The Magic Circle (60 page)

Before turning in, I rummaged for a bottle of mineral water to brush my teeth, and noticed at the bottom of the bag the Bible still there from Sun Valley. Seeing it triggered the memory of a conversation with Sam, out under the stars one evening before I went away to school. Though I couldn’t have known it then, that would be the last time I would see Sam until just this past weekend, on another Idaho mountaintop.

I pulled the Bible from the bag, rested it on the chipped porcelain rim of the bathroom sink, and flipped through the pages until I came to the Book of Job, as I heard Sam’s voice in my mind.…

“Do you remember the story of Job?” he asked as we stood there together looking up at the night sky.

It seemed an odd remark for someone who didn’t read the Bible. All I could recall was that Yahweh had cut poor Job a pretty one-sided deal, giving Satan carte blanche to torture “God’s servant” as he pleased; it seemed awfully cruel. I said as much to Sam.

“And yet, interestingly enough, despite the suffering he underwent,” said Sam, “in the end Job had only one real confrontation with God. He asked a famous question: ‘Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?’ Do you recall what God’s reply was to Job’s simple plea for understanding?”

When I shook my head in the negative, Sam took my hand in his, lifted his other hand, and swept it wide to encompass the entire night sky—that sparkling stellar array that had remained so remote and unchanged over billions of years.

“
That
was the answer to Job,” Sam told me. “God arrives in the midst of a terrifying whirlwind, and for page after page he enumerates all He’s accomplished. He’s created everything from hail to horses to ostrich eggs—not to mention the universe itself. Job can’t get a word in edgewise with all the bombast, nor should I imagine he’d want to at this point, what with all he’s just been through. God’s behavior on the occasion seems incomprehensible, and philosophers have wondered about it for thousands of years. But I believe I’ve found an interesting clue.…”

Sam looked down at me in the starlight with clear grey eyes and quoted: “‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?… Who hath laid the measures thereof … or who hath stretched the line upon it?… Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?’”

When I made no comment, he said, “That’s a pretty specific answer to a pretty specific question, don’t you agree?”

“But you told me Job’s question was, ‘Where is wisdom to be found?’” I pointed out. “How does showing off over creating the universe answer that?”

“Precisely what’s been puzzling the
sages philosophes
all these aeons: What was God’s point?” Sam agreed with a smile. “But as my favorite poet-philosopher said, ‘In the end the philosophers always go out by the same door that in they came.’ On the other hand, for those who can read a road map, I suggest God’s reply
is
an answer. Think about it. God seems to be saying that the coordinates mapped out in the heavens
are
the guide to wisdom here on earth—‘as above, so below’—do you see?”

Maybe I hadn’t seen it then, but I thought I did now. If the placement of holy sites in relation to one another was truly patterned after the constellations themselves, it was even possible to visualize how, over time, that heavenly map had gradually
become
the map of earth—which in turn would connect the geography below with the archetypal meaning of the constellations above: totems and altars and gods.

I saw something else too, though I had only three hours to sleep before learning what all this had to do with the Soviet Union, nuclear energy, and Central Asia. For once, I’d actually begun to feel the warp and woof were twined into a pattern.

Wolfgang rang me on the house phone in time for the two of us to have a brief tête-à-tête over breakfast before our nine o’clock meeting with the Soviet nukes. I found him alone in a corner of the dining hall where I’d met Volga only hours earlier, seated at the end of one of the long tables, his back to the wall.

I passed down the rows of Russian businessmen in ill-fitting black suits, huddled together eating bowls of thick hot porridge and sipping their black coffee in silence. When Wolfgang saw me approach, he put his napkin on the table and stood to seat me beside him, then poured me some hot java. But his tone, when he spoke, was surprisingly chilly.

“I don’t think you quite understand the position we are in, here inside Russia,” he told me. “It’s rare for Westerners to be invited in for open discussion on so sensitive a topic, and I explained that our behavior would be watched. What on earth were you thinking, to conduct a secret late-night meeting with someone right here in the hotel? Who was he?”

“It was a surprise to me too, when he showed up. I was already in my pajamas,” I assured him. “It was my uncle’s valet, Volga. Laf was worried that I never even phoned him in Vienna. I should have called.”

“His valet?” said Wolfgang in disbelief. “But I was told you were together for hours—until nearly dawn! What did he say that could possibly have taken so long?”

I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell Wolfgang about last night’s chat, and I resented his tone. Wasn’t it enough that I’d spent a week with little sleep, and all night with no dinner, without being confronted at breakfast by the Spanish Inquisition? So when a surly mustachioed woman arrived at our table with a tureen and a bread basket, I ladled myself some hot oatmeal, stuffed a piece of dry toast in my mouth, and made no reply. After my tummy was warm, though, I felt a bit better.

“Wolfgang, I’m sorry, but you know how my uncle Lafcadio feels about you,” I explained. “He was truly worried, knowing you and I were alone together in Vienna. When he didn’t hear from me, he even called the office back in Idaho to try and find out what might have become of me—”

“He called your office?” Wolfgang interrupted. “But with whom did he speak?”

“With my landlord, Olivier Maxfield. They’ve met each other,” I reminded him. “It seems there were things Laf wanted to discuss with me. He tried first in Sun Valley, then in Vienna, but it never happened. That’s why he sent Volga to meet me here.”

“What sorts of things?” Wolfgang asked quietly, sipping his coffee.

“Family things,” I told him. “They’re pretty personal.”

I looked at my bowl of porridge, already congealed. I’d learned from last night one couldn’t be sure when the next meal might be forthcoming, so I forced myself to take another mouthful. I washed it down with some of the bitter coffee. I was unsure exactly how to say what I knew I had to, so I just set it out there:

“Wolfgang, when we get to Vienna, instead of flying directly back to Idaho, I want to make a detour—just for one day.” I paused as he looked at me. “I want you to arrange for me to meet my aunt Zoe, in Paris.”

Wolfgang and I were picked up after breakfast, in front of the charming penal colony we now called home, by a van that resembled a tank with windows. It was equipped with a driver, as well as a fresh female Intourist “escort” to be doubly sure we got where we were supposed to go. To remind myself, I pulled out my file from the IAEA and checked the schedule and attached map.

This morning’s first meeting was about an hour west of Leningrad, toward the Baltic: the nuclear power plant at Sosnovy Bor near the summer palace of Catherine the Great, where we were scheduled to tour what in America we’d call a commercial reactor, one that produces electricity for public consumption.

As we went, it occurred to me that this was the first time since San Francisco I was free of drizzle, fog, ice, and snow—free to look at my surroundings. Along the river I had a sweeping view of the Hermitage, a brilliant shade of pea green, reflected upside-down in the Neva like Volga’s fabled city of Kitezh, shimmering in the depths until the Last Days when it would rise again, dripping from the waters. Fleecy clouds floated across a brilliant turquoise sky. The skeletal architecture of trees lining the road, their branches spangled with diamonds from last night’s rain, still spoke of winter, but the earth was moist with the rich aroma of newly awakening life wafting through the half-open windows of our van.

Right off the bat that morning, as we were escorted around the vast power plant at Sosnovy Bor by a group of clean-cut engineers and physicists with names like Yuri and Boris, I learned for the first time, with enormous interest, precisely what had brought the Soviets to the pass of extending us this invitation. Just this month of April, during a visit to London, Mikhail Gorbachev—perhaps carried away by the spirit of
glasnost
and
perestroika
—had surprised everyone by announcing the USSR’s decision to cease unilaterally the production of HEU, the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads, and to shut down several Soviet plutonium production reactors as well.

That afternoon, during my first in-depth plunge into that premier Soviet think-tank, the Leningrad Nuclear Physics Institute, the story began shaping up on a very significant scale. In another of those lengthy briefings that nukes everywhere are so fond of, the institute’s director, one Yevgeny Molotov, a handsome but hatchet-faced man with an unsettling resemblance to Bela Lugosi, gave us the back story.

It began with the same struggle Volga Dragonoff had alluded to only last night, a contest waged for the past two millennia which still seemed to be under way today. The part of the world involved—once again, Central Asia—had lost little of its mystery in the process. The British, along with the Russians and others, had engaged in this tug-of-war for the past five hundred years, and coined a name for it. They called it the Great Game.

THE GREAT GAME

Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical [idealist] conception and the dialectical [materialist], which form two opposing world outlooks. [In dialectical materialism] the fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal, it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing itself
.

—Mao Tse-tung

East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet
.

—Rudyard Kipling

The East will help us to conquer the West
.

—Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

Ivan III of Russia, a descendant of Alexander Nevsky, shook things up for the first time in a quarter millennium when he refused, in the year 1480, to pay tribute to the Golden Horde. Ivan married Zoe, the only niece of the last Christian Byzantine emperor. When Constantinople fell to the Turks, he arrogated to himself the spiritual crown of head of the Eastern church and Defender of the Faith.

This politically astute wedding of church and state took place at what would be an important historical moment for western Europe: the year 1492, when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and Ferdinand and Isabella evicted the Moors and Jews from Spain, severing the seven-hundred-year infusion of southern and eastern cultures and pointing the face of Europe to the west. It marked the beginning of the end for the feudal system and lit the fuse of nationalism, with the subsequent rush for colonial expansion that that would entail.

An island to the north was rather late at jumping into this land-grabbing game. The East India Company was officially chartered by Queen Elizabeth I of England only on December 31, 1600. It was established to compete with the Dutch who, themselves already in competition with the Spanish and Portuguese, had still managed to corner a virtual monopoly on the spice trade in Malaysia and the Spice Islands. Within fifty years, chartered East India trading companies had also blossomed in Denmark, France, Sweden, and Scotland. The “jewel in the crown” of England was India with her vast troves of wealth, seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, and warm-water ports.

But the Russians by now had noticed these attributes, too.

Until the many reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, the Russian peoples themselves had appeared more Asiatic than European, with their long flowing robes, uncut hair and beards, sequestered women, and exotic church rites. Yet with their paranoiac fear of being surrounded again as they had been during the “lost centuries” of Mongol domination, these formerly backward feudal fiefdoms managed to expand their borders at the truly impressive rate of 20,000 square miles per year. In the two centuries from Peter’s death in 1725, they absorbed nearly all the vastly diverse cultures in a several thousand-mile swath surrounding them, pushing to the east through Siberia all the way to the Bering Sea, and to the west grabbing all or sizeable portions of Lithuania, Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Livonia, Karelia, Lapland.

A panicky Britain extended its influence north and eastward into the Punjab and Kashmir, annexing Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Baluchistan, and making serious runs on Afghanistan and Tibet. Egypt and Cyprus were occupied, the East India Company was dissolved, and Victoria, crowned Empress of India, had an empire where the sun never set.

As a countermove, by the beginning of the First World War, Russia expanded south and west and seized possession of Ukraine, the Caucasus, Crimea, and western Turkestan—today Central Asia—right down to the Indian-Persian border. Now two empires that once had been separated by thousands of miles had borders, in some places, within only a few miles of each other.

Nor did Russian expansionism end with the Russian Revolution. When Lenin called for a world uprising of the masses against colonial oppressors, he focused specifically on India, encouraging the colonized to throw off the (British) yoke of imperial slavery. But the Bolsheviks themselves, it soon proved, had little intention of offering autonomy to the colonial possessions Russia had acquired throughout four centuries of imperialism. Those regions attempting to break away during the ensuing civil wars and peasant uprisings were quickly brought to heel.