Francis wanted to capture the dream: for the third night, he had read the name of a place he had known, and, now, wanted to build into the story. There were three, at equal distance from each other, the monk had said. The last day, his stare fixed on some old manuscript he had dug out from the loot of a raid, years back, he’d looked for clues. In the morning, like today, he could not recall the names. Long ago, he had travelled, feverish, and briefly lived there, at the vortices of the triangle, carried away by the rage to discover the truth.

Where he was now, near the small park, in the city he loved, was one of those places, he was certain of it. He tried to lift his arm, and discovered he was almost unable to move: he would have to go back to his therapist. He had to work, look again at the archives.

In the park, he had met the shadow of an old monk, one night. That was before the first dream. The monk had spoken in an old, forgotten, language, and Francis had only understood a few words. Where were the other two places?

Myriam was away, back in London, or already travelling on business. Francis had no news, apart from a short message from his son, saying that all was well. After the morning coffee ritual, he sat at his desk and started reviewing the note he had written about the last three nights dreams. The dreams were short and very clear: the monk, or his shadow, was showing him an inscription carved on a flat stone. The design showed a triangle, and a name at each of the vortices. But Francis could not read the names. He looked out of the window, which was opened on Viktoria Park. There, one late evening, when the alleys were deserted, and the low murmur of the city was already swallowed by the thin drizzle, he had met the monk, or, he thought, someone who dressed like a monk. The monk was sitting on a bench, and was reading. Francis, on impulse, sat next to him, and greeted him. 

Then a long silence had followed, before the monk replied in a language Francis did not recognise at first. The monk had shown Francis a picture in the book he was reading. The book was old, but printed, it was no antique manuscript. The picture, on a full page was hard to see in the feeble light of the park’s lamppost. It was the stone and the carved triangle. Francis wanted to ask the monk questions, but soon the monk had disappeared, as if melting into the obscurity of that corner of the park, and Francis was alone. Then the dreams had started. The first dream showed a vortex of the triangle, and a name, magnified, but not readable. Francis was convinced it was related to his location here, in Berlin, without knowing why. The following nights the other two names had been displayed, one at a time, still unreadable. On reflection, Francis thought the monk had spoken in Aramaic, however unlikely this was. Had the names on the stone been engraved in the Aramaic alphabet?

On his note, Francis had sketched the picture, as well as he could recall it, and what had appeared in the following three nights.  The dreams had been short, and silent. Each time Francis had woken up, before  dawn, and felt difficult to move, as if he had been asleep for much longer. Since Myriam had left, he had been working on his story, set in the Middle-East at the time of Mohammed, and revisiting a lot of his research on the people and tribes that then inhabited the vast area from the Red Sea to the confines of India. As he tried to rationalise the incident, and the encounter with the “monk”, Francis remembered, that many years before meeting Myriam for the first time, he had travelled to Northern Italy, as he was working on an essay about the ancient Christian cults of Palestine. There, in the old city of Bolzano, he had met a respected and elderly Austrian historian, an expert on the period that preceded the first crusade, who had told him of a belief that was common to nomadic tribes of the desert lands. According to that belief, Man had three birth places: his actual birth place, a place of his spiritual choosing, and where he would be reborn, on his death. Later, visiting the ruins of a great cistercian abbaye in Yorkshire, Francis had thought that this may well become his “second birth place”.

Those memories were coming back to him now, as he decided to go out, see his physiotherapist, and stop mulling over the “monk” and the triangle. He had been too introverted since the start of the crisis. This was now over. He could leave the city, as and when he chose. 

Picture source