by John Crowley
Next letter, postmarked Praha, March1968. Had he returned to America then from Vienna, and gone back again? Or stayed through the New Year into spring? “The visa you acquired for me with such effort seems to have worked. Am writing this on the train now between Vienna and Prague. When I was last there it was falling to the Nazis. Now the Russians may crush it. As once the armies of the Empire did. I conceived a novel there, about a werewolf let loose on the city.” Out of the envelope which held this letter there fell a postcard, without a message, printed obviously long before the letter was written: The Citadel of Prague/Praha, The Hradschin, the Cathedral of St. Wenceslaus, sepia towers against the oncoming clouds.
“You know the Work was actually said to have been completed in Prague city, in about the year 1588. There was undoubtedly some great excitement in this city then, a huge stir, which is certainly bound up with the appearance of some sort of immensely valuable something. It’s just unavoidable. Whether it was something found, or something made, or something coming into being just because the time was ripe; whether it was a process, or a treasure, or a person, or something entirely different—well I won’t say your guess is as good as mine, else why have you gone to such generous expense to get me here; but I will say I despair of discovering it under the countless coverings of time and change, not to mention the principal players’ own resolve to keep up the mumchance no matter what. And here come the greatcoats to check papers.”
Another sepia postcard: “Intourist has given me a room in a former convent of the Infantines, a wonderful Baroque building built for them by the great Bohemian magnate Peter of Rosmberk (sp?). I have my own cell. I imagine myself in black, Pure, and subsumed in prayer.”
Prague made him loquacious; there were many pages from that city.
“The strangely wonderful thing about Prague is that it is untouched. It went through the war almost without a scratch (the buildings, the stones I mean): was never shelled or bombed. And ever since it has been entombed in Socialism, which means that except for the usual atrocious concrete apartment blocks and a few statues of Uncle Joe, little has changed ‘post-war’ either; it hasn’t been rebuilt in the International style (glass boxes) or tarted up with new shopping districts or choked with cars. (Cars are the plague of Europe now, as bad as bombs, filling every street and square, shaking down the monuments. Here there are a few official Zivs with darkened windows. The rest of the populace walks, or bikes.) Look: here in the old part of town, untouched, is a street of medieval houses known as the Alchemists’ Street, ’cause that’s where some of the crowd of smokesellers lived and worked who were trying to produce the Elixir for the Emperor Rudolf II before their Imperial pensions ran out. One of them was Doctor Dee, with his menage of children, mediums, servants, and angelic counselors. Can his house be seen? Gotten into? I will find out, Boney, I promise you.”
There was a postcard somewhere here too, Boney remembered it, of this street; sepia, empty, the cardboard brown. Had they only had antique postcards for sale in that city? Or had Kraft perhaps never actually left the United States at all, and only sent him souvenirs gathered over there in other days, had them mailed home at intervals by a confederate abroad? Were the letters and the stories and the absurdly omniscient guidebook all a game, rigged for his instruction, or for Kraft’s amusement?
“Giordano Bruno was here in 1588, and the Emperor Rudolf II gave him 300 talari for reasons unspecified. Talari is Bruno’s word, ‘dollars’ is closer actually; the word ‘dollar,’ says the guidebook, comes from Tal, valley, because the great silver workings of Count Stefan Slik that supplied the imperial mints were located in Joachimstal, near Carlsbad. The Valley of the Dollars, sort of. The Bohemians, you know, were the greatest miners of Europe. Did you know that the Czech mountains were once full of gems? Do you think of gems as being found only elsewhere, in Burma or Peru? I do. But there were lots here. Says here that Rudolf was desperately fond of jewels, and had the most extensive collection anyone had ever heard of; he had a gem-hunter extraordinaire, Simon Tadeus by name, who worked up in the Giant Mountains—I was up there in the 1930s, Boney, in that brief, terribly brief period when this suffering nation was free.
“The Giant Mountains! Do you see the Seven Dwarves, marching home as evening falls, picks over their shoulders, their knapsacks alight with stones? I suppose Carlsbad has some sort of accommodations still. I will speak to my guide and keeper, an unlovely and gentle youth. I have a plan.”
This letter apparently continued after the interruption, or perhaps the next sheet was from another day, from the same pad of blue paper though:
“Rudolf II engages me more and more, one of those rare historical characters with whose plight you feel an instinctive sympathy. He was exactly the same age (I calculate to my astonishment) as Sir Philip Sidney! Sidney met him once when he was on a mission in Europe, a junket sort of, and found him ‘extremely Spaniolated,’ to his disgust. That came from his upbringing at the Spanish court of his uncle, Philip II. He always wore Spanish black and white, and had that characteristic ambivalence about his childhood that you see in people raised strict Catholics, a mixture of deep repugnance and unassuageable nostalgia. He was in some important sense not a Catholic at the end of his life, an amazing thing really at the time because he did not therefore become a Protestant either; he only abandoned, in terror, in disgust, in guilty dissatisfaction, his old religion. He is supposed to have refused the last rites.
“Of course there are a thousand portraits of him in this city he loved, to which he came I think to escape Vienna and the Jesuits; there are silver-gilt busts and equestrian portraits, etc. etc. My favorite though isn’t here, it’s in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in the deliciously horrible gallery of waxworks: a little plaque in high relief, about the size of a postcard, the Emperor in bright realistic colors, cherry cheeks, gold necklace, like a plastic souvenir; and his hand on the head of a favorite dog. He looks like a more subdued Orson Welles, but with a strange note (strange for an Emperor) of supplication in his eyes.
“You know, Boney, that when his physician—the Paracelsian iatrochemist Oswald Croll, this was—asked Rudolf why after all he longed so greatly to obtain the Elixir, the Emperor is said to have answered, That he might not die ever, and so not be judged. Is that your reason, Boney?”
The game, Boney had at length understood, had been Kraft’s very sophisticated way of flattering his aged patron, repaying him for the Foundation’s support by indulging him, seducing him almost it seemed at times: slyly, irresistibly persuading Boney, in the intimacy of their shared fantasy, to experience his own harmless but deep desires, his fears, his selfish hopes.
It was not his reason, no. He had no fear of being judged, had no fear at all of anything that he could name; he was only unable to feel the obligation to die: as though he had learned by rote the lines he would speak, ought to speak, when the scene had to be played, but now as at last it drew near, finding himself unable to speak them.
“That same Croll or Kroll, by the way (author of the Basilica Chymica), had a famous chest or trunk of some kind, containing I am not sure what, which after his sudden death (sudden for an iatrochemist) was sought for fiercely by the Emperor, who fought off the great noble Peter von Rosemberk, who also desperately wanted it. No mention of this trunk or chest after that. Where is it now? Where for that matter is the Perspective Lute, invented by Cornelius Drebbel; where is the Perpetual Motion Machine he made for the Emperor in 1610? Where is the Prophetic Automaton built in this city by Kepler’s friend Jöst Burgi, the clockmaker who invented the second? And what exactly did it prophesy?”
Boney dropped the sheet from his lap, unimportant he thought, not one of those to be sequestered. He raised his eyes. The day beyond his study was summer full-charged. Summer: promise and its satisfaction, yearning and sweetness all mixed, and so palpable as not to seem to be in Boney’s breast at all but in the day’s and only flowing unceasingly into him through all his senses.
Now shouldn’t these sensations begin to grow less intense, so that he could at least begin to resign them? He had heard his doctor say more than once that for the old and sick the world grows smaller and less dear, shrinking down to the compass of their sickrooms, its population reduced to a few or one or two (an heir, a nurse), all the rest forgotten. Which made it the easier to leave. That it was not so for him, that this summer day seemed not less but more precious than any day of any summer that had preceded it—couldn’t that be a sign, a sign that he was not to surrender it?
He would not, not till it was reft from him.
Yes, it had just been Sandy’s joke, a joke intended at once to needle and to titillate: pretending to believe that the Rasmussen Foundation had sent him on this crazy errand, to bring back from the Old World an elixir against. Death.
And yet here was his last telegram, here held in Boney’s brown ticking hand, from Czechoslovakia, dated 1968, one joke too many, which Boney had not dared question him about when he returned for fear of being mocked as cruelly as only Sandy could mock; and now he was dead and couldn’t explain:
MON EMPEREUR STOP HAVE WHAT I PROMISED YOU STOP PACKED W/ TROUBLES IN OLD KIT BAG STOP SMILE SMILE SMILE STOP SANDY
It’s six miles from Fellowes Kraft’s house to Boney Rasmussen’s, over a hill, through a wood, out along the open road, and down a dale. Pierce had no car, and had no way of telling Rosie Rasmussen he was done for the day and wanted to go home (his hours were very much his own), and so he’d told her that today he would walk to Arcady when he was done. Was he sure? It’s a hike. Sure, he liked to walk, he needed the exercise.
So she had drawn him a map, at his insistence (he could tell that she was one of those people who almost always know where they are in relation to other places they have been or might go, as he was not; one of those who when they said “south,” and pointed, really pointed south). He unfolded it now, half a long sheet of lined yellow paper, and it was indeed very simple.
He retrieved his bag from the house, locked Kraft’s door carefully behind him and pocketed the brown key. If you lose it, Rosie had said—and then no more, unable to think of consequences dire enough to threaten him with. He walked down the dusty drive.
A key, a house, a drive. Once his cousin Hildy had come home from boarding school with a game, a test actually she said, a psychological test, to be administered to each of them in private (so that one person’s answers wouldn’t influence the next subject’s) and with a certain solemnity.
Now you must say the first thing that comes to mind, she had said. You are going to imagine you are going up the front path to a house. Not this house or somebody you know’s house or any particular house. Tell me first what sort of path.
Nodding sagely at the response, no comment beyond that. Now you’re going in the house. You find a key. What sort of key? Where is it? What does it open? You find a cup. What cup? Where is it?
A cup. A door. Water. He couldn’t remember all the items there were, only that they were simple, and singular; and when the house had been traversed and left, the interpretations were given. The path to the house was your past life. Was it crooked or straight, muddy or tidy? The key was knowledge, how you felt about it, how you would use it. Pierce had seen in his mind an old brown Yale key, just like the one he had just now put in his pocket; he had known, somehow, that it was the key to the door to the basement. Hildy’s own key (she said) was a tiny one that unlocked a glass cabinet. The cup was love: Hildy’s was a translucent china teacup, delicate as sugar; and it was locked inside the cabinet with the key. Pierce had seen a sturdy and necessary mug, and through it there ran a dreadful crack, no kidding, I mean I just instantly saw it. Joe Boyd’s was a battered tin cup chained to the faucet.
Pierce looked at his map, turning it so that it matched the way he faced. He felt again in his pocket for Kraft’s key, and set off down the road rightward; it unrolled between two rows of ancient trees, scaly-barked, lop-limbed, titanic. Had they been planted here centuries ago, or were they the remnants of a forest, left standing by the roadside to shade the traveler? Seen from within the cool vault that they made, the fields and meadows were bright as stage sets or dioramas. Pierce stopped where the road crossed a tiny brook, and stood for a time watching the water run, amid the blue flags, over coppery stones.
Meaning. You were told the meaning of the cup, the door, the water, and discovered that you had unerringly attached the right referent to each, if you had assigned any at all (Sam’s house was nothing but his own house, the key his own house key, the cup his coffee cup). It was as though the meaning had come first, before there were actual cups and keys to hold it. The first language, which cups and keys, roads and houses, had only come into existence to illustrate, the language not of denotation but of meaning.
Was that what Bruno had been talking about? He and all those who ransacked their vocabularies (in Latin, Italian, French, English) for words that meant what logos means in Greek—“word,” “idea,” “reason,” none of them right or large enough. Maybe because they had no word such as Meaning has since become in English.
Meaning. The hidden interior light that makes things things, the light which casts a matching shadow in the mind, a picture, a glyph: not a picture of its shape or size or color, not a sign of its difference from me but of its likeness to me. A glyph combinable with others in a language hot enough, powerful enough, to dissolve the distance between Inside and Outside, the fountain and the mirror, strong enough to replace the thing with its meaning. To make wishes come true.
The door of Arcady stood open, only a screen covering it, itself not completely shut. Still Pierce pulled the brass knob of the bellpull, and waited. He was foolishly pleased to have got here without mishap.
When it appeared that no one was going to answer, he opened the screen and stepped in; and standing in the broad vestibule grew certain that there was no one at all in the house.
“Hello?”
He wouldn’t be sorry to have missed Boney Rasmussen, who made him uncomfortable, the more uncomfortable the more tactful and deferential he was. But he did need a ride home.
“Hello?” he said again, only to hear the salute fade into a confirming vacuity, no human presence. He seemed to have the house to himself.
He took a few steps down to the end of the vestibule, to the threshold of a large sitting room where he had not so far ever seen anyone sit. Dark drapes over lace petticoats to keep the sun from fading the rug. The cool cavern brought clammy sweat to his neck.
Rosie Rasmussen had told him that somewhere in the house Boney kept a real Renaissance crystal ball, once actually used for skrying, first owned, Boney had told her, by John Dee himself, a pedigree for which Pierce would have to see a lot of evidence before believing. He kept it, Rosie said, in a little wooden chest or drawer, locked with a key.
That one there?
A sort of commode of inlaid wood there had a top compartment, and he could see from where he stood a little key in its filigree lock. Just as he took a step toward it, a telephone went off beside him with the force of a burglar alarm; he leapt away from it, an aged black instrument on a spindly table under a lamp, probably the house’s original. He almost expected when it rang again to see it rattle in its cradle, like phones in cartoons.
If someone was in the house, the ringing would cease, an extension somewhere picked up. It didn’t cease. Pierce’s hand reached out to still its imploring, and he drew it back. It’s not for you, you dope. When it rang again, he picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Pierce? Oh I’m so glad, I didn’t think you’d answer.”
It was Rosie Rasmussen. Pierce grew conscious at that moment that Rosie’s station wagon had not been parked outside the house.
“Something’s happened,” she said, sounding far away. “I can’t come get you.”
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s Mr. Rasmussen,” she said. “Some kind of attack. I found him, he was on the floor. He
got a little better, but.”
The black receiver was cold against his ear, and as heavy as marble. “Heart?” he asked.
“They don’t know. He’s in Intensive Care. Anyway. Pierce. If you could think of some way to get home.”
“Sure. Sure. Listen don’t worry about it at all.”
“It’s the housekeeper’s day off …”
“I’ll think of something. I can always hitch.”
“Oh!” she said suddenly. “Spofford will be coming by to feed his sheep.”
Pierce had seen the sheep when he came in the gate, standing in the shade of Arcady’s oaks. “Oh. Okay. Fine.”
“What?” she said, but not to him, to someone beside her there where she was, the hospital; someone with news maybe. “Pierce I gotta go,” she said, and the phone was silent before he had said goodbye.
SEVEN
“Love,” said Val the Faraways astrologer to Rosie Rasmussen, and held out a fried-chicken wing to Rosie’s daughter Sam, who shook her head. “If they were making up the houses of the Zodiac now, there would have to be one house that’s the House of Love.”
“There isn’t?” Rosie said.
“No. It’s amazing.” Val stripped the meat from the wing herself with one practiced motion of fingers and teeth as Sam watched wide-eyed. “There’s Nati, that’s the fifth house, and that’s the House of Children basically: it sort of includes sex, or at least procreation, but it’s got to cover wills and legacies and inheritance too. And there’s Uxor, the seventh house, the Wife. Marriage, and partnership, and like relationships. But hey, I don’t have to tell you: that’s just not quite love.”
