Icejacked

Three Months On

The last three months had been hectic and hard work since the first day I met Leddicus, who was apparently icejacked from the past. My life changed beyond recognition, but I wasn’t complaining. I was doing well with my living iceman. My university was making no complaints about my reports, the magazine was still paying me for regular articles, and on top of that, other papers and magazines were printing aspects of Leddicus’s story, for which I was being paid. It got better all the time. Mr. Calabro had barely been in touch. The only thing he was picky about was his insistence that I blind copy him in to every e-mail I sent about Leddicus. Since I’d given him that guarantee, I had only heard from him about three times. His clipped tones questioned details in the reports, and he wanted the name of the hospital press officer and a contact number. Apart from that, I hardly gave him a thought except when sending e-mails.

Once it became clear that I would be in for a while, I moved out of my hotel and rented a local flat on a short-term lease. It worked out cheaper than the hotel, and it gave me space to spread out a bit. It was a relief to leave that tiny basic room. It was becoming claustrophobic. I had managed to hang on to my flat in St. Gallen. Things could not have been better.

was a fantastic place to stay, not least because it was the home of Ötzi. I’d spent some happy hours roaming the museum and reacquainting myself with my old friend. Often on Saturday or Sunday, I took drives out to one of the local castles. Runkelstein was astonishing, it was perched precariously on the edge of a cliff, as all good castles should be. On dark nights, when the mist was thick, I could quite imagine Dracula peering out from one of the windows, but of course, this was not his patch.

The surrounding countryside was full of woods and rolling hills. It was totally stunning and allowed me to indulge in long walks, my second love. I wasn’t too keen on steep climbs, so, if the weather was kind, I got on a cable car and enjoyed the magnificent views without too much effort.

Leddicus had become somewhat of a celebrity, helped to some degree by my copy in Archiv and other articles I submitted to various publications. The world press loved this mystery man. Not a week went by without an e-mail or phone call from some publication wanting to get more information. I wasn’t quite sure how I managed to retain my exclusivity on this story, but long might it continue.

Very early on, Leddicus decided that, if the majority of people spoke English these days, then he had better learn it. He started going every day to the English class in the hospital. It seemed he had a knack for language and picked it up remarkably quickly. We could now have basic conversations in English. He still made mistakes, but after only three months, he wasn’t bad at all.

I bought him a mobile phone, and he called me now and then, sometimes speaking very loudly and sometimes very quietly as if testing its limitations. But unsurprisingly, the technology confused him.

When he first got the phone, he asked me, “How far can this machine make the sound stretch?”

It was very difficult to answer him without the jargon that his English did not yet encompass. I did have a stab at it and tried to explain about satellites, but his face was a picture of childlike confusion. So I just shrugged at him.

Even if the hospital did not believe he was two thousand years old, they were still puzzled as to how anyone could survive being frozen solid in a block of ice. After he had been in the hospital a while and his general health was stable, they discussed the situation with Leddicus and reached agreement that he should undergo a series of tests to find out if there were any long-term damage and to try to discover how and why he managed to survive. Poor Leddicus, he had been poked, prodded, x-rayed, scanned, and undergone many other tests, including the extraction of numerous DNA samples. Each day, another technician seemed to be whisking him off somewhere. When time allowed, I accompanied him. He was quite stoical as he sat there, wired to various buzzing, flashing, clicking machines. It would have been daunting for me, and I was used to technology. I couldn’t begin to imagine what was going through his mind. I was ever hopeful that these tests could give us some answers.

I found, as each day passed, that what I initially dismissed as preposterous now hovered in my mind as a probable improbability. He could actually be telling the truth. Against all the odds, he could be who he says he was. Even as I followed this train of thought, it grated, and I pushed it away. I was sure there must be another rational and logical explanation.

He had been receiving intensive physiotherapy. Initially, he could not walk unaided. When he tried, his knees buckled under him, and his arms had no sustained strength. He could barely hold a knife and fork. Every day, his nursing assistant took him to his English lessons while the nursing staff investigated what appeared to be muscle wastage. He looked so forlorn when I left each day as the physio arrived to put him through his paces. I occasionally took pity on him and joined him in his workout. I encouraged him as he gritted his teeth and shuffled along.

I was concerned that some permanent damage had been done, but with the support of the physiotherapists, perhaps a little of my cheerleading, but ultimately, Leddicus’s grim determination, he improved steadily. Halfway through the second month, he could walk unaided, and pretty soon, there was no stopping him.

Leddicus showed me his swatch. He had forgotten he had it with him, but the hospital had been efficient and kept it safe. They gave it back to him as he gradually regained his strength. It was a selection of the materials that he and his family traded. One was very expensive, a deep purple that was difficult to achieve and used a special and distinctive dye. He had some old-looking papers safely nestled in the middle of the material samples. Written on parchment type paper, one was in Latin. He told me it was to show people proof of his “free Roman” status.

Leddicus gave me permission to take the swatch and the papers to the university that had assessed the age of his clothes. The dating of these articles matched the clothing, being in the region of two thousand years old. The Latin paper, when translated, backed up what Leddicus had told me. It indicated he was financially secure, a cloth trader, and a free Roman. It seemed to be an ancient passport or reference, requesting those reading it to protect him and give him assistance in his quest.

Everything I touched with Leddicus seemed to verify his story. The more I got to know him, the more I liked him. He was a very special guy in more ways than one. In the face of such adversity and confusion, he was patient, pragmatic, and cooperative and still retained a sense of humor.

The other papers wrapped in the cloth were in Greek, ancient Greek, similar to the Greek that would have been used to translate the Bible. The university told me that they appeared to be greetings to different groups of people called “people of the way.” The university was still working on the translations, so I would check back with them on this in a few weeks.

The time had come for Leddicus to leave the hospital. They had not found anything wrong with him. All the tests they had been carrying out had drawn blanks. There still did not appear to be any scientific or biological reason for the anomaly of why he survived being in a block of ice. They had also been looking closely at Leddicus’s physiology. I was sure some of them thought he was just mad. But in every way, apart from his story, he seemed to be perfectly normal, apart, that is, from his complete lack of understanding of anything modern.

The phone, the TV, electric lights, and hospital equipment, everything seemed to be a complete mystery to him. His reactions constantly amused me. Once I took my laptop into the hospital and showed him a webcam. When he saw himself on the screen, he kept checking the picture and then looking at his body to see if it were all there. He probably thought I had stolen some of it and put it in the laptop.

But a hospital was for sick people, and he obviously wasn’t sick, so he couldn’t stay there any longer. He needed to find a permanent place to live. He thought he had a lot of money, but he would soon discover it was not legal tender. He would also discover that, legally, he did not exist. He had no birth certificate, driving license, ID, or passport, nothing to prove who he was.

In , my home country, the exchange rate and the cost of living in other countries was brought into sharp focus for me in one of the stories my father regularly told me. He knew a young Polish migrant, Andrzej Pietraskievitch, who was working locally. His brothers planned to join Andrzej in Switzerland. At the time, was still under the rule of the communists. Andrzej became extremely agitated when he knew their visit was imminent. He asked them to delay their trip to give him some time to save up so he could look after them. But they were adamant and assured him they had plenty of money. They had each saved up one year’s worth of salary. Andrzej had his fears realised when his brothers arrived. Their first night in a hotel used up their entire year’s salary. They were devastated and could not understand how this could be, and Leddicus would not understand either. My father, ever the socialist, helped them to find some cheap accommodation and get work. As a result, the two families became firm friends.

As a student, I did some voluntary work with an organisation helping refugees. I quickly realised how important bits of paper were to them. Passports, birth certificates, and identity cards are pieces of paper that give us our identity in our culture. Most of us take them for granted until we haven’t got them. As history is my bag, I am aware of Fridtj of Nansen, the first refugee high commissioner of the , the forerunner of the United Nations formed in 1921. He realised how vital a piece of paper was to a refugee and perhaps invented the refugee travel document. It looked like a national passport. This document became very important in 1951 when was dealing with so many refugees after World War II.

Leddicus had a passport of sorts. Passports have been around in some form or other since the dawn of civilisation. Roughly four thousand years ago, it seemed that Moses, in his writings, inferred that, when Abraham sent his servant Eliezer to to find a wife for his son Isaac, he gave him some sort of passport that provided him with “safe conduct.” It is also on record that Augustus furnished Potaman the philosopher with a general passport, “Voyager dans les Pays etranger.” The terms of that passport were significant. “If there be anyone on land or sea hardy enough to molest Potaman, let him consider whether he be strong enough to wage war with Caesar.”

Leddicus’s passport, without doubt, would not function in modern bureaucracy. I wanted to take him to to meet the staff at Archiv and my colleagues at the university, but he wasn’t going anywhere without a passport. In many unexpected situations, it is vital to prove who and what you are. A Tamil refugee friend from , wanted to get married, but was unable to do so. The town hall containing the proof he needed of his single status had been destroyed when it was demolished in a bombing raid. Another resourceful friend managed to obtain the document from a local bureau … well … local in the sense that it was the corner shop where he printed up the document and stamped it.

“How awful! That’s illegal!” I hear you cry, but perhaps the binding and restrictive bureaucracy is awful.

Travel documents for Leddicus were my immediate concern. I needed advice and help from friends. I decided to visit Father Patrick. He opened the door and shook my hand warmly. He beamed with delight. We hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks. Now that Leddicus was speaking English, Father Patrick’s role as interpreter had ended. He still visited him from time to time, but our paths rarely crossed. We sat and chatted through the passport situation over coffee and croissants. He was unable to help me in this instance.

I spent a couple days on the phone and called everyone I could think of to try to resolve the situation. A combination of support from the university and Archiv helped me achieve my goal. They pulled out all the stops. They were as keen to meet Leddicus as I was to take him to . Leddicus was now the proud possessor of a special refugee travel document, and we could travel out of .

I thought how useful it was to be in a place where you have connections that are powerful enough to make things happen. The refugees I worked with as a student didn’t have powerful friends, and they were often totally alone. When assisting them, I would sometimes need to photocopy papers for them. But they would not give me even the most simple of official pieces of paper. Instead, they would accompany me to the photocopier and, once there, hand it over to me nervously. They watched my every move as I put it into the chute. I sometimes wondered if they thought I might eat it. As soon as the copy had been made, they retrieved it from me, visibly relaxing once it was back in their possession. At the time, I found this quite amusing. But having been through this situation with Leddicus, I now acutely recognised that those pieces of paper we take for granted were a lifeline to many displaced people.

Let the packing begin! Leddicus could now travel officially, and we were going places. Yes, sir! This guy could make me! What would it be like when he finally walked out of this hospital building into the big, wide, modern world?

I think I need a very good camera.

***

Mr. Calabro sat hunched over his laptop, his regular post-midnight haunt. The Palanatino Enigma was progressing well, far from finished, and many gaps remained, but he was encouraged. His mobile vibrated gently on the desk.

“Yes,” he answered curtly.

He listened intently. He pushed back his laptop and drew a notepad from the drawer in the centre of his desk. As he listened to the call, he made brief notes in small capitals: Turkey–25–29,11/Philippines–20–31,11/Vietnam–50–14,12.

He laid down his pen and cut the call without saying good-bye. He leaned back in his chair and, with both of his slender hands, pushed his hair flat against his head. He sat for a while with his hands linked behind his head and looked at the ceiling. His pale blue eyes were deep in thought. He checked his watch. It was two thirty in the morning. He indulged himself in a cigarette that he smoked while staring at the sky out of the open window. The gardener had watered the huge terra-cotta flowerpots earlier in the day. The mellow smell of wet earth drifted upward and mingled with the cigarette smoke. Two stories down, a cat padded noiselessly across the courtyard. The automatic lights blinked on and dazzled, sending the cat scampering for cover. His eyes narrowed against the brightness that spoiled his view of the stars. He closed the window gently and prepared an e-mail.

Shipment requirement not met. Further goods being sourced. Delivery expected over four-week period. Confirm transport, holding bay, and finance is in place.

He read it through twice and clicked send. The secure server confirmed encryption, and the e-mail blinked away.

He poured his arbitrary measure of Grappa, sniffing at it as if it were a fine wine. He sipped it slowly and waited. The house was silent apart from the occasional settling floorboard, creaking as it cooled. Two floors down, his wife slept peacefully, accustomed and unconcerned about his nocturnal habits.