SECOND BODY

“Live slow, die fast.
“Live fast, die slow”
Words on a T-shirt

PART ONE

1. Three Wise Waters from Ephesus

In a handsome yellow bus circling the streets of Belgrade as a gift from the Japanese government came the sound of a mobile phone. Mozart. A middle-aged woman in a black astrakhan fur cap the tufts of which joined seamlessly with her raven hair began rummaging hastily through her purse and pockets. The mobile was nowhere to be found. It rang again. Again Mozart. The sound came from the pocket of a boy standing next to the woman.

- That’s my mobile ringing in your pocket – said Lisa Swift (for it was she) with a slight foreign accent.

- Tell me about it! – snapped the boy and at that very moment Mozart resounded from his pocket once more.

- Why doesn’t the gentleman answer the call if the phone is his? – asked Lisa ironically with the same strange accent.

The boy hesitated for a moment or two as though he were waiting for something. The bus was slowing down as it approached the stop at Terazije. When it came to a halt, the boy took the ladies’ Nokia from his pocket and answered it:

- Hello! Yes?Then he got off the bus and handed the mobile to Lisa with the words:

- It’s for you. Your husband!Lisa screamed, in a foreign language somehow, leapt from the carriage at the last moment, took the phone and yelled a frantic “Hello!” into the receiver. There was nobody at the other end.

Of course it could not have been me, her husband, on the phone, for I had been laid to rest forty days before at the Belgrade cemetery at 50 Roosevelt Street.

***

When the first weeks of mourning were over, Elisabeth Swift, my wife, or rather my widow, held a commemoration service and went off to the village of Babe at the foot of the Kosmaj mountain where I had a family house. There were some legal formalities about my estate there that she had to take care of. She was having breakfast on the porch covered in tiny windows of all colors. Memories of our life together were passing through her mind, first of all the unusual circumstances under which we had met and married.This is how it all took place.

First I have to say that I had reached the age when we realize that we have our bad days every year. Mine flocked around my birthday. Then I would become a baby again, catching my thoughts like flies. On one of those days I opened my e-mail and found a letter of the kind written by women offering an erotic relationship. The letter-cliché was signed by a certain Elisabeth Swift whom I had never heard of before. She had added her e-mail address as well. Miss Swift wrote:

Hi!
I think we had correspondence a long time ago, if it was not you, I am sorry. If it was, I could not answer you because my Mozilla mail manager was down for a long time and I could not fix it only with my friend’s help, so I got the email’s address out for me…
I hope it was you I corresponded with and that you are still interested, as I am, though I realize much time has passed since then.
I really don’t know where to start.
Maybe, you could tell me a little about yourself since I lost our early letters, your appearance, age, hobbies and are you still in the search?
If it was you, I wrote to and you are interested to get to know me better I have a profile at: http://ermo.org.
Don’t really know what else to say for now I hope this is the right address. Let me know if you are interested. And I hope you won’t run when you see my picture.
Au revoir
your devoted reader
Elisabeth Imola Swift

I read and forgot the letter with a smile that authors keep for their female readers. But Lisa Imola Swift did not. Soon after that she appeared in my life in person.

If you’re an author, you will probably have women who enjoyed the love you described in a tale or men whom you took into your novel for a month for a mere several hundred dinars decide to send you a small present. All these gifts are of insignificant face value, but of immense virtual weight. And so over the years I came to possess all sorts of things: a Russian house ghost of painted stone, Greek rosary beads, a glass saber full of Georgian cognac, a folding effigy, the pipe of some reader from France (which I didn’t use for other people’s pipes are not to be smoked), a fine box of Havana cigars that I smoked with gusto even though I knew that the tobacco was shaped by South American women rolling it across their ample thighs.

Six months after I received the letter and forgot about it Miss Swift contacted me once more and asked if we could meet, for she had a gift for me. She was in town. We met at the Que Passa? café in Kralja Petra Street. Lisa Imola Swift turned out to be younger than I expected, very businesslike and successful in her profession, and from an equally successful family. Her real name could barely be pronounced: Amava Arzuaga Eulohia Ihar-Swift. Imola was her nickname, and Elisabeth her name. Her mother originated from the noble Ihar family of Aragon, and Lisa inherited from her the habit of falling asleep with a book in her hands, and her paternal grandfather was from England, where in a moment of revelation he bought a theater box next to that of the royal family and made a fortune leasing out the seats to anyone who wanted to be seen beside royalty at performances. From her male ancestors Lisa learned that she could arrange her life, her actions and relationships like a garden: like an orchard she planted and watered it by design. And grafted…

When I first learned of all that, and knowing that she was an archaeologist, I thought she was interested in my work as a historian. But no, she dumped a bunch of my novels onto the table asking me to sign them. That was the reason she had come.From Turkey, where she occasionally worked on the excavation of ancient cities, she had brought me a present of a tiny bottle that I first thought held some scented oil from Asia Minor. I opened it and took a sniff. It had no smell. My reader laughed.

- It’s water – she said – you’re supposed to drink it.The vial really did contain water, I drank it and then heard the tale that goes with it and is well worth listening to.

- Ephesus is an ancient town in Asia Minor on the shore of the Aegean Sea – Elisabeth told me – and is famous as a port where caravan goods were unloaded for centuries to continue their journey across the vastness of the sea. The town was also long known as the cult place of “great mothers”. First it held the temple of Kibela, Phrygian mother of the gods and nature. When it was destroyed, the same stone was used to build the temple of the Greek goddess Artemis, eternal virgin and protector of nature and children. Here, in Ephesus, the Virgin Mother ended her life in this world. The “Gospel according to John” (19:25-27) says:

“Standing beside the cross of Jesus were His mother, His mother’s sister, the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene. And When Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing near, He said to His mother, “Mother, there is your son!” Then He said to His disciple, “There is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
And that is how it took place. After the death and resurrection of Christ, his mother, the Virgin Mary and Saint apostle John, the one testifying to all this, went to Ephesus together and took up residence there. And there they ended their lives in this world. Then on the foundations and from the material of Artemis’s temple in Ephesus a church was raised, and then a basilisk, the remains of which can be seen to this day. Moslems built a mosque on that same spot, one of the few mosques in the world with no minaret. It too has been left only with “female” markings, for a minaret resembles the male energy reaching for the sky, and the dome a breast offering itself to the stars and the Moon. And so the “great virgin mothers” passed on their stone to one another through the centuries and the millennia.However, Lisa’s story did not end there. Some time in the 19^th century a German nun, a certain Ana Katarina Emerich, dreamed of Ephesus and in this town that she had never seen the exact spot in which, under a layer of soil, the house that the Virgin Mary had spent her last year on Earth stood. The nun published this dream in a book based on which Lazarene priests dug up the house on the designated spot. This building is believed to be the one in which the Mother of God lived and presented herself to Ephesus. Her house has a kitchen and behind it a bedroom, and beside the house is a medicinal spring. They call it the “Spring of the Virgin Mary”. It has three finely walled-in streams of water, each of which has a separate stone niche. And a secret. Namely, one stream bestows health upon those that drink, the second happiness, and the third love. The legend does not say exactly which of the three streams is the one to bring happiness, which grants health and which bears the gift of love. And it would do no good to taste of each of the waters, for medicinal is only the one to quench the first thirst.

Lisa drank from the middle stream, and caught some of the water from the stream on the left into a small vial to bring me as a gift. But this was still not the end of the story. As she was filling the vial she noticed a note lodged between two stones. In the hope of learning more about the secrets of the spring, she pulled it out and read it. The note contained a number and something resembling a code:

Sorriso di Kibela: 1266
Slightly disappointed, she wrapped the bottle in the note and moved on.Her work took her through Munich and she spent a few nights at the hotel Kempinski – The Four Seasons. She decided to enjoy herself for a while. For breakfast she had champagne and strawberries, and ate lunch at an inn full of Russian ladies and couples, with the inscription: BREAKFAST IS SERVED UNTIL 4 PM
DAS FRUHSTUCK BIS ZUM 16 UHR WIER SERVEN!
After lunch she went to the Pinaquoteque to see the earliest computers and collection of chairs, bought a mixture of tea named “Snowy Waltz” at Dallmayer’s and had a meal of oysters. She bought two teacups for her future marriage. They were large, of light material and transparent. She returned to the hotel tired but happy, swam four-five lengths in the rooftop pool at the Kempinski and went down to her room. On the table she found a hotel business card with an indication of the weather that awaited her the next day, and the other side of the card had an offer for pleasant dreams: a full half dozen of pillows that the guests could order and receive the same evening. They had at their disposal ordinary pillows filled with wool, anti-allergy masterpieces of the 21^st century, as well as those filled with horsehair, additional down pillows, some decorative tubular models and cushions stuffed with bore bristles. At the “Four Seasons” hotel the guests could chose their “good night” pillows and in them different dreams. You could almost order a French, Russian, English, Arabic or Greek dream. My lady friend chose one of the cushions filled with bristles, since she liked her pillows firm. Whether the pillow was the cause, or because of the memory of her trip to Ephesus so recently, she dreamt the Aegean Sea full of cold yesterday’s rain, and then dreamed of drinking water from the Spring of the Virgin Mary, from the faucet at the right. When she woke up she had the idea that she might, if she tasted water from all three of the streams in her sleep, be able to discern which would bring happiness, which love, and which health. In the hope of dreaming of the Ephesus Spring of the Virgin Mary once more, she ordered a new pillow the following evening, this time stuffed with horsehair. But nothing happened. She didn‘t dream of the waters in Ephesus that or the following night, although she had changed her pillow yet again. And so her pilgrimage ended somewhere in Germany on a heavy woolen cushion.

Before she moved on, Lisa decided to pass through Belgrade and bring me her gift – the vial of water from Ephesus. She gave it to me with the caution that the streams of the Virgin Mother’s wondrous spring bring not only good, but a message as well.

- The great Mother Nature reveals one of her secrets to us through the water. Water is eternal and wise – Lisa concluded her tale – it tells us the truth that we are as loathe to accept as all other wisdom:

Your happiness need not always accompany your health, nor your love.
And that is how this matter began. We had a fine laugh over the letter that she had slipped me through the Internet and not half a year had gone by when we were married. Although I had the feeling that she was more in love with my books than with myself.On our first evening together she sang me her favorite song: Let’s go straight to number One… kissed me on the neck and asked:

- Can you read kisses? Kisses are like love letters. They can be read, and they can be tossed away unopened. A kiss can mean hello! Or good night, farewell or good morning! It means goodbye, brings betrayal and death, or illness, extends a welcome, remember me or bon voyage! The harbinger of joy or misfortune. Through a kiss one of our bodies passes into the other.

I replied that I had read the letter she had written on my neck, though it was written in English, and took her to bed.

2. The Ring of Living Stone

There’s a square in Paris that is the most famous jewelry store in Europe. PlaceVendome has a monument in the middle with a history so complicated that it can barely be memorized. In writing it down I listed twenty or so various dates that had changed its appearance and fate. It is surrounded by a circle of the world’s most well-known jewelers. They have tiny windows like necklace boxes from which the most precious stones of the continent glisten throughout the day and evening, and at night they all disappear behind bars and steel curtains. When you cut across the square from the Seine, left of the corner is the shop held by Cartier. First you ring the bell and then wait for a perfectly dressed young man to step out and ask what you’d like to see. One June morning a pair of tourists walked into the shop. The young man that greeted them was told by the lady in her English-French that she would like to see the rings. Although the ground floor had small windows with necklaces, collars and rings, the youth didn’t let the customers take a look. He looked them over and sized them up very quickly before sending them upstairs to the further competence of his superiors. She was wearing a black satin hat, a very light Alberta Feretti fur coat and Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. These provided a very fine setting for her nails painted bright red – Ferrari and lips of the same color. She wore four strings of pearls around her neck. Her companion was hatless, in a Fendi coat. Instead of a tie he wore beneath his chin a decorative button that the young man, though knowledgeable in such matters, was unable to assess. He knew neither its value nor its origin. As they climbed the circular staircase, the young man gave an unnoticeable sign to those upstairs that customers were on the way and with that his work was done.

And so my wife Lisa Swift and I began the search for a ring of stone that was to mark our lives, and our death as well.The second floor was very roomy and had arched windows in niches looking down on the square. Each of the niches had a table and two armchairs for customers on this side and a view of the Place Vendome. They asked us to sit and wait a moment. Miss Anat Asis the Cartier expert would be free to come to our attendance in a little while. We sat and looked out upon the square instead of the jewelry displayed all around us. That didn’t seem to be the custom here. Two men were sitting in the niche next to ours. They were talking quietly across the table. The older one was constantly moving his foot under the table as though he were writing. We realized that he was terribly tense underneath his calm exterior.

Lisa took charge with determination. She said without hesitation that we would have a female conversation here and now instead of male. That meant that I would leave it to her to explain our arrival in her Francanglais, although my French was incomparably better than hers. Actually I had the function of a walking dictionary of the French language for Lisa in Paris more and more frequently.

- You always have too many words. You speak in sentences. Nobody needs sentences today. A few hints are sufficient, with pauses between them left to be filled. Like SMS. This is the 21^st century, you have to take shortcuts, and I’m better at that. Besides, we’ve already heard that a woman will be on the other side of the table, so the two of us will reach an understanding faster than you and she.

At that moment Miss Anat arrived, a plump lady of ripe middle age, dark, with strong brows and eyes that had seen the pyramids more frequently than we. She had the full body of a Venus of Willendorf and the beautiful head of a Venus de Milo. She sat down in her chair across from us, and folded her arms that bore two very discreet bracelets.

- What can I do for you? she asked and smiled for the first and last time during our entire visit. Her smile was at least ten years younger than she was and looked like it had been borrowed. Smiles were as expensive as jewelry here.

- A ring – blurted Lisa and pointed towards me.

- I’m sorry – and Miss Anat whispered to Lisa – does he take off his ring when you make love?

- Yes.

- That’s easy then.

Miss Anat made a widespread gesture with her arm and added:

- Choose any of them! Each of them will look at least ten times better and more expensive at home than it does here!

- But I’ve already chosen!

- ?

- I saw it at a friend’s. She told us that it had been bought at Cartier’s, so we stopped by to see if one like it could be purchased here. It’s made of stone and has only a narrow circular band of gold.

- You say it was bought from us? Describe it in a bit more detail.

- The ring is bio-active. They call it a “bioring” and say it’s made of “living stone”, whatever that means.

- Bio active? Would you say that in English please?

The ladies switched to English which Miss Anat spoke just as well as she did French and with the same kind of aloofness as though she was keeping it at a distance like a sizzling pan.

- That means the ring can change color – Lisa said – do you have something like that to offer?

- You say the ring changes color? How does it achieve that?

- It’s simple. Depending on the bio-energy given out by the human organism, the ring will show the state of your body and your mood.

- You must mean the rings that were sold from 1977 that were called “mood”, and made of liquid crystal.

- No. It’s a stone ring that works on the principle of ultra-short wavelengths emitted by our organism.

- And that really works?

- Perfectly. We’ve tried it. Although it always surprises you a bit. If it turns red on your finger that means you’re happy. When it’s blue you’re in love, and if it turns green you’re healthy.

- Those three colors?

- No, there’s a fourth as well. If it turns black that means it’s showing nothing. That it’s shut off, not receiving impressions. That’s the case with my husband. He kept putting it on his finger but to no avail, the ring would always turn black and show nothing. It’s the same with perfume. It doesn’t work on my husband’s body.

- Excuse me? – said Miss Anat, unsure if she had understood my wife’s comment correctly and added:

- I don’t understand. You said that you’d like to buy one of those rings for your husband, yet you’ve just concluded that it doesn’t react to his organism.

- What’s so strange about that, dear lady? We’re trying to find a ring just like it that will react on his hand.

- Very, very interesting, madam… unfortunately, I believe we don’t have such an item on sale, but I would kindly ask you to wait a moment while I go and check.

And Miss Anat rose and withdrew.

- Unbelievable – whispered Lisa when we were alone again – it seems we’ve come in vain. Somebody was mistaken when they told us it was made by Cartier.

Miss Anat returned with more questions.

- No, I can give you my final answer – we do not manufacture and have never manufactured such rings. But please, tell me madam, where did this friend of yours buy it? I would be very grateful. Could you give her a call? Feel free to use our telephones, they are at your disposal!

Lisa took her Nokia mobile from her purse and typed out a message. Several moments later the sound of waves came from the device and Lisa read and informed us of the news.

- My friend received it as a gift from Germany.And with these words the conversation was over, Miss Anat saw us out and mentioned that she would be very grateful if we could provide her with more information on the “stone ring” and we walked over to the nearby Ritz where you can choose between five different kinds of coffee on the terrace. Lisa ordered an Indian brand, I one from South America and we spent the rest of the afternoon taking pictures by mobile of the flawless garden of one of the most famous hotels in the world.

Drinking Perrier with her coffee, Lisa showed right there, on the terrace of the Ritz, that she found it difficult to come to terms with failure. She called the friend in whose possession we had seen the ring and asked for the address of the person that had given it to her.

A month later I had a “stone ring” on my finger. Lisa got in touch with the person from Germany whose address she had received from our friend. It turned out that the woman that had obtained the ring was once a student of mine and she sent myself and Lisa another ring just like the one we had already seen and had searched for in Paris in vain. It arrived in a tiny little bag made of rice cloth. With it came a note explaining what each color meant. Things that we had already known and tried out. Lisa was exited and placed the ring on my finger herself, but the result was complete disappointment. On my finger this ring, too, was black. It neither changed color, nor did it show a thing.

And this was written in the instructions that we received with the ring, in case it turned black:Black – nothing…

3. The Mantra

I remember that September on a rug in the woods well.

It’s autumn, and the forests have their period. Like clouds through an opaque night above the water, invisible thoughts drift deep within me. I’m sitting on my shadow like Robinson on his desert island; on a blanket in the middle of a meadow near the village of Babe at the foot of the Kosmaj mountain. On the slope above me is an old German bunker from 1943. All covered in brush and small firs. Beside me are my wife Lisa Swift and my school friend Teodor Ilić Češljar. It’s funny, but he has the same name as a painter from the 18^th century. Teodor is gazing at Lisa with a look that she was very familiar with in men and that she described accurately to me once. It was a look somewhere between a gynecological checkup and the assessment of a thoroughbred mare.When I met Teodor at school, his father has a smithy in the village of Babe. His son Teodor was strong as an anvil and divided earnings the peasant way, into “female money” (from poultry, milk, cheese, eggs and vegetables) and “male money” (from horses, wheat, liquor, pigs and fish). Teodor didn’t live off either of these earnings. It was told that after an unhappy love he went to stay with an aunt in Italy, then wrote from Paris and finally returned home, to the village of Babe where he was in the blacksmith business for a while, having inherited it from his father and his grandfather. And now we met after a whole decade and were sitting together. I had only just introduced him to my wife. Since it was the first time in a long while that we had the chance to chat we weren’t exactly bothered by her presence. The conversation was such that she just looked on in wonder. Besides she barely even understood our spirited discussion in a language she was still but learning.

First I asked him what he did for a living, since he had closed the smithy long ago. He told me that he was a trader.

- What do you trade?

- I sell verses.

- You write poems?

- Oh no!

- So you print books of poetry?

- Not that, either. I sell oral verses.

- How do you mean oral verses? You play the gusle?

- What does gusle mean? – asked Lisa in amazement.

- It’s hard to explain – I explained to her, and Teodor in turn explained to us both:

- I inherited several verses from a distant cousin in Italy, which had been left to her who knows by whom.

- Are several verses enough to live on?

- Yes, because each of them is worth gold. In Italian families a father would on his deathbed leave each son part of such a verse (as though it were the Bible), or give such a verse to his daughter as dowry, as though it were an anchor.

- What kind of verses are they to be worth gold? – Lisa joined the discussion – Shakespeare’s white verse that he didn’t print?

- No, not that. These verses are much, much older. They are passed on like folk songs from mouth to mouth.

- Which language are they in? – I asked.

- That I don’t know, and I can tell you that I don’t understand them at all. Language is always older than verses.

- Wait, wait a minute – interrupted Lisa – I don’t understand a thing you’re talking about. Slow down.

Although we switched to English, I didn’t understand either, so I asked:

- What’s the purpose of verses you can’t understand?

- I still don’t grasp what you’re saying in English, either – Lisa interjected once more – does that mean not even a buyer, myself, for example, would understand these verses of yours, Teodor?

- Why would I buy a verse I don’t understand? – I asked him.

- You don’t need to understand it. The important thing is that your wife will. For example, this here Lisa. The verses I’m speaking of have a very practical use. They’re worth more by night than by day anyway. I could let you, too, have one of them for a price.

- What would I need that for?

- They’re something every man needs. And a woman could make good use of them, too.

- Well what are they for? – Lisa wanted to know.

- While you’re reciting the verse the movements of the tongue are such that during oral pleasuring of a woman they bring on her climax.

- Wait, wait – exclaimed Lisa again – what is he saying?

- And can a woman pleasure a man the same way? – I immersed myself in the matter.

- Yes, I’ve already told you, but I haven’t tried it myself.

- Well do women buy this verse from you? – Lisa enquired.

- They do, but less often.

- How much do you charge them? – I asked.

- Slightly less, just as I would you.

- Even though I’m not female?

- You’re not female, but you’re a school friend. And you have a wife.

At these words Lisa embraced me and whispered in my ear:

- Buy me one, please, buy me one!

- And how much would it cost me with the discount?

- It would cost you two thousand euros.

- Two thousand euros for one verse?

- Yes. And that’s not expensive considering what it brings. Besides, that’s the price for you, like I said. It’s higher for others. Will you take it or leave it?

- I’ll leave it. Thanks a lot. As a school friend you could give me this miraculous verse of yours for free. Whisper it to my ear!

- Not a chance, don’t even dream of it.

- Admit that you’re kidding.

- Of course I’m kidding. It’s much more effective than that. If a woman whispers this mantra to you in a kiss, that means she wants a child with you and is sure to conceive. The mantra is called Kibela’s smile or whatever you like.

- Buy me it! Buy me Kibela’s smile! – Lisa Swift barged into our conversation, but my response to it all was silence. Then Teodor turned the conversation around:

- And what do you do now? Do you still write novels? – he asked.

- Of course I do and you’re well aware of that.

- I have to tell you something. Your books were much better before.

- Never mind – I retorted – they said something similar to Byron as well.

- What did they say to Byron? – Lisa wanted to know.

- Venetians have been saying for centuries that their town used to be much prettier. At the beginning of the 19^th century they said that to Byron as well. He replied: never mind, Venice has a new kind of prettiness now.

- I don’t understand a thing in your books – said Teodor.

- Why should you understand? My books are like a buffet. You take what you want and how much you want from the book, whichever end of the table you start from. I offered you freedom of choice, and you were confused by the plentitude and freedom like Buridan’s ass that perished between two stacks of hay, unable to decide which one to eat first.

- I don’t mean just you. I’m talking about your profession of writer. You are unnecessary today. A dinosaur. The most you can achieve in literature at the moment is for your novel to resemble the retelling of a “reality show”. What romance novels were in the 18^th and 19^th century TV porn channels are today, from which we learn what lies underneath when a man is wearing only a woman. Why bother with a book when you can see it all live? Besides, the ungifted are in these days. Authors don’t use their talent when they write any more, so it’s impossible to tell if they have any or not. That’s undoubtedly the authors’ gain, and the readers’ loss and the reader is therefore leaving. Both you and your literary brethren…

- Still, I do like to take a book to bed, or on vacation, I like to get room and board in a novel for 15 days at a moderate price – Lisa Swift interjected into this dispute on literature in the 21^st century.

Then I stood up to leave, my legs aching from sitting on a blanket beneath a tree. As we parted I addressed Teodor once more:

- As for your mantras, I can tell you that I know they’re no good unless they’re combined with something else.

- With what? – Lisa asked as Teodor mystically remained silent.

- They say in Turkey that wise water goes with such mantras to complete the effect.

- The wise water that I brought you as a gift? – Lisa marveled.

- The same. But that’s not all. The tale of the wise water and your magical verse began many centuries ago, my dear Teodor…

At this Teodor also rose abruptly, took his leave from us very politely and departed bearing his secret and his rug…

***

When we were alone once more, Lisa took me to a nearby inn, grabbed me by both hands, sat me down in the garden and while we were waiting for coffee shot out:

- Tell. Quick, tell me all you know, that you haven’t told me.

- What haven’t I told you?

- You haven’t told me anything, and you know all. You know after how many paces a man ends up on his own… Why does the ring have no effect on you? Only on you?

- I don’t know. But I have two presumptions.

- Put the case! – Lisa cut in – presume!

- One time in Africa we were taken to a Berber village and our fortunes were told by a sorceress with a live snake around her neck. When it was my turn she looked into my palm and my ear and fled.

- What does that mean?

- I suppose my energy and hers cancelled each other out. I don’t know.

- You mean your energy and the energy of the ring also cancel each other out?

- Perhaps.

- Do you really think the ring is afraid of you like that fortuneteller in Africa? Ridiculous.

- It’s not the ring, it’s me. I prevent the energy from pouring out of me and into the ring.

- Why do you do that?

- I don’t do it purposefully and consciously. That’s just the way it is. I’m hindered by the fact that I know too much about the ring. Working at the Venetian Marciana archive and the Moscow manuscript collection of Rumjancov I came across information telling that the ring was used for sorcery in the past.

- And you’re only just telling me that now? Will you tell me what you wrote about the ring?

- No.

- Why not?

- Because I didn’t write anything and have no intention of doing so.

- How come? Isn’t that in the domain of your professional research?

- Yes and no. It’s in the domain of something that ancient authors call an imperial secret, and they say that “imperial secrets should be kept”.

- But you’ll tell your wife this secret, won’t you?

- Yes, but not because you’re my wife.

Lisa took offence, looked at me in amazement and asked:

- Why then?

- Because with the ring and that water from the Spring of the Virgin Mary you’re on the brink of discovering the secret yourself, so we’ll discover it together from now on, as far as we’re able and permitted to. The secret is called the second body.

- Pray tell!

- First I could tell you something that you, in England, are particularly sensitive to. I’m talking about a secret of which the “Holy Grail” is but a part. You know the story of the Holy Grail, of course. It’s enough to take just one look at the “shroud of Constantinople” now found in Italy and called the “shroud of Turin” to notice that this mantle seems to bear the imprint of the front and back of Christ’s body. I’m certain you know that some eyewitnesses from ancient times were horrified when this shroud was shown to them as the “Holy Grail” and they saw that the imprint portrays a person with four arms, two heads and four legs. Regardless of the authenticity of the shroud, the story of the Grail can be interpreted differently, as a symbol of the duplicity of the body of Christ. Namely, as a tale of the fact that Christ had a second body as well. Besides, that’s written quite clearly in the Bible. You just need to read carefully.

- And what did you find in the archives?

- That some persons in the past researched the question of whether we also have two bodies, like Jesus did. A woman tried this in Venice around 1770, and a monk in Sent Andrea, in Hungary, around 1749. Perhaps it can be supposed that there were other attempts of this kind as well in those cities at the time. For example, it has been recorded that a harpsichordist, composing music in Venice for clocks and street organs, tried in vain to perform sorcery this way, with a ring, holy water and the chanting of mantras. He tried to determine whether man has a second body or not. All those people did so with utmost naivety, but I believe their efforts at least have the value of brave steps on a thorny road.

- Well did they come to any conclusions in their sorcery?

- The ring sent confusing messages. Those present had the impression that the ring was lying.

- Well was it?

- I’ll tell you the story, and you decide for yourself.