"I'm not afraid of you."
It was easy for Kurt to find the entrance to the Louvre. All he needed to do was follow steady stream of people pouring into base of the great glass pyramid that he'd seen from the roof of the cathedral. He'd been right when he'd suspected it would be large, crowded and well lit, but he'd had no idea exactly how large, how crowded, and how well lit it would be until he was standing there. The sun was high in the sky now and it lit the foyer below the glass structure as though it were a spot light, white hot and without a single shadow.
Kurt hung back when he reached a pair of sliding glass doors that opened to admit people onto a spiraling staircase that led to the entrance underground. There were people everywhere. If he went in and walked down the steps with everyone else, there would be no place for him to hide, no way for him to get out. He would be trapped inside with nowhere to run. Kurt started to back away. It had been a stupid idea. He had come to Paris to find information, not to go site seeing at the Louvre. He wasn't even supposed to go into buildings like this; he didn't belong here.
Kurt turned and started to walk away. Then he stopped, a new and even more bothersome idea forming in his mind. Why didn't he belong here? There certainly weren't any rules against him entering public buildings, except for maybe the ones imposed upon him by Margali and more recently, Wolfgang. In fact, he could never remember a time when anyone was anything but reluctant to let him go anywhere outside the protective realm of the circus. He remembered when he was very young, how on a hot day he'd begged and begged Margali not to make him wear mittens on the train, that he would be a good boy and keep his hands in his pockets, and it made him wonder if he wasn't a willing participant in his own segregation. And the way he had thought about the interior as a "trap", it sounded less like an art museum and more like a prison or a war zone.
Kurt frowned. That wasn't what he wanted to be like. He was a trapeze artist for heaven's sake. He was supposed to be fearless, a daredevil, not a caged animal, frightened to leave his protective nest. He whirled around and faced the museum's entrance a second time. His original purpose had been to see art, but now that goal was lost; trumped by the much harder task of simply walking into the building. Kurt tugged his hood further forward and set his jaw as he walked back towards the entrance, once again joining the clusters of tourists entering and walking down the steps.
He stopped just outside the doorway again, but he refused to allow himself to turn away this time. Through the glass he could see that the steps led down into a brightly lit foyer with tables and benches and a small café. Along one edge people were queuing up to enter the museum. He watched several more groups enter and walk down the steps. He shut his eyes. How was it that he had walked across what he was nearly positive was Hell, barefoot, and yet he was afraid to enter an art museum? The thought made him laugh. Kurt opened his eyes and looked down at his feet; at least here he had shoes on. Kurt smiled at his own joke and when the next group of people walked through the sliding glass doors he stepped in behind them.
Kurt wasn't sure if it was the interior of the museum or maybe just his coat, but it was too warm and seemed to have much less oxygen than it did outside. As he descended the spiral staircase he took one last glance back up towards the door and the plaza above, but he didn't turn around.
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It was like being fifteen years old again. Well, it was like the good parts of being fifteen anyway. After dumping their gear off at Drew, Kyle, and Brett's "Europe Extreme" tour paid for hotel room, they'd changed, grabbed three more bikes, and took off to tour Berlin California style.
As the three of them raced through the city jumping over curbs, park benches and each other, setting off car alarms, and generally making a ruckus, Christian realized how lonely he was as the circus' sole cyclist. Confined to a tiny circle beneath the big top he'd forgotten how great it was to go out with a bunch of buds and just ride.
Not only was he digging the riding, Berlin was the city where he'd "found his talent" so to speak. He'd come to Germany as a failure with a couple of bikes and a useless college degree that was probably going to get him work as a translator at best and a career in food service at worst. He expected to go nowhere fast, but instead his life had opened up. And thanks to his command of the German language, his quick wit, and the fact that the average German citizen wouldn't know a "bunny hop" from an "abubacas" even if it jumped up and bit him he'd found his calling. Within a few months he was making a decent living as a street performer with write-ups as a "Berlin must-see" in several tourist publications.
Just being in Berlin again was exhilarating. There were so many old haunts that Christian wanted to visit, so many people he wanted to drop in on. Plus he wondered if anyone had taken over his spot in the plaza where he always liked to perform. It had been so easy to leave. He had always wondered how hard it would be to come back. It turned out it wasn't hard at all. He was here and it was awesome.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kurt waited his place in line, his hand wrapped around the crumpled remains of his earnings from performing in the park, a few paper bills and several coins. He hadn't checked the cost. He hoped it was enough. Now that he was in the building it wasn't so bad. It was true that there were a lot of people there, but nobody was bothering him; it seemed that Wolfgang had been right so many years ago in the airport, they were all too involved with their own business to be concerned with him. No one gave him a second glance.
He watched the people in front of him passing money to the ticket clerk in return for slips of paper and then passing them to a second clerk to walk through a gated entrance. It seemed easy enough, similar to the train even and Kurt had seen that dozens of times. With his hand still in his pocket he practiced keeping his sleeve over his fingers as he would need to do when he passed the money to the clerk. When it was his turn he shuffled forward with his head down and pushed his money forward.
"I'd like to come inside to the museum please," he said.
"One adult?"
"Um, yes," Kurt said, realizing that that must have been what he should have said.
"Special Exhibit?"
Kurt froze. "Um, Je suis…" he stammered, not sure what the ticket clerk was asking. Did he want to know if he, Kurt was a special exhibit or was he asking something else?
"Do you want to see the special exhibit of paintings from Hungary as well? It costs an extra two francs," The clerk asked with a weariness that told Kurt this had happened before.
"Oh," Kurt said trying not to laugh at his own stupidity. He put his hand, still wrapped up in his sleeve, over his mouth to cover his smile. Margali's family was from Hungary; the special exhibit sounded interesting. "Yes," he said, "yes, I'd love to."
The ticket clerk gave Kurt a funny look as he handed over Kurt's tickets and his change. Kurt scooped them up into his sleeve and still smiling, started towards the entrance to hand his tickets over. He couldn't believe how easy this had been. He was going to tell Margali and Wolfgang that the next time the circus was in a big city like Berlin, Prague, or even Paris again, he wasn't going to stay behind so easily.
"Excuse me! Hey, you there! Stop! You can't go in like that." A gruff voice called out. A large hand clapped down on Kurt's shoulder as he felt his insides turned to ice. The smile faded from his face. It had been too easy. He should have known; he should have expected that it wouldn't stay that way.
Kurt didn't know what to do. Would it be better to teleport or simply try to run? He didn't like the idea of teleporting in a public place like this, especially when he wasn't sure where he was going, but when he looked around at the security guards stationed at various points in the room, running didn't look like an option either. He was trapped.
His earlier trepidation at the entrance had not been unfounded after all. Cursing his recklessness, Kurt took his sleeve wrapped hands out of his pockets, and holding them up like he'd seen bank robbers do in Wolfgang's old movies, he said, "Please don't hurt me, I just wanted to go look at the museum." Kurt slowly lowered himself down to his knees adding gravely, "I surrender."
"Huh? You surrender?" The security guard looked confused. "You have to check your backpack," he said.
"My… My backpack?" Kurt asked almost in disbelief. He looked up. Something was wrong with his backpack. Was that all? He felt his face flush with embarrassment. How stupid he must have looked. He stood up quickly.
"No backpacks in the museum. You have to check it there." The guard pointed to a counter across from the ticket clerk's that said "Coat and Bag Check" over it in several languages.
"Check it?" Kurt asked. He was trying not to sound too quaint and clueless, but he had no idea what the guard was talking about. He furrowed his brow staring at the racks of bags and coats behind the counter, a woman in a Louvre security uniform standing watch over them. "Will I be able to get it back?"
"Of course," the guard said, giving Kurt a suspicious glance, "you'll get a tag for it. It works just like any other coat check."
Kurt could feel his ears getting hot now. This was getting embarrassing. He gave his hood a furtive tug to make sure it was covering as much of him as possible. The security guard gave him another suspicious glance and tried to peer around it. Kurt turned away from him.
"Thanks," he said, "I'm, um, not local." Kurt pulled his arms out of the straps of his pack and dropped it on the counter where it was exchanged for a plastic tag with numbers on it. He added it to the tickets in his coat pocket wondering how many other civic rituals he didn't know about. He suddenly felt like a storybook hero transported to a strange land with all sorts of unusual customs and etiquette except that this was Paris, and not some far away place.
"I figured," the security guard said, smiling for the first time. He walked with Kurt all the way through the ticket check and into the first gallery of the museum. Kurt tried to ignore him, but finally risked a glance behind him.
"You're all right then?" The guard asked as if to reassure Kurt as much as himself. It was odd that even here complete strangers were still asking him if he was all right. Kurt wondered if they would ever stop.
"I'm fine," he said, an automatic response, spoken a little too quickly. Kurt paused, considering. Finally he added in more even tones, "If ever you're not busy when Circus Gehlhaar comes to play, visit us. Ask for Kurt Wagner,"
The security guard looked thoughtful a moment, pointing a finger at Kurt as though trying to remember something.
"Circus Gehlhaar," he said at last, scratching his chin, "I remember them I think. Came and performed last year right? I took my daughter to see them. She was absolutely wild about "The Incredible Nightcrawler". You know him?"
Kurt smiled and for a moment turned to that the guard could catch a glimpse of what Kurt looked like beneath his hood. "Yes," he said, "very well. Tell you daughter he says hello."
He answered the security guard's look of surprise by putting his finger to his lips and winking conspiratorially. Then Kurt turned, and quickening his pace followed a small knot of people toward the gallery, eager to begin his first ever exploration of an art museum.
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The members of Circus Gehlhaar live a life subdivided into routines. They had routines for arriving at a venue and routines for leaving. And within the leaving and arriving routines were subroutines to handle the individual tasks of setting up and taking down one's living quarters as well as the larger higher profile tasks of putting up and taking down the tent and performance equipment. Most of the time they did this work without even thinking about it; it was all part of life for them and it meant that the real living happened in between the routines except in those rare cases where the routine itself was special.
This was one such case.
Over the years since they had come the know Father Dietrich, the empty lot below his church had come to feel like home. The shows they played there were always better and hours between them were always a little less hectic. Even during their non-stop eighteen month Les Chansons tour before, they hadn't minded stopping in Hamburg and now, with the tour over, returning to Hamburg seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.
As Wolfgang walked through the trailers and caravans there was a palpable difference between the way they were setting up now, and they way they did when the circus had just arrived in the middle of the night where they only had a few hours to make the place livable and catch some sleep before showtime. Everybody was relaxed and in a good mood. Everybody, it seemed, except for him.
He stopped outside his own trailer in time to see Maria's backside emerge from the door as she swept out the floor. It was always so strange to him to see her doing housework. She always looked to him like she belonged on the runways of Paris with her long tanned legs and silky black hair that fell nearly to her waist. He put her arms around her so she couldn't return to her work. He could smell the perfume she liked to wear combined with the subtle and even pleasant musk that told him she hadn't bathed yet that day.
"What are you doing?" Maria asked.
Wolfgang was silent for a moment, staring off into the distance with his chin on Maria's shoulder. "Kurt's not here." He said after a long pause. "Father Dietrich said he never showed up. We don't know where he is."
Maria furrowed her brow as though trying to take this in and turn it into good news. Finally she said, "yet. We don't know where he is yet."
Wolfgang looked out towards the roadway. "I don't like not knowing where he is." He said.
Maria started to squirm out of his embrace in an attempt to return to her housework. "You don't like not knowing anything," she said. "What did Father Dietrich say?"
"He said God looks after Kurt."
Maria picked up her broom and matched her gaze to Wolfgang's, looking out at the empty road leading toward the church. "Then we'll just have to trust Him," she said. She opened the door to the trailer.
"Trust who?" Wolfgang asked, "God or Kurt?"
"Exactly." Maria smiled enigmatically as she shut the door behind her.
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Kurt sat down on a low wooden bench in a small side gallery where he could still see the artwork, but was out of the way of the milling throngs of people passing through. He was tired and his feet hurt, but he felt relaxed. The low hum of so many people speaking French at once reminded Kurt of his childhood when the circus had consisted of almost equal divisions of French and German performers. All his memories from that time seemed softer, strangely gilded by the idea that it was only a matter of time before all the other blue people with tails showed up, that he was completely normal, only a matter of time.
Kurt sighed and looked around, wondering where to go next. Out of habit, he nearly pulled his feet in under him to perch on the bench's edge, but quickly thought better of it. Besides the fact that he couldn't really "perch" comfortably with shoes on, he had wandered in and out of the Louvre's maze of galleries for nearly two hours without incident. He didn't want to draw attention to himself now.
Actually, it was the shoes that were bothering him the most, the shoes and the hard floors. Kurt had never spent an entire day in shoes like this, walking on hard flat floors instead of running and climbing barefoot from the ground to the variety of surfaces and footholds the circus offered and he was beginning to see what everyone complained about. He stared down at the simple black shoes that now seemed like a pair of jail cells for his feet.
"They're Pradas," Wolfgang had said to Kurt after he had outgrown his last pair, "You'll like them."
Kurt had had no idea what that meant, but Pradas or not, he couldn't wait to get home and take them off. It was with a slight pang that Kurt realized that he had no home to go to here in Paris. His Circus Gehlhaar trailer was a long way away and if he found himself unwelcome at 22 Rue la Verrier, he would be spending the night on the street and then performing in the park the next day to earn enough money to eat before beginning the long journey back to the circus.
Kurt stood up. As nice as this little sightseeing trip was, perhaps he had spent enough time here and it was finally time to reach his destination. As he started towards what looked like an exit, he put his hand in his pocket and felt a second slip of paper. He pulled it out and looked at it, wondering what it was for. The Special Exhibit of Hungarian Art; he'd totally forgotten. He had paid for it. He couldn't leave without at least seeing it. Kurt looked around, wondering where to go until he spotted a wall map with directional arrows. Following them dutifully he made his way towards the special exhibits gallery.
It wasn’t far to walk and as Kurt wandered through the gallery, which had been hung with works from the National Gallery in Budapest, he tried to find some link back to Margali within them. There were a lot of portraits and it seemed to Kurt that the Hungarians were very fond of painting each other. He liked the landscapes best not only because they reminded him of his own travels around Europe, but also there was the additional fascination of the names of the places; names like "Felsöbánya" and "Zebegény". But as much as Kurt tried, he really couldn't see any connection to his foster mother in any of the paintings.
It made sense of course. Margali had grown up Romani and as a young girl, she, her mother, and her sister had been cast out to wander Europe alone. She was no more Hungarian than she was French or German.
As he meandered through the various displays of painting and sculpture, Kurt wondered about his own family. Were they the same as Margali, "Citizens of Europe" rather than claiming a particular country of origin? Amanda and Stephani had different fathers, and of course Kurt was not related by blood to any of them. And though their fathers were gone from her life before either of their children were born, Margali's only concession to their identities was to give the children names from their countries of origin. Thus Amanda had an Irish name to go with the red hair she had inherited from her father. Kurt could remember how when they were children people occasionally made awkward attempts to fit him into the family by saying that he and Stephani must be brothers. And while it was true that they had both inherited their dark curls from their fathers, Stephani had inherited his from his swarthy Italian father. Thus he had Margali's father's name "Stephan" with an "i" added at the end to make it sound as Italian as his father was.
Of course, Kurt thought with a smile, the joke had been on all of them because as it turned out "Amanda" wasn't a particularly Irish name at all, and while there were plenty of boys named "Stephano" in Italy; "Stephani" was really a girl's name. Not that it mattered anymore. Walking through the Louvre, Kurt suddenly appreciated the "patchwork" feel of his foster family more than ever. None of them quite belonged anywhere and it made it that much easier for him to fit in.
Kurt drifted aimlessly through the gallery not really stopping to scrutinize each painting, but rather taking the works in as a whole. He didn't really like Hungarian art, he'd decided, or at least he wasn't any more or less impressed with it than any of the other art he'd seen that day. He wished Wolfgang or Maria was with him. They actually knew about art. He was sure that if they were with him explaining things, it wouldn't seem like such an overload or at least he could have understood why one painting was significant when compared to the others around it.
He stopped to look at a small black and white charcoal sketch that stood out only because of its simplicity in a room full of colorful canvases. It was a delicate sketch of a nude man on russet colored paper. He stepped up for a closer look and saw that the artist had used the two colors of chalk to show the dark shadows and highlights on the man's body, letting the paper provide the mid-tones. Kurt had seen Wolfgang turn out a dozen sketches like this in an hour, but there was something familiar about this one. Then he noticed that the artist had taken his white chalk and with just a few scribbles had outlined a pair of wings. It was not a man at all, but a drawing of an angel.
Kurt looked at the plaque mounted beside the sketch and felt his heart begin to beat a little faster. He couldn't take his eyes of the name of the sketch that was so unexpected here, in this place that until moments ago, seemed to have nothing to do with him or his family.
The artist had titled the sketch, "Demon".
"Everybody knows demons and angels are one in the same," Kurt whispered under his breath, finally knowing why it was that he recognized the nude's curly dark hair and aquiline nose. Had Azazel once had… wings?
Now Kurt suddenly had a purpose. Was this a sketch from life? Had this artist actually seen Azazel? He looked around the gallery. Perhaps there were other paintings by the same artist. Maybe they would give him more clues as to how, and why, in this Special Exhibition of Hungarian Art at the Louvre, there was a drawing of Azazel.
The exhibit was quite large and as Kurt quickly traversed the paintings he began to wonder if he wasn't being silly. Perhaps the angel's appearance was just a coincidence or maybe in the Hungarian language the word for "angel" was the same word as it was for "demon". It could have had nothing to do with Azazel or Martuska Szardos or…
Kurt stopped, his mouth open in surprise.
Or it could have everything to do with it, he thought.
He hadn't seen the painting since he was eight years old and even though it had only been a color plate in a book about art that Lars had stolen from the circus' cook, it had frightened him. Now, seeing the same painting, only this time 14 feet wide and 18 feet high, it frightened him more.
Kurt took a few surprised steps back and turned away. Maybe Martuska had lied to him. Perhaps all this had been for nothing and now Azazel, instead of just showing up at inconvenient times, was going to haunt him for the rest of his life with little tricks like this one. Kurt frowned, but when he looked around he noticed he wasn't the only one looking at the painting. It was so large that half a dozen people could view it at once with a comfortable distance between them. They could see it too, which meant he wasn't imagining it. And, Kurt remembered, these were 19th Century Hungarian artworks which meant that this painting was made a century before.
Turning back around he couldn't help but stare at it. The details of the painting had been burned into his mind long ago, but it was different seeing it so large. The figures of the priest, angel, and demon were larger than life sized locked in their permanent struggle of vanquishing and being vanquished. But there were other details that Kurt hadn't been able to see before in the tiny color plate and these made the painting even stranger to him. There was a robed man atop a mountain of skulls holding aloft a key while another man kissed his feet, a nearby crucifix lay carelessly tossed aside. A woman mysteriously hovered between the demon and the angel as though mediating their dispute. All around them a battle raged with a variety of weapons each more deadly than the next. The priest, Kurt realized was not even looking in the direction of the conflict, but appeared to be running away.
Kurt didn't know how many times people came, viewed the painting, and left, while he stood there, but a thought was forming in his mind as he looked at it. Kurt had never considered himself much of an art aficionado, but now he wanted to grab the people next to him and explain the different parts of the painting to them as he made each discovery. The longer he stared at it, the more he understood.
The battle being fought was not a war at all, but rather a series of individuals fighting and discovering which one had the weapon of advantage, culminating in a swordsman throwing aside his cutlass as a bullet pierced his chest. There was not just one man with a key atop a mound, but many. These were kings who had been given power and were now proudly holding it up for their subjects to see. In the meantime a woman, naked on the ground offered up her child to a man who did not want it. The painting showed a world in chaos that Kurt as a child had always thought was supposed to be hell, but now he realized it was this world. The painting showed the state of the world after it had been granted the gifts of technology and warfare. And presiding over this world, watching what it did with those gifts that he had given it, was Azazel.
The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction. Kurt hadn't known the name of the painting when he was a child because the book had been written in English, but now, written along side the giant canvas in French, German, English, and what he assumed was Hungarian, it made perfect sense.
Azazel was the angel.
Kurt thought about Azazel's words to him standing in the church yard not even a year ago.
"I brought war and weapons to this Earth." Azazel had said. "I brought science and technology. All the things that the humans use to corrupt and pollute this planet of theirs was mine once."
And so here it was for all to see, Azazel's gifts to mankind and what mankind had done with them. Kurt averted his gaze as he slowly unwound his rosary from his pocket. He stood there for a few moments, running the familiar beads through his fingers as and staring at the crucifix as he thought. Kurt looked up, understanding now that the expression on the angel's face was the all too familiar arrogance and not the determination to vanquish evil he'd thought it was as a child. He stared unblinking into the painted Azazel's eyes and it seemed as though he was speaking to the being itself.
Azazel may have triumphed once, but it would never happen again.
"I'm not afraid of you," Kurt said. "I am not afraid."
Author's note: The two pieces of art described in this story are real. I really saw The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction on tour at the Louvre when I was 21 years old. It really is that large and it was almost like you could walk into it or something. I think I stood there for like half an hour just like, "whoa".
When I started writing Even Angels have Scars, I knew exactly which scary angel/demon painting Kurt was to find in Lars' book, but I didn't post a picture of it until now because I wanted to tell this story first.
Anyway, here they both are:
The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction
Demon (sketch)
Both of these works are by the Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy. They are currently on display at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest.