In this case, I knew the lost city wasn’t just a landscape of the mind. Lost cities of the Khazars had only recently been discovered in this same region, which Stalin had buried underwater by rerouting rivers. This triggered a picture that was gaining prominence in my mind, something that seemed to pop up at every metaphysical-metaphorical-mythical-mystical turn in this millennial hunt for the “sacred hallows”—something I knew must be the kernel of hidden truth in Pandora’s manuscripts.
“All these legends, the Kitezh, the Eddas, the Nibelungenlied, the Grail sagas of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes—they’re all tied together somehow, aren’t they, Volga?” I said.
He nodded slowly, but continued to study me, so I went on:
“It must mean something, then, that while they’re all a bunch of legends, they’re set within the context of plenty of verifiable historical facts. Not to mention that the objects and places and events described in these tales seem to have been sought for so long by everyone from powerful political leaders to mysterious mystics—”
I thought I noticed a strange gleam in the depths of Volga’s black eyes.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” I said, all at once on my feet. Though I could still see my breath in the air, I didn’t want another swig of slivovitz just yet. I paced as Volga sat in silence. “Norse, Teutonic, Slavic, Celtic, Semitic, Indo-European, Aryan, Greco-Roman, Dravidian, Thracian, Persian, Aramaic, Ugaritic,” I said. “But Pandora figured out how they’re all related, didn’t she? That’s the reason why she divided her manuscripts among four people in the same family who never spoke to each other—so nobody could ever put it all together and see what she had seen.”
Then I stopped and stared at Volga, realizing I might have revealed too much of what I knew or didn’t know. After all, hadn’t Laf sent him all this way here to reveal things to me instead? But when I looked down at Volga, he had a strange expression.
“There is one very important thing in what you’ve just said—more important than the rest,” he told me. “Can you see what it is?” When I was clearly at sea, he said, “The number four. Four people, four corners, four quarters, four sets of documents. Time is of the essence, for the aeon draws near. And you haven’t seen the parts Pandora herself collected, all combined.”
“As I understand it, nobody’s seen them all,” I pointed out.
“That is why I’ve come to Russia tonight,” Volga said with great care. My heart was pounding as I slowly sat down again. “In Idaho, you were unprepared for the acceptance of this mission that now I see in your eyes. I hope it is not too late. There is one person who’s had access to all the documents over the past many years—or at least, to those individuals who themselves possessed them. Although, as you’ve suggested, those four people—Lafcadio, Augustus, Earnest, and Zoe—were estranged from one another, they were not estranged from her.”
I stared at him, not believing my ears. There was only one person he could possibly be speaking of. But then mercifully, I thought of a hitch that would make his suggestion impossible.
“It’s true that Jersey was married to my father, Augustus, and afterwards to Uncle Earnest too,” I admitted. “And we lived off and on with Uncle Laf while I was growing up, in the years between. But Jersey never had anything to do with my horrid aunt Zoe in Paris. The two of them have never even met, so far as I know.”
If Russian walls had ears, it wouldn’t take an “initiate” to translate Volga’s reply.
“I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but it’s quite urgent that you know,” Volga said firmly. “Your mother, Jersey, is the daughter of Zoe Behn.”
WARP AND WOOF
[When the Moirai weave fate] the length of a man’s life … is represented by … the vertical i.e. the warp threads. [But] what of the woof, those threads which are … knotted round the individal warp threads? In these it would be natural to see the various phases of fortune which are his lot while he lives, and of which the last is death.
The old Norse goddesses, the Norns, spun the fates of men at birth.… The Slavs also had [such] goddesses … so too apparently the ancient Hindus and the Gypsies.… Not only do the Norns spin and bind, they also weave. Their web hangs over every man.
—Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought
Buddhism is both a philosophy and a practice. Buddhist philosophy is rich and profound. Buddhist practice is called Tantra. Tantra is the Sanskrit word meaning “to weave.”
… The most profound thinkers of the Indian civilization discovered that words and concepts could take them only so far. Beyond that point came the actual doing of a practice, the experience of which was ineffable.
… Tantra does not mean the end of rational thought. It means the integration of thought … into larger spectrums of awareness.
—Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters
Volga Dragonoff’s revelation turned out to be the first of all my recent family shockers that didn’t make me feel like collapsing. Indeed, there were aspects of this revised picture—based on what I knew for certain about my mother’s side of the family—that actually rang true. I hoped they might even help fill in a few pieces of the larger puzzle.
When I was two years old, my mother had packed me up and left my father. For the next twenty-odd years, Augustus divided his time between his Pennsylvania estate and posh offices in New York that were home to the family mining and minerals empire, the legacy of Hieronymus Behn.
Jersey returned to her life performing throughout the glittering capitals of Europe. I was carried along in her turbulent wake for the next six years, until her subsequent marriage to Uncle Earnest. I rarely saw Augustus after the split. He’d never been much of a talker about family matters, so all my information about my parents’ marriage or my mother’s previous life had been filtered through Jersey’s ice-blue eyes.
Jersey was born in 1930, between the wars, to a French mother and an Irish father on the British Channel island for which she was named. The Channel Isles, just off the Normandy coast, became indefensible by the British once France surrendered to the Germans in 1940. Inhabitants were evacuated upon request, but many demurred—especially the residents of Jersey, of whose population more than eighty percent opted to stay on. These suffered the predictable deportations or depradations when Germany occupied and fortified the islands to create the “mailed fist of the western wall.” Those who’d refused evacuation wouldn’t be liberated by the British until near the end of the war. But by then, my mother was not among them.
Early in the invasion of France, so the story ran, Jersey’s mother went to the aid of her family and was trapped inside France. Jersey’s father, an Irish pilot who protected English skies in the Battle of Britain, was shot down by the Luftwaffe soon after. Ten-year-old Jersey, a virtual orphan, was forcibly evacuated by the British to London. Then, during the Blitz that rained German fire from the skies on the civilian population of England, she was sent for safety with other English children—“bundles from Britain”—to families in the United States until the war’s end. By that time Jersey’s mother, a member of the French Resistance, was reported “missing in action” in France.
The story, repeated these many years, always ended with a tearful Jersey avoiding further comment by reminding us of the bravery of her ill-fated parents, and of the pain it caused her to try to think back on those harsh, hard times.
In support of this picture was plenty of circumstantial evidence, including posters, playbills, and reviews detailing Jersey’s extremely early public life in America. At ten she was placed as the foster child of a New England family who recognized, when Jersey was about twelve—an age when many musical prodigies are discovered—that she had a most remarkable singing voice. In the summer of 1945 when the war was drawing to a close, Jersey lied about her age (which was fifteen) to try out for the lead part of Margot in The Desert Song, a Sigmund Romberg musical that had been touring the provinces since the dawn of history and was crying o
ut for fresh blood. The tour de force role was ideal for a young coloratura like Jersey.
On opening night in the boondocks, our Cinderella was discovered by the proverbial New York scout, who understood the depth and range of those fresh, bell-like tones that would later make Jersey’s voice so easily differentiable from dozens of other young sopranos. The agent signed Jersey, assuring everyone that she would complete high school despite the brilliant career he foresaw. He got her a high-caliber professional voice coach. And the rest, as they say, was history.
What I needed to find out now was the secret history, as Volga Dragonoff might call it: the unknown story, if indeed there was one, behind the very public story of my mother. But in all honesty, taken fact for fact, there weren’t so many details of Jersey’s well-documented life that would actually contradict what Volga had claimed: that the sensational dancer and demimondaine Zoe Behn was really Jersey’s mother.
For instance, a quick calculation told me that if Laf was born at the turn of the century, and if Zoe was six years old when he was twelve, then when my mother was born on the isle of Jersey in 1930, Zoe would have been twenty-four, the perfect age to run off to an island with a handsome Irish pilot and make a baby. And hadn’t Wolfgang said she was a member of the French Resistance? It was also plausible that Zoe, who’d lived most of her own flamboyant and equally well documented life in France, might have left a ten-year-old daughter in the relative security of the Channel Islands, if she feared for someone else whose safety might be threatened by the German occupation. But just for starters on my lengthy list of questions—who might that someone be?
Furthermore, though thousands of families had certainly been separated by the war and many were unable to locate lost relatives for a period extending into decades, it had now been nearly fifty years since the described events took place. It was highly suspicious, if not impossible to imagine, that in all that time neither Jersey nor Zoe was aware that the other was alive and well, living glamorously in Vienna and Paris.
Add the significant fact that my mother had been married to two successive men named Behn, and had also lived with a third, my uncle Laf. Regardless of how little Jersey claimed to know, or actually might know, of her own roots, how could the detail have escaped her, these many years, that the three men she’d lived with were actually her mother’s brothers—hence, her own uncles? And if Volga and Laf knew this much of family affairs, what about Jersey’s two husbands, Uncle Earnest and my father Augustus?
I didn’t get much further with Volga on these questions, though. Either he didn’t know anything else or he was reticent to say more.
“You must ask your mother,” he repeated whenever I pressed him. “It is for her to say what she wishes. Perhaps she’s had reasons for not speaking before now.”
When my patience and stamina were nearly at an end, my warden Svetlana returned, motioning with those frantic, frightened gestures, desperate to lock me back in my room before someone caught us all dallying there in the dining hall. Before we parted, I thanked Volga for what he’d revealed. Then I took a quick moment to scribble a note to Uncle Laf, saying I’d surely try to check in with him as I passed back through Vienna. I added by way of explanation that the tightness of my schedule and the distance between the IAEA and Melk had prevented me from keeping my earlier promise.
Back in my room, though, I couldn’t get to sleep—and not just because of my empty stomach, icy bedchamber, or mental exhaustion. To the contrary, I knew that my insomnia resulted from a hyperenergized brain. I had some serious thinking to do about this pattern of errors, omissions, myths, and lies that seemed to make up my life. At the crack of dawn, I’d surely be roused back to action by life’s little importunities rapping once more at my door. But I wouldn’t be ready to field anything new until I’d regrouped and figured out where I stood right now.
From the moment Volga mentioned my mother as a possible contender in the game, it had occurred to me that, just like Hermione, Jersey was not only a name but a place—a place, if memory served, with enough Celtic standing stones to qualify as a key point on the mysterious power grid. And it had finally registered that all this time I might’ve been looking in the wrong direction: down, instead of up.
Those ancient builders who’d designed Egypt’s pyramids or Solomon’s temple didn’t need maps and calipers to site their structures. They had used the same tool kit over a span of thousands of years, whether to navigate a desert or an ocean. It was also the single reference they’d have needed in order to pinpoint precise spots on earth—that is, the canopy of stars painted across the night sky. So once again, all that history and mystery and mythology seemed to drive home a key point, at the same time pointing me in the right direction. Toward the stars.
Before turning in, I rummaged for a bottle of mineral water to brush my teeth, and noticed at the bottom of the bag the Bible still there from Sun Valley. Seeing it triggered the memory of a conversation with Sam, out under the stars one evening before I went away to school. Though I couldn’t have known it then, that would be the last time I would see Sam until just this past weekend, on another Idaho mountaintop.
I pulled the Bible from the bag, rested it on the chipped porcelain rim of the bathroom sink, and flipped through the pages until I came to the Book of Job, as I heard Sam’s voice in my mind.…
“Do you remember the story of Job?” he asked as we stood there together looking up at the night sky.
It seemed an odd remark for someone who didn’t read the Bible. All I could recall was that Yahweh had cut poor Job a pretty one-sided deal, giving Satan carte blanche to torture “God’s servant” as he pleased; it seemed awfully cruel. I said as much to Sam.
“And yet, interestingly enough, despite the suffering he underwent,” said Sam, “in the end Job had only one real confrontation with God. He asked a famous question: ‘Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?’ Do you recall what God’s reply was to Job’s simple plea for understanding?”
When I shook my head in the negative, Sam took my hand in his, lifted his other hand, and swept it wide to encompass the entire night sky—that sparkling stellar array that had remained so remote and unchanged over billions of years.
“That was the answer to Job,” Sam told me. “God arrives in the midst of a terrifying whirlwind, and for page after page he enumerates all He’s accomplished. He’s created everything from hail to horses to ostrich eggs—not to mention the universe itself. Job can’t get a word in edgewise with all the bombast, nor should I imagine he’d want to at this point, what with all he’s just been through. God’s behavior on the occasion seems incomprehensible, and philosophers have wondered about it for thousands of years. But I believe I’ve found an interesting clue.…”
Sam looked down at me in the starlight with clear grey eyes and quoted: “‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?… Who hath laid the measures thereof … or who hath stretched the line upon it?… Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?’”
When I made no comment, he said, “That’s a pretty specific answer to a pretty specific question, don’t you agree?”
“But you told me Job’s question was, ‘Where is wisdom to be found?’” I pointed out. “How does showing off over creating the universe answer that?”
“Precisely what’s been puzzling the sages philosophes all these aeons: What was God’s point?” Sam agreed with a smile. “But as my favorite poet-philosopher said, ‘In the end the philosophers always go out by the same door that in they came.’ On the other hand, for those who can read a road map, I suggest God’s reply is an answer. Think about it. God seems to be saying that the coordinates mapped out in the heavens are the guide to wisdom here on earth—‘as above, so below’—do you see?”
Maybe I hadn’t seen it then, but I thought I did now. If the placement of holy sites in relation to one another was truly patterned after the constellations themselves,
it was even possible to visualize how, over time, that heavenly map had gradually become the map of earth—which in turn would connect the geography below with the archetypal meaning of the constellations above: totems and altars and gods.
I saw something else too, though I had only three hours to sleep before learning what all this had to do with the Soviet Union, nuclear energy, and Central Asia. For once, I’d actually begun to feel the warp and woof were twined into a pattern.
Wolfgang rang me on the house phone in time for the two of us to have a brief tête-à-tête over breakfast before our nine o’clock meeting with the Soviet nukes. I found him alone in a corner of the dining hall where I’d met Volga only hours earlier, seated at the end of one of the long tables, his back to the wall.
I passed down the rows of Russian businessmen in ill-fitting black suits, huddled together eating bowls of thick hot porridge and sipping their black coffee in silence. When Wolfgang saw me approach, he put his napkin on the table and stood to seat me beside him, then poured me some hot java. But his tone, when he spoke, was surprisingly chilly.
“I don’t think you quite understand the position we are in, here inside Russia,” he told me. “It’s rare for Westerners to be invited in for open discussion on so sensitive a topic, and I explained that our behavior would be watched. What on earth were you thinking, to conduct a secret late-night meeting with someone right here in the hotel? Who was he?”
“It was a surprise to me too, when he showed up. I was already in my pajamas,” I assured him. “It was my uncle’s valet, Volga. Laf was worried that I never even phoned him in Vienna. I should have called.”
“His valet?” said Wolfgang in disbelief. “But I was told you were together for hours—until nearly dawn! What did he say that could possibly have taken so long?”
The Magic Circle Page 45