The Combinations, page 15
standing at the edge of the square below, gazing up searchingly at the prison walls.
She stayed there till the guards came & sent her away. Blonde beneath a black
peasant scarf, like a vision out of a fairytale. Whatever else happened, Wojnicz
never forgot that fair fräulein’s face. Nor the date. It was a Sunday, the th of
April, . In Warsaw it would’ve been Easter, but in Petersburg he’d have to
wait another days. It’d taken that long for God to get from Poland to Russia.
Instead of wasting a bullet on him, they sent Wojnicz to a Siberian gulag
near Irkutsk to ponder the error of is ways. They breed a vicious strain of
tuberculosis out in them there gulags, but Wojnicz was lucky & the disease only
took thirty years to kill him. In the meantime he tried his hand at escape: wound
up down the hole after the first two attempts, third time he got lucky. It was the
summer of , humidity around %, the permafrost oozing up through the
taiga & temperatures into the thirties. Wojnicz made his way south, across
Mongolia by camel-train, to Peking. And from Peking, dirty hungry penniless,
via Hamburg aboard a fruit boat, for the price of a handmedown waistcoat & a
pair of reading glasses, to Commercial Rd London, where, transformed into
Wilfrid Voynich, he married, in , the daughter of one George Boole, author
of The Laws of Thought & inventor of Boolean logic.
Ethel Lilian Boole wasn’t your typical pale-skinned beauty. Irish by birth,
she was the youngest of five daughters. Her mother was Mary Everest, whose
uncle had the mountain named after him. But despite the notoriety, the Booles
weren’t exactly living the highlife & poverty forced them to board Lilian with
rich Uncle Charles in Lancashire, a pious industrialist who liked to dish out the
abuse. While his wife & children stood dutifully by & watched, he’d tie his niece
to a piano leg & bash on the keys, raging like a mad evangelist against this
sluttish piece of filth he’d been obliged by charity to defile their home with.*
Strange the ways of the world. When eventually she left her uncle’s house,
* Jack Raymond (London: W. Heinemann, ). [:]
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Lilian Boole went on a scholarship to study at the Hochschule der Musik in
Berlin. She chose piano. Soon she became involved in political activism, it seemed
like a natural progression. She travelled to St Petersburg & on Easter Sunday
found herself standing outside a prison in which anti-Tzarist agitators were being
kept. Her marriage to Wilfrid Voynich seemed fated, though fate wasn’t
something she believed in, rather it appeared to her as a necessary unfolding of a
larger narrative, the dialectical progression of History with a capital H.
The Voynichs, “rare people” in the class of bibliophiles & propagandists,
opened an expensive book emporium at Soho Sq. which dealt in first editions,
incunabula, books unknown to bibliographers, & served as the base of operations
for the Society of Friends for a Free Russia. Eleonor Marx, Friedrich Engels,
Peter Kropotkin, G.B. Shaw, William Morris & Oscar Wilde all passed through
the Voynichs’ doors (their in-house cataloguer, one Herbert Garland, later
penned a memoir, Some Famous English Bookshops, volume III of which was
devoted to his former employer & had many interesting things to say).
While Wilfrid devoted his spare hours to publishing elaborately designed
catalogues, Lilian Voynich began a career as a novelist. In addition to translating
& smuggling illegal literature, she now penned revolutionary potboilers, ace-of-
spions stuff, that had a young officeboy called Ian Flemming watering at the
mouth — books that were dead as mutton eighteen months after they were
born. The pièce de résistance was The Gadfly (), an unlikely survival which
lived to reach the bestseller list behind the Iron Curtain, a half-century after the
fact. Stalin, whose judgement in all things was infallible, considered its author
greater than Shakespeare & caused a recently discovered minor planet to be
named in her honour.
The Voynichs’ flourishing book business didn’t go unnoticed by Scotland
Yard, however, & as the Great War rumbled eastwards the order went out to
bring them in. Deftly evading capture, the two crypto-Bolsheviks decamped
across the pond to an address at Aeolian Hall, nd Street, New York, where
news of the October Revolution wasn’t long in coming. Needless to say, the rare
books came too, including the recently discovered “Roger Bacon” Manuscript.
After the war it was business as usual. Then eight years before the Non-
Aggression Pact, comforted by the knowledge that the last Tzar was dead,
W.M. Voynich quit this world for some higher plane.
The Widow Voynich — stern, childless & ever-mindful of Nazi
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sympathisers in Congress — secluded herself from the world with her dead
husband’s books. And his former secretary.* From time to time men with
German-sounding accents made inquiries over the telephone, into the present
whereabouts of the fabled Manuscript. They offered Reichsmarks, gold, certified
US Treasury bonds, to no avail. Then soon enough the Atlantic once again
erupted into war & the world forgot. A Russian translator rediscovered her in
the s at Stalin’s behest, living in a time-capsule, surrounded by the
meaningless din of TV & McCarthyism. The translator handed her a royalty
cheque which she fed to her cats. The remainder of the decade passed
uneventfully. Though she might never’ve known, the year Ethel Lilian Voynich
died was the year they put the th star on the Star Spangled Banner — the year
Ben Hur swept the Oscars — the year Eichmann was kidnapped in Buenos Aires
& Khrushchev pounded his shoe at the UN — the year Sputnik bore a pair of
mutts* into outer space & safely back again — the year Operation Grand Slam
went pearshaped & Ebbets Field Stadium in Brooklyn got demolished & John
F. Kennedy became the youngest elected President of those United States.
And the Manuscript?
While he’d been alive, Voynich was never shy about airing his personal
theories as to who wrote it & when & where. He even had photostats made &
sent to all the experts. Most of them figured him for a con-artist or a crackpot.
By not too many even remembered the Manuscript existed. One of the
ones who did was Hans Kraus, a Gotham City antiquarian, infamous in the
trade. He practically staked-out Lilian Voynich’s funeral. She’d always been the
stubborn type, wouldn’t sell no matter what — had some sort of sentimental
attachment to the old stuff her husband left behind. She died surrounded by cats
& bookshelves crammed with junk. The ex-secretary, her sole heir, was sick of
the stuff — the Bahamas that time of year had a certain appeal. Hans Kraus lost
no time finagling the Manuscript out of Miss Nil for a tidy $.
Maybe Kraus thought he could crack the secret himself, use it to mint
gold. Or maybe he calculated a big fat profit on the biggest unsolved mystery
since before the Bermuda Triangle. It might’ve got him a fifteen-minute slot on
Ripley’s Believe it or Not, but the market wasn’t buying that year, or any other
year. When he finally got sick of trying to peddle it, Kraus decided to salvage as
* Anne Nil, Lilian Voynich’s sole companion for thirty years. [:]
* “Belka” & “Strelka,” accompanied by rabbit, rats, mice, flies, plants & fungi, all of which survived, apparently. [:]
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much of his reputation as he could by donating the Manuscript to the Beinecke
Rare Books Library at Yale University. It was an uncharacteristic act of
generosity from a man famed for his ruthlessness. But he probably figured by
then it was a fake. Besides, it was tax deductible.
o
Was it the fault of Gustav Mahler that Němec ever laid eyes on this eighth
wonder of the occult world? Or a half-hearted fianchetto in a forgettable gambit?
The way he explained it to the Bugman was like this, beginning with
Mydlář & the old fellas playing chess at the Klementinum, then fastforwarding
to evening trawls through Malá Strana & winding up on the Prof’s doorstep,
being in the neighbourhood so to speak, acting on impulse & a certain degree of
curiosity, finding himself in front of a certain house on Jánský Vršek, in the hot
rain, & it slowly dawning on him where he was. A likely story.
To be fair, Němec had been carrying around the address of the man who
called himself Hájek for over a week, crumpled in his trouser pocket. The Old
Man’s “invitation” had been nothing if not perfunctory: a street name & number
scribbled on a page torn from his notebook, thrust into Němec’s gangly,
reluctant hand as he (Hájek, “the Prof”) packed away his chessboard that fateful
afternoon. It was a parting gesture Němec promptly forgot — perhaps it was
intended that way.
His sudden appearance, therefore, might’ve surprised the Old Man, but it
didn’t. Not in the slightest. It was, to quote a well-worn turn of phrase, as if he
(Němec) had been expected all along: the anticipated outcome, you might say, of
a gambit calculated to remain imperceptible till long after the fact & even in
hindsight cloaked in uncertainties. The impression suited the occasion, Kelley’s
Tower & all that. The Prof met him on the stairs, turned him around, pointed
out the salient features, the “Donkey in the Cradle,” etc., before ushering him
back through into his thinking parlour. There was a chessboard with pieces
arranged on it on a table between a couple of padded armchairs: all that was
required were the players. It was all both strange & yet strangely familiar…
This second encounter had the air of a private audience between Ruy
Lopez & some exiled minor Lama, wizened in brown suit, tie askew, silver hair
fanning up from broad Sklavic forehead, high-cheekboned & blunt-chinned,
beardless. The setting was vaguely mortuary in a decayed, unimposing kind of
way: a stage set for a low-budget silent film someone had dragged-up from the
85
vaults & dubbed over, washed in watts of sepia tone, the smell of beeswax &
tallow oozing out of the furniture. Němec admired Lopez’s tenacity, right up to
the point of conceding. It was a close game, but all the moves had already been
written down. And then the Prof told him about the Manuscript.
‘Well you sure know how to pick ’em, dontcha kiddo?’ the Bugman said.
Němec knew the only way to tell the story was to play it straight, the crazy
stuff would take care of itself. Only he wasn’t sure if any of it was really crazy or
not. Every minute of his life till the moment he escaped from the Home had
been like a joke someone made up just to dare you to laugh, too absurd to be
anything but fiction, except it’d all been real, too real. Like someone shows you a
book no one’s been able to make heads or tails out of for hundreds of years?
Němec shrugged. The way he described it to the Bugman, if aliens had made a
report on the Lost Workers’ Paradise, it might’ve looked pretty much the same.
But it wasn’t the Manuscript itself that was crazy, it was what the Prof told him
about it that was crazy.
While Němec spieled it out the Bugman sat on the edge of his deckchair
among a dozen pecking chickens, holding a mirror in one hand & clipping his
nose-hairs with a pair of scissors in the other. Even with the evening coming, the
heat radiating up from the roof was palpable. He could feel the Astroturf wilting
between his toes. The chickens had that dazed hypnotic look in their eyes. An
indecipherable Morse flashed from the Bugman’s mirror as he worked the
scissors up inside is left nostril. Němec adjusted a pair of sunglasses against the
glare, mumbled something about how he figured the Prof was just some lonely
old guy big-noting himself on the back of a scam laid down in antiquity, to give
him some leverage, so to speak, when the day came to get his ticket stamped for
the Great Hereafter. Maybe upgrade to World Traveller class.
At the same time Němec remembered thinking how maybe the Old Man
regarded him in a not dissimilar way, like a stray dog in search of a bone & a
place to gnaw on it — touching if you’re prone to sentimentality about things
that bite, companionable the way driftwood is when there’s a current to keep it
close by, eddying in the shallows, till the river rises again & carries it
downstream, imbued with all the fatalism of a broken clock. He thought maybe
he was being played for a sucker twice-over. The way people had of sizing him
up like some kind of man-child, how he stuck out of his clothes at wrong angles,
head lopsided, a bit slow in the face to anyone who didn’t look too deep. But
that wasn’t the way the Prof looked at him. The Prof looked at Němec like
someone he wanted to listen.
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After a while Blecha put down the scissors & mirror & poured himself a
brandy. He poured one for Němec, too. Soon dusk began settling over the
rooftops, like the two of them were parked in a drive-in with the whole story
playing up there on the biggest screen around, just the way Němec was telling it.
The Bugman nodded patiently, sipped his brandy, scooped his favourite chook
into his lap so he could pet it & coo over it.
‘Well,’ he said after Němec’d talked himself out, ‘there’s no accountin’ for
charity, kiddo.’
o
What the Manuscript actually was? Well who could say? What it appeared to be
was legion. Rumours spread from the moment of its discovery, circulating with
the ebb & flow of the times. Its momentary fame was interrupted by the Great
War, the October Revolution, the Depression, Fascism, the teetering end of
Empire. By the time Kraus got his hands on it, the Voynich Manuscript seemed
like an artefact of a forgotten age. But word of it still circulated, cunningly,
quietly, in the occult mists that still shroud this world in which the Organisation
Man fancies himself king.
Dispersed in remote corners of the globe, factions of self-described adepts
gathered with patient stealth, & having gathered, multiplied & re-divided like
bacteria, evolving into counterfactions & countercounterfactions, each with its
own theory, its own dogma, its own key to the Great Riddle. And like the
clandestine sects of police informers that’d first set Michał Wojnicz on the path to
becoming Wilfrid Voynich, their secret conspiracy produced a public enigma,
photographed & available on request for inspection on a single spool of microfilm.
But how it’d got there acquired over the years a lore whose intricacy in the
retelling was almost as Byzantine & unfathomable as the Manuscript itself.
‘Which, of course,’ the Prof said, ‘doesn’t prevent anyone believing it
harbours a true secret.’
Of course he dismissed the lot as the work of cross-eyed zodiac-gazers,
demon-worshippers, penny-ante Fausts trumped-up on the limitless prospects
their narcissism afforded. To such imbeciles the Manuscript was nothing short
of a magic mirror, reflecting whatever they wanted to see in it. Yet stripped of its
mystique, what was the Voynich Manuscript but a book no-one could read —
whose fascination, like a femme fatale, lay solely in being out of reach — an
object merely of desire in place of an object of knowing?
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‘Unable to know even the nature of its secret, they turn to other facets, in
the hope that science, after all, or if not precisely science something at least
resembling it, can lead them to the other side of the mirror & out of their cul-
de-sac. In place of the usual hocus-pocus they pose questions: Who wrote the
Manuscript and when? What’s its provenance? Is it a forgery? Can it in some way be computed? The answers? No-one knows. Probably they never will.’
o
The Prof had a little ritual which he practiced without fail each time Němec
came to visit him. He would set out a bottle of white port beside two cut crystal
glasses on a tray on his desk & ask Němec to pour while he rearranged the
chessmen on the small checkerboard table. The label on the bottle had the word
Lágrima printed on it in large green letters.
‘The tears of Eurydice,’* the Old Man pronounced on their first such
* The Ancient Greeks, it seemed, had an elaborate yarn, about a young maiden, called Eurydice,
