The Amber Room

by T. Davis Bunn

  “Katya said that I should wish you a happy Name’s Day,” Jeffrey said. “She is only giving us a couple of minutes alone. She is impatient to see you herself.”

  Gregor ushered Jeffrey inside. “There is a saying that when it is pretty on Saint Gregor’s morn, winter has been banished to the depths of the sea, and spring has truly begun.”

  “When you talk about things like the saints, it makes me feel as if I’m coming from a totally different world.” Jeffrey accepted his glass of tea with a nod of thanks. “Does it bother you that I’m a Baptist?”

  “My dear boy, the only thing that concerns me is whether or not Christ will know you when the day of reckoning arrives.” He sat and straightened his back in the slow way of one who is aware of possible pains. “We shall someday stand before the throne to be judged for our reward. I am speaking about believers here. From my own studies of the Scriptures, I understand that there shall be a second judgment for nonbelievers. A truly terrible thing. Too terrible to even contemplate. No, I speak here of the judgment of believers. When we stand before His throne, I do not think the majestic Lord will ask us to which denomination we belonged. I believe He will ask us how well we have loved.”

  “I don’t feel I know Him at all,” Jeffrey confessed.

  “You will,” Gregor replied with utter certainty. “For the moment, take heart in the fact that He knows you. His knowledge is perfect. Just come to live by that and you’ll do fine.”

  Jeffrey gave a dispirited shrug. “I guess I need to have a better handle on religion.”

  “As I said yesterday, the last thing you need is religion,” Gregor replied emphatically. “Religion won’t ease your restlessness. Christ entering your life, my dear young friend, that is the answer. Not the laws, not this or that sect, not any certain form of worship. The answer is found in knowing Jesus Christ. The solution is being filled with the Holy Spirit. The Lord has said, I will let my goodness, my graciousness, my presence pass before you. And He will, Jeffrey. Open yourself, and He will do as He promised.”

  “So, how should I worship?”

  Gregor smiled. “My favorite definition of worship is to turn toward and kiss.”

  “Turn toward what?”

  “Yes. That is the endless question of those whose thirst remains unquenched. You must open yourself and let Him show you where to turn. Seek Him with the eyes of your heart, not with the eyes and mind of material man.”

  Jeffrey allowed a fragment of his frustration to surface. “That sounds more like poetry than an answer I can use.”

  Gregor gazed at him fondly. “Those same words could have been said by your grandfather,” he replied. “In a different tongue, but with the same honest spirit. He would be very proud of you, my boy.”

  “For searching in vain?”

  “No. For searching in honesty.” He shifted painfully. “Could you please be so kind as to set one of those cushions behind my back? Ah. Much better. Thank you. Now then, pay attention to me, Jeffrey. When Peter stood on the mountainside and witnessed the Lord’s divine majesty unveiled during the Transfiguration, what did he do? He did as most of us would have done. He wanted to jump up and set up tents and build stone monuments and move around and do. And the Lord said to him, Stop. Be still. Relax. Don’t strive. Receive. My young friend, I share with you this same message. Take the single solitary step of being open, and let the Lord work the miracle before you.”

  “You’re saying that I shouldn’t be so ambitious,” Jeffrey said.

  Gregor looked dismayed. “Is it so easy to misunderstand me? The Good Book is full of calls for us to be ambitious. The key is what we are to be ambitious for—ourselves, or Him. I cannot imagine that the Lord would endow so many of us with this focused power and then have us call it sinful. That is in my mind utter nonsense.”

  “That’s a relief,” Jeffrey said. “I could see changing my ambition to suit His need a lot faster than I could see getting rid of it completely.”

  “It is an unfortunate human trait to call qualities that we ourselves do not have a sin in someone else. We wish to be comfortable with where we are and who we are, and therefore we do not see that someone else may be driven to greater heights, to greater service, through a quality that is bestowed by our Maker.

  “Paul himself calls us to make service our ambition. The word used when First Thessalonians was written was philotemesti. It means to hasten to do a thing, to do it quickly, to exert yourself to the fullest while doing it. It says that we must consider the focus of our ambition to be a vital action, and we must therefore expend whatever energy is required to do this thing.”

  “It sounds, well, thrilling.”

  “Of course it does.” His eyes shone with a light that humbled Jeffrey. “Take the one essential step, my boy, and then wait. He in His own good time will come, will enter you, will fill you. Not because you’ve been good. No. Not because you deserve it. You’re too honest to suppose that. Rather, because He is the God of unfailing love, and He has been waiting for you to turn and invite Him in.”

  “But I’ve asked Him,” Jeffrey said plaintively. “At least I’ve tried. But when I say it, I can’t even do that right.”

  “You can do it perfectly,” Gregor replied. “With God’s help. He has built up an expectation within you. A longing. A thirst. He wants your life to be aggravated and restless with longing for what only He can give.”

  “That’s it,” Jeffrey said, immensely relieved to be understood. “Like an itch I can’t scratch.”

  “In the second chapter of Acts,” Gregor told him, “a group of people witnessed the effects of the Holy Spirit for the very first time. Before their very eyes, the invisible was made visible. And they questioned it. They asked, is this truly of God? For remember, my young friend, these people considered themselves to be believers. At the same time, those who were honest with themselves must have found God to be extremely distant, a power on high rather than an integral part of their inner lives. Certainly they lacked this personal contact with a living Savior, and the Spirit that was His gift to believers.

  “I find myself looking back across the incredible distance of these two thousand years and living the experience with them. I see myself being forced to choose—do I remain with the acceptable and the visible and the traditional, or do I reach into the invisible and recognize the hunger that gnaws at my heart? I stand with these baffled witnesses, ignited by the yearning within me to search the unseen realm. Yet I am anchored by the calls of this world, afraid of choosing, knowing that I must choose, realizing that not to choose is in itself a choice.

  “Yes,” the old man continued, “I can very easily see myself standing with this crowd, terrified by the changes demanded by my empty existence, seeking some way to ignore the call and remain with what is comfortable, what is defined by the elders and the leaders and the people in power.

  “But I cannot. I am called by the voice of my heart to turn toward the unseen and accept the Holy Spirit. I am called to dance with the joy that such madness brings.”

  * * *

  The buzzer rang, startling them both. Jeffrey stood and released the downstairs catch, then waited while Katya climbed the stairs. She arrived slightly breathless and very excited. “Hello, Gregor.”

  “My dear young lady, what a joy it is to see you again. Come in, come in. How was your trip?”

  Katya accepted his invitation for tea and watched him bustle about the cramped apartment with his listing gait. Once the water was boiled and tea served and Gregor seated, Katya lifted her package. “I brought something for you.”

  “My dear child, how thoughtful.”

  “It’s nothing, really.” She watched him unwrap the package with shy eyes. “Just something I saw that made me think of you.”

  “There could be no greater gift than your thoughts and prayers.” He lifted up the frame. “Marvelous. I am deeply touched.”

  He turned the antique frame around. The yellowed parchment was decorated top and bo
ttom with brilliantly hand-colored pictures depicting two of Christ’s parables—the shepherd returning the lost sheep to the fold and the man finding a pearl beyond value. The center contained a hand-lettered verse. Jeffrey read the delicately scrolled words, “Teach me, Lord, in the ways of the wise.”

  “Jeffrey took me to my very first antiques fair a few weeks ago,” Katya said. “I found this, and I thought of you.”

  Gregor pointed to the empty wall at the end of his bed. “I shall hang it there, where it will be the first thing I shall see upon rising each morning. Thank you, my dear.”

  “Those are two of my favorite parables,” Jeffrey said.

  “Do you know what a parable is? A heavenly truth clothed in an earthly body. It is a way to make the unknowable clear, the unseen perfectly visible.” He smiled at Katya. “I am deeply touched by your thoughtfulness.”

  “Has Jeffrey told you that we are traveling to Czestochowa tomorrow?”

  “Is that so?” Gregor was clearly delighted. “May I impose and accompany you? I have long wanted to make another pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Jasna Gora.”

  “It wouldn’t be an imposition,” Jeffrey replied. “But I thought pilgrimages went out with the Middle Ages. Something you only find nowadays in books that make fun of the old practices.”

  “Our modern world is too swift to criticize what it does not understand and to condemn what it finds the least bit uncomfortable,” Gregor replied. “A pilgrimage is nothing more than a prayer with feet.”

  “I think it would be great to have you along,” Jeffrey said simply.

  “I’ve heard about this place all my life and never been there,” Katya said. “My mother has a copy of the picture in the church, the Black Madonna, on her bedroom wall.”

  Gregor asked, “What time is your meeting there scheduled?”

  “Lunchtime.”

  “Do you think it might be possible to arrive in time for the eleven o’clock Mass?”

  “Sure. I’ll just call Rokovski and ask if we can meet him there.” Jeffrey stood and signaled to Katya with his eyes. “We have to be going.”

  “Indeed you do. Business is waiting.” Gregor pushed himself erect and saw them to the door. “You know where the Russian market is?”

  “I have found it on a map,” Katya replied.

  “Splendid. Until tomorrow, then.”

  * * *

  A continuing thaw left Nova Huta’s Russian market swimming in a sea of mud. Visitors paid it no notice, except to walk on tiptoe through the deepest puddles. When Jeffrey and Katya arrived, the sun was shouldering aside clouds and casting an unfamiliar light upon throngs who jostled good-naturedly among the acres of stalls and peddlers. They joined the crowds strolling, gawking, pointing, laughing. They listened to people arguing prices in a mishmash of Polish and Russian and Ukrainian.

  The slender young man whom Jeffrey had last seen in a Cracow apartment with two valuables strapped to his thighs spotted them first. He shouted them over with the underhanded come-hither gesture of the East. Beside him stood a young-old girl in her twenties dressed in layer upon layer of sweat shirts, her unkempt dark hair tied back with a length of ragged cloth. Her face was as hard and unflinching as her eyes. Before the pair of them were piles of wrenches and crowbars and hammers and hacksaws and nails and screws and manual drills.

  The Ukrainian nudged his companion and spoke to her in a Russian singsong. She spoke in turn to Jeffrey and Katya in Polish, her mouth barely moving in the rock-hard face.

  “He says their profit from the last trip was enough to go into business,” Katya translated to Jeffrey. “At least, I think that’s what he said. This girl’s Polish is horrible. I can barely understand her.”

  “Buy-sell,” the man shouted happily in an English so heavily accented as to be barely understandable. “Valuta.”

  “Valuta,” Jeffrey agreed, liking him. “Tell him I’m glad things have worked out so well.”

  Their conversation attracted attention from nearby stallholders and patrons. The gawkers and gossipers began to gather and watch and listen and point and talk words that needed no translation. Look, an Englishman speaking with another woman—listen to her Polish. And how do they know this pair from the other side?

  The young man waved his hand proudly over his wares, said through the dual translators, “Even after bribes to the border guards on both sides, a good day brings enough to keep both our families alive for a month.”

  By now the crowd hemmed them in on all sides. The woman spoke a warning; the young man grinned and jerked his head for them to follow. He clapped the next stallholder’s shoulder in passing, said something that was answered with a grunt and a shift of position by the man’s thick-set wife.

  Jeffrey and Katya followed the pair by stalls selling everything from tatty sweaters to sheets to pocket watches to aspirin to Russian fur-lined gloves and hats. Most of the sellers were women, hard-faced and very large and older than their years. The stalls were rudimentary in the extreme, waist-high blocks of poured concrete with wavy plastic roofs supported by rotting timbers. The entire market lot was surrounded on all sides by multistory Communist-built apartment bunkers.

  They crossed a mud-swamped parking lot and stopped beside a thoroughly trashed and battered Soviet Lada. The young man opened the trunk, tossed out sacking and roof-ropes, and pulled out a single remaining wooden crate.

  “On the black market the dollar sells for two hundred and ten rubles and it’s going up every day,” he said through the laborious process. “Prices shoot up fifty, maybe a hundred percent each week. Pensioners get enough money each month to feed themselves for three days. There is trouble brewing.”

  “So why don’t you get out?” Jeffrey asked as he watched him gingerly unwrap multiple layers of padding.

  “Family,” he answered briefly. “Parents and uncles too old to move. And where would I go, what would I do? There at least people come to me and say, sell this, help me, bring me valuta so I can feed my family another month.”

  The box held three individually wrapped parcels. The young man tossed back the final layer of matting in one to expose a pair of delicate porcelain “Easter eggs,” so named because they were often given by royalty as gifts at the end of Lent. These were painted with minute yet beautifully accurate pictures of the Sansouci Palace of Potsdam. Jeffrey squinted more closely, made out people no higher than a pinhead moving across a graceful bridge. He knew from his reading that they had been painted with a magnifying glass and a brush made from one single horsehair. Each egg represented a month’s work by a skilled artisan. They bore the stamp of Meissen, dated 1710. Museum quality.

  Next emerged a case the size of a small paperback book. The outside covers were of engraved silver, framing a solid block of ivory. Gingerly he accepted the case from the grimy hands and opened it to find a Diptyque; on each block of ivory, two carvings, one above the other, depicted scenes from the life of Christ. Cases such as this one had once adorned the private chapels of late medieval royalty. From the formation of the carved figures and the surrounding decorative motif, Jeffrey guessed that the piece dated from the fourteenth century. Possibly earlier.

  Reluctantly Jeffrey handed back the item and accepted the third. His initial disappointment faded when he realized that he was not holding a painting as he first imagined, nor an icon, but rather a seventeenth-century Adoration. The frame took the form of an altar, with Doric columns of ebony and silver holding up an ornate frieze and a cross inlaid with polished semiprecious stones. The centerpiece was a painting on what appeared to be a sheet of lapis lazuli. The stone’s deep blue had been used to depict a starlit sky from which a finely painted cloud of angels sang hosannas over Mary and the Christ-child.

  Jeffrey looked up. “These will feed a family for a lot longer than a month.”

  The young man answered his unasked question with grave words. Katya’s tone matched his as she translated, “In 1917, when the Communists began taking control of the countrysi
de, some of the villages heard what was happening in the cities, churches looted and desecrated or burned to the ground. Priests handed the church heirlooms to devout families, as they knew that most of their brothers in the cities were vanishing without a trace. The villagers were sworn to guard these treasures and to return them to the church once the Communist threat had passed. But now the villages are starving, and the sick are dying untreated. The priests are giving dispensations to sell off what treasures survived.”

  Jeffrey looked back at the treasure in his hands. “Your village will eat well for a long time to come if this is authentic.”

  “I am an honest man,” the man said strongly. “A good man. I take a little and give most back. This is not for me.”

  “I believe you,” Jeffrey replied. And he did. But he explained, “There are a lot of fakes coming out of Russia just now. All this will have to be carefully authenticated.”

  The young man nodded. “But the last shipment, they were real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then take my word.” He waved an arm covered to the elbow with grime and grease. “Genuine and old.”

  Jeffrey cast another lingering glance over the items, nodded agreement. He thought so, too.

  “You can buy icons? Good ones, old. Silver frames. Some gold.”

  “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “There’s a wall of icons now in one London antique store.”

  The young man was not surprised by the news. “But if I bring you ones as special as these?”

  “Then I can buy them. I don’t know the price, but I will buy any of this quality.” He traced the pattern of the blue-veined sky. “Definitely.”

  “For a lot of people and villages, the only thing of value they have left is the icon. Stored away since the Revolution. Now they either sell or starve.”

  Jeffrey inspected the young man. “Things are that bad?”

  “Come and see,” the man replied, his animated face turning as flat as his companion’s. “Some things you have to witness to understand.”