Human Traces (24 page)

Your affectionate sister, Sonia

The following spring, Jacques received a letter from Abbe Henri to say that his father was dying and was not expected to last the month. Jacques made the necessary arrangements with the Salpetriere and set off in the train with Sonia for Brittany. They stopped on the way to collect Olivier from his asylum, but by the time the three of them arrived at Sainte Agnes it was too late: the cancer had moved rapidly through old Rebière's body and he had died in his bed two days earlier, his passing somewhat eased by the quantities of morphia Abbe Henri had been able to procure for him. The body was still lying in the upstairs room on a fragile catafalque, and Tante Mathilde sat on a rush-seated chair beside it, a handkerchief clasped in her fist. Old Rebière's face was strained by death, and the flesh was reduced by its long struggle; with his black necktie and hanging jaw, he looked like one of the men in the back wards of Olivier's asylum, Jacques thought. The father he remembered was not there in the coffin and he found it irritating that this corpse should guy him so foolishly. Nevertheless, he felt reluctant to see him lowered into the grave. Even an empty body was a kind of presence, and what he wanted was more certainty. They could bury him, and in three days' time he could come and dig him up; he could prop him up again in his bed as primitive civilisations did with their dead leaders, unable to comprehend that something vital was missing. In any case, what exactly had gone? When he was alive and Jacques was in Paris, he was not there. When they were both in Sainte Agnes, but Jacques was out in the fields, he was equally missing. Most of the days and hours of Jacques's life had been spent away from him, so in what significant sense had death made his father more absent than before? Olivier seemed quite calm at the sight of his dead father. He stroked the hair back from his waxy forehead, then lifted up the right arm and examined the hand with fierce attentiveness. When he had seen all he needed to see, he walked over to the window. Abbe Henri officiated at the mass the next morning. A handful of villagers were gathered, rubbing their hands together for warmth in the icy church. There were one or two old people Jacques recognised from childhood but whose names he could not remember; his father's employer had not made the journey from Lorient. Abbe Henri spoke of Rebière's lifelong connection with the landscape; he extolled his love of the country and his understanding of traditional ways. "His thrift and patriotism placed him in a noble tradition of French countrymen, though I know the accolade he would have sought, and which I think he deserved, was to be considered a true Breton. He was not a demonstrative man, but he had his passions and his beliefs. I know that he feared God and that in the end, when he made his last confession to me, he placed his trust in the Almighty." What choice did he have? thought Jacques. His father was a man who had not lifted his gaze from the landscape of his birth; his existence had been that of the crab under the rock, while before him the sea lay un regarded He might as well submit to the idea of a divine purpose now now that he was to go beneath the sod, back into the land, because, at this moment, as they filed slowly from the church, there was no better explanation available to human thought. A sense of purpose was what he and the other mourners craved, faced with this block, this meaty absence, that weighed on his and Oliver's shoulders as they carried the coffin out into the churchyard. If God could provide purpose, then they had better turn to Him. They stood by the grave, the wet grass lapping over their polished shoes. The church was on top of the hill, and in the distance Jacques could make out the grey, mist-covered sea. As Abbe Henri read the final prayers, Jacques put his arm round Sonia's shoulder to his right and, to his left, round Olivier's. He pulled them to him with the strength of his grasp, so that they might make a common bulwark of their energies against the void, and he felt the squeeze of their returned embrace. The gulls let out their indifferent cries, and Jacques found his eyes boring into a small knot of wood in the fence post at the edge of the graveyard. He pictured its tiny molecules in ceaseless agitation while his father's life had stopped. He could not believe that, God's purpose having been fulfilled, He had gathered His faithful servant to His bosom again, but he had no better explanation to offer and could only stare ahead, at the knot in the wood, with a sense of numb ignorance. He noticed afterwards what guilty pleasure he took in being alive. Something had happened which none of the mourners could explain, and when the funeral was over, they all became conspirators. They had gone through the rituals with due formality; they had been kinder about the dead man than he deserved; they had done everything they could to speed him on his way to some sort of afterlife that lay beyond their powers of conjecture. Then, shuddering with relief, like guilty children, they acted as though it had never happened; they pretended that it had no bearing at all on their own lives or on their ability to carry on. Because they could not understand death, they shovelled the responsibility for grappling with it onto others poor widow, bereaved child, chastened old people closer now to death themselves anyone at all, so long as they could put it out of their own minds. What frauds they all were, he thought. Jacques watched Sonia making lunch for his family and the villagers who had come to join them. He loved the practical way that she took control of the kitchen, deferring to Tante Mathilde, but organising it herself; he saw how her fascinated eyes took in all the details of his childhood home, and it made him feel happier than he could easily explain. He heard her laugh and then he heard the same sound coming from his own throat. They were laughing behind his father's back, he thought, but he could not see what else he was to do. After they had been back in Paris for about two weeks, he found that he began to dream about his father almost every night, and in his dreams it transpired that there had been a mistake. Old Rebière was not dead; he had somehow survived the cancer and was still alive, albeit in a precarious state. There was something a little suspicious about these dreams, something unreliable that Jacques could sense even as he dreamed; but the central fact, though surprising, was irrefutable: there he was, alive. During the day he could easily hear his father speaking inside his head, any time he chose to imagine him. He was alive in his memory and in his inner ear; he knew what his father would say or do in any situation. He had never been more present than now that he was dead, and Jacques wanted there to be a clearer distinction. This was not the dramatic decease he had imagined death to be, and it was for that reason unsatisfactory and hard to bear. Come back to me, father, he muttered to himself; come back and put your arms round me as you never did in my life; take me to your heart or else go away and let me go forward with my life alone. Thomas awoke one morning in May in a guesthouse in Carinthia, a mountain-locked province of Austria-Hungary, to which Monsieur Valade had been drawn by an idea of lakes and mountain views. There were white rolls and jam for breakfast, laid out on a table in the deserted dining room, where Thomas ate alone. There was no sign of the Valade family until ten, when Monsieur Valade arrived in a pony and trap with two bicycles. It transpired that Madame Valade had risen early to take the children boating on the Worthersee, and Valade had decided to explore the countryside and take Thomas with him. They rode off a few minutes later, with painting materials stuffed into rucksacks on their backs. In the afternoon, they stopped to drink from a narrow stream that ran down the pine-covered hillside. Valade looked about him with a quizzical eye. "It is too picturesque," he said. "Too many ravines and yellow cottages with irritating coils of smoke. Let us go on." It was growing dark, and Thomas was exhausted from the unaccustomed pedalling. "Where is the map?" said Valade. "May I see it?" "You have it," said Thomas. "After we stopped by the stream, you put it in your pocket." Each searched his belongings, looking disbelievingly at the other, but between them they could find no map. "It makes no difference," said Thomas. "It is easy enough to orientate ourselves from the sun and the mountains. We started in the valley over ' "We were not in the valley. The guesthouse was halfway up a hill' "Perhaps. But not as high as we are now. The sun is going down to the west." "Surprise me, Doctor." "So Vienna is to the north east, which is... That way. And that means Bad Ischl, where we all drank that unpleasant water, is over there." "And where did we start from this morning?" "I have not the faintest idea. We are in Carinthia somewhere. There are mountains. Lower down, there are lakes. I have money in my pocket." "So do IWe should find somewhere to spend the night We could have dinner. A quiet dinner, with little conversation." "I understand what you mean," said Thomas. "Let us go... Let us go west, towards the setting sun." "Why?" "Because it is downhill." After an hour of pedalling, they came to a run of rustic houses which thickened into a village; at the centre was a triangle of grass. They went down one of the roads that led from it, and on the rising ground they saw the sign of a guesthouse, attached to a timber-framed building with magenta-painted walls. Valade's face lit up with an unaccustomed smile. "It is exactly like the one we left this morning." They leaned their bicycles against the wall and went inside. There was no one in the small wood-panelled hall, and Thomas called out to attract attention. Eventually, a young woman dressed in the full, pleated skirt and embroidered sleeveless jacket of the region emerged through a swing-door. She seemed slightly puzzled that any travellers might want to spend the night in the guesthouse, but willing enough to oblige; she showed them upstairs to a plain room with starchily clean sheets and red geraniums in its window boxes. "We would also like to eat," said Thomas, taking charge since Valade spoke no German. "Of course. Maybe you would care to take a drink in the garden before dinner." The girl curtseyed and left them. "What did she say?" asked Valade. "She said she will serve dinner, but not to a Frenchman, only to her friend the Englishman. The only good thing the French have ever done, she said, was to surrender to the Prussians at Sedan." "What an uncommonly welleducated woman," said Valade. Thomas led the way into the garden, where beer was brought to them by a second girl, dark-haired, but dressed in the same way as the other. "Now this is something I could paint," said Valade, pointing to the view over a narrow valley. "Why this?" said Thomas. "You would never be able to find this place again. It is entirely individual, yet at the same time it seems to represent or suggest the countryside we have been travelling through all day. It is one thing and everything." He drank from his glass of beer. "Perhaps that is what art is, Doctor." Thomas looked ahead, over the grass and a chicken-run behind, to the obtuse triangle of pine forest, some meadows with a dozen or so cows motionless in the dusk and beyond them, an ascent into hills with a grey line of water going over sharp rocks. There was only one building in the entire view: an ochre-painted schloss, half-hidden on the horizon. "I shall stay for three days until I have it right," said Valade. "What about Madame Valade?" "Sophie? She will not worry. I left her for a week once and I am not sure she even noticed I had gone. She knows there is money in the drawer." The dark-haired waitress returned and told them what was for dinner. Thomas translated. "You can start with sheep's lung soup or clear soup with liver-dumplings. Then it is something that translates as "battle-plate". I believe it a mixture of grilled meats. "Slaughter-plate" might be a better translation." "Which animal? The pig?" "The cow, I imagine. Perhaps a little of each." "What a poetic country. "The slaughter-plate. "Tell the young lady no, tell "the flesh-thing" I shall be delighted. And bring their best red wine. The Prince would have us drink nothing less." They were alone in the dining room, the dim candles making it hard to see which part of the animal they were devouring: sausage, liver or rump. The wine was elegant but rich. "This is how burgundy tasted when I was a child," saidValade. Afterwards, there was a thick pancake with dried fruit, of a kind loved by the Kaiser. The two waitresses watched them as they ate, their eyes running up and down in candid appraisal. "Do you think they like what they see?" said Thomas. Valade snorted. "I had girls like that every night when I was a student. They just wanted someone to pay their rent and take them dancing." "But why are they staring?" "I could not say, Doctor. Perhaps they are intimating that they would like to share your bed. They would like you to take them both, then watch while they amuse each other. Or perhaps they are just curious about two strangers. But you will never know, will you? So many women..." Thomas felt melancholy when he went upstairs to the bedroom. He was kept awake first by the coffee he had drunk to settle the huge dinner, then by Valade's snoring. There was light coming through the rustic shutters when he finally fell asleep and dreamed of Roya Mikhailova, dressed in riding clothes, being stolen from him by Valade and driven into the night while he ran after them through glue, shouting silently. In the morning, Valade set up his easel in the garden. He told Thomas he wanted to attempt something in the style of Corot. He was much taken by the Barbizon school, but disliked the Impressionists, whom he blamed for having created an appetite for instant sensation in landscape which his own work was not equipped to satisfy. "I shall see you at dinner," he said meaningfully. Thomas took a bottle of water and put some bread rolls and ham from breakfast in his jacket pocket. Then he set off on his bicycle, heading towards the ochre-coloured schloss he had seen on the horizon. It was late afternoon by the time he found it. The road through the trees suddenly cleared and he found himself looking down on an extraordinary building. To the traditional Carinthian country house or schloss was attached a newer part, an enormous rectangular courtyard, with a smaller court at one end and what appeared to be a kind of hall or meeting room at the other; it was joined to the old house by a covered cloister. The windows were shuttered and barred; the grass of the substantial gardens had long been left
uncut. Attached to the chain that guarded the double front doors was a notice with the address of a lawyer in the nearest large town. The dilapidation, the scale and the neglect suggested the place was without prospect of an owner; its enchanted position, its peace and grandeur made Thomas certain that he had found the site of his life's work.