Sophie and the Sibyl (26 page)

Sophie, anxious in her wedding dress – we let it out last night – why does it still feel too tight – here? – forgot every tiny niggle in her delight at the crown and sprays of white petals, barely opened, tipped with the soft breath of pink. Oh Mama, she embraced her mother, leaving the old Countess breathless from a slightly too ferocious hug.

And here she comes down the aisle on her father’s arm, stepping out ahead of the music, her own spring beauty challenging that gorgeous shower of roses. As the minister opened his book and smirked down upon their fresh faces, the bride’s expression changed slightly, her joyous glow sank just a little into discomfort. Do you, Maximilian Reinhardt August, take Sophie Anna Elizabeth Constanza to be your lawful wedded wife? Sophie handed the bouquet to her little sister Lotte, who crouched at her side, shifting from foot to foot, still clutching the train, and then rubbed her bare neck beneath the veil with sinister energy. There was no doubt about it; the bride had begun to scratch beneath her own ears.

‘Sophie, what’s the matter?’ muttered Max, as the minister urged God to bless the rings.

‘I’m covered in greenfly,’ hissed the bride, ‘the church has warmed them up, and they’re pouring off the roses.’

Rome, city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar! Sophie rubbed her eyes, bent down, tightened the laces on her boots, and braced herself for an afternoon in the Vatican Galleries. For she was beholding Rome, where the arrow of their wedding journey finally attained its target. They occupied an enormous suite at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Sophie reduced their entourage to two. Karl to deal with the luggage, tips, hotels, carriages, customs officials, alterations in the tickets and the train timetables, and the seamstress, Margareta, to deal with Sophie’s travelling costumes, hatboxes, jewellery case, numerous sets of shoes, scarves, silk and lace petticoats, evening gowns, morning gowns, riding jackets, stockings, slippers, and ladies’ unmentionables.

But how had they travelled and what terrible obstacles had they overcome? Sophie’s boisterous and practical good sense served them well on their wedding voyage to Italy. Max expected everything to be perfect. Sophie dealt with matters arising when it wasn’t. They travelled by train from Berlin to Paris, leaving the old house in Jägerstraße invaded by decorators, and managed by Wolfgang. Then after a suitable passage of time spent goggling at famous art works in the Louvre, they settled in to study the antiquities. Sophie’s skill with languages suddenly became a traveller’s asset in her marriage trousseau. She spoke and read three tongues perfectly. Her French poured forth as fluent as her native German, and apart from a faint accent, which her family described as charming, her English, bolstered up by a parade of governesses, did more than pass muster. She chirruped away at Miss Arrowpoint over the wedding breakfast, idiomatic, faultless. Now she got them all better rooms with gorgeous views and their stamped documents returned – immediately, Countess, yes, of course – with bows and compliments.

And what of those first days of marriage? Were they blissful treasured hours, or an embarrassing, unfortunate couple of weeks, best forgotten in later years? Well, neither description suits the case. Remember that Sophie and Max have known each other all their lives. He teased her when she was first learning to walk, delighted whenever she fell over. She bit him on the shoulder when he held her too tightly. She ate his share of cream gateau, that slice he had saved, specially saved, to celebrate his first birthday meal at the adults’ table. He found himself facing a slicked empty plate, barren even of crumbs. And then he had chased her into the fountains. No, Max Duncker and Sophie, Countess von Hahn, her name, title and inheritance intact, according to her grandfather’s wishes, by special dispensation from the Kaiser himself, no, this young couple squabbled their way into a happy marriage. They conducted a decorous sequence of disputes about almost everything. And both of them enjoyed every minute. That wedding night, which should have been assisted by modern English diagrams, collapsed in affectionate, exhausted slumber. And the first serious bedroom wrangle took place when Sophie announced:

‘Max. Listen to me. This is important. I don’t want any children for at least two years. And I have all these devices and techniques to stop it happening. Look!’

Max didn’t object to devices and techniques, some not unfamiliar, if they presented no impediment to his desires, but he did object to Sophie knowing about them. She decided this was unreasonable.

‘You don’t risk your life in childbirth. I do.’

He felt overtaken and rejected. She thought this was an excessive burst of egotism.

But the possessive love of good companions, who passed every waking hour either looking at or thinking about each other, always carried the day. Their servants got used to the Master and the Countess racing up and downstairs in search of one another, and shouting out from windows.

Well then, Sophie’s cleverness at languages is earning her a good deal of respect. But she has never studied Latin or Greek. Max has studied both. And suddenly, in the fading shadows of the Museum in Florence, where they paused on their way south to Rome, surrounded by sarcophagi, Sophie resented the limits placed on her education. She determined to mount an assault against the dead languages covering the tombs.

‘What does this say?’ She flashed a gloved hand at the dedication beneath a seated woman on a small box, built for ashes.

‘I don’t know,’ said Max, ‘it’s written in Etruscan.’

He’s lying, thought Sophie in a rage of ignorant frustration, and stalked off down the dusty aisles, leaving Max amidst the alien tombs of the Etruscans.

For now here she was in Rome, puzzled and impressed by the unfolding ruins, toppled columns, marble pavements and colossal shattered grandeur, which poked through the tissue of the modern city like dead white ribs. They stood on the steps of the Palazzo Senatorio, gazing at the massive calm of the colossi, strangely streaked and disfigured by the blackening weather. Confronted with something strange, vast and extinct, Sophie realised that the safest path to understanding led through patience, study and the capacity to sit still and listen. But very few young girls, aged not yet nineteen, and recently married, actually possess these skills, that are the gifts of maturity. Those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge, which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, will not easily grasp Sophie’s dilemma. She gazed upon the wreckage of antiquity, baffled. How had a complete world with a language, a religion, wealth and land without boundaries, and an enviable, arrogant identity, simply ceased to exist? Why were these particular fossils declared significant? And what, exactly, had destroyed this empire and then strolled onward through history without so much as a backward glance? Max rejoined his young wife later that night and found her buried in an enticing mixture of Bulwer-Lytton and Gibbon.

But if the nights were dedicated to
The Last Days of Pompeii
and
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and thus to the earnest acquisition of scientific information concerning the cycles of history, then the days must be given up to viewing the wonders that remain. They wandered beneath the hollow arches of the Colosseum, with giant fennel luxuriant among the crumbling brickwork, and the Baths of Caracalla, amidst whose abandoned halls and tunnels dwelt a sinister mixture of starving cats and importunate beggars.

She was invited to a special evening viewing of the treasures in the Vatican, but the afternoon turned sultry and airless. Sophie therefore lay down upon her bed after luncheon and immediately fell asleep, volume 2 of Gibbon open upon her breast. Six o’ clock gone before the little maid tapped upon her door. The light glowed, grey and ugly behind the still curtains. Sophie rubbed her eyes, bent down, tightened the laces on her boots and braced herself for the Vatican Galleries.

Enter Professor Kurt Marek. Sophie had never set eyes upon the famous Professor of Archaeology, History, Ancient Languages, Greek Law and Religious Philosophy from its earliest beginnings, Philology, Linguistics and All Kinds of Knowledge. But here he stood before her. As she stepped into the salon he appeared to grow up out of the carpet, dapper, tiny and vivid with quick movements. He bowed, skimmed across the room, kissed her fingers, drew himself up, so that she could appreciate his burgundy waistcoat and emerald tie pin, nodded in acknowledgement of the fact that he was at least a head shorter than she was, stroked his goatee and proclaimed:

‘Countess! I am honoured, honoured. I am here to escort you to your husband, who has, I imagine, spent a difficult afternoon in the Galleries. The air outside is intolerably close. I fear we may be in for a thunderstorm. The fiacre awaits us. May I carry your cloak?’

He whirled her down the stairs.

‘Too oppressive, my dear, to wear anything but the lightest of jackets, yet I fear that we shall need our weatherproofs before the night is out. You are wearing boots? Good, good. But that little hat will not protect you. Ah, your cloak has a hood? Well then, we are secured against all eventualities. Drive on.’

He tapped the roof of the cab with a vigorous bang and they lurched away towards the distant dome of Christendom, embraced by Bernini’s colonnades. The river’s lead stream matched the sky. Sophie noticed with distaste how poor many of the people lurking in the streets near the banks seemed to be. Filthy children hung with rags, who wore no shoes, picked their way through piles of discarded waste and rotting vegetables. The smell of fresh human faeces and urine drenched their path. Professor Marek snapped the windows shut and they jolted onwards in the airless black box, stifled.

How welcome then were the gardens and fountains of the Vatican! Many of the daily visitors surged past them, warily glancing at the descending sky, their faces shiny with sweat. Professor Marek patted his brow with a handkerchief soaked in lavender as they paused inside the fine spray from the fountains. At the high doorway he produced a letter for the guards covered in purple stamps and declaimed a short paragraph in rapid Italian. The result was instantaneous: peremptory bows and formal greetings, then they were whisked through the arching halls at an extraordinary speed.

Max, seated on a camp stool before a fabulously decorated sarcophagus, from which he was copying the inscription, rose at once to meet them. Sweaty and dishevelled, he shook hands with the Professor, kissed Sophie, and then began to button up his collar. As the two men stood talking Sophie wandered away between the tombs and statues. The giant, cavernous galleries echoed above her, cooler than the outside world, but filled with torpid, stagnant air. Beyond the rows of eternal stone tombs, the inhabitants of which had long since dropped to dust, and through a high wooden doorway, loomed the white shapes of blank-eyed statues, crowding one another, like a mob frozen in flight. Gods and men jostled each other aside. A row of busts lurked at eye level, backed against the wall. But the great statues, larger than life, all faced towards her, uncanny, unbending, rigid. An athlete cradled a discus; another stretched every marble muscle, flinging an absent javelin into empty air. Here stood one of the Gorgons, her head a mass of broken snakes, her giant hand curled around a pot. A dying man, one stone arm raised across his face, reached out to her with his other arm. She noticed that two fingers, whiter than marble, even in the murky dusk, had clearly been restored. Her soft glove stroked his expiring foot. She peered at the contorted body above her, as he sank down in pain, his shrinking genitals disguised by a plaster fig leaf. These torsos, buttocks, straining throats, knees buckled, arrested in stillness, nevertheless disturbed her, like an oncoming army, arms lifted, heads thrown back.

‘Sophie!’ Max called through the galleries. She must see the best pieces: the Apollo, the Sauroktonos, or The Boy with the Lizard, the sitting statue, called Menander, the Faun of Praxiteles and the old Faun with the Infant Bacchus. A selection of marvels awaits us! As they strolled, perspiring, through the vast halls, cluttered with the reliques of antiquity, Max and Professor Marek talked incessantly in lowered voices. When they reached each artistic phenomenon the torrent of learning crystallised into dates, details and the informed observer’s pedantic commentary.

‘These portraits are Roman copies of Greek originals. The dates are of course approximate. Apart from this one, which is indeed a very famous statue. Also a copy –’

Sophie looked up and stared into a particular face, austere, severe, the face of a judge; but there was a detectable tremor in the mouth. She leaned against a neighbouring plinth and concentrated. The blank eyes gazed into hers; a courageous face, immediate, modern, uncorroded by time.

‘Who is that man?’ she demanded.

Professor Marek also gazed at the face, reverent, and for the first time the little man ceased to fidget and stood quite still.

‘This, my dear, is the poet and philosopher Lucian, Governor of Bithynia and Phrygia, later of Caria and Lycia. A native of Gaul. He survived Nero’s reign and spent his last years at his villa in the south. He left some wonderful descriptions of his beloved estate in his personal letters, his fish ponds, olive groves and vineyards. But my colleagues working there in France cannot locate the site with any certainty.’

‘He was a Stoic,’ Max added quietly, ‘educated at Athens in the Greek schools. He never embraced the new religion, but it is known that he protected the Christians in his household.’