The Last Stoic (24 page)

“Do you love the emperor?” the magistrate asked, beginning the interrogation with the customary first question.

“No,” Marcus replied, “I do not.”

“The Arab.  Do you know how that noisy jackass died?”

Mark shook his head.

“Just stopped breathing one
night.  Hard to believe.  A young guy like that.”

The soldier paused and smiled.

“How about you?  You feeling
alright?  Let’s see, you’ve had two cell mates removed either dead or dying. 
The towel-head makes three.  You a betting man?”

The soldier left, laughing.

Mark enjoyed the deepest sleep
he’d had since arriving. 

In the middle of the night he
heard the cell door open and soldiers enter.  They placed a hood over his head,
secured his hands behind his back with plastic ties, and led him out, prodding
him forward.  Brought to a small, empty room, he was thrown to the floor and
stuffed into a sleeping bag.  It was zipped up so that Mark was fully cocooned,
like a pupa.  They kicked and stomped and struck at him with batons.  Mark
remained quiet and still.  Dissatisfied, the men removed him from the bag,
wrenched his bound wrists behind his back, and attached them to a steel chain
suspended from the ceiling.  Still hooded, he could see nothing.  He was
hoisted to his knees.

“Raise him to the roof.”

Mark recognized the voice of the
magistrate. 

The steel chain began winding
from the wall, pulling up toward the ceiling along with Mark’s wrists and
arms.  He was fully suspended from his wrists, his arms and elbows pulling
irresistibly at their joints.  He’d never experienced such pure, blinding
agony.  Still he made no sound.  He lost consciousness inside a minute.  The
soldiers lowered him again to his knees and threw a bucket of cold water over
him.

“No more questions.  You’re
useless.  Absolutely fucking useless.  This is just for fun now. Photo ops.”

They laid him on his back and he
could feel the hard boots of one of the soldiers on his chest.  Another stepped
on.  Mark could feel his chest compress.  His lungs flattened and his diaphragm
constricted.  This is what the soldier meant.  Just stopped breathing, he had said. 
This is how Nasir died.  Pressed to death.  One of the soldiers stepped off
again, and the other jumped up and down, cracking several of Mark’s ribs. 

“Easy.  Not too fast.  No marks.”

The soldiers tenderized him like
he was a cut of meat.  They raised him into the air by his wrists or stretched
him out on the ground, kneeling or standing on the pressure point at the centre
of his chest, shouting and cursing at him.  They resuscitated him and started
again.  The flash from a camera illuminated his hood.  He understood this might
be the end.  A minor miscalculation on the part of the soldiers and
unconsciousness would turn into heart failure or brain malfunction.  It would
be a lamentably undignified exit.  But he was determined to part with life cheerfully. 
As the unforgiving boot ends continued to cascade into his already fractured
ribcage and his lungs collapsed irretrievably, he concentrated on all the
wonders and joys of his all too brief existence in his present form, as Mark,
son of Luke and Paulina.  He lost consciousness a fourth time.

Shortly after dawn, the magistrate was back in the room, agitated and impatient.

“No fucking more!  I just got
word.  He’s off limits.  He’s spoken for.”

The soldiers were confused.

“For Christ’s sake, someone high
up is vouching for him, wants him out,
unharmed
.  Get the doctor.  Clean
him up, make him presentable.  This is a goddamn, fucking fuck up.”

The magistrate was now at his
ear.

“You won’t be able to prove a
word of what you think happened here.  You were uncooperative when you first
arrived and we had several altercations in which we had to subdue you.  All
within the reasonable bounds of proper procedure.”

Paulina breathed into his slender neck.

“My beautiful heron.  We missed
you so much.”

Marcus was silent.  He wanted to
tell her everything.  Instead, he hugged her closer, enveloping her with sore
arms.  Still there was pain, lodged deep and entrenched, despite convalescing
for a week before his release in the care of the best Greek physicians.

“Where’s grandfather?” he asked,
“I have a lot to tell him.”

It was mid-afternoon and a
yellow-grey shaft of light filtered palely into his modest cenaculum,
illuminating the motes of dust suspended lazily in the stale air. 

“Vincentius is dead.”

Marcus tilted his head down
toward Paulina, as though hard of hearing.  He parted from her, trying to
reconcile the words with his last images of the man, cascading into his room on
the dawn of his departure, vigorous and resolved. 

“Dead?”

“Yes.  He was with me,” Paulina
continued, “the two of us made the trip together.  He wasn’t well when we
left.”

Vincentius had contracted a
vapour before leaving, she continued, he’d become feverish.  They urged him to
stay home but he’d insisted.  It was his money and his acquaintances in Rome
that would get Marcus out, he’d said. 

“I’m afraid the exhaustion of the
trip and the worry…” she trailed off.  “There was something else.”

“What happened?”

“An altercation.  A young man
called Patricius. Grandfather was convinced that he knew more about your
disappearance than he let on.”

“Disappearance?  Didn’t you know
where I was from the start?  Isn’t that why you came down here in the first
place?”

“No,” Paulina replied, puzzled. 
“We had no idea.  No-one had any idea.  You were just gone.”

“But didn’t Gus tell you?  Didn’t
he send for you?  Paulus Cornelius?”

“No.  They were just as mystified
as everyone else.  They said you failed to show up at the worksite one day and
assumed you’d had enough and had gone home or moved to another city.”

Gus.  Marcus recalled the events
at the rally.  Patricius standing nearby accusing them.  Gus appearing suddenly
from the woods.  He sat down, thinking. 
Why had no-one from the firm come
to bail me out?  Why did they not contact my family?  Gus caused my
incarceration.  What I saw that late night at the worksite was not the trickery
of the shadows.  My eyes did not deceive me.  And Gus suspected as much.  He
wasn’t there to help.  He was there to make sure the soldiers finished the
job.  He promised to take care of Sura.  Jupiter!  What has become of Sura?
 

“This Patricius was a queer one,”
Paulina continued, “he was right there, in your insula, when we arrived. 
Grandfather discovered from him that the Praetorians had taken you.  The young
man stabbed Vincentius with a knife before he could leave and then stabbed
himself.  To death.  Grandfather was left bleeding on the floor.”

The priests at the temple found
Vincentius.  When the bleeding was stopped and his wound was sealed, he
insisted that they hire a litter back to Rome.  He met with dozens of his
associates on the Capitoline Hill and the Forum, in the tavernae and thermae
around the city, many of them two or three or four times, often from his sick
bed, or from the litter.  The long hours, the sleeplessness, and the anxiety
overtook him. 

“It meant everything to
Vincentius that he get you back, Marcus.  We can be thankful that he died
knowing that he’d secured your freedom.”

His old friend, the Senator
Frontinus, assured them, just a day before Vincentius passed away that Marcus
would be released and that it had all been a terrible mistake. 

“And he asked me to give you this,”
Paulina said, putting a book on the table.  Marcus turned it over and opened
the first page.  It was Vincentius’ parting gift, the intended traveling charm,
the rare copy of Marcus Aurelius’ journal, signed by the emperor himself. 

Marcus stared at the book for a
long time.  Paulina watched him closely, wondering what horrors her boy had
undergone in the distant prison camp, trying in vain to suppress the worst she
could imagine.  He thought of Vincentius, feeling all at once the
disillusionment and distress his grandfather must have endured, learning that
his grandson had been imprisoned.  How humiliated he must have felt approaching
acquaintances for their help in retrieving his grandson from a prison camp. 
Did
he ever wonder if I might actually have been involved in an assassination
attempt?
  Marcus flipped the page absent-mindedly, and read the first line
of the journal.

From my grandfather…

He smiled.

“Where is grandfather now?”

“We arranged for a funeral for
him in Rome, as was his request.  Many of his former colleagues were in
attendance.  It was very tasteful.  As a last favour, Senator Frontinus offered
a space in the equestrian columbarium just outside the city walls where many of
the Frontinus ancestors reside.  He made the offer after Vincentius died so we
don’t know his wishes.  The senator graciously allowed us to postpone the
decision until we had a chance to discuss it.”

Paulina gestured toward a bronze
urn sitting on a pedestal in the corner of the room.

“Vincentius remains with us.” 

It pleased Marcus to think that
Vincentius had been accorded such an honour.  But to be interred far from his
home in Verulamium?  He stood and walked to the urn, laying his hand on the
heavy, metal lid, quietly thinking upon it.

“He’s been granted a niche high
and on the periphery,” Paulina continued, “It seemed lonely to me and I said as
much.  The senator said
you’re
never really alone on that hallowed ground.  That the site has seen more people
come and go than are alive today.  Even before it was Roman.  Cave-dwellers. 
The Villanovans.  The Latins. The Sabines.  The Etruscans.  A thousand
different tribes and clans.  I just don’t know.”

“I thought grandfather would want
to be buried at his villa at Verulamium.  Did he not say before he died?”

Paulina looked away sadly.

“He didn’t…,” she paused, “and
the villa is no longer ours.”

“What do you mean?”

“We had many expenses.  The
travel.  Accommodations.  We had to hire a number of physicians, the best in
Rome.”

Paulina described the many
contributions to different officials, senators and consuls, praefects and magistrates.  There were fees just to speak to someone.  They had to make sure this or that
official received a discreet bag of coins so they would put pressure on some
other official. 

“We had to sell our stake in the
farm and grandfather sold his villa.  You know your father and I don’t need
much, and don’t want much.  He can still work on the farm.  I can pick up some
more work tutoring the local children with their music.  Vincentius won’t miss
his old villa.”

Marcus said nothing.

“We’d all have gladly traded the
emperor’s palace to have you back.  It’s a bargain.”

They brought Vincent’s ashes across the landscapes
he’d called home and loved so
dearly, scrambling furtively over the fences and through the hedgerows onto the
ancestral homeland that was no longer theirs, interloping this last time for a
final communion with the streams and trees, ponds and meadows.  The place was
now a summer property, a getaway for another family to escape the extreme heat
of the southern climate for a more temperate vacation of fishing, boating, and
water-skiing.  Next to Vincent’s old cabin, space had been cleared and a
foundation laid for a new chalet.  The old barn, where Vincent had kept the
horses and donkeys, had been pulled down and was a mess of rubbled cinder
blocks and broken beams.  They wandered across the meadow, dispersing the
ashes, to the edge of the woods, and found many recently felled trees, cleared
to enhance the view. 

Among the toppled trees was the
ancient yew, fallen like its neighbours.  That is where they stopped. 

The yew shouldn’t have looked
like this: horizontal, inert, dismembered, and vanquished.  It had seemed to
Mark more permanent than the sun and the sky and the mountains.  He felt like
he’d stumbled across a crime scene.  The massive concentric stump with its
countless rings was misshapen and reddened from the many, repeated chainsaw
cuts.  The earth was redolent with mounds of fresh, soft pulp.  Several feet
away, stacked neatly, lay the hundreds of severed and trimmed limbs, reserved
for future corn roast bonfires and a blazing hearth at Christmas.  An attempt
had been made to extricate the stump.  The backhoe tracks were still visible. 
The roots were exposed.  Some were gouged and hacked, but none completely
sundered.  Mark opened the urn containing his grandfather’s ashes and sprinkled
half around the remains of the yew.  He scattered them over the stacks of
branches and along the drip line and over the circle of slender shoots that
pushed up tentatively through the layered humus where the yew’s expansive
boughs had, in its prime, touched the earth.

The others returned home, getting
chilled by the late autumn gusts.  Mark stayed longer, breathing the rich air
emanating from the woods, hearing the chatter from the birds and squirrels
making their winter preparations, savouring the moist, coolness coming in from
the lake.