Rex (11 page)

Had they really gone down into the cave where the forty thieves store their gold, into its deepest depths? I looked at them, not wanting to believe any of it. Were they sick in the head? Didn't they know that the gold was guarded by dwarves who would spring out at them, race after them the instant they saw them come out with the ingots? Nelly read the questions in my face and nodded ruefully, with a quick inclination of the head toward Batyk, the genius and mastermind behind so brilliant a plan (jeeringly). She picked up the story now and continued it in a voice of scorn, indignant over how bad an idea it had been and also because the story didn't end there, as you will see.

It ends months later, when those mafiosi (real ones, Petya, real ones!) went to sell the stones—having spent the intervening period taking them to Amsterdam in three lots—and learned the truth and realized that this man, a scientist, a weak man in appearance (without glasses, that's true, with excellent vision, the eyes of a gemologist, let me tell you): this man had swindled them! Right there in the jeweler's they let out a howl of pain, furiously twisting and turning and craning their necks high like young wolves as the Dutch policemen's arms encircled them. As if those arms were braided out of the same cords that in 1795 would have tied Kirpich and Raketa to the galleys to row their way across the seven seas (as happened to the Writer's Jean Valjean) but now, only a year and a half ago, had them assembling traffic lights in Bijlmerbajes. At least this was healthier work, their huge stumpy fingers battling with the tiny, fleeing screws. Dreaming throughout
their prison sentence of throwing Vasily to the ground and jumping up and down on his legs with that false joy of criminals who seem to take all jobs as a joke, even the task of delivering a beating to someone, jamming the steel-reinforced toes of their boots into Vasily's ribs. They hadn't seen it coming (the traffic signal's red light blinking on and off during the final test sequence), they hadn't understood, and they'd fallen prey to that swindling scientist.

Top quality synthetic gems, though, it must be said, for they did succeed in selling a first lot in London's diamond quarter, and not a single one of the gentlemen with Victorian sideburns and knit vests took them for fakes. Quite the contrary: their accomplice, Senka, an amateur jeweler, collected the money and sent it to them along with the good news, and they used those dollars to buy themselves the fine aluminum briefcases and luxurious Italian shoes that must have been waiting for them in some storage locker at Bijlmerbajes.

During those same months Vasily (but not Batyk, whose strange preference was for kilims and Persian rugs and who had no eye for Italian clothing) was putting the first wrinkles in his first 100 percent cashmere suit, bending down to see if he could detect any new fold not foreseen by its designer and going out the next morning to buy himself another one, and more clothes for Nelly, and expensive little sneakers for the boy. Or inviting, as he told me he'd done, a whole table of relatives to E*'s top Chinese restaurant. The datable, isolatable moment when he acquired the bad habit of tipping 100 percent. Almost all the money spent in the same place as the swindle, at the very entrance to the forty thieves' cave, in E*.

But how, I asked Nelly at that point, how could they have imagined they could stay there in the city all that time after pulling off so massive a double cross?

They'd been frightened, quite naturally; they'd gone much too far, what doubt could there be? Trembling and sweating the whole night they'd had to spend in the cabin, Vasily afraid and Batyk terrified that with a scale model of a natural diamond continually revolving in their minds the two lumpen proletarians would suddenly figure out they were being swindled. But in the end they managed to get out of there, finally emerging the next morning across the same embankment of dirty gray ice, following the chrome fenders of the thugs' jeep.

“Friends?”

“Friends!”

Until the jeep went around the corner and they watched in relief as it turned and disappeared behind a wall of pine trees, and then said to each other: That's all folks.

But not shouting with glee, as in the silly movies where they throw money in each other's faces. Tense and keeping a tight grip on the steering wheel, a heavy feeling in the stomach that only diminished with the passage of days. Until your father stopped keeping an eye on the door they might come through at any moment, Kirpich and Raketa, the men he'd watched as they slept fitfully on the table's unvarnished planks, the four of them trapped by the snow storm, with millions stowed away under the table. And the two mafiosi had behaved themselves, they'd slept peacefully and hadn't swerved into another possible ending for the story that would have had them going out into the snow as day began to break, softly closing the cabin door behind them, the money back in their possession and two corpses left sprawling on the wooden floor behind them.

Larissa had already told me about it while we were out on the dance floor. I wanted to find out what all the talk of disaster was about (failure! bankruptcy! as your father had cried out that time, inadvertently confessing) and was about to ask her when she herself, during Vasily's momentary departure for the men's room, grabbed me by the arm and we made our way, continually moving to the beat, to the very center of the floor beneath the music's fullest blast. She told me everything, shouting in my ear, and my astonishment at what I heard was such that I stopped dancing and stood there petrified, at the mercy of the other dancers' momentum and the thrusts of their elbows. Seeking her ear wherever the movement of her dancing took it. When she told me, I stepped back and looked into her eyes, wanting visual confirmation for what I'd heard. And grabbed her by the shoulders and again and again yelled: It can't be! Impossible!

Amsterdam? I asked her immediately. And she answered: Of course not. I've had to push him sometimes, to get him to go home, because he has to do something. I've told him so, he can't just hide out waiting for them to put him to death (I overlooked the word, Petya, she couldn't have meant:
dead
).

Nor was what she told me about your mother true: that it had been her idea to move to that rich city, Marbella, that seaside resort where he was still bent on going ahead with a second plan, an even more fantastic plan. At the very mention of which Larissa, when she heard what Vasily was telling her, had burst out laughing. And laughed that
night in the disco, again, remembering how she had laughed. A plan that involved the following: Nelly herself behind a counter, a small workshop in Marbella, specializing in jewelry repair. Where they would restore brilliance to cloudy diamonds—according to the sign outside—bluer now, redder, just like new. The real diamonds being, when the jewelry was returned to its owners, very far away, pried free of the little teeth that kept them in their settings and newly on sale in cities like Bombay or Tel Aviv. All due to the great skill of Vasily, who by then, two weeks later, three weeks, would have made stones in no way different from the originals. Twirling on their owners' wrists, gleaming in tiaras and Cartier bracelets, emitting flashes of sparkling light whose falsity was indistinguishable to the eye. Their owners would never know: gems of the same water, the same size. “And me?” Larissa giggled loudly. “I'm the queen of Sheba and the empress of Russia!”

Idiot girl! It shocked me to hear her talking about Nelly like that. I pulled my head from her shoulder to look at her and question her, about to retort: Nelly? No way! But that gesture took me out of the range of her voice, and I had to draw closer to her eyes (spheres of golden crystal, so beautiful) and thus could see, as I watched her speak, wherein lay Nelly's, your mother's, mistake.

Not because their owners or the alert eye of some jeweler invited to a party aboard one of those immense yachts might somehow realize. Anchored well away from the coast, reaching into the cooler and colliding with the bejeweled wrist or forearm of Rania (of Jordan), this hypothetical jeweler would never shout, “Hold on just a second there, my queen! Those stones are fake!” Never, though neither his etiquette nor his good breeding would prevent it: a jeweler can be just as vulgar as anyone else. But to begin with, no jeweler would ever be invited aboard one of those yachts; a simple jeweler would never be rubbing elbows with Fannia or Theodora of Greece, his index finger
pointing to a set of tourmalines on the arm of Mathilde of Belgium. And even if such eyes, by some miracle or improbable chance, were present there, they wouldn't respond to the glint of Vasily's diamonds with any suspicion, blinded as they'd be by the similar sparkle of all the other stones, their corneas enameled by the intense brilliance, light hammering hard and fast at their retinas' rods and cones.

The danger would not appear there, did not lurk among the rods and cones. No, Nelly! (No, Petya!) The danger was this: how many chokers, how many rings, how many Van Cleef invisible settings—the stone seeming to float, trembling, upon a golden net—how many damaged pieces, how many stones blackened or made opaque by the years? How many? I shouted into Larissa's ear. Very few. How many Saudis, how many Russians, how many Englishmen would drop off their Carrera y Carrera, Boucheron, or Bulgari at a nameless workshop? I could picture them going in, examining the pieces on display, and fleeing after one look at Batyk, his skinny arms crossed over his hollow chest, his sullen gaze.

Larissa had to be about my age: a franker nature and longer bones, a common sense her whole body exuded and a forthright intelligence that had made her laugh at their project. But Nelly had accumulated more sun in her cheeks, like a piece of Baltic amber which, closely scrutinized, held up to the eyes, contains little figures, inclusions, biographical accidents, flies trapped in the fresh resin, insects that should never have flown so close.

And there was I, in excellent spirits between those two suns, like a compatriot of Skywalker on Tatooine gazing upon the two luminous bodies in its sky, one orange, the other blue. Turning to face one and then the other (mentally). A sect of sun worshippers on that distant planet: which of the two would it revere? What would Sir James Frazer have gathered from their ancient lips? Which of the two suns, Petya?
The question didn't trouble me; I didn't hesitate a second. I was more powerfully attracted by the sun that had shone in space for more years; my adoration was greater, and there could not be nor was there any battle within me between the sect that worshipped the young sun and the worshippers of the older sun.

Sixth Commentary

Indistinguishable from an original text at first sight, the words of the annotater, the Commentator. Which, if subjected to isotropic analysis by some prodigiously memorious savant of India and read from right to left, starting with the final word, would reveal no break whatsoever in their paragraphs, a clean crystal with no flaw to shatter the light. Knowing, nevertheless, having understood long ago that these are false and secondary texts, cunningly secreted around the grain or seed of a primary text, which he gradually surrounded with commentaries, building them up layer after layer from the prodigious decoction of his memory (that, yes). Cultivated pearls, muscovite micas, metamorphic crystals that shine, in the end, as if by a natural light and for which he had very beautiful texts at his disposal, other people's gems that he had no qualms about breaking into pieces in the depths of his study.

A whole public library at his disposal. And not by chance did he take refuge in a library, in the depths of its labyrinthine corridors, a room with a fake sign saying
Do Not Enter
or
Staff Only
where he examined those fragments or bits of text in satisfaction. A treasure, the rich copy of precious stones that could reach us and be admired only thus, truncated and inserted into his commentaries. Knowing that he would give them the full brilliance of the book they were torn from, so that entering into his work our eyes wouldn't see a single break in the light: an equivalent reaction coefficient set in an exquisite mounting, that was his aim. But to come upon one of these fragments of Baudelaire (page 133) or Maeterlinck (page 189) is to turn off a dirt
road, a bumpy backwoods lane, and go speeding along the ideal asphalt of a superhighway. However bad this comparison or commentary of mine may be. Here's a better one: like Han Solo's ship after someone has taken a hand to it outside an intergalactic bar and suddenly, with a low hum, it shoots off effortlessly into space.

Always flowing better in those passages, but then back again to the feigned taciturnity, the mania for the right word, the con job of the precise adjective. Without ever a real metaphor or image. The Writer says of Flaubert that he never finds a good image in his work (nor have I). Only that dogged struggle with the text, the tireless polishing that finally dries it out, or perhaps it's not dried out but oiled to the maximum degree, to a high sheen, with a look of premeditation about it. Abstract gestures, paper frenzies, never a pair of hands raised to the breast in an outburst of true emotion, as when the Writer confesses to us that he has wept, that his hero, an alter ego of the Writer, Søren K., has wept.

The same astonished reaction from your father to the answer you gave him out by the pool one evening when I was watching the two of you from above, not knowing that you were talking about me. He asked you in amazement: Where? On hearing you muse over the reasons why no man can vanquish terrestrial gravity, why gravity cannot be annulled. “So much theory, such profound knowledge: from where?” he inquired. And you answered: “Do not be amazed by my learning, Papa, for I am receiving my education from a person who is the very incarnation of the intellect.” And he raised his eyes then and tried to catch a glimpse of me from below, intrigued by these words: this young man, this foreigner, the incarnation of the intellect?