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

Hmm: her lifelong dream. Not a major contender in the goal-setting department. And despite the hochdeutsch accent, her manner exuded the vacuous wispiness of a none too clever child. She offered her fingertips like a limp washcloth to me; her eyes, which a moment ago had seemed of impenetrable depth, now seemed only impenetrably vacant. I glanced at Olivier, who shrugged and grinned back a little sadly. There was definitely room for rent upstairs.

“I hope you two will be like sisters,” Laf said, pressing Bambi’s arm.

Laf turned toward our table of waiting waiters, at last prepared to be seated, the signal for the rest of us to do likewise. The Transylvanian factotum Volga Dragonoff—who could divine Laf’s every whim as if they were connected at the frontal lobes—found himself a chair across the room by the door and sat there holding Laf’s cape on his lap. I’d never known Volga to take a meal with my uncle or any of the family, even when stranded for two days inside a lean-to in the Tyrol with nothing to eat but trail mix. I tapped my brow to Volga and he nodded back, not smiling. Volga never smiled.

“Bambi is an extremely talented cellist,” Laf was telling Olivier, which got my attention. I knew what that meant. “Everyone knows,” he went on, “that deft fingering and the action of the bowing wrist are hallmarks of all great string artists. But very few realize that, when it comes to the cello—”

“It’s how you grip it with your thighs that really counts,” I finished up.

Olivier glanced at me, choked, and reached for the water.

“Yes, indeed,” Uncle Laf agreed as the maître d’ arrived with the menus. “The performer’s body itself must become the instrument, completely enfolding the music in a hot and all-encompassing embrace of passion.”

“I can see that,” Olivier managed to croak. His eyes were riveted in astonishment on Bambi’s Olympian body.

“I’ll have the oeufs Sardou,” Uncle Laf was telling the maître d’. “But with béarnaise, and plenty of extra lemon.”

Olivier leaned toward me and whispered: “I am breaking out in hives.”

“Gavroche, perhaps you young people will like to go skiing this afternoon, after brunch?” Uncle Laf asked when he’d finished ordering for Bambi as if she were a child.

I shook my head and pointed to my injured arm.

“Then we two can have our private chat while the others ski. But just now, while we have our meal, I thought I might tell a story of more general interest—”

“A family story?” I asked, with what I hoped was a tone of cautionary reserve. Hadn’t Uncle Laf told me on the phone that what he had to say was confidential?

“Not really family,” said Laf with a smile, patting my hand. “Actually, this is my own story, a story I’m sure you’ve never heard, for your father doesn’t know it any more than did my half brother Earnest. Nor does Bambi here, who thinks she knows every dark and hidden secret behind my transparent and public life.”

This seemed an odd characterization of the vapidly beautiful Bambi, whose demeanor suggested an incapacity for sustained interest in any topic.

“Despite my long and full life, Gavroche,” Laf continued, “I still recall every sight, every taste, every scent. Sometime I must discuss my philosophy that aromas are indeed the keys to unlock such early memories. But the strongest memories are those associated with either the greatest beauty or the greatest bitterness. The day when I first met Pandora, your grandmother, was a combination of the two.”

The procession of waiters arrived, set down our dishes, and simultaneously whipped the lids off with a flourish. Laf smiled at me, and went on, “But to explain how it all began, I must tell you first of the bitterness—then the beauty.

“I was born, Gavroche, toward the end of the year 1900, in Natal province on the east coast of South Africa. The place itself was named four hundred years earlier by Vasco Da Gama to commemorate the Nativity, for he’d sighted the place on Christmas Day. The astrological portents at the time of my birth were extraordinary: five planets at once were passing through the sign of Sagittarius, the archer. The most important of these was Uranus, bringer of the new world order, the planet that was expected to usher in the new age of Aquarius nearly upon us. Or one might call it, rather, a new world disorder, since from ancient times it was prophesied that the Aquarian age would begin with the violent destruction of the old order, crushed and washed out to sea as though by a tidal wave. For my family there in Natal, that upheaval had already begun: I was born at the very height of the Boer War, the event that baptized this century in fire and blood.

“For two years after my birth, this war had been raging between the more lately-come English settlers and the descendants of earlier Dutch immigrants who called themselves Boers, like the German word Bauer or farmer—those whom we English call simply boors or country bumpkins—”

“We English, Uncle Laf?” I interrupted in surprise. “But I thought our family was descended from Afrikaners.”

“Perhaps my stepfather—your grandfather Hieronymus Behn—had the right to claim such boor-ishness,” Laf agreed with a dark smile. “But my true father was English and my mother Dutch. My mixed parentage, and my birth into a country torn by such a war, go far to explain what bitterness I felt toward the bloody Boers. This war was the match touching off a chain of events that would soon engulf the world, and propel our family into the very heart of chaos. I have only to think of those events and I cannot choke down my gall, nor quench my unrelenting, burning, and fathomless hatred for those men.”

Holy shit. Unrelenting, burning, and fathomless hatred? Until this moment, like everyone, I’d regarded Laf as a brilliant violinist but a dilettante nonetheless,