While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls—the World.
—Lord Byron
During the night, they slipped through the slumbering medieval beauty of Mostar, two-thirds of the way from Sarajevo to the Adriatic, and over the ancient bridge of Stari Most. Around daybreak, Cicero slowly stirred. Unleashed from the confines of their hospital beds, released from the effects of stifling narcotics, and focused by their need to run away, Johan and Cicero had managed to be twenty or thirty miles away from the ward by dawn. Cicero could hardly contain his excitement at the thought of reaching the land of his namesake.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.” Johan greeted the bleary-eyed child as he lifted his scrawny head from the rhythmic comfort of the donkey’s neck.
“Where are we?”
“We just left the Land of Nod, where there is no God. And you can’t see a thing for monkeys!” Johan joked. It was a clumsy ad hoc translation from Yorkshire English, one of Bill’s favorite revised lines for waking Johan up.
(Bill’s version was:
In the Land of Nod,
Where this is no God,
And yer can’t see nowt fer nettles.
It had always made Johan giggle.)
Cicero shook his head and accepted a flask of water from Johan, putting it to his cracked and parched lips.
They pushed on in a comfortable silence. Their path drew a straight line from the rising sun in the east. Given it was midsummer, the sea would soon come. Cicero had never seen the sea. A crumbling shack at the side of the road served up day-old coffee, white cheese, and a fatty wurst, the skin of which got stuck in their teeth. When it became time to settle the account, Johan realized he had no small change. The proprietress, a toothless old hag with endless creases on her face (“More than Leeds has tramlines,” Bill would have said) rolled her generous eyes. Then she stared deep into the dark wells of Cicero’s pupils as if they were her crystal ball, and mouthed to him an informed and silent “good luck.” Johan lifted Cicero into his seat on the beast’s back, then Johan yelled back to the bag of bones in the doorway:
“Thank you for your kindness. How far to the coast, madam?”
“One hour, past the next peak. Just keep going,” she said, and she slipped back into her dark shack. That night Johan dreamed of how she had then pondered things yet to come, which from the depths of Cicero’s eyes had become exponentially clearer to her.
* * *
The boy’s illness seemed to be of little concern or consequence to Cicero himself, so why should Johan involve himself unnecessarily? He asked the young lad to make him aware of how he was feeling, and if he needed anything. They shook on it as Johan briefly entered Cicero’s wise slipstream and tried to enjoy each emancipating breath.
They soon reached the port of Split. Johan purchased two passes for the crossing to Ancona, bribing the old guy on the desk with a shekel to allow the boy on board without papers (it happened all the time and was considered to be an unofficial sales tax by the scruffy bureaucrat). The donkey was not to be allowed on the boat, and Johan released him into an adjacent pasture.
Cicero the Senator took Johan’s hand with his cold, bony paw.
They walked the plank together.
They showed their tickets and boarded an old wooden boat, powered by the filthiest of engines. Maybe fifty were able to sail in her, although on this day, there were only an old deckhand, Johan, and Johan’s physically frail but mentally feisty young Roman soldier.
The old boy waited an extra hour to see if anyone else would show, making excuses for their tardiness, but Cicero and Johan cared not. They were on no schedule.
Finally, the grumpy young skipper arrived; the deckhand departed and let the ropes loose from the jetty. They reversed gear (this led Johan to chain-smoke for half an hour) out to the depths of the bay before chugging to a stop and heading west toward Italy.
Soon the warm Adriatic wind was blowing in their faces. And for the first time in weeks, the first time since the morning of June the twenty-eighth, Johan Thoms felt almost unburdened. Cicero’s smile dislodged osmotic endorphins from within Johan and released them into his system.
Cicero lay down on one of the two benches that ran the length of the boat. He rested his head on his new hero’s lap, while Johan, delighted to be putting a deep, watery buffer between himself and any of his pursuers, looked out below the water line at his own wavy reflection. His hair had grown, his face had thinned, and the words of Shelley came involuntarily into his mind:
Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
When Cicero awoke, they were within sight of Italian soil.
Rome’s finest was returning!
* * *
Ernest watched as Johan reached into the trunk, disturbing its thousands of letters in their small powder-blue envelopes. In his nostrils, Ernest caught a wonderful, invisible ribbon of released ylang-ylang, gardenia, and sweet Himalayan tuberose. The envelopes he saw first had been addressed simply to Johan Thoms, c/o The Count, Sarajevo. Others bore the words Johan Thoms, Argona. The trunk appeared to have spent time at the bottom of the ocean, for there were fish scales around the seams, though when Ernest ran one through his fingers, he swore that it smelled of warm butter. The trunk had a large letter P painted in lilac on the side, and it was the type in which you’d expect to hide a fortune in Spanish gold.
Sarajevo, July 14, 1914
My dearest J.,
I am still in Sarajevo. I will stay here at the President for you. Oh Christ, I miss you. Tomorrow, I will see Novac. I don’t know what to do. Should I visit your family? Please come back to me, you fool. I am afraid that your ghost is not good enough!
These days are dragging. Though in many moments I fear the worst, I truly believe that you are out there, and that deep down you would love to return; if not to here, then at least to me. I wish we were again drinking schnapps in Dubrovnik, or once more in that Bucharest orchard. Please come to me the second you receive this, and let’s disappear together. I need stay neither in Vienna nor here.
And nothing is your fault. Please return. I swore to myself that today I would not be driven once again to the point where I write words and lines to force Caligula to blush, my brutish darling.
I love you, and I don’t care that I feel so selfish. There are greater machinations at work.
Yours, madly,
L. xxxx
* * *
Among the letters, Ernest noticed several written on a different paper stock. These sheets were also a different color, and when he leafed through them, he saw that they were also in a different handwriting, that of a man. There was another pattern too: these were unfinished, often ending in the scrawl of an unstable person. Ernest held in his hand one of the letters Johan had tried to write to Lorelei, and looked at the elder man, who nodded slowly, looking away and to the floor.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”