The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  Hillary Clark was quivering with rage. Evelyn Pierce looked at her through half-closed eyes and in a cold, clear voice announced her decision.

  “In the absence of any evidence about the defendant’s age, the charge of rape is dismissed. With respect to the charges of incest and murder, the motion to dismiss is denied.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Henry Hammersmith was waiting in the hallway just outside the courtroom. He looked at his old friend Darnell with the gloating confidence of a gambler about to collect on a sure thing, a bet he had known he could not lose.

  “I told you I knew you’d pull it off. You really put the screws to her in there, the way you trapped her into admitting that she had to have a document if she didn’t have someone’s testimony.” He shook his head in admiration for what, had he been on the other side of it, or had it been another one of Darnell’s trials, he would have dismissed as just another shyster’s trick, a piece of legal legerdemain that, even if effective, was still a scandal. “She didn’t know what hit her! And you got the charge thrown out!”“Thanks, Henry, but don’t let’s get carried away. We’ve done some good, that’s all.”

  Along with Adam, they were making their way out of the courthouse. Darnell was still thinking about the trial, watching the scene all over again, what he had said, what Clark had answered, how it had all played out. He had set a trap, just like Henry said, but what Henry did not know was that it had been a trap without a plan. There had not been any thought, nothing like a developed strategy; it had come to him on the moment, the sudden realization that if Hillary Clark insisted that a witness knew her age, she would not think twice before agreeing that in the absence of the witness, age could only be proven by some sort of official documentation.

  “You know, Henry,” he said in confidence, “someone told me once that among the many writings of Aristotle there is a work called ‘Sophistical Refutations.’ I’ve never read it, and I doubt I’d understand it if I tried, but I like the title. It reminds me a lot of what I do – and what, you old bastard, you always accuse me of doing – attack an argument in a way that isn’t quite legitimate. What I did in there – the safest thing to attack is what someone believes in most. It’s almost always the thing they’ve thought about least. Why should they think about it? They know it’s true. No one has ever questioned it.”

  They chatted for a few more minutes on the courthouse steps. The air was cool and crisp and after a long day in court felt good against Darnell’s face. He listened to Henry’s words of encouragement, but out of the corner of his eye he watched the way Adam looked all around with the keen interest not of the idle tourist but of the well-informed traveler, someone who comes not to have a good time but to learn everything he can about each new place he visits. Seeing the girl, seeing Alethia, had made a marked difference in the young man’s attitude and demeanor. Busy with all the details of the trial, Darnell had not noticed any change before. He had not seen any sign of the wounded anguish that had worried Henry Hammersmith, but he saw it now in reverse reflection: the added quickness in his movements, the new intensity in his always eager eyes, and a greater confidence, to say nothing of the burnished glow upon his cheek.

  “Yes, thank you Henry,” said Darnell in reply to an earnest compliment he had barely heard. “I’ll see you both in the morning.” He turned to go, but then remembered. “Adam,” he called after him, “tomorrow, after trial, I’ll need you in my office to go over some things before you testify.” Adam waved and then set off with an easy loping stride that forced Henry Hammersmith to take two steps for one of his.

  The streets were crowded, everyone stuck in traffic. Blaring horns, shrieking brakes, the creaking, cranking sound of buses rounding corners, the tin bell charm of cable cars groaning on uphill iron rails, the city was a screaming welter of shouted noise and - every single discordant note of it - music to William Darnell’s ears. He walked along, lost in the anonymity of the crowd, grateful for the privacy and the chance to clear his mind. He was only a half a block from his Sutter Street office when he remembered. He began to walk faster, afraid he might be late.

  Gerhardt Holderlin was sitting in one of the large, overstuffed chairs in Darnell’s outer office doing absolutely nothing. The daily newspapers and the latest editions of a half dozen magazines were arranged in perfect order on the square glass coffee table in front of him but he had not bothered with any of them. He seemed content to wait quietly, without the need to find some diversion from himself. To the contrary, he was so lost in thought that he did not know he was not still alone until, standing right in front of him, Darnell asked how long he had been there waiting.

  “Not long, not long at all,” he said with an eager smile.

  Whatever the thought that had so preoccupied his mind, he was now outgoing and civil, assuring Darnell that he had not minded waiting at all; it had given him a much needed rest from all the noise and commotion of the city outside. Darnell led him into his private office and shut the door.

  “This looks like a perfect place to think and work,” remarked Holderlin. Not content with a cursory glance, he walked over to the book-lined shelves and began a closer inspection. He stopped in front of the photograph of Darnell’s law school class and, with his hands clasped behind his back, studied it for a moment.

  “Front row, fourth from the left.” He looked back at Darnell, so much older now, for confirmation.

  Impressed, as well as surprised, Darnell stood next to him, examining the picture, wondering that someone could pick him out so easily. Did he really still look like that serious and rather too intense young man with the confident, too confident, perhaps even arrogant, eyes? Darnell scratched his head and emitted a short, nostalgic laugh.

  “It’s been so long, I’m not sure I could have picked me out. You have an unusual eye, Mr. Holderlin. But, please, sit down.”

  Moving past him, Darnell dropped his briefcase on the floor and sank into the familiar comfort of his chair. He sat there a moment, letting the tension of the trial run out of him, a way to trick himself into thinking that it was all the rest he needed. Full of false energy, he sprang forward, pushed a button on the intercom and asked his secretary if she would mind bringing him a cup of coffee before she left for the day. He hesitated, glanced across at his visitor, and asked if she would mind bringing two.

  “Do you want me to wait, Mr. Darnell?” asked his secretary after she brought the coffee. She had been with him for nearly thirty years and knew his habits better than he knew them himself. Almost as much as Summer Blaine, she understood that without someone to badger him into it, he would not do any of the things he was supposed to do for his health.

  “I’ll be fine. You can go,” he said, his eyes fixed on Holderlin, wondering what this interesting European was going to say.

  “Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully.

  His eyes moved away from Holderlin and reached her full of willful guile.

  “I promise I won’t do anything I shouldn’t. I won’t drink more than a fifth of whisky and I won’t smoke more than two cigars!”

  “You’re impossible, you know.”

  His gaze became gentle and considerate, a look with which he often let her know that he did not doubt she was right but that there was nothing either one of them could do about it. She understood that, accepted it, but still felt better – they both felt better - for reminding him just how incorrigible he was.

  “Now, Mr. Holderlin,” he said when the door shut and they were left alone, “you’ve come all the way from Berlin because you think you might be able to help me. You said you had been on the island forty years ago, and that there were things I should know. Why don’t you tell me first how you found it, how you discovered it? And then perhaps you might explain why no one knew what you did – Why no one else seems to have known this island existed before Captain Johansen found it just two years ago?”

  Holderlin sipped slowly on his coffee and then held the cup and saucer in his lap. He
listened to Darnell, nodding in agreement with what he said, but seemed reluctant to begin, as if the answers to those few short questions would take an endless telling.

  “It was forty years ago, but it began longer ago than that, when I was still a boy, if you want the whole truth of it. My father was an archeologist who spent more time in Egypt than he did at home. He told me stories about ancient civilizations that had been buried for thousands of years before their ruins were first discovered. He told me about the Egyptians and the Persians; he told me about the Sumerians and the Greeks, about all the oldest, lost civilizations, but the story that most astonished me, the one that, once I heard it, stayed in my mind, was how Schliemann discovered Troy. Schliemann – how he discovered….Do you know that story, Mr. Darnell, the curious thing that Schliemann did? A thing so obvious that…which is the reason no one had thought to do it before. Do you know how remarkable it is to think something possible that no one else believes?”

  Holderlin’s voice was like a dark echo, everything he said coming back on itself. The words ran together, then stopped, as if each time he started he knew he could not finish, the thought to which he was trying to give expression that elusive.

  Darnell was not quite sure what he remembered about Schliemann and the discovery of Troy, only that he remembered something.

  “Schliemann – the name; yes, I think….I might have read…but no, I can’t recall anything now.”

  “Schliemann read Homer. That was not so remarkable; a hundred years ago everyone – everyone in Germany - did. It was part of every schoolboy’s education. But Schliemann took it seriously; that is to say, he left open the possibility that this great work of poetry, a work that was supposed to be nothing more than a fiction based on legend, was real and that the ancient city of Troy was in the very place Homer said it was. So he looked, tracing the descriptions in the Iliad, and found it exactly where it should have been. Astonishing! Schliemann discovered Troy by reading Homer. And that’s how I found Atlantis, or what was left of it.”

  “How you found -?” Darnell now realized that Holderlin was not a fraud, a sly adventurer, some con-man trying to sell a made-up story for money; Holderlin was demented, insane, living in a world of his own invention, a would-be modern day Columbus who instead sailing across an uncharted ocean had fallen irretrievably into an imaginary past.

  “You asked why no one knows what I found forty years ago – because of that: your reaction,” said Holderlin, triumphant in the certainty of his knowledge. “The reaction anyone of intelligence would have had. Discover Atlantis? What proof could I offer? I had none, but even if I had there were reasons I could not – did not – tell anyone what I had found. It’s a secret I’ve never shared with anyone – until now.”

  He looked across the book-lined room to the window and the city lights outside. There was a long pause as he steadied himself, as it seemed, for what he had to do.

  “I don’t blame you for not believing me. There have been times during all these years when I’ve wondered whether I should believe it myself, whether it isn’t some strange delusion that took possession of my mind; times when I have asked that question that casts doubt on my own sanity: whether the madman ever knows he’s mad. It’s a question I can’t and won’t pre-judge for you, Mr. Darnell. Let me tell you what I did, and what I found, and then you can decide whether what I’ve said is the truth or the ravings of some lunatic who ought to be put away.

  “Schliemann read Homer and discovered Troy. The story, as I said, made a great and lasting impression on my boyish mind. That isn’t to say it became an obsession, or anything like that; in fact, I didn’t think much about it while I was growing up, a child in my father’s house, nor did it form the basis for what I finally decided I wanted to be. My father told me all those stories, but of course he only did that when he was home, which, as I grew older, was less and less all the time. There had been a gradual estrangement between my parents, which, when I realized it later, explained much about the way we lived. One effect was that, in terms of my mental development, I went my own way.” Holderlin hesitated, went back to the thought and started again. “That isn’t true of course; we none of us ever really do that – we’re always dependent, except for a very few of us, and then only when we’re much older, on the influence of others. My point is that without my father’s constant presence I was much more open to what I heard in school, what my teachers taught about what was important and what was of only passing interest. By the time I went to university I had no doubt that the only subject worth studying was philosophy.

  “I studied all of it, ancient and modern, but I was drawn most of all to Plato. At first, it may have been the way he wrote; not the sometimes mind-numbing treatises of Aristotle, to say nothing of the scholastics, but in those wonderful dialogues that make even the most difficult questions come alive. The problem, which I did not understand until much later, was that Plato wrote at different levels, disguising what he really meant in words that, if you looked closely, had a double meaning and sometimes more than that. He had such a genius for concealment that he could hide what he wanted to say by not appearing to hide it at all. You can spend a lifetime trying to find out what he really means.”

  Holderlin lapsed into a long silence. He sipped some coffee; then, very carefully, afraid he might break them, put the cup and saucer safely on the edge of Darnell’s large ornate desk. He seemed to disappear inside himself, trying to recall with exact precision what it was important for Darnell to know: the extraordinary thing that had happened to him and the utterly accidental way it had occurred.

  “I must have read it who knows how many times – a dozen, more than that? And not in German, mind you – in Greek. One of the most difficult of the dialogues – not as difficult, I admit, as the Parmenides, but difficult enough – the dialogue in which Plato takes up the not unimportant question of the origin of the world, or rather, whether it has an origin, whether it has come into being or has always been. Someone said that we are all born metaphysicians, all those questions we ask as children about the why of things, but that we grow out of it. Perhaps I never did – grow up, I mean; perhaps I always remained a child – because once I read the Timaeus I knew I had to try to master it, had to understand every nuanced word of it. I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on it.

  “Strange I didn’t see it, didn’t think of it right away, the first time I came upon that passage, instead of a year later, when I was going through the dialogue for what I thought might be the last time; the last time, I mean, before I finished writing and was ready to take my degree. It was always there, in plain sight, the story of what happened to Atlantis.”

  A tiny, shrewd smile creased Holderlin’s mouth. It was the look of someone who had stumbled upon something no one else had known; it was the look of someone who now believed in chance.

  “I had considered myself so independent-minded, fully able to make my own judgments, but I was still under the influence of others; the ‘spirit of the age,’ some might call it, the belief that we did not have to understand Plato as Plato understood himself, that we knew him better than he knew himself because we had the advantage of history and could understand the assumptions of the age in which he wrote. It is always the arrogance of the present to look down upon the past. That was the reason I paid so little attention, why I did not take seriously what Plato wrote about Atlantis. It was just another fable, a contemporary myth he could use to explain a point. Then, late one night, as I sat reading through it for what I thought would be the last time, I suddenly remembered – I could hear my father’s voice – that story about Schliemann and how reading Homer he found Troy. What if everything Plato said was true?”

  He expected some reaction, an acknowledgement of the breath-taking possibility this opened up, but Darnell was forced to tell him that, beyond the blunt assertion that Plato had written something about Atlantis, he had only the vaguest idea what any of this meant. He motioned toward the bookshelves that towe
red to the ceiling.

  “I’m afraid that my life and education have been more limited than yours. I’m a lawyer, Mr. Holderlin – that’s all I know. The last time I read anything Plato wrote was when I was an undergraduate, and apart from a feeling that it must have done me good, I couldn’t tell you much, if anything, about what it said.”

  There was nothing superior in the broad smile that suddenly crossed Holderlin’s fine, straight mouth. It was the look, rather, of genuine good-will; of approval, if not outright admiration, for a man who did not hide his ignorance behind a cloak of self-importance, dismissing ancient learning as irrelevant to the more pressing issues of the moment. If children were born metaphysicians, men like Darnell when they got close to the end sometimes greeted death that way as well. Holderlin got up from the chair and walked over to the window. He stood there for a moment, watching the busy, endless movement on the streets.

  “No one has time to waste,” he observed out loud; “and so they waste all of it.” He turned back to Darnell. “I’ll tell you what he wrote. It’s a story that was told to Solon, the famous lawgiver, the wisest of the Seven Sages, a story that was passed down through four generations before someone called Critias told it to Socrates. I’ve studied it so often, gone over it so many times, that I know it now by heart, but I won’t recite it to you – it would take too long and I know you have things you need to do. I’ll try to give you a brief summary, but in a way that gives you a feel for how it was written in the dialogue that Plato left us.