Gongs and bells and the low thudding of the diesels.
Why is magic to be laid aside when the world's real work is taken up? Is that what I have to learn? Is it only that a story of magic can't end until magic is given up?
* * * *
From the Hook of Holland he went to the Hague aboard a local train or trolley; it passed magically from the city into the countryside, past tiny tidy farms damp brown and gray, stopping at crossroads for people dressed in brown and gray to get on and off. He got off where his directions told him, a gray suburb where up a street was a consular office of the People's Republic of Czechoslovakia. An undistinguished building that might have been a small clinic or even a private house. Inside just two young men in open shirts and leather jackets, universal young men, one bearded, who welcomed him without ceremony, and helped him fill out the forms he needed for his visa. Czech flag on the wall with hammer and sickle. They copied the numbers from his passport, they photographed him and asked an array of personal questions that had no relation to one another or to anything else, as though randomly selected to test his memory—or his truthfulness, maybe, he thought with a comic stab of paranoia. And they gave him his visa, with pleasure it seemed. His photograph within it, dark turtleneck, tousled hair, black piratical beard, glower—would it help or hurt? Troublemaker or fellow traveler? Did it matter? It was a sort of handsome fellow, though not himself maybe. The other riders on the tiny train into the city watched him study it.
In the morning, sore and rattled from a night in a student hostel busy nightlong with comers and goers (no more of those, he vowed), he boarded a long sleek international train bound for Köln, which was Cologne, and the Rhine journey to Heidelberg.
Absurd, but I am continually surprised that the Europeans celebrate their own historic sites, not only the big ones but the littlest and least, places I've known about only as I got their names and map coordinates from esoteric works. Come to find out that they and their legends are well known, they are advertised, you pay money to enter them, and you get pamphlets that explain them all. At Heidelberg you're told every rooming house Goethe stayed in, what moonlight walks to take up onto the castle ramparts, just where Goethe stood when he famously observed, etc.; stationery, souvenir plates, beer mugs, with the same pictures engraved on them. Why did I think it would all lie neglected, only waiting for me? Because I didn't really believe it existed?
He hadn't; even as he walked it, it seemed to him that his own presence summoned this Old World into existence in all its solidity and fullness, a fullness at once expressive and as mute as stone, which a lot of it was, stone: churches and pavements and castle walls and apartment buildings where whoever lived: more mute and obdurate than he could have imagined in advance. He put out a hand and touched speechless stone and so caused it to come to be. It was unsettling. He couldn't make it stop. He got used to it.
Far famed, Schloss Heidelberg is part ruin, part restoration. The restored parts are largely without interest, resembling a combination of a Swiss Stübli and the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner. Be sure to engage a Führer (official guide) if you wish to go through the maze of passages, rooms, belvederes, towers, and corridors, or you may never find a way out.
He might have liked to see what the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner, or something resembling one, looked like; but the interiors were geschlossen for the winter months and there was no Führer. He wandered in the Schlosshof, the castle yard. A silver fog hung over the river Neckar and the toy town far below. Pierce followed the obvious way, down the sloping walks and the famed terraced gardens, beneath a great arch—the Elizabeth-Pforte, built as a birthday surprise (legend has it) in a single night by the besotted Frederick V for his English queen—and into a broad bare terrace. Where were the famed gardens?
"Here,” said Dame Frances Yates. “The designer was Salomon de Caus, a French Protestant and an extremely brilliant garden architect and hydraulic engineer. He was on intimate terms with Inigo Jones..."
Fine rain had begun to fall. She took from her bag a collapsible umbrella, pointed it like an épée, and pressed a button; the umbrella opened as it lengthened. Pierce held it over the two of them, for she hardly reached his shoulder. She told him how de Caus had blasted away the mountain with gunpowder to level it for his gardens, how he constructed grottoes where musical fountains played, and a water organ based on a design in Vitruvius, and a statue of Memnon that sang when the sun struck it, “as in the classical story,” which Pierce couldn't remember.
Nothing of what she described—geometrical beds, obelisks, an airy palace, a maze, another maze—could now be seen; only a mossy and almost illegible river god at the entrance to a grotto. A cave. Empty. The dumpling-shaped tourist with umbrella and walking shoes who had reminded him of Dame Frances stared with him into the dark echoey silence, and withdrew.
It was a ruin, more even than a ruin, a quasi-natural object, vine grown and shapeless, devolving from its status as a work of hands and minds to a complex lump of stone, disorganizing every day a little further in the entropy of hope and desire, which proceeds only one way. What had destroyed it? Lightning, said the guidebook, striking not once but twice, and a dynastic dispute with a French king in the following century. But Dame Frances said it was the two of them, Frederick and his Elizabeth, the might-be-happy couple blessed by Shakespeare's ambivalent mage. The two who in 1619 reigned for a winter as king and queen of Bohemia, a reign as brief and illusory as a masque: and who brought down upon their magic kingdom on the Rhine the tercios and the pikemen and the musketeers and the sappers and the end of everything.
7
She called him Celadon, after the shepherd-knight in d'Urfé's L'Astrée, that vastly popular romance about the Golden Age and the return of Astræa, goddess of Justice and Peace, ears of corn wound in her hair. Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna. He wrote his love letters to her in French; she never learned German. The marriage had been the work of the nobleman Christian of Anhalt, a ferocious little man with wild red hair, tireless bearer of a heavy destiny (so he believed), and the counselor closest to Frederick. Frederick called him Mon père.
Anhalt was there to receive the Princess Palatine when she first arrived at Oppenheim in the Palatinate, and he brought her to Heidelberg, her new seat, by means of a series of masques and processions designed by wise workers to assure her and her spouse's health, happiness, and success, drawing down upon them the best astral and divine influences by the right arrangement of signs, persons, geometries, and words. She passed through arches covered with roses, with images of Church Fathers, Ancestors, Deities. A pretty boy gave her a basket of fruit in the name of Flora and Pomona—Spring and then Autumn, flower and then fruit—for Fertility; and she ate hungrily, and everyone laughed and rejoiced in her. Her husband came out to meet her in a wagon made like Jason's ship, sailing with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece. Music, in Venus's mode (the Hypolydian) and generous Jupiter's (the Lydian) and smiling Sol's (the Dorian), but not the melancholic Hypodorian; there would be time enough for Saturnine music later.
She brought with her a troupe of English actors, for she loved plays and shows and let's-pretend above all things. They performed old plays and new, Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won, The Merrie Divil of Edmonton, A Game at Chesse, which mocked the Spanish. Her Celadon delighted to see her laugh, delighted to see her delighted, and if plays delighted her there would be plays. No matter that his family was not only Calvinist but fiercely Calvinist: his father had once held up a consecrated host before the congregation and ripped it into shreds: “Fine god you are! We'll see who's stronger!” From then on it was tough bread and wooden mugs at the infrequent communions in his whitewashed chapel.