“Let’s eat first,” he said. “I’m starving.”
For the first time, we made small talk. It was only brief, for he eats too fast, although I did not comment on it that first time. Tristan had studied physics at West Point but ended up assigned to the Military Intelligence branch of the Army, which—in roundabout ways he constantly deflected with the term “classified”—led to his recruitment by his “shadowy government entity.”
For my part, since nothing was classified, I divulged the source of my polyglot tendencies, that being: my agnostic parents having been raised Catholic and Jewish, my two sets of grandparents competed for my faith from my earliest years. At the age of seven I proposed to my Catholic grandparents that I learn to read the New Testament in Latin, in lieu of attending Sunday school. Thinking I would never attain this, they agreed—and I was functionally fluent in classical Latin within six months. Emboldened by this, shortly before my thirteenth birthday I similarly evaded being bat mitzvahed by testing out at college level for classical Hebrew. My Jewish grandparents offered to fund one semester of university education per each ancient language I mastered at college level. That was how I afforded my first three years of school.
Tristan was very pleased with this story—almost as pleased with himself as with me, as if patting himself on the back for having chosen such a prodigy. When we finished our meal, he collected the disposable containers, rinsed them, and packed them neatly back in their bag. “All right, let’s start!” he said, and we moved to the couch so I might examine the documents.
In addition to the cuneiform tablet there was something in Guānhuà (Middle Mandarin) on rice paper, about five hundred years old—Tristan to his credit at least knew to handle this with gloves on. There was also, on vellum, a piece written in a mixture of medieval French and Latin, I would say at least eight hundred years old. (It was
As he had warned, Tristan would not tell me where he had obtained these artifacts, nor why it was such a (seemingly) random collection. After several hours with them, however, I saw the common theme . . . although it was hard to believe what I was reading.
In short, each of these documents referred to magic—yes, magic—as casually as a court document refers to the law, or a doctor’s report refers to medical tests. Not magician-trick magic, but magic as we know it from myths and fairy tales: an inexplicable and supernatural force employed by witches—for they were, per these documents, all women. I don’t mean the belief in magic, or a mere weakness for magical thinking. I mean the writer of each document was discussing a situation in which magic was a fact of life.
For example, the cuneiform tablet was a declaration laying down what a witch at the royal court of Kahta was due in recompense for her services, and regulated the uses of magic that courtiers were allowed to ask of her. The Latin/French one was written by the Abbess of Chaalis regarding the struggles that one of her nuns faced, trying but failing to renounce her magic powers, and the abbess wondered if she herself was to blame, as she was not truly wholehearted in her own prayers for the sister to be relieved of her powers, since those powers often made life easier at the abbey. The Guānhuà took a little more work—I had but a cursory relationship to Asian language groups by then. It was itself a recipe from the provinces for a dish involving various hard-to-find aromatic herbs, as described to the writer (a circuit-riding Mandarin magistrate) by self-reported witches (whose activities were referred to as a footnote on the side of the recipe). Finally, the nineteenth-century Russian was written by a self-identified (aging) witch and lamented the fading powers of her sister witches and herself. This one also made a passing reference to the desirability of finding certain herbs.
These were rough, almost off-the-cuff translations. When I had finished the fourth one, there was a silence between us for a moment. Then Tristan gave me a disarmingly sly grin, and spoke:
“What if I told you we had more than a thousand such documents. All eras, from six continents.”
“All bearing this family crest?” I asked, pointing to the blurry stamp.
“That is the core of the collection. Others we collected on our own.”
“Well, that would challenge certain assumptions about the nature of reality that I did not even know I had.”
“We want you to translate all of them and extract the common core of data,” said Tristan.
I looked at him. “I assume there’s a military purpose.”
“Classified,” he said.
“If I have a context for translating, I can do a better job of it,” I protested.
“My shadowy government entity has been collecting documents of this nature for many years.”
“By what means?” I sputtered, both fascinated and dismayed to learn that a well-funded black ops organization was competing against academic researchers in such a manner. That sure explained a few things.
“The core of the collection, as you’ve been noticing, is from a private library in Italy.”
“The WIMF.”
“Beg pardon?”
“The Weird Italian Mother Fucker,” I said.
“Yeah. We acquired it some time ago.” His face twitched and he broke eye contact. “That’s not true. I was just being polite. We stole it. Before other people could steal it. Long story. Anyway, it gave us plenty of leads that we could follow to acquire more in the same vein. By all means fair and foul. We now feel we have a critical mass that, upon translation, might yield a sense of what precisely ‘magic’ was, how it worked, and why there are no references to it anywhere after the mid-1800s.”
“And you wish to have this information for some kind of military purpose,” I pressed.
“We wish to have one person do all the translations,” Tristan said, firmly not answering my query. “For three reasons. First, budget. Second, the fewer eyes, the safer. Third and most important, if the same person processes all the material, there is a greater chance of gleaning subtle consistencies or patterns.”
“And you are interested in those consistencies or patterns why, exactly?”
“The current hypothesis,” Tristan continued as before—that is, without actually answering me—“is that perhaps there was a worldwide epidemic of a virus that affected only witches, and magic was literally killed off. I don’t think that’s it, but I need to know more before I offer an alternate hypothesis. I have my suspicions, though.”
“Which are classified, right?”
“Whether or not they are classified is classified.”
The documents were many, but brief; most were fragmentary. Within three weeks, working alone at my coffee table, I had produced at least rough translations of the first batch of material. During that time I also gave notice, apologized to my students for abandoning them before they’d even gotten to know me, moved out of my Harvard office, and managed to reassure my parents that I was still working, without telling them exactly what it was I was doing. Meanwhile, Tristan was in communication with me at least twice a day, usually appearing in person, occasionally calling and talking to me in the most oblique terms. Never did we email or text; he did not want anything said between us to be on record. There was something rather swashbuckling, if unsettling, about the need for such secrecy. I had no idea what he did with the rest of his time. (Naturally, I asked. You can guess what his answer was.)