The Magic Circle (39 page)

“But we were talking about belief, not behavior,” I pointed out. “When things are brought down to earth, the results are never exactly as we’d planned. For example, to you the idea of the Ghost Dance seemed beautiful, but look what really became of it. The dance incorporated so many paradisical elements it was quickly embraced by the Arapaho, the Oglala, the Shoshone—and most especially the Lakota, who were the ones destroyed by it in the end.”

“What do you mean, destroyed?” said Wolfgang, looking confused.

“Why—they were killed,” I said in amazement. I found it hard to believe there was someone who knew nothing of the story at all. “It’s one of the bitterest subjects in the history of the Native Americans, but at base it resulted from conflicting beliefs. The people were prevented from hunting; they were rounded up and put on reservations and forced to farm. Then just before the turn of the century the great famine came. Thousands were starving, so they danced and danced. The dances became wild and ecstatically hysterical; the people went into trances, trying in desperation to bring back the idyllic, Arcadian past when the earth and her children were one. They believed the magical shirts they wore would repel soldiers’ bullets. White settlers were frightened by the new religion—they took these to be war dances—so the Ghost Dance was outlawed. When the Lakota found a more remote site to continue the dance, government troops rode in and cut down whole families, shot and butchered them: men, women, children, even tiny babies. You must have heard of the 1890 massacre of all the Ghost Dancers, at Wounded Knee?”

“Massacred?” said Wolfgang in horrified disbelief. “For
dancing?
”

“It does seem hard to imagine,” I agreed, adding with sarcasm, “but the federal government
has
usually taken a hard line on these regional issues.”

Then I kicked myself for seeming glib about something that was, as it deserved to be for Sam and most Native Americans, their own personal vision of the Holocaust and the Apocalypse rolled into one.

“That’s a truly astounding story,” said Wolfgang. “Then it seems that descendants of civilized white Europeans are the villains of the piece?”

“You’ve no idea,” I concurred. “But you did ask what I believed in, so I guess I’d have to go with conventional tribal wisdom: I wish there could be something like a Ghost Dance that would bring a renewal of harmony between us and our grandmother the earth, as Native Americans call her. Of course, I wouldn’t be much help myself in bringing it off: I’m not a very good dancer.”

Wolfgang smiled. “How can that be,” he said, “when your aunt Zoe was one of the greatest dancers of the century? And it seems you have many similar qualities. You’re designed like a dancer: your bones, the movement of your muscles, the way you ski, for example—”

“But I’m afraid to ski in the deep powder,” I pointed out. “I’m a control freak. You can’t be a control freak and be a really good dancer too. Sam’s mother—though I never met her—was full-blooded Nez Percé,” I said. “When we were young, Sam and I did the ceremony to become ‘blood brothers.’ I wanted to join the tribe and be an official Nez Percé, but Sam’s grandfather disapproved because I’d refused to dance. A newcomer to the tribe must become what the Hopi call
hoya
, which itself is the name of an initiation dance. It means ‘ready to fly off the nest’—just like a baby bird.”

“But I’ve seen you jump off a cliff,” said Wolfgang, still smiling. “Yet you imagine you cannot release yourself enough to dance in the deep powder. Do you see what a powerful thing belief can be—that in fact it’s really through your own choice you’ve decided you can do the one thing but not the other?”

“At least I know what I believe about Sam’s grandfather,” I said, avoiding Wolfgang’s observation. “I think his real hope was to distance Sam, his only grandchild, from my side of the family. We
are
a bit peculiar. But from Dark Bear’s point of view Sam and I may have been becoming too close for comfort. The Nez Percé are strict about bloodlines. As Sam’s cousin, I would have been considered forbidden fruit: intermarriage isn’t permitted even among more distant relations—”

“Marriage?” Wolfgang cut in. “But you said you were only a child at the time.”

Damn. I could feel the hot blood creeping into my cheeks as I tried to duck my head. Wolfgang put his finger under my chin and tilted my face up to his.

“I have a belief of my own, my dear,” he told me. “If this cousin of yours were not prematurely deceased, I believe I’d be quite alarmed by this blushing confession.”

Just then—thank heaven—over the loudspeaker they called our plane.

During the long flight to New York, Wolfgang filled in some of the blanks he’d skimmed over yesterday with respect to our impending mission inside the Soviet Union for the International Atomic Energy Agency. But when it came to the background of the IAEA, I already knew quite a bit.

Anyone who toiled as I did in the nuclear field was known as a “nuke” and was almost universally disdained and loathed. Note the popularity of slogans such as No Nukes Is Good Nukes or The Only Good Nuke Is a Dead Nuke—deep wisdom of the bumper-sticker school of philosophy.

The chief mission of Wolfgang’s employer was channeling nuclear materials into peacetime and positive uses. These included diagnosis and treatment of disease, elimination of the toxic pesticides of the past century through programs like insect sterilization, and the development of atomic energy, which now supplied seventeen percent of the world’s electricity while significantly reducing pollution from fossil fuels and cutting down on strip mining and deforestation. All of which gave the agency the necessary clout to enforce the safeguarding of weapons-grade materials as well. And a recent nuclear fiasco might have pushed that door open a crack wider.

Six months after the 1986 accident in Ukraine, the IAEA began to require early information on all accidents that threatened to have “transboundary effects”—like that mess at Chernobyl, which the Soviets had tried to deny until radiation was being detected all across northern Europe. A year later the IAEA created a program to counsel member states about waste hazards of the sort Olivier and I tackled daily in our jobs. Then only a few months ago, the agency added far tougher provisions against illegal transport and dumping of radioactive waste. But though the Chernobyl disaster triggered many of these changes, to the public at large it had never been made clear why.

Chernobyl was a breeder reactor, the kind the Soviet and U.S. governments, among others, had long supported, but which the public instinctively and universally feared. Perhaps with good cause. As the name suggests, a breeder reactor actually produces more fuel than it consumes—like the technique of the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies that I’d once taught Olivier for growing a “sop,” the sourdough starter used in leavening bread. You take a little nuclear leaven, a fissile material like plutonium-239, and add batches of ordinary stuff like uranium-238, which is in itself unsuitable as a fuel. You wind up with a bigger load of leaven—more plutonium—that can either be recycled as nuclear fuel or be diverted into making bombs.

Because breeders are so commercially viable, the Russians had run them for decades, and so had we. Where had all that plutonium gone? Well, as for the U.S. during the Cold War, there was little mystery: It was recycled into warheads, enough for everybody in America to have a few in his garage. But when it came to the Russians’ hot waste, I had the feeling we might soon find out—when we got to Vienna.

The International Atomic Energy Agency sits on Wagramer Strasse beside the Donaupark, on an island enfolded by the arms of the old and new forks of the Danube. Across the glassy expanse of river lies the Prater with its famous giant Ferris wheel—the same amusement park where, seventy-five years earlier, my grandmother Pandora spent the morning riding on that carousel with Uncle Laf and Adolf Hitler.

At nine
A.M
. on Tuesday, Wolfgang’s colleague Lars Fennish was waiting to collect us and our bags at the
Flughafen
and to drive us into town for today’s meetings. After my long, exhausting journey with little sleep, I sat in the backseat, not really wanting to talk. So while the two men conversed in German about our schedules and plans for the day, I gazed out the blue-tinted windows at the dreary suburban view. But as we approached Vienna nostalgia swept me, and I was plunged into the past.

It was nearly ten years since I’d been in Vienna, but till this moment I never realized how I’d missed the city of my childhood: all those Christmases and holidays spent with Jersey amid the musical milieu at Uncle Laf’s—eating sugar cookies, opening ribboned gifts, and hunting for Easter eggs. My personal image of Vienna was richer and more multilayered than the schmaltzy image the city presented to the rest of the world: as Uncle Laf put it, “the town of
Strudel und Schnitzel und Schlag.
” I saw a different Vienna—one steeped in many traditions, drenched in the flavors and aromas of so many diverse cultures that I could never think of Vienna without being flooded, as now, with that sense of its magical history.

Since its beginnings, Vienna has been the cultural gateway that at once unites and separates east, west, north, and south: a point of fusion and fission. The land we today call Austria—Österreich, or the eastern kingdom—in ancient times was named Ostmark: the eastern mark, the boundary where the fresh new Western world ended and the mysterious East began. But the word
Mark
also means “marshes”—in this case, those misty marshlands along the Danube River.

Running seventeen hundred miles from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, the Danube is the most important watercourse connecting western and eastern Europe. Its Roman name
Ister
, or the womb, is still used to describe the alluvial delta separating Romania from the USSR. But whatever the river’s name in many tongues over many centuries—Donau, Don, Danuvius, Dunarea, Dunaj, Danube—the more ancient Celtic name from which they all derived was Danu: “the gift.”

The gift of water recognized no boundary, freely bringing its gift of life to all peoples. And there was another gift that had been harvested for millennia along the banks of the Danube—a treasure of dark gold upon whose riches Vienna itself was built, and for which the city had been named:
Vindobona
, good wine.

Even today, on the hilltops overlooking Vienna, I could see row after row of grapevines grown from gnarled old stock, interpatched with yellow corn sheaves from last autumn’s harvest—gift of the goddess Ceres. But wine was the gift of another deity, Dionysus. His gift eased pain, brought dreams, and sometimes drove people mad; he invented dance, and his most conspicuous followers were frenziedly dancing women. So to me it seemed, if any city belonged to this particular god, it was Vienna, land of “wine, women, and song.”

I myself, at an early age, had a run-in with this same divinity right here in Vienna, when Jersey sang a matinee at the Wiener Staatsoper of the Richard Strauss opera
Ariadne auf Naxos
.

Abandoned on the isle of Naxos by her great love Theseus, Ariadne contemplates suicide—until Dionysus arrives on the scene to rescue her. The lyric Jersey, as Ariadne, was singing that afternoon, “
You are the captain of a sable ship that sails the dark course
…” Ariadne believes the figure suddenly before her is the god of death, who’s come to take her to Hades. She doesn’t realize it’s Dionysus himself, that he’s in love with her and wants to marry her, to carry her to heaven and toss her wedding tiara among the stars as a bright constellation.

But I was so young, I didn’t understand the situation any better than Ariadne. I guess that’s why I threw the first and only public performance of my life—one that, within my family at least, I’ve never managed to live down. I really believed this awful Prince of Darkness (the tenor) was about to carry off my mother to an eternal torture of hellfire and brimstone, so I ran up onstage and tried to rescue her! It literally brought down the house. With unforgettable indignity, I was forcibly removed by stagehands. Thank heavens Uncle Laf was there to rescue
me
.

Afterwards we left Jersey signing autographs in her flower-filled dressing room and, no doubt as soon as we’d gone, apologizing to her astonished public for her child’s unrehearsed behavior. Laf took me off to cheer me up with
Sachertorte mit Schlagobers
, followed by a stroll on the Ring encircling Vienna. When we came to a fountain, Laf took a seat on the rim of the basin and, pulling me to him, regarded me with a wry half smile.

“Gavroche, my darling,” he said, “I offer a little advice: You should never sink your pretty teeth into the leg of someone like Bacchus, as you did back there today. I mention it not only for the reason that this particular tenor may not wish to appear onstage ever again with your mother. But also because Bacchus—or, by his other name, Dionysus—is a great god. Although,” my uncle reassured me, “that singer was only pretending to be him.”

“I’m sorry that I bit that man who sang to Mama,” I admitted. But I was intrigued. “You said he was only pretending to be the god, so does that mean there’s a
real …
Dy-oh-ny-soos?” I tried to sound it out. When Laf smiled and nodded, I was full of questions: “Have you ever seen him? What’s he like?”

“Not everyone believes he exists, Gavroche,” Laf told me earnestly. “They think he is only part of a fairy tale. But to your grandmother Pandora, he was very special. I’ll tell you what she believed: the god comes only to those who ask for his help. But you must truly need his help before you ask. He rides on an animal which is his closest companion—a wild black panther with emerald green eyes.”

I was very excited. The image of the tenor whose calf I’d bitten only an hour ago had completely melted away. I could hardly wait for this living god to come, padding up the Karntner Strasse astride his steaming jungle beast, into the very heart of Vienna.

“If I really need his help, and if he comes to rescue me, Uncle Laf, do you think he’ll take me away, like Ariadne?”