The Cusanus Game

  “Where do you want to go, signorina?” he asked. Judging by the dialect, he was from the north, like most of them. Bologna, perhaps, or Modena.

  “I live up there—to the right, across from the convent of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori.”

  “Then you should pack your suitcases. You’re better off moving across the river. Here there are more and more guys who will make short work of a young girl like you.”

  “There are guys like that on the other side too.”

  He laughed sarcastically. “You’re probably right. But this here is no longer a secure zone. You enter at your own risk—that you should know.”

  He pulled a lever and a gap opened in the coil of wire. I pushed my Lectric between the dangerous-looking, chest-high loops, which were covered with razor-sharp blades a handbreadth apart. The barrier closed behind me.

  At that moment three explosions could be heard in close succession up on the Gianicolo, then a fourth, and once again the infernal howl of the ShriekGuns broke out. I stood still. Sweat poured down my ribs. It wasn’t only the heat, which had been weighing down on the city for months like a smothering dusty pillow—it was pure fear. I felt my intestines twist into a knot and my knees threaten to give out under me.

  “Get out of here, signorina! Off the street!” the officer shouted behind me.

  I couldn’t make out any immediate danger. A helicopter with whirring rotors kept appearing over the pines, and its engine noise, which sounded like the rattle of shots being fired, was accompanied by the shrill screaming and subsonic hum of its sonar guns, which shook my bones and threatened to shatter my skull; then it disappeared again. The hill seemed to be enveloped in smoke, as if the dry trees on its summit had caught fire.

  “Go, signorina, go!”

  I turned around. God, what did the guy want?! The voice in his breast pocket was squawking excitedly. He was waving his arms.

  “Take cover!”

  I leaned my Lectric against a trellis with flower troughs in which pale pink rhododendrons had perished in cracked hard soil, and sought shelter in the entrance to a former restaurant, the door of which was boarded up.

  Suddenly I heard the clatter of hooves and looked up with surprise. From the Porta San Pancrazio, a riderless horse came bursting down the hill at full gallop, a heavy farm horse; a dun—with rolling eyes, waving mane, and extended tail—dashed past me and toward the barricade as if out of its mind from the noise, was about to leap over it, hesitated at the last moment, frightened by the soldiers standing on both sides of the road, slipped, spraying sparks, on the cobblestones that formed an island there in the soft asphalt, could no longer slow itself down, and plunged with flailing forelegs directly into the coils of wire.

  How it screamed! I hadn’t known that horses were capable of such sounds. It was a constant shrill wailing as if from a person in extreme torment.

  The soldiers, who wanted to rush to the rescue, recoiled in fright from the kicking hooves. In its panic the animal got itself ever more hopelessly tangled in the wire barrier. The razor-sharp blades dug ever deeper into its flesh; blood streamed onto the pavement. The officer shouted an order and drew his pistol. Crouching, he approached the animal and shot a laser beam into its wide-open mouth. A whitish red fountain erupted between its ears and stained the fur on its back with dark spots. The animal went silent and seemed to shake its head incredulously; then its jaw sank between its twitching forelegs onto the barbed wire. Suddenly there was a smell of singed hair and burnt flesh. The horse’s eyes looked like peeled hardboiled eggs.

  I had to turn away, and sat down in a daze on one of the two plastic chairs, which, once white but now yellowed and gray from the dust and the corrosive air, decayed among the dried-out flower troughs.

  ROYAL PUB was written in gold letters on a moss-green sign with peeling paint. Renata and Marco had sometimes come here when they had visited me. And CarlAntonio, the mutant, the “boy with his clever backpack,” as the students good-naturedly called him. For others, the Siamese twins were the “Monster of Cattenom.” While Antonio sat there turned away and stared dully at the street, Carl, his “backpack,” had chatted with us. CarlAntonio were the most lovable thing the dark heart of Europe had left us.

  The Royal Pub had closed the previous autumn and never reopened.

  I stood up and avoided looking at the dead horse. Via Garibaldi was still deserted. A dozen people stared out the windows. Once it would have been hundreds; onlookers would have swarmed around the cadaver like flies, so that the soldiers would have had trouble keeping them away. Where had all those people gone? The fact that there were barely any illuminated windows in the evening was not only due to people’s fear of snipers—they had meanwhile moved away. Trastevere was almost as empty as it had been a thousand years before, when only a few fishermen and herdsmen lived on the bank of the Tiber.

  * * *

  I CARRIED MY Lectric up the steps to the front door. In the hallway, the usual mess: broken-open, twisted metal mailboxes, some stuffed full to bursting with leaflets and district newspapers. The floor was littered with a layer of electronic confetti, DotChips and VidDiscs and dirty envelopes torn open in search of cash.

  No word from Mother. Is Grandmother still alive? Why does Mother still not have an ICom, so that you could call her? Why doesn’t she send an e-mail to the institute, as I’ve implored her again and again?—the only reliable way in times like these. But she prefers to live in the previous century. Keeps an eye out for the mailman. You’d need a time machine to stay in contact with her. Was she always this way? Probably Father already found her old-fashioned. I don’t know. He was always up with everything that was currently in fashion. That was his job. Oh, Father.

  I plugged the Lectric into the charger in the hallway, locked it up with the chain, and stuck a 100-Euro-Chip into the slot. The eye of the battery glowed reassuringly green; so there was power.

  “Is that you, Signorina Ligrina?”

  “It’s me, Stavros.”

  He emerged from the shadows and leaned his Uzi in the corner. A bear of a man, barefoot, wearing only Bermuda shorts, blue and white in the colors of his homeland, with HELLAS printed on one leg, PATRIA on the other. He dried his bull neck and close-cropped hair with a gray towel.

  “Couldn’t it be cleaned up a little bit here?” I asked him.

  He looked around as if he were seeing the mess in the hallway for the first time, let his glass eye wander over it as if he first had to scan the image of the disorder in order to perceive it at all. He rubbed his laser-ravaged chest, on which bushy islands of gray and black hair grew between pools of smooth, melted-looking pale pink—his painful memento of the lost naval battle of Icaria.

  “What for?” he mumbled with a dragging voice. “No one lives here anymore.”

  “Am I no one?”

  “Scusi, signorina.” His intact blue-black eye smiled.

  He put his arm around me and gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. He smelled terribly of garlic and sweat. Sometimes, when he was a bit drunk, his tongue prosthesis took on a life of its own; it crept out of the corner of his mouth like a curious, flesh-colored amphibian, replete with thousands of glittering nanosensors, and explored his stubble-covered cheek and his chin. In Turkish captivity they had cut out his tongue. “Imaste dio…” blared the portable radio back in his chamber. I liked him, felt safe when he was in the house.

  * * *

  THE WATER WAS brown and smelled stagnant. As I stepped out of the bathroom, I heard the rumbling engine noise of a heavy machine down on the street. I peered through the curtain. They were trying to lift the horse cadaver out of the barrier with the help of a mobile crane, but the bowels were so tangled in the loops of the razor wire that they could not be separated. The intestines had to be cut loose. Excrement and bodily fluids poured out onto the pavement. My stomach clenched into a small, hard ball, into a fist thrusting upward. I ran back into the bathroom, pushed my damp hair out of my face and held it together with m
y fist behind my neck, while I vomited into the toilet bowl. “Anigho to stoma,” Mikis Theodorakis sang with a loud voice, Stavros’s patriotic friend.

  My God, did the Greeks have only one composer in four thousand years? We could easily have given them two or three dozen.

  * * *

  TOWARD MORNING TRASTEVERE was burning, down on Piazza Bernardino da Feltre. It took almost an hour for the fire department to arrive, because the roadblocks that fearful residents had erected to protect themselves had to be removed.

  * * *

  WHEN I CAME from the university in the afternoon, Via dei Fori Imperiali was closed, as was Cavour and Piazza del Colosseo. Not by the police, nor by the military—there were no uniforms in sight far and wide—but by supporters of the Praetorians. The convoy was heading toward Piazza Venezia: trucks full of electronic and holooptic equipment, flanked by drivers in black leather on Harleys without mufflers. Bald, colorfully tattooed heads, thick necks, fat faces, painted with chalk and black stripes straight across the eyes. Bodyguards. On a rolling platform was a bizarre cage resembling a litter, from which ribbons in the national colors fluttered under colored awnings. In it a young, dark-skinned woman was chained up, a delicate girl with smooth black hair styled in Egyptian fashion into a helmet. She was naked and wore a silver ring pierced through her nose. She shook her head and raised her chin proudly. Jerkily, she tried to stand up, but a movement of the vehicle threw her back into the pillows.

  The Praetorians were preparing one of their holoshows. All morning loud snatches of music could be heard from Piazza Venezia. Wagner, I assumed—undoubtedly a copy of the “artistically controversial” productions of The Ring by Sigurd Wagner and Lutz-Loki von Stein, in which boars had supposedly been castrated on the open stage.

  I had to take a detour, heading south on Amba Aradam and Terme di Caracalla, and finally came out at Via Aventino. It was early afternoon. The sky was shrouded in dusty smog, in which a hazily shining sun had nested for weeks. It seemed to have moved closer and swollen to three times its size. I got off, leaned my Lectric on the railing of the Ponte Palatina, and looked down into the dried-out riverbed. In the embankment walls yawned the mouths of forgotten ducts, from which stinking secretions dripped, congealing into puddles of organic pitch—millennia-old veins in the body of the city, which eluded the cartography of the sewer maps. Even the deepest points of the riverbed had been baked into a cracked morass. The dogs and cats that ventured under the arches of the Ponte San Fabricio at Isola Tiberina and the Ponto Rotto in search of water scarcely had a chance against the rats or fell victim to the ravens that kept an eye on their territory from the dried-out plane trees along the Pierleoni promenade. The pits and hollows between the rocks encrusted with bird droppings were littered with skulls and skeletal remains of small mammals—mostly pets abandoned by their owners when they moved away.

  Silence surrounded me. Not a sound could be heard, in the middle of the city. There was not a single vehicle on the riverside roads. They had disappeared without a trace, the beautiful cars with the enchanting names: the Alfa Romeos and Lamborghinis, the Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes, the Porsches and Fiat Luxes, the Chevrolets and Bugattis. Once they had roared down these roads, but now their names sounded more like those of long-extinct noble houses. The sources had run dry from which they drew their power. There was gasoline only for public service vehicles and for the military—or for groups like the Praetorians, who had good connections with military officers.

  Not a breeze stirred. The plane trees along the riverside lane had shed their withered leaves. It seemed to me as if they were holding their breath. Suddenly I heard a soft whimper behind me. I turned around and saw a killer dog.

  “Help me!” he croaked. His lifeline on the top of his head was almost closed. Only a sliver as wide as a finger shimmered murky red, and his short, dark brown fur had already become discolored; jaw and ears showed the typical ghostly blue-white of approaching death. From his jowls dripped mauve saliva. His sticky fur smelled of wet excrement, and his rattling breath stank of inner putrefaction. The rejection of the implanted larynx had begun.

  “Help me,” he whined. He had clamped his tail between his hind legs.

  “I can’t help you. Go to your master,” I replied gruffly.

  He raised his head and barked hoarsely. Was it a weak cough? A sad laugh?

  He could hardly stand up for hunger and exhaustion. His tongue hung out of his mouth. His bloodshot eyes stared at me pitifully. I turned away. These genetically modified animals got to me. No doubt he had killed people. That was what they were made for. Laboratory products. Intelligent killers. He was a dog, but he bore a little bit of human being within him, which they had implanted in him. When these animals became useless, they were gassed or given a lethal injection. But they were cunning, and some got away in time. That didn’t help them, however, for they had a built-in clock that indicated their expiration date. Death began from within.

  I rummaged in the basket on the handlebars and found a bar of chocolate that had gotten soft. I put it on the ground in front of him, to avoid coming into contact with his saliva, for you couldn’t know what viruses had been custom-made for them in order to control their lifespan. He sniffed at the bar and slid his almost transparent tongue over it, then devoured it greedily.

  “Thanks,” he panted; a thin thread of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. It was clear: Soon the ravens would come.

  Suddenly deafening crashes of thunder could be heard in the east over the city center, and an eruption of colored laser light rose into the sky; it flickered through the haze as if the sun had now finally reached the earth and had begun to interact with the atmosphere. Cascades of fire flooded downward and rose up again like faculae from a corona. And above them rang out the shrill cries and the laughter of the Valkyries, who, wrapped in fluttering robes of blazing colors and shadows, stormed through the sky on their steeds in a wild gallop. Hiaha! Hiaha! Hoyotoho! Hoyotoho! Hiaha! The haze over the riverbed turned into a circling, screaming inferno of white and gray as hundreds of gulls suddenly descended. And in no time the ravens were there too—dozens of them, flying up out of the plane trees with flapping wings to defend their territory in a concerted action. And as quickly as it had come, the apparition of birds was gone again. A few white feathers fluttered downward.

  The sky over the city had turned steel blue. Copper-colored lasers flashed through the haze; between gray-black graphite crags the glaring orange river of lava moved slowly eastward. Solar matter. Erupting prominences, blazing filaments.

  Moss-gray domes bulged, bathed in liquid silver, under which shadowy riders in bronzed armor gathered. Mighty steeds with a shoulder height of twenty yards. Snorting that reverberated loudly from the facades of the houses, as if you were standing among the animals, the creak of leather, the clang of weapons. Heavy helmets, adorned with cow horns or buzzard wings—closed visors. A signal was given, and the hunt went on. The infernally loud music soared, sank, soared again. Hoyotoho! Hoyotoho! Hiaha! Hiaha!

  I hated those fascists, but you had to grant them one thing: They knew how to stage their spectacles. By selecting specific, particularly grandiose opera scenes and revamping them to the point of perversion, they created the backdrop for their excessive experience of life. Their production was, as always, impressive and technically perfect, but in its mythical pomposity inhuman and sometimes disgusting.

  I remembered an evening the previous autumn when I had ended up at a performance of Aida with Bernd, my boyfriend, which the notorious Condottiere Sergio had personally staged. He had transformed the north side of Piazza Navona into a city gate of Thebes—the great stone faces of the monumental statues severe and dignified, still unscathed by the Coptic and Islamic iconoclasts and the sandstorms from the Libyan Desert. As ever-thicker clouds of fog drew closer from the Nile and the daylight faded, the colossal statues stood out more and more clearly; between them, to the electronically reproduced sound of fanfares, the triumphal
procession surged in, Radames at the head, followed by his officers in absurd gaudy uniforms, behind them slaves hauling the rich spoils—gold and ivory.

  On the gallery, dressed entirely in gold and under a canopy of peacock feathers, amid priests and dignitaries: il re—with crook and flail as insignia of power and crowned with the sun disk between the horns of Hathor, surrounded by his royal guard of bird-headed Osiris warriors with metallically shimmering neck feathers and steel-blue beaks. At his side Seth in a scarlet robe, god of violence and rape. “Trema, vil schiava.”

  The face of the ruler appeared in close-up, was optically blown up to the size of a four-story house. “Salvator della patria,” he bellowed, as windows opened in his eye sockets as on a screen—as if rectangular holes had been punched in them. Blackness behind them, then suddenly dark skin, slave skin, so extremely enlarged that you saw every pore, every little hair, every bead of sweat, and then—like lightning—a lash of a whip whizzing downward through the air. Breaks in the skin, beads of blood appeared. The next stroke whizzed downward. The beads spattered. “Nulla a te negato sarà in tal,” cried the amputated-seeming mouth of the king, “lo giuro per la corona mia, pei sacri Numi.” The sound of his voice, amplified a thousand times, thundered down to the Ponte Parione and could undoubtedly be heard as far as Tiburtino and Salario, while the echo boomed back from Capitolino and Aventino.

  As the naked temple dancers offered the king and the priests the treasures of the vanquished, an expanding projection was suddenly superimposed over the image: Il Condottiere himself, shoving his erect member into the mouth of a black slave girl. It was a live recording. The spectators held their breath; only a few, disgusted by the performance, turned away. Some could not conceal their excitement, rummaged with their hands in their pants pockets. A number of the girls with white-painted faces screamed with rapture and groped at their leather outfits as the triumphal march progressed.