CROSSING A SHORT BRIDGE led them to an island in the Spree River that housed five museums. Herb had no desire to re-visit the Bode. He followed Gwen into the Pergamon, which contained the ancient Greek altar she had wanted to see since college. Built in the second century BC, buried for millennia, then excavated by a German engineer in the late 1800s and transported to Berlin, the altar was arguably the most exquisite sculpture of the Hellenistic era.
They entered an immense room brightly illuminated by a frosted-glass ceiling. Gwen was encircled by marble panels that rippled with wrestling figures. Seven feet high, one hundred yards in length, the frieze depicted a mythic gigantomachy—a war between Greek deities and a race of giants. Gods and goddesses leapt, shoved, and stomped, defending their new order against the sons of Gaia, Earth’s mother. The battle would be a victory for Zeus’s clan over a matriarchal world—a victory for culture and history over chaos.
Once she had absorbed the sheer size of the frieze and assimilated the massive effort that must have gone into creating it, she looked closely at the carvings. Muscle details, precise as anatomy lessons, filled the panels. Deltoids, glutei, pronators, latissimi dorsi, many others she could no longer name. Not in a lifetime, she thought, could any individual have made more than a small part of this frieze. Who were the sculptors? What were their lives like? The bodies they had shaped, motion frozen forever in stone, were voluptuous. They made her think of Rick, of their early days together. She regretted her own ability to love passionately had been so transient.
Gwen’s reverie soured. She looked for Herb and saw him sitting idly on a bench. She checked her watch. An hour had passed. She forced Rick out of her mind and walked the full length of the frieze one last time.
She was struck by something obvious. How she had missed it before? Only the front and side of each god or giant was revealed. The back of each figure was embedded in stone, unformed in amorphous, infinite space. This frieze was more than art. It was a metaphysical treatise.
Gwen was inspired. She fantasized taking up a hammer and chisel again. In college, she had broken through once, reaching the point where her muscle endurance and ability to visualize what needed to be removed from a stone block were sufficient to complete a work—a bust of Eva’s head. She would readily admit it generous to call the piece folk art. Nonetheless, she was proud of it.
Gwen massaged her triceps and biceps. Why not try, she thought.
Herb was beside her.
“Meet your expectations?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” she said with a mysterious smile.