The Amber Room (32 page)

“And Gregor has business for us to attend to,” Jeffrey added.

Alexander looked down on Katya. “My dear, you have done excellent work. I thank you. From the depths of a despairing heart, I thank you for the work you have accomplished.”

She raised a timid hand. “There is one thing more.”

“The other item in your fax,” Jeffrey remembered.

She nodded. “Frau Reining called. The people Jeffrey and I met in Dresden are ready to deliver the sample.”

Alexander slowly sank back into his chair. “When?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

He pondered the news, then shook his head. “Tempted as I am to remain, this you must do yourselves. We do not have evidence that these findings about the chalice are anything more than simple conjecture, and Andrew should not be left without an immediate contact. I shall therefore report this possible development to Rokovski and urge him personally to accompany you to, where did you say this meeting was to take place?”

“Czestochowa,” Katya replied. “At a hotel near the Cathedral of the Black Madonna.”

CHAPTER 31

Winter appeared to vanish with the dawn. The sun rose in a pristine sky and banished the bitter cold as though it had never existed.

“A glorious morning,” Gregor said in greeting. “Let us hope it is truly the arrival of spring.”

“Katya said that I should wish you a happy Name's Day,” Jeffrey said. “She is only giving us a couple of minutes alone. She is impatient to see you herself.”

Gregor ushered Jeffrey inside. “There is a saying that when it is pretty on Saint Gregor's morn, winter has been banished to the depths of the sea, and spring has truly begun.”

“When you talk about things like the saints, it makes me feel as if I'm coming from a totally different world.” Jeffrey accepted his glass of tea with a nod of thanks. “Does it bother you that I'm a Baptist?”

“My dear boy, the only thing that concerns me is whether or not Christ will know you when the day of reckoning arrives.” He sat and straightened his back in the slow way of one who is aware of possible pains. “We shall someday stand before the throne to be judged for our reward. I am speaking about believers here. From my own studies of the Scriptures, I understand that there shall be a second judgment for nonbelievers. A truly terrible thing. Too terrible to even contemplate. No, I speak here of the judgment of believers. When we stand before His throne, I do not think the majestic Lord will ask us to which denomination we belonged. I believe He will ask us how well we have
loved
.”

“I don't feel I know Him at all,” Jeffrey confessed.

“You will,” Gregor replied with utter certainty. “For the moment, take heart in the fact that He knows you. His knowledge is perfect. Just come to live by that and you'll do fine.”

Jeffrey gave a dispirited shrug. “I guess I need to have a better handle on religion.”

“As I said yesterday, the
last
thing you need is religion,” Gregor replied emphatically. “Religion won't ease your restlessness. Christ entering your life, my dear young friend,
that
is the answer. Not the laws, not this or that sect, not any certain form of worship. The answer is found in knowing Jesus Christ. The solution is being filled with the Holy Spirit. The Lord has said, I will let my goodness, my graciousness, my presence pass before you. And He will, Jeffrey. Open yourself, and He will do as He promised.”

“So, how should I worship?”

Gregor smiled. “My favorite definition of worship is to turn toward and kiss.”

“Turn toward what?”

“Yes. That is the endless question of those whose thirst remains unquenched. You must open yourself and let
Him
show you where to turn. Seek Him with the eyes of your heart, not with the eyes and mind of material man.”

Jeffrey allowed a fragment of his frustration to surface. “That sounds more like poetry than an answer I can use.”

Gregor gazed at him fondly. “Those same words could have been said by your grandfather,” he replied. “In a different tongue, but with the same honest spirit. He would be very proud of you, my boy.”

“For searching in vain?”

“No. For searching in
honesty
.” He shifted painfully. “Could you please be so kind as to set one of those cushions behind my back? Ah. Much better. Thank you. Now then, pay attention to me, Jeffrey. When Peter stood on the mountainside and witnessed the Lord's divine majesty unveiled during the Transfiguration, what did he do? He did as most of us would have done. He wanted to jump up and set up tents and build stone monuments and move around and
do
. And the Lord said to him, Stop. Be still. Relax. Don't strive.
Receive
. My young friend, I share with you this same
message. Take the single solitary step of being open, and let the Lord work the miracle before you.”

“You're saying that I shouldn't be so ambitious,” Jeffrey said.

Gregor looked dismayed. “Is it so easy to misunderstand me? The Good Book is full of calls for us to be ambitious. The key is what we are to be ambitious
for
—ourselves, or Him. I cannot imagine that the Lord would endow so many of us with this focused power and then have us call it sinful. That is in my mind utter nonsense.”

“That's a relief,” Jeffrey said. “I could see changing my ambition to suit His need a lot faster than I could see getting rid of it completely.”

“It is an unfortunate human trait to call qualities that we ourselves do not have a sin in someone else. We wish to be comfortable with where we are and who we are, and therefore we do not see that someone else may be driven to
greater
heights, to
greater
service, through a quality that is bestowed by our Maker.

“Paul himself calls us to make service our ambition. The word used when First Thessalonians was written was
philotemesti
. It means to hasten to do a thing, to do it quickly, to exert yourself to the fullest while doing it. It says that we must consider the focus of our ambition to be a vital action, and we must therefore expend whatever energy is required to do this thing.”

“It sounds, well, thrilling.”

“Of course it does.” His eyes shone with a light that humbled Jeffrey. “Take the one essential step, my boy, and then wait. He in His own good time will come, will enter you, will fill you. Not because you've been good. No. Not because you deserve it. You're too honest to suppose that. Rather, because He is the God of unfailing love, and He has been waiting for you to turn and invite Him in.”

“But I've asked Him,” Jeffrey said plaintively. “At least I've tried. But when I say it, I can't even do that right.”

“You can do it perfectly,” Gregor replied. “With God's help. He has built up an expectation within you. A longing. A thirst. He wants your life to be aggravated and restless with longing for what only He can give.”

“That's it,” Jeffrey said, immensely relieved to be understood. “Like an itch I can't scratch.”

“In the second chapter of Acts,” Gregor told him, “a group of people witnessed the effects of the Holy Spirit for the very first time. Before their very eyes, the invisible was made visible. And they questioned it. They asked, is this truly of God? For remember, my young friend, these people considered themselves to be believers. At the same time, those who were honest with themselves must have found God to be extremely distant, a power on high rather than an integral part of their inner lives. Certainly they lacked this personal contact with a living Savior, and the Spirit that was His gift to believers.

“I find myself looking back across the incredible distance of these two thousand years and living the experience with them. I see myself being forced to choose—do I remain with the acceptable and the visible and the traditional, or do I reach into the invisible and recognize the hunger that gnaws at my heart? I stand with these baffled witnesses, ignited by the yearning within me to search the unseen realm. Yet I am anchored by the calls of this world, afraid of choosing, knowing that I must choose, realizing that not to choose is in itself a choice.

“Yes,” the old man continued, “I can very easily see myself standing with this crowd, terrified by the changes demanded by my empty existence, seeking some way to ignore the call and remain with what is comfortable, what is defined by the elders and the leaders and the people in power.

“But I cannot. I am called by the voice of my heart to turn toward the unseen and accept the Holy Spirit. I am called to dance with the joy that such madness brings.”

The buzzer rang, startling them both. Jeffrey stood and
released the downstairs catch, then waited while Katya climbed the stairs. She arrived slightly breathless and very excited. “Hello, Gregor.”

“My dear young lady, what a joy it is to see you again. Come in, come in. How was your trip?”

Katya accepted his invitation for tea and watched him bustle about the cramped apartment with his listing gait. Once the water was boiled and tea served and Gregor seated, Katya lifted her package. “I brought something for you.”

“My dear child, how thoughtful.”

“It's nothing, really.” She watched him unwrap the package with shy eyes. “Just something I saw that made me think of you.”

“There could be no greater gift than your thoughts and prayers.” He lifted up the frame. “Marvelous. I am deeply touched.”

He turned the antique frame around. The yellowed parchment was decorated top and bottom with brilliantly hand-colored pictures depicting two of Christ's parables—the shepherd returning the lost sheep to the fold and the man finding a pearl beyond value. The center contained a hand-lettered verse. Jeffrey read the delicately scrolled words, “Teach me, Lord, in the ways of the wise.”

“Jeffrey took me to my very first antiques fair a few weeks ago,” Katya said. “I found this, and I thought of you.”

Gregor pointed to the empty wall at the end of his bed. “I shall hang it there, where it will be the first thing I shall see upon rising each morning. Thank you, my dear.”

“Those are two of my favorite parables,” Jeffrey said.

“Do you know what a parable is? A heavenly truth clothed in an earthly body. It is a way to make the unknowable clear, the unseen perfectly visible.” He smiled at Katya. “I am deeply touched by your thoughtfulness.”

“Has Jeffrey told you that we are traveling to Czestochowa tomorrow?”

“Is that so?” Gregor was clearly delighted. “May I impose
and accompany you? I have long wanted to make another pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Jasna Gora.”

“It wouldn't be an imposition,” Jeffrey replied. “But I thought pilgrimages went out with the Middle Ages. Something you only find nowadays in books that make fun of the old practices.”

“Our modern world is too swift to criticize what it does not understand and to condemn what it finds the least bit uncomfortable,” Gregor replied. “A pilgrimage is nothing more than a prayer with feet.”

“I think it would be great to have you along,” Jeffrey said simply.

“I've heard about this place all my life and never been there,” Katya said. “My mother has a copy of the picture in the church, the Black Madonna, on her bedroom wall.”

Gregor asked, “What time is your meeting there scheduled?”

“Lunchtime.”

“Do you think it might be possible to arrive in time for the eleven o'clock Mass?”

“Sure. I'll just call Rokovski and ask if we can meet him there.” Jeffrey stood and signaled to Katya with his eyes. “We have to be going.”

“Indeed you do. Business is waiting.” Gregor pushed himself erect and saw them to the door. “You know where the Russian market is?”

“I have found it on a map,” Katya replied.

“Splendid. Until tomorrow, then.”

A continuing thaw left Nova Huta's Russian market swimming in a sea of mud. Visitors paid it no notice, except to walk on tiptoe through the deepest puddles. When Jeffrey and Katya arrived, the sun was shouldering aside clouds and casting an unfamiliar light upon throngs who jostled good-naturedly among the acres of stalls and peddlers. They joined the crowds strolling, gawking, pointing, laughing. They
listened to people arguing prices in a mishmash of Polish and Russian and Ukrainian.

The slender young man whom Jeffrey had last seen in a Cracow apartment with two valuables strapped to his thighs spotted them first. He shouted them over with the underhanded come-hither gesture of the East. Beside him stood a young-old girl in her twenties dressed in layer upon layer of sweat shirts, her unkempt dark hair tied back with a length of ragged cloth. Her face was as hard and unflinching as her eyes. Before the pair of them were piles of wrenches and crowbars and hammers and hacksaws and nails and screws and manual drills.

The Ukrainian nudged his companion and spoke to her in a Russian singsong. She spoke in turn to Jeffrey and Katya in Polish, her mouth barely moving in the rock-hard face.

“He says their profit from the last trip was enough to go into business,” Katya translated to Jeffrey. “At least, I think that's what he said. This girl's Polish is horrible. I can barely understand her.”

“Buy-sell,” the man shouted happily in an English so heavily accented as to be barely understandable. “Valuta.”

“Valuta,” Jeffrey agreed, liking him. “Tell him I'm glad things have worked out so well.”

Their conversation attracted attention from nearby stallholders and patrons. The gawkers and gossipers began to gather and watch and listen and point and talk words that needed no translation. Look, an Englishman speaking with another woman—listen to her Polish. And how do they know this pair from the other side?

The young man waved his hand proudly over his wares, said through the dual translators, “Even after bribes to the border guards on both sides, a good day brings enough to keep both our families alive for a month.”