Salamander (3 page)

The next morning he resigns his commission. Prince Eugene tearfully embraces his old comrade-in-arms.

My dear Konstantin, what will you do?

Puzzles
, the Count says, placing his sword in the Prince’s hands.
I will do puzzles
.

After his son’s death Count Ostrov retired to his ancestral castle, on a precipitous island of rock in the River Vah. This ancient stronghold had been built by his ancestors on the crumbling remains of a Roman fort in the same year that Constantinople fell to Mehmed the Conqueror and Gutenberg printed his first Bible.

As a boy growing up in this castle, the Count had loved puzzles.

Cryptograms, mathematical oddities, those new criss-cross word games known in his native land of Slovakia as
krizovka
, riddles and philosophical conundrums, optical illusions, and sleight-of-hand tricks: all beguiled him and, so the Count came to believe, each of these puzzles was related to the others by some hidden affinity, some universal pattern that he had not yet uncovered. Their solutions hinted at a vague shape, like the scattered place names on a mariner’s chart that trace the edge of an unmapped continent. The philosophers of the age were asking why or how God, perfect Being, had created an imperfect world, a world which at the same time the new science was comparing to an intricate machine of uncertain purpose. Perhaps the answer to such questions could be found in these seemingly innocent diversions of the intellect. Was not the mind itself, the Count conjectured, a composite engine of messy animal imperfection and clockwork order?

Yet if there were a single solution to the infinite puzzlement of the world, the young Count Ostrov had been forced
to abandon the search for it. In the tradition of his forefathers he had taken up the sabre and spent his life on horseback battling the encroaching Turks. At the time the thought did not occur to him that he might make some other choice. One of his ancestors, after all, was legendary for having decreed that when he died, his skin should be fashioned into a drum to call his descendants to arms. Another still led his men into battle after an exploding shell had blinded him.

Now the Count indulged himself in puzzles as he had never been able to in his youth.

He had
trompe l’oeil
doors and windows painted on walls. Filled rooms with unusual clocks and other marvellous trinkets and curiosities: refracting crystals and magic lanterns, miniature cranes and water wheels, ingenious traps for mice and other vermin. The few dinner guests who stopped at the castle over the years were required to solve riddles before they were allowed to eat.

He hired servants who were what he called human riddles. Massive-jawed giants, dwarves, beings of indeterminate age or sex, boneless contortionists, and people with misshapen or extra limbs. Many of the menial tasks in and around the castle were,
however, performed by ingenious mechanisms installed in the castle by inventors from all over Europe. Count Ostrov dreamed of a castle in which there would be no living servants at all, but despite many attempts he had not yet succeeded in having a machine fashioned that could prepare roasted larks just the way he liked them.

Not long after the Peace of Passarowitz, the Count found his cherished seclusion threatened by another kind of invasion: that of the document men. The castle was besieged by government functionaries toting satchels bulging with documents, rolled-up maps under their arms, maps which they spread out on his huge oak desk to show him what the Imperial Survey Office and the Superintendency of Frontiers had jointly decided: the River Vah now formed the revised boundary between the Duchy of Transmoravian Bohemia and the Principality of Upper Hungary.

Like a vast bloodstain the empire had changed shape once again. And once again, as so many times before, the land of Slovakia, like a slaughtered ox, had been sliced up the middle.

In consequence
, the document men told the Count,
although your forests, fields, and vineyards are all situated in Bohemia, this castle stands precisely on the border with Hungary, and thus falls into two administrative districts
.

Which means?
the Count growled, stroking his moustache.

Which means that Your Excellency is now subject to the duties, excises, levies, and fiduciary responsibilities pertaining to both states
.

Which means
, the Count said, stabbing a finger at the dotted line that bisected his homeland,
every time a pheasant is killed and
plucked at my back door, roasted in the kitchen, and carried out to me on the front terrace, another coin will be plucked from my purse
.

He argued that by their own logic, his castle did not in fact exist,
as an entire castle
, in either Bohemia or Hungary, and thus should be exempt from taxation altogether, and from any other meddling in his affairs, for that matter. The document men plunged into their law tomes and surfaced with an obscure ninety-year-old
lex terrae
stipulating that a fugitive could not be shot at by soldiers from either of two neighbouring nations as long as he stood precisely on the border.
For if he be wounded in a leg that stands in one realm
, the statute read,
some of the blood he sheds will of necessity flow from that part of him residing in the other, the which transfer of vital humour clearly falls under the Unlawful Conveyance of Spirituous Liquors Act
. Such a man, in other words, remained suspended in legal and political limbo for as long as he took not a single step in either direction. And so it appeared that by analogy the Count’s argument for autonomy was viable. Yet the document men insisted that an exemption of this kind could only take effect in the improbable circumstance that there were no separate, self-contained rooms in the Castle Ostrov.

Just as the several parts of a man’s body blend together seamlessly
, they reasoned,
so your castle would have to be a space in which, for example, no one could say exactly where the gaming room ended and the chapel began
.

At that moment Count Ostrov had the great revelation of his life. Not only would he fill rooms with oddities and brain-teasers, he would transform the castle itself into a devious labyrinth, a riddle in three dimensions, a giant puzzle.

Nineteen years were devoted to this grand design. In the world beyond the castle, peace gave way once again to war.
The Turks retook Belgrade and were rumoured to be preparing for a march on Vienna, where the newly crowned empress Maria Theresa, young and inexperienced, was already under siege by Frederick of Prussia and his opportunistic allies. Armies tramped once again across Europe, cannonballs flew and villages burned, and during a brief lull in the conflagration the document men returned to inform the Count that the border had been renegotiated and moved, freeing him (at least until the next war) from the threat of dual taxation. He treated the document men to a sumptuous dinner for their trouble (complete with the obligatory riddles), dismissed them from his thoughts and went on with his project.

Dry goods, cookware, clothing, furniture were gathered from their respective niches and redistributed throughout the castle. Ancient walls were knocked down and centuries-old doors taken off their hinges. Fixtures were unfixed, immovables became movables. There were windows set into floors and ceilings, inaccessible doors halfway up walls, winding passageways that circled back upon themselves or led to seemingly impassable barriers of stone that would slide away with the touch of an ingeniously concealed catch. Then came the tables, chairs, and beds mounted on rails in the floor, the mezzanines that lowered themselves into subterranean crypts, the revolving salons on platforms filled with halves of chairs, divans and settees whose other halves would be found along farflung galleries amid a clutter of incompatible household objects.

The workings of the castle were made even more complex by the Count’s insistence that although the rooms merged, there would be no such intermingling when it came to social classes. Once every hour through the night, the Count’s bed, and that of his daughter, Irena, left their temporary chambers
and roamed the castle on their iron rails, in the morning ending up where they began. Despite this nocturnal meandering, the Count saw to it that neither of them came near the areas reserved for the servants. For their part, the servants learned to remain as unobtrusive as possible when they went about their tasks. Their presence was a constant reminder to the Count that he had not yet succeeded in creating a castle capable of functioning on its own without constant human intervention. As they made their daily peregrinations, the servants would conceal themselves behind moving pieces of furniture, or take circuitous routes that kept them well away from where the Count and his infrequent guests were to be found. Eventually he hired a Venetian metallurgist who fashioned automatons to take over some of the castle’s more repetitive chores, and to these creations he gave the Slovak name for peasant labourers. There was a
robotnik
that polished silverware, a
robotnik
that folded bedsheets, a
robotnik
that woke the Count every morning by playing his favourite folk melodies on the violin.

The intended result was that the castle seemed scarcely inhabited by human souls.

But the crowning achievement of the Count’s great labour was undoubtedly the library. A Scottish inventor, at enormous expense, designed a system of hidden tracks, chains, and pulleys, driven by water and steam, to create a ceaseless migration of bookcases that without warning would sink into the walls or disappear behind sliding wooden panels. Others dropped through trapdoors in the ceiling or rose from concealed wells in the floors. The entire castle in effect became the library, and no private space was inviolable. A guest at the castle might be luxuriating in a perfumed bath, or lecherously pursuing a servant when, with a warble of unseen gears, a seemingly solid
partition would slide back and a bookcase or a reading desk would trundle past, the Count himself often hobbling in its wake, consulting his watch, oblivious to anything but the timing and accuracy of the furniture’s progress.

As volumes began to arrive in parcels, boxes, and crates, they were unpacked, inventoried, and given a first cursory examination by the Count’s daughter, Irena.

When Count Ostrov first returned from Prince Eugene’s campaign, Irena was in the care of her nurses, and so she remained until the day the women came to him in terror to tell him that the child had fallen ill and was near death. He descended like a thundercloud on the nursery, scattered the women, and finally got to know his daughter.

Never one to place trust in doctors, the Count installed Irena in his own bed, consulted the few medical treatises in his possession, and set to work to cure the disease himself. He spent a sleepless week preparing herbal concoctions and force-feeding them to the child, who immediately threw most of them up all over the blankets. He had her shivering body swathed in reeking medicinal gauzes. She was steamed, plastered, and bled.