You spoke with Tibor?
Tibor found me. “It’s all hide-and-go-seek, Ottavia,” he said, the smell of Absolut wafting in from just outside my vision. Tibor was dead, of course, thankfully with his head intact and spine straight enough to sit on the stool beside me.
“I know, Tibor,” I said. “You always told me, success is based on the willingness to open the wrong cave, to look for the cat in the wrong box. But I’ve been successful. I found the cats. Every time!”
“Maybe,” Tibor whispered, and the smoke from his eternal Camel mixed with his vodka breath, “your American dogs are following you. They just don’t want to kill their pussies.”
They didn’t want the answers. They didn’t want the answers to the equations. That’s what Tibor was telling me. No one wanted the answers, not even Una and Dodo and the Unimaginables — they were guides, not executioners. When the Americans found Saddam, when they shot the Old Man and dumped his body at sea, it was an accident, a mistake. Everybody was having too much fun with their beheadings and their stables of torture. They were slitting throats and sacrificing cattle to their own gods. But they drew the line at sacrificing the gods themselves, even if they were the other chap’s gods. Where’s the fun in that? Game over.
But while they weren’t finding the gods I found, the gods I found were killing real people — other men, other women and children. I saw them, too, homing in on our rearguard with their Stingers, blowing off the legs of our Rolands with their landmines and Improvised Explosive Devices. The ritual slaughters. Abrahams beheading their Isaacs, Ishmaels beheading their Abrahams, with no angel or djinni to stop their hands. Charlemagne only lost Roland in the Battle of Roncesvalles. But we were dying — not just Americans but we, we — by the hundreds, by the thousands, headless, limbless bodies with names and histories and families, Tibor after Tibor after Tibor. I tried to connect the dots, to understand the picture that I was helping to draw. But the freckles kept moving. And moving. And moving. And the roar of Charlemagne in pain only grew louder.
“Get out,” Tibor said from his stool, “before your Australian comes back from the bathroom. Just walk out. Get Louiza and go back into the forest.”
Did you?
I stood, as Tibor suggested. I started walking out. But then I looked up at the TV over the door and I saw you.
You saw me?
You were talking to Hillary about her campaign, something about following Obama. And that look, seeing you. Another force.
Another force?
Yes, Cristina, another force. Different but just as strong as the force that joined me and Louiza. It was a force that reached out of your studio and through the radio waves across half the world to me. It was a force that said keep moving, Ottavia. Keep moving. Move forward.
…
Are you still there?
…
Cristina?
I’ve had a long time to think, and not just in the twenty years since Tibor’s fiftieth birthday surprise, but before. The long hours, the plane rides when I should have been preparing questions for a foreign minister or a warlord. The thoughts weren’t complicated — I don’t do complicated, that was Tibor. I’m the one who is prepared. I am the one who is never late. Long before Tibor and I climbed onto the plane out of Bucharest to Rome and he gave me his New Wave lecture on the smallness of the Earth, the absurdity of human ambition, and perspective in general, I realized that being on time, moving forward was the only reason for moving at all. When I was dying for a pee and left my first husband standing on the steps of the National Theatre on our wedding day and came out on the arm of Tibor, that was moving forward. When I persuaded a variety of commissars and less — I don’t need to go into detail — to sign exit visas out of that shit hole for me and Tibor, that was moving forward. And when the nurse came back into my hospital room and told me in the fading light of that Roman evening that my baby had disappeared, well … I had a choice. Move forward or die. Tibor tried to move with me, but he used up his energy moving in too many directions at once and never achieved escape velocity. He was too democratic or too much of an anarchist to accept that forward is forward and backward is backward. All roads lead to Rome, he used to say, blah blah blah. Well, news update — they don’t.
I moved forward. I found you. And I saw that you too were moving. And I let you keep moving, without forcing you to pull us, to pull us forward with you. I warned you about Tibor, about allowing him to deflect your motion. But you were free to ignore me. So … as Tibor used to say. Which means absolutely nothing.
You can stop.
I have stopped. I’ve been stopped.
By what, Cristina?
You still won’t call me …
Please.
But Ottavia …
Cristina, stop. Please. The only person in the world who ever treated me like a parent was Malory. He read me a goodnight story the first night I met him. About the crowning of King Charlemagne. How the Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al Rashid, returned in disguise to Rome — although he had never been in Rome out of disguise — dressed in the uniform of his own ambassador. He was in love with the daughter of Charlemagne, but she was married already to the King of Septimania, a Jew.
Ah, Septimania …
And there was a child. Both the Jewish father and the Muslim lover were olive-skinned, and in those days there was no DNA testing. So not even Aldana knew who the father was.
That was the story?
It’s the story of the history of the kings of Septimania. It begins with doubt. If Septimania can survive with questions of origin, I can survive without a mother.
Origin? That’s a cold way to speak of a mother.
Malory was curious about origins. I’m not. I’m moving forward. Like you.
Malory. He told me my voice was out of tune.
He told me something else. That your voice sounded one way in his left ear, another in his right — like a Tibetan throat singer or maybe some Balkan peasant woman who could sing two notes at once. I always thought it was the cigarettes, the endless cigarettes refracted into gray, into your voice.
I like that. Those endless cigarettes have turned me into a Balkan throat singer who no longer has a throat.
We can live without voices.
And type messages, like we’re doing now, on a keyboard to a face on a screen for the rest of my life?
…
What was it that Tibor said? “I won’t turn fifty. Je refuse.” Well, Ottavia, I was always younger than Tibor, until. It wasn’t fair that I turned fifty before he did, that I grew older than him. But I won’t make sixty-five.
I know where you are, Cristina. Even without your telling me.
The hospital hasn’t changed very much. Perhaps the Roman pines outside the windows, the palm trees are a little taller, the sun a little older, the water of the Tevere a different water than the one that flowed past Fatebenefratelli the afternoon you were born.
The day Malory named the Pope.
Only one person is missing.
Would you like me to get her to the keyboard?
Louiza?
Hello, Cristina. I never knew your name. But I’ve never forgotten the mole on the crest of your cheekbone or your hair, gray in the afternoon light of the hospital window.