Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

“The woman who looked after me has decided she can stand my habits no longer,” he said when she’d finished. “I am too messy for her, and always shouting when she tidies my papers away for me. She could not grasp that what seemed mere chaos to an unlearned eye was in fact carefully arranged and designed. Just like the world, no doubt, seems to men who cannot understand the complexity of God’s creation.”

She smiled at him. His face was wrinkled and severe, and would have been forbidding had it not been for the vivacity of his eyes, the slightly amused way he had looked on as she had (no doubt) eaten up both his dinner and his breakfast for the following morning.

“So I am a desperate man, you see. Abandoned, and alone in the world. Do you know how that feels? I see you know all too well. Will you help an old man in his hour of distress? That is the question.”

“Help you, sir? How?”

“Stay here awhile. Cook me some more soup. Do all those mysterious tasks which women do so easily, and which send me into a panic. My people bring me food, which is kind of them, but they are forever bothering me. They expect to be paid in conversation. You could not only keep body and soul together, but you could defend my sanity from their constant chattering. Be warned though; I am a dreadful man. I shout and grumble almost without ceasing. My habits are considered all but impossible. I sleep little and often talk to myself in the middle of the night. I am, as you see all too well, horribly untidy, and become quite ill-humored if I am disturbed while I am working or thinking. You will no doubt come to hate me cordially.”

She had scarcely left his side since, and loved him like mother and father combined. Despite his warning, his ill temper consisted of little more than a tendency to complain about lost papers or a bad back. He had no violence in his soul whatever, only gentleness and immense patience, for to begin with she made many mistakes. But bit by bit, they became indispensable to each other. The dark little house settled down to a reasonable level of organized chaos that satisfied them both; she worked all day—preparing food, cleaning and tidying, chopping wood—and it was not hard work, as the house was scarcely more than one room on top of the other, and the upper room was reserved for his papers. Occasionally, as a special treat, he would let her up there to sweep the floor under his supervision, clucking over her anxiously lest she tip over a pile of papers or disrupt his personal universe of manuscripts. And once a week she would prepare a special meal, get out the candles, and sit quietly with him, and they would talk; wonderful, fascinating talks, for he was a magician with words and could do anything with them. She learned much from him and through careful, discreet questioning, he learned much about her. She knew this, and saw that he did not mind what he knew.

And then Olivier arrived, made his incoherent profession to her in the street, and immediately this life she had built herself began to crumble and shake. He had said little, but she read into his words much that he had not intended. This will not last forever; the old man will die and you will be on the streets again. You are living in a dream, and dreams all end sooner or later. You are young and he is old; do you not want more?

For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.

OLIVIER WENT BACK the next day, and the day after; the week’s absence from Avignon stretched into a fortnight and then a month. It was only when Gersonides could stand him no more that he was dispatched back to face the wrath of Ceccani and make a groveling apology for, once again, having disappeared without notice. In that time he changed irrevocably. He became a poet, a true poet, rather than a youth penning verses for his amusement or to explore the classical forms of the long-dead heroes he so admired. He went beyond his models and created something new in that month, at the same time that he wrestled with Gersonides’s elusive answers and tried to pin down Rebecca’s irresistible appeal. He did not know, at the end, which of the two was the more important for him; both complemented the other, for eventually the old man abandoned his caution and reserve and allowed himself to be seduced by Olivier’s boundless curiosity and desperate desire to understand.

He was unlucky, he knew it, even cursed. Why, after all, should he have found himself in this predicament? He had fallen in love with an idea of a woman, then had that idea made flesh. Had her voice, her face, and her character been different—had she been any other person in the world—the disease might not have taken hold in such a way. More than this cannot be said; there is no reason to explain why someone like Olivier may love someone less beautiful, less agreeable, less fortunate than those more favored but who left him utterly indifferent. He tried not to speak to Rebecca; she tried to avoid him. It would have been easy to do so had each truly wished it. But on almost every occasion he came, she was there, preparing food or sitting on the step outside the house. And on nearly every occasion he stopped, and found some reason to talk to her and become engaged in a conversation neither thought they wanted. Both then went their own ways, determined that it should not be repeated, and then Olivier spent the rest of the evening seeing her dark hair and hearing her soft voice, and as she chopped vegetables or swept the floor, she thought about his awkward, endearing grin, or the way he spoke to her more gently each time they met.

Gersonides saw it all, and worried for her.

IT TOOK FOUR weeks to get back home, and by the time the trip was over, Julien was, if not exactly a changed man, then at least profoundly affected. Like most of his generation, he had experienced war before, directly and brutally. But he had never experienced defeat, nor tasted the chaotic panic of blind flight. Even at Verdun, order had held, just, and he had maintained the illusion at least that the outcome depended in some minuscule manner on his own contribution. Such a thought had given him solace as he froze during nighttime watches, as he shivered with fever in the caverns below the fortress, and as he had bayoneted the one enemy soldier he had killed with his own hands. But the memory of his flight home did haunt him; it was far worse, in his mind, than anything he had experienced twenty years previously. He traveled through a collapse; everywhere he went he could see an entire society, a civilization, even, coming apart. It gave him much to consider as he traveled—first on the train that inched forward then stopped for hours, heading for a destination that was supposedly Bordeaux. He abandoned it at Clermont-Ferrand to let it go west while he began to walk east, uncertain whether the blistering summer heat would be worse than the cold of winter for such a trip. The train was still immobilized long after he was out of sight of the station.

What was he flying from? The chaos and panic in Paris were obvious, the emotions on the faces of those who got on the train, and those roughly ejected from it, were clear. And yet neither he, nor anyone else, had even seen a German soldier, nor had a single enemy plane yet flown over Paris. No newsreels reporting the debacle had come in from the front. They were all flying from an idea, nothing more concrete than that, and as they fled, the delicate tissue of society came apart. There was no one to ask for information, as no one knew anything. No one to ask for help, as few could even help themselves. Nowhere to buy food; there was none to be had and no one wanted money anymore. A millionaire was poor compared to a peasant with half a loaf of bread. In the space of a few days, the citizens of one of the most sophisticated nations on earth, which ruled a good part of that earth, which had a history of continuous growth stretching back to Clovis the Frank, had suddenly been propelled into a state of nature, knowing no rules except survival and no law except self-protection.