A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  * * *

  • • •

  Once a month, my brother Johan came to visit and we would sit for an hour in the visitors’ room discussing family matters. He brought me books to read, another month’s supply of paper and pens, and in return I entrusted him with all the work that I had produced in the intervening time for safekeeping.

  I could hardly sleep the night before one particular visit, as I was anxious to discover whether he had fulfilled a request I’d made of him the last time he came to Hohenasperg.

  “Well?” I asked when he sat down, barely giving him a moment to inquire after my health. “Did you find him?”

  “Have you heard about this?” he said, ignoring my question as he placed a copy of the Wiener Zeitung before me and tapped his finger on a news story. “An English naval captain suffered a mutiny on board his ship last year and now, twelve months later, he and some of his crew have shown up in England when they were all presumed dead, having traveled three and a half thousand nautical miles in a small launch. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

  “Why should I care about such a thing?” I asked, frowning as I glanced at the article. A young cabin boy by the name of Turnstile was recounting his story to the reporter with great dramatic flourishes. I hoped the child was being paid by the word, as he could earn a pretty penny for such a narrative.

  “Well, you were in a shipwreck once, weren’t you? When you lost—”

  “I remember,” I said, nodding my head. “I don’t need reminding of that terrible night. Three people died, after all.”

  “Of course,” he replied. “I just thought—”

  “Rikard,” I said, more insistently now. “Did you find him?”

  “I did. And I’m pleased to say that he’s now safely living with Ulli and me.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. My greatest concern throughout both my trial and incarceration was for the welfare of my son and, after my conviction, I asked my brother to take him in and act as his guardian.

  “And how is he?”

  “He’s quiet,” he replied. “Doesn’t say much. He misses you, that’s for sure. He doesn’t seem to get along with Ulli, for some reason. If she tries to pull him in for a kiss, he screams. What do you suppose that’s about?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, even though I could offer a fairly educated guess.

  “But other than that, he’s a good-humored boy,” Johan added. “We’ve put him into the local school, although he’s struggled to make friends. His head’s always in the clouds.”

  “And his reading? His writing?”

  “He’s good at both. He takes after you in that regard. But he excels in mathematics and the sciences.”

  He reached into his satchel and removed my monthly supply of pages and ink and I handed across my most recent set of poems, which were on the subject of icebergs, despite the fact that I had never seen this phenomenon with my own eyes. He glanced at them for a moment and shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite understand why I would waste my time on such scribblings.

  “What should I do with all these?” he asked me. “Do you want me to see if I can get a printer to publish them for you while you’re in here?”

  “No,” I said. “Just hold on to them, that’s all. When I’m released, I’ll decide what to do with them. Perhaps I can make my career from it yet. I’m not too old to start over, I hope. Especially now that I’m no longer chasing Heinrich.”

  “A career as a poet?” he asked skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there are worse ways to earn a living, I suppose. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but still.”

  “And what about Dieter?” I asked.

  “Dieter?”

  “When you found Rikard, wasn’t he being looked after by a young man?”

  “Oh him, yes,” Johan said, shaking his head and laughing. “He’s a peculiar one. He made Ulli disappear before my eyes so I punched him in the nose. He won’t make that mistake again.”

  “But was he well?”

  “Very well. He has a strange household, though.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “So, this Dieter, he lives in a house with a friend of his, Tilmund, while his wife, Olaia, stays next door with her friend, Quira. How can a marriage thrive under such strange circumstances?”

  I shook my head. “They’re a peculiar couple,” I admitted.

  “They seem to loathe each other. They came out to say goodbye to the boy when we were leaving and barely even looked at each other. Anyway, Dieter said to wish you well and to thank you for all that you have done for him. He’s making a living as a magician now and said that he would never have been able to do it, had it not been for your help.”

  Before Jonah left, I asked him whether he might bring Rikard to see me sometime and he looked down at the floor, as if he didn’t want to hurt me by answering truthfully.

  “I asked the boy that myself,” he said. “Only he seems frightened of coming to a prison. Perhaps not quite yet, but one day in the future? When he’s a little older?”

  I nodded, but felt a great depth of sorrow. I longed to see my son but, of course, I did not want to upset him by bringing him into such an awful place. At least I knew that while I could not fulfill my obligations to him as a father just now, he would not be short of love.

  SCOTLAND

  A.D. 1832

  A COUPLE OF YEARS into my sentence at Bridewell Prison, Glasgow, I no longer felt intimidated by my fellow prisoners, but the boredom remained. Even Johnny’s monthly visits did not make up for the tedium I felt at being trapped within these four walls and I longed both for my freedom and to see Richie again. Although my son still declined to visit, he wrote to me regularly and I treasured each of his letters. Displaying a higher than average aptitude for his studies, he had been transferred to a school in Edinburgh and I was pleased to know that he was receiving a good education. It showed from the manner of his writing, which was formal and composed with a careful hand. He wrote a lot about the sciences, a subject of which I knew little but in which he had a particular interest, and he could spend pages detailing facts and suppositions about the planets and the constellations of the night sky.

  Having grown up immersed in Scottish literature, I had always hoped that one day I might finally write a novel. I took particular pleasure in reading the adventure stories of Walter Scott. Knowing my passion for the man’s work, the warden allowed me to keep copies of Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and Quentin Durward on my shelves. Even Kelman, the Australian incarcerated in the cell next to mine, enjoyed me reading aloud from them at nighttime, although he maintained that a true writer specialized in composing verse, a talent that I had never been able to call my own.

  Since my confinement, I had been working on a novel, my first attempt in many years. It told the story of an itinerant musician. Eventually he settles in the home of a wealthy merchant who employs him to play in the evenings, whereupon he falls in love with the man’s wife. There’s a great hullabaloo, of course, and I included three duels within its pages as well as a lot of swordplay and ladies swooning. The hours in my cell were so long that I found the words flowed. Taking my heart in my hands, I decided to write to my literary hero and ask whether he might be willing to read it.

  My dear Sir Walter Scott

  Forgive the intrusion of an unsolicited letter from a stranger, but I hope it finds you in the devil of good health. I will not lie to you, sir. I am currently bound in the Bridewell in Glasgow, taken in for a ten-year stretch on account of the fact that I did kill a young girl. She was asking for it, though, I won’t pretend otherwise, for she did me some wrongs that I will relate to you on another occasion, should you give me the opportunity, but believe me, if her ghost was to pass your way as you read these lines, I would hope that she would have the honesty to say, Aye, he’s
not wrong, I was asking for it. Anyway, here I am, paying the price for my crime, as that’s what the courts decided and there’s little point in me crying over what cannot be changed. (I might add that I am also charged with the murder of a man, a cousin of mine, but of that accusation I assure you that I am wholly innocent.)

  I write to you now as one who has read all your books and think them to be among the greatest stories ever told. I have nurtured a lifelong desire to be a writer myself and, while counting the days away in here, have composed a novel that I hope might be of interest to you. It tells the story of a musician and has a motley cast of characters in it, and a deal of adventure, fighting, misunderstandings and bloodshed.

  I have also included a humorous section related to a boy who does magic tricks. I knew such a fellow once and have stolen some of his artistry for the chapters that include him. I don’t know if this is proper. Perhaps you can advise.

  I’m sending it to you here, Sir Walter, and it’s the only copy I have so take care with it, if you please. Would you be interested in a read?

  Until I hear from you again, so—

  And here I signed off with a lot of “your most humble servant” and “always in your debt” lines, and handed it to Johnny when he came a-visiting, who in turn promised to send it along to Sir Walter’s publisher in Edinburgh. I was right happy, I don’t mind telling you.

  * * *

  • • •

  My neighbor, Neil Kelman, was drawing closer and closer to the day of his hanging and I knew that I would surely miss him when he was gone. No sooner had I dispatched the letter and manuscript off to Sir Walter than he started to tell me the story of his own life through the gaps in the wall and I began to wonder whether there might not be a story in there, too.

  He described a curious childhood in southern Australia, where, he told me, his father had been a career criminal. When the man died only a few days after being released from prison, Kelman was still just a boy, but it was left to him to look after his mother and sisters, and so the family emigrated to Scotland in an effort to improve their prospects. Once he was out of short pants, he suffered any number of arrests, for he was always on the lookout for a way to take something that wasn’t his by rights and served a few sentences in the jails of Scotland during those years. But then, when he was in his early twenties, he got involved with a rough bunch. When the police came to his house to arrest him, things went awry and he tried to kill one of them and got away without capture. Later, though, he learned that his mother had been arrested in his place, and wasn’t he sick with horror at the thought of such an injustice, and it wasn’t long before he, along with his associates, went on a killing spree, their victims being policemen all.

  “I don’t take any pride in the blood I’ve spilled,” he admitted. “But I was young, that’s all. And stupid. And full of passion. But you don’t take a man’s mother and lock her up when the poor creature has done nothing to deserve such a fate, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “No, you don’t. Not if you have any common decency about you anyway.”

  As it turned out, Kelman and his associates managed to steer clear of capture for a few more years because, for some peculiar reason, the people of Scotland were following their adventures as if they were reading a pictorial weekly. Cheering them on, they were, for there was an element of the Robin Hood story to their tale, only with a lot more bloodshed involved. When he and his gang tried to ambush a police train near Aberdeen, it went badly wrong for them and every lad was killed, save Neil himself, who was captured at last and brought to trial and thence to the Bridewell with the intention of a noose being placed around his neck as soon as was legally possible.

  But he’d built up such a following by then among the good people of Scotland that a whole group of them got together and signed petitions for his execution to be commuted to imprisonment. Not a chance, said the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary in unison, and it was thought that the matter was even raised with Queen Victoria herself, who acted like she’d swallowed a bee when she was asked to be merciful.

  “So that’s how you found yourself in here,” I said to him one evening when he completed his tale. “It’s a sorry story.”

  “Aye, it is,” admitted Kelman, who remained stoic in such matters. “But such is life.”

  “Would you let me write it?” I asked.

  “A history book, do you mean?”

  “No, a novel.”

  “But it all happened, my friend. In what way would it be a novel?”

  “I could take the events of your life,” I explained, “and write them as if they were part of a great story. Telling the facts when I knew them and inventing at other times. Putting words into your mouth and those of your gang. It would be a way for people to remember your name.”

  “People will have forgotten about me by the time they’ve thrown me in my coffin,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll be discarded like a lump of hard cheese. But if you think you can make a book out of it, then you have my permission. I can’t imagine it’ll sell very well, though.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I have another sheaf of pages in here and enough ink to be going on with for now. And I need something to get me through the time ahead or I’ll go mad.”

  “Then my life,” he replied with a wide smile, “belongs to you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  To my surprise, I received a visitor one afternoon who was neither my brother nor, as I continued to hope, my son. During my period of incarceration I had never been asked to meet with a stranger and, as I entered the cold room where such encounters took place, I stared at the fellow, wondering whether he had made a mistake in coming here at all.

  He looked to be a middle-aged man of considerable means, aged somewhere between forty and fifty, with graying hair and a friendly complexion. When I first entered the room, I disturbed him in the act of reading a newspaper, which he folded up upon seeing me and placed inside his leather satchel.

  “I think you might have the wrong man,” I said as I sat down opposite him. “I’ve never seen you before, friend, but as I rarely get to enjoy a conversation with anyone who isn’t a fellow inmate, I’d be happy for you to stay a while, if you don’t mind.”

  He shook his head and consulted a notebook, asked me my name and, when I offered it, smiled.

  “Then you are indeed the right man,” he said. “You are the fellow who wrote to a particular friend of mine, Sir Walter Scott?”

  I stared at him in astonishment, saying nothing for a few moments. Was this a trick that the guards were playing on me or something truer?

  “Forgive me,” he said, extending his hand. “I should introduce myself. Matthieu Zéla.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Zéla,” I said, shaking it. “What class of a name is that, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “French,” he told me. “I was born there. Some years ago now.”

  “I’ve never much held with the French,” I said. “No offense, Mr. Zéla.”

  “Matthieu, please. And no offense taken. You’ve visited my country, then?”

  “No, never.”

  “Then might I ask the cause for your complaint?”

  “Aye,” I said. “Well, truth be told, I don’t like the cut of their jib.”

  “I see. A well-constructed argument.”

  “And what brings you here?” I asked. “You don’t look like a man who spends very much time in Her Majesty’s prisons.”

  “As it happens, I’ve seen more than my share of these sorts of places,” he said. “I have a nephew who occasionally finds himself in need of bail. But I haven’t come here to talk about myself, but rather to talk about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes, and this novel that you wrote. Sir Walter read it.”

  “No!” I said, for Sir
Walter Scott had always seemed a person of almost mythological existence to me. To think of him sitting in his armchair turning the pages of my manuscript was almost overwhelming. “That’s very kind of him. And you know him, you say?”

  “Oh yes,” replied Zéla. “We’ve been friends for quite some time. I attended a talk he gave once in Edinburgh and we indulged in refreshments of an alcoholic nature afterward, passing the hours with a discussion over the nature of fiction. He’s a fine fellow. He would have come himself, only he’s traveling at the moment. His publishers have taken him to London, where he’s to offer a series of talks and readings to the paying public.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “So he sent me in his stead. He admired your book a great deal. He said that it is not without flaws but these could easily be remedied with a little more work on your part and a little advice on his. Indeed, he has given me some notes to pass along to you. I hope they won’t cause you any offense?”

  He reached into his satchel once again, this time retrieving a half-dozen pages, on which a small spidery handwriting could be seen. “It’s mostly to do with plot, the passage of time, that sort of thing,” continued Mr. Zéla. “Sir Walter is very good on that so I’m sure his advice will be well worth taking.”

  “And I’m most grateful for it,” I said, accepting the pages and looking through them quickly, although I knew I would pore over them when I returned to my cell later.

  “One thing he wanted to know, though,” he continued, “is whether you are a musician yourself?”