The Dream of Scipio Page 25

  “Please don’t go mentioning Jews again,” Marcel said wearily when they met a week or so after his talk. “I’m sure you were making some general historical point of no great relevance, but it doesn’t sit well at the moment. Not the way you did it, anyway. I have had six letters of protest, and the policeman sitting in on the meeting was highly critical. I don’t need it at the moment.”

  It was only when he received news from a list distributed around the Préfecture—an unremarkable, routine document, mainly intended to alert bureaucrats of housing in the region no longer occupied and now available for requisitioning—that Bronsen had been interned and had died in the camp that he began to panic.

  “What is Les Milles?” he demanded of Marcel one morning. He met him as the préfet was walking across the Place de l’Horloge on his way to the office. A sunny morning, with the first breath of spring in it. Julien had taken to eating his breakfast in a café nearby, though the experience—once full of so many different little pleasures—gave him little joy now. Even though the tide of refugees was ebbing, and the air of desperation was fading, the city that he knew so well seemed changed by the experience. There was a bleakness, even a hardness about it he had not noticed before. The buildings themselves seemed more grim, more evocative of a harsh and cruel past, as though the recent miseries had reminded the stones of what they had seen take place before them in the course of so many centuries.

  He almost didn’t notice Marcel as he marched across the square. Still determined in his gait, his slight figure just fending off a hint of the ridiculous, the pompous in his stride. Only someone who knew him well, like Julien, could see how he stooped a little more each month. Only at the last minute did Julien finish his coffee—although its bitter, unpleasant taste reminded him of no coffee he had ever drunk before the war—throw down a few coins, and hurry to catch up with him. Marcel stopped and looked at Julien as he approached, and put the question without any ceremony. “Good morning Julien,” he replied. “Have you been lying in wait for me?”

  “No. I just saw you. What is Les Milles?”

  “It’s a processing camp. For illegal aliens. Nothing to worry about,” he replied. “A routine sort of thing for foreigners wanting exit visas. Got to put them somewhere so they don’t vanish. Why do you ask?”

  “I have just heard that Julia Bronsen’s father has died in it.”

  Marcel grunted. “The Jewish financier? What do you expect me to say?”

  “He was French, and he died there.”

  “Evidently he wasn’t French, or he wouldn’t have been there.”

  “He was a citizen. He had a passport.”

  “Not the same thing anymore. And as for dying, that’s a shame. But people die. There’s a lot of it about at the moment. He must have been—what? Sixty? Seventy? It happens.”

  “So why lock up old men?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Julien. Those people in these camps are lucky. They get housed and fed free of charge, all their wants and desires looked after. And they’re hardly under arrest. It’s for their own safety, you know. Feelings are running pretty high about people like that. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner people like him leave the country the better.”

  “He won’t be leaving now, will he?”

  “Evidently not. And as I say, I’m sorry. But it is not in my area, and I didn’t know he’d been taken in. So don’t get angry with me. He was your friend, I know. And if I can do anything practical to help, just ask. But don’t ask me to mourn someone I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have liked even if I had.”

  “In that case can you find out what happened to Julia? She was meant to be meeting him in Marseille. They were going to leave together.”

  Marcel’s eyes narrowed as he thought. Favors were currency, to be hoarded and used with care. Julien, for the first time, felt like a petitioner.

  Eventually he nodded. “I’ll make inquiries. All right? Can I go to work now?”

  Julien could not work out whether he was more hurt or angry that she had not contacted him; in any case both emotions were overwhelmed by worry for her. It was getting difficult to travel, but the trains still ran sporadically; as soon as he could he went to Marseille himself to get her.

  The reality was much less bad than his imaginings of squalid hotels, prostitutes, and the poverty of hunger; she was living in a tiny little hotel hard up by the docks, along with a dozen others in a similar situation. The owner was irrepressibly cheerful, remarkably so as it seemed that the chances of anyone paying her the full amount they owed was small. “That is war,” she said philosophically as she took Julien up to her room. “But what can I do? If I throw them out then I get others who cannot pay either.”

  Julien knocked and walked in. She was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette, disheveled and with dark shadows under her eyes. She leaned forward onto herself when she saw who it was. She looked dreadful; tired and very frightened. He went to comfort her, but she waved him away. “Get out, Julien,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Five minutes. Come back in five minutes.”

  He shook his head in surprise, but did as he was told. Stood outside on the narrow landing underneath a hissing gas light, until she opened the door once more and let him in. She’d put on a clean dress, combed her hair, tidied the room. The effort distressed him far more than the first sight of her; for the first time in her life she had been reduced to the conventional. His fury at her bubbled over because of it.

  “Why didn’t you write to me? What are you doing here? Have you taken leave of your senses? What were you thinking about?”

  She opened the window to let in some fresh air, even though it was cold outside. “I like the noise of sea gulls,” she said. “I think I’d like to live by the sea. I always enjoyed my stays in the Camargue.”

  “Julia . . .”

  “Sorry. But if you ask rhetorical questions you can hardly expect an answer. If you must know, I didn’t write because I couldn’t manage it, because I didn’t know where you were, and because I haven’t exactly been thinking straight since my father died. Did you know about that?”

  “I heard. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, of course. So am I.”

  She shut the window and sat down once more on the bed.

  “But I am not as destroyed by it as I thought I would be. Strange, don’t you think? I think it is, anyway; I have a sense of liberation. I am penniless, bereaved, hiding in this horrid little room. The man who looked after me selflessly all his life, who comforted me, protected me, helped me, loved me without reserve is dead, killed in a dank little prison for no reason. The world, the worthwhile part of it at least, seems to be coming to an end. And my main reaction is to feel more free than ever in my life. And at the same time I sit here transfixed like a frightened rabbit, and sooner or later someone will come and take me away as well.

  “I’m a Jew, you know,” she added seriously, looking at him with an almost childlike intensity.

  “I thought you might be,” he said with a faint smile.

  “Well, I didn’t,” she replied. “Not really. My father always pretended we weren’t; I know nothing about it at all, but now the government says I am one, so I suppose I must be.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so worried. You’re French; they’re only arresting foreigners.”

  “Only foreigners,” she echoed. “That’s all right, then. Except I’m a foreigner as well. Another piece of news. I always thought I was French. I was convinced of it, in fact, but no: My mother was German, and I was born in Germany. My parents were traveling there at the time; my mother was ill, it seems, and they went to take the waters. I was born in Baden-Baden. Do you understand what that means?”

  Julien nodded. “It means the sooner you get out the better.”

  “It does. But I can’t get an exit permit without showing my identity card, and the moment I show that, I have my citizenship taken away and the police come round. So, I sit here thinking ab
out my new liberty as an orphan. And, I must say, I have been drinking somewhat too much. Do you know, I’ve been drawing, after a fashion? I got some children’s crayons. Do you know what I’ve been drawing? Flowers. Vases of flowers. The world is falling to bits, people are locked in camps, I’m stuck in this place, and I have been drawing flowers.”

  It was not her situation that shook Julien but her response to it, the overly dramatic way she spoke, the ill-considered gestures, the way in which she had forgotten so completely the way she was that she seemed almost a different person.

  “You must get out, and you must let me help you,” he said. “I’ve come with money and the names of people who might help. Will you let me?”

  She looked at him blankly, and nodded.

  JULIEN WAS NOT certain how many laws he broke over the next five days; certainly there were quite a few. He derived no pleasure from it, but had no fear either. No alternative ever crossed his mind. Her safety was the only thing of concern. It was a strange transformation in him as well; up to that point he had scarcely even walked on the grass in a park before; throughout that period most people who were arrested and sent to camps were caught because they could not bring themselves to break laws that they knew to be cruel, even though they knew obeying would lead to disaster. The habit of order was not easily broken; once it was, it was not easily repaired either.

  By this stage he was no longer wealthy, as one effect of the war had been to destroy much of the value of investments and savings. Even the money he nominally possessed was hard to obtain; when he heard of Julia’s whereabouts, he had reverted to old habits last employed in Rome. He went to a dealer in Avignon and sold him his precious Cézanne. Not for very much, but he knew enough to realize that he was given as much as the dealer was likely to get for it himself. Again a favor, he knew the man well, had taught his son. Such things kept civilization going.

  The money he received was just enough for the bribes, the tickets, the payments required to get all the bits of paper Julia needed in the time available. There were those who could help, those who would do so if prodded with a little gift, and those who could be persuaded to turn a blind eye by overstressing his connections to people of importance. He took risks, got everything she required except for the precious exit visa. This she provided for herself.

  She was brought back to life by his activity on her behalf, and disappeared one morning at dawn, coming back only as dusk fell once more. Julien spent a day in terror, convinced she had been arrested; he made inquiries but no one had seen her. So he sat waiting; there was nothing else he could do, his fear growing at every moment. When he heard the handle turn and saw the door swing open, he felt sure it was the police, come to search the room.

  It was Julia, who walked in calmly and greeted him as if nothing had happened. She threw an envelope on the bed. “Look,” she said. “What do you think?”

  She was exultant, smiling, herself again. Her hair was loose and the way she moved had returned to its normal ease; for the past few days she had seemed like a creature in a cage, constantly fearful of brushing against the bars and being reminded of its imprisonment. Now she walked like one newly made free. He looked in the envelope. It was the exit visa. “How on earth did you get that?”

  She laughed, a delicate, musical peal of laughter. “I didn’t. I made it. I didn’t spend six months at the École studying etching for nothing, you know. I went to a specialist printer—don’t look like that, he’s quite safe. He’s a Jew as well, and we Jews stick together, it seems—and he lent me his press and a couple of plates. I borrowed our next door neighbor’s visa for an hour last night and copied it, then etched it and ran off a copy. The stamps I did by hand. What do you think? They’re the best bits of work I’ve done in a year. Julien?”

  Her insouciance, combined with the worry of the day, was too much. He rocked backward and forward on the bed, crying like he had never cried since his mother died so many years before. She knelt down in front of him, stroked him gently, and comforted him, then took him in her arms.

  They were both entirely defenseless, and made love for the first time; in many ways for the first time in their lives, and they had both waited a long time.

  “A shepherd does not abandon his flock,” he said when his opinion was asked, although what he meant was that, once he had left, he might never come back. “Your people need you,” he added, meaning that if he earned the gratitude of the population, the contrast with turbulent, disobedient Rome would be ever greater.

  A strange man, this de Deaux, someone who never would have gotten on well with Ceccani even if the practicalities of great power had not forced them into mutual opposition. For he was a born politician, who acted on his instincts rather than from any easily grasped principle. He had no interest in the sort of thing that so fascinated Ceccani; Olivier would have found no patron in him; abstract knowledge was important only if it served to advance the church. Even in appearance they were different, the Italian short and stout, exuding a chilly affability, the Frenchman tall and gaunt, with a permanent cold even in the full warmth of a Provençal summer.

  The Frenchman won the argument about the plague, for Clement was disinclined to leave the city in any case, as he felt safer behind the thick stone walls of his palace. There he did little, but merely remaining became an act of leadership and courage. De Deaux also won on the matter of the purchase, and was sent to open negotiations with the Countess of Provence—who guarded her independence from France jealously, and needed money to make sure it continued. Ceccani noted the move and knew it was de Deaux’s attempt to end forever the possibility that the pope would return to Rome, where he should be.

  Clearly, de Deaux had put in a great deal of advance work before suggesting the idea; permission must have been won from the king of France, who must have concluded that a richer, more secure Provence was a small price to pay for the possibility of permanent French domination of the papacy. It made his own plans the more urgent; he needed to ensure that the negotiations failed, that France would reject the very idea of giving the countess money, that the countess would cancel any sale. He needed to set them at each other’s throats. Time was short. He needed to move swiftly; and he needed to cast a shadow over de Deaux, and weaken him.

  While Ceccani watched and Clement retired to the top of a great tower in the palace to escape the plague, de Deaux put himself in charge of daily activities, acting in the pope’s name. Thus, through him Clement consecrated the Rhône itself as a burial ground, so that corpses could be thrown in to be washed downriver to the sea, rather than rotting in the houses and the streets. He emptied the prisons and put the dregs they contained to work dragging the bodies to the water’s edge. And he was doing his best to discover the source of the illness—if there was one—so that something might be done. Or, failing that, so that something might be seen to be done, however ineffective it was.

  He also brought his Jew to Avignon to see if he could discover the source of the infection. Ceccani noted all the maneuverings, saw the purpose hidden beneath them. For Cardinal de Deaux was steering the papacy into earning the love of the population, cementing its presence there in their hearts as it had already done in their wallets, fixing it ever more permanently into the very ground of Provence. He was staking his claim to the succession at the same time that he was creating the atmosphere in which the negotiations to buy the city outright were getting under way. Time was very short. Ceccani knew that if he did not move soon, he would never move at all.

  Gersonides was brought to Avignon not quite in chains, but as good as. Certainly he would have been shackled and tied to the back of a horse had he persisted in his initial reluctance to come. The two armed soldiers outside his door would brook no refusal. The rabbi had, with the greatest irritation, packed bag and books and accompanied them.

  “I do not know when I will see you again,” he said to Rebecca at the door. “The plague is not here yet, and I will not come back until it has extinguished itself
in Avignon. I do not know if it travels with people, but it seems very possible. I do not wish to bring it to my own home because of a selfish desire to see your face.”

  To this woman he was as gentle as he was gruff and offensive to men like Ceccani, even though she was every bit as stubborn and self-willed as he was. What was admirable in a man was unseemly in a woman, however, and she had not found a husband, nor was likely to do so. Who, after all, would seek out a penniless servant, with no family, no history? He doubted if even the young Christian, befuddled by her though he was, would be so rash. Gersonides had accepted that the young man was truly besotted, had seen the war rage in him with interest, noted the appalled disgust on his face as the emotion swept over him each time he came. To fall in love with a Jew; so strong was the reaction, so real the complications, he even felt a little sorry for him. And then he saw that same face—a handsome face, he noted, well formed, ringed by curly fair hair that was rarely combed but generally clean—ease as the soul within accepted its fate. And Gersonides also relaxed, for he saw that the young man would not trifle with her, although he knew that there was, for the first time, a possibility that she would now leave him. But what would she do? How would she react? How would it end? He was fearful, for his desire not to leave her mingled with his wish for her happiness and his consciousness of the dangers she faced.

  For Gersonides, she was, quite simply, the center point of his life since the death of his wife and six children, all of whom, one by one, had died—three at birth, two when they, in turn, had come to give birth, and one of sickness. For them he grieved, fully and without reservation, although with the stoicism that was his natural character. Rebecca, however, was different, for had she died, he would have died as well. She had come to him by chance, lost and bedraggled, and he had taken her in, fed her, and warmed her. She worked for him selflessly and with absolute honesty, listened to him when he wished to talk, kept quiet when he did not. In the two and a half years since she had come to his door she had replaced wife, daughters, sons, and family. To lose her was the one thing he feared, which was why, on one of the few occasions some hint of a suitor had been mentioned, he had always found reasons to reject the approach. He knew it was selfish, that he should give her up and encourage her to leave. But he could not do so, and he reassured himself with the thought that she evidently had no wish to venture into the world either. Until now, perhaps.