The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

she said. “A place of power, like the caves at Eleusis, or that one at Subaico just outside Rome, opposite where you’re building your summer palace. And of course, the time must be right too.”

“The time?” said Nero. “You mean morning, afternoon, or midnight? Or the time of year—spring or fall?”

“No, nothing like that,” Agrippina said. “Lucius said it was a Persian or Egyptian concept.” She stroked his arm and added with a smile, “I mean, the idea that it must be done while the aeon is changing—at the cusp between one celestial age and another.”

“But then,” said Nero, gazing out on the raging fires that were now devouring his eternal city, “that would mean these objects must be collected together right now!”

THE LOST DOMAIN

Such moments, such particular glimpses down long vistas of the unattainable … phrases like the domaine perdu and the pays sans nom [describe] far more than a certain kind of archetypal landscape or emotional perspective on it.… We first grasp the black paradox at the heart of the human condition [when we realize] that the satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire.

—John Fowles, afterword to

Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier

Only after Wolfgang and I had completed the two-hour drive to the airport at the far side of Vienna, got through parking, check-in, and customs, and boarded our plane for the flight to Leningrad did I have a real chance to try to organize all my mental notes on what I actually knew so far about Pandora’s mystery.

I felt like a player in a millennial scavenger hunt, chasing scattered clues across continents and through aeons. But what had begun as a dizzying pile of unrelated facts was now a clearer path that connected geographical spots on the map with animal totems, animals with constellations in the night sky, constellations with gods, and the names for these providing the key. So as I looked out my plane window at Leningrad, that watery city of inland canals just beneath our wings, it seemed appropriate that this land into which we were descending had as its own symbol, mascot, and animal totem the Russian Bear.

For the first time I realized in just how many cities I’d sojourned without seeing them as the residents did—or even as tourists might. Because of Jersey’s and Laf’s status as world-class performers, even inside Russia at the height of the now waning Cold War, their lives on the road had remained an endless procession of chauffeured limousines and champagne.

My father, too, on the rare occasions I’d joined him abroad, preferred to cloister himself within the walled fortresses of hotels for a privacy only money could buy—just like that week in San Francisco. So although I’d experienced the glittering facades woven by the history and mystery and magic of many spots on the planet, I’d missed most of the dirt and drudgery and inconvenience—a portrait very likely far more real.

Tonight, as Wolfgang and I stood on the granite steps outside the Leningrad airport along with a steaming mass of a hundred or more shadowy Eastern-bloc types, waiting in the dark drizzle to be cleared, one by one, through the single glass-walled immigration station open within the airport, I began to see for the first time a wholly different picture.

This was the USSR depicted in State Department statistics books like those Wolfgang had loaned me—a land with a population thirty percent larger than that of the U.S., inhabiting more than double the land mass, yet living on only a quarter of our per capita annual income, producing only a third of our per capita gross national product, and experiencing a significantly higher birth rate and lower life expectancy.

And Leningrad, the sparkling city of Catherine the Great and Peter the First which had shimmered upon the waters like a northern Venice, now seemed to be sinking back into the pestilent marshland from which it had once been reclaimed. As with most Russian cities, the occupants of Leningrad spent their time queuing up and waiting, in what appeared to Western eyes an inexplicably contagious mass atrophy.

It had been nearly seventy-five years since the Russian Revolution. I wondered how long a people so weary of their own existence could endure the stranglehold of beliefs and methods of enforcement they didn’t agree with. Maybe our invitation and presence here today would provide part of the answer to that question.

Wolfgang and I were collected at the airport by an officious-looking uniformed young woman from Intourist—a group rumored to be the hospitality branch of the KGB—and taken to our hotel. En route, Wolfgang cryptically intimated that the Soviet government wouldn’t approve of unmarried male and female colleagues practicing on their premises what he and I had practiced, and nearly perfected, in his castle all last night. I got the message, but not the whole picture—until I got a load of the place.

The barrackslike “hotel” that our hosts, the Soviet nuke establishment, had graciously arranged for the duration of our stay had all the charm of your average U.S. federal penitentiary. There were many floors that all looked identical, long halls paved in grey linoleum illuminated by fluorescent lights that, to judge by the humming and flicker level, hadn’t had their tubes replaced since they’d been installed.

After quickly arranging tomorrow’s schedule, Wolfgang and I were parted and I was led to my own wing by a hefty female storm trooper I imagined was named Svetlana. Arriving at my boudoir du soir, she assured me in broken English that she would remain posted downstairs for the night, then showed me three times how to lock myself in, and waited outside my door until she heard me do so.

It was only then I suddenly realized I was starving, having eaten nothing since the croissants and chocolate that morning. I rummaged through my bag until I found some trail mix and a bottle of water, wolfed down enough to silence my ravenous stomach, undressed in those damp,