Montparnasse with suspicion. Clematis had spoken of “an enchanting music that worked upon my
senses until I thought I would go mad from bliss,” but what consequences did such celestial music
pose? I could not help but wonder why those I had trusted most, those to whom I had given my
complete loyalty, had deceived me. If they’d failed to tell me the truth about the lyre, surely there
were other pieces of information they’d kept from me as well.
These were the doubts filling my mind when I heard the rumbling of a car below my bedroom
window. Drawing aside the curtain, I was astonished to discover that the sky had brightened to a pale
gray hue, tinting the street with a hazy presentiment of dawn. The night was gone, and I had not slept
at all. But I was not the only one who had endured a sleepless night. Through the murky light, I saw
Gabriella emerge from the car, a white Citroën Traction Avant. Although she wore the same dress she
had worn in the Athenaeum, its satin still giving off all its liquid luster, Gabriella had changed
dramatically in the hours that had passed. Her hair was in disarray, and her shoulders hung heavy
with exhaustion. She had removed the black opera gloves, revealing her pale hands. Gabriella turned
from the car to the apartment building, as if contemplating what she might do, and then, leaning against
the car, buried her head in her arms and began to sob. The car’s driver, a man whose face I could not
make out, emerged, and although I could not know his intentions, it appeared to me that he intended to
further harm Gabriella.
Despite the anger I had felt toward her, my first instinct was to help my friend. I rushed from the
apartment and down the successive flights of stairs, hoping that Gabriella would not leave before I
made it to the street. When I arrived at the entrance of our building, however, I saw that I had been
wrong. Rather than harm Gabriella, the man had embraced her, holding her in his arms as she cried. I
stood at the doorway, watching in confusion. The man stroked her hair with tenderness, speaking to
her in what appeared to me to be the manners of a lover, although at fifteen years of age I had never
been touched in such a way. Pushing the door open slowly, so that my presence would not be
detected, I listened to Gabriella. Through her sobs she repeated, “I can‘t, I can’t, I can’t,” her voice
filled with despair. Although I had some idea of what inspired Gabriella’s remorse—perhaps her
actions had at last registered upon her conscience—my astonishment was truly great at the words the
man spoke. “But you must,” he said, holding her closer. “We have no choice but to continue.”
I recognized the voice. It was then that I saw, in the growing light of dawn, that the man comforting
Gabriella was none other than Dr. Raphael Valko. After returning to the apartment, I sat in my room
waiting to hear Gabriella’s footsteps upon the stairs. Her keys rattled as she unlocked the door and
walked into the hallway. Rather than go to her room, as I would have expected, she went to the
kitchen, where a clattering of pans told me that she was making herself coffee. Fighting an urge to join
her, I waited in the shadows of my bedroom, listening, as if the noises she made would help me to
understand what had happened in the street and what was the nature of her relationship with Dr.
Raphael Valko.
Some hours later I knocked upon the door to Dr. Seraphina’s office. It was still early in the morning,
not yet seven o’clock, although I knew she would be there working in her usual manner. She sat at her
escritoire, her hair tied back in a severe bun, her pen poised above an open notebook as if I had
caught her midsentence. Although my visits to her office had become routine—indeed, I had worked
upon the vermilion settee each day for many weeks cataloging the Valkos’ papers—my fatigue and
anxiety over Clematis’s journal must have been apparent. Dr. Seraphina knew that this was no
ordinary visit. She came to the settee in an instant, sat across from me, and demanded to know what
had brought me to her at such an early hour.
I placed Dr. Raphael’s translation between us. Startled, Seraphina picked up the pamphlet and
turned the thin pages, taking in the words her husband had translated so long before. As she read, I
saw—or imagined that I saw—a glimmer of youth and happiness return to her features, as if time
peeled away as she turned each page.
Finally Dr. Seraphina said, “My husband discovered the Venerable Clematis’s notebook nearly
twenty-five years ago. We were conducting research in Greece, in a small village at the base of the
Rhodope mountain chain, a place Raphael had tracked down after coming across a letter from a monk