Neil Olson - The Icon

The place had once been a sort of solarium, decades ago, but he had seen right away how to utilize it. The walls were reinforced, a domed oval ceiling stuck on, more Byzantine than Western. The six stained-glass windows came from a bombed-out church in Alsace. There were a dozen wooden panels from Hungary, depicting the stations of the cross. Also, some blackened, ornate candelabra from Italy, though he seldom lit candles in here. None of these objects was terribly valuable, not by the standards of his other possessions, but they all pleased and eased him in a way that other work could not.

On the far wall, lit softly from above and serving as altarpiece, was the Byzantine panel. Older by a thousand years than anything else in the room, his greatest treasure, though it had failed him in nearly every way. The Virgin’s face and hands had faded long before he had taken possession of the work. Now, except for those dark eyes, she had become indiscernible to his failing vision, creating the impression of a deep maroon robe wrapped about some spectral being. Not what the maker intended, but quite effective. Kessler wheeled himself the length of the chamber to sit before it.

Müller had never meant to give this one up. Safekeeping only, but when the situation became hopeless in ’45, he’d needed money to get out. Money, a Swiss identity, safe passage, Kessler had arranged it all. His own funds, not the bank’s. It was far from the only treasure to pass through his hands, and the bank or its managers had kept many when the owners vanished into the cauldron of war, but this was the only one that he had taken for himself. Contrary to the snide insinuations that he knew circulated about him, he had purchased all the other items in this room and in the rooms beyond after the war, legally and aboveboard. True, he’d had the upper hand over emotionally shattered churchmen and penniless aristocrats, whose temporary need outweighed their devotion to art. He wasn’t proud of that, but business transactions were never made at equal odds. Someone always had the advantage, and it might as well have been someone like him, who would properly revere the work.

No one knew the icon’s true history; at least it had never reached Kessler’s ears. Some said it had been in that village church for centuries. Others, that it had been owned by a long succession of despots, Greek and Muslim, priests, thieves, from Ali Pasha all the way back to the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos. It had almost certainly been made in Constantinople, long before the fall, even before the first iconoclasm. Shrouded in rumor, impregnated with mystery.

His blurred vision blurred even further, a dampness in his eyes. Not piety, or God’s grace, but simple fear moved him to tears. Fear of his impending end and what waited beyond, sorrow at all that was lost, loved ones, friends, a world that he understood, his youth and vigor, his sight and sense, all lost, irretrievable. He closed his eyes. Prayer was, as always, impossible. He was not such a fool as to ask anything of heaven, even an explanation, so what should he pray for, and to whom? Contemplation was the best he could offer, a meditation on his past and his sins, and before him the Virgin, most forgiving of those heavenly rulers, to witness his soul laid bare, to grant, if she saw fit, the mercy for which he could not ask. It was a pathetic act, like crying in the corner until mother came, rather than confessing his misdeeds to father, but it was all he was capable of. Heaven must meet him halfway, or leave him below.

He had nearly confessed to Ana, in the grip of one of his fevers. The weight of his guilt over Richard was terrible; it bore down on the whole length and breadth of his life, crushing everything. There was no one to tell, and no hope of comfort from that direction even if he did. What had he actually said to the girl? He couldn’t remember, but it could not have been much; she had never spoken of it afterward. Yet there was that drawing back on her part. Is that when it had happened? Again, he could not remember. All recent experience had become indistinct. His powers of recall were fragmenting, the wrong shards always stabbing to the surface-a first, unrequited love he’d forgotten for seventy years, random childhood terrors, the looming figure of his father, that sour grimace just before he struck. His mother, whose face he could no longer conjure up, just the softness of her hands, her voice.

He might have slept; it was unclear. When he opened his eyes again the room seemed darker, and the icon glowed with a radiance he knew from descriptions but had never yet seen. A smile forced the stiff muscles of his face, and he felt a presence behind him. That was not a new or even an unexpected sensation, but it was rare, only the third or fourth time he’d experienced it, and in combination with the odd glow around the painting, it must portend something. His scalp tingled, and he would swear he felt heat in all his extremities, even his feet, strangers these ten years. He maneuvered the controls with his right hand and the chair turned ninety degrees, so that he faced the gold-and-red window depicting Christ with the cross upon his shoulder. The shadows in the chapel had grown deeper, but light still seeped through the archway from the hall beyond, and interrupting that weak light, at the farthest edge of his peripheral vision, was a figure.

The old Greek priest, whom Kessler allowed to see the work years before, had told him that the magic had gone out of it. Of course, he didn’t call it magic. Energy, perhaps, or spirit, yes, the spirit had gone out of it, the old fraud announced, close enough to kiss the paint, gray head shaking. Apparently, he had known the icon before the war, had prayed before it in the sacred stone church of that little village in Epiros. He had recognized it as being far older than the locals guessed and possessed of powers older still, had sensed-how had he described it?-a living presence in the wood. Despite himself, Kessler had felt his breath catch at that description. Gone, the priest insisted, dismissing the spell he had cast in an instant. Something had happened, some desecration, some strange devaluation, perhaps stemming from the icon’s removal from its native soil-those damn Greeks. Whatever the case, the magic was gone. The work’s value was now strictly artistic, granting, of course, the power of art to inspire the faithful.

Kessler had suspected some attempt to delegitimize the icon in his eyes and compel him to part with it. Nevertheless, it had wounded him, so deeply that he was not even able to think about the encounter for a long time afterward. Perhaps on some level he came to believe what the old man had said. Yet things had happened, things written of in the past that found a place in his life, bracing up his ever-shaky faith. He had lived long, too long, maybe, yet he had outlived countless dangers, illnesses, injuries. Longevity was one of the powers attributed to the icon. Stories existed of men who owned it, or dedicated their worship to it, living 120 years, fathering children in their eighties. In Kessler’s case, long life had seemed a kind of mockery. He’d defeated illness but had never been completely free of it. There had been only the one child, the son whom he had lost. What was the purpose, the gain of such an old age?

At some point it had occurred to him that his reward might come in the next world, not this one, and that proved a difficult change in thinking. Because he was not sure he believed in a next world, was not even sure he believed in the Almighty. It was conceivable to him that there was such an entity, and such a place, but one did not arrive there without a deep, abiding faith. No hellfire was necessary for the rest. The contemplation of a black abyss, utter nothingness, was more than sufficiently terrifying. Then he had begun to see Her. And what unexpected joy that had caused. And fear, too, for she would not be there without a purpose, but he was hopeful that she intended him some good. She had ever been the source of mercy in all the tales that he knew, and if she could not save his enfeebled body, perhaps she could save that thing that was more important, if it was real: his soul. He thought of all these things in a moment as the figure hovered at the edge of his vision, waiting. Shame overwhelmed him, suddenly, sickeningly. Belief came from the heart, not the eyes. He had no right to demand proof, he, the worst sinner on earth. And yet, had it not been so with Paul? With all the disciples? And countless others since. Might not the eyes persuade the heart? Who was he to decide?