Free Cemetery of Swallows by Mallock;, Steven Rendall Page A

trying to make ends meet,” he decided to explain to Mallock. “But you have to understand their position.”
    Then he began to talk about this people, its strengths, its customs, and its obsessions from the past. All the muddy habits that a man who has experienced communism and dictatorship accumulates under his shoes. Then he fell silent. Probably to let Mallock admire the landscape and thus understand the reason for these things he’d taken too long to explain.
    Minutes and miles passed. Curve after curve, the road tipping the car from right to left as a hand turns a glass of wine in order to assess its color. To be sure that Mallock was enraptured, the sun turned orange. On both sides of the road, the magical encounter between this golden tint and the green of the leaves, dazzling in its beauty, suddenly raised once again the question of God’s existence.
    â€œIt’s this same light, this sunset imprisoned in drops of resin, that one finds intact in a piece of amber.”
    Mister Blue had broken the silence.
    â€œEach of those stones is like a hologram going back to the dawn of our Earth. With this ochre and golden light, and these insects captured in full flight or as they are laying eggs. When I examine one of them for the first time before deciding to buy it, I always feel the same emotion.”
    â€œDo you know what each piece of amber contains?”
    â€œNo, that’s the name of the game. I try to guess by wetting them and looking through them, but I’m allowed to polish them, to “open a window,” as they say, only after I’ve negotiated a price and paid it. I’ve bought pieces of amber for next to nothing in which I’ve found treasures. But that’s rare, unfortunately. Seven years ago I paid a relatively high price for a stone because I thought it contained at least a fragment of a lizard. That’s an amber-hunter’s dream. It was in fact there, and by a wonderful surprise, whole and almost intact. A miracle!”
    â€œWill you show me that when we get back?” Mallock asked.
    â€œAlas, I can’t. I was forced to resell it in order to be able to continue to negotiate other pieces of amber. I’ve always regretted it. It was shortly afterward that I decided to construct a
cantina
next to my shop. It allows me to earn enough money not to have to separate myself from my most beautiful pieces. Ah, we’re almost there! Come see me tomorrow, I’ll show you.”
    They covered the last miles that led to Cabarete without Mister Blue ordering his foot to press more lightly on the accelerator. He seemed determined to run over someone. If not a person, then at least a pig or a chicken.
    â€œIn St. Petersburg there was a room entirely covered in amber,” he went on without slowing down. “I believed that it was a legend until the day when I found, right here on the island, and very oddly, among the belongings of the father of one of my men, a black-and-white photo showing that room. Unfortunately, the poor guy had died in a collapse at one of my mines. For a reason that still escapes me, in his cabin he had a whole file on this treasure.”
    Mallock would never have imagined that this room was also going to be part of the fabulous enigma that had brought him here. He felt he was nearing the stable and was dying to take a good shower.
    â€œIn the summer of 1941,” Jean-Daniel continued, “the Third Reich began its offensive on the Russian Front by bombarding Leningrad. Hitler wanted to wipe that city off the face of the Earth. But inside Catherine the Great’s palace there was an exceptional room completely paneled in a kind of amber parquetry.”
    â€œMade on this island?”
    â€œNo, it wasn’t. It had been made for the palace of the king of Prussia, Frederick William I, by an architect named Andreas Schulte and a jeweler, Gottfried Tasso. In 1716, Frederick made the incredible decision to trade