Barry Unsworth: Pascali's Island

Mahmoud shouted and the firing stopped. A series of appalling groans came from somewhere at the top of the slope. We listened to these sounds in silence for some time, then Mahmoud sent the soldiers down to recover the bodies. I went with them, Excellency, a sort of dogged self-punishing urge to completeness impelling me. I saw Lydia and Mister Smith lifted, quite tenderly now, by the sober-faced soldiers, carried to the top. Lydia 's hair had come down and hung behind her as she was carried up. Her face was unmarked, a white oval in the moonlight, eyes staring. It took six men to raise the statue sufficiently for Mister Bowles to be extricated from it. I looked at him once and then no more. He had no eyes, no nose, no mouth: only a glistening mask of blood. Mercifully, at this point I was released from further attention by an attack of vomiting. Spasm after spasm kept me there, while they made litters for the bodies with the oars and spars Mister Smith's men had brought up. Still retching, I crawled into the bushes, out of sight. No one looked for me or called my name. I lay there motionless, until the steps and voices and groans had gone, until long after they had gone.

Gradually, with the restored calm of night around me, the warm air enfolding me, I began to feel comforted. My loneliness and sickness were compounded with that of the world, diffused to the furthest spaces I could imagine. I knew that my limbs would not carry me down again. After a while, I slept, Excellency. Slept through the crossing of the moon and waning of the stars, through the first light. When I awoke I was cold and hungry, but my mind was clear. I stepped out from the bushes, looked briefly across the floor of the hollow. The statue was still there, lying face down, his back leg raised a little from the ground. The fall had broken off his right arm at the elbow, so that he was prostrate against the earth, his face pressed into it. I could not see the arm anywhere, and I did not look for it.

I climbed out of the hollow, along behind the remains of the villa. I came to the one arch left standing and the angle of the ruined wall. There was the cavity below it just as Mister Bowles had described – he had taken great care, I remembered suddenly, to describe the precise location of his 'finds'. Acting on impulse, I made my way up there, knelt above the cavity, put in my hand. At about the extent of my arm, my fingers touched something. I strained further and my hand closed over an object cold, smooth, shaped. I was excited, Excellency. I drew it out: it was a doll, made of some hard, whitish, rubberised material, resembling congealed fat; a grotesquely, offensively, ugly doll, with protruberant eyes and thick blubbery lips; bald, but otherwise quite sexless and ageless. In the morning sunshine I stood there, turning the obscene thing over in my hands. On its nude left buttock, stamped in faint blue ink, Potsdam 1896. I knew now why Mister Bowles had returned to the site that afternoon, the afternoon he had been 'led' to the statue: not to complete his researches, as he had given out, but to plant this outrageous doll: he had intended Mahmoud and Izzet to find it after he had gone. It was his last trick, Excellency, quite gratuitous, designed to give aesthetic shape to his whole transaction. Did I not say he was an artist? Also, of course, it was part of his 'mission', part of what he had been sent to do. He had wanted to show them the error of their ways.

After a moment more, I knelt again, carefully replaced the monstrous thing. They will look there, if they retain any belief in his truthfulness. I hope they find it – perhaps they already have, they have been busy on the site these last few days.

All that is more than a week ago, eight, perhaps nine days – I do not keep count of the days, Excellency. There were nine deaths altogether: Mahmoud's four soldiers – the two above were also killed, and in the same way, stabbed as they lay there; and five of Mister Bowles's party – the wounded man died two days afterwards, he had been shot in the abdomen. The sixth, who was thought to be a Pole but turned out to be Lithuanian, was unhurt. He was found next day in the foothills near the shore. He is at present in the military prison and it is probable, with that leniency the Turks show after bloodshed, that he will be released.

It is not known for sure who killed the soldiers. Their rifles had been taken, and their bayonets, and cartridge belts, and boots. None of this was found either on the site itself or on the boat when they afterwards searched it. I myself see this as proof that the murders were done by Greek rebels from the mountains. And it confirms my suspicions about Mister Smith: if he was there to land arms he would have had the means of communicating with the rebels. I think he arranged it in advance, as soon as the date of the attempt had been fixed with Mister Bowles. I would like to think it was without Mister Bowles's contrivance, but he must have had some knowledge of it, knowledge that his obsession enabled him to disregard.

Now I have his notebook only, the rows of neat figures recording his trickeries. No words, no intrusion of feeling, not even a reference to the statue. The notebook was to record his transactions only-which were also his acts of retribution. He was keeping accounts straight with his daimon.

Other than that, nothing. Nothing of hers, of Lydia 's. They have locked up the studio until her parents in Lyons can be informed.

Nothing really but questions. Questions of fact, questions of interpretation. The head, the bracelet, the documents concerning the lease – I do not know where he hid them. Probably up there in the hills somewhere, but far away from the ruins. Someday, no doubt, they will be found again, to provide a new set of puzzles.

Mister Bowles, Lydia too, remain mysteries to me-opaque, ungraspable. As does this brief action in which we were all engaged…

At least I did not make characters of them. Now, after these few days, they have already lost unity in my mind, their wholeness was a physical impression only, not surviving the body. I am left with fragments – that word again: Mister Bowles as he was on the day of his arrival, as he stood bareheaded, momentarily bemused, with all my story contained in his luggage, the head, the bracelet, the obscure doll; his face as he laid the head on Mahmoud's desk, that quick licking of the lips his only sign of stress; his face again, gleaming and fanatical as he ministered to the bronze youth; then that final mask of blood. There is no way now of recombining these elements.

And Lydia, whom I neglected so after the statue was found: her awareness of him, right from the start, we all saw it, that first evening, every movement was for him – as if she had been waiting; her bare arm glimpsed among the rocks; her landscapes, which imprisoned things – we ourselves were arrested that day in her studio, in poses to her liking, among the other objects assembled there. Then I saw her as Circe. But there was the gown, that sacrificial smudge. I should have known then. She was the victim of all of us, because she had nothing material to gain. She was there for love, Excellency. It was as if she was waiting, as if her possession of freedom was only apparent, until Mister Bowles came. Perfect balance is insufferable, as I have said elsewhere in this report. Perhaps Lydia too, with her ostensible fear of the irrational, perhaps she too was waiting for the gesture that shatters the glass. And then, Mister Bowles had this gift for inspiring people with his own vision of things, involving them in his purposes. Like a skilful cast of the net… She was intending to go with him. Their suitcases were found on the boat…

You will understand, Excellency, that I am offering you simply one version among many. Even in that Mister Bowles and I are alike, the version chosen being that which lends itself to the shaping fantasy at the time. Everything is thus enveloped in its own thick aura of alternatives, including me, the observer. One chooses a convenient self, a suitable standpoint. I could have been a different kind of voice in this report.