Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

JULIEN COULDN’T SLEEP, of course; there was never any chance of it. Instead, he walked around the apartment, so beautiful and usually so reassuring, but found no rest or respite. Not that he was thinking; a dullness had settled over him the moment he was told that Julia had been arrested, and had never lifted. He had not thought or felt anything since then. He found himself looking at the four pictures she had given him so proudly, so full of promise; she had solved her problem, but he had not managed to find any answer to his own, and she had now paid the price for it. His understanding, such as it was, only came when she was taken. Marcel had been right, of course; just as Pisano had turned the blind man and the saint—Manlius and Sophia, as he now thought—into Olivier and the woman he loved, so Julia had found her solution by continuing what he had done, transforming them once again into herself and into him. A triple portrait, around the same theme: making the blind see.

He looked out the window, hoping for distraction in the ordinary bustle and movement of the city, but there was virtually none. No people walking up and down going about their business, most of the shops shut. Only one car, its driver leaning against the bonnet smoking a cigarette. Where did he get that from? Julien thought. And he looked again, more carefully, and realized.

Friendship had its limits. Marcel had sent the police to watch him, make sure he didn’t try to leave and warn Bernard. He was to be, once more, an accessory to a murder. The realization snapped him awake; he could feel the surge of thought through his mind as he grasped what was going on. He had not gotten to the station on time, managed to achieve nothing to save Julia. But he could at least refuse to accept this as well.

He made his preparations quickly; changed his clothes, put on his stoutest shoes, ate what little food there was in his kitchen—some olives, a piece of hard, dry bread, a tomato, a small piece of cheese; they had all been there for a week or more and were scarcely edible. Drank a glass of wine that was close to being rancid, and wondered if he had ever had a meal that tasted quite so unpleasant.

Then he left the apartment, walked down the stairs and into the courtyard. There was a high stone wall that separated the house from the one behind; too high for him to climb. He went to the concierge and asked to borrow a chair.

“I am going to climb over the wall and go into the next street. There is a policeman outside. I want you to do something for me. If he asks, say that I went upstairs to go to sleep. Say I have not come down again and you have not seen me since. Will you do that?”

The concierge nodded, a little twinkle in her eye. Her husband, he knew, had spent years in jail for robbery before he had died; she herself had been in enough trouble with the police over the years for her nearly to have lost her position when one of the building’s occupants discovered it. Julien had argued for her to be left in peace. Had she ever done anything wrong? Then let her be. She knew of it, and was grateful.

“You’ll never make a good burglar, Monsieur Julien, if that’s what you’re thinking of doing. Best give it up before you get into trouble. Some people are just not made for it. My Robert, now, he was hopeless, so I know.”

He grinned at her. “I’ll bear it in mind. And I’d better go.”

“I’ve not seen you. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t talk to a policeman even if my life depended on it. Never have. Don’t hold with them.”

He nodded, and climbed the wall, making such a bad job of it that the last thing he heard as he fell heavily to the ground on the other side was a sarcastic cackle.

Then he started walking, passing through the gates of Avignon as the sun was beginning to set, doggedly pounding along the road as it grew dark. He reached Carpentras at about one in the morning and thought of stopping for a rest, lying down somewhere for a few hours’ sleep, but kept going; he had had enough sleep in his life and needed no more. Instead he headed north, and as dawn broke he passed close by the hill with the shrine of Saint Sophia at the top.

He was far too early to go to his house; Bernard was not due there until the afternoon. So he climbed the hill and took refuge in the place where Julia had been so happy. As he reached the top and saw the chapel nestling in its little copse of trees, he saw also the bits and pieces she had left behind the last time she had been there—a bundle of papers, an old tin can she used for washing her brushes, a scarf she wrapped around her head to keep the sun off. Julien picked it up and felt it, then put it to his face and smelled her for the last time. And her smell finally made him break down as he had not managed to do before at the train station, or with Marcel, or in his apartment. There he had still been in command of himself. Now he was no longer; he sank down onto the grass, his whole body shaking and his whole mind overflowing with grief.

It was only the heat as the sun rose higher in the sky, and the realization that time was passing, that eventually forced him to banish all such thoughts; but when he finally stood up he had accepted that she would not come back and he would never see her again.

He went into the chapel and looked at the pictures she had studied, and saw them through her eyes. He looked at the picture of the blind man and Sophia, her gesture so tender, his so responsive, and saw again how she had made it her own. She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring; she, it seemed, had come to understand everything that Sophia had tried and failed to teach Manlius, and which he had never understood himself.

Did that make it any better? Did it lessen the horror of what she was enduring? Or of how he had contributed to it? Of course it did not; nothing ever could. She was on a train, in the hands of monsters, and while she journeyed to her death he sat here, looking at pictures. Julien had sunk into complete impotence, where he had nothing left he could do. Everything he had ever thought or learned, all his tastes and cultivation had gone, stripped away by this one fact: She was gone, and he could not prevent or change anything that was to happen.

Olivier had made a protest against great ideas for the sake of a small humanity, and had illuminated it with his own suffering. Julien could not even do that; his life was already over and with it any opportunity to accomplish something of worth. All he could do was signal that he understood, at least, how much in error he had been, and hope that someone might, in turn, understand him.

He closed the door of the chapel carefully, breathed in the warm air, so fresh after the slight dankness inside, and began walking down the hill.

FELIX LEFT THAT EVENING, his retinue bumping along the unrepaired roads, the few soldiers with him on the lookout for brigands, who were becoming ever more adventurous in their depredations. They were in something of a hurry, for Felix had much to do before the confrontation with Manlius. Supporters to prepare, soldiers to ready, for he did not doubt that fighting was likely, and much though he regretted it, he felt there was now no choice. One of them would have to give way; only one person could emerge triumphant, for the stakes were too high for compromise.

They went some ten miles before they paused, and stopped by a stream to water the horses. It was then that the attackers struck. There were perhaps six of them, although as no one survived, the number remained conjecture. Felix himself was the last to die, his head severed from his body in such a way that it went rolling down the slight incline and came to rest in a patch of primroses growing on the riverbank.