It was at the Pasternak, at my favored table beneath a portrait of Bulgakov, where we met without the burden of fanfare. She arrived before me, as I had lingered too long in the cemetery. I took my seat across from her but said nothing as she seemed deep in thought. I caught myself staring into her eyes, ancient eyes that seemed to have witnessed the formation of craters, countered by a fount of vigor.
She was murmuring to herself, reciting in an ecclesiastic tone some obscure fragment without beginning or end. I sat quietly as I had witnessed this once before in the garden of Schiller in Jena. A kind of mystic seizure producing a mild cosmic shift wherein small but marvelous revelations were recorded. On one occasion she was able to locate the exact spot where Schiller and Goethe planted a gingko tree. On that same afternoon, mutually caught up in the beguiling atmosphere, we witnessed together a shimmering projection of the Magister Ludi wandering through the garden. We never spoke of it but I am confident that those precious moments created a unique and unbreakable bond.
I struggled to stay still and attempted to follow her but merely grasped a few phrases, something about an emperor, the ghost of burning hooves and the turning spokes of a wheel. I flipped through scores of mental notecards, finally pausing at a grainy image of the back of the saddle of a rusted bike. A bent figure was furiously pedaling within the ivy-covered walls of a celebrated university. It took a few moments to identify him. Someone I never knew but had abstractly adored. Professor John Nash circling on his bicycle in Princeton. Suddenly her words became clearer, the crown of an idea, very defined, recognizable, translucent, like the belly of an insect.
-Could you mean the mathematician? I asked, pulling myself into the present.
-Go on, she urged excitedly.
-The emperor of ice cream.
-What? Tell me! she cried, startled.
- It’s from a poem I think, maybe e. e. cummings.
-Oh no, it’s by Wallace Stevens.
-Ah yes, you’re right.
-The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream, we recited in unison.
-Whatever made you think of it? She asked.
-I don’t know, some half memory.
-When I was a girl, she said, this poem had not yet been written, yet I sensed it coming and repeated this line over and over in sync with the beating of my heart. After a time, it was fixed in my soul, and eventually it was written by the poet. I realized then that it is possible to anticipate certain comings, as the arrow senses the approach of prey.
We lapsed into a common silence, each pressing the perimeters of her own space. I was somewhat mystified by the references to the beloved mathematician and was about to enter an icy labyrinth, when she reached into her purse and extracted a pale handkerchief. I was surprised to see that her hand was shaking. I caught the calming scent of lavender and waited until she steadied and spoke. -There is a matter I wish to share with you. We will be speaking of it in the days to come. In August, our Number 4 received a telegram from the basecamp of a young scientist, relaying that we had lost over twelve billion tons of ice in Kulusuk in a single day. This was not just distressing for the earth but for the future of the Emperor. What if all the ice should melt, the glaciers, icebergs, caps and ice fields, the ice sheets, the ice mélange forming within glacial fjords that are made up of sea ice, permafrost, icebergs and the smaller relatives of icebergs. The melting of the world. What would be left, what would be left of his kingdom?
Truly I was mystified. Whoever was she speaking of? I laid my hand upon hers. She was wearing white kid gloves, slightly soiled. In fact, on closer look I noted she did not possess her generally tidy appearance at all and was almost as disheveled as myself.
-Perhaps the melting would produce pure waterfalls, a greening of the land, I said, in a flagging attempt to be optimistic.
-No, no she insisted. All that lies beneath the ice has nothing to do with him. His is a kingdom of ice, even the drifting icebergs breaking off, vertical, magnificent. If it all melts, all becomes moot, a nothingness, less than zero. And worse still viruses and bacteria not known to man, frozen in the once indestructible depth of the permafrost, will awaken to be irrevocably released.
The Secretary looked at me across the table, she seemed to be overtaken with an urgent sadness; her eyes changed color like the atmosphere surrounding a rainbow, not an actual color but a radiant absence of color. Suddenly I pictured Eugene at the turnstile crying out the thing is the thing is. His words reverberated but she failed to notice. After several moments she rose. My heart sank a bit at the prospect of her departure.- Are you leaving so soon? I haven’t offended you have I?
-No no quite the contrary. I knew you would be of great assistance. But I must go, I’m feeling a bit ill. Please read these materials and I will explain everything.
-Shall we meet again soon?
- Yes. I will be waiting in this same chair tomorrow.
-I will be on time. I promise.
-Good. She suddenly brightened.
-I will tell you then of his equivalent histories.
-Whose? I asked.
-Why the Emperor’s, of course.
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