Father Lamereaux drank. He raised the glass again and emptied it. His hands relaxed and he smiled gently. All at once his eyes sparkled.
I think that’s better, he said. I think that’s much better.
Father, I wonder if you could tell me why you named the child Gobi? I assume that was your doing.
Yes, it was, although I haven’t thought about it in many years. Sometimes we forget certain things when we go into retirement. I believe I’d like another, please.
Quin refilled the glass.
Not in years. Didn’t remember it at all, but now I do.
How did you happen to choose the name?
First of all because the infant was brought to me nameless. Hasn’t it always been so? The Emperor arrives in the world nameless, yet centuries later we know the era by his name and no other. It’s an old custom and an important one. No other name will do.
And what did the name Gobi mean?
Ultimately who is to say? We know it was the name of an espionage network that once existed here and in China. We know that Adzhar suggested it that afternoon we had the picnic on the beach, he and I and your parents, the time we wore gas masks. We know your father said our group should have a name and Adzhar said it should be Gobi. We know the four of us laughed and that was that.
And who was Adzhar?
I’m not sure. Marco Polo perhaps? I’ll have another, please.
Quin poured. Father Lamereaux smiled.
Do you know I’m beginning to think I might come out of retirement? This would be an appropriate day to do it, during a typhoon.
And Adzhar?
Yes indeed, a very dear friend. He and I and Lotmann were inseparable in those days. Have you ever heard of him? Do you know anything at all about this unique little man who had such a miraculous way with languages?
No I don’t, Father. Nothing at all.
Well, then you should. It would be folly to visit the East and not know something about the man who spent his whole life getting here. Lotmann never drank, but Adzhar certainly did. Well, I think I’ll just have one more before I go on. One or possibly two in memory of both of them.
Quin filled the Jesuit’s glass. Father Lamereaux sipped. He smiled gently and began to whisper.
He was born the son of a shoemaker in Gori, a town in Georgia, a few years before Alexander II freed the serfs. He was sent to a seminary in Tiflis to study for the Orthodox priesthood but was soon expelled as an anarchist and a nihilist. He was a restless man, Adzhar or whatever his real name was, once he hinted it might be Dzugashvili. In any case, when he was expelled from the seminary he went to St. Petersburg to study chemistry. A few years later, in the spring of 1880, he fell in love with a beautiful woman.
Sophia was a member of the nobility, the daughter of the governor of St. Petersburg. When she was a baby her autocratic father cast off his wife and sent her to Switzerland so that he would be better able to carry on his many affairs with women.
Sophia grew up not knowing she had a mother. When she discovered the truth about her father she decided to kill the Czar.
She visited her mother in Geneva and there contacted the Russian nihilist exiles who were also plotting to assassinate the Czar. With her beauty and her position she was a valuable asset to them. She moved in court circles, and her hatred for her father was so great she was more than willing to use her body to obtain information on the Czar’s security arrangements. It wasn’t long before the Czar’s courtiers, in bed in her arms, had told her everything the plotters needed to know.
Sophia brought Adzhar into the plot because of his knowledge of chemistry. She didn’t love him and he knew it, her obsession with humiliating her father left no room for loving anyone. But when she asked him to design the bombs for the group he agreed. Sophia took his prescriptions to Geneva and smuggled the materials back in a suitcase. Adzhar then put the bombs together in a shoemaker’s shop he had rented on the route through St. Petersburg that the Czar would be using during the first week of March 1881. In all there were eight men and two women in the plot.
On March 1, near the shoemaker’s shop, a bomb was thrown at the Czar’s carriage. The Czar was dazed and stepped down into the street. A second man ran forward and threw a bomb at their feet, killing himself and the Czar but no one else.
Of the plotters one man was killed in the explosion, one shot himself, two escaped, and the remaining men and women were sentenced to death. Because of Sophia’s rank Alexander III himself had to sign her death warrant. He was reluctant to do so, but his courtiers persuaded him out of fear that she might reveal their indiscretions with her. As it turned out she said nothing. She had disgraced her father and that was enough. She was hanged without betraying anyone.
Adzhar, one of the two men who had escaped, was then in his early twenties. The news of Sophia’s execution reached him in Helsinki, where he had gone into hiding. He also learned that the Russian government was sending agents abroad to try to catch him and the other man.
Adzhar knew he had to find as remote a spot as possible, so he went north to the land of the Lapps. For the next half-dozen years he lived with the Lapps in isolation, wandering with them and their reindeer herds across the wastes of the Arctic Circle. When he left them he went to Iceland and worked as a shoemaker. While with the Lapps he had learned Lappish, an Asian language, as well as the Scandinavian tongues. Now he learned Icelandic. He still had not forgotten Sophia, and the discipline of learning languages, he discovered, was a way of putting aside his unhappiness.
After a half-dozen years reading the Icelandic sagas he went to the Faroe Islands and learned Faroese, then to the Isle of Man to learn Manx. During this period he also acquired Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and English. With English behind him he went to America, as did so many East Europeans at that time.
The St. Petersburg uprising of 1905 came and went, as did the artillery pieces later placed around the Shinto shrines in Japan. In New York he met Trotsky, the hero of the 1905 uprising who was now traveling to various countries soliciting aid for his cause. Although Trotsky was nearly twenty years younger than Adzhar, he revived Adzhar’s political idealism.
One evening there was a famous encounter between the two men that resulted in Adzhar delivering his incredible prophecy, a prophecy that later caused Trotsky to give him his remarkable code name.
It happened in the Bronx. Trotsky had gone to Adzhar’s shoemaker’s shop for blintzes and borscht. Trotsky was in a bad temper that evening because he had spent the day working on his history of the 1905 failure. He refused to eat anything, and all the food, which Adzhar had spent the day preparing, seemed about to go to waste. Adzhar decided to enliven the gathering with a story. Trotsky replied that there wasn’t a story in the world that could lift his gloom at that moment. Adzhar smiled and answered in an unknown tongue.
What’s that? asked Trotsky.
Passamaquoddy, said Adzhar.
What?
An Indian tribe, a branch of the Algonquins. I lived with them for a few weeks one winter in order to pick up their language.
And what did you learn in this useless tongue?
How the world was created.
How?
Like this.
Adzhar recounted the epic. He told it first in Russian and then in the original Passamaquoddy. As related by Adzhar, the exploits of the central character strongly resembled Trotsky’s life up until then. Trotsky listened more and more intently, delighted to hear his struggles described in such an odd-sounding language. Although he didn’t believe for a moment that Adzhar’s version was authentic, he still found it amusing to imagine that a half-naked Indian with a bow and arrow and a feather in his hair had once experienced in North America the same struggles he was now undergoing in Russia. He laughed and joked and ate quantities of blintzes and borscht. By the end of the evening he had forgotten all about 1905 and was talking enthusiastically about the next uprising, which he was certain would succeed.