Angelology(98)

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