I waited. Behind me, I heard the rattle of a bicycle chain on the towpath by the river, a shuffling breeze through the apple trees. I tried to imagine Cristina, my mother, with the proto-me inside her, the two of us riding the raft of Fatebenefratelli down the Tevere, waving up to the girls of Santa Sabina looking down on us from the Giardino degli Aranci.
“Tibor finally arrived on the second day. He was with a strange little English man and his strange little English wife—a girl really—very pale, very blonde, very pregnant. I saw them come in. I saw them lay the girl on the bed. I wanted to speak with Tibor. But then both of us, the English girl and I, went into serious labor, and the doctor shooed everyone else from the room. When I woke up enough to focus, I was in the room again, alone. Or, to be more precise, Tibor was gone. The English girl was gone, the strange little English man was gone, the doctor was gone. The light from outside was sulfur and cold. It was all I could do to pull the blanket up to my chin. I don’t know when the nurse came in, it could have been two minutes or two hours later. She put me in a wheelchair—the pain was, well, pain. She wheeled me down to where Tibor was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I was in no shape to understand much except that there was a problem. Everything was in Italian, and my Italian was still new. But what I understood, what Tibor and I understood at the time was like this:
“The English girl and I both gave birth. Both babies were taken away in a single cradle, to be weighed and measured and registered. But when the Sister went to bring the babies back to us, she opened the cradle and it was empty. Not two babies. Not one. Empty.” Cristina paused to light a fresh cigarette. The sound of her lighter shocked me.
“And one of the babies that wasn’t there was me?”
“I screamed for a long time, I think,” Cristina continued. “Or maybe I just think I screamed.” She exhaled, smoke rose into the branches of the apple trees—had she even heard me? “Then I stopped. Tibor smoked. I smoked. It grew dark outside. We went home. Tibor didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Tibor made up a story for our friends, about the authorities—I don’t know exactly what, we never discussed it. All I had to do was smoke and accept their sympathies. Somehow—and I don’t expect this will make you happy, Ottavia—we both came to believe that this was the best solution, whatever happened to you was better. I would be lying to you if I said we hadn’t thought about giving up the baby every day of the nine months of my pregnancy. We spent enough of our childhood in Rumania fighting against the dictator who was calling on our patriotic souls to climb on top of each other and have children. It felt like we’d be giving in, selling out, if we actually had a child.”
But there had been the anniversary production of the Divine Comedy, I thought, when Sister Francesca Splendida sent me down to meet Tibor with eleven other girls, and something in the way that I did something—my sense of space, of direction, the way I could find things—reminded Tibor of his own early days with the Bomb Squad and his unerring ability to sniff out the mines along the delta of the Danube that the Soviets, the Germans, or maybe the Emperor Trajan had left during one war or another. And Tibor and Cristina were convinced that one of those two babies who had disappeared from Fatebenefratelli ten years earlier was me. Maybe. Tibor had become a successful director in America. Cristina was climbing up the ladder of television journalism. They had enough money to pretend. I could be a toy, a cat they took out once or twice a year, to pet and play with when they weren’t otherwise engaged. It was in nobody’s interest to check DNA, to open the lid of the genetic box too wide—except mine. Maybe.
“Cristina,” I asked, since the word mother had never gained much of a flavor, “why are you telling me this now?”
“Because Tibor—because your father—needs you to help him.” She let the cigarette drop next to a forgotten crabapple. “And I don’t think you should.”
Cristina returned to Cambridge for my graduation a week later. Tibor too. He was playful, in manic high spirits. All my friends thought that I was the luckiest girl in the quad to have such a fantasy close at hand. The hint of a bald spot on Tibor’s crown had widened into permanence. But the rest of his hair was thick and cut and shaped in a way that spoke of financial health as much as art. He had no idea that Cristina had come up the week before, that we had driven out to the Orchard and spoken. But that evening, after half a duck and two bottles of Merlot at Midsummer House, after I’d walked them back to the University Arms, Tibor stopped me under a sulfur lamp on St. Andrew’s Street. The National had signed him to direct a production of Sophocles’ Antigone. He had a concept that he knew could be extra ordinary but required the kind of diplomacy and organization and sense of direction that he believed only I possessed. Might I come work as his assistant? Immediately? This clearly was the help that Cristina warned me about. But Tibor, my father! The National—how and for what reason could I say no?
Even though the National ran with strict union rules regulating hour and place, everyone involved in Tibor’s Antigone had signed a waiver to accommodate Tibor’s particular method. Every day, the entire company met in a large rehearsal room just before noon. Not just actors but designers, carpenters, seamstresses, the occasional executive, and a smattering of ushers and other front-of-house personnel. At the stroke of twelve, Tibor would appear to give a benediction to the company—a sermon that riffed on Sophocles, Dante, Winston Churchill, the changing politics of Eastern Europe, or sometimes just a comment on the hairstyle of one of the actors in the company. Eventually, the road led back to Antigone. And with that, Tibor would declare the workday begun. A couple of trestle tables were laden with food and drink. Most of the company would grab a salad or a Scotch egg and a coffee to fortify themselves for the day’s surprises. Tibor never made a plan in advance. He might begin by gathering a covey of actors into a corner to discuss context and character, or he might spend two hours drilling a speech with the Creon in the middle of the hall while the others looked on. Or he might just huddle with the costume designer, even though everything had been sifted and sorted, for the entire afternoon.
At four, lunch was exchanged for tea. At seven, the drinks trolley appeared. More food at seven-thirty, and then the official end of the day at midnight. Everyone—particularly the actors—was expected to be present all the time, all part of the theatrical engine. “An infernal machine,” Tibor called it, quoting Sophocles or Anouilh or some other aesthetic engineer.
And for the first week, the machine ran like a well-oiled Jaguar. The actors were marvelous, particularly the Welsh girl playing Antigone, the young daughter of the dead Oedipus, who defies the laws of her Uncle Creon to bury her brother, who was killed trying to restore morality to the throne. When they weren’t rehearsing with Tibor, they’d go off into corners by themselves and swot the history or run lines. Fruit and bottled water were the staples of their diets that first week—I was the one on the phone every morning at eleven, calling to the buttery for fresh supplies. And so we came to the end of the sixth day and all was good.
Monday was the day of rest. Part of my job was to pick Tibor up at his over-designed hotel on St. Martin’s Lane before rehearsal and deposit him there afterwards. I didn’t expect to see him on Monday—frankly, I needed a day away, and there was some unfinished business with a tutor of mine up at Trinity. But at 7 a.m. my telephone rang.
“Oc-TAY-vya?” The woman on the other end was clearly not someone who knew me. “I’ve got a friend of yours here. In a bad way.
What’d you say your name was, love?”
I took the tube up to Baker Street, to a basement flat just north of the Marylebone Road. Reshma was the girl’s name—she was tall and well filled-out, roughly my age, but in different circumstances. As she fixed me a cup of instant—with a drop from the pint of milk she’d asked me to pick up along the way—she told me about her dilemma, whether to return to Bollywood or try to make it in England. She rattled off the roles she’d played in community theater in Hendon and Ealing and mentioned a coup
le of TV shows I’d vaguely heard of that had almost offered her a role. The TV was on low by the counter—BBC strangely enough, with Anna Ford reading the morning news. I looked around Reshma’s kitchen and wondered behind which door “my friend” was hiding, or lying, or dying.
“So—” It was the door behind me, as luck would have it.
“Poor darling!” Reshma looked up at Tibor with the eyes of an actress in mid-audition. Tibor waved her off. He was dressed in the same clothes I’d left him in at the hotel the night before. If he had taken them off, it hadn’t been to sleep. It wasn’t particularly warm in Reshma’s kitchen, but Tibor’s shirt bore a stigmata of sweat beneath the arms and breasts. He was holding a water glass in one hand. The other was planted on his knee to support the weight of a back that refused to straighten. “He’s been stuck like that for over an hour,” Reshma said. “That’s why I called you.”
Tibor shook his head and waved the glass towards the TV. Anna Ford was talking about Vice President Cheney, who was preoccupied with his own stress test. But Tibor was more interested in the bottle next to the TV.
“Do you really think?” Reshma asked, not moving from the chair.
“Ottavia!” Tibor shouted in a Tom Waits whisper and shook the glass again in the direction of the bottle. I brought it over to him—a liter of Absolut with perhaps a slurp and a half at the bottom. “Pour,” Tibor said. He drank, he swallowed. And with an effort that seemed to wring several slurps of sweat out of his body, Tibor straightened his back with a crack that momentarily drowned out Anna Ford. “So,” he said, fully erect. “You found me. The same way you first found me and Cristina.”
“Did I find you?” I asked him. “I thought it was the other way around.”
“When La Principessa walked into my rehearsal on her wedding day,” Tibor said, “wardrobed to the max in full bridal regalia and looking for the District Hall, do you think it mattered which one of us found the other? Which one of us was the Sun? Which one the Earth?”
I blushed, struck for the first time by an image of Cristina seated on a bathroom sink, her wedding dress hiked up around her waist and her second-hand heels digging into Tibor’s bomber jacket.
“In love and discovery,” Tibor said, looking over my head at Reshma, “there is no Fucker and no Fuckee. Only the Fuck. It’s what we do afterwards,” he said, striking a match, “after the cigarette and the vodka and the snoring are over and the stage lights are off, that’s what matters. Action,” he said, pulling on the Camel, “action is everything.”
“I was just telling Oc-TAY-vya here about my dilemma.” Reshma offered me a cigarette. I declined.
“Give her the address,” Tibor said to me.
“Which address?” The most intelligible person in the room was still Anna Ford, and I never knew what she was saying.
“The Studio, the National …” Tibor waved his own cigarette at me. “My concept,” Tibor said. “Cristina told you I had a concept. She warned you, didn’t she?”
I didn’t know that Tibor knew about my tea with Cristina, about her warning. So I said nothing. But on cue, a familiar Eastern European voice came into the room, care of Reshma’s TV.
“This morning, my guest is the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney.”
“Fututi pizda matii!” Tibor roared. “It’s the Puli-tzarina!” A baby started crying in the next room.
“Oh shit!” Reshma said, as a wet stain began to spread over her T-shirt by her left nipple. “Pardon my Swahili and pardon my hungry monster. Won’t be but a minute.” And with that, she disappeared through another door.
“She follows me everywhere!” Tibor lurched around the room looking for the remote. Cristina continued to talk calmly to the vice president with authority and the charming scalpel of her Rumanian accent. I was happy to have her in the room with us, even if I could understand Tibor’s annoyance. Cristina had a way of looking through the camera and making you believe you were her sole audience. Nevertheless, I reached behind the TV and pulled the plug.
I got Tibor out of the flat and into a mini-cab by Regent’s Park before Reshma finished breakfasting her infant. Back at the hotel, I poured coffee and scrambled eggs into Tibor and tucked him into bed. He began to snore immediately. I cancelled my Cambridge tutor and the rest of my Monday and pieced through the hotel room Tatlers and Vogues. Cristina was mentioned five times in the magazines, Tibor only once and then as “husband of …” I thought about calling Cristina but remembered Tibor’s reaction to her appearance on TV. She follows me everywhere. I remembered her appearance just a few weeks before on the forecourt of Trinity. Was Tibor jealous of Cristina’s success?
Was that why she warned me?
Was he warning me?
I thought about Reshma and her baby. I thought about the night Tibor had spent in her depressing flat. I thought about why I had followed Tibor’s instructions and given her the address of the Studio. I didn’t think about the bottle of Absolut.
Tibor woke around 4 p.m. He sat up in bed. He had no idea where he was. He reached out with his left hand and hit a pillow. He reached out with his right and knocked over the over-designed bedside lamp. I stood above him and handed him his glasses. He tweaked them over his ears and looked up at me.
“So.”
I offered to call up some food. I handed him a glass of water.
“Go away.”
“Can I call you later? See if you’re okay?”
“I’m okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Are you sure?”
He looked up at me again and blinked. Twice. Thrice. I don’t know if Cristina ever got that look from him. But I understood her warning.
In the morning, Tibor was downstairs in the lobby of the hotel waiting for me. There were no signs of the previous day’s adventure. If anything, he seemed more energized than he had a week earlier before the first rehearsal. As we walked through Trafalgar Square and across Hungerford Bridge to the South Bank, he talked about how the time had come to begin to unveil the new concept for Antigone. It was a concept he had been considering for over twenty years, since his first days in Rome.
And that’s when he mentioned your name.
“Malory will understand.”
I had no idea who you were, or whether the name Malory referred to a man, a woman, or a Rumanian experimental theater company. I didn’t ask. But then, I didn’t ask a lot of things on that late-morning walk to the Studio, and if I had, a clarification of the name Malory would have been low on the list. I was glad that Tibor was mobile. I wanted to forget our lost Monday. It was Tuesday, the beginning of a new week. We would show our passes at the stage door, take the lift to our well-lighted rehearsal room, listen to our week-two benediction from our glorious leader, and set off on the next episode of our journey towards genius.
“Oc-TAY-vya!”
It wasn’t just the sight of Reshma outside the stage door. It was the sight of Reshma and five other women—Asian, Latin, African, Polynesian, and Eskimo—all yoo-hooing Tibor in ways that told me one thing. Monday hadn’t been the product of Tibor unwinding at the end of a long week by drinking a bottle of Absolut and picking up an Indian prostitute. Tibor had been doing this every night since we began rehearsal. He had been going out in London with a bottle of Absolut and looking for women. A new bottle every night, a new woman every night.
“My concept,” Tibor said, as he stirred the six new women into the murmuring mix that was his disconcerted company, “is that Antigone will be played not by one woman, but by seven women. Antigone is not just white, not just black or yellow or …” I could have supplied Tibor with the names of the seven colors of the rainbow more easily than figured out the reasoning behind his coalition.
“But why?” It was the Welsh girl, the original Antigone who asked the question. Entirely reasonable. Entirely within character, both as a Welsh girl and as Antigone.
“You should know, Antigone.” Tibor smiled a dangerous smile, the warning of imminent atta
ck. “Your Uncle Creon thinks there is only one right side to any battle, one right answer to any question, one nephew, one hero who can be buried. But you …”—and Tibor laid a comforting palm on her shoulder—“know that sometimes there is more than one answer, more than one hero, more than one heroine.”
“Perhaps …” she began.
“Tell me,” he said, smiling again. “How many boys have you fucked in your life?” Before the Galahads in the company could raise their voices in defense of the poor girl, Tibor held up his hand. “I don’t really want to know. I suspect the number is more than one. But I’m sure you’re looking for the one guy to settle down with, the one man—or maybe woman, I’m easy—to spend the rest of your life with. Aren’t we all?”
The murmur dwindled to the silence of general confusion.
“On the Other Side, where I was born, One was the only number. One party, one president, one way of living, of thinking, of eating, drinking, shitting, and, when it came down to it, one missionary position for making love. I have been fighting a battle against One since I escaped from the Other Side. It is a battle I have tried to describe and explain. And now all of you—and I include our six new, professional colleagues—are here to give life to that battle. To prove once and for all that life is full of answers and origins. There are more Big Bangs, more explanations, more ways to tell where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and why we’re taking the trouble. As many, Dante would say, as the fireflies a peasant sees on a summer’s evening, when he lies on his back on a grassy hill after his work is done. And you, my pilgrims, are going to bring the light of all these fireflies to the world!”
The company was made up of professionals, people who had been in the business, some of them for more than forty years. I was impressed how many of them followed Tibor’s concept for the first day or so. Many of them had worked in the political sixties and seventies with non-professional actors—Kentish farmers and farriers in reenactments of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or Hackney undertakers reliving the Great Plague of 1666. And they all had grown up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the theater where the Director was the One.
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