Barry Unsworth: Pascali's Island

All the same, it was sent at his behest. He honoured his promise. He recognised the contribution I had made. There is even, in the note, care for my welfare and safety. And I have betrayed him. Perhaps at the very moment I was putting the knife into his back that envelope was being slipped under my door. The money has not made my act superfluous, because it was not the motive; but it gives me a feeling of love for Mister Bowles. Not gratitude, love. Also it renders the flower more repellent. In a few hours from now he will be in the hands of the authorities, who are also denizens of the swamp. It will be perhaps the last arrest your accredited representatives on this island will make, because your power too is at an end, Excellency. You too, the king alligator, you are finished too.

Excuse me for the bitterness of my tone. Let me try to preserve coherence in my narrative, even at this late stage, due distance, a semblance of order. I will begin with my visit to the site today, my second visit and I fervently hope my last. (But Izzet told me to remain here, await instructions, and I fear they have plans for me still.)

I set off early. I kept well down below where the soldiers were stationed. They were probably still sleeping, but I took no chances. Mister Bowles himself had not been there long when I arrived. He had brought wine and bread and tomatoes, and he shared this food with me, we ate it together sitting against the bankside in the shade – the sun had not yet risen high enough to reach the lower part of the hollow, which still had the cool of night in it.

After we had finished eating we set to work, each armed with a long-bladed knife. Mister Bowles brought these. He had got them, he told me, from a stall in the market. Presumably they are left-overs from the Sacrifice Bay ram. Mister Bowles worked on the line of the body turned outward, I on the other side, cutting deeper into the hillside, hollowing out the earth behind the head and right shoulder. We had to be careful not to cut too much away behind, especially in the lower part, as there was a danger of disturbing the balance of the figure, which, as I have said, stood upright.

We worked like this for perhaps two hours. At regular intervals one or other of us would step back and survey him. Little by little the naked body was assuming shape under our hands. There were no longer those disfiguring gouts of clay which had produced dread in me by bemonstering the features. The metal was still clay-coloured, and clay was crusted in the ears, the corners of the eyes, the folds of the lips, the short curling hair; but the proportions were clear now, the level brows, the line of the chin, the strong column of the neck.

As we worked Mister Bowles talked to me. His hesitations and plunges seemed less strange here, the rhythm of our work providing a sort of accompaniment. He had always, it seemed, been interested in the ancient world. 'Ever since I was so high,' he said, holding out his knife. At school it had always been the ancient history lessons that he liked best, looked forward to most. 'The very names,' he said. 'Sumerians, Babylonians…

And then the idea that you could dig, find out things about them… When people asked me what I wanted to be, you know, I always said, Archeologist.' But his father had died when he was fourteen, there had been difficulties with money, he had had to go and work in an insurance office, marine insurance, in the City of London. 'How I hated it,' he said. 'Totting up figures all day long, you know. I was there for ten years. Until my mother died.' I thought of his little notebook, the neat columns there. It was probably in the insurance office that he had acquired this orderly habit. Was it there too, I wondered, during that ten years' slow rage, that he had seen his mission in life?

I was silent for some minutes, prising away the earth from behind the neck and below the right shoulder. The face was raised slightly, as if in faintly smiling response to some greeting, or perhaps summons. 'What happened then?' I asked him. 'Oh,' he said. 'I gave it up, you know. I mean, there was no longer any reason… I started off on my travels. Rather like that doctor, Doctor Hogan. That's why I was so interested. There was a sort of parallel.'

I forbore to point out the differences. Mister Bowles too, then, is a believer in portents and parallels. Like myself, Excellency – again there was this slight shock of recognition. The difficulties I have had in seeing Mister Bowles clearly, have derived from the fact that he is too close.

By now we were full in the sun. Mister Bowles had stripped to his shorts again, and applied more of that sweetish-smelling oil. I retained shirt and trousers, for fear of being burnt by the sun. 'I read everything I could,' he said. 'I kept up with the latest discoveries. When I was a boy, Schliemann was my great hero, you know.' He paused, glancing across to me. 'Those things I told them,' he said, 'they were historically accurate. The facts, I mean. I never… In all the time I have been travelling around, I never gave false information. Everything I have said could be supported by evidence.' It was amazing to listen to him, Excellency. He had claimed to have found a marble head and a gold bracelet where no head or bracelet had been. And here he was, glancing across at me with his hallucinated eyes, talking about false information. There was, a kind of logic in what he said – so long as you could believe that the first lie was justified, and Mister Bowles clearly did believe this. 'That head and bracelet,' he said, as though reading my thoughts, 'I am sure now, in the light of this find, that what I said was quite correct. This villa is undoubtedly the site of a considerably earlier house. You only have to look at the foundations to see that. I am convinced that this statue was part of a collection formed during the Attalid period. Perhaps someone from the mainland who had a country house here. That is the only time that would correspond to the date when there would have been anyone in this part of the world rich enough or cultivated enough to form such a collection.'

'How do you think it got here?' I said.

'Anybody's guess,' he said. 'It certainly wasn't made here. Shipped from Greece to Asia Minor, I should say. Then, some time later, here. You can see how the land has subsided very considerably all over this part of the hills. Quite possibly the earlier house was destroyed in that way. Who can say? We're talking about two thousand years. He has been here, in the hillside, for two thousand years.'

Upon this, I stood back again to look at him. He was free now to the waist. Below this he was exposed in low relief, still backed against the clay. He was a very young man – shapely and strong, but slender – not quite yet at the full growth of manhood. Though discoloured with tarnish and engrained with clay, nothing of him that we could see was broken or incomplete. The features, fingers, genitals, all were perfect. One arm, the one turned to us, was held somewhat away from the side, bent at the elbow, the forearm extended forward of the body at an angle slightly below the horizontal. The hand was open, fingers spaced a little. The other arm was at his side. He appeared to be taking a short step forward, the right leg being a matter of nine or ten inches in advance of the left, though both feet rested flat on the same level, thus throwing the weight of the body slightly back, contradicting the apparent intention of forward motion. This tension in the form gave an appearance of hesitation to the pose, reinforced by the blind face, the smiling curve of the caked lips.

'He's marvellous, isn't he?' Mister Bowles said. There was a shy ardour in his tone. He might have been showing me a photograph of some loved person.

'He is, yes,' I said, and my assent was unforced, Excellency. It was now very hot in the hollow. 'I think I'll go and find a bit of shade,' I said. 'Rest for a while, if you don't mind.'