Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“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.

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 syllables 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.

That first night, Malory did little more than sip at his jar of punch as Radu and Sasha — once he’d relinquished his guitar to Dora or Brendushka or one of the other many Nurses Malory eventually came to know — and a handful of other members of the Bomb Squad peppered him with questions. Not just searching for the obvious physical details about Louiza, but for behavioral quirks — the way she walked, the way she talked, the way she thought. Malory gladly told and retold the stories of his two encounters with Louiza to an audience far more demonstrative than Settimio. He told them about Louiza’s mathematics, he told them about Whistler Abbey. They were intrigued by the story of negativity and soberly awed by the image of Louiza tracing i = u onto Malory’s naked chest in the late afternoon light of St. George’s.

“Do not forget the Pip.” Tibor pulled at a cigarette and wiped the smoke from his beard. And so Malory told them of the Pip, from Louiza’s discovery in the shutters of the steeple of St. George’s through its fall from the organ loft of Santa Maria and Tibor’s miraculous discovery of the tiny apple seed in the morning shadows of the pavement below the altar. Malory tried not to embellish or editorialize. But Radu in particular encouraged him not to worry himself too much with the effect his own attraction to Louiza had on his description of the girl.

“We need to find the girl you are searching for,” he said. “Not just some little blonde named Louiza.”

When he was finished, Malory excused himself and walked out the gate. The Driver found him around a discreet corner and drove him on the Vespa back home to the Villa Septimania. Malory returned the next night and the next for an update from this new family of dispossessed. The Nurses and Bomb Squad would wander in at odd moments from their occasional jobs. Some evenings Tibor was already at the Dacia when Malory arrived, some evenings he showed up later or not at all. But Malory always found a Nurse chopping vegetables she had seduced off a fruttivendolo in the markets of Campo dei Fiori or San Cosimato, and Radu or Sasha or Vlad scaling and grilling a fish that one or another extra from Tibor’s production had donated to the cause. Malory listened to tales of discovery as they chopped and scaled and he experimentally sipped on a glass of whatever was placed in his hand. He listened to stories of escape from the East — Radu and Sasha wrapped in horse blankets in a corner of a refrigerated truck, Dora and Anda less insulated in the boot of an English tourist’s Morris Minor. Tibor and Cristina had flown out of Bucharest in style, of course, thanks to Cristina’s discovery of an uncle in Ramat Gan, who wangled her an Israeli visa with a flight connection in Rome.