by Tobias Hill
Hassan the giant comes in with tea, a bowl of olives, a bowl of persimmons. I watch him put the tray down on the side table, pour two cups. He doesn’t look at either of us. All his movements are quiet, like his walking. The tray he leaves behind is old lacquer, inlaid with leaves of gold. Beside me, Eva von Glött is still talking, on and on.
‘Pearls, yes. They have such a subtle beauty, so elegant. They grow. Little lives. They are a function of pain.’
She picks up an olive. Eats. Extracts the stone from her teeth. She is happy talking, and I wonder who she has to talk with, in her courtyarded mansion. I try to keep her going.
‘Pain.’
‘Pain? Yes, pain. The oyster has delicate flesh. Easily hurt. When grit becomes lodged there, it wraps up the pain in pearl. It smooths away the hurt. The pearl is a function of pain. But that must be part of its beauty, don’t you think?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘I think so, and I have thought about it a great deal.’ She drinks her tea. It smokes in the half-curtained light. ‘They have the charm of beautiful girls. They come in all the colours of human skin. You have good skin. If you looked after yourself, you could be quite pretty.’
‘If you say so.’
She begins to watch the television again. We sit together on the sofa, not talking. The woman who loves pearls and the woman who loves stones. Old friends, insulting one another.
The sound is turned off. A man and woman are having sex. Light and shadows fall across their flesh, their faces. All the colours of skin. Eva von Glött watches them with her mouth open, but only a little. When I can wait no longer I begin to talk, quietly.
‘I am looking for something. I heard you might be able to help. It’s a jewel. A great jewel. I’ve been looking for it for … I’d do anything to …’
I look down at my hands. The red knuckles, like conch pearls. I trace a shape on the skin. A triangle. A diamond.
‘It is a triangle of gold. A medieval design, from Burgundy. A knot as big as the palm of my hand. Gold set with eight stones. One diamond, three rubies, four pearls. The old name for it is the Three Brethren, les Trois Frères. It is–’
‘I know what it is,’ says the old woman. She doesn’t look away from the screen. Her voice is soft again. Thoughtful. ‘You are very clever, to find me here. Or very lucky. To bring me this nice gift. It is a gift?’
If you like.’
‘My father once held the Brethren.’
‘What?’
There is silence in the television light. I turn and stare at Glött, I can’t help myself. Her face in profile is softer, but the eyes remain sharp. The remote control is still in her hand.
‘Your father owned the Brethren?’
‘You don’t listen,’ says Glött. ‘My father collected fine jewellery, but he had no talent for money. This jewel you want. He was offered it in London. At the turn of the century. I think so. Unfortunately it was too expensive for my father. It was quite ridiculously expensive, and he was no longer quite ridiculously rich. It slipped through his hands. He regretted that for the rest of his life. He used to talk about it when he was drunk. It made him cry.’ She pauses the film. Turns to me. ‘I could never stand to see men cry.’
‘Who bought it?’
She shrugs. Pouts.
‘Who was the seller?’
‘How should I know?’
I sit quite still, watching her. What she says could be true. I know the Brethren was in England in the nineteenth century. The facts fit the fact, and the old woman looks as if she is telling the truth. Still, appearances are deceptive. I weigh her up. She begins to fidget under my gaze.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘I don’t know.’
Glött sets her lips. She doesn’t look embarrassed now, only proud. I have made a mistake. Sooner or later, I find, I always make a mistake. ‘I’ve heard stories of the Brethren before. People who have it. People who know people who have it. Always just stories …’
‘You don’t believe me.’ She picks up the control. Turns on the film again. The sound of gunfire fills the room.
‘Do you have any proof?’
‘Not for you.’ She whispers it. Her face is stony now, her eyes settling on the screen. Lips and cheekbones precise as waxwork.
I sit beside her. My eyes are on the film but I see nothing. I try to gauge the situation. Dispassionately, because I would never claim to be a good person, only good at what I do. If I leave now I will have to come back, tonight or tomorrow night. However large he is, I have only seen one guard, and one camera. But theft is no solution here. I don’t know what I want in this house, or what is thievable. All I have seen is an old woman with a head full of words. I would steal them, if I could.
The despair begins to rise up inside me. I try to force it away. Every day, for five years, it has become harder to ignore, and today is not a good day. Beside me the old woman cackles. When I look up she is watching me with bright eyes.
‘You’re in trouble now. Aren’t you? It shows. If I won’t help you, what will you do? If I don’t give you something. Where will you go? Eh?’
I don’t know. To myself I can say it. Not to her.
‘How long have you been looking?’ Her voice is gentler now. I shake my head and stand. The conch pearl is on the side table and I take it. The price of a flight to wherever I am going.
‘Wait. I said wait.’ Glött is pulling herself out of the sofa. Her legs are thin, stiff as sticks. They shake as she stands. ‘You will wait when I tell you to. I asked you how long you have been looking. Because I wonder how much you know about jewels.’
‘Everything I need to.’ I take a Turkish million-lira note from my pocket and wrap the pearl in it, like a bulse.
‘Yes, I’m sure you do,’ says the old woman. She takes an unsteady step towards me. Raises her voice, as if I am already gone. ‘I need someone. A servant.’
‘I’m not a servant.’
‘A worker. Someone who knows what they are looking at. My father liked stones. I have more than you have ever seen. Also many more than I will ever want.’ She takes another step. She is steadier now, tall for an old woman. ‘I have a proposition. Since you are here. I want you to catalogue my father’s stones.’
‘Why should I?’
‘To get what you want. My father’s diaries will be here. Business records. Work for me. We will see if we can find them.’
The exit is beside me. Sunlight inches through the curtain.
‘I am taking pity on you, Katharine Sterne. Make sure you accept it while it is still offered.’
I turn round and put down my case. The pearl is still in my hand and I hold it out. Glött waves it away. ‘Pff – keep it.’
‘No, it’s for you.’ I walk over to her. ‘I’ve never liked them.’
‘No?’ She raises a pencilled eyebrow. Takes the jewel. ‘Then I will teach you why you do. We have time.’
An aeroplane thunders overhead, a weight of metal balanced in the hot sky. Glött smiles up at me. Her teeth are blue-white, pink-white, yellow. All the colours of pearls. She extends her hand and I reach out and take it.
* * *
The lives of stones are the lives of the dead, which always lead back, never ahead.
My notebook looks old. I am burning the pages at both ends, charring them black with ink. I write methodically, covering all the steps I have taken. It is not like President Araf’s diary, with its precise little secrets. I do not write this so that it is never read. Here, there is an address from a soft-porn calendar. Here, a telephone number in northern Switzerland. In between, footnotes. The pages look old and so do I.
It is late as I write. Outside my window is a courtyard of black stone. The walls of this building are male basalt, and if I went outside and put my hand against them, I would feel their retained heat. The female stone would be cool underfoot. There are bats, I can hear them. They are fishing with their voices. Casting out little weights of sound. R
eeling them in.
I am in Diyarbak’r, in the house of Eva von Glött. I am writing the history of the Three Brethren, which is the story of myself. All its owners are dead, and the jewel is lost.
The leather flutter of bats. The house around me, heat fading from its stone roofs and corridors. For someone who loathes it, Glött has chosen herself a stony place to live. Possibly a house of pearl is still beyond her means. I imagine she’ll upgrade in a few years’ time.
Sleep nags at me. My pen is wandering. I am writing nothing tonight. I am not drawing the treasure map, the Brethren at the end of it, three steps east and one step back. This is only for myself. Soon the notebook will run out and then I will regret the pages I have wasted.
On the table beside me is a turquoise inscribed with Cufic script. The strokes of the characters are linear, primitive as axe-cuts. They are seven, eight, nine hundred years old. They will still be legible when the bleach in the pages of my notes begins to fail, the paper turning back to the colour of wood, the ink degrading. When the records written in my lifetime have been delaminated, the photographs faded to red skies and purple silhouettes, the inscriptions on jewels will be unchanged. Nothing is more permanent than stones. They are the Rosetta, the Avenue of Avebury, the Record of Darius.
All day I have been looking for an old woman. Tonight, I find myself thinking of my mother. She died when I was seven. Her name was Edith and she was old when I was born. I have a stone of hers somewhere, a garnet from a broken rope.
Edith. She smelt of the darkroom: old photographs and dried-out swimming pools. The darkroom smelt of her. Nothing in the house was as important as the blacked-out pantry beside the kitchen. It was the only room we could never know, an unexplored chemical darkness where Edith could disappear for minutes or hours, unreachable, the door not to be opened.
In bad dreams I imagined her dissolving into the dark as the door swung ajar, blackening like silver salt. A Eurydice of a mother. Only sometimes were we allowed inside, one at a time or fighting for the stool by the trays of hypo and developing fluid. In the airless space Edith would lean over us. Her yellowed fingers would pull pictures from the dark. Her voice: There, and there. Abracadabra. Particles of black silver growing into smiling faces. The smell of it was like nothing else. The scent of dangerous and precious things.
I find it hard to write about her. It pulls me away from my life. When I think of her I’m always looking back over my shoulder.
But this is the quality of the dead: they lead you back. Jewels do the same. The Three Brethren has lured me through five hundred years of history, and in the history of jewellery five hundred years is only the beginning. The earliest jewels are a hundred times older than the Brethren. Ostrich-shell beads, from the east of Africa. Along with worked stones, they are the oldest evidence of modern human intelligence. That in itself interests me: that jewels and weapons are the ways we recognise ourselves. The impulse to make these two things is our common ground, unchanged over fifty thousand years. We identify the function of the jewel as instinctively as that of the axe-head, and we infer intelligence from them both. The weapon is made from a need to kill. The jewel is made out of a love of things. Love and death are how we recognise ourselves in our ancestors. It is only to be expected.
They lead you back. I’m out. It is night. This is years ago. The club is in Hoxton and it is winter outside, but here, where people are dancing, it’s warmer. I am looking for someone. The crowd moves around me as I move through it.
The club walls are painted black. Music beats against them. The bass shudders inside me, under my breastbone. No one talks here, and not many of the people are dancing, nothing that purposeful. But they move, and they watch. There is pleasure in movement here, a low-grade adrenaline. A slow, furred static of sex.
I am looking for the man I came with. I left him talking to the DJ, but when I go back to the record tables he is gone, no one knows where. His name is Tricky, like the singer. His girlfriend is called Tricia. Tricky and Tricia. I am not his girlfriend. Nevertheless, I am with him, and I want him to take me home tonight. I move through the crowd. Behind the sound system is a matt black door. I try the handle and step through.
Inside the room are piles of gigantic speakers, scarred, black and monolithic. Between the speakers is a cot bed. On the bed is a boy. He is wearing a pair of combat trousers, no shoes, a cut-down string vest. He looks Japanese, both in himself and in his choice of clothes, and he is smiling. Not necessarily at me. There is a blue pill in his belly button.
I smile at him, or smile back. Even in here the music is loud. I have to shout a little. ‘Have you seen Tricky?’
Now he is certainly grinning at me. He points at the pill, snug in its cavity of flesh. I shake my head.
‘No – Tricky. You know Tricky?’
He shrugs. His shoulders are thin. The skin is tanned a colour between ochre and ash. It occurs to me that he is beautiful. Not handsome but really beautiful, like a girl. When he talks his English is good. It has a slight accent, American or Canadian. ‘No, but I wish I was him. Are you sure you won’t join me?’
He takes a pantomime breath, holds it in, and puffs out his belly. His face is staring and surprised. With the pill in its orifice he looks like some strange parody of a belly dancer, and I have to laugh. The music is muted now and I realise the door has swung shut. I don’t look round. I nod at the pill.
‘What is it?’
He picks it out. Holds it up between finger and thumb, next to his grin. He turns it, like a key. His eyebrows go up, dark and thin. ‘Trip or treat?’
‘Trip or trap.’
‘No!’ He sits up and looks wounded. More pantomime. ‘Come on. This cost me about forty bucks. That’s how much I like you already.’
‘I never take sweets from strangers.’
He holds out his hand. ‘Yohei.’
‘Katharine.’ We shake hands. I sit down on the camp bed.
‘There. Now we’re not so strange.’ He holds out the pill. It is bright blue, the colour of a fine turquoise. Yohei lies back, wrestles with his trouser pocket, and pulls out another pill. It looks the same as mine. He holds it up.
‘Katharine, I would like to make a toast. Okay?’
Okay.’
‘To sweets from strangers.’
‘Sweets from strangers.’ We click the pills, like little dice. They last all night. The next day, after the sun comes up, we make love.
I remember kissing him. There were tiny hairs on his forehead and cheeks, a down that caught the light like dust. He was a gentle lover. I only knew him for six months before he went back to Canada. In the way such things happen in real life, I suspect I’ll never see him again. We talked about that once. There was a term in Japanese, he said. Eng. It was both a concept and a word of advice. It meant that anyone you meet may be the most imporant person in your life. Therefore, that every stranger should be treated as a friend. Loved before it is too late. You never know (he said) in which night your ship is passing.
He loved Britain. He was obsessed with the Royal Family. It was his Japanese blood, he said, and if it hadn’t been the royals it would have been some other British icon. There were worse things than Diana, he said, in a society capable of sock suspenders and hotels that sold food like aeroplane meals.
When we went to the Tower of London it was Yohei’s third time. I had never been before. He gave me a guided tour. We were both hung over, juicy with sex. It was a white-skied day. England in the spring.
‘Don’t feed them.’
‘Why?’
‘It says. Look.’
He looks. A yard out across the lawn are two signs. One says: KEEP OFF THE GRASS. The other says: DON’T FEED THE RAVENS. Two of them step up towards Yohei. Coy, sidestepping birds. Muscled as pitbulls. Their beaks are like something from the Royal Armoury.
‘Listen, if ice-cream cones could kill these fuckers, they’d have been dead centuries ago.’ He throws them half a cigarette. The nearest bird sna
ps it up, clack. A man walks past backwards, murmuring into his camcorder.
Yohei stands up. ‘Okay. Jewel House.’ I sag.
‘Jesus, Yohei, what did you have for breakfast?’
‘You. Come on. I thought you liked stones.’
‘I do.’ We are walking already. There is a queue outside the Jewel House door. An old woman asks me if I can direct her to the little girls’ room. Yohei directs her. The smell of traffic drifts down from Tower Bridge.
Inch by inch, we advance inside. Pressed in with the crowd, we pass Rundell & Bridge’s Offering Sword with its swirls of brilliants and emeralds. Between two travelators is a long showcase full of crowns. Yohei points them out as we trundle past. The Queen Mother’s. Saint Edward’s. Last of all, the Imperial State Crown.
It is covered with diamonds like bright encrustations of salt. The brilliance makes it hard to see and we go back again for another pass. I take the back travelator, Yohei the front. He waves his hands through the glass, pointing out jewels for me. The Stuart sapphire is big as a plum but thin, a sliver of blue the colour of eyes. On top of the crown’s four arches are pearls called Queen Elizabeth’s Earrings. To me they look like ugly things. Four greyish veiny epiglottises hung over the throaty folds of the velvet cap.
‘Here. Swap.’ Yohei grabs my hips and pushes me back. Now I am on the front travelator, and he is on the rear. He tells me to look out for the Black Prince’s ruby. I’m more interested in him. I’m watching his eyes through the glass when I see it.
We are face to face, the stone and I. It is a malformed ovoid of blackish red. There is a hole drilled through it that has nothing to do with the crown. The hole is clear because it is plugged with a smaller ruby. The stop is paler. A small droplet of blood on the thick clot of the stone.
