THE BEDCHAMBER

The borzoi took advantage of those moments when Attilia was not watering the flowers with music to chew the piano leg. So it was this morning. Attilia was not playing. She was crying and writing a letter on the piano-lid. From time to time the animal would interrupt his lazy work to gaze at his mistress with concern.

Dear Masterbuilder John,

As you know, my father dismissed Damascene and his workers without paying them. He said he would not pay them for an unfinished building. As if it were their fault. And he won't pay you either, for "the box hedge isn't growing" - as he puts it.

My conscience pains me in this matter because it is all my father's fault. Who knows where he gets to and what he did wrong? So I am sending a recompense for the expenses you have had, as well as money for the Damascene and his workers to pay for their labors on the palace. But only you are able to find them on various building-sites and repay my father's debt to them with this money. My coachman and I couldn't trace them when we looked. If any money is left over, use it to build a church for somebody for whom a box hedge church wants to grow.

I am sorry that everything concerning my future wedding has ended so miserably. But look up in the sky at night: there are stars and above them in space a huge all-embracing thought....

Yours, as a daughter

Attilia

When the money and letter had been dispatched, Attilia started walking her father's hounds for them to tear their nails. It was spring. The garden round her father's house, which had long since been landscaped, gave off certain scents in the morning; other plants (specially chosen for the purpose) exuded a particular freshness in the heat of noon, while the night flowers responded to the moonlight with waves of sweet aroma.

Attilia wept into the tear-collecting urns, placed along the paths laid by the unhappy Shuvakovich. Time went by, the months passed. Attilia resolved to let her hair grow. She waited for the new moon, trimmed her hair and put the locks under a stone lest the birds take them to feather their nests.

Then she sat and waited for her hair to grow. She felt lonely. Her fiancé, Alexander, was fighting far away, the builders John the Damascene and John the Ladder were God alone knows where, and she did not get along with her father. She scolded him whenever he looked like her late mother, and he seemed particularly to take on the appearance of his deceased wife Maria on Sundays and holy days....

One morning Yagoda ran excitedly to his master, bringing him important news:

- The box hedge is growing! It's started growing again!

It was true. The green temple of John the masterbuilder was once more stretching its way, slowly but surely, up towards the sky.

- That means that the other stone church by the Tisa must be growing, too - concluded Nikolich, and hastened with his daughter to the river.

When they arrived, however, disappointment was in store. The half-finished church was in a sorry state. The stone walls had collapsed down to the foundations, and these could scarcely be glimpsed amid the brushwood, weeds, and overgrown vineyards where there had once been a building site.

Hopping mad, Nikolich felt like kicking the hound who was fidgeting around his legs, but remembering that the borzoi could bite faster than his leg could land the blow, he stopped himself just in time. He got back into the carriage and returned home.

Attilia did not accompany him. She sat on the riverbank and sang softly:

Oh, Tisa, quiet water,
Freedom of my heart,
You drops that falter,
A stream of bliss thou art

Arabian gold
Sails down the middle stream,
From the heart cajoled
Is the name of love supreme....

In the early evening she went into the unfinished palace. Beneath the colonnaded facade she came upon a large map of the whole area along the Tisa made of glazed bricks. The baked earth painted in dazzling colors showed the immediate surroundings - Ada, the palace on the Tisa, with forests, hills and small towns in the distance.

The scale in miles was given at the bottom of the map. In the top corner was a painted brightly-colored globe, pierced with arrows showing the four points of the compass.

On an open window-sill in the entrance hall with the large fireplace lay the keys to the rooms. A little further away stood Damascene's pair of large wooden builder's compasses.

- Look, he left something behind!

It was clearly some sort of message from him and it cheered her up.

The bedchamber was unlocked and Attilia went in. From Damascene's drawings she know that the bedchamber was at the very center of the palace. Yet she had not expected that it would be so enormous, circular, with a spacious round bed in the middle. She threw herself onto the bed and cried.

It was getting dark. She decided to spend the night in the palace. She led the hound inside and gave orders for supper to be brought to her in bed. She ate with gusto as one always does after shedding tears and stared at the strange room around her. Her hair sparked continuously and absurd snippets of conversations held long before ran through her mind, all mixed up. There were two kinds of silence around her: the small silence of the palace and the endless silence of the night outside - which unsettled the borzoi in her room.... Then she looked out of the windows, of which there were three. One window gave onto the river Tisa, invisible in the dark though the freshness and smell of its waters came into the room. From the Tisa there also came, every now and then, strange screams which frightened her and she resolved to lock her door. But while the key turned in the lock, the lock refused to accept it. Were it not for her boundless confidence in Damascene's skill, Attilia would have thought the lock faulty. As it was, she turned the key again and again, counting each time. It was only at the thirtieth turn of the key that the lock finally clicked and secured the door. This unnerved Attilia even more. She did not know whether she would be able to open it again and if not, she realized with horror, she might remain imprisoned in the palace. But, again, at the thirtieth turn of the key, the door opened with no trouble. Exhausted from weeping and fear and staring at the window onto the Tisa, Attilia finally fell asleep.

In the morning she was awakened by the Sun. Damascene had placed the room so that the Sun would awaken Attilia every morning. Around her stretched the strange circular bedchamber which looked as if it had been drawn with a pair of compasses. Attilia recalled the compasses she had found and thought:

- If I set up the compasses in the middle of the room, that is, at the center of the palace and the middle of this bed I am lying on...

Suddenly Attilia let out a shriek, feeling the wooden legs of the compasses exactly between her own legs.

- The cheek of the man! - she thought instinctively. Pulling herself together, but in fact intrigued by this discovery, Attilia continued her investigation. She got out of bed to look through the sun-filled window and what she saw took her breath away. Standing in the garden beneath the window was the dark-skinned female statue with the green eyes. The stone girl fixed her glass eyes on Attilia, beckoning to her with the crooked forefinger of her left hand. Her right arm was missing.

- That's the statue Damascene dug up - Attilia realized and at once concluded that the bust had been stolen from her father by the builder, who had returned it to the estate as a message.

- If I imagine the bedchamber to be a circle drawn by a pair of compasses, I can start from the center of the room in a straight line through this window looking East, where the statue is beckoning to me. If I continue, how far must I go for something to happen, to discover perhaps what Damascene's message is. But how far must I go?

Attilia wanted to go down into the garden, but again the lock stopped her. Once more she had to turn the key thirty times, like the preceding night, to unlock the door. Then it dawned on her. That number was, in fact, the next sentence in Damascene's wordless letter.

She went out onto the porch to look at the brick map of the Tisa region. She plunged one point of the builder's compasses into the Tisa, at Ada where the palace was situated, and traced a circle with a half diameter of thirty miles, using the scale given at the foot of the map. Then from the center she draw a straight line due East. The circle and the line crossed at the town called Temishvar. Attilia jumped up cheerfully and called to Yagoda:

- Harness the horses, Yagoda, we're going on a journey! To Temishvar!

When they got there, people directed them to the newly-erected Church of the Presentation of the Holy Mother of God in the Temple, which she immediately recognized from the ground plans submitted to her father by John the Ladder. The church was identical to its box hedge twin, but this time complete, made of stone and marble, with all seven windows. It was, without a doubt, the temple that master church-builder John had dedicated to the Holy Mother of God.

Attilia entered.

Come in, come in, Miss Attilia, we've been expecting you - said the priest and sat her down on a seat near the altar. Above the seat Attilia saw the beautifully carved coat-of-arms of Nikolich of Rudna, her own coat-of-arms:

The priest brought her a document with a wax seal and a tiny box made of fur. The document was the deed of property. It designated Attilia as owner of the church. The fur casket contained two wedding rings.

- A gift from John the builder for you and your fiancé - explained the priest. The insides of the rings were engraved with the same single letter - A.

- Which John? - enquired Attilia - There are two!

- Well, there are two rings - rejoined the priest and burst into laughter.