Look Away

1

“Back then, are you?” the old man said, raising an eyebrow and looking up from the desk in his study after Karl Haupmann had let himself in through the door in the backyard. “Most men’s sons have been home for years, you know. But I suppose you may as well go and tell Cook there’ll be an extra serving tonight at dinner.”

The same old rooms and dusty corridors, and even the face which regarded him from the peeling mirror in his mother’s bedroom, seemed nothing like as changed as it should. Karl, is that you? He had no idea any longer. But it was the same food, as well—no, it was worse, for Cook was almost as doddery as his father—still eaten at opposite ends of the same long table with the cobweb candelabra set between them and dusty drapes drawn across the shuttered windows, as the old man explained how the Civil War’s aftermath offered many opportunities for the alert businessman, and how even the trade in the so-called implements of slavery still thrived. The state prisons, for example, were crying out for iron shackles. Then there were many other countries such as Brazil where life was still ordered—as in the Koran, the Bible, and the Torah, which, of course, all sanctioned slavery—in the more traditional way. Business, apparently, and contrary to all the evidence of this dying house, remained stubbornly good. Karl Haupmann listened and said little in response, just as he had always done.

But the Bowery was transformed. The flower stalls and cheap china stores he’d visited with his mother had vanished, and the languages and accents which clamoured from every doorway and alley had drifted into tongues he could no longer follow. Prostitutes openly offered their wares, and men dressed unconvincingly as women. There were unsanitary tattoo parlours, rip-off employment agencies, cheap flophouses, and even cheaper saloons. There were nightly knife-fights and brawls. The new towns of what they were now calling “The Wild West” had been far less wild than this. Veterans sat on the stumps of their legs in doorways with begging placards hung around their necks, and it remained a mystery to him how they ever came or went. But this was the new world he’d fought for. This was what freedom looked like. This was what the future had become.

Obtaining morphine, however, was far less of a problem than might have been expected, with or without proof of his being a doctor of medicine, and it was as important as ever—no, it was more so—that he maintain a full record of each dose, and keep track of the changes of the moon. The notebook Oonagh had once given him was falling apart and almost finished, so he bought another, and was newly amazed at the elegant strangeness of his own handwriting, and the rapidity with which it filled.

Time, the world, span by as if with a will of its own.

He took the train up to Boston one day a year or so later, and wandered the precincts of the university, and stood beside the worn steps of the house on Devonshire Street that Oonagh and Morgan had once rented, wishing he could still go in. Then, he sought directions to reach the city’s main Roman Catholic cemetery, and found the Callaghan family mausoleum, where Oonagh and Morgan’s bodies had been reinterred. He started and turned as he traced the raw new inscriptions, thinking he heard distant voices, but it was only the wind stirring through the elms.

Such were the wonders of modern steam transport that he was back home that same evening in New York, and shouted down the table to his father that he’d be taking full responsibility for the family business from now on. After all, he was here, and hadn’t the old man always said he wanted him to follow his father into trade, and fresh money was needed if this mouldering house was to be maintained. That, and he had to find the means to finance his continued supply of morphine, otherwise he might as well kill himself and give up.

The bank accounts, ledgers, bills of exchange, and records of disbursements were all in disarray. But, seated up in his father’s study as the old man retreated to his bed, he found he enjoyed the challenge of setting things straight, and discovering how business worked. He read the trade papers. He headed out toward the docks in a pre-war suit, and wandered amid the spars and funnels, the coal-heaps, sacks, tea chests, gantries, and strewn ropes; taking in the wonder of everything that washed up to this great city from across the entire globe.

His dealings were successful almost from the first. Trade, it seemed, was easy if you simply saw it for what it was: a mere chance of profit set against the risk of loss. That, and if the tall, cadaverous-seeming man the other merchants found themselves dealing with made them feel inexplicably afraid. He saw the same fear in his father’s eyes each evening as he bore up the simple dinners he prepared—Cook now having retired—to his room. The old man needed his food to be cut up now, and he struggled to wield even a spoon.

Months, then years, then somehow whole decades passed in this way. Karl Haupmann sometimes wondered what it was about this old house which he’d spent his later boyhood years longing to escape that now kept him chained. Karl, is that you? Even more so when he looked in his mother’s old bedroom to check that the roof hadn’t yet leaked. The rugs. The pictures. The shuttered windows. The long bookshelf filled with old visions. The grim sight of his own ageless face in the blackening mirror. The sag in the wide four-poster bed.

His father had always been a remorselessly practical man. No tedious courtship rituals or foolish pleasure garden dances for him. He’d brought, and bought, his wife from an orphanage in Germany, and took her to this same house, and expected her to assume a life and a role in an alien country for which she was never prepared. No wonder she and her only child had been like playmates. No wonder they’d been sneered at by Father and Cook. Then there had been those last days when she’d been confined up here as a kind of invalid—although what, exactly, the physician in Karl Haupmann wondered, had been diagnosed? So many questions, but by now his father was too frail to do more than mumble in answer to the questions he should have put to him decades before.

Keeping to the shadows, he prowled the streets and the docks of this looming, teeming city. He invested in commodities, bought shares, speculated in bonded goods, took his regular infusions of poison, and howled, inwardly, at the dark of every moon. His father grew incontinent, and needed to be turned, lifted, and washed, and tremulously opened his toothless mouth like a newborn chick for each offered spoonful of food. The old man wept almost constantly, and flinched and made an odd moaning sound whenever his son entered his room.

One night, a prickling ache came to Karl Haupmann’s jaw and saliva flooded his mouth as he leaned over his father’s bed. The old man seemed oddly beautiful to him, and he felt a sharp desire for a moment of consummation when all the contempt and deceit which lay between them would finally be dissolved. He was even leaning forward and stretching his head toward a tremulous vein—just there, beneath the parchment of the throat—which could so easily be breached in a salt, red flood. But the old man was cowering in his sheets, giving off pleading moans. He left the room in sickened disgust.

So it went. An elevated railway—everyone called it the El—was constructed through the Bowery, dooming and darkening the district even more with its noise, shadows, and soot. The Croton Reservoir, whose turrets had looked down over upper Manhattan like a fairy castle for decades, was demolished, and the uptown area around the great new park which replaced it soon became the address to be sought. There were blizzards, heatwaves, trainwrecks, fires, sunken ferries, new bridges and financial panics. There were wars in Europe, a great fire in Chicago, and the Indians lost most of their land. The ships at the docks shed their sails and grew chimneys, and the city began to thrum and glow with the new energies of electricity.

At least the songs which drunks bellowed in the street were familiar to him: one thing that could be said in favour of the Civil War was that it had begat some decent tunes. There was “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and there was “Dixie,” with that repeated line about looking away that had always struck him as strange. All far better, though, than today’s jangling, ragtime nonsense, which mainly seemed to be an excuse to dance indecently and sing about the sexual act.

He felt as if he was clinging against the tides of time to the rocks of the past, but the face he glimpsed in streetfront windows remained resolutely unchanged. Not that of a young man, perhaps, for he’d inherited his father’s doleful features, but the official records said he was now in his late fifties, which, even if the other residents of the Bowery were too transient to notice, and the men he dealt with at the docks came and went almost as often, was clearly absurd. But no matter, for a man’s papers could be adjusted just as easily as an unwanted import tariff or troublesome bill of lading. All that was needed was payment to the right—or the wrong—kind of city official, and Karl Haupmann acquired a birthdate of 1872. But he didn’t feel reborn.

Still that sense of long history, the visions and dreams. A cloaked woman in an antique workroom. The spire of that cathedral. The glimpsed buildings. The return, by slow footfalls, of a taunting, mocking presence at his back just before the morphine did its work. He restudied his old notebooks and began to make more detailed entries in the newer ones. He revisited libraries. He examined maps, purchased guidebooks, and read histories. What was keeping him in this city anyway, other than a sense of something lurking, which was surely nothing more than his own far-flung shadow? That, and the strange filial obligation he still felt as he bore his father’s latest bowl of gruel along the upper hall.

The whole house stank of death, yet still the old man clung on. He couldn’t speak, didn’t even cringe or moan now when his son entered his room. Could barely swallow without hands holding up the pillow and massaging his throat. But somewhere deep in that wet gaze was something which seemed to flicker between fear and understanding. Is that you? Often, after he’d wiped the old man clean and changed his sheets and was setting him back on his pillows, he found his hands lingering around the frail neck. Was it kindness, cruelty, or an odd kind of honour which stopped him from doing the obvious thing? He simply didn’t know. But he knew he was beyond feeling love.

Then, on one of the coldest nights during the bitter winter which heralded in a new century, the old man finally died. He’d expected the change to be slight, but somehow it wasn’t. The house suddenly felt emptied, and he almost wept as he hadn’t in decades to find himself so alone. Still, and as always, there were things to be done, and he arranged for the body to be incinerated by a hygienic new process known as cremation, and scattered the ashes from a ferry, and watched them float off across the grey East River beneath a congregation of screeching gulls. Back at the Bowery, his trunks were already packed, and the tickets bought, and nothing but dust and lost memories now lingered in the house. Still, he found himself craning to look back up for a final sight of the shuttered windows as a motor cab bore him toward the docks.

2

For all his years of experience in trade, he still thought of ships as names on notices of arrival in the trading pages, and was unused to the rolling corridors, and chatter over the dinner table about who he was and what his plans were in Europe. But a difficult crossing soon emptied the public rooms, and he found himself standing on the deck surrounded by nothing but the heaving Atlantic. Satisfactorily alone.

First, he took the train for Paris, and had expected to have to spend some time there topping up the schoolroom French, but found the language came to him with surprising ease, even if with an accent and a turn of phrase which had the storekeepers shaking their heads. It was a question of getting used to this different continent, and to living in hotels, and being a traveller of means. A question of replenishing his supply of morphine, as well, which proved to be no problem at all on the streets of Pigalle, where almost anything imaginable, and many things that weren’t, were bought and sold.

This was a city both more old-fashioned and modern than New York, and he marvelled at the odd-shaped cars, and the great old buildings, and the different manners, and the sounds and scents, and the moustaches of the men and the women’s daring clothes, and at how the waiters somehow knew to tip up the chairs of their pavement cafes the exact instant before it rained. Church bells rang out. He wandered amid the statues and perambulators in the Luxembourg Gardens, where worried-looking priests sat with their heads bowed in their hands. He familiarised himself with the libraries, galleries, museums, and antiquarian bookshops… But he was having too pleasant a time in this city, when he’d already wasted pointless decades back in New York.

He headed east. Sat in his own train compartment and watched as the cow-grazed fields changed to vineyards and the rivers shone like steel. Then came a border post. Guards in military uniforms who shouted in German accents as they moved along the train. Papers, papers, and Karl Haupmann was glad that he’d changed his identity to match the man he seemed to be. Alsace, always a contested province, no longer being part of France.

Strasbourg Station was almost a cathedral in itself, although that was typical of the pomp of this strange new age. He collected his trunks, rattled over the cobbles in a taxi between the ancient buildings until he glimpsed the famous tower, once said to be the highest in Christendom… And felt, as he stepped out onto the wide central square, little more than a dulled familiarity. This was all too much as it should be. He noticed a few small disarrangements from his expectations—changes in shop signs and styles of dress—of the kind the onrush of time always brought, but nothing more. Perhaps all he was experiencing was the bland familiarity of a scholar visiting a place they have long known from plates, maps and photographs in old books.

It was the same when he entered the cathedral through the great west door. The incense-hazed space inside was murmurous with sightseers, nuns, priests, and worshippers, along with a few trapped pigeons and the clonking of the huge clock from which figures—peasants, angels, demons, and saints—emerged each quarter-hour, but he felt none of the vast lift, or fall, he’d craved. This was all far too real to be any kind of dream. He had the taxi take him to a nearby hotel, and asked for their highest room, no matter that it lacked modern facilities, and wondered, as he laid out his clothes and peered out through the little window at the steep, serried rooftops and the nests that the storks built amid the chimneys, why he felt so quickly at home. But even that was easy to explain. After all, he’d spent his few happy years looking out from a similar garret back in Boston.

He sought out permissions to inspect private libraries and state records. Had the maître d’ install a small desk beside his window so he could sit there as he worked. Whole seasons passed in this way. The storks departed and returned. The process of study was pleasantly involving, and he continued to surprise himself with his knowledge of antique French, and developed his weak German into something workable. He sometimes drowsed, to awake with a start, lost from where and who and what he was. Amid the endless question marks of his entries, he drew the shape of a branch, the dance of those birds, the glimpsed side of a face, the spire of a church, and stared at his own hands.

The workmen’s and trades guilds had been strong in this city in the time before the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century. Although, and thanks to these same upheavals, detailed documentation was very scarce. No record, then, of a man called Ezekiel, but a guild was formed by those who repaired the interiors of churches to which he might well have belonged. Even now, men with paint pots and saws were setting up scaffolding inside the cathedral’s east transept of the Cathedral of Our Lady, although they were as wary of his questions as the guides, priests, and cataloguers had been. In any case, he was content simply exploring the narrow streets, or wandering beside the canals of the Old Quarter, or staring at the smiling Madonna in the chapel of Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune where the storks of this city danced in courtship behind her shoulder, or meeting the gaze of the demon in the church of Saint Madeleine, who was surely holding back some ghastly secret behind that smile, or the weeping angel in the chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows in the cathedral.

Possibly more pertinent were the records of the Revolution itself, which, for all its destruction, were far more comprehensive than those of the decades before. An incident had been recorded during the height of the so-called Terror, when justice—or whatever then passed for justice—was being liberally dispensed by the newly enfranchised citizens within the cathedral itself. One of the many accused—described in some accounts as a savage monster, but in others as merely a young woman—had apparently bathed the place in blood. The only name which was recorded, however, was that of the state prosecutor, one Roland Morel.

Brutality piled on brutality. Dead end after dead end. But he was intrigued by the records which he came across during his second winter in Strasbourg of a large house named Fontville, which had endured for most of two centuries before the Revolution, little more than thirty miles outside the city, close to the banks of the Rhine. It was said to have been a large manor house, or perhaps a palace, but also some kind of shrine or retreat. Whatever Fontville had been, secrecy and rumour always seemed to attach themselves to it, along with an odd aura of power, at least until a pitchfork-wielding mob had marched there during the time of the National Convention, and found it already razed to the ground.

The name still existed on modern maps—there was even a railway station—and Karl Haupmann headed there filled with fresh purpose and anticipation, although he knew the area would have changed a great deal. What was now Fontville squatted along the Rhine in a prickle of chimneys on which no stork would ever nest. He thought he’d glimpsed the future in the bright streets of New York, and then again in Paris, but he saw it much more clearly here. Muddy roads oozed between iron fences. Giant furnaces glared beyond. Sluggish ships dragged their way down the poisoned river on ropes of smoke. And everywhere there was a vast pounding, like the boom of distant guns.

He walked beyond the last of the factories to the edge of a wasteland where all the detritus of this new age of industry seemed to have been dumped, and clambered over tangled wire toward a kind of lake or pit, and peered down from the burned stones of its ancient lip. Here at last was something like the recognition he sought. He thought of caves and caverns, and ancient rituals in dark moon-mirrored halls. Of servants and masters swallowed up by the ages like Russian dolls. He could even smell the faint detritus of some eternal rot. The vision disgusted the man in him, but appealed to everything else. Foul water bubbled. Another step, and he’d be forever lost. He hurried away to catch the last train back to Strasbourg, and the comforts of his books.

He mustn’t give up. Not when whatever he was seeking or fleeing still raged in his blood. This much morphine and this many entries made in so many pages of his notebooks, and the night screams and sweats that sometimes came during the blackest phases of the moon, until the maître d’ insisted he find another hotel. But none of that mattered. Not when he already knew this city so well. Not when he was getting closer to finding the thing which had already destroyed everything he loved.

Then, seated one evening again in the civic gloom of the public records office of the Deutsches Reich, with yet another reluctant official sent searching for documents which probably didn’t exist, he uncrackled an ancient contract—misfiled, of course—which was dated 1651, and written in legal Latin, concerning the transportation of unspecified goods to Fontville in the Nordgau Region of Alsace from a place referred to as Skala in Warszawa, which he took to mean the modern city of Warsaw in Poland. Neither of the parties to the document were named, but as the official began glancing uneasily toward him and dimming the lanterns, he traced and retraced the wild, dark, letterless scrawl of the signature at the base of the page in a kind of exhilaration, for this, surely, was another step along the trail.

3

He crossed into Germany with the remains of his possessions now only filling a single trunk. Saw looming mountains, neat, gingerbread villages, battlement-crested cities. That, and more of those factories pointing their smoking fingers at the sky like the barrels of guns. Then another border, and papers, papers, and this time the guards wore Russian uniforms, and were loyal not to the kaiser but the tsar. They fingered their pistols. What possible reason could an American have to travel across these lands? But they let him through, and his journey continued through slow days of forest and rolling hills.

He’d bought himself a Polish phrasebook, but it seemed that Russian was now the language to use in Poland, at least when it came to dealing with bureaucrats and guards. Warsaw was a climbing, rambling, confusing city, built and rebuilt from stones so old they made even Strasbourg seem young. But Skala, yes Skala, there had once been a fortification by that name, or something like it, although it was long lost, right here within the precincts of this city and near the Kraków Gate. But why are you asking of this, American, in your mangle of languages? All too easy to be accused of being a spy.

Different smells and different musics. Different foods on fat wooden plates. The people here prayed unashamedly in public, and greeted each with hugs and loud voices, and kissed hands. Cossacks strode in the main market square, flashing their grins and their blades. The Polish and the Russian eagles supposedly intertwined in an endless embrace—or fighting in a frantic death grip, if you believed the words scrawled on the walls.

An innkeeper on the street, where Karl Haupmann grew certain that Skala had once risen, lit a lantern, raised a trapdoor and invited him to inspect his lower cellars, in return for a moderate fee. These low stone tunnels were clearly far older than the creaky baroque building above them, and filled with an odd kind of darkness that welled up like ink. A bad smell too. Earthy, yet somehow bloody. The innkeeper said he didn’t use them even for storage, as the air tainted the beer.

Money, though—or at least what he still had of it—could get many things. He wrangled bribes and bought permissions. He hired a gang of out-of-work Lubin coalminers, and hoists, and buckets, and wagonloads of pit props and excavating tools. People came out from their houses to gawk as the first loads of rock and earth were borne up to the street, then returned not long after to complain about the noise, and the risk to their foundations, and the awful, pestilential stink. Some old slaughterhouse had surely been here, or perhaps an ancient garbage pit. Soon the miners were refusing to go back down, and the innkeeper was protesting that the stench was putting off his customers, and there was talk of disease, and Karl Haupmann had to pay off more and more people, and then plead his credentials with the suspicious and corrupt city police.

He worked on alone. Dug with a shovel and then with his hands, scooping out more of the sour, ancient dirt with its grey-white particles of bone, the dark so deep and strong and all-encompassing now that he could see right through it into that black, wordless, nameless signature—the ink of ages back from that pit in Fontville which had surely bled from this same dark well. Shifts and shouts and stirrings far above him, but what did that matter? He clawed on. Then came a stronger rumble, and blackness squeezed down around him, filling his eyes and mouth. Followed by long silence, infinite dark. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, but still he longed to burrow on, and struggled against the seeking hands that finally hauled him out to the light. After all, what did he care if he was buried alive?

They said that it was a miracle, a kind of rebirth, and that he should make an offering at the nearest church. That he should then leave this city, and not return, or otherwise face arrest. He headed south. Kraków, and then the misty Carpathian Mountains, and papers, papers, and more men with guns and uniforms and yet more suspicion at the borders of another empire, this one being the Holy Roman Austro-Hungarian Empire. But there was still method to his madness, for wasn’t he entering the very lands in which the kinds of creature he sought had long been said to dwell?

There were stories, certainly. And cheap amulets for sale at roadside stalls, and silly figurines on display in shop windows, and academic tomes on folklore, and maps of the recommended tourist trails. And sir, yes, sir, you come here after seeing the famous play back in your homeland, or perhaps reading the famous book? Most, most popular, all very excellent, and if you step this way I will show you the very crypt which contains the famous vampire’s tomb. That, or, with the company of my most excellent sister, you care to sample the local wine…?

Vlad the Impaler was an able, if merciless, general, born in 1431 and died in 1476 or perhaps 1477, and a national hero in his native Romania, and righteous protector of the Christian cause. And Countess Elizabeth Báthory was simply a sick woman who used her status to pursue her desires; a type of human monster which still thrived in this modern age. The truth was always disappointing, as Karl Haupmann should have known better than anyone by now. Yet still he travelled on.

There were now machines which could fly under their own power, and others which could transmit messages through the air, and there were telephones in all the hotels. And the universe was far bigger than anyone had conceived, and time was malleable, at least according to some clever German, and atoms weren’t atoms, but a fizz of potentialities which slipped in and out of existence according to the blurrings of mere chance, and Karl Haupmann sometimes wondered if he was still a man of science. Or any kind of man at all.

That booming in his head. The visions. The voices. The cold, constricting dark. He had much less money now, and morphine—either in pill, powder, or suspension form—was getting harder and harder to obtain.

Another border, another boundary, and the uniforms were grand but tatty as he entered the Empire of the Ottomans, the so-called sick man of Europe, which was shedding territories much as a moulting bird sheds feathers. The women wore hoods, headscarves, and veils here as they had in his blurring memories of Strasbourg, but the customs, the signs, and the auguries, were much harder to be sure of. The smoking of opium and its derivatives being an established social custom, for example, yet a long prison term, or even a public stoning, for any foreigner who should dare to ask about the stuff.

Difficult times, yet he thought Constantinople a glorious city. Its mosaic light, glittering with gulls’ cries and the shouts of street traders; its sky pricked with minarets and threaded with calls to prayer. But the problem of his contagion still burned in his blood, and money was short and the night sweats were growing and the moon was thinning and he was struggling to learn Turkish and he had no real idea why he was even here.

Finally, he arranged a midnight meeting beside the famous burnt column which had stood by the Grand Bazaar since Emperor Constantine had taken the city in his name. He scowled up through scudding clouds at the dark sky, and saw no trace of a moon. Everything was raw to him now. The stones of the Meze as thin as the pages of history, and no one here but his own tearing need, and the wind, and the scent of the sewers. Another night like this, and he’d have to resort to other poisons, or else become the very creature he sought.

“No, no! Please! Wait…!”

A small man in a red fez and a stained white suit came scurrying after him.

“Apologies! I was late—a misunderstanding!”

“Why should I believe you?”

“No reason.” He was grinning breathlessly. “I am Doctor Basar.” He flourished his fez. “And I am, like you, a man of medicine. And I have exactly what it is that you are seeking.”

The oldest trick in the book. Lure him into some dead end where his accomplices would be waiting. But Doctor Basar’s cheery yet penitent air was oddly convincing, and Karl Haupmann followed through narrow alleys, and up a creaking set of external wooden steps. The click of a light, and they were inside a grubby surgery set with ancient glass jars, faded anatomical prints, a cluttered desk, and a cracked leather examining table. He had visited such places before, had dealt with other doctors, so-called men of healing, who were anything but.

His jaw ached as Doctor Basar cracked his fingers, spun the dial on a wall safe, and set three small glass vials on the desk between them.

Karl Haupmann picked one up, then almost broke the glass as he slammed it down. “This isn’t what I need!”

“Please, please…” Doctor Basar was nowhere near as afraid as he should have been. “Do you not think I would have at least changed the labels if this was a deceit?” He took one of the jars, eased off the cork, tipped a little white powder into his palm, and licked it. He shivered, wiped his nose. He held the jar out. “You must try…”

He looked again at the vial’s label. Heroin was derived from opium, but it was generally used as nothing more than a cough suppressant, and he seemed to recall it was going out of favour, due to problems of over-dependency, even for that. Still, he shook out a little of the powder. It had a sharp, bitter taste, with no evident numbness on the tongue, but as it flowered inside him something, part recognition and part discovery, seemed to stir. It was almost a release. A kind of dream.

“You see, my friend?” Doctor Basar was smiling broadly. “I can tell that you are a connoisseur. You must forget morphine. The nations of the world have grown greedy for it as their armies prepare for war, and the price has become unreasonable. But heroin… It is like wine after beer, or the allure of a beautiful woman after grappling with whores. And that is just taken on the tongue, so I leave you to imagine the feelings you must expect from inhaling the fumes. Or, better still, if you take it directly into the blood. The feeling the first time it enters… Ah…! My friend…!” Doctor Basar’s eyes fluttered white. “I envy you for what lies ahead…”

4

He wandered the souks. He marvelled at stories of the puppet sultan’s many wives, and the weakness of his powers, and the scale and grandeur of his palaces. He saw boys lift hooped flagstones to dip fishlines into the black waters of ancient cisterns. He watched officers, the so-called Young Turks, march and preen and brandish their guns. He stood between the grand mosque of Hagia Sophia, which had once been the greatest cathedral in Christendom, and the even grander Blue Mosque, on the site of the old Hippodrome, where chariot races had once taken place, and wondered if the roaring in his ears came merely from the traffic.

He took a ferry across the Bosphorus to Haydarpaşa on the doorstep of Asia, and then another smaller vessel up through the Sea of Marmara. He was travelling in the wake of Alexander the Great, and many other seekers of wonder, power, and mystery. He was entering the lands of his mother’s Arabian Nights tales. From here, he could follow the spice, silk, and opium trades all the way to India, and perhaps then on to China. He could drown himself in distance and history until all that remained of his own past was lost.

Boat by boat, village by village, he moved along the southern shores of the sea, which was now known as the Black, although it had once been called the Hospitable. He glimpsed tombs and temples on promontories, or waving in weeds under the waters, and here were the peaks, somehow homely, somehow reassuring, of the Pahar Mountains, their flanks lush with forest. It was far easier here, where people still painted eyes on the prow of their boats, to see how little of life ever really changed.

He came to a village called Esbarun, with an old Byzantine fort at it centre which was still used as a residence by the district governor, and found a kind of peace in studying the blotched mosaics of its chapel, and wandering its shore, where old men sat repairing fishing nets in the sun. Then, walking one day in the resinous shade of the forest, he found himself climbing higher than usual. More rocks up here, a tumbling maze formed from the remains of walls and pillars graven with mossy inscriptions, long brought down and broken by the earthquakes from which this landscape suffered.

Full summer, and a full noon, but the shadows seemed to chill as he climbed around deadfall trees and stones until he reached a clearing he felt he almost knew. It was empty of birdsong, and filled with deep drifts of a shade so darkly pale it almost felt like snow. And there was a cave from which this ancient silence seemed to emanate especially strongly, set around its face with more of those weathered hieroglyphs, and giving out a familiar scent of dampness, age, and decay. The cold mouth seemed to slope down like a stone gullet, and there looked to be no purchase on the rocks, yet still he felt himself drawn to it, leaning in and down, until—

“Effendi?”

The voice was faint but clear. He turned from the cave’s mouth and clambered back out of the clearing, then down into the warm day where birds sang and the mountains shimmered, and the lad who made the district governor’s tea was climbing up through the gorse and beckoning him urgently.

“Effendi…!? Now!”

The governor was in his office with Karl Haupmann’s papers laid before him.

“You have not heard?”

“Heard what, excellency?” It wasn’t hard to sound confused.

“There has been a killing of some minor Austrian prince in Serbia, which the Russians are using as an excuse for aggression. Turkey, of course, is rightly siding with the kaiser and the emperor of Austria, but your position here…” The governor waved aside a fly. “Your position here in my country becomes suddenly very difficult. Although you are American, you will be thought of as a spy for the British. Which could be very bad for you, with all our foreign borders already closed. But then, some skills are especially useful in such times as these. Are you not”—he tapped the papers—“a man of medicine, someone who knows how to tend the wounded?”

5

As war ignited along several fronts, against the Russians in the north and the Arab states in the south and the British-commanded Indian and Australian troops in the east towards Mesopotamia, he worked first in a school requisitioned as a hospital on the fringes of Constantinople, and he saw firsthand the modern advances in anaesthetics, and the new understandings in microbiology, along with the help X-ray equipment offered in trauma diagnosis, and the life-saving effect of blood transfusions. But, set against this, great progress had also been made in the methods of death and destruction. Guns were more accurate, shells were bigger, and, thanks to modern transportation, troops and weaponry could be brought more swiftly to bear on points of enemy weakness, with trenches dug and pumped dry and then protected with landmines, barbed wire, and water-cooled machine guns which could fire up to six hundred rounds a minute. The only significant advancement in warfare that he didn’t witness the effects of was poison gas, which, although reputedly common in the fields of France and Belgium, wasn’t deployed in this Eastern theatre. A small mercy indeed, for then the British launched a seaborne attack on the Dardanelles, and he was posted to a cramped hospital ship within earshot of the howitzers at Gallipoli. Here, where the pounding and the screams of agony couldn’t be drowned out by mere heroin, Captain Physician Karl Haupmann came to wonder if he’d ever left war behind.

Then the year was 1918—the Ottoman Empire had been destroyed, and a battalion of French troops marched into what people were now calling Istanbul as the sultan hid in his palace. Karl Haupmann was arrested and questioned as a collaborator, but adjudged to have done nothing more sinister than work as a medic for the Red Crescent, and was declared free to leave Turkey. But where, and how? All his possessions were gone, and this was nothing like a proper peace. Just a different kind of war, with revolts and revolutions springing up as the boundaries of the old empires collapsed everywhere across Europe. Ragged people wandered the roads, fleeing or seeking something. Vagabond troops took whatever they needed, with minor differences in belief, accent or skin colour as good an excuse as any for more slaughter.

This, he knew as a victim of history, was what human existence had always been like: folly after folly, century piled upon century, greed upon greed. And would not any person or creature who witnessed these things come to think of humanity with nothing but contempt, and conclude that life was irredeemably cheap? Shivering, wrapped in sacks and beaten by the sun, gunfire still pounding in his ears—a physician, a man of supposed healing, who ignored the needs of others and hoarded his own precious supplies—he prowled north and west. Hiding in burned-out barns and drowned cellars. Burrowing in rotted haystacks amid the bodies of the truly dead. Yet still he couldn’t relent.

He was surer than ever that some taunting dark figure, the originator, the survivor, lay just a little way ahead of him, out there in the clear dark or the searing light. Karl, Karl… Ezekiel… It seemed to beckon and know who and what he was. Even what he was for. And then, when he looked behind, it was following him as well. He’d once been a good man, yes. A man of his trade and his family. And then out of the twilight, something had come. And then… A whole life had gone by, quickly as falling… He, who had once awoken eager for the discoveries of a new morning, and walked through Boston to his lectures with the whistle of a catchy new blackface minstrel tune on his lips.

I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten

Look away! Look away! Look away!

Dixie Land.

In Dixie Land where I was born in,

Early on one frosty mornin,

Look away! Look away! Look away!

Dixie Land.

Oh, I wish I was in Dixie!

Hooray! Hooray!

In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand

To live and die in Dixie

Look away, look away,

Away down south in Dixie…

Look away, children, as the bad-seeming man approaches. But feel pity for him too, for there but for the grace of some other kind of god… A delicate dance for this leprous beggar, hunched in cattle-truck carriages or wandering the roads. Stealing what he needed, or the things that would get it. Seeking out druggists and apothecaries the way a fox scents out hens. Crawling through back windows. Creeping, shadow by shadow, toward the shine of a cupboard, the glint of shelves. Mercury and iodine and hydrogen peroxide and boric acid and quinine and chloroform and tinctures of carbolic and bandages and suture packs and useless rubber implements, all of them clattering and raining around him in his heedless, hurrying need.

Peering at labels. Sniffing, licking the contents of shattered bottles in search of morphine in acetylated form, most commonly made by the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company of Leverkusen, Westphalia, under the brand name of Heroin, although its reputation was in decline, while a sharp syringe and some citric acid were often just as hard to obtain. Sometimes he just worked the stuff into the puddle of an opened vein until the moment stretched, contracted, and he was swimming through a crystalline sea. Doctor Basar back in Constantinople had been right, and the moment heroin gave him was always much darker, deeper, sweeter, clearer, and simply better than he could ever have imagined, but ever more quickly gone. A distillation of everything. His needs, all the pain and memory, erased. He’d never felt so clean, so pure, so at the heart of being and not being himself, until he was dragged back to the grim rubble of wherever he’d tried to hide. But that, and the dizziness and the letdowns and the retching and the shakes and the driving, pounding headaches were an infinitesimally small price to pay. For, at least until the next night, the next dark moon, the entire world was almost perfected, and he was nearly cured.

He was in a city now. A place he almost knew. The cathedral still standing proud, but so much else in ruin. Lives shattered, crunch of glass, the shops looted, and papers please, yes, papers, you hear me you filthy vagrant, stop right now or I’ll shoot, and why the hell are you cackling like that? Who, exactly, do you think you are? Soldiers marching, and daily public executions by means of a guillotine in the parade ground square, which was still the most humane method that science could devise. Briefly, there had been an uprising, a joyous call for freedom and Marxist brotherhood after shedding the German yoke. But the Commune had been suppressed by the armies of the triumphant French, who once again claimed Strasbourg as their own, and nothing and everything was the same.

He searched the sky for a moon in the fires of the night, and found nothing but his need. Karl…? Ezekiel…? Is that you…? He was crawling across a snowy clearing toward a black cavern, from which the echoes of old songs of battle, all the lies that were told, wafted out: “John Brown’s Body,” “Over There,” “Ça Ira,” “La Marseillaise,” “Dixie.” Then the vision cleared and he was in a place with a fallen sign which read Fontville, where the railtracks were buckled and most of the chimneys had fallen, and those that remained were smokeless, storkless, and dead. And here was barbed wire, and burned stone, and a great pile where all the detritus of this entire great war seemed to have been heaped in one spot: Old cannons. Broken wagons. Dead horses. Torn flags. Rusted guns. The bodies and the blood. Everything, beyond heroin, that he craved. And, right here at the whirlpool centre of every kind of darkness, was a great, ghastly, falling pit. He staggered toward it, weeping, through shards of glass and bone, and waded deep to drink of its eternal dark.

And that was all.