The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

Valley, but not in front of the person you arrived with—and then suddenly you had to leave.

Your colleague Mr. Olivier Maxfield tells me that he also would like to reach you. He asks that I tell you he needs to speak with you privately on another subject, and soon.

Your uncle Lafcadio

“Did Olivier mention what he wanted to talk to me about?” I asked Volga, hoping this didn’t mean something was wrong with Jason, my cat.

“It was concerned with business, I believe,” he said, adding, “I have little time and much to say. And I should dislike for you to become ill by staying up so late in the cold, therefore I must proceed. But because Russian walls like these around us often have ears, I ask that you not ask questions until I have finished—and even then, please take caution about what you say.”

I agreed with a nod, helped myself to another swig of the warm libation he’d brought, and bundled my coat up tighter around me so Volga could begin what I thought might well prove the longest speech in his reclusive life.

“First,” he said, “you should know that it was not the maestro Lafcadio who was my original patron: it was your grandmother, the daeva. She found me when she was already a well-known singer and I was a young boy orphaned by the First World War, working for pennies on the streets of Paris.”

“You mean Pandora took you in as a child?” I said, surprised. Along with Laf and Zoe, that seemed an excessive burden for a young woman who, if Dacian was accurate about her age, by the end of the war couldn’t herself have been much more than twenty. “And how did she get to Paris? I thought she lived in Vienna.”

“To understand the nature of our relations, I must tell you something about myself and my people,” Volga said almost apologetically. “It is part of the story.”

It suddenly occurred to me that the stony Volga Dragonoff might actually know more—or at least be willing to divulge more of what he knew—than the other players in my extremely reticent and suspicious family. Being alone with him like this, after midnight in a freezing, deserted barracks of a dining hall, might in fact prove to be my best shot at peeking under that lid.

“You’ve come all this way at great inconvenience, Volga. Of course I’d like to hear whatever you’re willing to share with me,” I assured him with great sincerity, pulling off one glove and blowing on my fingers to warm them.

“Although I was born in Transylvania, it was my mother’s people, not my father’s, who originated there,” Volga said. “My father was from a triangular region running from Mount Ararat, near the Turkey-Iran border, to the Georgian Caucasus and Armenia. In this small wedge of land there had flourished what was already a century ago a dying breed of men, of which my father was one: the ashokhi, bards or poets who were trained to hold in their memory the entire history and genealogy of our people, dating back to Gilgamesh of Sumeria.

“Several figures who played a part in my father’s childhood were later to cross paths with our family, at critical moments, over many years—and with yours as well. While still a child, my father began his studies at Alexandropol under the tutelage of a noted ashokh, father of a boy my father’s age. The son would one day become the famous esoteric Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Some years later, another boy came from Gori in Georgia to stay, along with my father, with the Gurdjieffs. This was the young Yusip Djugashvili, who was preparing himself for a path he soon rejected: the Orthodox priesthood. Yusip would also later become famous under his adopted name of ‘Steel-man’: Stalin.”

“Wait, Volga,” I said, putting my one gloved hand on his arm. “Your father grew up with Gurdjieff and Stalin?” To be frank, the way my life had been running of late, I was stunned that Volga’s ancestry could outclass my own, when it came to bizarre.

“Perhaps it’s hard to imagine,” Volga said. “But this small part of the world had a powerful mixture of—how one would say?—great fermentation. My father remained until nearly age forty. Then during the revolution in 1905, he crossed the Black Sea into Rumania, where he met my mother, and I was born—”

“But the Russian Revolution didn’t take place till 1917,” I pointed out. Even I knew that much about twentieth-century history—at least so I thought.

“You refer to the second Russian Revolution,” Volga said. “The first one, in January of 1905, began as an agrarian revolt and general strike and ended in ‘Bloody Sunday’ when the brutal tsarist program of Russification of all subject peoples touched off a massacre that was long building. My father was forced to flee Russia. However, as an ashokh, he never forgot his roots.

“When I was born in 1910 in Transylvania, I was given the name Volga, the Slavic name for the longest river in Russia or on the European continent. Its oldest name was Rha—like Ammon Ra the Egyptian sun god. But the Tatar name for this river, Attila, means iron—from which the Scourge of God also derived his name—”

“Your name is the same as Attila the Hun’s? Like in the Nibelungenlied?” I said.

I recalled this bit of data from only this afternoon. It was against Attila that the Merovingian-Nibelungs had fought over the same piece of turf later claimed by Heinrich Himmler’s SS—a connection that seemed important enough to follow up. My fingers were tingling, not just from the cold. Despite the extent of my hunger and fatigue, I was truly focused on where all this was leading.

“Precisely,” said Volga with a nod. “Your grandmother came from a part of the world that, from time immemorial, everyone wished to possess. Even today, this struggle is far from over. For the past hundred years, the Germans, French, and Turks, as well as the British and Russians,