The Far Arena (63 page)

One more day, she thought. If she could do one more day. Eugeni finished shaving, and went to sleep in a chair curled around his knife, the pommel near his cheek.

She was so tired. Nerve-drawn tired. Bang-slapped tired, beyond tired. She could go only so long without knowing whether Eugeni would fall on that knife in deep depression or cut up a village.Those carabinieri had been so close to death. Just a flick away, had one done something to launch Eugeni, as he had been launched in the kitchen back in the university hospital.

She could imagine the blood on the stones, and there would be no laughing from surrounding sidewalks then.

It was hard going to sleep this night, despite her weariness, and she lifted her head from the pillow of this hotel room and stared at her charge curled up on the chair.

She had never needed anyone as much as she had needed him the first night alone with him. He could have taken her sexually, she knew, for she would have done anything just to keep someone holding her.

She had been shattered that night; her will had been broken into uselessness. She was sure he did not understand what her chastity meant in relationship to her God. But he did know vows and obviously knew her and what the breaking of that vow would mean, and he gave her, that first night, the same gift she now passed on to her God - her virginity. He could have taken it, and not taking it, forswore it forever.

She knew, as frightened as she was now, she would not be as weak as that first night away without permission from the convent.

She turned in the soft bed, and she could not sleep. She needed sleep, a mind-cleansing rest, more desperately than she could remember.

But one did not force sleep, any more than one tried to force the grace of God.

She had not slept well since that day they left the cabin, and each moment driving she feared, unreasonably, she knew, being stopped by some policeman and asked if Eugeni was the man who had mercilessly butchered the world's finest fencer. Was he that man ? Was she the nun from Ringerike ?

That would not happen, she knew. Lewus had paid the price of their freedom. So had Semyonus. She thought of herself now as Olava and the dead American as Lewus and the Russian doctor as Semyonus - Eugeni's terms.

Everyone had paid a price, and she had thought, that night back in the cabin, hers might be the easiest. She had thought there would be some apprehension, by staying away from her order for a while. But she had not expected this.

This was nightmare.

The leaving without permission had unhinged something so deep in her that she only now realized she had felt invincible before, never knowing how strong indeed she was, until that strength had left her and she found herself just begging to be held at any price that night, just to have warm human arms around her.

Now at the centre of her being was a frightened little girl who had run away from home. She had never needed before, and she needed now. She needed her mind back again with all its security. She needed to know for certain she was doing right. If she knew that, she could be strong again.

Eugeni was speaking in his sleep. Olava listened. A word here or there was recognizable, much like the first tapes of his voice. He slept with that kitchen knife inside his curled arms like a child with a doll. He talked much in his sleep. The only night he hadn't talked in his sleep, perhaps, was that one that lasted centuries.

He had seen her weaker than anyone had ever seen her. And he had given the hand of a friend, when he could have been a lover. Perhaps she was not beautiful enough in his eyes. Whatever it was, she was grateful that on that one night a man could have had her, that man did not. He helped her with her gift to her God. It was so hard to know him. He went from depressed to happy and back again so quickly, she was not sure what triggered these things. Was he insane? Olava wondered. Would any other response be anything but sane ?

He wept easily, but perhaps not too easily given the way he was raised. Perhaps those tears, when he saw the Via Flaminia, when he looked for that town that had gone, were a gift of God, like a wound bleeding clean, or like the soul getting rid of pain it could not handle.

Sometimes he wept with his hands over his face, but at the Via Flaminia moisture rimmed his eyes, and he was quiet. The wound was deep.

Olava looked up at the dark ceiling and listened to her charge mutter away. Dreams, too, were where people cleansed their wounds.

And now Olava realized why she was not allowing herself to sleep. Because if she slept, she would have to awaken. And that would be tomorrow.

And she did not want tomorrow.

For tomorrow was Rome. She had promised Lewus and Semyonus that Eugeni would walk the city he had lived in. He would return where he had been. This had been agreed on. She would first take him out of the country, and then, it seemed so natural and wise at the time, take him back to Rome.

'Show him where he has been,' Lewus had said.

But what terrified Olava this night, what she had not understood in the cabin in Norway, when nobility and correctness seemed like such a clear duty, was how Eugeni would react to Rome.

If the little temple of Minerva, a goddess he had made no special sacrifice to when she was worshipped back in pagan times, could evoke that display in the square in an instant...

What then would he do when he returned to Rome and found home had left him so long ago ?

Thirty T
wo

Rome?

Did she expect me to believe this was Rome? Did she expect anyone to believe this was Rome?

All right, I could grant a road falling to disrepair. But did time have teeth to eat stone as it ate all flesh ?

'Yes, Eugeni,' she answered.

She was highly distraught, a condition which at times was hard to discern because Olava's natural way was an inner tautness. But today it was worse, so I went silently from one disaster to another.

I had expected damage, but Olava had said there were preserved things. Nothing was preserved. There were poor, pitiful, worn stones. It could have been anywhere. The lovely temple at Caesar's forum was a mound of rubble and a few worn columns. I tried to remember what the temple had said
above it. If I remembered, the t
emple was beautiful white marble with fine sculpture above inscriptions that the Julian Caesar had donated this temple. It was to grand, one could smell the incense in the entire forum. Now there were b
ushes and grass, and some wildfl
owers, as there probably had been before the founding of the city.

'To the left, there were statues, Olava, and the workmanship was so fine you would have sworn they could breathe. Between those little pillars there,' I said.

Olava nodded. She understood. She smiled too quickly this day, and darkness had begun to appear under her eyes.

'There was no grass here, of course, there was marble. Are you sure this was Caesar's forum ?'

'Yes. It was.'

There had been a tomb we had passed that was still left. I forgot the man's name, but I remembered that he had built it so that for eternity people would know who he was.

The marble had been stripped like an apple skin. Olava had said that many of the buildings had been shorn of their fine marble covers to build other buildings in later ages.

But what buildings could they have built to justify these desecrations ? There was nothing but tenement garbage. I remembered the stacked cubicles the poor lived in, and now everyone lived like that. The finest hostel Olava pointed to, just inside the remnants of a c
ity gate, stripped to its inner
brick, was like a tenement. My slaves outside my house lived like that, and now everyone, even the rich, lived like that.

Olava thought I would mind the vendors, but vendors were one of the few things that reminded me of Rome. Still this was called Rome.

'What a price to pay for so little in return,' I said of the new buildings being built from old. What had been done to the vestals was worse than rape. I looked at a little field set aside.

'This is the House of the Vestal Virgins, where it had been. See. Some statues are left,'
said Olava.

'Statues. They look scarcely carved. The features have been melted back into the stone they came from. And worse. If this were...'

'Yes?
’

‘I
f this were the home of vestals, then those statues would have been on the inside. But there is no outside.'

Olava said something about the old style of the House of the Vestals being copied by cults within her religion.

'Olava, I am going to talk to you.'

‘I
don't want to argue with you today, Eugeni. I am very tired.
’
'Arguing is the nicest part of knowing you. You are good at it. Don't fear me. You are inconsistent and illogical, but you do not shame either your race or sex.'

Olava cocked an eyebrow. There are many who, given so much in ability, rarely have to use it all. So that when they are called upon to strain, it appears to them like some gigantic, insurmountable obstacle. Had Olava come to my Rome, instead of me to hers, in one week she would have been at Domitian's elbow or someone equally important. Olava's tiredness came from knowing the fear and uncertainty that most people dine on as a weekly fare. For her it was the first time. And that was why she was tired. And that was way she was distraught. And while she asked for respite, I knew she didn't need it. Many, while tired, are stronger than those who are fresh.

‘I
am not going to argue,' she said, which, if I gauged correctly, meant she was going to argue, but this time would allow her normally courteous self a bit of vindictiveness.

'Woman, I may have been like the fish or the meat, stone and cold, but to me, looking at this field with some stones in it is difficult. To me, it is but a year since I was marched from the city. Miriamne is dead a year. Petronius is a young boy, and yet, if he had been lucky, he would have been an old man, and gone so many years before. I cannot accept that this was the House of the Vestals.'

That is all right,' she said.

'You give me permission
T

She did not answer. But I pursued my line. 'So here we have a garbage dump in place of Rome, and you telling me that your cult has taken this or that from my time. And I see all has passed, and not even a game to mark its going. And I am told this is preserved and that is preserved and lives still and nothing lives. Nothing. It is dead. Dead.'

'You are angry with me.'

'I cannot be angry with time. You will have to do,' I said, and I smiled, to let her know that in my anger was also a bit of jest.

On a street where there had once been so many temples it was called the 'sacred street', we found only a few bitter pieces of marble that were supposed to have once been the temple of Romulus, according to Olava.

'I don't remember there being a temple to Romulus,' I said. 'No. That has gone from my memory. There was a temple here. But I don't think it was Romulus.'

Now Olava was reading from a little book - the marvel of this age being machines producing things like that in perfect uniformity. Any nation in this day could put an army into the field with the same helmets, helmets still being used although not as necessary as once.

'Romulus, the temple of Romulus,' she said.

Now I knew by legend that Romulus was a founder of Rome. Olava read from her little book.

'Ah, yes. Of course,' she said. "This Romulus was the son of Maxentius, and it was built in the year 300, our time. Christian era. That's after you.' She turned the pages in her little book.

'On the Tiber, Eugeni, is a small circular temple, and a rectangular one in excellent condition.'

Then do you have statues to your executed god in them ?'

‘
No. They are preserved, according to this book, close to what they were at the Forum Boarius.'

A fenced-in park marked where the temples were, the round, Mars, and the rectangular, Portunus.

'
I made public sacrifices to Mars there,' I said, and Olava, who had not written since the night in the cabin, now furiously wrote a short note into the book. The word I could read. It was 'Mars'.

'T
hey do not say that in the book?’

'No. They didn't know. It's a very old temple, old even in imperial times, what we call your age now.' 'No it wasn't' 'No?'

'I donated it. To honour my manumission and love of Rome, I believe. It was an Aurelian temple.'