they are not human bones at all. Always the past is like a mirror and we see ourselves. I ask you, is it possible Hector of Troy was seven meters tall?"

  " 'Giants walked among us,' " Peter quoted.

  "Ha! I see you make a joke. But I wish you to imagine seven meters—what about his wife, the lady Andromache? Was she also seven meters, or else six and a half? I would like to have seen that! Besides, we have found much armor in the ruins of Troy. Many plates and dishes—no, it is ridiculous. These bones are not found in those places. They are deep, deep, deep inside the earth where they have turned to stone. But sometimes the earth surrenders them. I tell you if we could only find a skull. But it is frustrating! The skulls break and shatter, becaase the bones are thin."

  Peter found himself distracted by a happy memory. Several times his parents had taken him to the Museum of Natural History in New York. "The skulls are hard to find," he said.

  "Yes, of course. I see you are a sensible man! Is it not obvious? These are animal remains, but animals like we have never seen. The little elephant, the feeble mammoth—it is not like that. Come, my daughters have made sketches. This is of a find near Trebizond. Perhaps when you are digging in the mine, you will find something like this and send for me. Ha—another joke! No, my friend—I am sorry to have hurt you. I am an old fool."

  The drawings were exquisite, huge beasts in red pencil and watercolor, their skeletons superimposed in hard black ink. They were dinosaurs, obviously, but none he recognized—no triceratops, no stegosaurus, no tyrannosaurus rex. He recognized none of the names that were so carefully printed, in Roman letters, under their enormous feet. But the drawings were so beautiful. "Your daughters, they are very skilled," he said.

 
But he was thinking about the bones in the natural history museum and about his parents. Without warning he had tears in his eyes. He reached up to wipe them away and the chains clinked. "No, my friend," continued Aristophanes Turkkan. "You must not hide these things. It is a man who lets his tears fall. Come with me!" And he led Peter to a side table where there were bottles and glasses laid out.

  "I think we will not sleep tonight," said the old man as he lit a candle. Then he unstoppered a bottle and poured out a stream of green liquid into two long-stemmed glasses. "This is the green serpent that has coiled inside my heart. But if you are a man, you do not care. See how it glows!"

  Settled in the delicate spheres under the candlelight, the liquor shone. "Warm it in your hands, you see. Wash your breath with it. It is absinthe from your country. Always from your country. Everything that is not as it appears, I think it is from your country. Everything that is a mystery. Men whose faces have not changed for twenty-five years. In this fight between barbarian; and honest men, I think you have all the weapons, all the powers. It is why Mejid Pasha is afraid of you."

  Peter had managed to interrupt his tears. But his voice still felt lumpy and uncertain. Finally he blurted out, "Is it true what he said? Did the Chevalier de Graz carry a cow across a battlefield, rescue a cow when there were people dying?"

  "It was a calf, I think. No man alive could carry a cow such a distance, not even the Chevalier de Graz."

  Turkkan had picked up one of the glasses. Warming it between his hands, he made the liquor turn in a small whirlpool before offering it to Peter—"I have been a judge for a long time in the courts of this city. Certainly there is a difference between the truth and a lie. But in the house of what is true, there are many chambers, and some are sealed from the others. Today you have taken their truth serum, and I apologize for that. That is something for criminals, which you are. But you are also a man and a champion, and so I offer you this other serum for the truth. Smell! It is from Targu Mures!"

  Peter took the glass. The liquor in it was intolerably sweet.

  "It is a taste to hide the wormwood," Turkkan admitted, smelling his own glass. "I beg you to examine the stone bones of these creatures and examine my daughters' sketches while I tell you another story which is also true because I saw these things myself with my own eyes. I am right to think you don't remember—this was before the Peace of Havsa, so we were still at war. But all alone a man crossed through the line, unarmed, without speaking our language, already famous to us because of the wrongs he had done to us at Nova Zagora and ether places. I tell you we might have been justified in shooting him where he stood, or striking his head from his shoulders and sending it to Schenck von Schenck. I tell you arguments were made. This man acted as nothing, and then asked if it was true as he had heard, that every year there was a wrestling competition in Adrianopole, the yagli-gures festival on Sarayici island—oiled wrestling, we call it. It is the most important competition of our national sport. And this man stood there, cold as anything; I tell you he was not a giant but an ordinary man. Smaller than myself. He was no great reptile as you see in my daughters' drawing. And so we laughed to think that he would fight against Vassilye the Greek and Mehmet the Conqueror, who had won the open competition for three successive years—the greatest champion of the age, we thought. And so the colonel said, why kill this man? Why take him prisoner? Mehmet the Conqueror will kill him with more glory to us, and we would put his bones into a bag and send them back to Frederick Schenck von Schenck, whose soldiers were pressing us so fiercely—if we'd only known how weak they were, and how they'd brought every starving boy onto the line to press us, while we held many back because of the caution and stupidity of our generals, who were not used to fighting a madman like von Schenck when he was keeping nothing in reserve—it doesn't matter. This boy was not yet twenty and he stood there with his hands behind his back, a look of stupid pride on his face as we all thought."

  Still Turkkan was smelling the absinthe in his glass and had drunk none of it. He lifted it up, inspected the green glow.

  "They took him for questions and he said nothing. You cannot imagine the impudence! So I was sent for, because I was a famous wrestler in the camp—I had received the silver cup from General Fernandes-Cohn. The general told me to make a fall with him, and so I did, in the stadium of the Janissary Corps.

  I tell you I was the stronger man, but it was like struggling with water, or like Menelaus and Proteus in the story. I called him the Proteus man. Never could I hold him or catch a grip until I found myself straight on my back. I saw the mark before my face and I bit him—so, I am not proud of that. And I will try to make it up! Tonight I will try, my friend.

  "So you must understand the arrogance of this man as he stood under the torches on Sarayici Island. A crowd of many thousands, and they wanted Mehmet to tear him to little pieces. It was the only reason we allowed it, to see the enemy beaten like this. In the army our spirit was low, though we had the stronger position—every day the stronger position as we retreated from von Schenck. We knew this man was a staff officer, aide-de-camp—we knew his reputation. This story of Nova Zagora, it was one of many! So the saltan promised Mehmet the Conqueror a diamond ring from his own finger."

  "I don't remember," Peter said. He drank the absinthe in little sips. And sometimes he looked down and touched the sketches of unknown dinosaurs.

  Now again he felt burdened and suffocated by the weight of this new story though he longed to hear it: "So they stripped down naked in the pitch, and the boys came out to grease their bodies with the olive oil. I tell you, the Chevalier de Graz did not stand up to the shoulder of our champion. I alone thought he had a chance because of my experience—I kept my opinion to myself! I put some money on his head, though, in a bet, because I felt shamed by my loss, and shamed to see this one man standing against death in the city of his enemies, and a crowd of many thousands as I said. I put my money as a token for his courage, and I'm glad I did! In those days I was only a poor soldier. My father would not live in a house like this and send his son to school as I have sent my daughters. So my friend, I owe you many good things. I ask you, why did you kill this thief and criminal, Jacob Golcuk? If not for that, I would put you on a train to Bucharest with my own hands."

  It was true, the intolerable green licorice taste hid another bitter flavor, which now touched Peter on the tongue. "So I beat the champion," he sad.

  "Three falls! Three falls! The first, we thought it was an accident, though I made double my bet. It was so quickly, we thought Mehmet had slipped. But I knew he had not gotten his grip, this man who could squeeze a brick to powder in his hands as I have seen him do. De Graz slipped through his finger; and then turned him so he fell.

  "The next pass, it was the longest, and we saw the strength on both sides. Mehmet was careful now. I think he saw the diamond ring on one side of his mind, and anger and contempt of all the Turks upon the other—this for a man who had never lost a match. Who had never taken a fall, but now had taken one. In the crowd we thought he slipped, but he knew better. I thought I saw it in his eyes as they grappled and broke apart. Still he was always off-balance or stretched too far, and he was never in a place where he could use his strength. I tell you it was like fighting water or a nest of snakes, because he turned so quickly. But then his foot was behind the giant's knee, and the giant fell. Even though he rolled right up to continue fighting, there was no doubt of it. There was no accident this time. There was a terrible moaning from the crowd, and the princes of the court stood to go."

  Peter's glass was empty and he put it down. Still Turkkan had not taken the first sip of his liquor. Still he frowned, and examined it in the light.

  "I was in the seventh row. Right then as I stood there, I knew the war was lost. Not just the pehlivan competition, but the war with the barbarians, which we had fought for so long. In my great-grandfather's time our soldiers had reached the gates of Bucharest. Yet here we were, beaten by a boy as it occurred to us.
I tell you, that fight was worth a brigade of soldiers to the enemy, and von Schenck knew it. Four weeks later he broke through at Havsa and the sultan gave him peace. And he was happy to take it, because he had no army left, as we found out when it was too late. I tell you he was a devil, this man with his tricks and stratagems. And now his daughter has come to life in Braila! I tell you they will never catch her. Ceausescu the white tyger is finished now, I tell you."

  These words broke unexpectedly into Peter's thoughts. But he didn't want to talk about Miranda with Aristophanes Turkkan. "And the third fall?" he asked.

  "Was over in a minute! Less than that! I was in the seventh row, and I could see Mehmet's face. This was a man who had never lost! When the judge gave the signal, he threw himself immediately on de Graz, hoping to take him by surprise. Once more he hoped to crush him with his strength, but the boy turned under his arm. He stepped behind him and struck him in the back between the shoulder blades. It was the first time he had struck him."

  Now Turkkan drank his whole glass in one gulp. "I know!" he said, after he had wiped his mouth. "I tell you these things and they mean nothing. It is a story that has made you melancholy, I see. But it was something I wanted to set against the story of the calf, for we have all done terrible things. Because we are men upon this earth. Now tell me, why did you kill Jacob Golcuk? How could you take a fall from such a one? This is our last night and you must tell me. Tomorrow there will be a penal convoy to the east."

  "I didn't kill him."

  The old man stared at him and shook his head. "Alas, my friend, I don't believe you. But if it gives you pleasure to say nothing, I will understand. We have one night only, and it belongs to you. Where will we go, what will we see? If you like, my girls will come talk to us on the subject of their researches. I can see you are interested in these great lizards."