The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  Though I’d suspected he knew this, his announcement was unsettling. “The Well of Light.” I nodded. “Yes, I was there fourteen years ago. How did you find out?”

  “Few Westerners know the place existed, and even fewer Soviet officials of the day. It is one of Sufism’s best-kept secrets.” A look of amused curiosity came into his face. “There were speculations that you might be a spy.”

  “You don’t believe that, I hope.”

  “Shouldn’t I? Would you tell me?” He studied my face with even-tempered good humor. “But this does not worry my friends in Samarkand or Tashkent. The place had no military secrets. In a sense, aren’t we all spies?”

  “The only secrets I learned there had to do with sacred architecture. But you talk about it in the past tense.”

  “It is sealed up,” he said without emotion. “An earthquake collapsed the entranceways into its underground vaults. There is no secret mosque now, no Well of Light, no witness to the Earth of Hurqalya. Members of the school believe that the catastrophe was foretold by the school’s founder, Ali Shirazi himself. He said, in a phrase that few people have understood, that it would ‘open up the Well of Light.’ ”

  “What a tragedy!”

  “ ‘We live between the death of the old gods and the birth of the new.’ ” He quoted the German poet Hölderlin. “The great esoteric schools are mutating into forms we cannot predict. That is the case with the fellowship of Ali Shirazi, with most Sufi groups of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Iran. It is also true for nearly every school of hesychast prayer, and most Cabalists. It is hard to know what will take their place. There are a thousand new prophets now, and an avatar born every day. But just a few will last. Most mutations perish.” He said all this with the same even-tempered expression he’d displayed since our talk began, giving no evidence of regret. “But unfortunately, our time is up.” He rose slowly, still holding the beads he’d picked up from the floor. “It is past six o’clock. I hope I have been helpful.”

  Surprised, and disappointed, I didn’t respond at once. As I rose, he shook my hand. “Let us walk to your car together.” He ushered me into the night. “It is a beautiful evening.”

  Outside, the air had a fresh autumn bite, faintly laced with smoke from a distant chimney. He went ahead of me down the path, making no effort at conversation. Only our footsteps broke the stillness.

  Then I slowed my steps. Someone was groaning, or chanting, or calling for help. As I turned to locate the sounds, I saw a tall, narrow light beyond the ghostly birch trees. It came from a window in the necromanteion. “What is that building?” I asked, pretending ignorance.

  Ryzhkov stopped. It was evident now that the sounds came from some sort of prayer. “It is my own Well of Light,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

  I was startled by his invitation. “Yes,” I said. “It would be a privilege.”

  He led me through birch and pine trees to a clearing near the building. The chanting was louder now. It involved two, or perhaps three people. He gave a low whistle, and a second, and it stopped. There were no sounds of human movement, no rustling of leaves. Then the light in the window went out. “Wait,” he whispered. “Someone is coming.”

  A moment later, the woman who’d met me an hour before came around the tower. Ryzhkov said something in Russian, gestured for me to follow, and led us to a wooden door. Pulling it open, he waited for her to pass, then gestured for me to go inside.

  Lowering my head, I stepped into a cool black space filled with a fragrance of incense and stone. The only thing I could see was a narrow, faintly luminescent rectangle some eight or ten feet above me. It was impossible to tell where the woman had gone, or estimate the dimensions of the building. Ryzhkov touched my shoulder. “Sit here,” he whispered, helping me to a bench.

  There were receding footsteps, then silence. The dim rectangle hovered almost directly above me. But as my eyes adapted, a few parts of the ceiling appeared. It seemed that the tower was thirty or forty feet high.

  The place was deeply silent. There was no rustling of clothes, no movement of feet, no sounds of breathing. I looked again at the luminescence. Something had appeared in its frame, just a flickering. There was a tiny point of light, blinking as if to send me a signal. “Take hold of what you know.” I heard Ryzhkov’s voice. “Take hold of it now!”

  Startled, I looked around me. The place was still silent, and no figure was visible in the dark. Deciding I’d imagined the words, I looked again at the tall, narrow light. In the brief moment I’d glanced away, a second luminous point had appeared within it.

  Had the tower moved? The thought sent a shiver through me. Something about the place was changing, and I held onto the bench for support. My body seemed lighter now, my hearing more acute, and from a distant echo chamber there whispered the voice of Shivas Irons. “Michael, the stars are all around ye. They’re even heer beneath yer feet.” I remembered the moment he’d said it in the ravine by the thirteenth hole. “See the stars beneath yer feet.…”

  Then his voice came more clearly, with all the r’s rolled and each nuance of his manly inflection intact. “The entire world is heer inside us.” It was almost by my side. “Ye don’t have to move an inch.”

  There could be no doubt about it now. The voice was coming from somewhere beyond my ordinary process of recollection. “Ye can find me,” it said. “Keep comin’. I’m not very far away. The whole world is heer inside us.”

  Holding the bench to keep my balance, I noticed for the first time that it was made of stone. For reassurance, I grasped it with both hands, and felt the rock floor with my feet. Each of the words had Shivas Irons’s unmistakable burr, and they were coming from somewhere near me.

  And in a darkness deeper than the tower’s dark, in a place beyond sleep and dreams, there was the image of a face … a long face with blue eyes and red hair falling across its forehead. “The Kingdom’s coming, but it’s already here.” His voice was immediately present. “But no words, or philosophy, or state can hold it.” Waves were breaking, and there was a smell of the sea. I sensed that he wanted me to go for a swim from the rocks beyond his shoulder.

  “Where are you?” My question welled up as if it were always being asked. “How can I find you?”

  “Keep coming.” His speech shifted from Scots to King’s English. “Imagine. Practice. Start again. I’m not so far away.”

  Wonder, fear, joy, and sadness, all were suddenly present in me. My feelings were changing as fast as his face. “Are you living in Scotland?” I asked.

  “Yes,” came his suddenly distant reply. “And other places, too. But ye can’t reach me with a touring map. Ye’ve got to be more agile. Move more freely, see with more of yer eyes, feel with more of yer heart. There’s more freedom where I’m living, to love, to know, to move, but ye never have to go from home.”

  There was just the darkness now, and the cold stone floor beneath my feet. The tower was deeply silent. The little lights were gone. Even the rectangle seemed to be fading. Still holding the bench for support, I wondered whether there were vaults beneath me. Did the tower rest on a cavern as deep as the Well of Light?

  “Murphy,” Ryzhkov whispered. “Be careful when you stand.” He helped me up, and led me slowly through the dark. At the door I turned to see a taper lit on the tower wall, and a narrow ledge near the ceiling upon which two figures sat. Disoriented, I stepped outside and looked around me. Stars were shining through the trees, and two jumped through the branches toward me. They were the tiny points I’d seen. The luminescence had come from the sky that was visible through the necromanteion’s window.

  Ryzhkov shut the door behind us and started toward my car. Had he heard the voice of Shivas Irons? When he stopped to open the gate, I asked if he’d felt something strange.

  “What happened?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  I described the voice of Shivas Irons, repeated its admonitions, and asked if he had heard it.

  “No,” he answ
ered. “It spoke to you.”

  “Is your necromanteion like the mosque near Samarkand?” Even as I asked it, the question surprised me. “Are there vaults underneath it?”

  “When the old schools die, we must give them new form.” Amusement came into his face. “As you could see, it is not as big as the Well of Light. But it is big enough.”

  “Could I build a necromanteion?”

  “You already have one,” he said. “The golf course on MacDuff’s old property.”

  “But it’s closed now. Like the mosque. An English family bought it and tore down all the buildings. They use the place for hunting.”

  For a moment, he didn’t respond. “But you have other places,” he said. “Any golf course can be a necromanteion. Each can be a Well of Light.”

  * Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE HIGH BRICK Kremlin walls with their towers and parapets, and the striped onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, all brilliantly lit on this balmy September night, gave Red Square the same power and sense of place it had under Soviet rule. But the place was different now. Walking up the cobblestone incline from the former Marx Prospect, now given its old Russian name, Okhotny Riad, I looked around me for beggars, potential pickpockets, and Russian toughs looking for fights. As if to confirm my caution, two Japanese tourists were shouting after a man in a leather jacket who appeared to have stolen something from them.

  The center of Moscow wasn’t as secure as it had been, but was alive this night with good feeling and a sense of adventure. Several young Germans came striding past, shouting, flirting, and breaking into sprints across the square. Someone was singing an Italian aria as a large Uzbek family, evidently on a tour, gathered with broad smiles to let a Japanese group photograph them. Checking to see if the hip pocket that held my wallet was buttoned, I skirted a gathering of swarthy young men who looked to be from the Caucasus. With a conspiratorial look, one of them held up a silver flask, apparently to offer me a drink. When I waved him away, one of his companions held up a box of condoms. I had never experienced such vitality and latent disorder in Red Square. There were new freedoms here now, more diversity, and a sense of lurking violence. How many people in the crowd were carrying knives or guns?

  Still, it seemed a good place to get my bearings. In its huge well-lit expanse, there was enough room to be alone while assimilating my experience in Ryzhkov’s tower. Halfway between Lenin’s tomb and the GUM department store, I found a relatively open space where I could enjoy the kaleidoscope of human activity and begin to sort out my thoughts.

  For all these years, had I used the wrong ways to find Shivas Irons? Ryzhkov’s proposal seemed to have been confirmed by the voice I’d heard in his necromanteion. “Keep coming. I’m not so far away.” During my drive from Peredelkino, the words had run through my mind relentlessly, with every nuance of Shivas’s burr intact. It was uncanny that his voice had come just a few minutes after Ryzhkov’s suggestion. There had been other moments in the last seven years, at MacDuff’s property, in Nadia’s necromanteion, during moments of vivid and unexpected recollection, when some presence or power related to Shivas had come especially close. They were moments to build on. They gave me doors to pass through. If nothing else, my search had taught me that memory and imagination have well-guarded thresholds beyond which life-changing discoveries await us.

  A few feet away, a tall, bearded man in brown denim slacks and a blue windbreaker stood looking in the direction of Lenin’s tomb. “There must be a high wind blowing,” he said with what sounded like a British inflection. “See those flags on the Kremlin wall? How do they keep them flapping?” It wasn’t clear to whom he spoke, but no one else stood near us. Had he addressed the question to me? “What do you think?” he asked. “It’s quiet here. Is there a wind above the Kremlin?”

  He was about six foot three, had reddish brown hair, and his left eye was slightly crossed. But it was hard to tell how old he was. He might be thirty or sixty.

  “I’ve heard they use a wind machine,” I ventured. “It adds to the drama.”

  “They’re good at spectacles,” he said with admiration. “You’ve got to like their spirit. The Tatars, Napoleon, Hitler. No one has conquered them, unless you count that fellow in the tomb, and the other one who used to be there. They could fly kites on a windless day.”

  It was an odd string of thoughts, but triggered a sense of recognition. Had I met the man before? “I’ve seen Russians try it,” I said. “For all they’ve been through, for all their sufferings, they harbor amazing hopes.”

  “You mean fly kites on a windless day?” He turned to face me. “You’ve actually seen that?”

  “There was a contest here in one of the parks during the Brezhnev years. I was there. I saw it. Fifty or a hundred people with the damnedest contraptions you’ve ever seen, trying to get them in the air without any wind at all. It was hilarious.”

  “It’s something to learn from.” The man gave me a winsome buck-toothed smile. “You never know when a wind will come up. No one can predict it perfectly. Are you a frequent visitor?”

  Now I was sure I’d met him. “Since 1980, but I came here first in ’71. My wife organizes Soviet-American cultural exchanges. She’s been here fifty times.”

  “Well, she must be willing to fly a kite on a windless day!”

  “Haven’t we met?” I asked. “You look familiar. Do you come here very often?”

  “Perhaps we’ve met at Spasso House.” He referred to the American ambassador’s sumptuous residence. “Did you know Matlock or the Hartmans?”

  “The Hartmans. They were good to us. Yes, we could’ve met there. What do you do here?”

  He turned to look at the Kremlin. “Trade,” he said vaguely. “And a little finance.”

  Then I remembered. His name was Wilson Lancaster. I’d seen him at Spasso House in the 1980s, during a performance by Pearl Bailey staged by Arthur and Donna Hartman, the ambassador and his wife. Gennady Muhammadov, who had taken me to the Well of Light in the deserts near Samarkand, had pointed him out to me, claiming that he was Britain’s chief of intelligence in Moscow. From the moment I’d seen him, I’d been struck—and was again now—by his resemblance to Shivas Irons. The same height, the same reddish hair, the same slightly crossed left eye, and now this metaphor. During our day together, Shivas had said more than once that we are kites in the winds of spirit. It was stunning that the man had appeared an hour after Ryzhkov’s suggestion and the voice I’d heard in his necromanteion.

  But there are different kinds of synchronicity—some false, some evanescent. I wouldn’t force this one, or make any judgments about it. “Business must be tricky here,” I said. “Are you having any luck?”

  “It’s like the Klondike, or the California gold rush.” He turned to survey the square. “You’ve got to be lucky, careful, and quick on your feet.”

  “How’s foreign investment going?”

  “Slow, I think, for you Americans. A little better for the Germans. But surprisingly well for the Italians.” He paused. “And speaking of Italians, hello!” He waved toward a group of young men who looked to be from the Caucasus, in the midst of which stood Ziparelli! “Hello, Horace!” he shouted, then excused himself and strode away.

  Keeping passersby between us, I followed at a distance. If this was a meaningful set of coincidences, I wanted to see if it would unfold without my interference.

  Ziparelli introduced Lancaster to his leather-jacketed companions. “These are my friends from Georgia!” he exclaimed loudly in English. “They are traders, international financiers, and pioneers of the Russian recycling business!” Apparently, they shipped wastepaper and other garbage down the Volga through the Black Sea to Sicily. There were five in the group, and at least two of them carried pistols.

  Lancaster asked about the Moscow Country Club and watched a brief demonstration of the golf swing’s basic compo
nents. Then Ziparelli saw me. “Murphy!” he cried. “You are here! I cannot believe it!” He had shaved and was dressed in a stylish grey suit. “This is a great golfer!” he said. “Murphy, meet my friends!” He introduced me to Lancaster and his companions, reciting a series of Georgian names too rapidly for me to remember. “Wilson,” he said, “this man can hit the ball! We should have a threesome tomorrow!”

  “Ah, what a shame! I can’t,” said Lancaster. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “But you are a free man. Stay.” Ziparelli put a hand on his shoulder. “I will call our friend Bondarenko. He is my partner now. My partner, can you believe it? He no longer works in secret.”

  Lancaster looked at me. “Bondarenko?” he asked, an eyebrow arched. “How do you know him?”

  “Horace introduced us,” I said. “We only met yesterday.”

  He gave me his buck-toothed smile and turned to Ziparelli. “Horace, I’m sorry,” he said, with what seemed to be genuine regret. “We’ll have to wait until you’re in London next.”

  One of the Georgians tapped my shoulder. He was about five foot six, had thick black eyebrows, and hadn’t shaved for several days. “For you,” he whispered, offering me a box of condoms. “It is cheap.”

  Every one of the Georgians smiled. “What kind are they?” I asked, not wanting to be a spoilsport.

  “Russian.” He winked at the others. “They stand up by themselves!”

  “They are made from old tires,” said one of his companions. “They are from Russian recycling and still have treads. Once you get in, you cannot get out.”