The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  Where there were people, there were spies. The pink Petersburg stones had always been unquiet with the tectonics of revolutionary forces. To attract the attention of the Tsarist variety would be problematic, while to attract the revolutionary variety would be disastrous. Saskia sat in the rear of the covered compartment. It was darkest there. She let the faces impress upon her instant by instant, as if each were a word in a book, and tried to discern errors in their grammar. The spy as error, as a dropped stitch. She smiled. No, she thought, no matches yet. But there will be a price on my head not much smaller than the heist expropriation. Do they still look for me in St Petersburg? Probably.

  Saskia needed to be lucky.

  Her cabbie took her across the Nikolayevsky Bridge, which joined Vasilyevsky Island to the mainland near the western corner of the Winter Palace. The red paint on the government buildings was peeling. Saskia watched the birds wheel above squares and the canals. The cabbie stood to bow towards the Orthodox chapel in the centre of the bridge. He did not slow his horses.

  They passed the Hermitage, the golden spire of the Admiralty, and entered Nevsky Avenue, its buildings elegant as a parade, their styles countless.

  At the hotel, Saskia checked in using her Danish passport. Her trunk was carried to her room. She asked for tea and the most recent edition of the Morgenbladet while she rested in the reading room. The best the waiter could do was the Financial Times, and one third of that had been obscured using black ink by the imperial censor.

  Later in the day, she received a note from a waiter. It had two wax seals. When she opened the note, the paper was blank. Saskia did not stop to finish her tea. She went upstairs to her suite. There, she held the note over a candle and watched as the paper darkened to reveal white letters. It reminded her of Draganov’s business card.

  Calamity! Execution date brought forward by bureaucrat. Knight died bravely last Wednesday at midday along with fifty more comrades. I am so sorry. Assume plan is cancelled. Will make arrangements.

  R.

  Saskia lowered Robespierre’s note another centimetre and watched it burn. She recalled a poetaster in the Outfit called Yevgeny who was fond of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. Yevgeny was forever reciting the words until they passed into cliché and dulled. But their brightness returned now, as Saskia pondered them in FitzGerald’s translation.

  The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety, nor Wit,

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

  When the paper was ash, she brushed her hand clean and went to her trunk. Inside she found the dark costume of a Finnish doorway woman, enough roubles to bribe all the guards of the Prison for Solitary Confinement twice over, the prison’s blueprints, and contacts for the river men who were to transport Saskia and Draganov down the Neva once they had escaped the outer wall. Now these things were for nothing. Saskia had failed him.

  She reached to the bottom of the trunk and took out a bottle of vodka. There was a shaving pot in the bathroom. She put some vodka in that, drank it, and buzzed for a boy. She took a sheet of headed paper from the bureau and wrote:

  Dear General,

  I was instrumental in the robbery of the State Bank of Georgia, which took place on 13th June last year. While transporting the spoils to St Petersburg, I had a change of heart and diverted the money to the School for the Blind as a charitable donation: twin dressers, each with a false compartment at the rear. There you will find the money satchels.

  In haste,

  A friend

  This note she placed in an envelope addressed to General Aleksandr Gerasimov, Fontanka 16.

  She drew a second piece of paper and wrote:

  My dear, I am disconsolate. Don’t wait for me.

  Yours,

  T

  This she addressed to Max—Robespierre’s current cryptonym—at a hotel in the north-east of St Petersburg. She gave both envelopes to the boy when he came. Then she loosened the buttons on her blouse and lay on the bed. She wondered what it would feel like to die. Would it be like going home? Her memories of those parallel universes, and the two deaths there, were half-formed, as though they had happened to someone else. Would it be like rebirth, into nothing?

  The stump of her wrist itched. She scratched it, thinking, Not yet.

  She wondered if her Plan B was going to work. She felt like a fool; the jingling, irritating complement of a knight who highlights the virtues of the knight through contrast.

  ~

  After sunset, the house on the Moika was glorious beneath floes of cloud, and dramatic with electric light and its rolling flags: the Imperial and Tsar Ivan’s double-headed eagle. Saskia stood across the street. She had adopted the costume of the Finnish doorway woman, rolled in some dust and old manure, and bought the stock of a nearby abacus seller. Now, as a downtrodden abacus seller herself, late in a hard life, she rested with her shoulder against a telegraph pole. The electric traffic within the pole fell upon her as a cascade of whispers.

  She waited until midnight. Then she left her abacuses in a pile, set fire to it, and ambled across the road. She watched the flames grow from the anonymity of shadow next to Nakhimov residence. Passers-by stopped to look. A shopkeeper came down from his flat and struck at the blaze with his nightcap. Finally, a policeman approached and created a perimeter. These dozen people, including the duty footman of the Nakhimovs, waited for the arrival of a horse-drawn fire engine, whose bell could already be heard from the direction of the Admiralty.

  The light reflected in the eyes of Saskia until she turned away, expressionless, and climbed the Nakhimov house using the drainpipe and the gaps between its stones. Because she was a dark shape against the light facade, she did not stop when she reached the Imperial flag. She made a risky grab for its base and swung her foot onto the small balcony behind it. She slipped onto the balcony and crouched, panting. Her heart rang like the bell of the fire engine.

  She pushed her way inside. This was the library. Here, she had waited to meet the Countess and Pavel Eduardovitch those three months before, when she had hoped to journey home through the Amber Room. The piano, bought for the birth of Ludmilla, was still there. There was a reality in which the piano was indeed played by her; but not this one.

  The library was lit by floor lamps near its three closed doorways. The books seemed to watch her. Saskia shook her head at this notion; it was the lens of her fear warping the room, nothing more.

  I will lead my fear, she thought.

  She waited for the clocks to strike the half hour. Then she hurried.

  ~

  At midnight, when Pasha had been sleeping in his bed long enough, Saskia opened her eyes. She had been hanging upside down in a dark corner of his room for two hours, unnoticed. She turned her head until the cartilage in her neck loosened with a click. She unwrapped her legs from the chain of the chandelier and lowered herself into a vertical position. Her legs were numb but not lifeless and she dropped onto a bear rug and crouched until the burning of the blood passed.

  ‘Good evening, Ms Tucholsky,’ said Pasha. He was sitting upright in his bed. Trunks and suitcases had been stacked behind him. As ever, the monogram on the lapel of his pyjamas made a constellation in the darkness.

  ‘We’re beyond that,’ said Saskia. She did not move from her crouch. ‘You know me now as Saskia Brandt.’

  ‘I see you as well as you see me, my friend.’

  ‘Do you see me now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pasha moved so that he was sitting cross-legged on his bed. He smiled. ‘Are you scared?’

  Saskia rose. Her plimsolls were quiet on the floor, but the wood popped. Street sounds could be heard through the open window. She reached the end of the bed.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘A young woman in black clothes. Your eyes are black but your skin is white, patterned darkly.’

  ‘The pattern is my vasculature. You see not only past t
he darkness, Pasha, but deeper. You are now sensitive to wavelengths of light above and below that of other people.’

  ‘Wavelengths?’

  ‘The spatial period of a wave. The waves in this case are those of electromagnetic radiation. The wavelengths can be very short, or very long, and we plot all lengths on a dimension known as the electromagnetic spectrum. The majority of what you see at this moment is derived from the near-infra red, which you can think of as wavelengths slightly longer than what normal people label as red.’

  Pasha looked at his hands. ‘I can see further into myself.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Saskia, carefully.

  ‘What else can I do? I am stronger, of course. Yesterday, I tried to lift my bureau. It was impossible at first, but then I felt a second strength combine with my own, and the bureau rose.’

  ‘Did your arms hurt afterwards?’

  ‘Yes. Tremendously. Is that the cost of this power?’

  ‘Cost,’ said Saskia, ‘is not the right word. Your muscles and skeleton, and all the connecting tissues, are designed for a given capacity of work. When you exceed that capacity, you hurt yourself. But the thing that gives you strength also gives you the capacity to recover more quickly.’

  ‘Can I die?’

  Saskia looked at the black handkerchief around her amputation. ‘That,’ she said, ‘will be difficult.’

  ‘Yet this is not a gift?’

  Saskia sat on the edge of the bed, put her elbow on her knee, and cupped her chin.

  ‘Pavel Eduardovitch, I could not leave you to die. I didn’t think about your future, or mine, or that of the thing I put inside your body. I’m sorry.’

  ‘This thing—is it a spell?’

  ‘At one level it is a spell. At another, it can be explained in the language of science. You can choose which.’

  ‘I choose science.’

  Saskia raised an eyebrow and looked at him. He expected her to be proud of that statement, but she was not.

  ‘What about your faith?’

  Pasha smiled. ‘“O Lord, revive me, for Your name’s sake. For Your righteousness, deliver my soul from danger.” Is it not so?’

  There was a new strength to his voice. Saskia wanted to believe that it was not the i-Core, an alien addition, but a hint of the parallel Pavel Eduardovitch.

  ‘You are a strong person,’ she said. The lower lids of her eyes brimmed. ‘Stronger than me, I would say.’

  ‘When I dream,’ he said, ‘the spell talks to me through the mouths of dogs. What about you, Ms Brandt?’

  ‘Sparrows.’

  Pasha nodded. Saskia felt his eyes on her for long seconds. He was deciding whether or not to ask a question.

  ‘Speak, Pavel Eduardovitch.’

  ‘Please, don’t be sad. You have given me life, and other things. I dreamed that the dogs formed a team and pulled my sled across miles of snow until I came to a place not unlike the Great Summer Palace but made entirely of ice. Inside, I found the Amber Room. Its walls were transparent and it had no ceiling. A woman was sitting there, at a piano, playing while the snow fell.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No, my sister Ludmilla.’

  Saskia turned to him.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She played me a beautiful piece on the piano. She had … she had,’ Pasha swallowed and looked down. In a wavering voice, he said, ‘She had Mother’s eyes.’

  Saskia reached across the bed and embraced him. His frame felt lanky and weak. Pasha wept on her shoulder and Saskia cried, too, remembering the bloody tears that she had once shed. She pushed his cheek against hers and felt the warmth of his neck. She could not avoid the dark thought that within him, inside that warm blood, was the i-Core.

  He sees the technology as dogs, Saskia thought. Can he infect other animals? Could he see through the eyes of a dog as it locks its jaw around the neck of a man? Is that my gift?

  ‘Come with me,’ said Pasha, when his breathing had slowed. Saskia relaxed her grip but Pasha still held tight. ‘I’m going on a Grand Tour. It was my idea and Mother agrees.’

  ‘What about your position at the Lyceum?’

  ‘Mathematics no longer interests me.’ His voice had grown younger. ‘I want to know about science.’

  Saskia looked at the suitcases behind his bed.

  ‘You’re taking most of the house with you.’

  ‘Only the essentials.’

  Saskia, still holding him, looked once more at the black handkerchief around her amputation. She understood that accompanying Pasha would be a great risk for him. Yet there was a youthful power in his body, and it spoke to her.

  ‘I cannot come with you,’ she said. At his disappointed sigh, she continued, ‘At least, not as you know me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  They were looking at one another now.

  ‘I am going away,’ she said, ‘but not in the manner you think. Do you remember when you were shot in the abdomen?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pasha, fiercely. ‘They told me there had been no wound and that the blood belonged to a revolutionary, but I know this is nonsense.’

  ‘The way in which your wound disappeared is the way in which I am about to change.’

  ‘You’re talking about the person inside you,’ said Pasha. ‘It relates to what Dr Freud says about the unconscious, does it not?’

  Saskia nodded. ‘In a way. And it reminds me of the ship of Theseus. Do you know the conundrum?’

  ‘Yes, it is told by Plutarch.’

  ‘Then tell me now.’

  ‘There was a ship that was preserved by Greeks. In preserving it, they replaced all the oars, and all the planks, and everything that rotted over the years, until it was no longer the ship of Theseus.’

  ‘And yet it remained the ship of Theseus,’ said Saskia. ‘Just as you remain Pavel Eduardovitch, even though the years pass and the atoms that made you are replaced by new ones.’

  ‘What will happen to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I will sleep, and when I wake up, my name will be Ute. I will speak only German.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Pasha. ‘I speak German very well.’

  ‘Good. My name, then, will be Ute, and I will remember you only as someone dreamed. I will recognise you, I’m sure, but our friendship will need to begin again. I might look different.’

  ‘How?’

  Saskia thought of the night she woke in the Swiss barn, not long after the Georgian Papashvily had tried to kill her. Her left hand had been quickening.

  ‘People who recognise me now will recognise me no longer.’

  Pasha’s expression was one of delight and puzzlement. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. But the sparrows have spoken to me in my dreams, just as the dogs speak to you in yours.’

  ‘Will the transformation happen quickly?’

  ‘As soon as I will it.’

  Pasha took Saskia’s head in her hands. He moved to kiss her, and she worried about spoiling the moment with a rejection of his advance, but his lips did not touch hers. Instead, he kissed her forehead.

  ‘You’re my friend,’ he said. ‘We will leave tomorrow for one of our Crimean estates. I insist: I use the imperative tense.’

  ‘Mood.’

  ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘I agree,’ she said. His joy concerned her, but warmed her, too.

  ‘Will it be like dying?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think it will.’

  ~

  Later that night, in her room at the hotel, Saskia sang herself a nursery rhyme:

  ‘Sleep-sleep-sleep. Don’t lie on the edge of the bed or a grey wolf will come and bite you.’

  ~

  Saskia opened her eyes on the dream world. Its simple shore was gone, replaced by a range of black cliffs against which slammed grey waves higher than the tallest building in St Petersburg. On those cliffs stood a castle of ice. From Saskia’s perspective halfway up a staircase cut in the cliff
, the walls of the ice castle reached more than one hundred feet above the rock. She gasped as a wave hammered into the gully below her. The shock of the noise made her stumble against the cliff. Then the water fell down and it was all she could do to breathe and ride out the sudden cold.

  She took the steps one at a time. They zigzagged up the sheer cliff without a hand-rail or any barrier to the heights. She reached the top of the cliff and, breathing hard, touched the wall of the ice castle. It looked like dirty blue marble, yellowing at the base where the salt water had piled against it over the years. She could not enter the castle here. Instead, she would need to cross an ice bridge. The bridge looked like the one that the smuggler Yacov Emmanuilovich had used to help her cross the border. It was wide enough for a cart and had trellised ice rails.

  Ute was standing on the far side of the bridge. Behind her was the dark mouth of the portcullis. As always, this was the person Saskia saw in mirrors: A self-possessed, beautiful and sad woman aged about thirty. She was wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, and black trainers. Her rucksack was slung over one shoulder and her left hand—whole, fingers drumming—was hooked under the strap by a thumb. Her sad expression became watchful when she caught sight of Saskia.

  What does she see when she looks at me? thought Saskia. A witch? A gathering of sparrows in the form of a woman?

  Saskia stepped onto the bridge. It was firm underfoot. She made sure to keep to the centre. A fall to the dark waters below would be a long one. She stopped on the shallow apex as the uncountable mountains of water spent themselves on the rocks below.

  Ute approached Saskia and stopped, too. She seemed taller than usual. Ute’s hopeful expression changed to puzzlement.