After von Kempelen’s death, the Turk was bought by Johann Maelzel, the inventor of Beethoven’s ear trumpet. Maelzel sold it to Napoleon’s stepson, then bought it back with an IOU, which he hadn’t repaid by the time Napoleon’s stepson died, so he fled to the United States. America’s first chess club, in Philadelphia, was founded in honor of the Turk.
Edgar Allan Poe saw the Turk in Virginia, correctly guessed how it worked, and wrote an anonymous exposé about it in the Southern Literary Messenger. The Turk’s moves were made by a “diminutive chess master” who hid under the table and followed the game upside down using magnets. According to the 1894 edition of the Encyclop?dia Britannica, the first operator, the Polish patriot named Worousky, had escaped suspicion because, unbeknownst to the public, his legs were artificial: the real ones had been lost in a campaign.
On tour in Havana in 1837, Maelzel caught yellow fever. He died on the way back to New York, and was buried at sea near Charleston. The Turk was auctioned in Philadelphia for four hundred dollars and donated to the Chinese Museum, where it was destroyed in the fire of 1854.
“What are you reading?” Svetlana asked. I showed her the book. She skimmed the pages about the Turk. “I find this very sinister,” she said. “I think you see yourself as an automaton in the hands of Ivan.”
“But the Turk outlives everyone.”
“Yeah, but then he burns up in that fire. It’s like Mephistopheles’s invention of Faust. Do you know, my mom thinks Ivan is the devil incarnate?”
“How does your mom know Ivan?”
“I told her on the phone about how he turned up on our flight to Paris. My mother is convinced that he did it on purpose—that he was pursuing you. She said, ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that he planned it. I can just see that poor Selin in this situation, pursued by the devil incarnate.’”
“That’s crazy.”
“Of course it’s crazy,” said Svetlana. “I never said my mother wasn’t crazy. If it makes you feel any better, I just told the same story to Bojana, and she just thinks it’s a terribly funny coincidence.”
I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on—just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.
Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.”
“But it is a self-sufficient system.”
“Do you see what you’re saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He’s cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything.
“Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.”
? ? ?
“Sometimes I fantasize about being an analyst,” Svetlana said, “but when I brought it up to my shrink, he said I’d be terrible. He said I’d never let the patient get a word in edgewise. I wonder if I should call my shrink. He’s on vacation but he gave me his cell phone number. He said I could call collect. Is that odd? I might do it.” She sat up. “Bojana really likes you, by the way. She told me to remind her to give you the silver tray when you get married.”
“I wonder what makes her so sure I’ll get married.”
“Well, if you don’t, then you don’t get the tray,” Svetlana pointed out. “I don’t know if Robin gets a tray when she marries Bill. Bojana did admire how physically well-put-together Robin is, with her matching sandals and dress and necklaces. She said that Robin already has a woman’s style, and that you have a bright, striking look, like a child’s, but that I need to be completely revamped. Starting with my hair.”
“Your hair?”
“Yeah, I have to go to her stylist and get a six-hundred-dollar haircut, and then we’re going to a boutique where her friend Nika works so she can give me a clothes makeover. Then we have to have tea with Nika, who has a very attractive son. She keeps saying things like, ‘Of course you aren’t fat, but if you could only lose just five or ten pounds . . .’ The fact that I used to be bulimic in high school is just not important to anyone in my family. When my own mother found out, she said, ‘Goodness, don’t torture yourself—there are pills for this.’ And she gave me a bottle of diet pills.”
? ? ?
As we were crossing the street, Svetlana pulled Bojana out of the path of a speeding moped.
“Thank you, darling,” said Bojana.
“Just think how it would have looked in the papers,” Svetlana said. “‘Aunt Hit by Moped, Niece Avoids Haircut.’”
The waiter at the bistro seated us in the front window. Bojana put on her reading glasses and ordered a bottle of Merlot. The menu was a five-course prix fixe. Svetlana ordered for herself and Bojana. Robin ordered for herself and Bill. I found some words that I thought I recognized in each course, and told them to the waiter, who went away. The Merlot cascaded into our glasses with a throaty gurgling sound.
“Svetlana tells me you will be spending some time in Budapest,” Bojana said. “It’s a marvelous city. I spent a marvelous weekend there when I was your age.”
I told her I would be in Budapest only a couple of days before heading to a small village to spread American culture.
“A small village?” Bojana set down her glass. “What on Earth do Hungarians in a small village need with American culture?”
“I think it’s related to globalization.”
“For a month, you say? Five weeks? No no, darling—it’s impossible. Go to Budapest, yes. Sit in a café and drink a really good cup of coffee. You can find excellent coffee in Budapest. In a village, I can’t say. The coffee may be very bad. Go to your village, if you must, for one week or ten days. Then hop on a train to Belgrade. You can stay with me.”
I felt touched. “You make it sound so simple.”