And then the dream of her youth, to become the best figure skater in the world, which she still might have become when she escaped to Europe at the age of sixteen as the youngest member of the Olympic skating team. But instead, being totally ignorant of men, she had made the disastrous romantic mistake of marrying a man she knew not at all, a man who lived in a seventeenth-century Albanian castle, the depraved Catherine Wallenstein.
Catherine raging insanely between the twin curses placed upon him by his father, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, who had come to think he was God and that his son was therefore Christ, who had named his son after the monastery in the Sinai where he had discovered the original Bible, twin unbearable burdens for Catherine Wallenstein, hopelessly lost as he staggered ever deeper into the symbols attributed to St Catherine, a sword and a crown and a wheel and a book, using a wheel to torture boys in the Albanian forests and a sword to kill them slowly as he bled from a crown of thorns and covered the book of his short violent life with sacrificial human skin, in savage madness reenacting on others the martyrdom of the historical Catherine and her mystical marriage to Christ.
Fated from the beginning, Catherine Wallenstein. Doomed by an intolerably pious act in the last century, his father's forgery of the original Bible, a stupendous task meant to bring order out of chaos and give grounds for faith where there were none.
Maud saved from him by the intercession of a mysterious old woman who had a strange hold over the castle, Sophia the Unspoken, at the time not known to be Catherine's mother, who helped Maud flee the castle in 1906 when her time was coming to give birth to Catherine's child, which Maud did prematurely in a peasant farmhouse, Catherine in pursuit with forty horsemen finding the farmhouse where she lay and slaughtering all the inhabitants before ordering some of his party to carry his newborn son back to the castle, Catherine himself galloping on ahead intending to murder Sophia, who instead at last brought an end to the curses on her son by striking him dead on the road in front of the castle. With her eyes, as she thought, and by making the sign of the cross.
Maud's Wallenstein son, Nubar, thus lost to her on the day of his birth. And seven years later in Athens an infant daughter dead while her second husband, the Greek patriot Yanni, was away fighting in one of his wars, Yanni himself dead in 1916 on the Macedonian front.
After four long years of sadness a dream in Jerusalem, where she met her magical Irishman just as he was emerging for the first time from Haj Harun's mysterious caverns of the past, Joe all whirling words and visions in the shadowy crypt of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Maud in wonder and silence slipping to her knees and performing a first wordless act of Communion there.
To be followed by beautiful Aqaba in the spring, the worn stones of Jerusalem in the summer and flowering Jericho in the autumn when the evenings were turning cold on the heights. And Joe away although he couldn't help it, and the terrible fear tormenting Maud as she gazed into the currents of the Jordan flowing near their little house, the muddy river of miracles by then reaching the end of its brief and steeply falling course from the rich slopes of Galilee down to the utter barrenness of the Dead Sea.
Fear that Joe would leave her. That this love would also go away. At her feet a rushing river and Joe too young to understand the terrified silences that gripped her that winter beside the Jordan, Maud unable to raise her eyes from the water and reach out and touch the man she loved.
So she had run away from the little house where Bernini was born toward the end of winter. She had left before Joe had even seen his son, not leaving a note behind for him because there was no way then that she could explain her dreaded memories of a barn in Pennsylvania and a castle in Albania, a daughter dying when Yanni was away at the front and Yanni's death, all those restless demons that had returned to shatter the dream of peace she thought she had found in the stillness of a crypt in Jerusalem.
Abandoning the little flowered house in desperation and going up to Galilee, where she rested until she could travel with Bernini. And then in April sadly journeying on to the only sanctuary she knew in the world, the lovely villa by the sea in Smyrna that was the home of Yanni's elderly half-brother, the elegant and kindly Sivi.
Sivi was then nearly seventy. He was unusually tall for a Greek, as Yanni had also been, both of them having inherited their large strong frames and deep blue eyes from their father, a famous leader of the Greek war for independence who had come from an isolated corner of Crete where the people were said to be direct descendants of the Dorians. The fierce old man had married twice late in life, fathering Sivi when he was in his fifties and Yanni when he was well over eighty.
So nearly thirty years had separated the half-brothers and much else as well, Yanni a warring patriot who had lived by the Cretan war cry against the Turks, freedom or death, Sivi a sophisticated arbiter of art and society at his famous teas in Smyrna, where everyone seemed to turn up sooner or later.
In the past year Maud had written Sivi only once, soon after returning from Aqaba, a short note saying she had fallen deeply in love in Jerusalem. But later when her fears had begun to paralyze her she hadn't dared to write. So Sivi had no way of knowing who was at the door on that April afternoon when he answered the bell and found her standing in the rain, thin and wasted with a baby in her arms, one battered suitcase at her feet.
Maud had memorized what she was going to say but the words left her the moment she saw Sivi suddenly towering above her. She couldn't speak. She broke into tears.
She didn't remember everything that happened after that. Sivi embraced her and swept her inside, delivered the baby into the care of his housekeeper and helped her upstairs, called Theresa, his French secretary, to draw a bath and provide new clothes, talking happily all the while in a warm excited voice as if the visit had been planned for months, as if the only misfortune on that dark April afternoon was that it had been raining when she arrived.
Later they sat with cognac in front of the fire, Sivi's deeply lined face all smiles as he wagged his massive head and chatted on about Smyrna and his recent adventures, never once mentioning Bernini or alluding to Maud's life during the last year, simply accepting her presence in his home and delving into ever more elaborate anecdotes to distract her.
Constantinople, 1899.
While Sivi was entertaining a young sailor in his hotel room the sailor's regular lover, a hulking customs inspector, had arrived and begun chopping down the door with an ax, shouting that he was going to kill Sivi. The only escape was the window and the door was giving way so fast there was no time to dress.
With an open umbrella over his head to serve as a parachute, Sivi went sailing out the window in a long red nightshirt and nothing else, the hotel room having been cold enough to warrant a nightshirt no matter what activities were under way.
The nightshirt billowed up, revealing his nakedness to the pedestrians below. And what was worse, it made it impossible for him to see where he was going.
To not even know, intoned Sivi, gesturing extravagantly, what manner of grave I was going to fall into? A diabolical trick of fate.