Shadrach in the Furnace

22

In Istanbul a few days later he has no guide, and he wanders that intricate city of many levels alone, confused, defeated by the complexities of getting from one place to another, wishing that some Meshach Yakov would discover him here, some Bhishma Das. But none does. The map he gets at his hotel is useless, for there are few street signs, and whenever he veers off a main boulevard he immediately gets lost in a maze of anonymous alleyways. There are taxis, but the drivers seem to speak only Turkish, tourism having perished during the Virus War; they can follow self-evident instructions — “Haghia Sophia” — “Topkapi” — but when he wants to go to the ancient Byzantine ram-pan on the outskirts of the city he is unable to make any driver understand, and in the end he has to resort to asking to be taken to the Kariya Mosque on the city’s outskirts, and getting from there to the nearby wall on foot, by guesswork.

Istanbul is gritty, grimy, archaic, alien, and irritating. Shadrach is fascinated by its architectural mix, the opulent Ottoman palaces and the glorious many-minareted mosques and the eighteenth-century wooden houses and the sweeping twentieth-century avenues and the battered fragments of old Constantinople that jut like broken teeth from the earth, bits of aqueducts and cisterns and basilicas and stadiums. But the city is too chaotic for him. It depresses and repels him despite the powerful appeal of its rich-textured history. Even now more than a million people live here, and Shadrach finds it hard to cope with such a density of humanity. There are the usual dismaying organ-rot tragedies on display in the streets, and an extraordinary number of feral children, some only three or four years old, trooping like desperate scavengers everywhere. And there are Citpols moving in wary pairs wherever he turns. Watching him, he is convinced. Is it just paranoia? He doesn’t think so. He thinks that Genghis Mao, unhappy over having given his physician leave to roam the world, is keeping him under surveillance so that he can be brought back to Ulan Bator at the Khan’s whim. Shadrach had not expected to be able to vanish totally — indeed, returning to Ulan Bator is definitely central to his emerging plan of action, though he still does not know when the right moment to go back will arrive — but he does not like the idea of being spied upon. After two days in Istanbul, a perfunctory tour of the standard sights, he flies abruptly to Rome.

He spends a week there, making his headquarters in an ancient hotel, mellow and luxurious, a few blocks from the Baths of Diocletian. Rome too is densely populated, and its urban pace is frenetic, but for some reason there are fewer scars of the Virus War and its nightmare aftermath here, and Shadrach begins to relax, to ease himself into a comfortable Mediterranean rhythm of life: he strolls the splendid streets, he sips aperitifs at sidewalk cafes, he gorges himself on pasta and young white wine at obscure trattorias, and all the traumas of the Trauma Ward become insignificant. Truly this is the Eternal City, capable of absorbing all of time’s heaviest blows and never losing its resilience. He sees, of course, the imperial monuments, the Arch of Titus that commemorates the Roman sacking of Jerusalem, the temples and palaces of the Capitoline and Palatine, the magnificent jumble that is the Forum, the haunted wreck of the Colosseum. He visits St. Peter’s, and, looking up toward the Vatican, muses on Genghis Mao’s mocking, corrosive offer to make him Pope. He does the Sistine Chapel, the Etruscan collection in the Villa Giulia, the Borghese gallery, and a dozen of the best baroque churches. His energies seem to grow rather than flag as he pursues the infinite antiquities of Rome. Oddly, he finds himself responding most intensely not to the celebrated classic monuments but to the ancient gray tenements, steep and gaunt, in Trastevere and the Jewish quarter. Are these the very tenements of Caesar’s time, mansions once, slums now? Is it possible that they are still inhabited after two thousand years? Why not? The old Romans knew how to build six stories high, and even higher, and built of durable stone. And it would not have been hard, despite the sackings and the fires and the revolutions, to keep those buildings intact, to rebuild, replaster, patch the old and make it new, constantly to refurbish and restore. So these gray towers may once have housed the subjects of Tiberius and Caligula, and Shadrach gets a pleasant little shiver from the thought that they have been continuously occupied across the ages. On second thought, it probably is not so; nothing, he decides, endures that long in daily use. These are more likely twelfth-century buildings, fourteenth-, even seventeenth-. Old enough but not truly ancient. Except in the sense that anything that antedates the rise of Genghis Mao, that has survived out of that former world, that prediluvian epoch, is ancient.

He wishes he could stay in Rome forever. A pity, he thinks, that Genghis Mao wasn’t serious about the papacy. But after a week Shadrach resolves to go onward. It is too pleasant here, too comfortable; besides, as he downs a Strega at his favorite cafe one warm humid evening, he notices two Citpols at a table at a cafe on the opposite corner, not drinking, not talking, merely watching him. Are they closing in, tightening their net? Will they pick him up tomorrow or the day after and tell him he must return to his master in Ulan Bator? He buys a ticket to London, cancels it at the last moment, and boards a plane that is about to leap over the pole to California.

And suddenly he is in San Francisco. A toy city, white and precious, rising on formidable hills and girdled by a sparkling bay. He has never been here before. Odd how he expects famous cities to be gigantic; this one, like Jerusalem, is surprisingly small. Drop it down in Rome, in Nairobi, in crazy sprawling Istanbul, and it would vanish altogether. Surprisingly cold, too. California to him has always been a place of swimming pools and palm trees, of football games played in bright warm sunshine on wondrous January afternoons, but that California of the mind must be somewhere else, probably down by Los Angeles; San Francisco in June has a sullen late-winter feel, with sharp insistent winds and gray, clinging fogs. Even when the fog burns away in the afternoon and the city glitters in brilliant light under an intense cloudless sky, the air still carries thechill of the ocean breezes, and Shadrach huddles into his inadequate summer jacket.

There are no ancient palaces to see here, no gazelles and ostriches ru