Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  "Let me ask this. If I were to make over this house and its contents to you, to the foundation, of course I mean. Then would it be all right if I just left everything here as it is? I'd trust you to find all that was worth finding, and discard the rest."

  "I don't know that you need to make this determination now,” Boney said. “Though of course."

  "Yes."

  "If you needed to feel it was all."

  "Yes."

  "In case."

  "Yes.” He let all that was unsaid flow back and forth over the wire, a ghost conversation he (and Boney too no doubt) could almost hear. Then he said: “I will take a rain check on the game, dear friend. I have a date with a hot-water bottle. I feel better already, though."

  "I'm very glad."

  "Will you call again tomorrow?"

  "I will. Don't worry about any of it."

  * * * *

  After a time Kraft arose—it had begun to seem a small surprise each time nowadays, that he had another getting up still in him. He gathered together the letters he had been reading, and inserted them again into the envelopes from which they had come. Then the pile of yellow typing paper, its top sheet already growing pale from the sun through his study window. No one knew of its existence yet but he.

  Dr. Pons had once, among his other tales, told him the story of the Shekhinah.

  The rabbis say that the Shekhinah is the earthly dwelling place of the Glory of God. It is a fragment or sliver of godhood, left over from that primal disaster when God somehow contracted or removed himself from a space in his own heart, a hollow, which eventually became the universe. Though terminally cold and dark (before God's separated and self-conscious Aeons or Sephiroth began to work within it) it contained, as it had to, having once been God, something of divinity. That something is the Shekhinah, which the alchemists call the Stone that transforms matter to spirit. And it's still here. It could be, Dr. Pons thought, very small; small and big mean nothing when we talk about divinity. It could maybe be held in the hand. And it might be anywhere, not enthroned most likely, not honored; for it is the lapis exulis, the gem of lost home, and gutters and ash heaps are as likely a place for it as any. When he was a boy walking those streets Kraft used to keep an eye out for it, going up the town and back again; looking for its telltale gleam in vacant lots, kicking cans that might conceal it. Once he kicked a can that contained a nest of yellow jackets, and was badly stung.

  It was very wrong of him to have teased Boney Rasmussen as he had, and sent him enigmatic telegrams from Abroad. He had never found anything on his travels that could extend Boney's protracted life, or warm his heart. But he had, one night in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, found the stone of transformation, its powers intact, not superannuated or even asleep, not a story or a fable, lying in plain sight in the vacant lot of the present.

  March 1968. Somewhere the journal for that year still lay, stuffed with the postcards he liked to collect on his travels, not new garishly colored ones but old-fashioned sepia-toned ones, which had always made him feel superannuated himself: as though he could not only see the colored present before him full of busy young people and shiny cars and advertising, but remember this old brown past too, the cars few and black, the trees ungrown or uncut. Like the one he got from a stand outside Franz Josef Bahnhof in Vienna, a picture of the very station he stood before, taken at the end of the empire, the horse cabs and taxis outside, the wide street clean and cobbled. From there the Vindobona Express departed at the difficult hour of eight in the morning, reaching the Czech border at Gmund two hours later.

  It was a fast new train, the coaches smelly and low, where they had been smelly and high roofed before, thirty years and a year before, when he had last looked out at these scenes. He had entered a land in dissolution then, and everyone knew it: the Nazi gangs flush with German pay and German successes were starting fights in the streets, beating Jews, assassinating ministers; they had colored with their menace his book about Prague, the Emperor Rudolf, werewolves and golems. Everyone wondered if the nation could survive. So much worse was waiting for them too, so much worse than he could have thought of, than anyone could.

  Most of the trains they passed were still steam driven, even in 1968, puffing their pipes as they went by on the parallel track. A former world still present. In fertile south Bohemia, all black mud and greening trees, sun-glitter danced over the broad pools built long ago by monks to breed carp to eat on Fridays, fish long-lived enough to be still there to remember, maybe. They went by Tabor, fortress town of the Hussite wars, the first religious wars in Europe since the Christians beat the pagans, but with many more to follow quickly after. All that the Hussites had wanted was a Bible in their own language, communion in both kinds, bread and wine, and the church's admission that though scripture could never be wrong, the church leadership could be. Their bravery raised wild hopes; people came to Bohemia from all over Europe—Wyclifites, Waldensians, proto-Quakers. And Adamites too, living naked in the woods and dancing around their fires and coupling indiscriminately: they believed, outrageously, that God entire was within each of them. Let out your prisoner, the women cried to the men as they tore their last rag of garment away, give me your soul, and take mine! They had to be killed like the beasts they were, even the Hussite preachers agreed with that; but they would not be forgotten.

  Up in those very woods that he could see, maybe: which were very like the woods of his home, where there were the same little white churches rising above hilltop villages, and log cabins where the city people came in the summer. Adamites too in the greening valleys of the Faraways; so he heard. Safe maybe though now.

  In midafternoon they slid down the long tunnel under the city to the central station, the big arches and glass: the train stations of Europe were the most lighthearted and heavenly of the works of the Iron Age; why had we never had these in our country, no, only windswept jetties or clanging Nibelung undergrounds. This station had been crowded with foreigners and journalists and spies too no doubt when he had got off the same train in 1937, for Tomá(c) Masaryk had just died, and still lay in state in the magic castle above the town. People were waiting in a long, an endless line to pass by his bier, to say farewell. A half a million people, Kraft had been told. The only wholly wise and good leader Kraft could think of, then or now; the only one immune to the twin European diseases of that time, rabid nationalism and anti-Semitism, and yet not a Communist either, not a utopian at all: only a just man. Good men still live, a Czech will say when something unexpectedly righteous is done to or for him. They were saying it now, today, for Dubcek.

  With a feelable blow of shock he found that the beautiful huge trees that had always surrounded Wenceslaus Square had been ruthlessly cut down, pointlessly too, destruction easier than construction in socialist progress. God what a sin. He stood staring, appalled, until he felt his coat sleeve plucked, and a young man—not a hustler, surely; apparently not a black marketeer, either, looking for jeans or bucks, but not seemingly official, who could he be?—looked up at him with an air of affront and welcome.

  His guide, who had been watching for him on the platform, and whom he had stridden past unregarding.

  * * * *

  Prague was restless, almost atremble in that early spring, like a March tree about to put out buds. Public places were crowded with people, young people talking and smoking and hugging each other. Kraft's guide, a young student assigned him as a courtesy or for some less openhanded reason by the Writers’ Union, seemed almost to have a fever; his eyes were bright and he quivered inside his leather coat from something other than cold.

  He was first put in a taxi, an old Russian Volga—could that really be a picture of Tomá(c) Masaryk stuck on the dashboard? He didn't dare ask—and taken to his hotel. It was a wonderful Baroque building that he thought he remembered: but surely it had not been a hotel thirty years ago. No, a nunnery. Where were the nuns? His guide made a gesture like shooing chickens. All sent away, long ago, 1950. Reacti
onary elements. But now: now they were returning, they were being, what was word.

  Rehabilitated?

  New time, the boy said smiling. Now all old things come back again. And now what would he like to see? The Charles Bridge? The Jewish Quarter?

  No, he knew those places well.

  Eat? Writers’ Union restaurant best in the city. Meet many writers. All new.

  No, he didn't want to eat, and yes, certainly, he wanted to meet writers, but not there, or not yet, if that wouldn't be interpreted as an insult? For some reason he knew he could be frank with this unlovely lean young man, tense and somehow twisted, like a hank of wire, smoking more or less continuously and tapping his black pointed shoes. He would, though, like a drink—an easy and apparently welcome request, though he was taken a long way to fill it, to parts of town that seemed to unfold as though right out of Kraft's own jogged memory. The bars and the caves—spelunka—were the very ones he remembered, oh yes remembered well; in his guidebook (still with him here in the Faraways!) he had used to mark with a tiny, innocent star the places where he had got lucky as the boys now said, girls too for all he knew. They went into Slavie, the café on the corner opposite the National Theater, a long L-shaped room, a fog of smoke and talk. His guide translated what he heard. Rumors of a Soviet army massing just over the border in the GDR.

  "And what new book do you work on now?” his guide asked. Move on, or away, from that subject.

  "Oh none,” Kraft said. “I would say I have no more to write. None that I think worth writing."

  The boy studied him smiling, as though trying to guess how his guest would like him to react.

  "I mean they're all not true, you know,” Kraft said. “Not a word of any of them. All made up, you know? Even the parts that are true aren't true. And finally you get tired, and just don't want to play anymore."

  The lad laughed, still eyeing him, pretty sure Kraft meant this blasphemy as a joke. And what could his weary abnegation mean here, where descriptions of actuality had for so long been made up, and the only hope lay in the imaginary? He felt a pang of shame, but really it was true what he'd said, there was no help for it, he had lived too long, through too many fictions, he couldn't feature multiplying them anymore.

  The lad was not to be shaken. Next day he took Kraft up to the Hradcany Castle, climbing climbing up the palace district like Pilgrim on his way to the Celestial City. The steps to the castle were crowded too, not with the prostitutes and young men with collars turned up and shacks where red kerosene lamps were lit and Gypsy children plucked at your sleeve—all that was gone, cleaned away by socialism; instead there were more talkers, young and old, studying newspapers mistrustfully or gathered around transistor radios. His guide wasn't forthcoming about what might be happening, a government employee himself after all, but amid his shrugs and terse replies his eyes looked at his American in hope and supplication.

  He took Kraft through the castle, beneath the astonishing vaulting ribbed like celery stalks and exfoliating in unfollowable complexity, the stairs up which armed knights once rode their horses, clattering and slipping. It was hard to get the boy to slow down; there was so much Kraft wanted to see, though less on display than when he had been here years before. When another huge army, he thought, had been massed in Germany, watching and waiting.

  They climbed the spiral stair to the room in the palace where in 1618 representatives of the Holy Roman emperor met with the Bohemian Protestant nobles who had determined to break with the empire. When the emperor's people made threats and demands, the Bohemians threw them one by one from the window—that window, there, his guide pointed to it. The high cold room was crowded today with Czechs old and young, looking around hungrily, touching the table where the meeting had happened, the window's deep embrasure.

  Taking Kraft back down through the castle district to his lodging at the Infantines, the young man made a sudden decision, pulled at the sleeve of Kraft's overcoat, and led him at a quick pace another way, smiling but unwilling to give away his surprise, and he led Kraft to the square where the candybox Loreto church stands next to a Capuchin convent (all the nuns and priests gone from them too, scattered), and across to a gloomy palace he didn't remember. A ministry of some sort now. Palace guards in blue caps and rifles at the wide gates to the courtyard, looking uncomfortable, for a little crowd had gathered there, peering into the courtyard within.

  His guide pointed to a window above, overlooking the courtyard. Others pointed too. It was the window of what had been the apartment of Jan Masaryk,Tomá(c)'s son, the one from which he had fallen to his death—pushed, yes certainly, pushed, the young man made violent motions as he spoke—the night after the Communist coup in the spring of 1948.

  Kraft looked from the window to the courtyard pavement to the window again. The guide's face shone with something like expectation. This very month, this day maybe, twenty years before.

  But Kraft knew that Jan Masaryk had only been the latest, and the poor officials of 1618 not the first, of an age-old series of such ejections in Bohemia. Change here seemed to require a man or men hustled out a high window, looking down shrieking in terror, fingers clinging to the jambs.

  Defenestration. Kraft looked up with the others. It was as though the sources of certain events lay not in their antecedent causes but in mirror or shadow events that lay far in the past or in the future; as though by chance a secret lever on a clockwork could be pressed that made it go after being long still, or as though a wind blowing up in one age could tear leaves from trees and bring down steeples in another.

  He thought—looking now out the window of his cell in the converted convent, the illusory castle alight and apparently afloat high up—you have to be on their side, you have to be. On their way into the actual future, still surrounded by brutal utopians. He thought: if I knew the secret laws by which history worked, I could reveal them, whisper them in the ears of this people in their peril, and they would know what to do, and what not to do. But the secret laws can't be known, and if known can't be told. You can only pretend to know them.

  Yes! A simple clarity that had escaped him or not visited him in 1937, when he had needed it, was now his, as though an egg he'd thought was marble had now cracked, and a fledgling emerged.

  You get power over history, he saw, by uncovering and learning its laws, formulating them, teaching them to others, who get thereby a share of the power you have. You form up your followers into an army, which can impose these irrefutable laws on Time's body; you have earned the power, by your grasp of History's Laws, to eliminate or hide away anything that confounds or flouts them. It is thus that in any age the Archons rule; the rule of the Archons in Heaven being contiguous with that of their epigones on earth.

  So the way to defeat power is to propose new laws, laws conceived in the secrecy of the heart and enacted by the will's fiat: laws of desire and hope, which are not fixed but endlessly mutable, and unimposable on anyone else. They are the laws of another history of the world, one's own.

  And didn't he, Fellowes Kraft, know very well how to build such a history? He did. He did it for a living. He had the tools and ingredients, and he knew how you used them: with heart's need you mixed pretend conversations, purported facts out of books, likely seeming actions, the light of other days.

  The Archons who made the world, and whose shadows continue to rule in it, would have us believe that its laws are immutable, eternal, self-generated, necessary. Perhaps they themselves believe it to be so. Very well: then we confound them by a counterknowing: we know that in fact we have ourselves conceived the laws that make the world as it is, and can change them if we will.

  When St. Patrick, servant and missionary of the great archontic church of Rome, which had formulated all the immutable laws of God, asked the Druids of Ireland who it was that made the world, they answered him that the Druids had made it.

  Build a new world in the face of power, and make it go; show them how easy it is. His own could of course only be
a fiction; so was theirs; but his would appear humbly between covers, unarmed, acknowledged to be false: that was the difference.

  O my God, he thought, overcome momentarily with a familiar giddiness, an anticipatory exhaustion. He had come all this way paid to find fabulous treasure or at least the rumor of it, and what had he discovered instead but another novel.

  Like a cold old man fallen absurdly in love. He knew the signs well enough, he had only thought that he was never to feel them again.

  * * * *

  The next morning there was a bus filled with more happy yakking Czechs (was the nation on holiday or had they just thrown over their make-work jobs and gone out to the country?) to take him up into the mountains to Carlsbad, which was now Karlovy Vary, the Czechs having won the war of place names while losing all the others, so far, so far. Then up to Jáchymov, Joachimsthal when he had gone up there in 1937, in a jouncing truck with two young men—what were their names? He could not remember. Jewish. He remembered that.

  It seemed suddenly foolish to have promised Boney he would go there, and dangerous too. He felt certain he would have an accident inside, lose his way or his guide, be unable to return.

  Spring was still far off, up in the mountains; the resort was open though, open year round apparently, for the workers assigned vacations here in shifts in every season, and to keep the staff employed, insofar as they were employed. Kraft's room in a beaux arts hotel was huge and cold, the bed a hilly landscape clothed in mysterious stuff repellent to the touch.

  He wandered around the stone gaieties of Carlsbad. Single words arose unwilled within him, each seeming capable of generating the new book all by itself. Salvation. Puzzlement. Aflame. A marriage. Urgent. A rose. Naked. Embers. He lay sleepless in the big bed nightlong, invaded by notions, his heart a great switching yard where train cars were shunted from every part of his soul, linked one to one to one in combinations he could not have conceived before and now could never forget.