Once when Tanya sat studying the origin of angels in his Novum Organum, he was beside her, shaking his head over a Chinese Qing Dynasty amulet in the form of a giant bronze coin with a square hole in it. The girl kept quiet. Presently her father fetched a loupe. He copied down the inscription. Then, smiling hopelessly, he handed the thing to her, saying: Here’s another present for you.
Father, promise you won’t be angry.
Well?
Father, what do you wear around your neck?
Often he grasped for relief by justifying, mostly to himself but sometimes to the patient, silent Vasojevic, his careful concealments, which his elders’ dark doings against the Turkish overlordship had established in his character from boyhood; the usual practices of any mercantile man deepened that groove of secrecy; the nervous, angry, weary despair which death’s manifold proximities inflicted cut him off most of all. He had anticipated that sharing his strange knowledge with Vasojevic would lighten his loneliness. Oh, they remained friends without a doubt; each possessed the other’s pities and dreads. As for the treasure, that too they held in common, if it did not hold them. No wonder that he scrupled to bequeath it to Tanya!
He remembered his wife in her dark dress and cap, sitting in a high-backed chair, nursing Tanyotchka; he must have just returned from Muscovy. In the garden, the doves were speaking to one another in their semiliquid voices. And he seemed to remember Marija’s face glowing against a red curtain, but he no longer knew where that had been. Nicola and Vuk, why did he retain so few images of them? Well, if he hadn’t sent them voyaging with their uncles, the family would die out. They had better learn the business, being unfitted for the other thing. Besides, let his brothers raise them up to be Turk-haters; no doubt that was right, even if he lacked the stomach for it.
The creature in the dark-glass was not in and of itself, so far as he knew, evil. If he declined to tell the priests about it, that was merely on account of their petty understandings. What he hid — that thing itself, and the unhealthy emotions which its guardianship stimulated — was of smaller account than its hiddenness. And since to hide was to deny, how pleasant to close his eyes!
He believed with all his soul that he had lived a life no more sinful than any other. If he had killed men at sea to save what was his, if he had on occasion made sharp bargains, such acts were necessary if one were to get on in the world. In any event he would be hated for his success. The longing to be rid of that loathsome treasure never left him — but then he would be shamed before his dead ancestors. By what right could he forever alienate this legacy from his family? Tanya would make wise use of it, to help her mother and the other children, after he was gone. Why shouldn’t she employ it for greater good? She, who in the course of her education had unswervingly dissected the brainlike, fungoid tissues of the chambered nautilus, possessed what he once had; even though she could never command a ship, she might yet do something of which he could dream.
Of course Marija wished to marry her off; fifteen was old enough, she said. — I need her at home, he replied.
Cirtovich, discerning that the lot of the most loving fathers is sadness, had already begun compromising with doom by establishing his daughters in the best marriages he could, endowing them with gold, land and blessings, while tying the sons-in-law to him through benignity, intimidation and mutual interest. But when it came to Tanyotchka, he did more, although not too much, maintaining over her, ever more invisibly, his paternal shield, regretfully aware that unpicked fruit withers on the vine, and therefore that protecting our children from the quotidian nastiness of life is a self-poisoning strategy. For Tanya, therefore, he sought only one good beyond the aspirations of other parents: He intended to save her from death. — But perhaps that wasn’t right, or worth whatever it would cost.
He had trained up his sailors to great knowledge in the hope that one day they might carry him to the sphere that the dark-glass being came from. If the soul is the center of the circle called consciousness, then cannot other circles be drawn, to calculate the center of malignancy, doom or absence? Therein lies the place to which all mankind must carry war. What if Jovo Cirtovich could hunt down foul and sniffling death itself, and impale it forever in its cave? Four years ago, thanks to a Turkish annotation of the Kitab Tahdid al-Amakin, he and Vasojevic had finally completed their plotting of our globe’s Tropic Nodes, from either of which, when Jupiter is right, one may sail into superlunary spheres, and perhaps even into that great blue dome of ultramarine, the Sphere of Fixed Stars, with its stars of silver and gold arrayed in as many constellations as there are kinds of beasts, fishes, monsters, demons, angels, swords, hairpins and crowns. One night in that tower in Niš, calculating in units of the fourth order from al-Biruni’s coordinates and Osman’s timetables, Vasojevic had raised his sextant, then his spyglass; he cried out. When Cirtovich tried to look, the instant had passed. Vasojevic swore that on the golden sun at the center of that blue hemisphere he could see Christ Himself peering out, holding a Bible against His chest and wearing a halo which was brighter than sunfire. Inspired, yet sickened by disappointment, Cirtovich quizzed him again and again. They could go there! And if they bowed down before Christ in His own house, what good would not be theirs? Until dawn they spoke, but with the sun’s advent came the dark-glass monster, hovering like Beelzebub, lashing its tentacles against one after another of the horses of a dozen cantering Turkish Janissaries who would torture them for sport. And so the two Serbs crept away, to study death and attend to their fortunes. The next time Cirtovich raised the subject, his friend replied: Yes, master, we could go there, for a fact! But given what would go with us, I misdoubt our reception… — That was when Cirtovich wondered how he could bear it if they met that squid thing riding on Christ’s shoulder, stretching out its arms to warn them that here too, here even in heaven, was their death? In short, the gruesome activity, ubiquitous and almost merry, of their old friend had worn him down. Cirtovich had escaped from the Turkish lands, founded his family anew, and heaped up wealth and knowledge. Enough. His father had done less. So he told himself, staring gloomily at Marija and Tanya, wishing, as ageing men will, to enjoy his harvest untroubled. (He was getting old precisely because he had achieved everything.) How fine to sit in his walled garden, never to see even Vasojevic again, God forgive them both! To close his eyes and listen to the honeybees, enjoying the clink of gold ducats as Tanya counted receipts in the doorway, and then to fall asleep in the sunlight! But whenever Tanya arose to help her mother or sisters, her long smooth arms flashing, he remembered again that she was a woman now, full fifteen years old, and ought to be married off soon for her happiness. — She was watching him strangely; what if she were unwell? Seeing her thus downcast, he slipped her a little pouch of Caribbean sugar. 13