Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“Come, Hercule,” the old nun said, and patted the darkened slice of bench next to her. “Sit. You didn’t come to hear me talk of your grandmother or the swamps of France. Or the birth of you or your mother, for that matter. Tell me why you have come to see me when there are more important people, I imagine, waiting to meet you.”

Malory sat. He spoke. He told Suor Miriam everything — the first discovery of Louiza, the meeting with his grandmother, Old Mrs. Emery. The funeral, the instruction to go to Rome, the loss of his fellowship, and everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, from the moment he’d arrived in Rome to the fantastical few hours in the Vatican. But most of all, he spoke about the rediscovery of Louiza in the second pew of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the dash to Fatebenefratelli, Tibor’s gray-haired and very pregnant Principessa , the kind nurse, and the red-bearded American obstetrician. Malory spoke, but he watched the eyelids of Suor Miriam for any sign that might indicate intimate knowledge that would unite him with Louiza. When he’d finished speaking, she sat in silence, her eyelids motionless.

“Suor Miriam,” Malory murmured, wondering if she had fallen asleep. “Did you hear me?”

Again silence. Malory stood. He looked out at the mini Albert Memorial. He turned to the other set of windows and the synagogue beyond. Enough. Enough of the little man in the long coat, the blind and perhaps deaf nun, whether or not she was the midwife who had delivered him. It was time to go to the police, the carabinieri , to camp out in front of the British Embassy and shine a little rational English light on the disappearance. He was not about to let Louiza become a second Aldo Moro. He walked back across the speckled marble confusion to the foyer doors and stairwell.

“Come back at four tomorrow afternoon.” Suor Miriam’s voice stopped him at the door.

“Excuse me?” Malory said, turning. “Why should I come back tomorrow afternoon? What do you know? And if you know something, why can’t you tell me now?”

“Poor boy.” Malory could feel Suor Miriam’s eyelids fluttering, even at ten paces. “I know nothing. Suor Anna, the young nun who was with you and your Louiza and the Rumanian and his wife, she will return to the hospital at four tomorrow afternoon to begin her shift at four-thirty. She comes to me first for my blessing. She may know something. Come here and we will ask her what happened. Together.”

“But if you know Suor Anna,” Malory walked back, barely controlling his own alto register, “why can’t we go see her now? Time …”

“… is immaterial.” Malory had forgotten about Settimio. This was the Settimio of authority. Although in the state Malory was in, authority was suspect.

“What do you mean immaterial? The longer we wait, the farther away she might be.”

“Come home, mio Principe, ” Settimio said, in a more gentle register.

“Home?”

“I brought you here to meet Suor Miriam. I thought it would give you some comfort to talk for a moment with the woman who first touched your head, who first dislodged your shoulders from captivity and brought you into the air of Rome. But the visit has only added to your agitation.”

“Do not be so hard on the poor boy,” Suor Miriam murmured. “This is a place that has seen great drama. It concentrates anxiety.”

“Indeed,” Settimio said. “I know.”

“How do you know?” Malory found himself standing over Settimio as other bullies at school had stood over him. He felt ashamed, but he felt too far gone to retreat.

“This room,” Suor Miriam said, “this ward has a history. I myself have been here for only a fraction. Most recently, it has been a hospital for the Jewish people — for many years, many decades. This is a place of injury, of recovery.”

Malory looked around. There were none of the overtly Jewish symbols he had seen in the stairwell. But there was something precarious about the two rows of windows, as if crossfire were the normal state of affairs.

“Settimio is too modest to admit to the role he once played here,” Suor Miriam continued. “The Germans left the Ospedale Israelite alone for much of the war. Why? Who knows, there is rarely an answer. But when the Gestapo finally came to the hospital in 1943 to gather up the patients and send them north along with the rest of the Jews of Rome, Settimio received the information first — don’t ask me how. He ran down from the Villa to the hospital, to this very ward, just minutes before the Germans arrived. We had a young doctor at the time — very attractive, the kind of Italian the Germans liked: thick-browed, clean, vegetarian. He spoke to the Germans while Settimio hid behind the nurse’s cabinet and whispered his lines to him, like that Frenchman with the long nose.”

“Cyrano de Bergerac?” Malory was in awe of the woman’s voice and answered in as automatic deference as in any oral exam.

“‘You are welcome to take the patients,’ the doctor said, repeating Settimio’s whispers. ‘But they are all suffering from Syndrome K.’

“‘Syndrome K?’ the officer said.

“‘Highly contagious,’ the doctor explained. ‘Inevitably fatal.’ I was standing right there where you are now. Forty-seven Jews Settimio saved. That day.”

Malory turned to Settimio, unmoving in his Windsor knot and his midnight blue coat, but changed nonetheless. Strange, Malory thought. Settimio seemed younger, at least not as old as Old Mrs. Emery or the nun sitting on the polished bench.

“Go home with Settimio, my poor boy. Come back and see me tomorrow at four in the afternoon. Tonight you will have to sleep with questions.” Suor Miriam reached up with her hands. Understanding the motion, Malory bent forward and let Suor Miriam bless his forehead with her lips, let her kiss take with it the last grains of his energy. The Driver was waiting below with both Vespas. Malory descended into the seat behind him, felt the October night warm on his face as they drove off the island, Fatebenefratelli at their backs, and rose up a winding alley that smelled of night and pine. A gate opened, and the Driver entered, it seemed to Malory, directly into the side of a hill. They dismounted. There were more stairs. A door opened, a light. There was a kitchen, bread-warm. Settimio removed his coat, Malory his corduroy jacket. There was a bed, there were pajamas, a glass of water. Malory lay down in a country beyond exhaustion but with enough strength for a final question.

“Settimio,” Malory said, pulling himself up against the pillows to a seated position, his legs following like serpents from a foreign zoo.

“ Sì, mio Principe? ”

“Where am I?”

“You are home.”

“Home?”

“Many years ago,” Settimio sat in the shadows beyond the lamplight and began to speak, “a Jewish butcher named Yehoshua lived in the town of Narbonne along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.” He spoke with a gentle bass, like the pedals of the great organ of that same Narbonne where Malory had first learned to play, singing him back to the last time he had been told a story at bedtime. Settimio’s voice encircled him as securely as the mattress below and the duvet above, floating around Malory’s ears at a gothic distance between waking and dream. Later, when Malory opened his eyes in the dark and the silence, he was not only unsure whether he was awake or asleep but even where he was and in which century. For more than a moment, he imagined he was back in the Dominican cell of Galileo Galilei where, only twenty-four hours before, the hempen bed cords had begun to engrave a fresh Roman dissertation into his skull. In the darkness of the morning, Malory reached with his right hand into the air beside his bed and located a cord and a switch.