by Adrien Goetz
That same evening, after signing a register, downing some raki, and admiring the frescoes, we were all three given beds in a large dormitory, in the heart of the sacred, filthy monastery of Dionysiou. On a cliff overhanging the sea, it looked like a drawing by Gustave Doré, a fantastic citadel made of huge blocks of stone, a stack of floors that seemed ready to tumble onto the rocks below, with a studded wooden door that had remained unaltered for four centuries. Ariadne closed her eyes.
I will remember the peacefulness of that first day until the end of my days. The view over a nature unchanged since the Middle Ages, which had never known modern roads, plantations from the Americas, the messy jumble of buildings. There had been a question, after the death of Alexander, as to whether to transform this sacred mountain into a colossal recumbent statue in his image. Was that not proof that this was where his tomb must be? No one had ever searched for it, which was the most inexplicable thing. The third tip of the Chalkidiki peninsula, this trident sinking into the sea, had become heaven on earth for the few monks who established monasteries there like the Coptic ones in Egypt. It was inaccessible, but we had managed to reach it.
In the middle of the night, we heard a dull hammering: the monks being called to prayer. I think I still hated them just as much as when I was twelve years old. It really was very ironic: to have made me cover so many miles so that I should endure, years later, one of those Masses that I had so loathed as a child. We went, we sat in the darkness and we watched. I almost fainted in the swirling incense, in front of paintings that rippled in the light of the church candles, at the moment when the Hegumen, the abbot, appeared, dressed in white and holding a huge staff. I understood that was how the Byzantine rulers, and the Roman emperors before them, must have appeared to the people. Adolphe claimed that certain rituals of Delphi and the sacred mysteries of Eleusis had been passed on to Rome, where they continued to be celebrated in the bowels of the Palatine Hill, and from there they had survived into Byzantium—and after the sack of Constantinople, the holy traditions, relics, precious paintings, and the true faith stretching right back to the depths of time were kept secret here in this rocky place, hidden from the world, facing the Greek sea, only for us.
Beside the church where the monks prayed—I said I thought they were hideous, hunchbacked, obese, some looked like they had the evil eye, though Adolphe told me I was exaggerating— there was a room adorned with frescoes opening on to a cobbled atrium. Adolphe and I looked at the paintings, one after the other. We came upon one in a corner showing a hermit with a long beard leaning toward a skeleton that was rising up from his grave. Before him, a crown of gold. It was the sepulcher of a king. Two names were written there. For the monk, “Sisoes,” for the skeleton, “Alexandros.”
Had one of the desert fathers, the solitary monks who established churches like the one at Bawit, near Siloam, where the French mission in Egypt was now excavating, discovered the tomb of the conqueror? Better than that: had he exhumed his body? Had these Coptic priests—if not my brothers, my not-so-distant cousins—dared to profane the most sacred thing on earth, the burial place of the noblest of all men? All my childhood hatred was flooding back. Adolphe told me that my reaction was ridiculous, that Egyptian hermits could hardly be held responsible for the priests of Nice. I told him they were a band of looters, thieves, scavengers.
That night we dreamed that Alexander’s body had been brought to Athos. Two hours later, we were awoken by the wooden drum announcing another Mass. Adolphe grumbled, regretted not having brought the works of Voltaire with him, and then convinced us that we had to leave for the veneration of the relics. Among the relics that Dionysiou gloried in were some objects in a silver chest, the most sacred because they had belonged to the Blessed Virgin. After the visit of the Magi to the manger, the mother of God, prescient and wise, had kept behind a little gold, a little incense, a little myrrh, and these “gifts of the Magi” were still here, she had brought them with her when she had decided to end her days on Mount Athos. We were allowed to admire them, the first Christmas gifts in history, shown to us by a mumbling assistant of the Hegumen, laid out on a small table in the center of the catholicon, the main church building in the monastery.
All of a sudden we heard a great commotion: the Greek police had stormed the courtyard. The monks ran outside, leaving us alone in the church.
I was seized by a moment of madness. I opened the cupboard that contained the relics, not to steal, just to look. Adolphe seized the one in the middle, a golden crown. “That looks very ancient indeed,” he said. Peering closely at the filigree olive leaves, braided and delicately worked, we saw on the inside a distinct inscription: “Alexandros.”
A rowdy mob of soldiers entered the catholicon. We had to show our passports, explaining that we were from an allied power. We were treated with respect, but that same evening we found ourselves back in Ouranopolis, escorted on a military boat.
It took me a little time before I dared open my coat to show my two companions, caught between excitement and horror, that I had brought with me the funerary crown of Alexander the Great. I despised the monks for hiding this extraordinary object and keeping it away from the eyes of the world; I had taken it back from them, it was justice. I had robbed the Orthodox Church and avenged myself of everything my mother had made me endure. I was euphoric.
Now we had an extraordinary clue to help us locate the tomb, which might even have been right there beneath our feet when we were standing before the fresco. We would have to come back. That night I saw in a dream the map of Athos laid over that of the Pointe des Fourmis: it was almost the same shape. The crown went through the formalities of the border crossing hidden beneath a pile of shirts in Theodore’s cabin that the customs officer didn’t even glance at.
Ariadne was spellbound by this escapade. I felt that I was growing in stature in her eyes. I wondered what would happen if she decided to leave Grégoire. She never ended up living with me. But that day, I thought, “Why not? A new life.”
Theodore and I bade farewell to Adolphe, who returned to Athens to spend a little time with his professors, who were complaining that they never saw him.
On the boat returning to Marseille, Theodore remained locked in his cabin. I wondered what he could have been thinking about. I never saw the crown again. But when I think about it, it belongs to me. I was the one who found it. I discovered it. I stole it.
In Naiads, Ariadne, my naiad, clapped her hands and took off her robe to join me in the water, to embrace me, fashion a crown for me with her hands, open her eyes wide as she stared into mine; to tell me that I would always be her hero, her Achilles, hers, only hers.
18
THE LIBRARY
“You mustn’t disturb your father, you can go into the library later. Walk around the back of the house if you want to go down and swim with Achilles.” Every morning Fanny made sure that her husband was left in complete peace when he sat down facing the sea to write, having first spread out over the table the engravings he was focusing on. Folios of illustrations of Greek vases from the museum in Naples and the English catalog of the Parthenon sculptures sat open on the lecterns. The library was the room inside the labyrinth that was the most difficult to leave.
In the early days, as I watched it being built, furnished, stocked with beautifully bound books, although everyone kept saying that I was free to go in whenever I wanted, I never felt entirely comfortable. All the rooms in the house had words inscribed on the door: some had a Greek name paying homage to a mythological figure, others translated their function. But on the door to this room there was no specific name; the Greek word βιβλιοθήκη was the same word in French, bibliothèque, a term that remained unaltered and proved that we were still Greek. It took me a long time to make this simple observation. In this room I experienced hours of suffering, hours of study that drove me to despair. It was so complicated. I used to think to myself, “And people are surprised that such a language died out!” And then one day, a
t the end of a week of dreadful exercises, Theodore said to me, “There you are, you’ve got it, you see.”
I hesitated to go into the library today. I walked through the door and rushed—almost ran—straight over to the windows to look at the view. I shouldn’t have; I collapsed, exhausted, into one of the chairs. I’m a broken man. I can’t go on much longer. I usually manage to hide it, but I have no stamina any more. I do three strokes of breaststroke in the sea and I can’t carry on. I am the antiquity now: I have no arms, no legs, no color left; I could be on display in a museum, like my paintings. It has been a long time since I have had any desire to read. I took a few deep, slow breaths, to recover a little, and looked around. I closed my eyes, opened them just before I fell asleep. I took out the special Royal Wedding edition of Paris Match from my camera bag and leafed through it in a state of absolute exhaustion, then dozed a little. I’ve brought with me the strange anonymous postcard that inspired this return to Kerylos. Is the stylized wreath an allusion to Alexander’s crown? Or is it merely a victory wreath for the Olympic Games? They are taking place this year in Melbourne, and the emblem looks a little like this . . . I wondered if perhaps one of the Reinach grandchildren wanted to play a joke on me, or one of the dairywoman’s nieces or the pastrycook’s daughter. The girls used to be friends of mine, they always teased me for my airs and graces, maybe they were still at it, or perhaps they just wanted to see me again. Tonight I am going to have dinner by the sea, in plain sight, in case anyone wants to speak to me . . . I shall prop the postcard on the table in front of me.
I wanted to film a little here, but I haven’t been able to. What’s the point? I barely managed to do more than push open the door of the thermal baths to glance inside. I would have liked to film the octagonal cistern and the little dome, but somehow I didn’t dare.
Fanny Reinach rarely went into the library; she had her own books that she stored in a large chest in her bedroom. Her particular passion was theater. She was the one who got me interested in Rostand. She loved to read aloud. To her the verse was a kind of music. She claimed that Thomas Corneille’s plays were much more beautiful than those of his brother Pierre—what she was saying, obliquely, was that the “elder Corneille” was not the great one, just as the greatest of the Reinach brothers was not Joseph, the oldest. She teased her husband, asking him what might have happened if there had been three Corneille brothers, if there had been a Theodore Corneille. She had several beautiful editions with eighteenth-century bindings of one of her beloved Thomas’s tragedies, Ariadne, whose action took place on the island of Naxos, where Theseus abandoned her. I learned the soliloquies, for a performance in the garden that we never managed to put on—no one else shared Fanny’s love for Corneille the Younger. She even went so far as to claim that he was the author of all the plays attributed to Molière: “There are fakes in literature too, and extremely talented forgers, there’s a whole book to be written revealing the names of all those who were the true authors of so many famous books. There are no doubts about the Reinachs though. They are too disorganized. For my sins, my husband writes all his books himself, built his own house, made his own babies.”
In early 1913, after our return from Athos, Theodore planned to write an account of our discovery, which he hoped would be published by the end of 1914. Of course it never saw the light of day. Fanny, who by then was seriously ailing, spent several weeks resting in the sunshine at Beaulieu. She died three years later. He never came out of mourning. He never again mentioned the Saint Sisoes fresco and its open grave. One evening in the army encampment, no more than ten days before his death, Adolphe said to me, “You know, our crown—he stole it from us, Uncle Theodore! He will never give it back. I have not seen it since. All I know is, it is somewhere in Kerylos. He’s hidden it. We shall take it out to celebrate our victory. It will go to the Louvre, it will be our golden revenge, revenge against the assassination of our good name . . . ”
I have no idea what he did with Alexander the Great’s crown. It must still be here, somewhere within these walls. Why did Theodore not want to make the discovery public? Did he have doubts about it? Was he hoping to keep for himself the possibility of further excavations on Mount Athos, hoping that he, like some contemporary Sisoes, would be the one to unearth the body of the king? Or perhaps he thought that the book should have been written by Adolphe . . . I even wondered if he might have placed the sacred wreath upon his wife’s head before he closed the lid of her coffin.
Theodore was a solitary man who used to force himself to be sociable, to hold his own in conversation with his beloved Fanny’s friends. He also knew better than anyone how to keep his own counsel. Left alone with his research, he would have needed nothing more. He had no interest in real life—except that one day he decided he wanted a house, not any house, so that his family could see the world in which he really lived. He must have thought that stones could be touched, bedrooms entered, beds slept on, plates eaten off, and that this entire world, come forth from his mind, would help his wife and children to live like their father did, or at least to understand him. The house entertained him, but it served this purpose too: it made exterior and tangible everything that was buried in the staircases, the rooms paved with tesserae, the painted galleries, and the immense library inside his head.
Though he may have had to force himself to play the paterfamilias, looking after his guests’ well-being was also, obviously, a straightforward manifestation of his fundamental generosity of character. He always said that kindness is the greatest of all the virtues. Perhaps it was also a cure he had invented to withstand life. I only understood this much later, thinking about it far from Kerylos, when I saw my own children doing well at school. A dunce like me, who became a good student by dint of great effort, didn’t instinctively think of such things. At the local school, it wasn’t that I was bad or mediocre. I was absolutely hopeless. I got everything wrong all the time in chemistry, I dropped Latin early, English was unpronounceable for a Corsican, I couldn’t understand what mathematics was about any more than how water came out of the tap. Students at the top of the class are often somewhat solitary, it’s common knowledge, no one likes them, they’re left on their own, they irritate everybody. Theodore was the top student in the whole of France. Every lycée gave out prizes, gold wreaths, piles of red books tied with broad ribbons. For him it was a hundred times more glorious and unbearable: in a way, Theodore was still the seventeen-year-old boy who stunned everyone when he was awarded the largest number of prizes ever handed out in the National Schools Competition. If he had had high hopes of coming top in Latin at Lycée Condorcet, of one day becoming best friends with the boy who came top in Latin at Lycée Henri IV or Louis-le-Grand, he was obliged at this point to drop the illusion. He was like a species apart, a white duck, or, worse, a blue duck or a yellow duck: the strange creature, even among the swans, that everybody stares at. He had to make an immense effort to have a life beyond family life, friends other than his brothers, to love, live, commit to an existence in which he must always have known there would not be many people he could talk to. A large building project is an excellent conversation starter.
The National Schools Competition has been in existence since the reign of Louis XV; Victor Hugo was a laureate—his subject in physics was the somewhat implausible “theory of dew”—as were Baudelaire, Évariste Galois, and before them Lavoisier and Robespierre, Turgot, Calonne, and Rimbaud, a superb student, outstanding at translation. In his first year of rhetoric, Theodore was awarded first prizes in French oral, Latin verse (Baudelaire was awarded only second prize), Latin translation, Greek translation, geography, and English, second prize in Latin oral and geometry, and a certificate of merit in history—a stimulating little wake-up call. The following year, by now specializing in philosophy, he received first prize in French composition—the queen of all subjects, he always used to say, the one that writers win, that Michelet was awarded—chemistry, and English, and second prize in Latin composition
, history, and mathematics. He beat Salomon, who had not picked up as many.
When Theodore used to talk about this in front of the family, it was unbearable, especially for his children. His father used to say, his German accent still quite pronounced, “My sons are the most gifted students in the whole of France,” with a stress on the word whole. The National Schools Competition still exists. Just before the last war, I clipped a photograph from the newspaper of a young woman standing in her kitchen who had won all the prizes in Latin and Greek, the first girl ever to pass this intellectual driving test. The Reinach brothers would have loved her, I’m sure, like the little sister they never had. They would have tied ribbons in her hair.
Theodore had a deep affection for his friends Eiffel and Fauré: he recognized in them both the solitary child who draws bridges in the margins of his schoolbooks, the musical prodigy with perfect pitch, an exceptional memory, and a host of ideas quite unlike anyone else’s—who, in order to survive, understands instinctively that the first thing to do is to not draw attention to oneself.
On the library walls, in the glow of the rising sun—according to the recommendations of the Roman architect Vitruvius, a library must be oriented toward the east—are the names of his only childhood friends: Euripides, Aristophanes, Archilochus, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Menander, Archimedes. Each name held for Theodore memories of joyful times—and of solitude. The topmost inscription on the wall declares: “Here, with the orators, the scholars, and the poets, I designed a peaceful refuge for the contemplation of beauty, which is immortal.” No first editions, no rare tomes, nothing but books for research and a few of those tall, illustrated volumes that cost a fortune.