The Third Antichrist (57 page)

‘Yes.’

‘On your own head be it, then.’

Bogdamic Camp, Romania
Saturday, 28 February 2010

92

Yola sat watching Sabir across the fire. ‘You’re hiding something from me. I’ve known it for months now. Whenever you look at me your eyes slide away from my face like a guilty child’s.’

It was the first time the two of them had been alone for weeks. There was a funeral at the camp, and all the men were off drinking, while the women were biding in with the corpse. Calque, for once, had agreed to join the men, with the vague notion of learning more about Romani customs for a book he intended to write when things got safely back to normal. Lemma was asleep in one of the caravans with her baby. Sabir, still in vigilant mode since the crisis at Ceausescu’s hunting lodge, had stayed behind, and had been duly surprised when Yola had appeared out of nowhere and sat across from him, easing her legs beneath her swollen belly.

‘They’re getting drunk again, I suppose?’

‘Don’t be so hard on us, Damo. It’s our habit. It’s our way of involving the dead for one final time in our lives. Of losing ourselves in them. Then they are gone. Forgotten.’

Sabir shifted uncomfortably. ‘I’d like to be forgotten.’

‘We could not forget you.’

He laughed. ‘Not unless I died.’

‘I would not forget you then, either.’

Sabir lowered his eyes. ‘I appreciate that. Sometimes I say foolish things I don’t mean. It’s best to ignore me.’

‘Are you still mourning Lamia?’

Sabir spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘No. I know she betrayed me. I know she intended to kill you out there in that quarry. Losing her has forced me to go back over our relationship and rethink the whole thing. I’m slowly beginning to understand what happened to us both. The tragedy of it.’

‘She did love you, though. She gave her life for you in the end.’

‘I know that too. That’s what makes the whole thing so bloody unconscionable.’

‘I’m sorry. I do not understand.’

‘So bloody unfair. So bloody dishonest.’

Yola raised her head. ‘You will find another woman, Damo.’

‘Where? Under a toadstool? Will I trip over her on the beach? Or maybe she’ll parachute out of a plane and I’ll see her fluttering down over my head like a butterfly?’

Yola shifted position. ‘The baby is kicking. Do you want to touch him again?’

‘If anyone sees me touch you like that I’ll be drummed out of the camp. They’ll probably chase me into Serbia and pin me up on a wanted board.’ Despite his protestations, Sabir got up and walked round to Yola’s side of the fire. He sat down and allowed her to place his hand on her belly.

‘There. Can you feel that?’

‘He’s like a cat in a postal sack.’

Yola laughed. Then her face lengthened and all laughter left it. ‘Tell me, Damo.’

Sabir snatched his hand away. He hunched forwards over his knees. ‘That was a stitch-up.’

‘A stitch-up?’

‘What you just did. When one person tricks another into doing something they don’t want to do.’

‘Didn’t you want to touch my baby?’

‘You know very well what I mean.’

Yola sighed. ‘So are you going to tell me?’

Sabir looked away from her. ‘I’ve got no choice. The thing’s been eating at me for months now. If I don’t spit it out I’ll choke on it.’

Yola closed her eyes.

Sabir took in a deep breath. ‘I don’t think your baby is the Parousia, Yola. I think I called it wrong. I think I’ve blown everything from the beginning and I’m only now beginning to understand just what damage I’ve done to everybody.’

Yola sat silently for a while, her eyes still shut. ‘Is this why you carry that pistol tucked into the back of your trousers, beneath your shirt?’

‘That’s to shoot myself with. If my mother can kill herself, why can’t I? She didn’t know she was a shaman, and I know I’m a fake one. Where’s the difference?’

Yola turned and stared at him – a no-nonsense stare that ate up the words he had just spoken and spat them out again where they belonged. ‘Tell me the quatrain, Damo. It is the only one of Nostradamus’s verses that you kept from us. We all trust you so much that I didn’t realize that you had done this until Alexi asked me how you actually knew our baby was special – was the Chosen One. Then it came to me. You had told us of all the verses bar this one. You had held this one back.’

‘Your baby
is
special.’

‘But not the Parousia.’

‘No. I no longer think so.’ Sabir kicked at the fire embers with the toe of his boot. ‘I’m sorry. I began to suspect this some months ago, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell you. I didn’t want to let you and everybody else down.’ He laughed. ‘So I talked myself back into believing it. It’s what people do when they’re scared to face the truth about themselves. When they’re in mourning for something that never existed in the first place.’

Yola laid a hand on his arm. ‘Listen to me, Damo. I am happy that my baby is to be a normal person. I prefer it this way. The other has been weighing on me. Particularly concerning Alexi. You know him. Almost better than anybody. He is not capable of keeping his feelings in check. One day he will blurt everything out to someone, and there will be a crisis. He will end up killing some innocent person. Or being killed.’

‘And you love him?’

‘He is mine. I am content with that. He is a good man. Mad. But good.’ She burst out laughing. ‘If O Del were to take him away from me, the hole Alexi left behind him would be so big that I would fall into it and drown. If Alexi ever grows up, he will be a mighty man.’

Sabir shook his head. ‘I never thought you’d take it this way. I thought you’d both turn on me. Reject me as your brother.’

‘One cannot reject a brother. It is impossible.’ Yola touched Sabir lightly on the side of the head with the back of her hand – it was something she would have done to no other man. ‘Don’t tell me the details of the verse now, Damo. I was wrong to ask it of you. Wrong to, as you call it, “stitch you up”. Gather everybody together and tell us tomorrow. By that time I will have prepared them. It will not come as such a shock.’

‘You are a wonderful woman, Yola.’

‘I’m an ordinary woman, Damo. Married to an ordinary man. And expecting an ordinary child. I am content with that.’

*

Sabir stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at his friends. Radu and Alexi were suffering from major hangovers – Calque merely looked a little pale. Lemma was nursing her baby beneath her shawl, and Yola was sitting next to her, watching.

‘Well, where to begin?’ It was the single most stupid thing Sabir could think of to say, but still he said it. He felt like yelling and tearing his hair out and running round in circles like a child having a tantrum.

Calque eased himself into a more comfortable position. ‘Why not just give us the quatrain? It’s something you should have done months ago, Sabir. In Mexico. Instead of carrying it around with you like a sackful of dirty washing. Then maybe...’ Calque brought himself up short. He knew just how far he could push Sabir. And where Lamia was concerned, he wasn’t on the firmest ground.

‘Thank you, Calque. I can always rely on you to tell it like it really is.’

Alexi and Radu seemed disconnected from the current conversation. Sabir was beginning to wonder when was the last time he hadn’t actually seen them drunk. The enforced idleness at the camp was having a very bad effect on them. No wonder Gypsy men had an average life expectancy of fifty years.

‘Very well then. It goes like this. And much good may it do all of you:

‘For God’s sake, Sabir. It’s in double Dutch, not French.’ Calque squinted at his friend. ‘I thought I knew my own language. But this is something else.’

‘Yes. It does seem a little elusive at first glance. But it’s in Old French all right. You’ll find nearly all the words in Frédéric Godefroy’s
Lexique de L’Ancien Français
. Paris and Leipzig 1901. Published by Bonnard and Salmon. I know because I checked.’

‘Enlighten us then, Oh Great One.’

Sabir groaned. ‘Well, that’s the problem. It’s open to interpretation.’

‘And you interpreted it one way? And now you’ve decided maybe you were wrong, and you ought to have interpreted it another?’

‘Something along those lines.’

Alexi gave a snort, stood up, stretched himself, and ambled away, clutching his stomach.

‘Your audience is abandoning you, Sabir. You’d better get on with it before you lose everybody.’

Sabir sighed. ‘This whole thing is giving me a bad feeling. I should never have embarked on interpreting this alone. To misquote Shakespeare, as you’ll no doubt tell me, I’ve been a very fool.’

‘Your reading, Sabir.’

Sabir closed his eyes. One could almost hear his photographic memory latching into gear. ‘First line.
Le Guion paranaistra l’apara
means “the Guide through-births the revealed one”. Which I take to mean that the Guide recognizes the Parousia.
Aparable
is Old French for clear or brilliant. Something which is decided by right. To
paranaître
is to bring to birth, in the sense of to make appear – to
faire paraître
– to make visible. Nostradamus uses the word
Guion
or
Guyon
a great many times in the course of his 942 quatrains – and it always means a leader, a guide, or a chief.’

Calque caught Yola’s eye and hunched his shoulders. Because they knew him so well, it was clear to both Calque and Yola that Sabir was hurrying through his reading on purpose – to disguise some awkward fact that did not suit him. It was not the first time they had witnessed this sort of behaviour from him.

‘But you’re our Guide, Sabir.’ Calque slowed down his delivery on purpose. He even deepened his voice a little to add more gravitas to the point he was trying to make. ‘You’re the one Nostradamus is talking about.’

Sabir gave him an old-fashioned look.

‘No. I mean that. You have been guiding us from the very beginning. It was you who recognized the quatrains. You who found the crystal skull. Both Ixtab and the Halach Uinic recognized you as a shaman/guide in Mexico. They saw you as one of Los Aluxes – the spiritual guardians left behind by the gods to protect the holy places of the earth from desecration, and then to prepare what remained of the world for a better future. So
you
should be the father of the Parousia, according to the verse. Not its protector. Not its through-birther, whatever that may be. I should have thought that much was clear. You have been purposefully misreading this line.’

‘Fuck off, Calque. I’m not in the humour for this.’

‘Damo.’ Yola was watching him intently. ‘Translate the rest.’

Sabir closed his eyes and returned to the memory place inside his head. ‘
Gitane guiternée guisandrie:
“A female Gypsy, tortured, cheated.” The word
guiterne
implies a stringed or fretted instrument of some sort – a whip, possibly, or a scourge. Maybe the sort of whip that was used to chastise Christ on the way to Calvary? But I’ve probably misread that too.’ He gave a long sigh, as of one forced to do something profoundly against his inclinations. ‘Next we have
Mira Bronzino
–
Mater Christi Samana
. That’s an easier one. It’s Latin. It means “the Mother of Christ is a Samana – look at Bronzino”. There’s an extra addition to this, however – the word Samana itself implies an ascetic. A teacher. The Gautama Buddha, for instance, was a Samana. Its strict meaning is “one who strives” – a good person. Saintly, even. Someone who follows the Buddha’s “middle way” between hedonism and austerity. Not a complete ascetic, in other words. Someone who has known the pleasures of the flesh and not rejected them outright. A sort of Mary Magdalene figure.’

Sabir was getting into the swing of things. His gaze was on fire. ‘In the Pistis Sophia, the greatest of all Gnostic writings, Jesus is asked sixty-four questions. Thirty-nine of these come from the Magdalene, who is described thus: “Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all the mysteries of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the kingdom of heaven more than all thy brethren.” This is the woman whom Jesus cured of the seven demons. The woman who may have been Jesus’s wife. The greatest portrait of her is by Agnolo Bronzino – the man mentioned in the verse. Here. I have a copy of it with me. Look at it while I describe it to you.’