The Amber Room (33 page)

By now the crowd hemmed them in on all sides. The woman spoke a warning; the young man grinned and jerked his head for them to follow. He clapped the next stallholder's shoulder
in passing, said something that was answered with a grunt and a shift of position by the man's thick-set wife.

Jeffrey and Katya followed the pair by stalls selling everything from tatty sweaters to sheets to pocket watches to aspirin to Russian fur-lined gloves and hats. Most of the sellers were women, hard-faced and very large and older than their years. The stalls were rudimentary in the extreme, waist-high blocks of poured concrete with wavy plastic roofs supported by rotting timbers. The entire market lot was surrounded on all sides by multistory Communist-built apartment bunkers.

They crossed a mud-swamped parking lot and stopped beside a thoroughly trashed and battered Soviet Lada. The young man opened the trunk, tossed out sacking and roof-ropes, and pulled out a single remaining wooden crate.

“On the black market the dollar sells for two hundred and ten rubles and it's going up every day,” he said through the laborious process. “Prices shoot up fifty, maybe a hundred percent each week. Pensioners get enough money each month to feed themselves for three days. There is trouble brewing.”

“So why don't you get out?” Jeffrey asked as he watched him gingerly unwrap multiple layers of padding.

“Family,” he answered briefly. “Parents and uncles too old to move. And where would I go, what would I do? There at least people come to me and say, sell this, help me, bring me valuta so I can feed my family another month.”

The box held three individually wrapped parcels. The young man tossed back the final layer of matting in one to expose a pair of delicate porcelain “Easter eggs,” so named because they were often given by royalty as gifts at the end of Lent. These were painted with minute yet beautifully accurate pictures of the Sansouci Palace of Potsdam. Jeffrey squinted more closely, made out people no higher than a pinhead moving across a graceful bridge. He knew from his reading that they had been painted with a magnifying glass and a brush made from one single horsehair. Each egg
represented a month's work by a skilled artisan. They bore the stamp of Meissen, dated 1710. Museum quality.

Next emerged a case the size of a small paperback book. The outside covers were of engraved silver, framing a solid block of ivory. Gingerly he accepted the case from the grimy hands and opened it to find a
Diptyque;
on each block of ivory, two carvings, one above the other, depicted scenes from the life of Christ. Cases such as this one had once adorned the private chapels of late medieval royalty. From the formation of the carved figures and the surrounding decorative motif, Jeffrey guessed that the piece dated from the fourteenth century. Possibly earlier.

Reluctantly Jeffrey handed back the item and accepted the third. His initial disappointment faded when he realized that he was not holding a painting as he first imagined, nor an icon, but rather a seventeenth-century
Adoration
. The frame took the form of an altar, with Doric columns of ebony and silver holding up an ornate frieze and a cross inlaid with polished semiprecious stones. The centerpiece was a painting on what appeared to be a sheet of lapis lazuli. The stone's deep blue had been used to depict a starlit sky from which a finely painted cloud of angels sang hosannas over Mary and the Christ-child.

Jeffrey looked up. “These will feed a family for a lot longer than a month.”

The young man answered his unasked question with grave words. Katya's tone matched his as she translated, “In 1917, when the Communists began taking control of the countryside, some of the villages heard what was happening in the cities, churches looted and desecrated or burned to the ground. Priests handed the church heirlooms to devout families, as they knew that most of their brothers in the cities were vanishing without a trace. The villagers were sworn to guard these treasures and to return them to the church once the Communist threat had passed. But now the villages are
starving, and the sick are dying untreated. The priests are giving dispensations to sell off what treasures survived.”

Jeffrey looked back at the treasure in his hands. “Your village will eat well for a long time to come if this is authentic.”

“I am an honest man,” the man said strongly. “A good man. I take a little and give most back. This is not for me.”

“I believe you,” Jeffrey replied. And he did. But he explained, “There are a lot of fakes coming out of Russia just now. All this will have to be carefully authenticated.”

The young man nodded. “But the last shipment, they were real?”

“Yes.”

“Then take my word.” He waved an arm covered to the elbow with grime and grease. “Genuine and old.”

Jeffrey cast another lingering glance over the items, nodded agreement. He thought so, too.

“You can buy icons? Good ones, old. Silver frames. Some gold.”

“I don't know,” he said doubtfully. “There's a wall of icons now in one London antique store.”

The young man was not surprised by the news. “But if I bring you ones as special as these?”

“Then I can buy them. I don't know the price, but I will buy any of this quality.” He traced the pattern of the blue-veined sky. “Definitely.”

“For a lot of people and villages, the only thing of value they have left is the icon. Stored away since the Revolution. Now they either sell or starve.”

Jeffrey inspected the young man. “Things are that bad?”

“Come and see,” the man replied, his animated face turning as flat as his companion's. “Some things you have to witness to understand.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You come see me first here, I'll take you to the
real
Ukraine. And more things to buy. Real treasures.”

“Maybe this summer,” Jeffrey said, liking the idea of a new adventure.

The woman lost her patience, snapped at her companion and started to move away. The Ukrainian smiled, held her shoulder, and gestured with evident pride at her spirit. He soothed her with a few words and said something more which was translated as, “Five thousand dollars now. It is a lot, but I must have it now. The rest you give to your priest, along with word on when you can come with me across the border.”

Jeffrey felt the thrill of stepping out into the unknown. “Gregor is not a priest.”

The young man shrugged. “The honorable man, then. In a world like this, which is harder to find?”

CHAPTER 32

“The Baroque era in Poland,” Katya said as Jeffrey drove them out of Cracow the next morning, “was a golden age in more ways than one. During that period, the nation entered into years of relative stability and vast political power. So long as far-flung powers did not ignite the flames of war, as sometimes happened—”

“Too often,” Gregor murmured. “For century upon century, war was seen as a valid arm of everyday politics.”

“This stability brought unbridled economic growth to Poland,” Katya continued. “And with this growth came phenomenal wealth to the ruling classes. Poland's location made it a bridge between empires—the Ottomans to the south, the Swedes and the Prussians to the north, the Muscovites in the east, and the tottering Holy Roman Empire to the west. For much of this period, the Polish-Lithuanian empire was the only one of these powers that was not at war.”

“A bridge of culture, and a bridge of trade,” Gregor agreed. “For seven months a year, ice closed off all the northern seas, so that the only way to arrive to the new empire of Muscovy was overland. The only safe overland passage, with decent roads and stable government and security against brigands, was through Poland.”

“And every time a cargo came through the empire, a bit was left behind in the form of taxes and payments and trades,” Katya finished. “Since there were fewer wars to drain the coffers of either government or commerce, the gentry grew rich.”

“Incredibly so,” Gregor said. “Sadly, the wars that swept through this land afterward left little evidence of what Poland possessed. But believe me, my dear boy. Poland once set the definition of what it meant to be wealthy.”

“A will dated 1640 tells of one woman's estate,” Katya
said. “She left
five thousand
diamonds and emeralds to her daughters. And she was not a princess nor a queen, Jeffrey, simply the wife of a wealthy landowner. Another landowner of this same period left his children a cloak woven of solid gold thread, embossed with eight hundred rubies. Yet another deeded to just one of her children over eight thousand pearls.”

The hills lining the new four-lane highway to Czestochowa were speckled white with old snow. The lower reaches nestled beneath a gently falling mist, the sky descending to wrap distant hills in ghostly veils. Ancient castles and hilltop monasteries emerged from the haze-like painted apparitions before melting from view. Jeffrey decided he had never seen a more beautiful winter landscape.

“When the pillage of this great land began,” Gregor said, “the stories that circulated spoke of wealth beyond the greediest of imaginations. Warlords swept in like packs of wolves following the scent of a fresh kill. One country estate contained so much art that the Swedes required one hundred and fifty wagons to cart it away. Another castle, which fell to the Austrian army, listed over seven thousand paintings in its archives.”

Tree-lined rivers appeared from time to time, impressionist glimpses that flowed into the white-shrouded distance. Carefully tended farms gave way to forests of silver birches, tall and graceful and otherworldly in the floating mists.

“But during the period of stability,” Katya went on, “this outward display of wealth was carried over into how Poles worshiped. By this time, the Polish Catholic church was referred to simply as ‘our church.' Rome was scarcely granted the time of day. The Vatican was so embroiled in trying to keep the Holy Roman Empire from scattering to the winds that little more than passing complaint was made. At least the name Catholic was kept.”

“Keep in mind as well,” Gregor added, “that the tide of Protestantism swept much of Europe at the onset of this era. While wars scarred the face of many countries, Poland opened
its arms to all sects, including many that even the Protestant church considered too heretical.”

“I love it when you two do this,” Jeffrey said.

Gregor showed genuine surprise. “Do what?”

“Trade off on each other. Tell a story together.”

Gregor looked at Katya in surprise. “Were we doing that?”

“I don't know,” Katya replied.

“Yes you were, and it's great,” Jeffrey assured them. “Please continue.”

“Very well,” Gregor agreed. “Where was I?”

“Heretics.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you. Calvinists formed a very large colony here under the protection of the king. Lutherans dominated several regions, converting even the ruling princes. Aryans, who were condemned by every other church body in Europe, populated several cities. There was even a point when a majority of the Sejm, Poland's parliament, was Protestant. In the almost two centuries that religious terror and oppression swept through the rest of Europe, only seven people were sentenced in Poland for religious crimes, and five of them were Catholics convicted of burning down a Protestant church. When a Papal envoy arrived to complain, the Polish king was heard to say, ‘Permit me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep.' At a time when other countries, Protestant and Catholic alike, were torturing people before burning them at the stake just for reading the wrong book, upholding the cause of human rights like this was extraordinary.”

“Many historians feel that it was precisely because of this liberal attitude that Poland eventually returned to the religion of its heritage,” Katya went on. “In any case, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Catholicism was again the predominant form of worship, and churches in wealthier regions reaped the benefits of their princes' and patrons' riches.”

“Regions such as Czestochowa,” Gregor added.

Katya nodded. “One patron decided such an important painting of the Madonna and Child needed to be clothed in
robes of more than just paint and so gave a cloak of woven gold and encrusted diamonds. Another donated a cloak of gold and emeralds. Another of silver and rubies. Yet another had an embossed metal plate designed and covered with a sheet of hammered gold, then set in the wall to slide over and protect the painting when it was not being viewed.”

“So what is so important about this painting?” Jeffrey asked.

Katya glanced at Gregor, who smiled and nodded. “After you, my dear.”

“It's hard to separate fact from legend,” Katya began. “All that can be said for sure is the original painting is at least one thousand five hundred years old.”

“What?”

“That is the minimum,” Gregor confirmed. “But being an incurable romantic, I prefer the legend.”

“So do I,” Katya agreed.

“Which is?” Jeffrey pressed.

“That it was painted by Luke on the tabletop from the holy family's home in Bethlehem,” Katya replied.

“Luke, as in the writer in the Bible?”

“There is much to argue that the story might be true,” Gregor said. “Legends and early historians both agree that it is so. There is also another image of Mary and the Christ-child in Florence, Italy, which authorities insist was also painted by Luke. The two paintings are remarkably similar.”

“This one was reportedly taken from Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Constantine around the year 300,” Katya continued. “Constantine stopped Rome's persecutions of Christians when he himself was converted. He is said to have placed this painting in his own chapel, where it remained for over six hundred years. By that time, the eastern Holy Roman Empire was collapsing. Constantinople was warring with enemies on every side, including some of its own provinces. Allies were desperately needed. In return for an oath of fealty, the painting was given to Prince Lev of Rus, as the
lands to the north were then known. Prince Lev moved it to his own palace at Belz, where it remained until 1382, when his descendant Prince Vladislaus decided to relocate it to a new monastery he was starting in Czestochowa.”