As darkness fell, he lit candle after candle in the sitting room, indifferent to what the monks might think of the concentrated brilliance. Should any tiny part of her wink on, he didn't want to miss it. When, by midnight, not so much as a chin dimple had shown up, he experienced alternate states of panic and relief; panic that her disappearance might be permanent, relief that he had not disappeared.
At dawn, he blew out the candles, which had come to resemble the fingers of careless mill workers, and continued the vigil by sunlight. Above Pan's cataractous snoring, he could hear carts creaking to market, birds blowing the bugs out of their pipes, and monks marching to and fro in front of the shop, but he couldn't hear a peep from the Other Side. There was simply nothing left of Kudra but a pair of empty shoes. In some kind of desperate attempt to get her attention, he set fire to the left shoe and smoked it.
He had just blown a ring about the size of her left breast when — how embarrassing! — the gendarmes arrived. They arrested Alobar, charging him with heresy, blasphemy, satanism, and witchcraft, and confiscated the new perfume bottle as evidence.
Breaking into the Bastille was as easy as falling off a ewe for the invisible Pan. Less than twenty-four hours after the arrest, before the whips and lashes had gotten limber, Pan had liberated Alobar, and the bottle as well, leaving nothing in their place but an awful smell.
Immediately, they made their way to the incense shop. It was boarded up, and a heavy wooden cross was propped against the front door. Prying boards loose from a rear window, they hurried upstairs. The sitting room was just as they had left it. Kudra's right shoe lay upturned on the thin carpet, like a boat washed up on a desolate shore.
It was barely four in the morning, but already candles were exercising their little flames, left, right, flicker, sputter, left, right, in the monastery halls across the street. Alobar knew he must get out of there, but first he bundled up as much fragrance equipment as he could carry, and left a note in Kudra's shoe telling her to look for him in the beet fields of Bohemia.
To Alobar's mind, there were several possible reasons why Kudra hadn't rematerialized. To wit:
(1) Once she had fallen over the edge (Alobar was assuming that her experience paralleled his own), she had just kept falling, growing lighter, looser, and larger until she became nothing — or everything — and was, therefore, in a rather grandiose way, “dead,” or, at least, irretrievable.
(2) In the world of the nonliving, she had been reunited with her parents, with Navin the Ropemaker, and with her abandoned children, about whom she felt, Alobar knew, continued remorse. (Alobar secretly blamed himself — no seventeenth-century male would publicly admit to such a shortcoming — for Kudra's failure to conceive in their recent efforts, but, of course, the fault lay with the pennyroyal that she had ingested for over seven hundred years and which had left a contraceptive residue that would bash sperm in the head for a long time to come.) In that case, she would choose not to rematerialize for a while, if ever.
(3) She had landed safely on the Other Side and was searching there for him. Since she had no way of knowing that his dematerialization had been aborted, perhaps she feared that he was lost.
(4) She had landed on the Other Side and become lost there, herself. Maybe she longed to come back but couldn't find her way.
(5) Since their practical objective in learning to dematerialize was to transport themselves across the Atlantic, it could be that Kudra had crossed directly and was waiting for Pan and him to join her in the New World.
In the event that it was reason number one that detained her, there was nothing Alobar could do but grieve. If it was number two, he could only carry a torch, as they say, and hope that his love would eventually draw her back to him. To deal with possibility three or four might or might not require him to dematerialize, but, in either case, he instinctively felt that their long-sought perfume would be the key to their finding one another again. For that matter, if it was number five that was correct, if she had taken advantage of a free and easy passage to the New World and was counting on Pan and him following her, the perfume would also be necessary, both as a mask for goat gas and as a signal in case their seeing one another directly was prevented by natural or supernatural obstructions.
Well, at least he could provide the perfume now. Or could he? That question — and a sack of beakers, tubes, crucibles, industrial-strength candles, citron, jasmine oil, and a five-ounce bottle with Pan on its side — weighed him down on the long trek to Bohemia.
The beet harvest was right on schedule. Toward the tail of July, peasants were in the fields from morning until night, ripping whiskered fetuses from the planetary mud. A steady parade of oxcarts wound toward the villages, bearing baskets of smokeless coals and sacks of idol eyes. Concealed in a hillside thicket, Alobar kept one eye on the harvest, one on the road to the west, down which he expected at any moment to see an hashish-colored woman jiggling and swaying: jumping beans in aspic, a satin ship rolling in a tide of licorice sauce.
The harvest petered out, the woman never appeared, but the Bohemian farmers, as they had done since Alobar could remember, left a few acres of beets undug so that they might complete their cycle and provide the seed for next year's crop. There was a patch of seed-beets here, a patch there, often miles apart. Alobar mapped the countryside, X-ing the fields where the treasure lay. He needn't have bothered. By mid-August, his nose could have led him blindfolded to the places where the pollen was congregating.
In the dark of night, Alobar and Pan collected the viscous powder from the plant tops, filling beakers that they stashed in a particularly dense thicket. Twigs and branches jabbed at their eyes, briers tore Pan's flesh and Alobar's clothing, but each dawn they kicked and shoved their way into the coppice, where they added another couple of beakers to the stash and lay down to sleep in a chaos of sweating vines, mucous leaves, and maggoty logs. Mistletoe dripped an unsavory liquid on them, a living confetti of spiders and earwigs dotted them from head to heel, curds of mushrooms and scrumbles of lichen soiled them to the bone, but Pan slept as if he were to that foul manor born, and Alobar was too desperate to care. His fitful dreams were all of Kudra, and when he lay awake in the rot and tangle, he sniffed at the contrasting clouds of musk that billowed from the god and the beakers of beet pollen, noting with immense satisfaction that they nearly cancelled one another out.
After a dozen containers had been filled, they hiked into the high hills, where smoke would not be noticed, and, while Pan lay on the humus, noodling his pipes (Alobar had fetched them in his sack, and they put the local fauna into a tizzy), Alobar constructed a crude laboratory. He boiled down the beet pollen into an extract, gray, gooey, and possessed of a basso profondo that could have brought the rafters down in the grand opera of smell.
When all the extract had been made, Alobar shook the wood lice out of his britches, washed his face in a creek, and set out for a large town on the Russian border, where he knew a vodka master to reside. Pan was left behind to guard their equipment. Without the feeble god to slow him, Alobar reached the town in a week. There, he approached the vodka maker, who, in return for the last of Alobar's French gold pieces, agreed to distill the beet pollen extract, an operation that, to Alobar's displeasure, consumed the better part of a month.