“Semper Vero has been in my family for only one hundred years and it has been for sale for most of that time. When my mother’s adoptive father, Priam, inherited the property in the 1840s from a distant cousin, he ignored the architecture, eyes only for the fat warped open volume of the overgrown and undistinguished park. On trains, boats, and carts he brought in rare evergreens from all over the world to make an arboretum, the first devoted solely to that species in the Central Empires — as if what they needed in this vast mountain periphery, filled then with virgin forest, was more trees. This indigenous forest he indeed sold off, wood lot by wood lot, to buy rarer and rarer evergreen seedlings and specimen plantings from other destitute estates. In the buildings, including his own home, he took not the slightest interest. Architecture’s only reason for existence, in his mind, was to give some inanimate organizing texture to the landscaping. But there was not a vegetable shoot in Cannonia whose story he could not tell. I used to follow him on his walks, and when I couldn’t name a shrub, he encouraged me to make one up, and then had a copper nametag made for my little fiction. Perhaps it was a kind of holding action,” he murmured solemnly, “this passion for the evergreen, or perhaps a reaction to the desultory and wanton mining, his hatred for the veins of antimony, quartz, and garnets which had seduced even the Neanderthals. Not to mention his absolute loathing for cattle, which he would shoot without a qualm if they even so much as looked across the fence at a rare shrub.” The crow left his shoulder as peremptorily as it had arrived, but he gave no notice.
“But then one day, at fifty years of age, when the trees had reached a nice maturity, when the vistas had filled in nicely and all the children grown, Grandfather Priam got up suddenly from supper one evening, took his cape and cane, walked out on the terrace and down the drive. . and never returned. No one ever discovered what became of him — though there was a rumor of a pilgrimage to a church in the East. At the fullest measure of his life, he simply. . disappeared. . as if the genius of his place could only be preserved by his exile.”
He said this with a tone of surprise as if he had just heard it for the first time, and turning slightly pale, left the subject by motioning to me to follow him down the winding drive where his grandfather had abandoned his little empire.
The drive had been modestly constructed in such a way as to suggest there was nothing more than a vineyard shack or an abandoned quarry at its end, but I noted its every turning might be defended by a handful of lightly armed men. At each bend, mountain torrents dove beneath severe humpbacked stone bridges, wide enough only for a single cart. These, he mentioned, had been constructed in the thirteenth century for the visit of the Blind King, Agram, who had desired to construct a castle and taxing facility upon the heights. The King with his beautiful dead gaze had been led along the road by the local nobles, winding round and round the short volcano by the longest possible route, until at last the Blind King pronounced the vantage too high and abandoned his project, to general relief.
As the road suddenly became nothing more than a cart track, one could make out in the failing light the town of Silbürsmerze, taking its name from the glistening carmine and tarnished silver heath which surrounded it. It hung suspended like a faint etching between blowzy curtains of protective mists, the sort of scene you wanted to rub up against to see if the color would come off. We forded the shallows of the Vah across a great sheath of granite, and as we approached, the town enfolded upon itself, like the mighty tribulations of a rose in a second, slightly desperate bloom. Unfamiliar as it was, I could not help but marvel at the peace it yielded, a town that was still connected with our dreams, the dreams we know are dreams while we are dreaming them and thus effect no fear. For we all walk the ramparts and narrow streets of a town very much like Silbürsmerze, coils of royal blue smoke from peat and fodder fires hovering on her outskirts, where heartbreak remains an aura but is not yet adumbrated, a place where melancholy still gives us character but has yet to become garrulous. Ah, Silbürsmerze: always veering towards sentimentality, but never quite making it.
At the very center of town we entered an amazingly severe, asymmetrical seventeenth-century square, completely arcaded, continuously vaulted, all friezes, alcoves, and spandrels; curdled tympanas, curved archivolts, and gables with crockets; constructed of molded colored bricks so that not a single square inch was the same color. At the north corner stood a church with a covered double-stair and two towers, one of five rectangles and three domes, the other a Saxon clock tower with an Astingi inscription which Iulus translated as “Each hour dooms Man, the last one kills him.” Squatting down in that off-center square, one had the distinct impression of a sealed, impermeable environ, a kind of conservative utopia, but a short walk to any of its corners revealed a narrow street, lane, or worn stair; Silbürsmerze was all exits. And there was nothing at its center, no statue, bell, or well, nothing but an irregular patch of diseased lawn with a low deteriorating stone wall about it.
“Be still,” Iulus whispered, “there are a thousand eyes upon us,” and it dawned on me that my interlocutor was the only human figure I had seen since my arrival. The only sound in the square was the strange hesitant clop clop of manual typewriters, hunting and pecking like a hobbled horse echoing across cobbled courtyards. Despite the absence of people, it seemed a place where no one ever died.
We sat there on the low stone wall for nearly an hour, buffeted by gusts of wind like the exhalations of an excited woman. My sense of mission was growing ever fainter. More than once I turned to my host with some wide-eyed authentic question, but then thought the better of it. The silent depths of that hour in the square, and something in his patient manner, canceled out the earnest gradegrubbing student in me forever.
Suddenly Iulus clapped his hands to his knees, as if he just remembered something, and ushered me into a half-timbered building with clerestory windows. Loping through an arcaded inner courtyard with a barbarian penile millstone displayed at its center, he went directly to a vaulted basement lit with window wells, an enormous room with Spanish studded leather walls and a black and red marble Moorish fireplace, which in palmier days had served as the town mint. The walls were hung with hundreds of hunting trophies, upon each of which was draped freshly killed game — live meat air-dried upon embalmed meat. From every cornice antlered heads stared with glassy eyes, snipey noses, and erect ears, the tissues of their half-open mouths painted a flamingo pink, maws coated with resin. From these obdurate horns and glistening snouts, from the long faces of forest animals, dangled the marbled membranous cuts of their fellow species — ribs, shoulders, and tenderloins; chops, briskets, and roasts; sausages, organ systems, and scaloppini; intricately carved carcasses, filleted silhouettes of musculature, the missing domesticated relatives’ bodies beautifully butchered and appended to the head of their species’ wild prototype. Haunch of stag venison, loins of flushed forest pig, crown roast of fetal lamb, livers dangling in a small silken net from the tail feathers of a cock pheasant in flight; rigid purple skinned hindquarters of rabbit straddling the figure of a stuffed dancing hare. It was as if the ark itself had foundered and sunk, turned upside down in the shallows, disgorging its drowned and butchered cargo of carcasses into eddies of diffused light. And we floated through this haphazard catalogue of delicacies like calm and purposeful sharks. The folk of Silbürsmerze had been through quite a bit, but it was evident that they would never starve.