“Explain that, please,” the newsman said.
“Certainly.” She did: “It is possible now for a woman to think of being more than a wife or a mother or a nun. It is still not so easy as it should be. It is much harder than in the more developed parts of the world, I am sorry to have to say. But it is possible. I studied at the medical madrasa in Alexandria. Many of the students there were women, but very few, sadly, came from Italy or anywhere else in Europe. Still, women can get a fair education even here, and can find useful work, rewarding work, to do with it. They can now, I mean.”
“But under the Aquinists…” he prompted.
“Under the Aquinists, women will go back to having babies and cooking and making coffee for their hung-over husbands. The men will beat them if they step out of line, and expect them to believe they deserve beatings for things like that. Any woman who does anything but fight the fanatics as hard as she can must be out of her mind. The same goes for any man who favors true equality between the sexes.”
“Thank you very much, Dr. Giulia Cadorna. We’ll be right back after these important messages.” The messages were important only if you cared about which brand of sweetened carbonated water you drank. Khalid tried to ignore them—not easy, when they were made to tunnel from the eyeballs straight into the brain and stick there.
“You know what the scary thing is?” Dawud said. Khalid made a questioning noise. The Jew went on, “The scary thing is how many women in these parts don’t want the chance to go to a medical madrasa or take charge of their own lives. They just want things to go on the good old-fashioned way.”
“Look at the Muslim countries when change got fast enough to see in one lifetime,” Khalid said. “Change does scare people. Plenty of the leaders who fought against letting women vote were women themselves. We’ve had generations to get used to the idea that things don’t stay the same. We’re ramming it down the Europeans’ throats.”
“And they’re doing their best to spit it out again, too,” Dawud said.
“I know. We wouldn’t be here if they weren’t,” Khalid said with a sigh. “We just have to hope they finally swallow it.”
* * *
Khalid and Annarita Pezzola met for lunch a couple of days after Pope Marcellus issued his bull. The eatery lay halfway between the Palatine and his hotel. They split an Italian-style cheese pie with anchovies, green peppers from the Sunset Lands, and fennel-flavored sausage. Khalid wouldn’t have found anything like it in Tunis … unless he went into the Italian quarter there. It might have been strange, and hard to eat neatly, but it was good.
“Do you know Dr. Cadorna?” Khalid asked.
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “We worked together several times before the fanatics killed Cosimo.”
“A woman did that,” Khalid said, remembering what he and Dawud had been talking about in the hotel bar.
“I know.” Annarita made a sour face. “A woman fooled by the Aquinists. They never have found out who let her serve that night, have they? That can only mean Lorenzo’s security still has a hole in it.”
“You’re right.” Khalid scrawled himself a note. “We still need to look into that—along with a million other things.”
“I’d say we ought to sack everybody who had anything to do with the palace servants, except that would make the innocent people hate the Grand Duke,” Annarita said.
“If there are any innocent people,” Khalid said.
He wondered if his cynicism would shock her. More important, he wondered if it would put her off. But all she did was nod and say, “Yes. If.”
Well, working closely with Grand Duke Cosimo probably would have turned a saint into a cynic. Not quite so casually as he wanted to, Khalid asked, “Do you have anywhere special you need to be this afternoon?’
Now Annarita shook her head. “The old Grand Duke would have expected me back as soon as I got done eating—and he would have expected me to eat fast. But here I am, on my own time. Lorenzo didn’t want me around.”
“The more fool him. Uh, he?” They were speaking Italian. Practice made Khalid’s better, but he doubted it would ever be good. That was a shame, though—he had other things on his mind: “In that case, do you want to come back to the hotel with me?”
She didn’t try to misunderstand him. “What about Dawud ibn Musa?” she asked.
“He took a room of his own on a different floor so the Aquinists would have to blow up the whole hotel to kill both of us.” Khalid was glad he could—more or less—truthfully tell her Dawud had moved out for some reason other than to give him the chance to get her alone.
“Did he? How convenient.” Annarita wasn’t fooled. But she wasn’t annoyed, either, for she went on, “Let’s go, then.”
They could have walked, but it would have taken twenty minutes or half an hour. Khalid waved for a cab. It stopped in the street to let Annarita and him slide in. People behind it blew a horn fanfare. The driver ignored the noise. As far as Khalid could see, you had to ignore noise if you were going to drive in Rome.
When they got to the hotel, he tipped the driver more than he usually would have. He tipped enough, in fact, to make the man go “Grazie, Signor!” and sound as if he meant it. In a place like this, where gratitude didn’t grow on trees, that had to mean he’d overtipped. Today, he didn’t care.
He and Annarita rode the elevator up to his floor. By now, the hallway and the ugly, gaudy carpet were as familiar to him as if he’d lived there for years, not weeks. He opened the door to his room and put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob. The message was printed in Italian, Arabic, and Chinese.
“Just a moment.” Annarita disappeared into the bathroom. She stayed there a little longer than a simple call of nature would have needed. When she came out, she nodded to Khalid. “Now we don’t have to worry that I’ll get pregnant.”
“All right. Good,” he said. Even if Pope Marcellus was more forward-thinking than most of his predecessors, the Catholic Church still rejected contraception. Whatever the Church thought, Khalid already knew that plenty of Catholics held a different view of things.
They hugged. They kissed. They helped each other out of their clothes. Beneath her concealing European outfit, Annarita wore sheer, lacy international underwear. Her bra, in fact, came from the same Egyptian firm Khalid’s ex-wife had favored. His fingers knew without thought how to slide it off her. If she noticed how smooth he was with the catch, she didn’t say anything.
As they got down on the bed together, he said, “It’s a shame to cover you up in that tent you had on. You’re a lot more beautiful without it.”
“I like the way you talk,” she answered. Things went on from there. After a while, as if reminding herself, she said, “That’s right. Muslims and Jews circumcise.”
“Yes,” he said. If she knew the difference, this wasn’t her first time. Well, he hadn’t imagined it would be.
She not only knew the difference, she proceeded to address it most pleasingly. Pulling back, she said, “I think it’s neater this way.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it,” he said, and soon returned the favor. She didn’t trim away her bush, as women in the Muslim world would have. He thought things were neater without one, but it didn’t matter much. He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t want her to believe he believed her uncouth.
Then they went on to other things, which worked the same the world around. Afterwards, he mimed limp exhaustion. Annarita laughed. “I feel the same way,” she said.
“Well, good. That’s the idea.” Khalid leaned over and kissed her.
“I wonder where we go from here,” she said, and then answered her own question: “Probably back to business. That’s what we get for doing this in the afternoon.”
“Is that what we get?” he said. She poked him in the ribs. Taking no notice, he went on, “With the curfew, if we did it at night you’d have to sleep here and go home or to business in the morning.”
“I know. It wouldn’t do wo
nders for my reputation. I don’t like that, which doesn’t make it any less real. People here aren’t as easygoing about those things as they are on your side of the sea.” Annarita’s laugh held little humor. “Of course, chances are the Ministry of Information and the Aquinists are both shadowing us. If I come to your room and stay for a while, they’ll draw their own dirty pictures.”
They would, too—it wasn’t as if she were wrong. Khalid shrugged. “Right this minute, I don’t much care.” He took her in his arms again. He was past the age for quick second rounds. More often than not, he was past the age for any second rounds. He held her anyhow, held her and kissed her. He’d bedded several women after his marriage fell apart. This seemed a less casual coupling than most of those. He’d known even while he was enjoying those that they wouldn’t go anywhere. This seemed as if it might.
He must have put some of what he was feeling into his caresses, because between kisses she asked, “What is it?” Fumbling for words in Italian, he went back to Arabic … and found he fumbled for words in his own language, too. He told her as best he could. She said, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t hope it would go somewhere. You never know before you try, but you need to hope.”
“All right,” he said.
She laughed at him. “I know about men,” she said. “Men think about the good time first. If anything else happens, that’s nice, but they still have the good time. With us, it’s more complicated.”
Which, like many things, was sometimes true and sometimes not so true. “Nothing wrong with a good time,” Khalid said. He didn’t ask if she’d had one. If you needed to ask, you wouldn’t care for the answer. If she hadn’t had a good time, she wouldn’t go to bed with him again, and that was the long and short of it.
“No, nothing wrong at all,” she said, “but that’s not always the only thing going on. Or it shouldn’t be.” He couldn’t disagree, not when he thought she was right again. He kissed her some more instead. That looked to be as good an answer as any, and better than most.
XII
Dawud ibn Musa eyed Khalid across the supper table in the hotel restaurant. “Wipe that grin off your face,” the Jew said, as if he were a drill underofficer barking at new recruits in the Sultan’s army.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Khalid said with dignity.
Dawud guffawed loud enough to make people all over the room turn and look at him. “The demon you don’t!” he said. “If they could bottle the way you look and sell it, the Aquinists and the Grand Ayatollah in Qom would make peace tomorrow.”
“That would be nice,” Khalid said. Persia was a part of the modern Muslim world, but a prickly part. Persians looked down their noses at Arabs the way Italians looked down their noses at Germans—they’d been civilized longer and, if you asked them, better. They clung to their own language and to the Shi’a school of Islam to help keep from getting completely swallowed up by the larger community.
“It would,” Dawud said. “But they can’t bottle it no matter how much they wish they could, and the Aquinists will go right on being Aquinists.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.” Following up on his own thought, Khalid went on, “At least they’re still pretending to listen to the Pope. If they broke altogether like the Persians, we’d lose a lever against them.”
“That would be all we need, wouldn’t it?” Dawud exclaimed. “Another Christian sect? As if the Europeans don’t already have enough reasons to squabble among themselves!”
“As if,” Khalid agreed. Wars between Sunnis and Shiites had torn up large stretches of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Persia in the early modern era. The idea that people should be free to go to hell in their own way rather than to heaven in yours had needed centuries to take root. The Persians still admitted it only grudgingly. The Aquinists aimed to pull it up and burn it.
“Well, you still look happy any which way,” Dawud said. “That’s good. You should look happy. People who always look like their granny just died aren’t a whole lot of fun to be around.”
Khalid paused with a piece of broccoli steamed in white wine halfway to his mouth. “I don’t look like that all the time,” he said, and then, more plaintively, “Do I?”
“No, not all the time,” Dawud replied in judicious tones. “But you do look that way—or you did—more often than I liked to see. I hope Annarita is good for you.”
Khalid reflected that Dawud didn’t need to spy on him to know what he was doing. “Me, too,” he said. “She hopes I turn out to be good for her. So do I.”
“Worrying about how the other person feels makes a fair start.” Dawud took a bite of eel that had been stewed in white wine and spices. The Italians often cooked with wine as well as drinking it. It made the cuisine exotic and intriguing to someone from the more abstemious side of the Mediterranean.
“I can see how it might, but why do you want to start with me when you give advice to the lovelorn?” Khalid asked. “Don’t you think you could make more money writing a book or articles in the newspaper?”
“You should always start with somebody who isn’t likely to throw rocks at you,” Dawud said: the sort of pragmatic almost-nonsense he excelled at.
Someone somewhere outside fired a pistol—once, twice. The noise pierced the walls of the hotel, but no bullets did. A neat three-round burst from an assault rifle answered a moment later. Several people in the restaurant looked up. A few exclaimed or crossed themselves. No one stopped eating for longer than a few seconds. It wasn’t as if the Romans hadn’t heard noises like that before.
“You can get used to anything,” Khalid remarked. He hadn’t stopped eating, either.
“Is that a blessing or a curse, though?” Dawud asked.
“Probably,” Khalid said.
Dawud sent him a reproachful look. “You’ve been hanging around with me too long.” He stopped to think. “All right—that explains why you’ve been looking so gloomy all the time.”
“Being in Italy and watching the whole country thrash like a snake you just stepped on has nothing to do with it, I suppose,” Khalid said.
“Can’t imagine why it should.” When Dawud went off on a flight of fancy, he wasn’t easy to call back to earth.
Another burst from an assault rifle, this one longer and more ragged, said the thrashing outside wasn’t over yet. “If only Cosimo had lived, he could have kept this under control,” Khalid said.
“If it were under as much control as he figured, he would have lived,” Dawud answered. Khalid grunted. He hadn’t thought of it like that. He should have.
“You know what the real trouble is?” Khalid said after a moment.
“Tell me. I’m all ears,” Dawud said.
“The real trouble is, whether Cosimo died or not hardly matters.” Khalid’s voice sounded harsh even to himself. “Sooner or later, the Aquinists and the rest of the Europeans are going to have to come to terms with the problem we’ve been wrestling with ourselves for the past couple of hundred years.”
“And which problem is that, O wisest of all men?” Dawud seemed to want to mock, but he couldn’t quite bring it off.
“I’m not the wisest of men, and I know it as well as you do,” Khalid said. “A good thing, too, or we’d all be in even more trouble than we are. But the problem’s plain enough—it’s how to live in a world where nobody’s much wiser than you are, where men are all you’ve got to judge by because God gets less obvious the more you look at things.”
“Oh.” Now Dawud wasn’t mocking. He was nodding instead. “Jews have been wrestling with that as long and as hard as Muslims have. We don’t like our answers any better than you like yours. And we really don’t like the idea that there may be no answer at all, not the way we used to think there was.”
“I don’t like that, either. It may be true, but I don’t like it,” Khalid said. “But we’ve been worrying about the question and worrying at it all this time now. Most of the Europeans haven’t even started. They don’t want t
o start. That’s a big part of why they have so much trouble dealing with the modern world.”
“Well, if the Aquinists win, they won’t have to worry about it.” Now Dawud tried to joke, but made heavy going of it. “They’ll shout ‘God wills it!’ so loud, it’ll be true for them. And they’ll take the modern world out, tie it to a stake, and burn it so it won’t bother them any more.”
“And here we are, trying not to let them.” Khalid thought of the two Grand Dukes, the live one and the dead; of Pope Marcellus; of earnest, capable Major Badoglio; and, last of all, of Annarita. He went on, “Not all the Europeans want to drop back to Aquinas’ time or even further.”
“We wouldn’t have a prayer if they all did,” Dawud replied. “Of course, considering what we’ve been talking about, having a prayer may not be so much of a much. We wish it were, because we remember how our ancestors thought. The Aquinists are sure it is, because they still think that way. And do you know what seeing who’s right will prove?”
“Tell me,” Khalid urged.
“It won’t prove a damned thing,” the Jew said. “What else have we been talking about?”
* * *
Major Badoglio had tacked a map of the Italian boot to a cork board on the wall of his office. Red pushpins, and a few green ones, showed where Aquinist trouble was brewing, and where the authorities had it under control or it had never got off the ground.
Eyeing the measling of red pins, Khalid remarked, “Things look better than this in the papers and on the TV news.”
“Of course they do,” the major replied. “Saying things are quiet can help keep them quiet. Saying things are terrible can help make them worse. People have a way of believing what they see and read.”
Which only proves people can be fools, Khalid thought. Italy got the kind of news the people who worked for the Grand Duke thought it ought to have. Some here sang higher, some louder, but they were all part of the same chorus. In the republics of the Muslim world, every political faction could promote its views. Here, there was only one.
Through Darkest Europe Page 20