by Iain Pears
“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.
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.
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.
Men reacted as they always did; some with an extreme of generosity, giving what little they could spare to strangers; others behaved with an equal and opposite extreme of harshness, demanding outrageous things in exchange. Honest men became thieves, honest women prostitutes, criminals became saints, all driven onward by an idea of what they were leaving behind. Home was the only certainty left, and Paris, the great city of immigrants, disgorged all those who realized that they had never belonged there, that it had never given them a sense of place. Hundreds of thousands were on the move, walking down the roads carrying suitcases, abandoning cars that had run out of petrol, scavenging in fields for food.
The train at least allowed Julien to leapfrog over the great wave of people who were not fortunate enough to get such transport; from Clermont onward he was in the vanguard, a pioneer taking the plague of panic and despair with him, communicating it to all he encountered through his ever dirtier, scruffier clothes, the increasingly gaunt expression as he walked twenty miles a day on little food. But he at least found compensation in it all. He saw his France through fresh eyes, and marveled once more at its extraordinary, overwhelming beauty and variety. He tasted, for the first time, what it must have been like for someone like Olivier de Noyen, traveling so slowly and registering every minute change in landscape and vegetation. Being without a map and having to take directions from passersby. Doing without any assurance that there was a bed or a meal to be found at the end of the day. Sleeping under trees in a forest, wrapped up in an old blanket he had found by a stream, picking fruits and mushrooms and making a fire to roast some potatoes he stole from a field. The parching heat of a shadeless road along a valley that he walked along after Issoire, the sudden torrential downpour that made him sit and shiver in a cave a few kilometers before Allegre.
And in the deepest valleys, farthest away from the towns, the less people were interested in the war, and the less they wanted to know. They or their children had been taken last time, many never came back; every village had its monument with the names on it. All Julien saw was relief that it was already over, that more names were not to be added to the roll call. Quick defeat was better than lengthy victory. The Germans would come, drink champagne, then go home again. That’s what they did. Perhaps the old woman who told him that was even right. Julien did not know, and after nearly two weeks without any news or any reliable information he found that he didn’t even care. The war was to the north, the concern of others. It did not touch those who ploughed their fi
elds and tended their goats. He was more concerned with the way the soles of his shoes were giving way.
He arrived home, at his mother’s home, strangely rested. Montpellier had been in chaos; the university closed, every building, it seemed, crammed with refugees, food running short. Avignon was worse. He stayed there for only a day, then packed a bag, wheeled out his bicycle—now the fastest means of transport available—and pedaled slowly to Roaix, feeling safety wrap itself around him the farther he left the big city behind. He had learned much and was fitter than he had ever been, burned dark by the sun, with the walk—near three hundred kilometers, more or less—having triumphed over the effects of years in libraries. He had a beard, which he kept for a week before shaving it off, burned his clothes and bathed, then waited to see what he should do next.
The little house in the country had scarcely changed in the past thirty years; he had not bothered to put in electricity or any of the other conveniences of modern life. Its whole purpose, after all, was to escape from it; now it served its purpose better than any well-equipped house. He had water in the well outside, a good supply of candles for night, an endless store of wood, which he chopped himself, and had spent so many years playing with the farmers’ children, now the farmers themselves, that there was never any chance that he would be denied food. There was one comfortable chair, a stout oak table, and all the books he might need. In a cupboard there was an old shotgun, which he oiled carefully and regularly, hiding it when possessing such things became illegal, and cartridges so that he could shoot birds or rabbits. How to skin and gut an animal was something he had learned as a child from the local farmers.
He stayed for nearly five months, moving between bursts of anxiety, during which he would pedal into Vaison and try to telephone Paris, or send off letters to find out what, if anything, he should do, and an indolence that permitted him to shut out the world and live the simple country life. He had enough money, and his needs, he discovered, were minimal; he could pass almost a week at a time without spending any at all. In the countryside he lived as he always did, rising at dawn and going to bed at dusk to conserve his dwindling stock of candles, and managed to behave as if nothing had happened. And he wanted to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible.
Of the outside world he had little, and only sporadic, information. The humiliating armistice filled him with despair, as did the exile of the government to Vichy. The treacherous way the English suddenly attacked and sank the best of the French fleet outraged him, and made him think of England’s own imminent, inevitable defeat with greater equanimity. The reestablishment of the government under the firm, reassuring guidance of Marshal Pétain was the only thing that gave him hope, but so far it made little difference to him. He watched from afar, and distinguished little of detail. So he missed most of the vast influx of refugees into the south, was unaware of how slowly they flowed out again like a human tide when a sort of calm returned. He did not hear of the resentments caused by these people, the shortages and the confusion. He saw nothing of the bedraggled, miserable army struggling south then breaking up in hopelessness; heard only a little of the much vaunted new moral order that was to rebuild France, restore its pride in itself, and begin the titanic task of cleaning out the decades of corruption and decay that were responsible for defeat. For France had brought this calamity on itself; that was the feeling, and now France must rise from the pyre of its own making.
Like most people, he was overwhelmed by the magnitude of events, the way the world had fallen to pieces so easily and the obvious difficulties of making sure it did not get even worse. And he consoled himself with reading, and doing little tasks, and by reawakening his long-dormant friendship with Elizabeth, his partner in catechism of near thirty years before. Her presence recalled easier and simpler moments, when all that was to be feared was the wrath of his father, or the disapproval of the priest when they broke out in a fit of giggles in church. She was long since married, but unhappily, to the local blacksmith, a man of almost legendary dullness whose sense of duty just managed to hide a streak of cruelty that, every now and then, would come peeping to the surface. What happened was almost inevitable; Julien certainly should have seen the danger. They began talking in the lane one day as old friends, she came in for a glass of water, and they reached out for each other at the same moment. She stayed for several hours, and returned on many occasions over the next three months. It was a foolishness brought on by the times.
She was not beautiful, not educated, not refined in any way, but had a coarse sensuality that Julien had rarely experienced, and they were drawn to each other because warmth and affection became so priceless in those days. Both of them were starved of it, and both managed briefly to forget everything else in each other’s company. But the world called him back to reality, and her dreams of escape vanished as he explained to her that he had to go, leaving her no alternative but to return to her rough, unsympathetic husband.
“But we can still see each other, when you come back here?” she said.
“I think it’s better not to,” he replied, as gently as he could but with a growing discomfort. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. It’s better if you just forget all about me. It was a dream; a lovely dream, but nothing more than that. Besides, sooner or later your husband will find out, and then everyone around will know about it. What will happen then?”
“Maybe he’ll throw me out,” she said with a smile. “Maybe I’ll have to come and live here.”
It was the look of alarm on his face, a slight disgust at the idea that came through the carefully constructed regret and understanding, that did all the damage. Elizabeth’s face turned stony, and she stood up from the little table in his kitchen.
“I see,” she said.
“Please,” he began, but she waved him away.
“Don’t say any more. There is no need to. I don’t intend to embarrass you, or make your life difficult. As you say, it would be best to forget it ever happened. I’m only sorry I misunderstood.”
“So am I,” he said, but could make no contact with her. She left a few moments later, and Julien breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief. The next day he packed a little bag and pedaled to Avignon, for all other forms of transport had vanished as if they had never existed.
Someone knew where he was; one of his letters had been received somewhere and had been passed on, in that mysterious way of organizations, into other hands, for in late February 1941 a letter was delivered to the post office at Vaison and was held there until he came in one day to see, again, if there was any soap; one of his neighbors had said there was some, and though he found the country life suited his temperament, he did like to wash properly.
He bought his soap, one precious bar of it, then called in at the post office and was given his letter. Marcel wanted him, needed him. The idyll was over; it was time to return to life. He was being asked to work for the new government. As he told Elizabeth when he announced he was going, he did not know when he would be back, or what he was wanted for.
Do we use the barbarians to control barbarism? Can we exploit them so that they preserve civilized values rather than destroy them? Was the old Athenian right, that taking any side is better than taking no side?
So he told himself, for he clung to some hope. But he soon learned it was worse than that, much worse. As he sat and looked, he saw a movement in the copse to the left; he sent off some of his bodyguards to investigate and they swiftly returned, leading a young boy with a rope around his neck. He was about seven, and he was crying in terror.
“Stop that noise,” Manlius ordered. “Give him some food if he needs it, if it will shut him up. Then bring him back to me when he is quiet.”
He turned away, got off his horse, and continued to walk around the burned-out buildings. Already he was beginning to suspect the truth. The damage was too neat, too orderly. Too little had been destroyed.
The boy was still crying. Manlius became itchy with his impatience to have c
onfirmed what he already knew. He took his whip off the saddle and prepared it.
It took a long time to get even the basics out of the whining, blubbering child. But eventually he confirmed the bishop’s suspicions. This had been no raid. His tenants had simply walked out, taking everything of use and value—his property, all of it—and marched off to the north, where softer conditions and better land had been promised them amongst the barbarians. They had had over a day’s start and would be hurrying. They’d taken oxen and carts and donkeys and goats, all the supplies and tools he had lavished on them.
The worst of it all was that he had, as always, most earnestly asked their leader at the last tax collection whether they had any complaint or wish. He had professed utter contentment; desired no better master.
He had not said, however, that he desired no master at all.
“This cannot continue,” the bishop said to himself. “It cannot go on.”
He was about to gallop off, when one of his bodyguards called him. “Sir, the boy . . .”
Manlius looked at him kneeling on the ground, quiet now.
“Cut off his hands and give them to him in a bag. Then let him follow his family. Let him be a burden to them from now on, not a help.”
He turned his horse, then hesitated. “No,” he said. “We cannot waste anything these days, however justly. Bring him with you and put him to work in the granary. There’s more than enough to be done there.”
The Magdalen would not come. What he had, he had done from memory, and a strange forgetfulness came over him as he tried to recall her features. So he gave up once more and returned to Avignon. He was often to be seen wandering the streets. Pausing and making sketches of faces flitting past. Only once did anyone remark on this and draw attention to his strange behavior. It was in the open space near the ramparts, marked down for building but not yet filled up with new houses, the fruit trees still there, the little stalls where merchants sold bread and fruits to women of delicacy who were wont to parade in the evening with their maids and mothers even in winter, for the evenings were not so very cold. Isabelle de Fréjus was there, walking up and down, and there also was Pisano, sitting on the ground, pretending not to look, sketching away to get her face just so, pitched at an angle he had seen once before and which, he knew, would be perfect for the representation of the Magdalen descending from her boat with her entourage. It was not her face that he wanted, merely its expression, but he studied her carefully nonetheless, staring at her in a way that, sooner or later, was bound to attract attention.
