A Possible Life

  She left the room with automatic steps, went quickly down the stairs and out on to the terrace, where Bruno was waiting, now hatless, in clean clothes. He looked bedraggled from the shower, almost as he had looked the first day he stepped in with Roberto from the rain.

  He handed Elena a glass of cold wine and poured one for himself.

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ she said, raising her glass to him.

  He smiled, raised his in return and sat down at the long table overlooking the olive grove.

  Then at last he spoke. ‘Thank you for coming. After all this time you’d have been quite within your rights to …’

  ‘I know.’

  His voice was deeper than she remembered. Had it acquired a different accent, too?

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said.

  ‘I joined the army. It was the only work I could find. We had a detachment in the Middle East Peace Force.’

  ‘Why didn’t you contact me?’

  ‘I had no money. I had to make a life.’

  ‘But you could have kept in touch. A message once a month.’

  ‘It was easier my way.’

  ‘Not for me it wasn’t.’

  Bruno drained his glass. Elena twisted her hands. She wanted time to run much faster, so she could have enough evidence to see if he was still the same man.

  Silvia brought tomatoes chopped with garlic and oil on toasted white bread.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve done,’ said Bruno.

  When she had finished, he said, ‘I always knew you’d be a scientist.’

  Elena shrugged. ‘And you. After the army?’

  ‘I did what I told you I might. Boatbuilding. I went to Lucerne, in Switzerland, where they still had money and orders. And then I began to write in the evenings. I had a room in a house that overlooked the lake. The landlady gave us dinner at six and then I was free to work.’

  ‘What did you write?’

  ‘Books.’

  Elena laughed. ‘What sort of books?’

  While he described them to her she wished she hadn’t asked. She wanted to know each detail of the stories he told her about; she yearned to understand which part of his life or mind they had come from; she felt the need to take them – his imagined people and their fictional deeds – back inside herself, her own being, where she felt they must in some way have originated.

  Silvia brought more food, Bruno poured wine; Elena felt contented, and, at the same time, alarmed. I don’t need to live at this level of danger or openness, she thought. This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.

  The sun went down the sky; Silvia and her daughter left for her house in the village. They talked on and on, Elena explaining why her work was at a critical point, Bruno asking what kind of life she and Fulvia had had together. It was one o’clock before they felt able to reopen the events of childhood.

  Elena looked at Bruno through the light of the gas lamp on the table. He was the same person. He was the boy who had wakened her ability to connect to others. Without him, what would she have been? He had acquired some confidence, but it had not changed him; there was still a natural tact that had kept him from referring to the childhood years till now. He had always had that sense of propriety, even when what he said was so direct. She watched him laughing as he reminded her of the accident that had befallen the Tuscans on the final leg of the regional cycling championship, when he had gone flying over the handlebars.

  It was starting to grow light, the Apennine foothills becoming dimly visible again, when he finally pushed back his chair.

  ‘You must be tired,’ he said.

  They went inside the house and upstairs to the landing. His room was one way, hers the other, but she went uninvited through his door with him. They took their clothes off in the faint light.

  He held her in his arms and said, ‘Elena, I don’t know. I’m not sure if this …’

  Through the thin cotton of his shirt she could feel the raised weals on the small of his back. She said, ‘It’s all right.’

  He said, ‘I think Roberto …’

  Putting her finger to his lips, she said, ‘Ssh.’

  When Elena was awoken by the sun coming through a half-open shutter, she found that she was alone in the bedroom. There was a note from Bruno saying he had gone to the village for milk and bread. He had left his screen on the table by the window, as though he had been hard at work since dawn. Before she could stop herself Elena had settled down in Bruno’s chair to read.

  Another Life

  At first I think it is one more settlement we are to capture and subdue. The clay houses and the ramparts of the citadel are familiar to me from my life as a soldier. How many such places have we passed through as we make our way east.

  My horse Kasam seems to think so too. He rears up in expectation of the battle and begins to snort. I have to restrain him from galloping straight at the gate. He is a warlike creature, yet gentle when we are in camp at night.

  I dismount and lead Kasam to a thicket of trees where green leaves suggest water. I tie his reins to a low branch and give him dried grass to eat from my saddle bag. He tosses his strong neck and whinnies with his own kind of pleasure.

  I am told to ride ahead because I know some words of the languages we encounter. We know that a column of reinforcements leaves our homeland every month. In mountainous country I ride Kasam to a peak, look back across the plain and can see a tower of dust on the horizon. It makes me glad to think of the young men with their hearts full of hope as they journey across the sand.

  Among the trees, I find a stream with clear water. I go back to Kasam and lead him to it. He lifts his hooves slowly, then walks in up to his belly. He lowers his head to the current and when he lifts it after drinking there are clear drops on the whiskers of his muzzle.

  Elena came up for breath and looked across at the Sabine Hills, green and indubitably real. She was laughing with relief, though she was also disappointed. She was pleased that the story was so far from Bruno’s life and hers, yet for the same reason found it hard to take seriously. She knew already, after only one page, that she would never be able to read anything Bruno wrote as a normal reader would – objectively, with critical enjoyment. This was a great loss. Or maybe not – she had read so few non-scientific books that she had no way of telling if this thing was any good.

  After a deep breath, she began to read again. The story was about a man called Imraz, presumably a Muslim soldier, one of the first to push out east from the Arabian peninsula, subduing towns and villages in the rush towards the Indian subcontinent, bringing the good news of the Prophet but without the time or the manpower to settle the conquered territories according to their holy law. Imraz was married, it turned out, and had two soldier sons, though there was frustratingly little detail about his wife.

  By this stage, Elena had understood that Imraz was dead. The citadel of the opening paragraph was a kind of limbo where the dead lingered until their name had been spoken for the last time on earth.

  Then, as Imraz wandered inside the citadel, Elena’s eye caught on a woman’s name.

  Then I see a young woman I knew before I was married. Her name is Malika and I am surprised that she is dead.

  I give the reins of the horse to Akmal, the friend of my youth, and tell him to wait for me while I run after Malika.

  She is going into a house when I catch her by the elbow. ‘Malika? What has brought you to this place?’

  She turns and looks into my face. ‘I died for love,’ she says. ‘For love of you, Imraz. Now I am waiting.’

  ‘And are you not yet forgotten?’ I ask.

  ‘No. A poet wrote a song with my name in it. Until the last time it is sung, I shall be here.’

  I stand on the threshold of the house. ‘I did not know you loved me so much,’ I say.

  Malika lowers her eyes and I see the tears fal
l. ‘I was afraid of what you would say. And I was afraid for your wife.’

  ‘A man can love more than one woman, Malika. A man is allowed more than one wife.’ I reach out my hand and place it on her arm. ‘What could I have said to harm you? I would have been happy to know that you loved me.’

  Am I Malika? thought Elena. Does he see me as someone he discarded or who was too timid to speak the truth?

  Or am I merely Akmal, the ‘friend of my youth’? She craved more detail and she feared it. Imraz seemed in the next section most of all concerned for his horse, Kasam, described as a ‘close-coupled gelding’, bred from a long line by Imraz’s father. Surely this reflected Bruno’s ease with horses and his love of them from some secret part of his childhood.

  It took her almost an hour to finish. It turned out in the end that it was neither the wife, the mistress nor the horse that really mattered to Imraz; it was the father who counted – the ghost whom he was now at liberty to release. The story ended:

  I kneel and remember my father, whom I loved. Seven years I mourned him. Seven years he appeared in my dreams as though still living. For seven years it fell to me to tell him each night, so softly, fearing to appal him, that he was dead.

  I remember my father in the days of my infancy when he held me in his arms and pointed to the stars in the sky. I sing to myself the songs he taught me as he sat beside my bed. I hear his voice again, modest and low, as he tells me of the battles he fought and of the wounds from which he bled. I see his eyes, loving and kind towards my mother and my sisters. I do not think of him in the last days of his sickness but as the young man who turned his face to the sun.

  When I raise my head, my father is standing before me.

  ‘You have come just in time,’ he says. ‘You have done well.’

  These are the words I have wanted to hear. I had not known until he speaks how much I had wanted to hear them. I lift my shirt and see a spear wound under my ribs. There are weals on my back, as though from a whip.

  ‘My time has come to disperse,’ says my father. ‘We are made of fragments and they must go back. They have finished with this man.’

  My father has started to grow faint before my eyes. I reach out my arms to embrace him as I have longed to do each day since his death. But when I bring my arms together he has slipped through them. Once again I reach out to him and once more I bring back my arms empty.

  Immediately a strong light begins to shine through him and through the body of Kasam. I take a step back. I see the outline of the man and the horse become vague and trembling. The energy that escapes their unravelling mass is for a moment so great that I can see by its light to the end of the world.

  I can see each particle of matter that made them. In the flash of the skin of a dolphin as it shoulders the wave and the tip of the feather of an owl as it falls in the night. In the end of a leaf of a plant by a road, in the fifth of the six legs of a fly. I see time going fast over mountains and rivers, over cities and plains and down into the cold oceans.

  I fall to my knees, scrape up dust, let it fall on my head, because this world I have been shown is grander by far than any world a god could make. I see a swarm of these specks as they surge and re-form in the hand of a human child to be born where different stars hang beneath a southern sky.

  Then, with a new god in my heart, I start to make my long way back to the place of my undoing.

  So fierce was Elena’s attention that at one point, when Imraz showed such affection for his horse, she had to stop reading. I cannot, she told herself, be jealous of a horse – of a fictional gelding.

  Not having read the Bible, she did not hear the borrowed rhythms, nor was she aware of a reference to Virgil’s Underworld when Imraz reached out to embrace his father. What intrigued her was that this man was a soldier, as Bruno had been, that he had the same weals on his back. And who would have thought that the missing father would overshadow all else?

  She had not long finished it when she heard Bruno call her name downstairs.

  Soon after her return to Mantua, Elena received a message from Beatrice Rossi. ‘Darling, you must come at once to Athens. We are on the verge. BR xx’

  Beatrice was waiting for her at the airport, and on the way into town she told Elena what had happened. A dock worker in Piraeus had fallen from a scaffold and impaled himself on an iron bar extruding from a piece of concrete. It had pierced the underside of his jaw and had been driven up into his brain. The surgeons had sawn off the bar below the jaw on site, but had not dared try to remove it.

  The odd thing was that the man had not lost consciousness. On the contrary, said Beatrice Rossi, he was extremely alert. He was talkative, highly focussed, with a prodigious memory and detailed plans for the future – more so, it appeared, than before the accident.

  Dr Rossi had reserved a room for Elena in her hotel near Syntagma Square. ‘It sounds as though the iron bar’s done the job for us,’ said Elena.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dr Rossi. ‘I think it’s pressing on the area where the faculty of raised human consciousness is located.’

  ‘The famous “neural substrates”,’ said Elena.

  ‘The very ones! He’s fully self-aware at all times, he can’t just lapse back. So if we can scan him, we can find the precise area and see how it works.’

  The accident had taken place ten days earlier and an item in a popular London publication had awakened the world’s interest. Under the caption ‘Kebab Man Puzzles Greek Doctors’, it stumbled close to what was important about the patient, without quite getting there.

  There were two problems for Elena and Beatrice in Athens: Dr Rossi was still regarded with suspicion in the scientific world, and access to the ‘Kebab Man’ was limited. However, in his hyper-alert state, he had welcomed the attention of journalists, believing he had something important to tell them.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Elena, ‘if you can’t get to see him as a scientist, you could pretend to be a reporter.’

  ‘That would be the first time in history,’ said Beatrice, ‘that a doctor has gained access to a hospital room by pretending to be a journalist.’

  Using all her charm, Beatrice Rossi persuaded the clinic to grant her an interview as a writer for an Italian scientific journal. It was one to which she had contributed; it was only the use of her mother’s surname that was deceitful. In her half-hour with the patient, she convinced him that he should be scanned again with Beatrice herself present.

  ‘He’s a bit of a monster,’ she told Elena that night. ‘How often in an hour are you really self-aware, do you suppose? I mean, you drive a car and play the piano while thinking about something else … But really self-aware as only humans can be?’

  ‘Maybe three or four times an hour?’ said Elena. ‘For a few seconds each time. Then I relapse into a sort of half-asleep, screen-saver condition.’

  ‘This man is “on” permanently,’ said Beatrice. ‘The pressure on his brain is making him the most sapiens Homo who ever lived.’

  During the first scan, Beatrice Rossi not only observed, but directed. Under questioning from the Greek technicians, she was obliged to reveal her identity and then, at the delighted patient’s insistence, to take control of the process.

  They scanned him for three days. The two women, Beatrice and Elena, made quite a pair as they arrived each morning at the clinic. Down the corridor they would walk together towards the scanning room, while staff, journalists and patients parted before them: Beatrice Rossi with her white lab coat flying open to reveal caramel skirt and black boots and Elena Duranti, the mousy sidekick, in her woollen trousers and glasses, padding along beside her.

  On the fourth day they discovered the truth. The defining quality of human consciousness, the thing that had given the world Leonardo, Mozart, Shakespeare and had made humans little lower than the angels, was not an entity, but a connection. It was an open loop that ran between Glockner’s Isthmus and the site of episodic memory. It was a link between two pre-existent facult
ies. It was fragile; it was, in evolutionary terms, very young – aged in the low tens of thousands of years. Through its speed-of-light pathway, the isthmus sensation of selfhood was retuned, refined and enriched by memory. The impingement of the iron rod had set the Kebab Man’s loop to permanently ‘open’; it had compromised his ability to lapse into normal or ‘screen-saver’ consciousness, the state in which humans happily perform for most of their waking hours.

  For millions of years, the phenomenon of Glockner’s brief neural unity had existed side by side with the faculty of autobiographical memory – but in isolation, like France and England before the invention of the boat. Then a mistake – a mutation in a single cell division in a single individual some tens of thousands of years back – had established a link. It was genetically the most successful mutation of all time because the endowment of self-awareness – particularly a voluntary self-awareness – allowed its possessors to infer thought processes in others and to predict what they were going to do; it let them empathise, guess, anticipate, manipulate, out-think, out-fight – and, where necessary, co-operate.

  Drs Rossi and Duranti left the clinic in Athens to prepare their findings for publication. The following week, surgeons successfully removed the iron bar from the Kebab Man’s brain, and he regained the ability to lapse at will into a normal and less demanding state of consciousness.

  Elena and Beatrice sat on the runway, ready to take off for Rome.

  ‘It seems almost an anticlimax,’ said Beatrice Rossi, fastening her seat belt.

  ‘I know,’ said Elena. ‘I know. But the fun will come when everyone works out what it means for their own disciplines.’

  Over the Adriatic they toasted their discovery of why humans are as they are with Prosecco from plastic glasses.

  ‘You’re famous!’ wrote Bruno to Elena. ‘All those afternoons in your little hut. All those nights in your room reading! I am very proud.’

  Elena was offered the post of deputy director at the Institute for Human Research in Turin, with the promise that she would accede to the top job in due course. She was pleased to have a position that enabled her to carry on with the work that fascinated her and to have enough money for a comfortable apartment in a pleasant section of the city. She wished only that the good fortune had come a little earlier in her life, when she might have shared it with her parents.