Byzantium Page 19
The Folsch Scandal
On December 5, 1895, the war minister visited Fasanenstrasse and disclosed to Burke a grave predicament. He had made a secret bargain with Russia: in exchange for three thousand Folsch rifles (whose precision was unmatched), the czar would quietly transfer a strip of land along the China Sea to German hands. But the rifles had been stolen in transit, and the czar’s minister was furious, accusing the Germans of duplicity. Were the rifles not recovered, an international crisis would be unavoidable.
That evening Burke traveled to the far edge of Silesia, the site of the theft, and once there followed a set of subtle clues (specks of foreign soil in the snow, a dropped button, a twisted leaf ) south and west across the Austrian frontier. At Pressburg he cabled the minister that he was certain the thieves were traveling by river barge. But the next day the minister received a disturbing report. He’d sent several of his own agents to aid Burke. They’d taken rooms for the night in a tavern, and when they called on Burke in the morning they found he was gone. His night candle was burned to a nub, unreadable notes and sketches lay scattered on his table, and his bed was unused, his small traveling bag still beside it, unpacked. There was no sign of a struggle, and the agents hoped Burke had simply taken a morning stroll to order his thoughts. But with each passing hour they knew: wherever he was and however he got there, he was already far away and would not be returning. The minister confined himself to his office and sent a barrage of conciliatory telegrams to the Russians while he awaited more news from his men, whom he’d ordered to search the riverbanks for Burke’s corpse.
Then, three days later, Burke turned up in Istanbul. He was found by an Armenian dockworker in the hold of a barge. His mouth was gagged, he was tied to a chair, and the rifles were stacked behind him. On his lap lay a note: “To the Ottoman Government, with my Compliments—Bloch.”
What happened next is at the same time baffling and inevitable. The papers accused Burke of treason—an accusation the minister encouraged, as it distracted from his own role in the blunder—and the people swiftly followed, hurtling rage at one who, not a week before, they had adored. Was it his color? Or that, so used to his successes, they could not understand his failure, could only interpret it as treachery? They said he had organized the theft of the rifles and planned all along to deliver them to the Turks. The Berliner Kurier claimed that for years Burke had been a secret agent of the Sublime Porte, that in exchange for the rifles he was promised a principality of his own and a fully stocked harem. They printed a cartoon of him dancing for the kaiser while in the background Sultan Abdul Hamid laughed. The Münchner Telegraf wrote that his brutish nature had finally overtaken him, that his being tied to a chair was a cheap ruse. The Zeitung interviewed Police Commandant Fuchs, who assured reporters there was no secret archfiend Bloch and excused Burke’s claims otherwise as the delusions of an overstrained mind, while the Frankfurter Abendblatt opined that it was natural that the Moor should help the Ottomans. They referred to his duskiness, and to the blood of southern climes coursing through his veins.
When Burke returned to Berlin—the Turks kept the rifles but sent him back—angry crowds gathered beneath his windows in Fasanenstrasse, calling for his expulsion. He refused to defend himself, said nothing of how he’d been caught or what had occurred during the three days of his disappearance. Within a week he was confined, for his safety, to a cell in a police station near the Ostbahnhof, where he received news of each fresh development—that a mob had rushed into his apartment, overturning the shelves of soils; that the Moor Clubs had been swiftly disbanded; that, at the Reverend Stöcker’s urging, people across the empire were building bonfires and burning the albums they’d filled with photographs and clippings of his adventures—with a stoic acceptance.
But by the time he was delivered to the French border, he was visibly broken: meek as an invalid, given to shaking. Our only record of him at this moment comes from the diary of a Sergeant Heinz. Not one of the newspapers sent a reporter, interest in the scandal having been swept aside by a suicide pact that had claimed a member of the general staff and a junior officer’s wife. When Burke’s guards let him go, he walked into the Belfort Gap and out of history. Some believe he settled in Tunis, others that he became a hotel detective in New York, but no one knows for sure.
The Final Mystery
Burke’s life and career give rise to hundreds of unanswered questions, but, so many decades after, perhaps most vexing of all is the matter of those three days on the Danube. His complete silence on the subject has divided the followers of his career into two hostile camps. The first holds that everything is as it appears. Bloch trapped him. The villain’s vanishing had been a ploy, giving him years to plot Burke’s downfall. He planned every detail, foresaw every effect—even how signing his name on the note would only stoke the people’s doubts. The proponents of this theory say it was only a matter of time, that even one of Burke’s intellect must someday stumble. To pretend he couldn’t, they claim, denies him the hallmark of humanity and puts any doubter in line with those who turned against him. He might have recovered from the scandal, they say, were he not a black man.
But others find this account laughable, call the appeal to humanity so much posturing, and counter that in ascribing such foresight to Bloch we rob Burke of any. They grant Bloch his scheme but argue that Burke would have been too clever to play into the fiend’s hands. Noting his erratic behavior in the months leading up to the scandal, they suggest Burke wanted to retire. Knowing there would be constant demands for his return, that only if he were disgraced would he be left alone, he made perhaps the cleverest move of his career: he walked willingly into Bloch’s trap, understanding all that would happen and seeing in it freedom.
There’s no way of knowing what happened during those three days, how Burke came to be tied up in the barge’s hold, and so we’re forced to choose blindly between the two theories, the choice becoming less about the truth and more about the Burke the chooser prefers. But doesn’t an opportunity lie in the absence of fact? That is why, taking elements of the second theory, we propose a third, one we’ve never shared: after Olivia’s poisoning, forced to decide between her and his career, Burke chose as he should have—he chose love. At Olivia’s bedside in Bad Kreuznach he plotted their retreat from the world, crafting the scandal—there was no Bloch on the barge, Burke arranged the theft of the rifles himself—not to aid the Turks but to ensure his fall. Only then would they be left alone to live out their years in peace and contentment, perhaps in the French countryside, perhaps on some Greek isle. There’s no evidence, of course. The decision he made after Bad Kreuznach appears plain, as do its consequences. But as long as we don’t know his end, why not grant him this last happiness? After all, where does history exist, except in our imagination? Does that make it any less true?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The stories in this collection were originally published in the following:
“Byzantium” in Electric Literature; “East Texas Lumber” in Harper’s; “The Don’s Cinnamon” in the Antioch Review and Best American Mystery Stories 2013; “Borden’s Meat Biscuit” in Subtropics; “The Traitor of Zion” in Ecotone; “Eraser” in One Story and New Stories from the South 2010: The Year’s Best; “At Boquillas” in The American Scholar; “Tayopa” and “The Moor” in Boston Review; and “Amy” in the Literary Review.
Thanks to: The University of Michigan Hopwood Prizes, the University of Toledo’s URAF Summer Research Award, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Helen Herzog Zell, my MFA classmates and teachers, Jin Auh, Jacqueline Ko, Steve Woodward, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
BREAD LOAF AND THE BAKELESS PRIZES
The Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prizes were established in 1995 to expand the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference’s commitment to the support of emerging writers. Endowed by the LZ Francis Foundation, the prizes commemorate Middlebury College patron Katharine Bakeless
Nason and launch the publication career of a poet, a fiction writer, and a creative nonfiction writer annually. Winning manuscripts are chosen in an open national competition by a distinguished judge in each genre. Winners are published by Graywolf Press.
2012 Judges
Tom Sleigh
Poetry
Randall Kenan
Fiction
BEN STROUD’s stories have appeared in Harper’s, One Story, Electric Literature, and Boston Review, among other magazines, and have been anthologized in New Stories from the South 2010, and Best American Mystery Stories 2013. A native of Texas, he now lives in Ohio and teaches creative writing at the University of Toledo.