Chapter 7
Luca
He finds it by accident.
He is in Se?ana for a meeting that runs short, the producer sick, rescheduled, thirty minutes of his afternoon returned to him without warning, and he has his laptop and a coffee and a restlessness he doesn’t know what to do with.
Thirty minutes in a town where he knows no one.
In Milan he would call someone, Marco, or Giulia, or whoever was free, but he doesn’t reach for his phone, and after a moment he notices that he hasn’t, and that this is not the problem he’d expected.
He reads for forty minutes.
It is not a large archive. A handful of race results, a profile in a Slovenian sports magazine from 2014, two photographs.
The profile is in Slovenian, and he runs it through his translation app, slowly, reading the machine English for the shape of the story underneath.
Continental team. Seven years. A stage win that apparently caused something in the domestic press.
And then, in a paragraph near the end, a name he recognises from other searches — a doping investigation, a network, a manager.
The article is careful. It says: connected to the same management structure. It does not say more than that.
There is no follow-up piece. There is, after a certain point, no mention of Kos at all.
Luca closes the laptop.
The next breath goes in only halfway and stays there.
He does not take notes. He does not open a new document. He pays for the coffee and drives back to the farm.
Matej is in the yard when he arrives, moving something heavy from the barn to the outbuilding, a copper vessel, large, both hands required. He sets it down when he hears the car.
Luca gets out.
“Good afternoon,” he says. “Matej.”
He says it right, has been saying it right since the clearing, since the wall and the wind, because he heard it once and it lodged, and Matej goes very still for just a moment. Not long. The length of a breath.
Then he picks up the vessel again. “Meeting finish early?”
“Rescheduled,” Luca says.
“Dinner’s late. There’s bread.”
“Alright.”
He goes inside. Gets the bread. Sits at the table and opens his laptop and writes three sentences about Teran and the ridge above the village and a stubborn man who kept three rows when everyone else converted.
He does not write about the archive.
He will carry it carefully — as you carry something that isn’t yours to put down yet — and he will say nothing, and it will make him patient in ways he cannot entirely explain.
Matej
He comes up late.
Luca is already in bed, on his side, which is the right side, which used to be Matej’s side, though Matej cannot remember deciding to give it up. He is reading something on his phone, the screen lowered. He glances up when Matej comes in, then back down.
Matej undresses in the dark on his side of the room. Gets in.
The mattress adjusts. Luca turns the phone off. In the dark they drift towards each other, the same as last night and the night before, worked out between their bodies while neither of them was deciding anything.
Matej looks at the ceiling.
Less than ten days. He has known this person no time at all, really, and somewhere in those days this became the arrangement of the evening: the bed, the weight of another body settling beside him, the sound of breathing that is not his own.
He has not questioned it. He has not, until now, caught himself at it — which is itself a question, and which he is not going to ask tonight.
He closes his eyes.
Luca shifts once, slightly, until his back is against Matej’s side, and goes still.
Matej listens to the shutters and thinks about nothing until he doesn’t anymore.
Luca
He is on the arm of the couch, perched there with a book he has stopped reading, the light almost gone, when the kitchen door goes and Matej is already talking, before he is fully into the room, before the cold has finished coming in behind him.
“So there’s a city,” Matej says, “and they decide the world is ending.”
No greeting. No preamble. He has come straight from the yard and he is still in the work jacket and the boots, and the words are coming faster than Luca has heard them come, faster than Matej’s whole flat register has so far allowed for.
“Fifteen-thirty-four. And there’s a tailor, and the tailor ends up — no.” He stops. He is wrestling one arm out of the jacket and it has decided not to let him. “No, wait. You can’t start there. It doesn’t make sense if you start there.”
“Then start where it makes sense,” Luca says.
“I’m getting to it.”
He gets the jacket off finally, with a wrench, and hangs it more or less on the hook, and bends to the first boot, and this is where the trouble really starts, because he will not stop talking long enough to balance properly.
He goes up on one leg, hauling at the heel, hopping once, twice, across the kitchen tiles towards the counter he is aiming to lean on and does not quite reach.
“Right. So. There’s a movement, radical, end-of-the-world people, the printing press has just made it possible to spread this kind of thing fast, and they take over a town in the northwest, in Germany.
Munster. Münster. However you say it. They throw out everyone who won’t sign on.
They burn the debts, the books, the old law, all of it.
Clean slate. They call it New Jerusalem. ”
The first boot comes free. He nearly goes over with it. He recovers without appearing to notice that he recovered.
“And the man who ends up running it — running all of it, king of it — is a tailor. A nobody. No standing, nothing, and inside a year he’s wearing a crown and there are coins with his face on them.”
Second boot. He braces a hand flat on the counter and gets it, and stands there in his socks, breathing, the worst of the choreography behind him.
He settles when the boots are off. The hopping stops.
The story slows down with the body, the way a thing told well slows when it reaches the part that matters.
“Then it goes bad,” he says, quieter now.
“They’re surrounded, the bishop’s outside the walls with an army the whole time, the whole time this is going on.
Inside it gets stranger. The king takes more wives.
Sixteen of them. Anyone who argues, he kills in the square himself.
People are starving by the end. Eating anything.
And they hold out like that for over a year, because they still believe it.
That’s the part.” He looks at Luca. “They never stopped believing it. Right up to the wall coming down.”
He pulls a chair out and sits, finally, forearms on his knees.
“And when the bishop takes it back, he doesn’t just kill them. The three who ran it, they put the bodies in three iron cages and hang the cages from the church tower. So everyone can see.”
The room has gone fully dark around the window.
“The cages are still up there,” Matej says. “Five hundred years. You can stand in the square right now and look up and they’re hanging there. Empty. They never took them down.”
Then, drier, the thing he has clearly been chewing on the whole way up the hill:
“The episode was called Prophets of Doom. Big title. But that’s not the part that gets me.
The part that gets me is how unoriginal it is.
You read about these people and it’s always the same.
A nobody decides he’s chosen, and it always, always ends in polygamy.
Every time. Five hundred years and the playbook hasn’t changed.
Sixteen wives and the world ending next Tuesday.
” He shrugs. “Nothing new under the sun. Especially not the people who think they’re the new thing. ”
Luca does not say anything yet.
He has been watching. The jacket, the boots, the hop across the tiles, the man arriving mid-sentence with a thing he had clearly been carrying around for days, and what it had cost him to keep it that long.
And Luca sees it, the whole shape of it, clearly enough to say it.
“You heard that days ago,” he says. “And the whole time you’ve been out there with the mulch and the motor oil, saying four words at dinner, you were holding onto this. Sixteen wives and the cages on the tower. You carried it around for days because you wanted to be the one to tell me.”
Matej stands there in his socks, the abandoned boots in the middle of the floor.
“It’s a good story,” he says.
“I wasn’t talking about the story.”
Matej looks at him. He does not deny it. He bends and picks up the boots, because that is easier than the other thing, and Luca lets him have the out, and does not pick his book back up.