Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  But on this morning, there were no Rumanians at the Mattatoio who responded to Malory’s questions, who knew the name of Tibor. The Driver took him across the river to Porta Portese, where matrons from Monteverde Vecchio knew they could always pick up cheap day help from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, or Albania when their regular domestics called in sick. Malory waded into the early-morning scent of women, desperate to wash pots in the back rooms of Chinese restaurants, to babysit the children of occasional tourists, to wheel the crippled and demented beneath the Roman pines for a bit of fresh air and a few hundred lire. But no one knew Tibor. No one knew a Rumanian woman who had recently given birth. Malory returned to the villa with no treasure to speak of.

  Four days after the Pope’s Inaugural Mass—which Malory watched as a favor to Settimio on a small black-and-white television in the kitchen—Malory was leaning over the parapet of the garden, looking down on Fatebenefratelli and thinking how accustomed he was becoming to his anxiety, when Settimio approached him with a message.

  “Suor Miriam telephoned from the Ospedale Israelite, mio Principe. Your Rumanian friend, he found Suor Anna. He was looking for you.” Settimio was glowing, Malory thought, with radioactive pleasure at his prescience. “He will be at Trajan’s Column at five this afternoon.”

  Malory arrived at Piazza Venezia on the back of the Driver’s Vespa. He’d seen Trajan’s Column before, or at least a plaster cast of it, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where two dismantled halves stood in a nineteenth-century pavilion built to house the story of Trajan’s conquest of Rumania. Two long helixes of chariots and fallen warriors, victorious soldiers and captive slaves as depressed as any he’d seen at the Mattatoio or Porta Portese, wound up the V&A columns—a comic strip for the circus-going masses. The message was clear even in London—Victory was in the Roman DNA. The single triumphant shaft of Trajan’s Column was the starting point for a display of conquest and power that stretched in an unbroken line of ruins down the Fori Imperiali to the Colosseum. Triumph was as politically complete as it was genetically inevitable.

  “Fututi pizda matii.”

  Malory looked up.

  “Organ tuner!” the voice called. “Organ tuner!” One hundred feet in the air, at the summit of Trajan’s Column, someone was waving his arms frantically. It was possible, Malory thought, that this someone had a beard. It was possible that the Rumanian had beaten Trajan at his own game.

  “Mr. Malory, please?” There was a man beside him, a boy really, in a pair of oversized black eyeglasses like the guitar player he’d seen out his window at the Trinity College May Ball that past June.

  “Me?” Malory asked. The Driver turned the Vespa back on, just in case.

  “Please,” the boy said again, “you are organ tuner man?”

  “Not exactly!” Malory looked up from the boy to the shout from Trajan’s Column.

  “Malory!”

  “Tibor!” Malory unstraddled the Vespa and started across the Via dei Fori Imperiali as the Driver stopped traffic as best he could.

  “Yes!” the boy said, running alongside Malory. “Is Tibor. He wants you.”

  “He likes heights, doesn’t he?” Malory said.

  “He sees better up there,” the boy said.

  “Maybe he can find somebody for me,” Malory said, hurrying down the incline towards the base of the column, although he imagined it would be difficult for Tibor to disappear at this point, perched as he was one hundred feet above the Forum.

  “No, no,” the boy said, skipping to keep up with Malory. “He is making auditions.”

  “Auditions?” Malory remembered something vague Tibor said about Shakespeare and Bucharest.

  “Don’t you know?” the boy’s glasses bounced on the bridge of his nose. “Tibor was big shot director in Rumania. National Theater, Shakespeare …”

  “Ah yes,” Malory said, “Carlsberg …”

  “… and Camels,” the boy added, smiling. “My name is Radu,” he said.

  “Malory.” Malory shook the boy’s hand.

  “Please, Mr. Malory,” he said, “this way.”

  Malory walked around to the far base of the column. Another boy guarded a door.

  “This is Sasha.”

  “Hello, Mr. Malory.” Sasha shook his hand—a skinny version of one of the Monkees, the one with long sewer-streaked hair and spaniel cheeks.

  “It’s all right,” Malory said to the Driver. The two boys, flashlights in hand, led Malory inside.

  For a hundred, maybe two hundred steps, Malory climbed a staircase as Radu and Sasha told him how Tibor had received money from the Commune di Roma and several charities to stage a production of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  “Tibor has a plan. He is going to cast two hundred people,” Radu said.

  “No pros,” Sasha added.

  “And lead the audience around Rome.”

  “Down to the inferno of a shithole of the Cloaca Maxima.”

  “Up to the paradiso of the altar of the Ara Pacis.”

  “Orphans as angels.”

  “Politicians and priests as the Damned.”

  “Refugees and homeless as refugees and homeless.”

  “Mostly Rumanians.”

  “Rumanians have a colorful history with Rome.”

  “I’m sorry,” Radu said, “that we can’t take you up the outside of Trajan’s Column. The whole history of Trajan’s slaughter of the Rumanians …”

  “Dacians …” Sasha explained.

  “His battle with the Dacians …”

  “Two battles, two wars …”

  “Brought them back to Rome as slaves …”

  “Like us …”

  “Fututi pizda matii!” Radu stopped and turned on Sasha and continued for thirty seconds in unbroken Rumanian.

  “Excuse me,” Malory said, taking advantage of the pause to catch what little breath he had. “Who are you?”

  Radu stopped. He pushed his oversized glasses straight on the bridge of his nose.

  “Tibor didn’t tell you about the Bomb Squad?” Sasha asked.

  “The Bomb Squad?” Malory wondered whether it was a mistake to leave the Driver below.

  “We came out of Rumania before Tibor and Cristina.”

  “Cristina?” Malory asked.

  “La Principessa,” Radu explained.

  “Back in Rumania, everyone was in the army. But because we are artists, we were drafted to clear mines out of the Delta of the Danube.”

  “Mines?” Malory asked. “Artists?”

  “Artists are expendable,” Radu explained. “But we are also very good.”

  “Sasha was very good,” Radu said, starting up the stairs again. “He is guitarist. He has good ear. But Tibor was best. His nose …”

  “Anything,” Sasha added. “Tibor can find anything. Music. Women. Just look what he found today.”

  Malory emerged from the staircase onto the platform at the top of Trajan’s Column and looked down onto the rubble below. The sun was thinking about calling it a night, but hundreds, perhaps a thousand people had shown up at the base of Trajan’s Column. A host of women in World War I nurse’s aprons and starched hats were trying to create some order, corralling the would-be actors into pens.

  “Who are those nurses?” Malory asked.

  “They are the Nurses.” The note was a low F-sharp. The paw landed on Malory’s shoulder. “Also artists. And there,” Tibor pointed down into Trajan’s Forum to a woman sitting on a block of fallen marble like a princess on a camp stool, surveying the triage, “is La Principessa.”

  “Tibor,” Malory said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “And I’ve been looking for you, Dante.”

  “Malory, actually,” Malory said.

  “Dante,” Tibor said finally. “You will play Dante in my production. You explained,” he turned to Radu and Sasha, “didn’t you?”

  “We didn’t get to that part.”

  “Fututi pizda matii!” Tibor said, but
then turned and smiled at Malory. “You and me, Malory. We are both of us, like Dante said, nel mezzo del cammin, in the middle of the road of life. When I found you, when you found me up in the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, we were both stuck in the middle of the autostrada with Cinquecento and motorini whizzing around us.”

  “Tibor …”

  “We were midway between the starry ceiling of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and certain death on the flagstones. You caught me with your metal hook before I fell …”

  “Tibor …”

  “But you. I couldn’t catch you. You are still lost. Like Dante. La Principessa saw it when you arrived at the hospital. You still need to make the journey. You are Dante, don’t you see, Malory? You need to be Dante, and I will direct you. I will be your Virgil B. DeMille!”

  “Tibor,” Malory said, stepping back from the paw to gain perspective. “I’ve been looking for you for two weeks. Since that night at the hospital, at Fatebenefratelli, with Louiza and your wife—Cristina, is that right? I was only gone for an hour or two. You weren’t there when I got back.”

  “So,” Tibor said. The sun dipped below the crest of the Capitoline Hill. Malory saw something dim. Or rather, he saw that he had pushed in the stop that closed off the bellows of the Rumanian giant. “Sasha, Radu,” Tibor whispered. “Go down. Send them home. Auditions are over.”

  “Tomorrow at the same time?” Radu asked.

  “Go,” Tibor whispered, but it had enough force to send his Bomb Squad down the spiral staircase. Malory waited for the footsteps to fade.

  “Tibor, did you and Cristina leave the hospital with your baby?”

  “Malory,” Tibor said and leaned over the railing, looking down onto the expectant actors and actresses, “does that look like a woman who left the hospital with a baby?” Malory took three steps towards Tibor and peered a little more gingerly. Cristina was sitting immobile on the marble block, her gray head catching the last of the sun, lunar still within the flickering motion among the ruins.

  “Suor Anna thought not.”

  “And Suor Anna is?” Tibor kept looking down, his wrists loose over the railing.

  “The nurse who wheeled Cristina down to you in the cortile. I spoke with her the next day. She said that as soon as you and I left, the English nurse and the American doctor wheeled Cristina and Louiza to another room, an operating theater. An hour later the English nurse came out with Cristina in a wheelchair. She told Suor Anna to bring Cristina down to you in the cortile. She saw you a little while later, walking across the bridge to Trastevere.”

  “So, you know,” Tibor said. “Why all the questions?”

  “I don’t know what happened inside the room, inside the operating theater.”

  “You tune organs, Malory. What do you think happened?”

  “I think there were complications. I think Cristina had her baby, your baby. I think, perhaps, that there were reasons—maybe Roman reasons, maybe financial reasons why she couldn’t stay in the hospital with the baby. I think you went back to see the baby the next day. I think you brought it home a few days later.”

  “Roman reasons,” Tibor said. “Why not Rumanian reasons?”

  “What are Rumanian reasons?”

  “I told you in the church, in Santa Maria on top of the Goddess of Wisdom, what I told La Principessa. If it is a girl, she must go away before I fall in love with her. If it is a boy, I will strangle him with my own hands.”

  “But you didn’t mean …”

  “Malory,” Tibor turned to him. “Go home. Go back and tune your organs in your country where the Theory of Evolution, the Primal Urge to Reproduce, the Social Contract and The Rule of Law and Newtonian Physics are still practiced by honest citizens. In my country—the country I carry with me that makes my back crack with the pressure and the poison—all those were burned a long time ago in a ditch that is still smoldering with a puzza that would turn your stomach if you ever visited.”

  “You left the baby?”

  “We saved a life,” Tibor said. “I told you at the church. I needed you to come to help me save a life.”

  “You also told me not to worry,” Malory said. “When Settimio”—Malory stopped, part of him already sensitive to discretion—“when I left with those men, you told me you would stay there, you would look after my Louiza, you would wait for me.”

  “So,” Tibor said, “you have come to punish me for putting the welfare of my Principessa over a promise I made to an English organ tuner I met only one hour earlier? Wouldn’t you do the same with your Louiza?”

  “She’s gone,” Malory said.

  “Gone?” Tibor changed key and looked at Malory. Malory nodded and looked down at the platform. “I’m sorry, Malory.” Tibor put his palm on Malory’s shoulder, but Malory stepped back. “These things happen,” he shrugged.

  “I don’t mean that she left today or yesterday. That day at the hospital—I was only gone for an hour or so,” Malory said. “I must have got back just after you left. But she was gone.”

  Malory raised his head. He saw Tibor’s eyes. Tibor was looking into him. There was a new focus, he thought, perhaps anger. “What do you mean gone? Not just in the operating theater?”

  “I mean that Settimio and I searched the entire hospital for two hours, spoke with nurses, doctors, administrators. No one had seen her, no one had seen the red-bearded American doctor or the English nurse or the babies. Only the next day, when I met Suor Anna …” Malory recounted Suor Anna’s story to Tibor, the disappearance of the doctor with Louiza, the single baby in the cradle in the lamplight of the operating theater. “If you and Cristina didn’t take your baby, then the baby that Suor Anna saw must have been yours. And Louiza must have been taken away with hers. With ours.”

  “And the hospital didn’t say anything?”

  Malory shook his head. “Not one record. Nothing.”

  There were footsteps in the column, and then Radu’s black eyeglasses followed by Sasha’s mop.

  “Mission accomplished,” Radu said, sucking in the evening air as best he could. Sasha had his hands on his knees in the hope that his breath might catch up with him more easily at that height. Down below, the crowd was sifting out towards the Piazza Venezia in one direction and the Colosseum in the other.

  “A new mission,” Tibor turned to them.

  “Really?” Sasha looked up.

  “We have to find a girl. And her baby.”

  “That’s not why I came,” Malory said. “I’ve already tried the police, the embassies.”

  “Please,” Radu said, and Sasha straightened up to join him and Tibor at the railing. “We are the Bomb Squad. We know how to find anything and everything.”

  “You really think?” Malory began.

  “It may take some time,” Radu said.

  “But if they are here, we will find them,” Sasha said.

  “What can I do?” Malory asked.

  “Leave it to us,” Radu said. “You are obviously no good at finding things.”

  “We had to find you, after all,” Sasha added, “no offense.”

  “Tibor,” Malory started again.

  “I will be your Virgil,” Tibor said, “I will guide you. I will help you find your Beatrice, if you will be my Dante.”

  “What do I have to do?” Malory asked.

  “Not much,” Tibor answered. “Go through hell, that’s all. Otherwise nothing, absolutely nothing.” And with that, he stepped into the column and began his descent.

  2/4

  Oh the sheets of roe

  Are filled with rubber

  Anchovy prints

  Are everywhere

  IBOR’S PAW GUIDED MALORY AROUND A FRAGRANT CORNER OF the prison of Regina Coeli in the direction of the music. Tibor had insisted—and now that Malory had found him, there was no real question he would follow—that Malory come home with him for dinner and plan the search for Louiza. They walked at a measured pace—as if Tibor were calculating strategy or counting syl
lables in a canto—from Trajan’s Column through the Ghetto and out the back end of the Teatro Marcello, to the Synagogue and across the Isola Tiborina. Part of the route was familiar from Malory’s dash with Tibor and Louiza two weeks earlier. But part was different and new. Even without the weight of Louiza in his arms, Tibor’s determination lightened Malory. He let Tibor guide him, be his Virgil, across the Ponte Cestio and into Trastevere, the dome of St. Peter’s making the occasional flirtatious appearance according to the curve of the river. He followed Tibor down a set of steps fragrant with rotting leaves and urine into the medieval circle of Rome, past the prison of Regina Coeli up to a high gate that shivered with the sound of drums, an electric guitar, and a Rumanian-accented song he thought he recognized.

  Cuttlefish ink

  Cappuccino double

  With a fork and knife

  On the Spanish Stairs.

  “Dylan?” Malory asked. It was the soundtrack of garden parties and May Balls along the Cam, but in a less self-conscious key—F-sharp major, perhaps—one whose strings were less taut, whose harmonics were less forced than the madrigals and pantos and practiced frivolity of Cambridge. Tibor pushed open the gate. Seven or so first-and second-tier members of the Bomb Squad, tie-dyed and batiked and bandanaed and bejeweled, and a variety of Danube mädchens, befrocked like Florence Nightingale auditioning for The Night Porter, were gathered around Sasha who, guitar draped like a Kalashnikov across his chest and perched on the bonnet of a shipwrecked car, was in full chorus:

  Gotta get a bag from my hotel room,

  Where I got me some dates from a pretty little girl in Greece,

  She promise, she beat and whip me,

  When I pain my fututi pizda!

  “So …Welcome to the Dacia.”

  Radu handed them glass jars filled with a bubbling, celebratory punch of indistinct origin. Nurses thrust ramekins beneath their chins, full of mozzarella and olive and some impossibly hot Carpathian pepper. More of them, dozens of them, Nurses and Bomb Squad, danced through the gate and in and out of the shadows of Christmas lights hanging like Babylonian grapes from the iron struts of the Dacia. Smudge pots of citronella lit the dying moments of quixotic mosquitoes who had slouched over to the Dacia from the neighboring Botanical Gardens. The Dacia, as Malory discovered over the succeeding weeks of punch and grill, had once been a nursery of fig and pear and apricot and apple trees for princes and cardinals who lived at the fecund base of the Gianicolo, two healthy spits away from the Vatican. The Nurses and the Bomb Squad took over the ruins of a house and garden from impatient families who used it as a rest room around the corner from the prison of Regina Coeli. They fixed the holes in the roof, put locks on the doors, ran the whole thing through with industrial brooms and whitewash, and baptized the compound as the Dacia, not because of any romantic memories of the summer dachas of Pasternak or Akhmatova or the Bucharest nomenklatura, but because Brendushka’s diminutive Dacia 1300 finally dropped its gearshaft in the middle of the garden after her flight from Bucharest. It was late October 1978 to Malory, the physics dropout from Cambridge. But to refugees from the other side of the Iron Gate it was still the Summer of Love.