Wonder

If walls could talk, would you want them to? To hear the wallpaper whimper out all those wanton recollections to the rows of tomes lined and listening on dusty shelves. The stories and secrets that collected in the creases of the crown molding, the memories made in front of those unapologetic voyeurs, the high up rafter beams. Tawdry details woven into the fabric of every ornate tapestry hung before the blinds. What would you want them to say if given the impossible chance to speak the language of their creators? If walls could talk, would they not also weep?

I was not born as you were; but constructed. Not by mother and father, but by an architect of vision. There was a rightness to the formality of my creation though I would have given all I was for one smile of satisfaction from the men who hoisted my joints into place. To know I was what they envisioned. The artists, masters of their craft, who came to lay the gold filigree and mirrors flush against the flesh of my body: The Amber Room. The workers, distant descendants of Pygmalion, standing back from their labor and admiring the brilliance of me while finishing the trim of a window facing out into bustling 1700’s St. Petersburg. Though I possessed mirrors for those who came to dwell within me, I had no glimpse of myself: The Eighth Wonder of the World. Tragic, but truth often is.

The first time the workers alighted home, I believed myself to be complete. Four walls entrusted with precious purpose. Be beautiful, be enchanting, be whole. Therefore, I was surprised when back they came, trundling in with lavish paints and slabs of amber to continue to enhance my beauty. My enchantment. I supposed I had thought myself whole prematurely. And so, construction continued. Ten more years of becoming…me. Though my creator stayed only for the first six, his pupil continued the efforts after he was gone. I continued to become.

I became and became and became until I was furnished with more than six tonnes of amber. The historical envy of every structure man had made before or would make hereafter. Men’s faces came and went, but as they gilded, carved, and sculpted me from the ground up, I felt my radiance growing. Gold leaf, gemstones, golden mirrors were grafted to fill out my countenance. Statues of children and angels were erected into friezes in the alcoves. Though I could not view myself as others did, I believed myself beautiful and was enchanted with the very idea of my own existence.

By candlelight, they said I was a creature of pure magic.

That was when I believed in magic.

When magic meant immortality.

What I would give to believe in magic again.

After fifteen years I felt the first hammer blows that would transport me in all my elegance to the Catherine Palace. Russian figures flocked from every corner to examine the radiance that emanated from my every nook and cranny. Many a loving word was exchanged from within me. Many a heated debate. A sophisticated discussion. A political audience. Lovers made promises while leaders broke them. Country lines were shifted, and shifted again. All the while I shone down on the many occupants who flitted in and out in the blink of the candles. I was fulfilling the purpose intended for me so many years ago when I existed only as a vision in the mind of an architect.

Be beautiful, be enchanting, be whole.

But nothing good lasts forever.

The bombings had started several years ago when the first assailants entered the palace. Recently, the lovers had been fewer, political strategists at their zenith. But now, there was no man, nor woman, coming to delight in my company. The world had grown cold toward spaces used for anything other than strict utility. Rather than awestruck courtiers, the only men whose faces I shall never forget entered my sanctum.

If you believe I was built with deliberation, then believe also I was ransacked in ecstasy. The looting of my soul undertaken with no witness there to defend me. The men filed in and busied themselves in tearing apart every detail of my figure, stripping me of my skin and leaving only the bones. The skin was valuable, they agreed. The wooden beams comprising the skeleton of my walls, however, was the same as any other room. The sum of my parts was deemed so much less to these vultures of culture than the composite of who I used to be.

The golden filigree cut away by these men bearing axes and swastikas. They chiseled away at all those splendid things so many had come together for two centuries to create. The torn canvas of my body just one more casualty in the great world war. If walls could talk, I would have wept for the golden sconces and amber plating ripped away from the essence of being. The gaping wounds that left me naked in their wake. The shattered mirrors scattered on the floor which reflected back to me the broken, barren body no longer mine. I stared for hours at the piles of debris that used to be me long after they had gone—now a bare room with punctures in the crossbeams, strips of paint left drooping in the glow of a burning city. My gaze never left the broken angels lying lifeless on the floor.

I was not beautiful, nor enchanting, nor whole.

Not long after, the reconstructionists would arrive and finish the job. Perhaps they believed themselves to be conserving me, cutting me into four equal parts with much tut-tutting and harumphing. Four walls laid flat on a wooden pallet and scuttled to a sanctuary manned by Allied forces. Perhaps the deconstruction of a ruined thing is considered better than the obliteration of a blemished idea. Perhaps they fancied themselves better than Nazi art thieves. Perhaps they intended, one day, to put me back together again.

We will never know.

Shoved into a safe house basement, I find myself locked into a room I do not know. In the years that follow, I will be forgotten. Just another blemish on an empty museum manifest. A wonder spun into legend, then myth. My dilapidated form perhaps still packaged in separate pieces even as new architects discuss the building of my successor; four walls to be constructed in my image in Catherine’s Palace, restored. But no part of me will be there to take place in the restoration—no, the creation, of another in my likeness. Even after the construction of a second Amber Room, I will remain a mystery to you. A lost piece of history screaming silently to be found and fitted back together. If walls could talk, would they not also beg? For what purpose do severed walls serve when torn asunder, stacked one on top of the other in an old wooden box in a place unknown even to me?

Though we cannot communicate, I can feel the eyes of this perfect, lead-lined prison tracing the dust collecting on my coffin: a wooden shipping box emblazoned in 1944 by well-meaning murderers to read “FRAGILE.” Murderers who found my desecrated body and chose to hide me away from the world until utility was not the only metric of beauty in the world. Men who saw the scars and beaten remains of the Eighth Wonder of the World and believed it was beyond wondering anymore. I will lie in the chamber, broken and afraid, ashamed of what this respectable room constructed of four symmetrical sides may think of me…and all the while I will wonder at the four imposters who now reside Catherine’s Palace in my place bearing my name. My stolen identity.

Are they not beautiful? Are they not enchanting? Are they not whole?

For how long?