The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  ‘I see. Well, your – she had a pain in her legs. That was a thrombus, a blood clot that forms in the deep veins. It’s important to understand.’

  ‘I know what a clot is,’ I say. I think, Thrombus After Eight Mints. It isn’t much of a name. Even for a clot.

  ‘You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? Now then, sometimes a clot happens when people are inactive – when they don’t move enough. Then the blood doesn’t move either. Or sometimes, the clot happens because there’s something in the family. Like blue eyes. That’s why you’re here. For a test.’

  ‘We have them in school.’ I wonder how Anne is doing in her test. If blue eyes help. I wish she would come back. There is a feeling in the room, nothing I really understand. It feels as if the air is clumsy. As if something might hurt itself here.

  It is five years before claims of malpractice against Doctor Angel reach the local newspapers. A year more before he leaves Southend Hospital, a health authority committee driving him first to the private sector, then to a clinic in Malaga. I followed his progress for some time. I had an interest.

  The blood doctor smiles. His teeth are splayed out in the middle, as if he has put too many in his mouth at once. Greedy teeth. ‘Clever girl. Do you like tests, Kate? How about sports, or games?’

  ‘My name’s Katharine,’ I say, and he stops smiling. The air lurches between us. He clears his throat again, looks down, and goes on talking.

  ‘Well now, then, you see, the thrombus broke up into two bits. One of them, an embolus, went up into your – into her head. That’s what affected her. Doctors call it a cerebral embolism. You may not want to know all this now. I’m trying to help you understand later, Kate. Katharine.’

  I say nothing. I am too busy thinking of Thrombus cough sweets. Green with a red stripe down the middle.

  ‘A cerebral embolism. Hers was quite exceptional. Highly unusual integrity.’

  I imagine the blood in my mother’s legs. It is motionless. Thickening, like mud at the seaside, mud squeezed underfoot. Doctor Angel is still talking, his voice curving up into a question. I look into his wet eyes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked if you’d like to see it? The embolus. The clot. You’re a clever girl, and you know what a clot is. I think it might help, don’t you? To get things out in the open. To have things clear.’

  I say nothing.

  He says, ‘To see it.’

  ‘Okay’

  He smiles again and stands up. In the corner of the room is a trolley with two cluttered trays. Doctor Angel gets a jar from the bottom tray. When he brings it round I catch sight of something red, and it is only then I understand what he is doing.

  I don’t want to see what he is holding. I think about shutting my eyes, but I don’t. I say nothing. I wish Anne was back. I’m not scared. I think, Ford Thrombus. I wish I was far away. My mother driving.

  ‘Here. Do you want to hold it?’

  ‘No.’ He doesn’t hear me. My fists are white against my sides. Doctor Angel brings the jar down to my face. I can’t look at it too hard. It hurts my eyes, like the lights at the dentist’s.

  The jar reminds me of fishbowls. In the clear liquid hangs a jewel. It is a deep red rose, big as a baby’s fist. A drop of paler blood clings to its side.

  ‘There now. You don’t see that very often, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’ I look up at Doctor Angel. He is smiling through me, not at me. I can peer back eighteen years now, into his damp eyes, and see that he is trying to help in some way. To get things out in the open. He doesn’t understand that he is doing anything wrong. There is a confusion there that I can’t comprehend, then or now. Perhaps he never did either.

  I don’t get angry until he turns away with the jar. Then I stand up and begin to scream. I am breathless with rage. Anne comes with the nurses and we leave. I never get to take the test. At the hospital gates May’s car goes faster, faster, the railing blurred into one long stripe.

  * * *

  On the ninth night I dream of Istanbul. In the dream I am buying fresh pistachios. I have eaten nothing else all day.

  Something is following me through the crowded streets. I catch only glimpses. It is a dog, but scaled, monstrous. Its muzzle is almost level with the heads around it. No one registers its presence. I reach the Sindbad Tourist Hotel, but when I go up to my room the door is ajar, the lock broken.

  Everything is gone. The rubies, the notebooks, the case with its exterior of veined leather. It feels as if someone has stolen my soul. And as I stand there, lost, there is a noise in the stairwell behind me. A click of claws on the chipstone steps.

  I wake before first light. Usually I am sharp at this time of day but not this morning. My head feels like an accident waiting to happen. I go down to the kitchen, brew some coffee and burn some toast. After carving off the residual carbon, I take my breakfast up to the roof garden.

  Glött is there before me. She is reading an out-of-date issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. On the ironwork table beside her is a glass of sour cherry juice and a bottle of vodka. She looks up at me, nods, looks away.

  I sit and eat my burnt toast while the sun comes up. The stone tiles begin to warm under my feet. It is going to be a beautiful day.

  ‘Stop staring at me.’

  I look up at her. ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You always stare, Katharine. You are like a cat. I have cancer, you know.’ She snaps the newspaper flat. Folds it. ‘You can’t see it. I am very old. It only kills me very slowly. Some people blame it on plastics.’

  ‘What do you blame it on?’

  ‘The communists.’

  ‘Communists?’

  ‘Do you like Martin?’ She catches me off guard, not for the first time. Glött has a butterfly mind, but the butterfly always gets where it wants to go. Sometimes she seems mad; but then the rich are eccentric, never mad. Being rich and eccentric only means that society accepts you because it can’t afford not to. People play by the rules of your games. The richer you are, the crueller they can be. Human chess or self-styled kingship. I wonder what rules Eva plays by, and if I am following them.

  ‘Martin? I don’t really know him.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I like him.’

  ‘You could do worse.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Martin will inherit this place. You don’t like it here?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Think of all those north European houses. The heads of foxes. It gives me the crawls.’

  ‘Creeps. Eva, I’m not–’

  She talks through me. ‘Animals coming out of the walls. It is beastly. The Arab nations are older and more civilised.’

  I think of Martin. His smell of tobacco and brass, which suits him. His girlfriend, Helene, who suits him too. I still don’t know what he is doing in Glött’s house, or what he does when he is not here. I can imagine him smoking months away in Thailand or Goa more easily than I can accept him in eastern Turkey. The only thing that doesn’t suit Martin is Diyarbak’r.

  ‘My mother always used to say that men marry down, women marry up.’ She nods encouragingly.

  ‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’

  She pouts. ‘Martin is a handsome young man.’

  ‘My mother used to say that beautiful people are like beautiful cars. Expensive to keep and bad for environment. I never used to understand what she meant.’

  ‘What utter nonsense.’

  We sit together. More together than apart, although the table is between us. Eva von Glött drinks her cherry juice, thinned with vodka. I drink my cold coffee. The brightening blue of the sky hurts my eyes.

  ‘You look tired,’ says the recluse. She is wearing a panama hat and Armani sunglasses. The sunglasses are too big for her. They make her look like an insect in lipstick, although no one is about to tell her that, least of all me. Possibly that’s the point of
being a recluse in the first place.

  ‘I was dreaming. It kept me up.’ An aeroplane goes over, east towards India. I talk softly, watching it go. ‘Something about a dog with scales.’

  ‘What? What kind of dog?’ She says it as if it would be her property. It irritates me and I don’t answer. ‘A dog with scales, was it?’

  ‘Mind your own business. What did you dream of?’

  ‘Sex. I usually do.’

  She is leering at the thought. I have come to like Glött more than the place she lives in. Beyond the landscape of rooftops I can see the city, lowlands stretching to mountains in the east, plains to the south. Strata of distance, still grey with river mist. I prefer bigger cities than Diyarbak’r, and smaller horizons. The east of Turkey is too empty for me. This is a place I sense I could lose myself.

  ‘There is a dog with scales in local myth. The sirrusch of Mesopotamia. You are dreaming of this place’s past.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me, I’ve been here long enough.’ I sip my coffee. Cool and bitter in the hot light.

  ‘What were its feet like?’

  ‘I don’t remember, Eva. I didn’t look. Maybe it was wearing heels, would that help?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am asking what kind of feet did it have? Were they claws, like a bird?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. And this was Turkey the last time I looked. Mesopotamia must be–’ I look south ‘– not here.’

  She picks up the bottle of Stolichnaya. Thins the cherry juice one more time. The bottle looks heavy in her frail hand. ‘I like young people. I find them charming, when they are not talking. They are ignorant almost by definition.’ She takes off her sunglasses. Stabs at the landscape. ‘All this, up to the mountains, is Mesopotamia. The Land Between Rivers. Here is the Tigris, which the Arabs and Turks call Dijleh. A hundred kilometres behind us is the Euphrates. You see? The rivers say we are in Mesopotamia. Not even Atatürk can change that.’

  She goes quiet. We sit watching the Tigris. Around it are acres of watermelon pits and flat irrigated fields. There are already people working around the melons, small with distance, reduced to the repetitions of their actions. It is what the history of the jewel does to its generations of owners. I follow the valley with my eyes, down towards Syria and Iraq. I can probably see them from here, although it is impossible to be sure. The Land of Two Veins, Mesopotamia.

  When I look back the old woman is watching me. ‘You probably think this is the end of the world. Eh?’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  Her mouth thins as she squints into the sun. ‘Diyarbak’r is five thousand years old. You can’t imagine it. It is a privilege to be here. A privilege, Katharine. The Romans were here, and Alexander, Timur the Lame. Alexander had a great shoulder-knot, did you know? A great clasp, like the Three Brethren.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘It’s lost, of course.’

  I lean toward her. ‘Eva, I’m glad you like it here, but it’s not what I’m looking for. No offence. I’m just trying to find the Brethren. Have you remembered anything yet?’ She ignores me. I speak up. ‘About the Brethren.’

  ‘Oh! That reminds me.’ She leers at me again. ‘I had a telephone call from an associate of mine. His name is Araf. He is President of Golden Horn Shipping and Air. But then you know that, don’t you?’

  She watches me go still. I think she enjoys it. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Why should I? He didn’t call you. Besides, it was days ago.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That you are a thief.’ Glött cackles as if she has made a dirty joke. ‘That I should telephone him if I saw you. And that you are on a wild ghost chase. Ghost, he said, eh? Such a foolish man.’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘Nothing. He sent me a calendar once.’ She puts her sunglasses back on. ‘New money. Grotesque taste.’

  “Thank you.’

  ‘No, it was my pleasure.’

  Her head wobbles as she smiles. She looks drunk now. It’s not yet noon. She’s hours ahead of schedule. I stand up and stack the cup, the plate, her empty bottle and glass.

  ‘I should go and work.’

  ‘Of course you should. I will see you at supper?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I say it as I’m walking away. Her voice comes back distantly, like an echo.

  ‘Maybe certainly.’

  The stone room waits as I left it. When Glött first brought me here her father’s collection was hidden behind a façade of order. All I have managed to do is break down the façade. It has taken me ten days.

  I put down the breakfast things and consider the stones. They are held back in the archives like a landslide waiting to happen. The furniture has ended up arranged in attitudes suggesting furtive escape. Urns retreated against the walls. Archive drawers crowded over the librarian’s steps and the tiled floor, as if I have caught them in the act of surging towards the exit.

  At the far end are the Miscellany shelves. In principle, if the details of the Brethren transaction exist, this is where I should find them. But then nothing in the stone room is where it should be; if anything, that seems to be its underlying principle.

  It’s two days since I broke the Glött system, and it hasn’t helped. Alongside the gemmological divisions of minerals are geographical subdivisions for objects that contain more than one type of stone. Jewellery in these sections is classified according to its dominant jewel. A gold bookmark set with Mikimoto cultured pearls, for example, is in one of three drawers marked Miscellany: Japan. A Louis François Cartier sketch for a necklace of chalcedony and Egyptian emeralds is filed in the twenty-seventh drawer of North Africa.

  It is the system of an unsystematic man. So many raw jewels come from Africa or Asia that there are nearly a hundred drawers for India alone. And the system is no use for the Brethren, since the shoulder-knot has no primary stone. Either that or all its jewels are dominant, the pearls according to number, the rubies by virtue of carats, the diamond by reputation. And if Glött’s father had settled on one of these, which country would he assign it to? How much did he know about the Brethren, and where do the stones begin?

  I get to work. For two days I have been looking through the countries that might represent the shoulder-knot, the five drawers of France, the twelve that are Persia. Yesterday I gave up halfway through India, and now I start where I left off. In the first drawer is a golden locket containing a Koran no larger than a human molar. In the second, a set of twelve agate plaques. They are carved with pictures of Buddhist demons and women in a variety of sexual positions. Most of them are rape scenes. I put them down like soiled tissues.

  It is not a beautiful collection. The more I see of the old Glött’s acquisitiveness, the less I like it. What he desired in jewels had less to do with beauty than with completeness. If he hadn’t been wealthy he would have collected something else, beermats or butterflies or budgerigars: the impulse would have been the same. It feels as if he was trying to reassemble the world in one room. I have nothing in common with him, only stones.

  By noon I have gone through fourteen drawers. The dust stains my hands and face. Twice I come to archives I’ve worked on before, and the jewels are not where I left them. I try not to think about what it means, because I know it means that I am fallible. In the stone room I need to be infallible.

  Oddities turn up which have nowhere to go, and I pile them on the desk. There is a smiling Buddha, two inches high. It is carved from ebony and iris quartz, which has iridescent inclusions of water. The Buddha’s eyes twinkle over his bellies and love handles. There is a tray of natural baroque pearls divided by form – Odds, Butterflies and Twins, grotesque functions of pain. A lapidary’s scales complete with thirty seeds from the locust tree Ceratonia siliqua, from which the carat measurement was derived. I experiment with them. Any four seeds will measure one carat. Every seed looks like every other. Thirty trees in thirty seeds, coiled like fists.

>   When the sun goes off the skylights I stop, stand back, and begin to sneeze. The impulse has been suspended by concentration, but now I can feel the mineral dust in my throat and nose. Even my sweat smells of its sweet dry talc. I wonder if I am becoming allergic to jewels and the thought makes me laugh, my echoes intrusive in the silent room.

  It is past five o’clock and I need a break and a bath. The breakfast things are still on the desk, surrounded by Lost Oddities, and I take them down through the mansion, its floors and stairwells and courtyards.

  The corridors are half-dark. Againstmy feet the stone is not warm, not cold. In the house I follow Hassan’s example and walk barefoot. I know my way now and I don’t get lost, although this is relative. In Glött’s mansion I’ve found ways to lose myself inside a single room.

  The bathroom is empty. Lights ripple off the surface of the pool. I shower quickly, half-watching my own body. In the clouded mirrors it looks graceful, the belly stretched flat between the curves of breasts and thighs. I don’t mind it. I don’t feel attached to it. My body has grown into itself these past few years. It is more graceful now than I ever feel myself.

  I close myself inside the sauna, the smell of stones fading as my skin dries and moistens with fresh sweat. Even in warm countries I like the feel of saunas. The hot, resinous consistency of the air. The confined space, which is half-lifepod, half-coffin. When I’m done, cleaned out, I sit back in the pool. Lying still, all I can see is the mineral plane of the water and at the farthest extents of myself, the islands of my knees and nose. Distantly, I can hear someone playing a piano I didn’t know existed. I wonder who it is. Which one of us. The house echoes with faint traces of its occupants and refugees.

  De-stoned, cleaner than my clothes, I wring out my hair and tie it back. The house feels still around me. Glött is watching another film, I can hear it from far away. The voices turned up too loud, the sound of a car moving through rain. I pass her room and go on upstairs. The lights of Diyarbak’r are coming on outside the high windows. It makes me think of London. Not the city I have lived in so much as the one in which the jewel has been, which Elizabeth saw with her ermine eyes, Victoria with her stone-cold gaze.