Vita Brevis (3 page)

It was easy to pick out Kleitos’s apartment on the busy Vicus Sabuci—it was the door under the arcade that had two holes clumsily bashed through the wall above it so extra windows could cast light into the surgery. To Ruso’s disappointment, it was locked. There was a large barrel half blocking the entrance, and there was no reply to his knocking. He was surprised: On his first visit he had been introduced to a couple of apprentices as well as Kleitos’s wife and children. He would have expected one of them to be there in the middle of the morning to take messages, even if the little Greek himself was out seeing a patient.

He hoped there was nothing wrong. Kleitos had seemed a decent man: an enthusiast who had plied Ruso with questions about military surgical techniques and the plants and minerals that could be found in Britannia and had made scribbled notes of the answers on scraps of parchment and the unused corners of writing tablets. He had recommended reliable suppliers of roots and herbs, and his promise to send a message if there was any work had sounded genuine. He had also seemed sincerely sorry when he explained that he could not send any of his patients to Ruso’s lodgings, because none of them would dare to go there. But staring at
the locked door, Ruso felt that if this was how Kleitos went about his business, it was hard to imagine he had a thriving practice.

The blank face of the hefty woman serving in the bar next door told Ruso it was a mistake to ask for information without first ordering a drink. The purchase of a cup of spiced wine loosened her tongue a little, but not in a helpful way. She didn’t know where the doctor was, and they didn’t run a message service. “Come back this afternoon.”

The wine was better than he had expected, which might explain the busyness of the surrounding tables: It certainly wasn’t caused by the warmth of the welcome. He took the cup across to where he could loll against one of the pillars of the arcade and keep an eye on the doctor’s front door. He might as well wait and have a chat with Kleitos now that he was here.

As he watched, another visitor arrived. She could not have been more than fourteen. Somebody seemed to have glued a perfectly rounded pregnant belly onto her underfed frame. She knocked, waited, knocked again, tried to peer around the edge of the door and called, “Doctor! Doctor, are you there?” before glancing ’round in an agitated manner.

Ruso stepped toward her. “Can I help?”

She turned, startled.

“I’m a doctor myself,” he assured her. “I’m just—”

But she had fled. Ruso, still clutching his drink and marooned in the middle of the arcade, attempted a casual return to the pillar.

“Nice try, pal,” suggested a voice from a nearby table.

Another voice said, “You again.”

“I really am a doctor,” Ruso insisted, not pleased to recognize the man with the bad haircut who had refused to let him past in the crowd at the amphitheater.

“So you keep saying.” The man indicated Ruso’s empty left hand. “Where’s your box of tricks, then?”

“I’m visiting Doctor Kleitos.”

“Feeling poorly, are you, Doctor?”

Ruso downed the rest of his drink in one gulp. “Not now,” he said, putting the empty cup down on their table. In his haste to get away he narrowly missed falling over that wretched barrel outside Kleitos’s door.

Around the corner he bent to tighten a loose bootlace before
trudging back down the hill past the bathhouses. The larger of the two had been commissioned by an emperor Ruso had actually met, although the aftermath of a massive earthquake had been no time to exchange pleasantries. Much to his first wife’s disgust, he had failed to exploit this brief acquaintance with Trajan, and by the time Hadrian had risen to power, he and Claudia were divorced. So she was spared the awful knowledge that he had failed to ask Hadrian for a promotion too. It was something that he was now beginning to realize might have been a major mistake.

Despite what he had told Metellus, this morning’s outing had been a waste of time. There was no vacancy for a surgeon at the gladiators’ training camp beside the amphitheater. The clerk had indeed offered to put his name on a waiting list, but when asked about the length of the list, the man had raised both hands and stretched his palms apart like a fisherman demonstrating the size of the one that had got away.

Ignoring the cries of the souvenir sellers, Ruso headed along the Sacred Way toward the business center of the city. The glare of sun on marble made him squint, and it occurred to him that Tilla was right. When they first arrived he had wandered down this most famous of streets, gazing at the marvels he had heard described so many times, barely able to believe that at last he was here, seeing for himself how everything was more glorious than he had imagined. Three weeks later, he was beginning to share his wife’s view that Rome had too much of everything. Too many columns and statues and temples, the public buildings gobbling up so much space that ordinary people’s lodgings were stacked five or six high on top of one another with cramped courtyards in the middle to let in some daylight. Too many smells, especially where the sewer vomited its waste into the river. Too much noise.

Worst of all, there were too many people who called themselves doctors. It was a sad state of affairs when a man who had run several military hospitals and who had prior experience of patching up gladiators could get no work, but some smooth-tongued charlatan in a fancy red outfit could drum up trade by dropping a young woman headfirst from the arches of the amphitheater.

His first wife’s urgings echoed in his memory: “You must put yourself forward, Gaius!” But he could not think of any crowd-pleasing, patient-attracting miracles to offer. He certainly wasn’t
about to start dissecting live animals or tying women to ladders. He wasn’t going to ask Metellus for help, either.

Passing through the shade of a ceremonial archway and back out into the glare, he averted his gaze from a couple of day laborers, who were still hanging about in the diminishing hope that someone would offer them work. He knew how they felt.

Ruso’s own hanging about was less public, since it was done in the somewhat gloomy private residence of his former commanding officer, but it was hardly less humiliating. In the weeks since their ship had docked over at Portus, it had become obvious that he was an embarrassment—like a souvenir from a foreign country that didn’t look as exotic when you got it home.

Unfortunately for Accius, Ruso was not the kind of souvenir that could be resold, as he had come here voluntarily. The voice of the first wife urged Ruso to remind Accius exactly whose idea it had been for Ruso to leave Britannia. Exactly who had insisted on pulling the strings that had released him early from his latest contract with the Twentieth Legion, and whose moral responsibility it now was to offer him work. But Claudia was not here to explain how this might be done without wrecking any chance of future employment.

Even if she had been, she might have struggled to be heard above Tilla, whose determination not to say, “I told you so!” had finally cracked over the stale loaf that was this morning’s breakfast.

“But why did he offer you a job if he did not have one? And why did you not ask what it was before you said yes?”

Ruso, who had already considered these questions many times, especially in the long watches of the night, had no answers to offer. He was still trying to remember why coming here had seemed like a good idea when Tilla closed her eyes and sighed, “Just like a man!”

“What else should I be like?”

She lifted up their daughter and pointed the chubby face toward him as if the baby wore the terrifying stare of a Gorgon.

“We have Mara to care for now! You must be more responsible! You are a father!”

But not, it seemed, a satisfactory one.

He had abandoned breakfast and clattered away down the
apartment stairs as angry with himself as he was with his wife. She was right. He had persuaded her to come to this place. Now those eyes that bore the changeable colors of the sea had dark hollows around them, and she was thinner than he had seen her in a very long time.

So, here he was, turning in yet again at the plain doorway that led to Accius’s family home. The owner of the shop next door nodded a greeting. The aged doorman, who had seen him almost daily for the last three weeks, stepped back and gave a bow that managed to be both respectful and supercilious at the same time. Or perhaps Ruso was starting to imagine things. Each of them was obliged to report to Accius, but the doorman had a job, whereas Ruso came here freely in the hope of being given something to do, but left empty-handed.

The scowl that Accius had probably been born with had grown deeper as the days passed. Doubtless Ruso’s visits were the reminder of a bad decision and of a disappointment. On his return from military service, the former tribune had expected better than to be put in charge of Rome’s Department of Street Cleaning.

Still, until this morning’s conversation with Metellus, Ruso had managed to hope that Accius had a bright future. Admittedly he was not among Hadrian’s staunchest supporters, especially since one of the men who had been executed shortly after the new emperor came into power was a relative. But Hadrian had been swift to express his disapproval of the killings. Then, in case anyone harbored any lingering doubts about his right to rule, he had arranged a massive public bonfire made up of everyone’s outstanding tax bills.

In this atmosphere of forgiving and forgetting, it had seemed possible that Accius’s aristocratic connections could still lift him to places high above the Department of Street Cleaning. Places in which, as he had assured Ruso, he would be in need of a Good Man.

Meanwhile, Ruso regretted ever mentioning his own family in the distant south of Gaul. Accius seemed to assume their modestly sized and debt-burdened farm was some vast estate like the ones that generated his own income, and that Ruso was able to drift around Rome indefinitely on a regular flow of unearned cash, indulging an occasional hobby of treating the sick while he waited
to find out exactly what a Good Man did, and to be given the chance to do it.

Accius had not been brought up to understand money. He did, however, understand social obligation. Yesterday he had gamely offered, “Ah. Ruso. Yes. I haven’t forgotten you,” although clearly he wished he could.

Today, however, after Ruso had negotiated his way ’round the spluttering marble fountain and stepped aside to allow some visiting aristocrat to shuffle past clutching his toga, he was greeted with a cry of “Ah, Ruso! Just the man!”

Wondering what he was just the man for, Ruso stepped into the grim austerity of Accius’s study. The former tribune was sitting forward with his elbows resting on a desk that looked as though several generations of ancestors had used it before him, and not kindly. Still, the scowl was lighter than usual, and his hands were clasped together as if he had trapped some good news between them.

Evidently the news was too good to release straightaway. “How’s the family?”

“They’re very well, sir,” Ruso lied, picturing Tilla in the cramped tenement room, trying to stop Mara from smearing porridge in her hair while keeping a nervous eye on the cracks in the wall lest something should crawl out. He dared not complain: They might have still been living in this large, gloomy house had it not been for Tilla’s announcement that she would soon be punching Accius’s housekeeper on the nose if the woman did not mind her own business.

“Good man,” said Accius. “Now.” He opened his hands. “Fortune has smiled on you. You’ll remember Doctor Kleitos, my personal physician?”

“I was just there earlier, sir.”

“Really? Did you know his father is very ill?”

So that explained the locked door. And perhaps why no one had taken in the barrel outside. “No, sir. There was nobody in.”

“That’s not the fortunate part.”

“No, sir.”

“This is.” Accius reached out a hand. His clerk stepped forward to present him with a little scrap of rolled-up parchment, which he passed to Ruso.

Ruso fumbled with the knot in the frayed twine and gave up, sliding it over the top with the loop still intact. Then he held the curled scrap open with his thumbs.

The Greek words
a coldness of the limbs and sweating on the forehead almost always followed by death
had been ineffectively scraped off, and underneath was a smudgy note repeating the news about Kleitos’s father. He went on to read in Latin, “‘I would therefore be grateful if you would take over as much of the practice as you are able until my return. The apartment will be empty, and you are welcome to bring your family. The key will be with the caretaker, whose wife runs the bar next door. He is expecting you.’”

Ruso blinked and read it again. He still didn’t believe it. Most men would have entrusted their patients to a known and reliable colleague, but Kleitos, on the strength of Accius’s recommendation and one informal visit, had put both his livelihood and his accommodation into the hands of a stranger.

“This is a great honor, sir.”

“I thought you’d like it,” Accius said casually, as if he had arranged the whole thing himself. “Of course, I told him a while ago that you were a good chap. You’ll have to move out when he gets back, but I gather the father lives several days away, so you should get a good run at it.”

Ruso carried on reading.

“Is there a problem?”

He glanced up. “It’s very generous of him, sir.”

“Good.” Accius settled back in his chair. “Frankly, I was beginning to wonder if I’d made a mistake in bringing you here.”

“So was I, sir.”

Accius paused, as if it had not occurred to him that Ruso might have an opinion. “Of course, I’m assuming he’s already cleared it
with his patron. You won’t let me down, will you? Kleitos’s patron is the father of a very lovely young lady, and she wants me to make a good impression.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“In fact, perhaps I should take you over there myself so you can meet him. Horatius Balbus is a fine man. Talks a lot more sense than some of these political types.”