"sous les paves, la plage" - harry potter fic: revisionist history (albus/gellert)

OK, guys. Several years ago, after the publication of Deathly Hallows, I started writing Albus/Gellert fic for rhoddlet's birthday. It has been her birthday many times over since then, and both of us have long since moved on from HP fandom. But this has been mouldering on my hard drive and eating away at me. Every couple of months, I sigh and look back at it, and add a couple of sentences. Then several months later, I delete those sentences. Rinse, repeat. Well, I tidied up the ending a little bit-- it's not entirely satisfactory, and it didn't go to the places I wanted it to go, but the longer it sits in my 'incomplete' folder the more of my soul it steals. Consider this an airing or an exorcism, as you will.

Therefore, in a ridiculous turn, HP fic. AGAIN. Probably the last of it you'll see from me, if I have any self-respect left at all. And it's also extraordinarily pretentious: religion, textual history, the uses of dragon's blood.



revisionist history




Albus-- do you know the meaning of bodhisattva? It means: a being bound for enlightenment. A Buddhist term. There is some debate as to whether it refers solely to those who have attained Parinirvana (the final stage of nirvana, generally achievable only through death: though they were Muggles after all) or to those who will stop short of that stage, who will not reach for (liberation?-- that is not quite what the term translates into, I think) until they have achieved the enlightenment of every other sentient being. They do this out of the GREATEST COMPASSION.

The enlightened are responsible for the enlightenment of everyone else, to shirk this responsibility is at best narcissism and at worst sin.

Think of the bodhisattva of this sort as a missionary of spirituality rather than religion-- and if they could do that, then why not missionaries of the intellect? Gellert, April 3rd 1902

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The gold-edged Bible that Gellert holds in his hands is-- though he does not know it-- the King James text, or as it is still called, the Authorized Version. By 1611 there are not only various translations, versions and editions in ancient languages (Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic) but over two hundred years of very controversial translations into the vernacular to pick and choose from. Gellert Grindelwald doesn’t have a very good idea of the chequered textual history of the Bible but if he did he would have appreciated it; yes, Gellert knows the importance of choosing the right word, he is perfectly comfortable in a world where mistranslation means death. Gellert with his microscopic knowledge and perfectionism and love for the esoteric would make an excellent textual scholar, and there is no text in Western canon as challenging the Bible in all its anarchic, sprawling, heteroglossic glory.

And though the Bible scholars do not know it they too have inspired Gellert; he takes from them the belief in monogenesis-- the belief that all of the world’s languages have a single origin. Gellert is able to lift that idea and shake it perfectly clean of the muck of religion and history and culture and set it down beside his own as if that is where it belongs. Gellert-- Albus will say many years later at a dinner party or perhaps a trial hearing-- was never a bigot when it came to ideas.

Gellert spends his nights reading the Bible like it is a bestseller.

Separated from a British literary and critical tradition-- whose root practices, however now altered, grew from and alongside Biblical exegesis-- he reads the Bible like Milton would have read the Mahabharata if only he had gotten his hands on it.

He sends Albus letters in Sanskrit and Latin, curses in Aramaic and finally stops talking at all. Albus spends a summer month in his ancestral castle in Bavaria learning about exchanging speech for silence, lips and tongues pressed against each other wordlessly. He learns his lesson well, and does not forget it even when Gellert abandons the exercise, coming to him feverish and white-lipped to tell him: the language of magic is universal.

From this month Gellert learned to look for meaning elsewhere, but Albus learns: words mean nothing, and so he spends the remainder of his life filling up the space around him with as many of them as he can. Even years later, and years wiser, his Sorting Feast speeches are a kind of homage to Gellert and Bavaria and stones that absorb sound. His speeches really say: the meaning is irrelevant, but the words are not.

But that conclusion is unacceptable to Gellert, who must catalogue and understand, who demands perfection from a haphazard schema, who treats history like a text that can be revised-- if only you have the right tools. Gellert applies the coherence of mythology to the real and it comes up lacking, but he is learning to shape his body to fit into the gaps.

Gellert: self-confessed atheist, ideologue, wizard, is secretly engaged in a quest to overcome original sin. To return to paradise. To replace a God that even in the deepest recesses of his soul he does not believe in.

It takes Albus a long time to identify the feeling he has for Gellert, and when he does he realises with astonishment that it is: faith.

But with faith comes fear.

“You’re not God,” he mutters into Gellert’s neck, the skin of his cheek still smooth and young and soft beneath his fingers. “No,” he agrees amicably. “I’m Prometheus.”

---

After Ariana’s death, Gellert leaves Godric’s Hollow for Bavaria and they do not exchange a word-- written or otherwise-- for five years. But it is Albus that breaks the silence this time, with a letter. When Gellert replies the silence contracts in his mind into nothing but a pause in the natural flow of their conversation. He does not mention the fact that Albus’s letters are written on Hogwarts stationery, and Albus in turn does not note that the post-mark on his replies are only charmed to appear as if they are from Bavaria.

---

It’s Gellert that sends Albus full vials of dragons’ blood in the height of their scarcity in the early 1910s. Nicholas Flamel tries to charm the secret out of Albus in his alchemical labs, set deep underground, but Albus is close-mouthed. Nicholas is left with no option but to take Albus on as a research-partner. His colleagues at Hogwarts are impressed; it is nearly unheard of for such a young assistant professor to be taken on by Flamel, but then, they all whisper, Albus Dumbledore was always rather brilliant. His reticence to praise is taken as modesty. Instead: he throws himself into Flamel’s work with all the single-mindedness of a lonely man. His letters to Gellert grow strange with alchemical symbols and hastily blotted stains and bloody finger-prints. It’s 1922 by the time they find five uses, another two years for the sixth, and four for the seventh. (The eight, ninth, tenth and eleventh are all discovered within six months of that breakthrough, but they’re almost an afterthought.)

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Do you see, Albus? The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Not-- physical death. Nothing so crass and material as that, Albus. But spiritual death. For want of a better word, we may name it “sin”. Gellert, April 2nd, 1928

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The seventh use of dragon’s blood is: forgetting. But a very specific forgetting. The forgetting of language, wizarding aphasia. Gellert thinks: if you put the correct mixture of dragon’s blood and several other ingredients into a population’s water supply you end up with the perfect citizens, linguistic tabula rasa.

With the right mix of magic and politics he can absolve the children of God from His divine and false tyranny.

--

Gellert takes up his pen and writes a new first verse in the margins of his Bible:

In the beginning, there were Wizards, and they they named everything: the sun, moon, stars and earth, all creation solidified from the breath of their words.

--

Albus watches as Gellert, bodhisattva, philosopher, missionary of the intellect marches across Europe and attempts to undo Babel. When God confounds the language of man what he is really doing is preventing them from achieving godliness. The fracturing of consciousness is really the fracturing of language. The beginning of sin.

Monoglossia is the first step towards global enlightenment, and the only language Gellert will accept is the language of magic which surpasses symbol, which is in itself the object of its own desire.

To enlighten he must conquer.

Albus sends letters that are not answered, written in languages so old human tongues can’t slide round their syllables: he sends Goblin cuneiform, Mermish singing stones, he sends letters and curses and love-notes and pleas, he sends a treaty written in Ministry legalese, which must count as a foreign tongue for how unyielding it is. He sends scraps of notes about theories long forgotten, political history, arcane potions, even a vial of dragon’s blood from 1914. One of the first that Gellert sent to him, with the blood turned to dark red powder in the bottom of the glass.

In the end, Gellert replies when he is ready, as he always does.

The flood is coming and in all the world it is perhaps only you and I that know how to swim. Will you help me teach them? Gellert, May 15th, 1945

He tips the envelope sideways onto his desk-- a Roman coin, rough around the edges, rolls out onto his desk and comes to a standstill beside his inkwell. Albus closes his fingers around the coin and feels the tug of a Portkey and the taste of old magic like copper on his tongue.

When he gets there, Gellert asks, “Are you here to stop me or join me?” and until Albus feels the warmth of the wand in his hand, he does not know which one is his answer.



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