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

they were given permission to do what is hidden within them, what lurks in their hearts.”

I felt truly ill. Zoe regarded me coolly with those steely blue eyes as she sat there sipping her plum-tinged champagne that looked like blood. The sunlight seemed suddenly cold. It was true, Laf and everyone else had warned me Zoe was a card-carrying Nazi collaborator. But that was before I was sitting here, sipping a drink named for her, hearing the noxious news from her very own lips. And it was surely before I’d learned that this storm trooper before me was my own grandmother! It was no wonder Jersey wanted to disclaim her—I felt like throwing up. But instead, I gritted my teeth and pulled myself together. I carefully set down my own glass of purple poison and squared off to confront her face to face.

“Let’s get this straight: you think there’s something ‘primal’ and ‘archetypal’ that makes ordinary people ‘resonate’ to the idea of genocide?” I asked her. “You think your pal Lucky was just some ordinary Joe with an idea whose time had come? You believe we just need permission from someone in authority for most folks to play follow-the-Führer and do the same thing again today? Well, let me tell you, lady, there’s nothing primal, archetypal, metaphorical, or genetic that would cause me to take any action without full awareness at a conscious level of what I was doing—and why.”

“I have lived long enough,” Zoe said calmly, “to see what forces are unleashed by making contact at such deep levels—including those you’ve seen triggered by Pandora’s manuscripts. So let me ask you something: Was it not you who requested this interview we are having? Are you then ‘fully aware’ that the date you’ve chosen—today, April 20, 1989—marks the one hundredth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth? Is it coincidence?”

I felt a horrid, horrid chill as I forced myself to look into those clear, frozen eyes of my awful, awful grandmother. But unhappily for me, she hadn’t quite finished.

“Now, I shall also tell you something you must believe. Who doesn’t grasp the mind of Adolf Hitler will grasp neither Pandora Bassarides and her manuscripts nor the true motives driving die Familie Behn.”

“I’d hoped Wolfgang would make it clear to you,” I told her coldly. “I came to Paris for one reason. I thought you might be the only person living who could explain the mystery of Pandora’s legacy and unravel the many secrets surrounding our family’s relation to them. I didn’t come to hear Nazi propaganda; I came here for the truth.”

“So, my girl: you want everything to be true and false, good and bad, black and white. But life is not that way, nor has it ever been. The seeds are in each of us. Both things are watered and grow side by side. And when it comes to our family—your family—there’s a great deal you’d be quite unwise to turn your eyes from just because you can’t sort things easily into boxes. It’s not always easy to separate grain from chaff, even once the crop has been harvested.”

“Gee, I’ve never been a whiz at deciphering parables,” I said. “But if your idea of ‘truth’ is that we’re all potential mass murderers unless we stumble onto the right fork, I’d disagree. What makes ‘civilized’ people think they can get up one morning, round up their neighbors, shove them into boxcars, tattoo them with serial numbers, then ship them off to a farm somewhere to be methodically exterminated?”

“That is not the right question,” said Zoe, echoing Dacian Bassarides.

“Okay, what’s the right question?” I wanted to know.

“The right question is: What makes them think they can’t?”

I sat there looking at her for another long moment. I had to admit, if only to myself, it was the right question. Yet it was clear Zoe’s and my perspectives, from the starting gate, were very different. I’d made the perhaps naive assumption that all people were innately good, but capable of being led into evil acts on a mass scale by the dark, hypnotic manipulations of a single man. On the other hand, Zoe—who, I had to recall, actually knew the man—held the position that we came equipped with the seeds of good and evil, and all it took to tip the balance the wrong way was a gentle nudge. What was the secret ingredient, clearly buried deeply within all sane societies, that prevented us from shooting our neighbors just because we didn’t like the way they cut their hair or mowed their lawns? For wasn’t that precisely what Hitler said he hated most about the Gypsies, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and Jews?—that they were different?

And in fact, I should know better than anyone that tribal hatred and genocide were hardly a fairy tale lost in the mists of the long ago and far away. It still echoed in my mind, from my first day at school in Idaho. Sam had escorted me, and as we’d passed some other boys in the hallway, one had whispered just loud enough for Sam to hear: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

My God.

It sickened me that every time I scratched a little deeper into the surface of the family history I found something ugly, chilling, or unacceptable—but I did understand that whatever my newfound Fascist grandmother here had to say, it might indeed prove the one thing that would bring me closer to the center Dacian had called Truth, at least about our family. So I swallowed the dryness in my mouth and nodded for Zoe to proceed. She set down her glass and narrowed her eyes at me.

“In order for you to understand any of this, whether or not you find it pleasant, you must first understand that the nature of the relationships we, in our family, had with Lucky were different from those he had with others.

“There were some who thought they knew him well. Like Rudolf Hess, who named his son after Lucky’s ‘secret’ nickname: Wolf.