Human Traces (42 page)

and point of deepest loyalty, had been dissolved before anyone had made out what it was for; suddenly it was too late, and there was something unsatisfactory about it that left him utterly alone. Sonia comforted him, wept with him and watched carefully over him; but, much though he loved her, she was not of his flesh and blood. In Olivier's skin and veins had been particles of inheritance that they shared with no one else, and that had been the nature of their existence and its challenge: to make of their lives whatever they could, beginning in their narrow Breton world. That challenge now was ended; there was no one left for him to report back to on his progress; and without that narrative, the game, whatever might happen to him in the future, was barely worth the playing, because no one else, however much they loved him, really cared. "We should have a post-mortem," he told Thomas. "I remember asking myself once what Olivier's brain might look like. If he can tell us anything that might help others, then we should certainly look." "Are you sure?" "Yes. I should like to be there. I would like to see this story through to its end." "As you wish. I shall send Josef to the hospital to tell them. I will make arrangements for the funeral the day after." Thomas meanwhile looked back at his record of the last conversation he had had with Olivier to see if they could illuminate his sudden leap to death. Were there signs a better doctor would have seen? What Olivier appeared from his hasty notes to have said was, roughly: I have no present. Go away! I will watch water. Daughter, no daughter. The Germans want me... I know the movements of the French king... They have sent their spies for me. The man with the hat is a spy. My skin is black. I think the sky is never green. And that seemed to be all. There was an emphasis on colour, on spying and... And nothing else at all that Thomas could see. Olivier's mind had long since been unable to make sense, so surely these ramblings were nothing more than the obiter dicta of a broken mind? Yet Thomas could not quite believe it. He felt there was more to his friend than that, and he felt that he should have found it. It was seven in the evening, the appointed time, and the small, bad-tempered servant manhandled the body from its refrigerated bed, banging the head as he did so, labouring beneath the weight before he finally wrestled it into place on the marble slab. Jacques, Thomas and Franz Bernthaler looked on, their faces concealed behind white masks. Around the walls of the dissecting room were specimens in glass jars: livers, aortas, larynxes. At the far end was a wooden board on which were hung saws, chisels, knives and other banausic instruments of the trade. The pro sector was the senior pathologist at the hospital, a man called Holzbauer. He approached the table briskly, rubbing cream he had taken from a tub into his hands. When the corpse had been arranged in the anatomical position and he had checked the identity, he began to examine the surface, dictating notes to his student as he did so. The skin was covered with abrasions from the fall and the ascent. Then it was time for the incision. Although Jacques had seen it countless times before, he found his fingernails deep in his palms as Holzbauer took the large scalpel to each shoulder and cut a "V, meeting at the breastbone; without pausing, he carved straight down to the pubic bone, perhaps three millimetres deep, diverting a fraction as he went past the navel. Working with a smaller scalpel, he began to ease the V-shaped section of skin from the chest wall. He held the first triangular corner of skin taut between forceps, from which it occasionally slipped, and used stroking motions of the knife to separate it from the cutaneous layer. Bits of fat or waste were occasionally deposited with the forceps in a metal mixing bowl near the cadaver's head. As the section of lifted skin grew larger, he was able to grip it in his hand, dispensing with the forceps; and when he had cut both sides clear he folded the flap up over Olivier's face, so the hairs of his chest pressed those of his beard. Jacques was glad not to have to look at his brother's features any more. Poor boy, he thought. He had a desire to embrace him, before he became no more than separate pieces it would be absurd to kiss. He reached out and briefly held the cold thick hand. There was a slight smell, not unlike that inside Meissner and Trattnig, the expensive butcher behind the market square in town. With what looked like a pair of secateurs such as Sonia carried in the garden, the pro sector cut the sternum and front ribs away, revealing Olivier's heart and lungs. With a scalpel, he cut delicately through the sac round the heart, reported no blockage in the pulmonary artery, then went down to the tail of his "Y', slicing back the muscle from the abdomen till it fell away on either side, so that all the inner organs from neck to groin were exposed. Jacques felt that he was looking at what he himself was made of, and noticed that the mixing bowl was gradually filling up with waste, with the detritus of his brother. The next stage was the most difficult, and reminded him of what Olivier himself, at a time when he was first starting to go mad, had shown him when they went hunting with guns and killed a roe deer. After some ritual marking of his virgin younger brother with blood from the testes, Olivier had taken out the guts entire and thrown them to the dogs. Holzbauer glanced towards Jacques as he detached the larynx and oesophagus, then went into the cavity to free the remainder of the chest organs from the spine. He left them in place while he detached the diaphragm and freed the abdominal organs. The contents of the upper body were now held in place only at the pelvis. Holzbauer looked over once more before slicing through this last tie. He stood back for the servant, who mounted a dissecting table over Olivier's legs, then removed the entire bloc of organs en masse and placed them on it. His brother was in pieces and Jacques could see through the empty body cavity to the spine. And this was all, this was all, he thought, as he gazed at the innards on the tray: the great delusion of the human being that he might himself be something more than matter. The pro sector continued with impressive legerdemain to separate the organs. He withdrew from a leather sheath beneath his gown something that looked like a carving knife, which he used in single, deft slices. Only the adrenal glands above the kidneys gave him pause for a moment. Franz Bernthaler went to work on the liver and spleen, while the servant opened the intestines over a stone sink, beneath a running tap. Jacques found himself stifling a protest. Surely this invasion of his brother's privacy was too much. It was a moment before he could name the emotion that gripped him at the sight of the servant rinsing Olivier's intestines: it was, to his great surprise, embarrassment. Since Olivier had eaten nothing on his last day, having hurled his breakfast plate from him, the stench of gastric acid, when Holzbauer opened the stomach, was less than Jacques had known it, though still enough to make his own stomach turn beneath his gown. Franz was busy weighing and slicing the pancreas and the kidneys; he took samples to be examined microscopically and placed them in small glass jars. Thomas whispered in Jacques's ear, "Are you all right? Do you want to stay for the brain? You can always look at it later, back at the schloss." It was such a forlorn sight, thought Jacques. Though Holzbauer had been as neat a performer as he had seen, there was blood on the floor beneath them, blood in the gutters of the slab, and small pieces of flesh stuck on the hooks of the scales. Even the chalk that the student had used to write up the measurements on the blackboard was red-tinged, while some of the statistics themselves were pink and smudged on the black background. There was no escaping the matter of his brother, the red and stinking material of his being. The hulk of his body now was like a half-built fishing vessel in the boatyards at Vannes: though beautiful, it was desolate, and already spoke of shipwreck. The servant poured the organs back into the cavity, where they made undignified slippery noises, as when Herr Trattnig heaved a large order of lights from a tray on to the scale, while the servant packed them irritably with his hands and replaced the chest plate over them. The pro sector nodded to the student, who leant over the body and began to sew up the "Y' with thick stitches, like those on a canvas sail. Holzbauer turned his attention to the head, instructing the servant to take the block out from under the body and place it beneath the neck. For the first time since Olivier had died, Jacques felt the desolation rise up in him. The pro sector took a scalpel to begin the cut behind the left ear, and the annihilation of Olivier was suddenly too much for him to bear. He found himself back in the bedroom of his childhood, back in a broken past, with the mother he did not know, in a dark room with just his childish hope of what life might bring, his boy's bravery and determination, where the only connection to the past he longed for, and to the future to which he would blindly burrow on, lay in the shape of his elder brother: Olivier alone had held the key, and Jacques could feel him now, ten years old, come to his younger brother's bed, healthy and alive, and lying there next to him, shaking with laughter as they listened to the grown-ups downstairs, wrapping his arm round Jacques and holding him against his chest, where Jacques first noticed that special clean, sweet smell of his, so that the recollection of it as they took Olivier to pieces made him suddenly gasp with the appalling grief that came up like a wave in him death, his own death too and the inevitable loss of all the vain hopes of life howling and breaking in the darkness. Thomas helped him from the room and took him upstairs to a bench in a gas-lit corridor, the seat where he himself had briefly sat while waiting for Herr Obmann to operate on Fraulein Katharina. The two men sat side by side in the murky light, as once they had stood gazing from France at the English Channel; now they leaned forward, heads held in their hands in the silent moment of defeat. "Would you like to see your brother's brain?" said Franz Bernthaler three days later. "It has been well fixed in formalin and you might find it instructive." "All right. I always said that I should like to see what it looks like, so I suppose I had better do so." Jacques followed Franz reluctantly to the cellar. Olivier's brain was in a bucket of fluid on the workbench, from which Franz lifted it and held it beneath the electric light. "They are always a little smaller than one expects, are they not?" he said. "So much of the skull area is taken up by the jaw, the eye socket and so on. Then the protection given by the skull restricts the brain space. Anyway, do you want to hold it?" "No." Looking at the organ, Jacques was thinking of Olivier's astral diagrams and of the stable; but he was also thinking of the little boy who had once healthily been governed by this beige and silent piece of matter, from which had sprung inexplicable games and fancies and laughter. "Grossly visible," said Franz, 'is a degree of cortical atrophy in the frontal and temporal lobes, here and here. I see a slight thinning of the surface brain tissue and a generalised shrinkage." "Are these not normal post-mortem changes?" "No. And you see here, the sulci are slightly enlarged. The grey matter seems to ripple slightly more than normal because of the depth of the sulci." "And how do you account for these changes?" "Rather mechanically," said Franz. "I suspect that we shall find that the ventricles are enlarged and that as they have pushed up and outwards, other things have had to make way' It did not seem enough, somehow, thought Jacques, as Franz took a large knife and made a sagittal cut, down through the centre of the two hemispheres. In section, Olivier's brain had the look of a squashed boiled cauliflower, in which the grey matter replicated the shape of the rippled florets, and the white that of the solid inside of the vegetable below. In the heart of the white area was the opening of the ventricle. "I have the brain of a patient without mental illness for comparison," said Franz. "Even in gross appearance you can see the disparity in size in the openings here." Jacques nodded. It was true; though he could not see that an increased capacity for the generation of cerebro-spinal fluid told him much about the metaphysical enigma of his brother's madness. "I shall now take some smaller sections to examine beneath the microscope," said Franz. "Would you like to stay and look?" "No, thank you. Tell me if you find anything unusual." "Of course." "And Franz." "Yes." "Do you normally incinerate the brains when you have finished with them?" "Yes." "Do you think you might arrange with the priest to have it interred with his body in the graveyard?" "I will ask him." "Thank you." Jacques was pleased to be back on the stone flags of the hallway; he felt the absurdity of the countless living functions his own brain performed each second without his even feeling them. You could not properly value such a thing; you could only laugh at it. In the autumn, they began to move to the Wilhelmskogel. None of them gave voice to what they all felt: that Olivier s death had blighted the place; that it had taken the joy from it. At a practical level, it had drawn their attention to how unsafe the situation was for lunatics, and new plans were drawn up to keep those most seriously unstable from having access to the drop. There was no alternative to the move, however; the lease on the Schloss Seeblick could not be extended and the stockholders in the railway company had legally protected expectations of the new venture. Geissler s transport system worked well, and throughout the summer large numbers of visitors were taken up on the railway and transferred into the cable-car for their ride to the top, where they were offered refreshments and directed on various walks. The local newspaper carried letters from one or two people complaining that their fellow-citizens had become lazy and instead of taking this newfangled apparatus should be made to hike to the top of the mountain, but the populace thought otherwise and bought tickets in large numbers. Jacques could not contemplate the move, in fact could concentrate on very little, tormented as he was by insomnia. He dragged himself through the days, dry-mouthed, dry-eyed, though he knew that his inability to sleep was the result of his mind trying to digest his loss, of the grief and the loneliness that he could not face by day. When September came, Sonia organised the carriages to start moving
furniture, while Thomas went twice weekly to the top of the mountain to oversee the final stage of the building works. The labourers had been discharged, back to Karfreit, and the plumbing, electrical works and decoration were in the hands of a building company from Villach. Hans had proved himself a worthy foreman, but was anxious to return to the schloss to see Daisy. The only person truly enthusiastic for the relocation was Daniel, who was allowed to celebrate his fifth birthday in October by taking six friends from the village up to the summit to play hide-and-seek in the building site. A place was found for him in the village school near the foot of the mountain, beginning in the New Year, and the thought of travelling to and from school each day in a cable-car filled him with delight. In December, Thomas received a letter from Hannes Regensburger, asking if he could pay a visit. His expedition to Africa had been delayed, he said, but he was more than ever certain that Thomas would benefit from accompanying him; he would not be leaving for another two years, so there would be time to make arrangements at home. Regensburger was the last visitor to the old Schloss Seeblick, arriving a few days before Christmas. He took dinner with Thomas and Kitty in their apartment in the South Court. "I am proposing to steal your husband away, Frau Midwinter," he said. "So I understand. But I shall fight you for his company' "If I promise to bring him back safely, would that make a difference?" "Certainly. I do not want him to be eaten by crocodiles." "I give you my word. We would be travelling a well-beaten path in open country and in cool weather. Some of the German government guest houses have running water and electric light." Kitty handed Regensburger a dish of vegetables. "What concerns me more," she said, 'is what possible use an English mad-doctor could be to a cartographic al expedition. Are you all expecting to go insane?" Regensburger gave a deep laugh. "No though in fact it has been known to happen. No. I was impressed by your husband when we met. It is really as simple as that. Of course, it is a good idea to have a doctor in a large party and I am presuming he has not forgotten the elementary skills cuts and stings and bruises and so forth. I understand that he is also a good photographer, which is not a claim I could make either for myself or for Lukas, my assistant. But we have managed the pictures before and we could do so again." "So, what is it about Thomas?" said Kitty. "It is a question of spirit," said Regensburger after a pause in which he drank from his wineglass. "There are one or two archaeological questions on which I have been doing some preliminary work at the university. These concern the dating of fossil remains. While I shall continue to be responsible for the homework, I know that your husband will share my intellectual interest and that he is a keen amateur of Darwin. But it is more even than that. Africa is a large country and it calls for a large response. When one sits by the camp-fire at night, it is better to be in the company of a man who has risen to the occasion. I feel confident that your husband is such a man." "And your assistant, Lukas?" "He is a very good cartographer." "I see. Well... I think I do." "I have been to see Oscar Baumann twice more and have talked to him about the archaeological sites he found. Although he was not personally interested, he did make maps and keep a good diary so I think that we should be able to locate one or two of them." "And how long would you take my husband for?" "I shall be away for more than a year, but I have worked out a different itinerary for him that would have him safely back to you in three months." "Do you think he is strong enough for such an undertaking?" "I believe he is stronger than I am. Look at him. Hardly a grey hair. No excess weight. You see, my dear Frau Midwinter, there is a fine adventuring tradition among British doctors. They have always been mountaineers and explorers. All I ask of your husband is to sit on a mule, take the occasional photograph and keep me company' "We will think about it," said Thomas. "There is presumably no hurry to decide." "Indeed not," said Regensburger. "You have at least a year to settle into your new home before I start to look elsewhere for my companion." As the builders neared the end of their task, Sonia inspected the main house on the Wilhelmskogel and marked out which rooms might be used for what. Frau Egger had already visited, somewhat apprehensive of the machinery that whisked her up, and given her approval to an enlarged kitchen, while Jacques and Thomas had chosen their consulting rooms. Neither family would live in the main house, it was decided, which was to be given over entirely to the patients and their welfare. The Rebières and the Midwinters had a small house each, a minute s walk apart, both with a fine view of the valley. At the age of forty-two, Sonia felt she had it in her to make only one more family home and hoped that this would be the last. She sighed at the prospect of more builders, leaking roofs, upheaval, unsatisfactory finishes; nevertheless, as she walked through her new house, assigned a room to Daniel, selected in her mind the curtains she had seen for it in the draper behind the church in town, it was hard not to admit a small quickening of pleasure, like an old war horse, she thought ruefully, roused one last time by the sound of the trumpet.