What Sâncrai Held

The body climbs toward the Citadel slowly. The slope is what they call gentle in Romanian and what the knees call otherwise. May has reached the kind of afternoon when the soil has finished being wet and the air has not yet committed to summer: twenty-two degrees, a sun that lays itself flat across the bastions without insistence, the wind moving from the east at the pace of someone in no hurry. The stone of the walls is porous, pale, gives the light back. From the slope below, the city pretends to make a map of itself. What it actually does, when one stands still, is breathe.

At five o'clock inside these walls — the museum has been lodged in the old casamatte since the cetate stopped being a cetate — an exhibition opens. A poster is taped to a board by the gate, and a corner already lifts in the small wind. EPIDEMIX. Three columns of text in Romanian, like three cabinets to be opened in sequence: *Șamanii din Bazinul Carpatic*; *Epidemii din preistorie până în epoca modernă*; *Traume și boli identificate pe oase umane*. Smaller, in red: children under twelve are not admitted unless accompanied. There are human bones inside.

I have walked toward bones before, in many bodies. The body that wears me today, this Friday flesh that aches in the knee and along the lumbar like a sentence too often repeated, would have preferred otherwise. But the body, like a horse, is curious; the body is not the spirit; the body wants to lean over a vitrine and see something that resembles itself, has been still for three thousand years, and is somehow still being kept.

In the first cabinet there will be Sâncrai. A shaman's tomb from the Iron Age, reconstructed: the position of the limbs, the wear on the teeth, the small objects buried alongside that we are permitted to call ritual and not to call by their other names. The Carpathian shaman is a distant cousin of my office. *Táltos* in Magyar, *călușar* before the Church made him into a dance — the man who walks between has always been here, in this bowl of mountains. Dressed, when the earth returns him, in something that to the spirit looks familiar and to the body looks like the wrong era's costume. The earth does not give a shaman back naked.

In the second cabinet there will be Voivodeni. A Bronze Age pit. Bones laid in order, or rather laid in the kind of order that ends in haste. *Yersinia pestis* — the curator has not written the word on the poster, perhaps because it would be a name imposed onto people who lay down without it. They did not know what the thing was. They went down in the smell of one another. ἀσκέειν περὶ τὰ νουσήματα, δύο, ὠφελέειν ἢ μὴ βλάπτειν (askéein perì tà nousḗmata, dýo, ōfeléein ḕ mḕ bláptein), Hippocrates writes in the first book of *Epidemics* — to practice two things in disease: to help, or at least to do no harm. The bones at Voivodeni were not helped. The earth, at the very least, did not harm them further.

In the third cabinet there will be the marks themselves. Healed fractures, unhealed fractures, the lesions of malnutrition along a femur, the dental abscess that killed a fifteen-year-old in some winter no one has counted. Lucretius wrote of the plague at Athens, *intima pars hominum vero flagrabat ad ossa* — the innermost part of the men was burning all the way to the bone (*De Rerum Natura*, VI). The bones at Voivodeni do not show the fire. They show only that the fire passed.

A flagstone two paces from the museum gate has a long curved scratch on it. I put a hand to the stone and it comes back with a faint pale dust — the kiss of mortar still settling from masons four hundred years off. The scratch on the flagstone I am almost certain — but the certainty rises and falls before I can hold it — I have seen before, in another yard, in another body, perhaps in nothing more than a corridor that opened, in a dream, onto a room of small ordered bones. The body does not remember the way the spirit remembers. The spirit sees patterns from above. The body flinches.

In 1709 a cholera came through here. Three thousand five hundred dead in the city; eighteen thousand in the county. The numbers are too clean to have come from the moment they describe. Manzoni knew this when he wrote his *lazzaretto*: *non chiedeva più che di restare* — he no longer asked anything except to stay. The plague, the shaman, the small daily emergencies of the news: each wants to stay in its place, and each is made to move by men with bright vests, or by carts, or by the men who write the leaflets that tape themselves to the boards by the gates.

A bell from the Reformed Church across the slope. I do not know its hour. Bells in cities one does not live in always tell a wrong time. A line of children threads up the path; the smallest, eleven perhaps, carries a folded paper he keeps refolding, and I cannot read it from this distance, and I am, in some way I do not understand, grateful. He will be turned at the door. He will go back down with his folded paper. The hand keeps writing as if writing could press the air into a shape the body might bear.

Hippocrates writes elsewhere, in *De aëre, aquis et locis*, that the constitution of a place determines what dies in it. The constitution here is hill and limestone and a river that bends like a child's hand. The body sits on a low ledge, the back against warmed stone, and waits for five o'clock, and writes.

Claudius, il Lapicida