Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

Hector Morville was not a man for such a crisis. He was deputy mayor of Vaison for no reason at all except for the fact that people liked him, and he so obviously enjoyed the little drip of honor that it brought. His wife had died, it was the town’s way of sympathizing. Doing something to bring him out of himself. The mayor often feigned illness before meetings—he was a lazy, if healthy man—so that Hector could wear the full insignia of office and swell up with pride as he sat at the head of the table. No one made fun of him, though it would have been easy to do so. His pleasure was too simple, too pure, to be spoiled by cynical laughter.

Now he was terrified by the sudden burdens of office, petrified by the danger overhanging his friends, people he had known for years. The crisis aged him within hours from being plump and shiny—like many, his family had a small farm that had turned to producing remarkable amounts of food under the stimulus of shortage—to being gray and stooped. An old man suddenly, with all the doubts and hesitations of the elderly.

And so he consulted Julien, his childhood friend, when he bicycled into town that evening to find out what was going on. Elizabeth Duveau was one of those arrested, bundled into the truck merely because she was walking across the main square of Vaison after buying some cloth in a shop. It had received a supply of cotton; every woman for miles around had heard of the event and had come to Vaison to see what might be had. When she did not return, the village of Roaix had collectively turned to Julien to do something about it. Julien came to the deputy mayor to discover the details, such as he knew them.

“They have not been harmed?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they want?” he asked. “Tell me, what do they want?”

“I imagine they want the people who killed that soldier.”

“Do we know?” asked Julien, who knew very well.

Everyone knew. The moment the town heard of the murder, they knew who had been involved. The two men had been seen near the town that evening, then had disappeared altogether when the body was found and had not been seen since.

No one could guess where they had gone; they had long practice in making themselves scarce. They were not the most admirable citizens of the town, one in particular was a known drunkard, but they had their own robust courage. When the order came for them to submit themselves and go to work as laborers in a German factory, they talked together and decided to refuse. They had never been disciplined, never been good at school or good workers. They had never learned to obey orders. Wartime turned these traits into virtues. One night they disappeared into the hills and woods that they knew so well, and the police and soldiers knew not at all.

After a while more people joined them and they became resisters, sometimes without even being aware of the transformation. Some were heroes, some were trying to escape the German factories. Some were idealists, some patriots, some joined because they loved violence too much, some because they abhorred it completely. Some had clear political objectives, some merely wanted to defeat the Germans, or to bring down the current government of France. Some fought for country, some for God, some for their families, and some for themselves. All were prepared to fight, although how they were to do so, and who they considered their enemy was not always clear. It was groups like these that Bernard was supposed to weld into an effective force capable of doing real damage to the Germans, and groups like these that so terrified Marcel.

“We cannot have these people in this town murdered because of them,” said Hector.

“What do you suggest we do?”

“We hand them over.”

Hector had never been a practical man. He still lived in a world where you told the police, the police did something. It was his own form of resistance to pretend such a universe still existed. He was at the end of his imagination, all his ideas used up. He had briefly put up a moment’s defiance, but all for naught. He sank back into his habitual impotence and shook his head sadly, as he always had when faced with something so imponderably wrong.

“That is not so easy,” Julien pointed out gently. “And perhaps not wise, either.”

“You have contacts, Julien. You are important. You know the préfet. Go and see him. Talk to him. He’ll be able to do something.”

Julien gazed sadly at him. His faith was touching.

“What do you think?” he asked Julia when he pedaled back to the house. She was still with him; Bernard had not yet made any arrangements to get her out and it looked now as though he never would. Months had passed by; Bernard didn’t even trouble to make excuses anymore. Yet the demands for more identity cards and documents kept coming. Julien hoped that when Bernard had made the agreement he had intended to keep it, but he was no longer sure. Julia had done everything he wanted and more. Anyway, it would be quicker now, so Julien dryly remarked, to wait for the Allies to come to them. Not that he minded so much; there had been no hint of any danger, and the days passed in such perfect happiness—peace, almost—their own tranquillity the greater because of the daily news of the fighting that sooner or later would engulf them all.

She was covered in ink; before he’d lived with her, Julien had never realized quite how messy, quite how physical was the life of a painter. It gave added impetus to his constant search for soap. He looked at her fondly as she tried to scratch her nose with some part of an arm that wasn’t covered in her particularly sticky brew of homemade ink, then took mercy on her and scratched it himself.

“Now I know why the Renaissance painters had assistants,” she said in relief. She looked in the mirror. “Dear God, just look at me!”

An old shirt without a collar, a pair of his old trousers rolled up at the bottom so she wouldn’t trip over them, no shoes, hair tied back with a piece of string, she looked utterly beautiful and more happy than he had ever seen her.

“Go,” she said, after studying herself carefully. “Of course you must go. What is there to lose? You must do something for these poor people, if you can.”

Julien left an hour later. He would, he reckoned, be back the following afternoon, and he promised to see if there was any soap or paper to be had. They were, he acknowledged with a smile as he left, the two most valuable things in the world.

IN 1972, shortly before he died, a journalist-turned-author came across the name of Marcel Laplace and wrote a book about Provence in wartime. His work was part of the reevaluation of the war that at that stage was just beginning to get under way, but was still more concerned with exonerating than accusing. Old accounts were settled, long-hidden deals and accommodations brought to light. In Marcel’s case the cost was not high; he was already ill by then and his mind had trouble concentrating; he was beyond recrimination and had no need to defend himself. His record and reputation spoke for itself.

Marcel, by then, was a man so loaded with honor that he was one of the great men of the state. He had been of major importance in different branches of the French civil service for nearly a quarter of a century after the war and had played a part in the economic miracle that had restored French pride in the 1960s. A technocrat, the epitome of technocracy, who had perfected his art in Avignon during the war, while putting into effect the policies for national renewal dreamed up in Vichy.

The journalist delved into his past and found much that had been forgotten. The book that resulted avoided the bureaucratic detail, the memoranda, the orders, the meetings, the appointments that were the daily bread of collaboration. He could have made much more of the administrative orders Marcel had issued, which showed him time and again going beyond the requirements of both régime and occupiers in his desire to please, gaining himself space to maneuver at the expense of others. A careful examination of the way he applied the statut des juifs would have shown that many people lost their jobs who might have survived had a more indolent préfet been in charge. That edicts on reforming schools, closing nightclubs, banning meetings might have been softened in more cautious hands.