The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  Holy shit.

  Wolfgang looked up at the Eiffel Tower for a moment, its small red beacon at the top nearly lost in the silvery mists. Then he slipped one arm around me as we stood there in silence.

  “If Tesla, like Prometheus, gave mankind a new kind of flame,” Wolfgang said, “maybe Pandora’s knowledge will prove to be both the world’s own gift and punishment.”

  GOOD AND EVIL

  SOCRATES: You speak of good and evil.

  GLAUCON: I do.

  SOCRATES: I wonder if you understand them as I do.

  —Plato, The Republic

  Despite the best of intentions and well-laid plans, I found myself lying in the carved four-poster bed of a Renaissance suite at the Relais Christine making love with Wolfgang all night—or what was left of it—with a passion so intense, so draining, I felt I’d passed the time in the arms of a vampire rather than an Austrian civil servant.

  There was a little garden just outside our room. Wolfgang was standing at the French windows looking out on it when I opened my eyes in the morning. His magnificent naked body was outlined by the web of wet black branches with their haze of tender pale green leaves unfurling just beyond the windows. I recalled that first morning in my cellar bedroom, when he’d crawled out of my sleeping bag and turned his back so he could dress—before he came over to kiss me for the very first time.

  Well, I was no blushing quasi-virgin any longer: life had certainly seen to that. But I knew that this man who’d driven up my heartbeat—once again, all night long—was still the enigma he’d been when we’d first met, long before I’d learned that he was my cousin. And despite any philosophical observations about spirit and matter, I had to admit that what I’d coveted from Wolfgang was a pretty far cry from spiritual enlightenment. I wondered just what that said about me.

  Wolfgang opened the windows that gave onto the garden, then came over and sat on the bed. He pulled down the sheet and ran his hands over my body until I began to tremble again. “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe I actually wanted more. “Don’t we have an imminent date for lunch that we really shouldn’t miss?” I forced myself to mention.

  “Frenchwomen are always late.” Licking my fingers, he regarded me meditatively. “It’s something in the air—an exotic, erotic perfume you exude that makes me somehow wild. Yet I always feel it’s illusion, that we’re wrapped in a magical smoky veil that no one must penetrate, or the spell will be broken.”

  It was a fair description of how I felt myself: there’d been an air of unreality about us from the beginning, an illusion so powerful it often seemed dangerous.

  “It’s just past nine o’clock,” Wolfgang whispered, his lips hovering at my breast. “We can skip breakfast—can’t we?—if we’re having an early lunch.…”

  Les Deux Magots is one of the most famous cafés in Paris. It was once the favorite rendezvous of the literati as well as the underground—two groups that, in France, had often boasted the same membership. Everybody from Hemingway to de Beauvoir and Sartre had hung out there. And apparently also Zoe Behn.

  As we crossed the square of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, its sculpted chestnut trees already coming into bloom, Wolfgang pointed her out, seated alone at a corner table in the sunny, glass-walled outdoor solarium that gave onto the open plaza. We entered through the restaurant, past the famous wooden statues, the two magots. These Oriental figures in their robes of blue and green and gold, surrounded by gilded mirrors, hovering on thrones high above the bar, seemed like Elijahs swept from the streets of Paris up to heaven in chariots of fire.

  We went out to the glassed-in terrace. As we crossed to Zoe, I studied this woman, my infamous grandmother, of whom so many scandalous things had been said and written over so many years. She might be eighty-three, but as she sat there sipping her glass of bubbly, it seemed the life she’d lived—lavish with wine, men, and dance—hadn’t served her at all badly. She sat “tall in the saddle,” as Olivier would say, with a proud bearing that complemented fine unweathered skin and the remarkable French braid of snowy hair that fell nearly to her waist. The strength revealed in her face recalled Laf’s comment that as a child she’d had all the self-containment of Attila the Hun.

  When we reached her corner table, she studied me with intense aquamarine eyes—a shade somewhere between Wolfgang’s turquoise and my mother’s famous “ice blue” ones. Wolfgang presented me to her formally, pulled out a chair, and seated me when Zoe nodded. She addressed Wolfgang, her English lightly flavored with a mixture of accents, never taking her eyes from me.

  “The resemblance is truly remarkable,” she told him. “What must Dacian’s reaction have been the first time he saw her!”

  “At first he found it difficult to speak,” Wolfgang admitted.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Zoe told me. “You must understand, Pandora was unique. Now that she’s dead, it’s startling to encounter someone who is almost her incarnation down to the finest detail. You’ve done well, having avoided most of your family all these years. Seeing this amazing replica of Pandora on a more regular basis, we might all have had to resort to taking salts or drinking something stronger than champagne! She was something powerful to be reckoned with, I can tell you.”

  For the first time, she smiled, and there was a glimpse of that languid sensuality she’d been renowned for—an attribute, as I recalled, that for nearly four decades had brought nobles and magnates to their knees, spilling riches at her feet.

  “Were you very close to my grandmother?” I asked. Then, remembering that Zoe was also my grandmother, I said, “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. Don’t apologize,” she cut in curtly. “One day perhaps you’ll learn the most important lesson I could ever teach you: that you may do and say as you please in this life, so long as you apologize for nothing.” I had the feeling, in Zoe’s case, this little rule of thumb must have come in handy more than once.

  She’d motioned for the waiter to come pour champagne into two more glasses that had been sitting at a side table awaiting our arrival. They were already partly filled with a mysterious purplish mixture which the waiter stirred into a cloud as he poured.

  “This drink is called la Zoe,” she told us. “Like my name, it means ‘life.’ The concoction was created for me one night at Maxim’s—oh my, how many years ago! Everyone in Paris who wished to be chic drank it. I wanted to meet you here at the Deux Magots for a toast to Life. As no one comes out so early, we can also speak privately here. I wish to tell you of the missing magot, and how he relates to us. Then, as it’s also the case that no one goes to lunch until two or so, I’ve made us reservations at the Closerie des Lilas in a few hours from now. I expect, at the hotel where you’re stopping, you’ve been given a decent breakfast.”

  I sat there frozen-faced, trying desperately not to let my telltale skin flush beet red at recalling our “breakfast” this morning. Wolfgang squeezed my hand meaningfully under the table.

  “Perhaps just a dish of olives,” he told the waiter in French. When he’d departed, Wolfgang added to Zoe, “In America, one doesn’t take alcohol quite so early in the day without a bite of food.”

  Except my bacchanalian family, I thought. We lifted our glasses to Life. With my first sip, the dark, heady flavor of this drink tasted somehow of danger.

  “Ariel …” Zoe pronounced my name with an almost proprietary expression. Her next words made clear why. “Since your mother has always kept our relationship secret, perhaps you weren’t told that it was I who selected your name? Can you guess after whom you were called?”

  “Wolfgang told me Ariel was an ancient name of Jerusalem, and that it means Lioness of God,” I said. “But I’d always imagined I was named for the little spirit Ariel who was held in bondage by Prospero the magician, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”

  “No—but in fact you were named for another spirit who was later patterned after that one,” Zoe said. Then she quoted in German
:

  “Ariel bewegt den Sang in himmlisch reinen Tönen,

  viele Fratzen lockt sein Klang, doch lockt er auch die Schönen.…

  Gab die liebende Natur, gab der Geist euch Flügel,

  Folget meiner leichten Spur! Auf zum Rosenhügel!”

  “‘Ariel sings and plays the—urn, harp,’” I translated. “‘If Nature gave you wings … follow my steps to a hill of roses.’ What’s that from?”

  “From Faust,” Wolfgang said. “It’s the scene atop the Brocken mountain, on the night called Walpurgisnacht, an ancient Germanic festival invoked by Goethe in his play. The word means ‘the night they cleanse the woods’—with fires.”

  Zoe looked at Wolfgang as if there were some unspoken significance in what he’d just said. Then Granny ever so charmingly pulled the pin from her hand grenade.

  “That part of Faust, the cleansing scene, is when the little spirit Ariel cleanses Faust of the bitterness and suffering he’s caused others,” she told us. “Often, mind you, Faust had harmed them unintentionally, in his quest for higher wisdom as a magus. You know, it was Lucky’s favorite passage. He wept tears every single time he heard it.” Then she added, “Most people don’t realize that the night he died—April 30, 1945—was also May Eve. Which is to say he killed himself, and Eva too, on Walpurgisnacht.”

  “‘Lucky’?” Wolfgang asked, puzzled. I realized he’d missed Laf’s story revealing our family’s cute nickname for the world’s most evil tyrant. “But April 30, 1945, it’s a famous date: the day Hitler committed suicide. That was ‘Lucky’?”

  “Why, yes,” I commented cynically. “A family friend, it would seem. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.” But there was something I hadn’t heard yet, which I’d have been only too happy to have missed, myself.

  “Not really a friend,” Zoe replied with remarkable sangfroid. “One might say, practically a member of the family.”

  While I was collecting myself from that remark, she added,

  “You must realize, I knew him since I was a child. The truth is, Lucky was an ordinary man with ordinary skills and background and education, but one who knew that his great strength lay in simplicity. That was what made it the more frightening to many, I think, for beneath it was something primal that resonates in one without conscious awareness. With Lucky, it was more than just mass hypnosis, as many wish to believe. Everything about him was archetypal: he touched a place of truth in everyone.” She paused, and added chillingly, “After all, he didn’t personally pull a trigger thirteen million times—nor did he give written orders for others to do so. Lucky knew all he needed was to make people feel they were given permission to do what is hidden within them, what lurks in their hearts.”

  I felt truly ill. Zoe regarded me coolly with those steely blue eyes as she sat there sipping her plum-tinged champagne that looked like blood. The sunlight seemed suddenly cold. It was true, Laf and everyone else had warned me Zoe was a card-carrying Nazi collaborator. But that was before I was sitting here, sipping a drink named for her, hearing the noxious news from her very own lips. And it was surely before I’d learned that this storm trooper before me was my own grandmother! It was no wonder Jersey wanted to disclaim her—I felt like throwing up. But instead, I gritted my teeth and pulled myself together. I carefully set down my own glass of purple poison and squared off to confront her face to face.

  “Let’s get this straight: you think there’s something ‘primal’ and ‘archetypal’ that makes ordinary people ‘resonate’ to the idea of genocide?” I asked her. “You think your pal Lucky was just some ordinary Joe with an idea whose time had come? You believe we just need permission from someone in authority for most folks to play follow-the-Führer and do the same thing again today? Well, let me tell you, lady, there’s nothing primal, archetypal, metaphorical, or genetic that would cause me to take any action without full awareness at a conscious level of what I was doing—and why.”

  “I have lived long enough,” Zoe said calmly, “to see what forces are unleashed by making contact at such deep levels—including those you’ve seen triggered by Pandora’s manuscripts. So let me ask you something: Was it not you who requested this interview we are having? Are you then ‘fully aware’ that the date you’ve chosen—today, April 20, 1989—marks the one hundredth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth? Is it coincidence?”

  I felt a horrid, horrid chill as I forced myself to look into those clear, frozen eyes of my awful, awful grandmother. But unhappily for me, she hadn’t quite finished.

  “Now, I shall also tell you something you must believe. Who doesn’t grasp the mind of Adolf Hitler will grasp neither Pandora Bassarides and her manuscripts nor the true motives driving die Familie Behn.”

  “I’d hoped Wolfgang would make it clear to you,” I told her coldly. “I came to Paris for one reason. I thought you might be the only person living who could explain the mystery of Pandora’s legacy and unravel the many secrets surrounding our family’s relation to them. I didn’t come to hear Nazi propaganda; I came here for the truth.”

  “So, my girl: you want everything to be true and false, good and bad, black and white. But life is not that way, nor has it ever been. The seeds are in each of us. Both things are watered and grow side by side. And when it comes to our family—your family—there’s a great deal you’d be quite unwise to turn your eyes from just because you can’t sort things easily into boxes. It’s not always easy to separate grain from chaff, even once the crop has been harvested.”

  “Gee, I’ve never been a whiz at deciphering parables,” I said. “But if your idea of ‘truth’ is that we’re all potential mass murderers unless we stumble onto the right fork, I’d disagree. What makes ‘civilized’ people think they can get up one morning, round up their neighbors, shove them into boxcars, tattoo them with serial numbers, then ship them off to a farm somewhere to be methodically exterminated?”

  “That is not the right question,” said Zoe, echoing Dacian Bassarides.

  “Okay, what’s the right question?” I wanted to know.

  “The right question is: What makes them think they can’t?”

  I sat there looking at her for another long moment. I had to admit, if only to myself, it was the right question. Yet it was clear Zoe’s and my perspectives, from the starting gate, were very different. I’d made the perhaps naive assumption that all people were innately good, but capable of being led into evil acts on a mass scale by the dark, hypnotic manipulations of a single man. On the other hand, Zoe—who, I had to recall, actually knew the man—held the position that we came equipped with the seeds of good and evil, and all it took to tip the balance the wrong way was a gentle nudge. What was the secret ingredient, clearly buried deeply within all sane societies, that prevented us from shooting our neighbors just because we didn’t like the way they cut their hair or mowed their lawns? For wasn’t that precisely what Hitler said he hated most about the Gypsies, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and Jews?—that they were different?

  And in fact, I should know better than anyone that tribal hatred and genocide were hardly a fairy tale lost in the mists of the long ago and far away. It still echoed in my mind, from my first day at school in Idaho. Sam had escorted me, and as we’d passed some other boys in the hallway, one had whispered just loud enough for Sam to hear: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

  My God.

  It sickened me that every time I scratched a little deeper into the surface of the family history I found something ugly, chilling, or unacceptable—but I did understand that whatever my newfound Fascist grandmother here had to say, it might indeed prove the one thing that would bring me closer to the center Dacian had called Truth, at least about our family. So I swallowed the dryness in my mouth and nodded for Zoe to proceed. She set down her glass and narrowed her eyes at me.

  “In order for you to understand any of this, whether or not you find it pleasant, you must first understand that the nature of the relationships we, in our family, had with Lucky
were different from those he had with others.

  “There were some who thought they knew him well. Like Rudolf Hess, who named his son after Lucky’s ‘secret’ nickname: Wolf. More attuned was Josef Goebbels, who had six beautiful blond children. An interesting number, six. Their names were Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedde, and Heidi.” She looked at me intently, then asked, “Perhaps you don’t know what happened to these little blond Goebbels children whose names all began with H? They too were sacrificed on Walpurgisnacht: poisoned with cyanide in Hitler’s Berlin bunker by their parents, who killed the pet dog Blondi in the same fashion and then took their own lives too.”

  “Sacrificed? What on earth do you mean?” I exclaimed.

  “May Eve is the night of sacrifice and purgation,” Zoe explained. “The next day, May first, was once called Beltaine, Bel’s or Baal’s fires, the sixth station of the Celtic calendar and the pivotal midpoint of the pagan year. The prior night, when Hitler committed suicide, April 30, was in ancient times called the Night of the Dead. The only pagan holy day never converted to the Christian calendar, it still possesses its original, undiluted primal power.”

  “You can’t mean the people who died in Hitler’s bunker sacrificed their own children in some kind of … pagan rite?” I asked in horror.

  Zoe did not answer directly. “The most important event of that night was the first: a marriage that took place between two people who knew they would soon be dead,” Zoe said. “Adolf Hitler of course was the bridegroom. But who was the bride in this oddly timed wedding? An insignificant woman who filled a significant role—and who interestingly was named Eve, like the first woman in the Bible, the mother of us all. Her last name describes the color of the earth, the prima materia that provides the basis of all alchemical transmutations. She was Eva Braun.”