Human Traces (27 page)

autumn, and although the world of human sickness was not predictable, it did look as though the economy of the schloss could be made to work. Heartened by this news, Jacques told her that the time had now come for him to go and fetch Olivier from his asylum. He had not wanted to uproot him until he was certain he could offer him a lasting home, but now, with the good financial news, he felt confident; Thomas would take over his patients while he was away and he expected the return journey to Brittany to take him no more than ten days.

Ten

As the train travelled west from Paris, Jacques had leisure, for the first time since he had made his visit to Torrington four summers earlier, to look back at the period of furious passion through which he had lived. Beyond the shuddering glass, he could see the landscape reel out continuously, sliced into rectangles by the rapid return of his eye. His own life sometimes seemed to him to have that quality of being made up of a series of separate phases, barely understood at the time, for all that they formed part of an unwinding whole. The moment of his appearance before the examiners to defend his thesis had marked the dramatic end of one such section. He had prepared very little for the interview dangerously little, when he came to think of it. It was as though he could not bring himself to imagine it in advance because too much depended on it; yet he could not have foreseen what really resulted, which was not just the ending of the student years or the acquisition of a licence to practise, but the sense that he had become someone else: for a moment in the churchy upstairs room where the test took place, he had seen himself from the outside, as the examiners saw him, and he no longer felt provisional or disqualified, but filled with power and confidence. If they believed in this strange Dr. Rebière, then why should he not do so too? And then, why not send the fellow out to do his life-work for him this awe-inspiring doctor whose work of 'first-rate scholarship' had brought his superiors no, his equals to their feet? After all, he was inventing other aspects of his life as he went along. The role of husband, for instance, was not how he had pictured it, this one-room urban penury with a divorced foreigner no solid house, no servants or children yet Sonia seemed content when all that he had brought was himself and what he carried in his head. So he turned his mind to his work and found that he could manage German as well as English and that much of what he read among the Germans seemed to fit in with his own preconceptions and interests. Was he allowed to take other men's ideas, pick them up like a jackdaw and carry them back to his nest? Was this thievery, or was it scholarship? The further he continued, the more he had the feeling that his work was blessed: almost everything seemed to relate to his central concern, to the working of the mind and to the subtle way that thought crossed into flesh. The evidence seemed to lie all about him, yet no one else had bothered to look down and pick it up. That did not matter: for millions of years the leaves had fallen from the trees before Newton described the simple force that made them do so; it was less than a hundred years since the brain had been identified as the organ of thought, relegating other favoured contenders, such as heart, stomach and pineal gland, to their more mundane work. And as for the fact that he had not travelled an orthodox academic road, that might be an advantage. Who had discovered more: overeducated graduates of the finest schools who cautiously added a new level of research to the best that been bought for them, or men inflamed by a sense of being excluded, driven by their own desire to labour onward, ragged, blind, into the night? Perhaps a little ignorance was a helpful and a necessary thing; it prevented him from feeling it had all been done before, while the blind spots in his vision helped him see other parts of the picture with burning insight. And Sonia... He had learned to think of himself as she viewed him, everything reflected back from her, so that he became the man she saw. He knew her perspective was only partial, that everyone had a different picture of him, but Sonia was no fool, her gaze was steady and her interpretation sound; and if she was a little too forbearing, more indulgent than he deserved, then he could privately supply the corrections. Sometimes he did yearn for a different idea of what he was; he felt restricted within the role she had assigned him not that there was anything wrong with it, just that it was singular and he wanted to exist in more than one pair of eyes. At Nantes railway station, he caught a branch line to the small town that was nearest to Olivier's country seclusion, and from the station took a cab across the pale, flat countryside, through the forest roads and the planted acres of gnarled and stunted vines that produced the acidic wine of the region, then across the village itself and onward to his remote destination. Night had fallen when he climbed down from the carriage at the gates of the asylum and pulled the bell. A nun came hurrying up the path from the main doors of the building, her habit flapping about her in the gathering wind. She scanned his face anxiously through the gate. "Come inside quickly," she said when he had explained his business. There was a solitary gas bracket in the main hall of the building beneath which he stood while the nun vanished into the darkness. There was nothing to see in the old building and no sound came to him, so he began to think about other things: he pictured Sonia at the schloss; he thought of her in the bright family rooms, so different from the dark lowland where he found himself. "Come this way," said the nun. She led him down a stone corridor with a vaulted ceiling, then showed him into a room and indicated a chair at the plain, scrubbed table. She left him again, without explanation, and he heard her wooden clogs going over the floor. He was in what appeared to be a kind of parlour, lit by two small candles in holders on the table; behind him was a sink with a dripping brass tap. His mind began to move on again, and he was aware of disregarding his odd surroundings, because the thoughts in his head were more alive to him. Perhaps soldiers in a cavalry charge were thinking about something other than the guns. With their thighs they could contain the swell and thunder of the horse, guide the sword with a young man's eyesight, all muscles tensed to kill or die, but could also be pondering the growth of a wist aria above the lintel of an aunt's front door. Did they deserve to be called brave? He remembered once performing an emergency tracheotomy on an epileptic woman in the Salpetriere, and at the moment his dexterity opened up the airway and saved her life he was thinking about lunch. How seldom it was that you fully inhabited your surroundings, engaging not only your senses but your awareness. On the occasions that you did so, time had a way of slowing, or appearing even to stop. So did we hurry on with other thoughts because we were preoccupied, so well adjusted to the world that it was scarcely worth our attention? Or would committing ourselves to it more fully involve experiences of time or doubt or fear that we did not really wish to have? Had the ability to escape into abstraction, to live outside our surroundings, been favoured by natural selection? It certainly appeared to be an ability lacked by the mentally ill, who were engaged so fully with their reality that they were stuck in it. There was some problem with time here, he felt sure: a healthy mind needed a proper relationship with time, which was clearly no linear given, but something more mysterious, and could be experienced in various ways. "Come this way," said the nun, and her voice caused Jacques to jump back into the candle-lit room. Although he had visited the asylum before, it had been by day, and he rapidly became disorientated in the darkness, following the nun's candle down a twisting corridor. A cat swerved between his feet, causing him to stumble and put out his hand: the wall was damp beneath his fingers. "Can I take him tonight, Sister? The superintendent wrote to me and said that if I countersigned his report to the Department, then ' "I am instructed to show you to a room where you can sleep. The lunatics cannot be awakened after darkness. They rise soon after daybreak. I will bring you food in the morning. In here, please." The nun lit a candle in whose light Jacques could see a narrow bed with a crucifix hanging from the wall above it, a table with a jug, a glass and a cloth-covered plate, a washstand and, beside it, a metal bucket. "Goodnight," said the nun, handing him the second candle, which she had fixed in a china holder. "God be with you." "And with you, Sister." She backed into the shadows and closed the door. Jacques was certain that he heard her turn a key, and looked at the door for a moment in disbelief; by the time he had tried it and found that it would not open, it was too late to remonstrate. He carried the candle to the table and found that beneath the cloth on the plate were two slices of dark, mealy bread and a piece of meat. The water in the jug was so cold that it must have been drawn from a well deep below any living earth; it sent jagged nerve pains through his teeth. He sat down on the bed and opened the leather bag Sonia had packed for him. His eyesight was not what it had been when he worked upstairs in his father's house, and the light from the candle was too dim for him to read by, so he resigned himself to sleep, removing his boots and his outer clothes then pulling up the covers. He smiled to himself, not the full simian gash that had charmed Thomas in the Pension des Dunes, but a small, solitary grimace: it was an adventure, and in the morning he would take his brother back to human company. Jacques was in a narrow tunnel, crawling on his elbows; too late, he felt that his shoulders were too wide: he had reached the point where he could not turn round and he was now trapped. His lumpish heart was rising from his ribs and he could hear the noise of chains, metal grinding on metal, which slowly emerged as the sound of his shutter grating on its hinge, turning slowly in the wind from the Atlantic as he awoke. For a moment he could not pull himself free from the dream: he was exhausted by the struggle, but knew that if he gave in to fatigue and closed his eyes he would be back in the tunnel. He swung his feet down onto the cold floor. The room had the rare and utter darkness of the cave, of a time before fire. He walked forward, holding out his arms ahead of him to protect his eyes. He felt the iron lozenge of the espagnolette and twisted it, pulling the halves of the casement inward. He pushed his fingers into the blackness, but could feel nothing; he worried at the darkness with his eyes until the cornea stung, but there were no shapes and no light. He did not want to return to sleep, so groped his way back across the room, took his trousers from the bedpost and went down on his hands and knees to search for his boots. The second time at the window, his hand encountered the wayward shutter, and he pushed it back on its un oiled hinge. Then he climbed out into the night. He tried to orientate himself by keeping the outside wall under his left hand, though soon there was a narrow ditch alongside the building that made it impossible. Through the blackness of the air he tried to picture the deciduous wood he had noticed by moonlight when he arrived; he imagined the high walls about the grounds, the ditches and lanes beyond, but it was no good: he was giddy and lost in the dark with no idea of his way back or forward; even the vast walls of the asylum were not there for his questing fingers. He was not frightened; he had seen nights like this as a child, and had found his way back from the woods to his unlit home. Something at last reached his senses, and so concentrated was he on his denied sight that it took a moment before he registered that it was not vision but a sound and it was that of a human voice. He tilted his head from side to side, trying to catch its direction, and moved uncertainly towards it. Despite the protective outreach of his hands, his head collided with sharp masonry; he closed his hands and found that he was embracing a corner of the asylum. There was no ditch at this part of the wall, and he was able to feel his way along again until the stonework gave way to the wood of closed shutters. The sound was coming from inside, and it had a plangent, otherworldly quality, yet at the same time seemed familiar. As he gently pulled back the shutters, which were better oiled than those on his own window, a mist of grey light at last reached him. It came from a single candle, obscured by the cloudy glass, and as he peered at it, he saw it bow and stretch in a draught, and at the edge of its penumbra he caught sight of a dark, shaggy head, quite still, the features rapt. It was his brother. Beneath the beard, Jacques could just see the lips moving, then he heard the sound, a sort of incantation, and although he could not make out the words, he was certain from the tone of his voice that Olivier was in some act of supplication, and that if it was not exactly a prayer he was at least addressing himself to a higher being. His face, covered by the uncombed beard, came into view only when the candle flame bent his way; then Jacques could see his earnestly closed eyes and his passionate engagement with whatever reality he inhabited. Jacques had a sudden picture of their shared bedroom as children and of his ten-year-old brother, still at that age blond-haired, his skinny body shaking with laughter as he climbed into Jacques's bed to escape from the flood they had been imagining downstairs. He could recall the distinctive sweet smell of Olivier's skin as they lay holding on to each other, trying to stifle their laughter in the darkness. Gently closing the shutters, he wandered back from the building and found a dry piece of earth where he could sit and wait for the dawn. He was back in his bedroom by the time a nun, a younger one than the night before, unlocked the door and brought in a tray with a piece of bread and a bowl of tea. Jacques gave her his largest smile, but she appeared not to notice as she turned in silence to leave. He shaved in the cold water of the washstand and changed his linen; as he pulled a clean shirt from his bag, a small photograph fell from the folds: it was of Sonia, taken by Thomas outside the darkroom at the county asylum. Jacques smiled: he knew she disliked it, but it was the only photograph of herself she had and she must have debated hard before slipping it in. The nun returned and conducted him in silence to the medical superintendent's office where he signed several forms asserting that he had examined the patient and took full responsibility for him. The asylum's own diagnosis of Olivier, he noticed, was 'dementia'; he did not demur in countersigning it, though the bluntness of the term affronted him. He felt happier to complete the section headed "Hospital or institution to which Patient is to be transferred', writing "Schloss Seeblick Sanatorium and Clinic for Nervous Disorders' with a flourish. It made it look as though Olivier had been singled out for special treatment, or promotion. The
superintendent, a severe, dark-haired man in a frock coat, apologised for the fact that his door had been locked; they had had some trouble with a previous visitor who had come under a false identity and had upset the patients at night by his wandering. He then escorted Jacques to a locked double door which he opened with some keys attached to his waistcoat. It was a large, light room, with pleasantly high ceilings and long barred windows overlooking the grounds. There were perhaps a hundred men in it, and when the superintendent walked down the middle, towards a long refectory table at which some were finishing breakfast from wooden bowls, there was a rustle of interest. "They do not see people from outside very often," the superintendent said from the corner of his mouth. "Which one is your brother?" Jacques's eye ran through the assortment of idiots, neurological cases and madmen; he was reluctant to engage too many of the hopeful eyes that were fixed on him. He saw Olivier by the window, standing alone, and his heart was twisted by the sight because Olivier was a man, his loved brother, and did not fall into the categories in which the others could be placed. It was an error. Every time he saw him in the asylum, Jacques had the same feeling: this was a real person, a man with a name, not, like the others, a patient, a mere example of an illness, but Olivier still. You could not allow the man to be swallowed by the illness, thought Jacques: surely the human soul was more robust. "How are you?" He held Olivier's hands between his own. Olivier said nothing. "I am going to take you with me and look after you myself. I have a beautiful house near the mountains. You are going to live with me and Sonia. Do you remember I told you about Sonia? And her brother Thomas, who is my friend." He looked deep into his brother's face: he had aged in the last couple of years, grown fatter; there were grey hairs in his beard and lines about his eyes. The years of delusion and being shut away were wearing him down, and life had gone on elsewhere, without him. The clutch of papers in the superintendent's hand, together with the appearance in their midst of an outsider, was exciting the patients, who smelled the possibility of escape. They began to shuffle towards Jacques and Olivier. "It is not safe for me to go," said Olivier. Jacques knew that anxiety of any kind seemed to intensify Olivier s symptoms and was prepared. He took a twist of paper from his bag, emptied the powder from inside it into a clean cup on the table and filled it with milk. "Drink this," he said. "It will make you feel better. Then we need to find your belongings. Look, my dear Olivier. All your friends here would love to leave. They would give anything to be in your shoes. You will be with your family and we are going to make you better." "Last night I was talking to the Sovereign. He warned me." "Do you know who I am?" Olivier nodded. "They told me you would come." Jacques turned to the superintendent. "Does he have belongings? I think we should leave as soon as possible." The superintendent spoke to an attendant, who returned with a small canvas bag containing a toothbrush, a shirt and a notebook full of intricate architectural drawings. "Is that all?" "Yes. I think you should leave. Some of the men are under the impression that you have an official function, that you are from the town hall or some such thing, and that you may be in a position to discharge them. Your carriage is waiting at the front gate." "All right. Are you ready, Olivier?" "I am not coming. They want to kill me, I know." "Olivier, it is natural for you to feel anxious." Two attendants were looming. "Please drink the milk," said Jacques. "It will make you feel better. When you move home, it is a big change and everyone feels uneasy. But we are going to a beautiful place overlooking a lake, where I will make you happy." Olivier began to back away, looking for the refuge of his solitary corner. The attendants took his arms; one of them raised the enamelled cup of milk to his lips. The other punched him in the belly, and when he gasped they were able to pour most of the milk into his mouth. They held their hands across his lips until he swallowed. Olivier began to struggle and swear, though Jacques could still recognise the sound of his brother's voice and detect the true cause of his raving and his violence, which was fear. As the two attendants began to force him towards the door, a wave of activity ran through the other patients. Some were so upset by the sight of Olivier's anger that they went into their rituals of self-protection, wrapping their arms about their heads, rocking, thrusting their hands inside their clothes to take comfort from their own bodies. Others saw in Olivier's departure a chance of release for themselves and came to plead their case with Jacques. "Monsieur, Monsieur, for several years I have been kept here, but there is nothing wrong with me... My sister's husband has had me confined..." There were hands clutching at his elbows, there were men placing their faces close to his, bodies barring his way to the door. "I beg you take a message to the Quai d'Orsay, they will know who sent you..." There were hands about his ankles and he struggled to keep walking. With the help of a third attendant they fought their way through the rising clamour; Jacques was compelled to use his arms and elbows to keep the supplicants at bay; he tried not to listen to the specific agony of each tale for fear of weakening. It seemed that scores of men had surrounded them and were placing their hopes of life and freedom on his shoulders; the room had turned from a place of quiet despair into a riot of shouting and pushing, as he squeezed between the double doors where the attendants cleared a passage with their fists. The superintendent slammed the door on the tumult and turned the keys in the heavy lock. Jacques leaned back, struggling for breath; Olivier was next to him, still held by the two attendants. After the sound of the lock turning, there was suddenly a pause in the commotion from inside, an utter, bottomless silence; and in that quiet, Jacques felt he had heard the sound of hope lost. The return to the schloss took them four days, during much of which Jacques had to keep Olivier sedated. Even slumped silent against the corner of the train compartment, he aroused inquisitive and disapproving looks. In Parisjacques called in at Madame Maurel's to see if there were any letters and because he knew that in such a household Olivier could spend the night without incurring anything worse than the odd disdainful glance from Madame Tavernier. In his torpid state, Olivier allowed Jacques to bathe him thoroughly, to cut his hair a little and to dress him in new clothes from a draper in the rue Christine. (He paid proudly in cash; for the first time he did not have to beg credit.) He offered to lend him his own razor, but Olivier's reaction was such that he did not pursue the matter. Then came the wearisome journey from the Gare de lEst, food and drink bought from small wagons on the platforms as they crossed the border. After they had changed train at Vienna, Jacques found his spirits starting to lift. Soon he would be able to share responsibility for Olivier with Sonia and Thomas; soon the change of atmosphere, the diet and the loving care would start to make his brother well. They could not cure him, but surely they could ease his pain. Sonia had made the best spare room ready for Olivier in the main house, not far from Thomas's, at the front, with a view over the lake. Although it was late in October, she had found enough blooms in the recultivated garden to fill two vases in the room, where she had lit the fire and made up the bed with new sheets. She had some trepidation about the safety of the fire, not knowing Olivier, but she thought it best to treat him normally and leave any special adjustments to Jacques. She was waiting at the front door when Josef, who had been despatched to the station, came back with his two exhausted travellers. The nine days of his absence were by far the longest period that Sonia had been apart from Jacques, and her joy at seeing him helped her to overlook the strange appearance of his brother; to her shame, she found herself reminded of an illustration from her childhood Bible showing the fettered Gadarene demoniac, whose many tormenting spirits ("My name is Legion. For we are many') Christ cast out of him and into a herd of swine. Thomas emerged from a consultation in his room at the end of the hall and summoned Hans to bring up wine from the cellars. Sonia had taken charge sufficiently of the kitchen to be able to insist on a plain leg of lamb with garlic for dinner, but compromised with Frau Egger by permitting fried veal brains with egg, one of her speciali ties as a savoury to follow the dessert. They had set the circular table in the waiting room so they could for once not eat in with the patients, and Thomas poured red wine for them all from misty decanters he had found in the cellar. Sonia felt light-headed from the wine and from her joy at seeing Jacques again; a slight apprehension about Olivier only made her dizzier, but she thought their idyll needed something rougher in its texture to make it more likely to endure. For some days after his return, Jacques continued to give Olivier acetate of morphia, gradually decreasing the dose and switching to hyoscine, which Thomas told him was recommended by Bucknill and Tuke, his dependable English authority. Olivier seemed calm, though completely unresponsive. Thomas slept nearby and listened out for him; Jacques also quietly locked his brother's bedroom door each night from the outside, worried that his apparent docility might be covering an emotional response to his change of home that was taking time to develop. It was decided that Olivier should be treated by Thomas. Jacques did not feel able to view his brother dispassionately, and Thomas was excited to feel that, after the years of warehousing in the asylum, he could at last spend time with someone suffering from what appeared to him a classic dementia. They had taken a dozen similarly afflicted patients from the regional asylum and housed them on the ground floor of the main courtyard. Their fees were met in part by the local authorities who had transferred them; the patients' families contributed what they could and the remainder was waived. The 'public' patients ate in the large North Hall rather than in the house dining room and were asked not to use the main courtyard; in most respects they were treated in the same way as the others, and were free to wander in the grounds or help with maintenance under Josef's eye. There was no official division of responsibility between Jacques and Thomas, but it began to happen, partly through the treatment of Olivier, that Thomas took more of the severe psychiatric cases and Jacques more of the neurasthenic. Every evening at six o'clock, they met in Thomas's consulting room to compare their clinical notes; each morning at eight fifteen they met in Jacques's room for half an hour with Sonia, Frau Egger and Josef to discuss the administration of the day ahead. Sonia would then repair to the narrow office, which lay between Jacques's consulting room and the main waiting room at the front of the house. They ate lunch and dinner with the patients, except at the weekend when Sonia insisted they dine privately in the waiting room, laid up with flowers and candles for the occasion, and all talk of medicine was forbidden. In the spring of the following year, they were visited by Abbe Henri, whom they at once appointed ex-officio chaplain to the sanatorium. On the day after his arrival, Thomas decided that they should have a photograph of the staff, both for the sanatorium archive and for possible use in future prospectuses; he thought the presence of a man of the cloth would lend a certain tone. His own Kodak he thought inadequate to the task, so a photographer was summoned from the city, a man with enormous moustaches who hid his head beneath a black cloth while he adjusted the focus of the camera on its tripod. He positioned them between the pillars outside the double front door, with Thomas and Jacques seated in the middle, Sonia to Jacques's left and Abbe Henri in full clerical costume on Thomas's right. Standing behind them were Hans, Mary, Daisy, Josef, Frau Egger and Olivier, who insisted on being included. "It is a pity Dr. Faverill cannot be here," said Thomas. "He is on our writing paper and that would make us a full eleven. A cricket team." The exposure time chosen by the photographer was so long, however, that Hans had time to run along the back row and appear twice, substantially at one end, a ghostly presence at the other, in the resulting photograph that was framed and hung in the office. "We are a real concern," said Sonia, when she completed the accounts for the first year, ending in May 1891, and handed them to her husband. "Why not?" said Jacques. "I never thought we could truly make it work. It was just something we... Invented." "All the practical side has been much easier than I thought. Mostly thanks to you, my love. No, really. Of course, the scientific side, our research and so on... We are still in the foothills." "But you are climbing." "I am definitely climbing." "Alone?" "At the moment Thomas and I are taking separate paths. We shall meet at the next plateau." "Are you going to share your thoughts with us?" "When I am ready. It is important to try to publish. It would also be good for the schloss. Provided people think my ideas make sense." "Are you worried that they may not understand?" "I need to go back to Paris at some stage to speak further with Pierre Janet. And before I read my paper in Vienna, I should like to try it out. I think I could perhaps read a short version to an invited audience here." "You could do it in the North Hall. In fact, we ought to have regular lectures and entertainments there." When Jacques left the office to go on his rounds, Sonia tidied the papers and went up to their private rooms. Truly she was surprised by how straightforward it had been. She herself had no training in any more than simple arithmetic, learned at dame school, then from a governess at Torrington; yet the bank seemed happy to accept her copperplate accounts, to set one of their clerks to make two transcripts, one for the tax collector and one which they returned, signed and franked with a scarlet seal, for her to put proudly in her desk drawer. They even showed a small profit. She had not been brought up to work; girls of her background were not expected to do more than supervise a house, though in a sense, she supposed, that was all she did. It was a large house, however, and a thriving one. It surprised her that a place of sickness could provide an atmosphere of such content. She