The Tavernier Stones (33 page)
Read The Tavernier Stones Online
Authors: Stephen Parrish
John left his hotel on Otto-Decker-Strasse and walked down the Hauptstrasse toward the central business district of Stadtteil Oberstein. At first, the storefronts failed to reveal any evidence of the town’s primary industry: there were cafes, travel agencies, tobacconists, florists, restaurants, confectionaries—the ordinary trappings of an ordinary tourist trap—but not a single rock shop.
Then the Hauptstrasse took a dip as it approached the center of Oberstein, and the goods on display finally began to change. The closer John came to the central Marktplatz, the deeper he stepped into the greatest permanent concentration of retail minerals, gems, and jewelry in the Western Hemisphere.
If it could possibly have been made out of rock, it was sold in the shops and from barrels and baskets on the sidewalks in front of them. Mineral specimens, everything from thumbnails to museum pieces. Long crystal shards projecting from matrix. Crystal balls. Uncut gemstones, by the piece for the collector, by the kilogram for the cutter. Loose faceted stones by the scoop. Worry stones. Fossils: Devonian fish etched in sedimentary rock.
So many beads dangled in long strands from street-side racks that a passer-by could grab and carry away a thousand semiprecious pebbles in one greedy fist. Some shop windows were crowded with geodes almost large enough to crawl into, like crystal caves; others bore sorted piles of raw emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, arranged in serpentine curves to portray rivers of precious stone.
Pet rocks. Amber, complete with pet insects, fifty million years old. Bookends and paperweights, the shape dictating the function. Cameos. Vases that couldn’t help looking like urns. Urns.
Shops crowded the Hauptstrasse as it wound around the Marktplatz. They jostled one another for choice spots beneath the Felsenkirche. They perched on both sides of the Kirchweg as it climbed the steep hill to the church. The half-timbered architecture sitting atop glass-and-steel foundations seemed to reflect the calm, purposeful disposition of the men and women who made a living fashioning stone.
There was a fountain in the Marktplatz, its centerpiece a bronze statue of a miner boy dressed in rags. The boy sat on a rock ledge, leaning back on one hand and hefting a large transparent gemstone in the other, gazing at it dumbfoundedly. The expression was excusable, given that the rough gem in his fist probably outweighed the fist. He was free of the mine now, removed to the center of a market square, and was almost without exception ignored by the many tourists drinking beer there, probably none of whom could distinguish good rough from bad. Beer, on the other hand, they were better trained to judge.
Jewelry, too. Finger rings. Toe rings. Arm and ankle bracelets. Necklaces. Necklace lengtheners. Necklace shorteners, to shorten necklaces lengthened by necklace lengtheners. Necklace slides, for people who couldn’t decide which way to go. Earrings. Lockets, with nothing to lock. Medallions, for people who had nothing to proclaim, to proclaim something. Stick pins to stick somewhere.
John paused in front of one shop’s display window to watch a diamond cutter labor at fashioning a round brilliant. The man was thoroughly engrossed in his handiwork: a stone no bigger than a pea. John would have expected the diamond to be at least big enough to handle with bare fingers, but this one was locked in the jaws of a clamp and he could hardly see it.
The cutter was polishing one of the facets. He kept lifting the clamp and examining the stone briefly through his loupe before returning it to the lap and continuing with the same facet. After several minutes of watching, John grew bored and moved on.
He approached an idle policeman and asked him whether he had ever heard of a landmark known as “the elevation.” The policeman slowly shook his head.
He toured the Heimatmuseum in the Marktplatz and bought all the books and brochures they had. He asked the saleslady about “the elevation,” but she had never heard of any such place. She called into a back room and asked the manager. He came out and they both faced him, shrugging and shaking their heads. It could mean the rock promontory that seated the church, they suggested, but it had never been known specifically by that name.
They gaped at his complexion as he thanked them and left the museum, no doubt waiting for the door to close before commenting on his acne problem.
He wandered back into the open market square, selected an outdoor Stübchen facing the statue of the miner boy, and ordered a beer. Its bitterness surprised him. The plastic furniture of the Stübchen seemed to suit the clientele, a knick-knack, rubbernecking crowd of biddies and balding, cabochon-bellied men.
He was delaying his visit to the Felsenkirche, because evening was approaching and he didn’t think he could do justice to it. Also he wanted to examine the new books and brochures first. But mostly he was just afraid that if he found nothing in the church, he would be in a stump about what to do next.
Perhaps he had acted irrationally. If he didn’t find a place reliably known as “the elevation,” he wouldn’t have any idea where to dig. Somehow he had thought it would be easier than this. That it would simply be a matter of asking, of being shown some prominent feature of that name, probably associated with the church. And then of measuring a man’s height—his own would do—from the base of the feature and putting a freshly bought shovel to work. Now that it didn’t look so easy, he was beginning to feel foolish.
He sipped his beer and stared long and thoughtfully at the miner boy holding the rough gemstone he had just lifted from the ore at his feet. The untold story of the statue was clear: although the boy had freed the gem, the gem had also freed the boy.
Johannes Cellarius had been there; John could feel his presence, even separated as they were by more than three centuries. The great cartographer had visited this very spot.
One hundred sixty-five feet above, in the center aisle of the Felsenkirche, Frieda Blumenfeld and Mannfred Gebhardt admired the stained glass windows on the south wall of the nave.
“There it is,” Gebhardt whispered.
“I see it.”
“I’m the one who discovered it.”
“Yes, you are.”
Gebhardt turned to inspect a group of paintings hanging on the wall behind the altar. Their polished tempera surfaces glowed in an almost luminescent cast of gold. “And right up there in front of us, clear as day—”
Blumenfeld grabbed his arm and pushed it back down. “We best not be pointing.”
“So,” he shrugged. “Nothing to it. We come in tonight, dig it up, and we’re out of here.”
“No, I think we’ll go home now and wait.”
“For what?”
“For the summer solstice. It’s only three days away.”
“You’re not being superstitious, are you?”
“No, just efficient. I’m just being efficient.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The next morning, John walked down the Hauptstrasse to the Marktplatz and began the long, panting climb up the stone steps of the Kirchweg. Rock shops lined the way. Baskets overflowing with trinkets sat outside their entrances, serving as bait to lure exhausted climbers inside.
At the top of the steps, the path leveled out onto a platform and came to a stop in front of an arch-shaped iron gate. The gate was bolted to the face of the rock and looked like a portal to the mountain itself. Which, in fact, it was: it opened to a tunnel that bored through solid rock to the church entrance.
From the platform, John had a clear view of both the town below and the cliff above. Nets and wire meshes clinging to the cliff face prevented injury from rock fall, a clear and present danger. The tunnel itself, according to one of John’s brochures, had been built specifically to protect people from being struck by falling rocks on their way to church.
He studied the gate before entering the tunnel. It had a lock and would almost certainly be locked at night.
Inside the tunnel was another stone staircase. Fluorescent lamps built into the handrail lit the arch-shaped passage and spread erratic shadows across dank, rough-hewn walls. The unfinished surfaces gave John the impression the builders had merely placed their dynamite charges, lit their fuses, and walked off the job.
At the end of the tunnel was a wooden door that opened to the church itself—a door that
also
locked. John hadn’t considered this detail in any of his mission planning. What if, after all his effort, he should be stopped by simple locks on gates and doors? He entered the church, paid the admission fee of two euros, and sat in a pew close to the altar.
also
locked. John hadn’t considered this detail in any of his mission planning. What if, after all his effort, he should be stopped by simple locks on gates and doors? He entered the church, paid the admission fee of two euros, and sat in a pew close to the altar.
The stained glass windows on the south wall of the nave were the first objects to grab his attention. Pastel rectangles, or “bricks,” cascaded down narrow, Gothic-arched panes of glass. In the easternmost window, the one closest to the altar, the pattern was interrupted by the image of a cross. The cross was skewed
exactly
as Cellarius had depicted it on his map.
exactly
as Cellarius had depicted it on his map.
Cellarius never employed point symbols, only pictorials. But the cross
was
a point symbol. The window therefore had to be a clue, albeit a subtle one, directing searchers to the Felsenkirche in Idar-Oberstein—if, in fact, the searchers got far enough in their search to visit the Felsenkirche in Idar-Oberstein and see the window.
was
a point symbol. The window therefore had to be a clue, albeit a subtle one, directing searchers to the Felsenkirche in Idar-Oberstein—if, in fact, the searchers got far enough in their search to visit the Felsenkirche in Idar-Oberstein and see the window.
So maybe Sarah had been right: maybe they should have come earlier. Maybe all they needed to find the lost Tavernier stones was contained in this church.
Ten or fifteen other people were milling about inside; some he recognized from the breakfast room of his hotel. He left his pew and did some exploring.
Dozens of sarcophagi lined the perimeter of the church, each one gouged from a solid block of sandstone. They extended lengthwise away from the wall and were packed closely together, leaving little elbow room for their dead occupants. John guessed that everybody important had been buried inside the church until the church ran out of room for them.
One branch of the balcony overlooked the north side of the nave, opposite the stained glass windows. Portraits of the apostles hung from its balustrade. Between the front pew and the altar, the portraits appeared in the order Judas, Matthäus, Marcus, Johannes, and Simon.
John paused under the portrait of his namesake and looked for similarities in the cloaked figure. He didn’t find any: the man in the painting, the only apostle depicted without a beard, had a scrunched, unhappy face. In the background, ominously, dark clouds roiled in the sky.
Were these artifacts important? he wondered.
At the rear of the north balcony was a wishing well. It was little more than a hole in the wall, lined with bricks, protected from the public by an iron grating. A shallow pool inside contained hundreds of copper coins, many already green from oxidation.
John took a penny from his pocket, tossed it into the pool, and wished for “the elevation.”
Finally he approached the altar. It consisted of a simple marble-topped table, a Bible, and a bouquet of flowers. Tall brass candlesticks rose from the floor on either side. No more ornamentation was necessary: the works of art on the wall behind the table, paintings created by the so-called Master of the Oberstein Altar, commanded center stage.
They were presented in a triptych. The two side panels told of Christ’s audiences with Caiaphas, Pilate, and Herod, and showed him being nailed to the cross. One large painting, of Christ being raised on the cross, occupied the central panel.
John turned around and scanned the small church; the crowd had thinned. A few remaining people loitered in the outer aisles, inspecting one artifact or another. The ticket salesman at the church entrance sat with his back to the altar and seemed to be nodding off.
He quietly stepped over a “no trespassing” rope, walked onto the altar, and examined the paintings more closely.
Their surface layers had long since cracked with age, although the egg yolk medium continued to shine. Gold paint filled all the backgrounds, creating flat planes that shimmered luminously, as if the sun were saturating skies and interior spaces with its golden rays. Contrasting red and blue garments draped the figures, the pigments still vivid six hundred years after the artist had applied them.
The figures wore halos and posed stiffly; both habits were characteristic of Byzantine art. But their facial expressions were alive with a vitality characteristic of early Gothic art. The style reminded John vaguely of Giotto.
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