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  Septimania, Jonathan Levi’s first novel since 1992’s critically acclaimed A Guide for the Perplexed, is a major work—a story at once personal and mythic, with themes as large as the universe and as small as an appleseed.

  On a spring afternoon in 1978 in the loft of a church outside Cambridge, England, an organ tuner named Malory loses his virginity to a dyslexic math genius named Louiza. When Louiza disappears, Malory follows her trail to Rome. There, the quest to find his love gets sidetracked when he discovers he is the heir to the Kingdom of Septimania, given by Charlemagne to the Jews of eighth-century France. In the midst of a Rome reeling from the kidnappings and bombs of the Red Brigades, Malory is crowned King of the Jews, Holy Roman Emperor, and possibly Caliph of All Islam.

  Over the next fifty years, Malory’s search for Louiza leads to encounters with Pope John Paul II, a band of lost Rumanians, a magical Bernini statue, Haroun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, an elephant that changes color, a shadowy U.S. spy agency and one of the 9/11 bombers, an appleseed from the original Tree of Knowledge, and the secret history of Isaac Newton and his discovery of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. It is the quest of a Candide for love and knowledge, and the ultimate discovery that they may be unified after all.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in

  2016 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the address above.

  LONDON

  30 Calvin Street

  London E1 6NW

  [email protected]

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Levi

  “When I Paint My Masterpiece”

  Written by Bob Dylan

  Copyright © 1971 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1999 by Big Sky Music.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  “The Inferno of Dante”

  Translated by Robert Pinsky

  Copyright © 1996 All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

  Reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1333-8

  To my parents,

  Judith and Isaac Levi,

  who lifted me onto their shoulders

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1/0

  Chapter 1/1

  Chapter 1/2

  Chapter 1/3

  Chapter 1/4

  Chapter 1/5

  Chapter 1/6

  Chapter 1/7

  Part Two

  Chapter 2/0

  Chapter 2/1

  Chapter 2/2

  Chapter 2/3

  Chapter 2/4

  Chapter 2/5

  Chapter 2/6

  Chapter 2/7

  Part Three

  Chapter 3/0

  Chapter 3/1

  Chapter 3/2

  Chapter 3/3

  Chapter 3/4

  Chapter 3/5

  Chapter 3/6

  Chapter 3/7

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love.

  —Song of Songs

  1/0

  3 September 1666

  ne garden. One tree. Two backs against the trunk, two bums on the grass, two mouths sharing a pipe after dinner.

  London is burning. Plague is riding flame and smoke, and the early August sun radiates death north to Cambridge. Henry VIII stands in stony guard over the silent Great Court of Trinity College, students dismissed until further notice. Further north still, in the garden of Mrs. Hannah Newton Smith, one of these students, her strange scholar of a son, sits with a friend. I am that friend, a foreigner—some traits cannot be disguised. But a foreigner who can think of no better way to weather the closing of the university than to share a pipe and a tree with friend Isaac.

  “I was a posthumous child.” Isaac blows a puff, the smoke mixing like China tea with the granules of sunlight, and passes the pipe to me. “I never knew my father, and the feeling was mutual. I was born Christmas morn, so small, I am told, that I fit in a quart pot, and so weakly that, when two women were sent to Lady Pakenham at North Witham for some herbal strengthener for my struggling spirit, they sat down on a stile by the way, certain there was no occasion for making haste as I would be dead before they could return.”

  “That would explain your healthy appetite.” I take the pipe from Isaac.

  “And yet,” Isaac watches the smoke rise towards the fruit in paisleys and curlicues, “I am certain that—my mother’s bitterness notwithstanding—I must, at one time, have had a father.”

  “And a Holy Spirit?”

  “Fuck the Trinity,” Isaac grabs the pipe from me and puffs again.

  “The college,” I ask, “or the concept?”

  “Father, Son, Holy Spirit—for an orphan like me, there is but one Father, one God—finitum—and all that we know, all that we are radiates forth from the One like the rays of the Sun. I suppose at heart,” he smiles a smile that at sunset gives me courage, “I must be a Jew.”

  “It isn’t the heart that interests this Jew.” I smile back with a glance at Isaac’s thighs.

  “A true Christian, like a true Jew, believes in the single God.”

  “The God of Abraham?”

  “And Isaac.”

  “That’s two gods right there,” I laugh. “Never mind Trinity College and your Trinitarians. You’d be surprised to know how many of my circumcised brethren are Quarternarians.”

  “Quarternarians?”

  “They believe, quite openly, in four deities. Some students of the Kabbalah even hypothesize the existence of seven Gods!”

  “Heresy!”

  “Septimaniacs,” I tell him. “Septimaniacs—with a God for each of the seven heavens, for each day of the week, for every direction of space, every planet, every Pleiad, every color, every virtue …”

  “And every deadly sin,” adds Isaac. An apple falls and lands between my legs.

  “Take a bite,” I offer without moving.

  “After you,” Isaac demurs. “There are plenty of apples.”

  “Precisely,” I say. “Welcome to Septimania.”

  1/1

  NE SHAFT OF LIGHT.

  Louiza.

  Louiza’s golden head around the side of the Orchard Tea Garden, Louiza’s pale chin lifting upwind, deciding direction, scenting the surprisingly balmy air of mid-March in 1978. Louiza crossing the Cambridge Road, elbows at her side, shoulders a marble channel for the faded straps of her flowered dress. Louiza’s teeth-bitten fingers lifting the latch of the churchyard gate, Louiza’s raspberry calves disappearing from view.

  Malory.

  Corduroyed Malory. Bell-bottomed Malory. Beatle-haired Malory.

  Malory up in the steeple of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. Hesitant Malory, five-foot-six-point-five Malory perched on the tips of his boots on a stack of abandoned hymnals, his Book of Organs in one hand, his breath in the other.

  Looking.

  Mal
ory looking for the demon that was throttling the church organ, keeping it out of tune and him from his lunch. Malory climbing up the steeple, looking out through the slats at a girl he had never seen, never suspected.

  Louiza looking for the loo, but drawn across the road from the Orchard towards a church and a ladder.

  “Hello up there!” Louiza.

  “Yes?” Malory’s own voice in the pinched register of a six-inch reed.

  “May I come up?”

  Louiza and Malory.

  They took refuge from their embarrassment in the view of the dappled fire through the windows of the Orchard. Then, from the far side of the steeple, the specter of the blasted yew—planted four thousand years ago, the vicar claimed, twice as old as our Lord—in whose hollowed trunk Malory had been known to conduct the younger nose-pickers of the parish in elementary hymns. Malory pointed Louiza to the northern reach of Whistler Abbey, and in the distance, the reclaimed marshland and hamlets of Rankwater and Silt, beginning to thaw in the early spring sun. Malory fought valiantly not to be discovered examining the corona of sunlight around Louiza’s jaw, the dusting of wheaten hairs that softened the rims of her ears, the way her nose in profile, as she followed the direction of his finger towards some distant Norman church, pointed towards a narrow upper lip and a chin thrust slightly more forward than classical beauty might have recommended. Malory wrestled with the magnetic attraction of Louiza’s left breast, its silhouette refracted by the prism of her cotton dress, its parabola hard with the defiance of youth, refusing to acknowledge gravity and raising the nipple towards an astonishing and hopeful zenith. Most of all, Malory struggled towards intelligence, realizing that the more he talked to this girl about the history of Cambridgeshire and the draining of the fens, the more his own voice fell out of tune.

  “May I ask you a question?” Louiza turned away from the view and fully into Malory’s face. Her eyes drew the blue of the afternoon into the steeple for a moment, with a force Malory had never imagined possible—not, at least, within the universe of Newtonian physics, which was, after all, his universe. The power of her eyes, the unity of their focus, as devoid of color as they were full of hope, convinced Malory of what he had already decided. Louiza was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, or at least the most beautiful girl he had ever seen at such proximity. And this discovery rendered Malory incapable of saying anything other than—

  “Yes?”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  Malory told Louiza how he had bicycled down from Cambridge, how he had arrived at St. George’s just after eight in the morning, intending to tune the organ and return to the Tea Room of the University Library for the first scones of the day. He was the Organ Scholar at Trinity, he mumbled, without going into great detail about the cold matins and inconvenient vespers he had to play, the acrobatic rehearsals whenever the Trinity Choir decided to premiere some optimistic composition by the Choirmaster.

  Tuning the nineteenth-century organ of St. George’s Church was a private arrangement, normally the job of a single hour. But fifteen minutes into the tuning that morning, Malory found something wrong with the D-sharp in the six-inch reeds of the organ. He slipped the rod a quarter-inch and brought the pipe into tune, only to find that the problem migrated to the G-sharp. Solving the G-sharp only spread the oddity to two other pipes. Sometimes it was a defect of pitch, sometimes it was complete strangulation. All morning he chased the blockage, from pipes to stops, from bellows back to console. The six-inch reeds were only fifteen feet above the paving stones of the nave and easily examined by means of a wooden A-frame that the warden kept with the mop and bucket behind the safe in the Lady Chapel. But as scones lost out to lunch and Malory still hadn’t left the church, the demon of the organ continued to elude him.

  It was after three when Malory climbed from the chancel, by way of a staircase behind the reeds and then up a vertical ladder, fifty-two rungs—so he told Louiza as she twisted a strand of hair around a wheaten ear—to the bell tower. He wasn’t certain what he’d find up there among the webs and guano. There was no clear link to the organ twenty feet below. Certainly the bellows drew air from up here through the four sets of slats cut into the sloping steeple, although it drew air, one might say, from everywhere. He needed a change of scene but wasn’t prepared to leave St. George’s until he had slain the dragon. Perhaps if he did not play, the demon would not appear.

  “It’s like Schrödinger’s cat,” Malory said.

  “Don’t know him.” Louiza bowed her head, casting a tangle of gold over the front of her eyes in an embarrassment that Malory immediately regretted.

  “No, no. Schrödinger was a physicist, German, back in the 1920s. He tried to describe why looking for things was, well, difficult. How looking changed what you were looking for.” Malory was so flummoxed by his own attempts at explanation that he could barely look at Louiza. “Schrödinger presented a problem—a cat is in a box along with a bottle of poisonous gas and a tiny piece of uranium. The uranium spits out radioactive particles at random, like a popcorn popper at Strawberry Fair. We can never tell when a particle will come whizzing out, or in which direction it will fly. But when enough uranium particles finally hit, the bottle of poisonous gas will explode.”

  “And then?” Louiza asked.

  “The cat will die,” Malory said. “Painlessly,” he added, although he was pleased to see that Louiza was more interested in the intellectual problem than in feline sensibilities. “So we make our experiment—we put the cat in the box with the gas and the uranium and seal it tight and let the clock tick. After a minute or so, we ask the question, is Kitty dead or alive?”

  “Yes,” said Louiza.

  “Yes!” Malory whooped. “That is the answer of the old physics. Yes, the old physics would have said—the cat is either dead or alive.”

  “Hmm,” Louiza hummed.

  Hmm? Was Louiza making fun of him, or did she already know the joke, or was she simply bored and he was losing her? “The new physics,” he continued, “quantum mechanics, says until we open the box, the cat is possibly dead and possibly alive.”

  “Or nibbling on popcorn at Strawberry Fair?” Louiza smiled, and Malory felt the pipes in his chest rise up half a tone.

  “Anything is possible,” he whispered, “until we look.”

  “And afterwards?” Louiza asked.

  “What do you mean?” Malory hadn’t reckoned on questions, only a little sympathy for an organ tuner who had missed his scones in search of a dead cat.

  “After the box is opened,” Louiza said, as simply as Pandora. “Once we look inside, is anything still possible?”

  “Well,” Malory said, “some physicists believe that there are two worlds that exist after the box is opened. In one world is the cat we see, in the other the cat we don’t. In one world, the cat is being chased by worms. In the other, he is raring to catch mice. The only problem is, neither world knows anything about the other. Live Felix doesn’t know Dead Felix exists. But they both do.”

  “Ah!” said Louiza, and clapped her hands. “That’s what I hoped.”

  “You did?” Malory said, pleased if confused by his ability to provoke such delight in this angel.

  “Yes!” Louiza said, jumping up and reaching for the high beam of the steeple. “You see, that’s where I come from, a world of half-dead cats.”

  It was then that Louiza explained to Malory what she had never explained to others. She told him of the soggy schools and playgrounds of the Norfolk marshes, where the teachers and children insisted on reading and writing in a language of letters that made no sense to Louiza. She talked of her mother, who tried to drill the rudiments of language into her uncomprehending daughter, while her father grumbled over reheated shepherd’s pie. Finally, Louiza told Malory about mathematics, how mathematics connected her to the world.

  “It was very simple,” she said. “If I could link a word with a number—say, the word cat with the number negative 57—if I could turn
a word into a formula, then I could read the world.”

  “Why negative 57?”

  “Because the world of my teachers, my enemies, my own father was all so negative. ‘Louiza can’t read’—negative. ‘Louiza can’t write’—negative. ‘Doesn’t focus in class’—negative. ‘Never amount’—negative. My whole life, one big negative. Naturally, when I began to think in numbers, I made z negative 1, y negative 2, up to negative 26 for a. So cat is negative 24 plus negative 26 plus negative 7—equals negative 57.

  “I am negative one,” Malory said, aiming at wit with sympathy.

  “No,” Louiza said, “i is the square root of negative 1.” Her eyebrows rose to emphasize the italics.

  Even Malory, flustered by Louiza’s parry, knew that mathematicians since the time of Newton have written the king of imaginary numbers as a lowercase, italicized i. The force behind Louiza’s pronunciation of the letter was, perhaps, born from the vertigo of those early mathematicians as they pondered the square root of –1, afraid themselves of tipping over with the effort of imagining such a thing. The square roots of negative numbers, after all, did not exist in the real world any more than half-dead cats. What number, times itself, would give you a square with an area of –1? When you squared a number, a positive number or a negative number, it gave you a positive answer. +2 times +2 equals +4. –2 times –2 equals +4. That was how it went. That was cricket. Those were the rules. All numbers, when you squared them, when you multiplied them by themselves, gave you a positive number. So the question, What is the square root of –1? was just, well, clearly not a question you should ask. Nevertheless, it was easy enough, with a piece of chalk and a board, or a pencil and paper, to scribble down equations like:

  x2 + 1 = 0

  For many people, these scribbles, these equations not only existed but demanded answers. Subtracting 1 from both sides of the equation, whether in the smoky, chintz parlor of Louiza’s Norfolk farmhouse or the drafty, gothic classroom of Malory’s King’s College Choir School led to:

  x2 = –1

  and then: