The Magic Circle (25 page)

I had never spoken to anyone of my private obsession, which I’d nurtured like a flame through all those lonely days of childhood. Ever since arriving at my school in Salzburg, after my classes each day I would go into the nearby woods and play for hour after hour on a small violin—almost a toy—that I’d been given as a child. Even the masters at my school didn’t know.

But there were limits to what even the most burning desire could accomplish given so inferior an instrument—not to mention that the extent of my instruction had been sneaking to listen outside the doors of the Mozarteum. All this changed one day, nearly a year before, when a darkly handsome young man came walking through the woods playing his own violin—and in strains at once so sweet and yet so transcendental, one forgot there was a violin at all, as if sounds emitted by his soul were merging with the air in a long, passionate embrace. He made love to the wind.

And that same day, the young man I’d just met as Pandora’s cousin Dacian Bassarides—whose name I’d never known till now—had become my master. Several times a week we met in the woods, and with few words he taught me how to play. So he must have been the go-between sent by Pandora and my mother to find me in Salzburg.

“Your mother
does
have a ‘last wish’ for you, Lafcadio,” Pandora said as she lifted little Zoe up onto the revolving carousel platform. “Once she learned from us of your gift, she prayed that you should become a great violinist—even the greatest in the world. To that end, she’s kept a private fund, set aside for you by your godfather, Mr. Rhodes, a fund your stepfather knows nothing about—not a huge sum, but ample to pay for your musical education when you are ready. In these next few years, Dacian has agreed to help you prepare for the conservatory. If your stepfather stops your schooling, we’ll find you a place to live. Is this plan of your mother’s at all to your liking?”

A plan to my liking? In one day, my world had turned inside out—from a future that resembled a prison camp with my stepfather as jailer, to a sweet-scented bed of rose and narcissus where all my fantasies would soon be fulfilled.

It seemed only moments, though it must have been an hour or more, that we whirled on the snowy carousel. Dacian played snatches on the violin with cold fingers—there was no steam, he explained, to run the calliope—and Pandora hummed the counterpoint through her muffler from which steamy breath emerged. Zoe danced and pranced about the circle as it whirled, and Earnest and I rode up and down proudly on our chosen steeds, a wolf for me and a soaring eagle for him. In between, my siblings spoke to me in whispers of what the future might be like without our mother—an interesting proposition from my viewpoint, since it described my entire past.

As to what Pandora’s role was in it all, or why she’d chosen our family on whom to bestow her fairy magic, this still remained a mystery. I felt so euphoric at the thought of realizing my true dream that it never occurred to me it might be years before I learned the answers to such critical questions.

My first family outing was now disrupted by a new arrival, who approached down the
allée
in the opposite direction to the one we’d come.

“Goodness, it’s Lucky,” Pandora said, pulling down her muffler and taking her cousin’s arm. “But how did he find us here?”

I didn’t find this intrusion on my fantasies to be in any respect lucky. Perhaps he’d come to collect us and take us home. From my perch on my wolf I studied him as he came.

He was slender, with a long, pale, clean-shaven face, and older than Pandora—perhaps even twenty or more. He wore a threadbare but well-pressed suit with an artist’s long fringed scarf, yet he had no topcoat in such weather! His mop of silky brown hair was cut in the popular “romantic” fashion, so he had to toss it back from time to time. He slapped his gloved hands against his chest for warmth, his breath streaming behind him. When he came close enough, I could see eyes of such startling blue intensity, it was hard to pull one’s gaze away.

He called to Pandora, “I’ve been searching for you long enough to become a block of ice in this weather, Fräulein.”

Zoe piped up, “Please, please, Lucky—come up here on the carousel and dance with me.” So I now understood that Lucky was the fellow’s name.

He regarded Zoe with mock derision. “Real men don’t dance,
Liebchen,
” he told her. “Besides, I’ve something of importance I must show you all. We have to see it today. The Hofburg museum will close up for cleaning and repairs next week, and these Viennese are so
gemütlich
, who knows
when
it will reopen? I’ll be long gone by then. But I’ve got today’s tickets for the Hofburg already for all of us, yes?”

“I’m sorry you’ve come out in the cold like this, Lucky,” Pandora said. “But I promised Frau Behn I’d show her son around Vienna today. He must be returning to school quite soon.”

“So this lad is the other Behn son—the English one, part Boer?” said Lucky.

Though I didn’t correct him about my Boer-ness, I wondered how such a lower-class person who didn’t possess an overcoat, or even a peacoat like Dacian’s, could possibly be acquainted with my family here in Vienna.

“Lucky was the roommate of Gustl, Lafcadio,” Pandora explained. “Gustl is the musician I told you about, the one who introduced your mother and me. They’ve known each other from high school, and have even written an opera together.”

“But I haven’t seen Gustl in ages,” Lucky told her with a smile. Swinging himself up onto the carousel as it whirled, he made his way around to my wolf and added almost privately, as if we two shared a secret: “Our paths are so different. Gustl has diverged toward the mundane, I toward the divine.”

Now that Lucky was so close, I saw his eyes really were extraordinary. I found myself nearly hypnotized. He studied me as if his appraisal would decide my total life worth, nodding to himself as if well satisfied, which made me strangely happy for some reason. Then he turned to Pandora, taking her hands in his and raising her fingertips to his lips. But he kissed the backs of his own hands instead—an odd, uniquely Austrian custom I’d sometimes seen in Salzburg.

“I don’t write librettos anymore,” he went on. “I’ve been working on paintings again; my watercolors have achieved some success. While I was engaged last Michaelmas for a small job of touching up gold leaf in the Rubens gallery at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, one night I went across the street to the Hofburg just before closing. And that’s when I found this thing of enormous interest. I’ve been studying it intensely each night at the library ever since. I’ve been up the river to Krems, also to the monastery of Melk, using their library too, one with quite interesting manuscripts—and even once to Salzburg for more research.” Then he turned to me.

“I don’t believe in coincidences, young man,” Lucky told me. “I believe only in destiny. For example, I find interesting the animals you boys have chosen from all this enormous menagerie. The name for eagle in Old High German is
Earn
, and Earnest sits astride an eagle—while the beast
you’ve
chosen is a wolf. Pandora’s cousin Dacian here, his name comes from Daci, the wolfmen of ancient Thrace, one of the oldest hunting tribes in Europe. You see, study enhances not only the intellect but the very way in which we perceive ourselves and our history.
My
nickname, Lucky, is something of a private joke among my friends. My Christian name in Old High German is Athal-wulf, meaning highborn or fortunate wolf—Lucky Wolf, do you see? And my family name originally must have meant the same as Boer: Heideler, or ‘heath man,’ like Bauer, one who lives from the land—”

“Whoa,” I cried, stopping Uncle Laf’s life story in midstream with a wave of my hand as we sat there in the Sun Valley Lodge dining room. “Rein up there, partner—you mean to say this guy was
Adolf Hitler?
”

When Laf merely smiled, I looked at Olivier and Bambi, who both had glazed expressions like a trout that’s just realized it’s no longer breathing water.

“Gavroche, the story was almost over,” Laf said.

“It’s definitely over for me,” I told him, pushing aside my half-eaten
saumon fumé
omelette and getting to my feet.

“Where are you going?” asked Laf pleasantly.

Olivier was wrestling with his napkin, trying to figure out whether he was my guest or Laf’s. I motioned him to stay seated.

“Outside for a walk,” I told Laf. “I need to swallow some fresh air before you ask me to swallow anything else.”

“I ask you to swallow nothing but a bit more champagne,” he said, still smiling and patting me on my good arm. “Then I shall go for the walk
with
you—or perhaps even have a swim?—while your friend here shows Bambi a bit of the mountain. That is, if you don’t mind.” Laf raised his brow in question to Olivier, who leapt to his feet.

After a flurry of waiters and coats and thanks and hugs, Bambi and Olivier vanished to the slopes and Laf and I headed off to the glass-walled outdoor thermal pool, surrounded by the mountains, its roof open to the sky. Volga Dragonoff met us there with bathing suits.

“Uncle Laf,” I said when we two were alone at last, ensconced in the steamy relaxing mineral waters, “how could you have told a ridiculous story like that one at breakfast? Olivier’s a friend of mine, but he’s also my colleague. After this morning, he’s going to think my family’s even crazier than you all actually are.”

“Crazy? I see nothing crazy about my story,” Laf objected. “Every single thing was completely truth.”

He ducked his head under the water. When he came up, the silvery mane was slicked back, accentuating the magnificent bone structure of his face and those sharp blue eyes. I thought how truly handsome he must have been when he was young. No wonder Pandora had fallen for him. But wasn’t that part of the problem?

“Everything you said was a myth,” I pointed out to Laf, “especially the parts about our family. That’s the first I’ve heard of your father being English—much less having a fortune of something like a hundred million dollars! And if Pandora really hated my grandfather Hieronymus as much as you say, why did she wind up marrying him that same year, when you were still only twelve, and staying married long enough to have a child by him?”

“I can imagine what Augustus’s version must be of the story,” Laf said with the first note of cynicism I’d heard so far. “But I’ll be direct, now that we’re alone. Though I hate to be the one to tell you of your own grandfather, Gavroche, you asked the question—and a good one—why Pandora might marry so despicable a man.

“When we returned that afternoon to the house in Vienna, we learned my mother had died in our absence. The younger children were distraught, beside themselves, and we were all sent early to bed. Next morning, in the predawn light, I was taken by several strong male servants to the train and forcibly escorted back to Salzburg.

“That day would be the last I would see of Pandora in nearly five years, for she was taken from Vienna and then the First World War intervened. Only five years after would I learn how she had been raped by my stepfather that very night—more than once. How he forced her to marry him, under the threat that he would reveal things about her that might bring great danger, to her and to her family as well.”

“He what?” I gaped at him. “Are you mad?”

“No—but I thought I might go mad, back then,” Laf told me with a bittersweet smile. I knew by the way he said it he was telling the truth, and I wondered whether he’d ever told anybody of this before now.

“Why don’t you finish your story, Uncle Laf?” I said, moving over through the water to put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry about what I said. I really do want to know everything.”

“Let me begin anew, with Lucky going with us in our carriage to the Hofburg to see the weapons collections and his discovery there of a mysterious and fascinating ancient treasure.…”

THE SWORD AND THE SPEAR

Over many centuries, the Austrian Habsburgs had cut and glued together their vast empire through a series of brilliant marriages to women who were heiresses to countries like Spain, Hungary, and so on. Now a part of the Hofburg, the Habsburg winter palace, had been converted to a museum to show to the public the royal jewels, the silver, the many collections accumulated over centuries.

The collection, one of the world’s most extensive; was of special interest to Lucky. He had said he believed in destiny, and en route to the museum in our carriage, he stressed to us children that the destiny of the German-speaking people should never have included rule by this dynasty of motley intermarriages, spawning the ragtag population we saw around us in the streets of the capital. But that is another story about Adolf, which by now everyone unhappily knows.

More to our point, Lucky had discovered within the Hofburg two relics that dazzled him: a sword and a spear. These items which he believed to be so ancient and valuable were placed, strangely enough, off in a corner in a plain glass case, almost as if abandoned. The sword was long and curved, with a grip that appeared more medieval than ancient. The spear was small, black, and unobtrusive, with a crude brass-colored collar holding together the handle and shaft. We children looked at them for some time, until Earnest asked Lucky to tell us their significance.

“These pieces,” Lucky said in an almost dreamlike voice, “go back at least two thousand years, and possibly much more. It’s a well-known fact that they existed already in the time of Christ, and were very likely handled by his own disciples. It’s thought the sword was the one carried by Saint Peter, who wielded it in the garden at Gethsemane and cut off the the temple guard’s ear. Jesus told him to put it away, for ‘They that live by the sword shall die by the sword.’

“But the spear is even more interesting,” Lucky went on. “It was carried by a Roman centurion, one Gaius Cassius Longinus, who was under the command of Pontius Pilate. Longinus pierced Christ’s side on the cross with this very spear, to be certain he was dead, and they saw the liquid flow from the wound.…”

I could see Lucky’s long, pale face reflected in the glass of the case before us. He still seemed lost in a dream as he gazed upon these weapons. His pupils were dilated, exaggerating the hypnotic quality of those intense blue eyes beneath his thick dark lashes. But Pandora, who was standing at the opposite side of the case, broke the spell.