Love and Sleep (35 page)
He felt a return of it as he sat there, the power that had visited him, borne in the breeze that passed over his sweat-damp shirt and his hair: not so strong as before, but strong enough that he could tell for sure that it was coming and not going.
He sat stock still, sandwich in his hands, trying to make its face appear, hear its name.
Just please don't hurt me
, he pleaded with whatever it was, not knowing that it could or would, and yet afraid.
On that Midsummer afternoon, Boney Rasmussen also sat looking out into the day, in the study of his own house, “Arcady,” a brownish pile of Shingle Style whimsy and not the only house in the Faraway Hills to bear a name. On the desk behind him (he had turned his swivel chair to look out at the lawns and the oaks, under which he could now descry a small crowd of sheep taking their ease) was a messy pile of papers, and these were Fellowes Kraft's also: letters which Kraft had sent over the years to Boney. Some were formal typewritten replies, self-effacing and cagy, to Boney's first expressions of interest in his work, and to the Foundation's early and tentative offers of help. Others from later years were fuller and franker; Boney and Sandy Kraft (everyone who knew him at all well called him Sandy, his right name too much a mouthful) had become, Boney thought, fast friends at last.
Boney considered each of these letters in turn; picked it up, read the date, read the letter, and after a little thought either dropped it to the floor or filed it in order in the growing pile on his lap. The latest ones were the ones he considered the most closely, questioning through his blue-tinted glasses each sheet of airmail flimsy that trembled in his shaky grasp.
A letter from 1967, from New York apparently, about Kraft's final trip to Europe, for which the Rasmussen Foundation had paid:
"
Mon Empereur
,” it began, Kraft's little joke. “I am off at dawn. Really. The ship sails at first light, after we spend a night rocking in harbor—some small problem to which they have not made us privy. Boney I know what a dreadful expense this is compared to cheap and popular air travel. I know it and
I will make it up to you.
What do you want me to bring back? Ah yes I see. But is that something we go abroad to fabled realms to seek? What we most want is, or ought to be, lying out in plain sight, isn't it; found finally in no exotic place or jeweled cabinet but right in your own backyard. Of course it is. And yet, and yet. It would be fun, Boney, wouldn't it, to find at last and finally
one
treasure that was
not
in your heart but in the world; something you could pick up in your own two unworthy hands, a splendor meant for you alone."
These two sheets Boney filed in the pile in his lap by their dates, and took up the next. This was not the first time he had tried to read all the letters together; nor was the arrangement by date the only one he had tried. He felt sometimes, when ordering them, as he did in games of solitaire, when the cards begin turning up one after another and moving off well, and it seems certain you must go out this time, when you hit a bind, the last ace hidden under the last red queen and the last black king, hidden, hidden.
The next was from Vienna, weeks later.
"They certainly did have some nice things, the Hapsburgs. There was at one time or another in the Hofburg the seamless cloak rent or rather
not
rent by the soldiers who diced beneath the Cross; and the Spear with which Longinus pierced the side of Christ, and which like the more famous Cup has haunted German legend ever since. And—hardly least—the one single physical relic of Jesus Christ himself which we can be certain was left on earth when He ascended into Heaven. What do you suppose it is? Yes! His little foreskin, amputated by the
moyel
St. Simeon Senex, who promptly passed away, having lived a hugely long life just to do this deed. And where did it go then? Well, like the Grail itself, it comes and goes; is sought for; is seen in visions; is rumored to be inside this or that fabulous gem-encrusted reliquary. A little literature springs up around it, little compared to the Grail literature. The mystic nun Hildegarde of Bingen not only saw but tasted it in a vision; it was placed like a Host in her mouth (His Body, after all) and she said it tasted sweet like honey. I am not inventing this. Actually antiquaries say that the penis of Napoleon used to turn up now and then at auction houses, a blackened rind, labeled “a tendon” or some such thing but of course everybody knew. But which would
you
rather get hold of,
mon Empereur
? I mean: There is no question, is there?"
This, after a long moment of thought (Boney's thoughts seemed lately to arrive in his consciousness a long time after they started out, like elderly drivers driving ever more cautiously; nothing for it but to wait), he dropped to the pile at his feet.
The next was also from Vienna, from the same trip in ‘67 probably, though the first sheet was lost that bore the date:
"...or an agate bowl, once in the possession of Ferdinand I, that was also supposed to be the Holy Grail. Interested? I am contemptuous, but of course there is no trouble at all in checking it out. Ferdinand was a phenomenal collector; one of his agents brought back from Constantinople the first tulips and lilacs ever seen in Europe. So says my guidebook. So it is out to the Hofburg today to see what we can see. Just let me throw on an overcoat, autumn is frigid in the Danube valley, and swallow a coffee
mit schlag.
The hunt is up."
The hunt was his game, of course, a game which had not seemed so cruel then as it did now: that the Rasmussen Foundation had sent him off to the European capitals to discover or to recognize for them the priceless and the eternal, and get possession of it somehow. They had used to laugh together, he and Sandy, about what might be found in the attics of the old empires, dusty, wrongly labeled by obtuse curators, and yet still living, still potent. A game. Boney remembered (just then remembered, old stored memories spilling, as they often did nowadays) how once, in the shabby science exhibit of his old high school, a snail shell, glued onto a card on which its Latin name was written, had one spring day, after a year or more of appearing quite dead, put out a foot, tugged itself free, and gone off across the glass of its case, leaving a starslime trail behind. Boney had seen it.
"Well it was there,” Kraft had written next day, April 1, the letter arising next in Boney's pile. “Large and
luxe
and unattractive. I quote the book: ‘Case V—Basin of Oriental Agate with the handles, fashioned out of what is asserted to be the largest single piece of this semiprecious stone; 75 cm in diameter; alleged that the word
Christus
is visible in the texture of the stone,’ not to me. It came to the Hapsburgs as part of the dowry of Maria of Burgundy, who married Maximilian I in 1470, along with the silver baptismal utensils in Case VI and the unicorn's horn in Case VII, just a narwhal's tusk according to this wet-blanket guidebook.
"Of course it might have lost something of its numinous lustre over the centuries (the cup, Case V, I mean). It might have appeared much different two hundred or eight hundred years ago. I wonder if we don't have all this backwards, and that once the world worked differently from the way it works now, and what was then a powerful engine is now junk—like a Model T left out in the rain for half a century.
"But maybe, probably, this just isn't it. They probably never really had it; or it was with the stuff that Gustavus Adolphus took away with him to Sweden, and it lost its charm amid the snows and Lutherans. Or maybe they did have it and
still
have it only no one knows where; maybe they forgot long ago and then had only the certainty that once it really had been in their possession. I can imagine them, Duke upon Emperor, rummaging through the
kabinetten,
searching among the cups, the bezoars, the jeweled lizard's skulls, the mercury barometers, automata, magic swords, reliquaries, the petrified wood, dragon's teeth, saint's bones, perpetual motion machines, vials of Jordan water, the forty-carat emerald hollowed out for a poison ring, the mummified mermaid, the
lac lunae,
the ten thousand clocks all chiming differently. Like Fibber McGee's closet. Got to be in here somewhere."
Next letter, postmarked Praha, April 1968. 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. 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.