Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  The physical absence of the god was the precondition of all religious faith. If the deity was there, self-evident, there would be no need for faith. But why was this the arrangement, thought Thomas; why should ‘faith’ be necessary? The obvious course for a thinking god would have been to make himself observable, not to make his power dependent on belief in the unverifiable. The hypothesis that underlay religion was merely an argument from necessity, because there was no need for faith unless there was absence. The interesting question, then, was whether that‘absence’was a caprice of an all-powerful deity or a real vacuum that followed a real presence: had someone or something actually vanished?

  To put it another way, he thought: the situation that confronted him at that instant in Rothenburg was of a world in which millions of people worshipped something they could neither see nor hear. The explanation traditionally offered was that this not-being-there was central to the divine plan for human existence; that the world had either been created or had evolved with this childish paradox at its core. But suppose, he thought, that there was a simpler and more credible explanation: that the absence was real; that the conditions of life did not comprise some infantile test of ‘faith’, but that something once present had genuinely disappeared.

  Suppose that what had disappeared was the capacity to hear the voice or voices of the god. Once, all those fishermen would have heard a god; now only Christ could. For early humans separated from their group – the young man, for instance, dispatched to fish upstream – the ability to hear instructions, to produce under the influence of stress or fear the voice of the absent leader or god, had once been a necessary tool of survival; but as the capacity to remember and communicate through words had slowly developed, humans had lost the need for heard instruction and comment. The ability to do so had long since ceased to be important and was in fact now like the sightless eyes of bats – a vestigial ability. In this way the Bible all made sense, not as a ragbag of metaphor and myth, but as the literal story of a people crying in the wilderness for what once had been theirs. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ What was that if not the forlorn and agonised call of the solitary human whose once ever-present, helping voice had left him? He could picture the terrified, lone man, bent over his little bit of agriculture, looking up, craving a voice from the silent hillside.

  Thomas felt quite calm as he gazed into the carving. At the beginning of the Bible, everyone – Noah, Abraham, Moses – seemed to hear God’s voice externally; then it was heard only by a minority, who became priests; then the gift became rarer, so the infant Samuel could hear but the old priest Eli could not; and then by the time of the New Testament, Christ alone – and perhaps Paul – could hear voices.

  Similarly, in the Iliad the heroes received their instructions direct from their many deities, from their individual and distinct voices; in the Odyssey, centuries later, the talking gods were in retreat: feeble, bickering and mocked by humans now capable of self-willed action. Penelope was faithful because she could choose to keep the idea of her absent husband alive in her ‘good’ heart, not because she was thus vocally commanded by her goddess; and although Odysseus still listened to Athena, he had taken her inside himself as part of his own mental function; he could even – something impossible in the Iliad – outwit and deceive her. Indeed, deception, the very theme of the poem, was the hallmark of a developed being, able to make hypotheses of himself in different times and places. There were, it now seemed to Thomas, two interpretations of this development.

  The first one, which he and the whole world had been taught, held that the bards whose accounts comprised the Iliad had used a literary device, a sort of metaphor, by which the dictates of conscience and will were personified into vocal debate and instruction from the audible gods. Their later followers in the Odyssey had lost faith in the multiplicity of gods, had grown tired of the poetic fancy of their elders and had opted for a more straightforward account of how the minds of human beings worked.

  The second and simpler interpretation was that all the bards, old and young, told the stories as they happened. Achilles did hearThetis. Moses heard Jehovah. Primitive men heard voices all the time and their ability to do so was critical to their success. Then, as they developed, they lost the need, and then the capacity, to do so. The change between the Iliad and the Odyssey, between aurally received instruction and greater independence of action, was not the result of a literary decision mysteriously communicated and agreed between illiterate bards over thousands of years. It was the story of what happened. Men of the Iliad era heard voices; those of the Odyssey could not.

  If you looked at the two theories and balanced the probabilities, Thomas thought, there was no question as to which was more likely to be true.

  Thomas walked up into the main square of Rothenburg to look for Nadine Valade. His mind, as he walked over the cobbles and glanced around the half-timbered buildings with their red-tiled roofs, was elsewhere. He was thinking of his departed voice and of those less benign that afflicted Olivier and others like him.

  He saw Nadine sitting at a café table beneath a colonnade, next to an expensive goldsmith’s. She was drinking chocolate and swinging her plump leg back and forth over the arm of the chair, revealing her red-stockinged calf.

  ‘You were ages in the church,’ she said. ‘It was so boring. All those wooden carvings. They are . . . Macabre.’

  ‘That’s an interesting word.’ Thomas sat down at the table and ordered coffee. ‘Who was that girl?’

  ‘Which girl?’

  ‘The girl in the church. About your age, wearing a fur coat. Dark eyes. Perhaps foreign.’

  ‘Has Monsieur the doctor taken a little fancy?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Nadine. She was a child.’

  ‘But she’s lovely, is she not?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Nadine’s eyes sparkled in her round cheeks. ‘Buy me another chocolate and I will tell you.’

  When the waiter had obliged, Nadine leaned forward at the table and wiped some cream from her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, andThomas smiled. She swallowed. ‘Well,’ she said again, ‘you remember that day we went down the river so Papa could do his painting? We met a Russian man in the restaurant where we had lunch and when he saw Papa’s sketches, he wanted him to paint his portrait. He is very rich.’ Nadine’s eyes widened. ‘He has a palace in St Petersburg and a country estate.’

  ‘So we shall be staying in Rothenburg a little longer?’

  ‘I think so. I like it here. Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But who is the girl?’

  ‘When Papa went to the Russian’s house, he met his wife and his daughter. The wife is from Persia. I think they met in Constantinople.’ Nadine rolled her eyes. ‘Can you imagine how romantic it must have been? The Russian prince and the beautiful lady from—’

  ‘But who is the girl?’

  ‘She is their daughter of course, you big silly! Her name is Roya. Roya Mihalova. Or Mikhailova. Or something Russian, I can’t remember. They seem to have so many names.’

  Thomas looked at Nadine’s happy face. Her mood would last for another hour or so, until after lunch, when she would be brought low by guilt about all that she had consumed; then she would either retire to her room and sulk or go quietly to the bathroom and try to make herself vomit.

  ‘Is Roya your friend?’

  ‘I have only met her twice. I went to visit them this morning, before church, with Papa. She is nice, but she is . . . Strange. A bit frightening.’ Nadine giggled. ‘Where are we having lunch?’

  ‘Back at the house. I have to give Gérard his massage. I told your mother we would be back by twelve thirty.’

  Nadine pulled a face. ‘I don’t like the food there.’

  ‘So much the better. Come on.’

  Pierre Valade, Nadine’s father, was an irascible man of whom Thomas had become peculiarly fond. Valade slept badly and could not bear to speak for the first hour of
the day, while he drank cup after cup of viscous coffee. He liked to go off alone into the open air with his easel and paints, though Thomas suspected this was partly to escape the irritations of family life, principally Madame Valade’s incessant talking. At lunchtime, when he usually returned to the family lodging, he often painted over the canvas on which he had been working, returning it to its blank state. He drank too much wine and slept in the afternoon, then rose, ill-tempered, at five to work in his studio until eight. Then at last he would commune with his family. He stroked Gérard’s legs and massaged his back; he teased Nadine about her playing of the piano and, emboldened by more wine, managed to still his wife’s torrential conversation to a manageable stream.

  The Valade caravan had travelled through Heidelberg and Wiesbaden before diverting to Rothenburg. Thomas protested that there were scores of such picturesque towns in Germany, but Valade insisted that he wanted to renew an acquaintance there. Although Thomas had been able to attend lectures at the psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg, he worried that he was not keeping up to date; at the university, they spoke with reverence of a psychiatrist called Emil Kraepelin, a young man only a few years older than Thomas himself, who was sure to rock the world on its axis, though for some reason he had accepted a chair in Estonia. Thomas wrote to Jacques, urging him to press on with his research while he carried out the mundane job of filling their coffers with Kalaji’s gold sovereigns, quantities of which awaited them by wire at every town they visited.

  Jacques replied that he had been obliged, following his unforeseen success with his thesis, to accept a position at the Salpêtrière. He had no choice but to repay the investment of the hospital in his studies; as soon as he could honourably extract himself, he would do so. He had spent the three weeks before his appointment began in Nancy, where he had studied hypnotism under Bernheim. He had not told the staff at the Salpêtrière about his visit, because Bernheim’s view of hypnotism was in direct and noisy contention with that of Charcot.

  ‘As you know,’ Jacques concluded, ‘Charcot believes that only hysterics can be hypnotised. There are valuable lessons to be learned about the mechanism of hysteria from that of hypnosis. Bernheim, on the other hand, assures us that all people can be hypnotised and he is certainly impressive in being able to induce the state in people chosen at random, none of whom has any history of hysteria or any other neurological disorder. I have learned a lot here in Nancy. However, I think that Bernheim’s view can be married to that of Charcot in an important way, which I shall not bother you with now, my dear friend!

  ‘Sonia is very well and sends her love. Do not worry that you are turning into a “money-machine”. We need every sou and I am doing enough research for two. Last night I had the strangest dream . . .’

  Thomas, too, was troubled by strange dreams, most of them concerning Roya Mikhailova, if that was her name. He dreamed he was in Torrington and had gone for a walk to the village duck pond on a hard-frozen day. As he stood among the weeds and looked down at the glassy surface, he glimpsed two dark eyes beneath the ice; he knelt down and tried to break the surface, to follow her, but with a flash of dark hair, she was gone. On another occasion, he was working in a field in Russia, mowing hay; he was exhausted and his back ached from the work. When he stopped for a moment to stretch, a carriage went rushing past, drawn by four galloping horses. He had a glimpse of a face at the carriage window, but he already knew whose it would be.

  Night after night he went to sleep in his clean bedroom in the pink-distempered house in a back street of Rothenburg, knowing that soon he would see those dark eyes and that girlish figure with its redolence of Petersburg and Persia, of sherbet and frost, rubies and minarets, and sense beneath his fingers the feel of bare skin beneath fur in an open sleigh with horses stamping impatiently by torchlight for the order to depart.

  When he awoke, he felt as though he had been touched by something immortal. It was frustrating because the condition of her presence was her evanescence, and it was shaming, because although the dreams were pure, there was something sinful tugging at their edge.

  Thomas wondered if this image of Roya had lodged in his mind because he had seen her at the moment when he believed he had had, for the first time, a valuable thought of his own about the nature of the human mind. After years of plodding nowhere down the fetid corridor of the asylum, he had suddenly, when least looking for it, found illumination. In which case, there was nothing particular about the girl, it was merely the coincidence of timing which made the sight of her – the thought of her – a way of bringing his mind back to that moment when it had at last yielded a truth to him. So Roya was like the jangle of the horses’ harnesses that, while meaningless in itself, roused the dogs to frenzy; or the taste of gooseberries, whose woolly tartness could transport him whole to childhood at the kitchen table at Torrington. The girl was no more than a trigger, or a password.

  But it did not feel like that, however much his reason told him so. It felt as though she represented something universal; that she belonged to a world that existed beside his own, a place whose natural laws were transparent and where there was no yearning, only tranquillity and fulfilment. The curse of being human was to be granted glimpses of this place, in music, in dreams and through the power of imagination – but only glimpses because the reality, like the Promised Land from Moses, was for ever withheld.

  In the waking life of the family Valade, Thomas contrived to see Roya once, when he made an excuse to accompany Nadine to her friend’s house. Their lodging was a good deal grander even than that provided by the Prince for theValades: two footmen stood at the door, and there was no trace of either parent, a sure sign in Thomas’s experience of unusual wealth. A German housekeeper accepted Nadine’s coat and asked Thomas if he wished to take a cup of chocolate.

  From upstairs, there was the sound of a violin, quite skilfully played, without the groaning scrape and wail of the beginner.

  ‘That’s Miss Roya,’ said the housekeeper, following his upward look.

  ‘She plays well, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Very well. This way to the morning room, please, I shall bring the chocolate through presently.’

  ‘Goodbye, Thomas,’ said Nadine. She waved coquettishly as she made her way upstairs, presumably towards Roya’s apartments, and he was certain that in her eye there was a teasing look: she was taunting him with her easy access to what he desired.

  It was draughty and uncomfortable in the morning room and Thomas wished he had not chosen to stay. Eventually, he heard footsteps and the housekeeper entered with a cup of chocolate.

  ‘Is there anything else I can fetch for you, Doctor? A newspaper?’

  There was a note of concern in her voice, which could have been construed as insolence, he thought.

  ‘No. No, thank you,’ he answered with the airiest charm he could conjure. ‘I shall just finish this, then I must be on my way.’

  The housekeeper withdrew, though he thought he saw a smirk on her face as she inclined her head.

  Suddenly, there was a clatter on the ceramic tiles of the hallway and a sharp female cry. Thomas put down his cup and went outside.

  Nadine and Roya were kneeling by a table which held an ormolu clock in a glass case. They were both laughing, but nervously. Nadine looked up, flushed.

  ‘The cat . . .’ she started to explain, then gave up because she was laughing. ‘It’s . . . Stuck!’

  They were both kneeling on all fours by the table, and Thomas saw that a fat marmalade cat was attached to the collar of Roya’s coat.

  ‘We were dressing up the cat in doll’s clothes and she got frightened. Her claws are caught. We were going to take her out for a walk.’

  ‘Would you like me to help?’

  Nadine began to laugh again. ‘Are you frightened of cats?’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘No, I think it’s the cat who’s frightened.’

  Roya was facing away from him towards the table; her green velvet dress was pulled up a li
ttle over the hips, so he could see the fine black stocking at her ankles above her buttoned boots. He knelt down and reached up to the cat, whose long claws were sunk into Roya’s fur collar and hood.

  ‘Keep still,’ he said, as he aligned himself behind her and took one of the cat’s paws. He squeezed it to release the claws and told Nadine to hold the animal’s leg away from the coat so it could not re-engage its grip. Then he leaned across Roya’s back and released the other claw; with no grip in its rear feet the cat was easily removed.

  Thomas stood up and moved back with the cat in his arms.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Nadine, helping Roya to her feet.

  By the time she turned to face him, Roya had pulled the rest of her coat on and raised the hood, so he saw little more than the flash of her eyes and the trace of blood subsiding beneath the skin of her cheek as she disappeared onto the street.

  The Valades’journey was extended to a full year andThomas drifted to Vienna with them. At the poste restante, there was a letter from Sonia.

  Dearest Thomas,

  We read your last letter with interest. Jacques was very excited from the beginning by your idea of the voices, so it was good to read more about it. Of course, it has a poignancy for him because of his brother. How you set about demonstrating the truth of your theory and quite what it means, if anything, for us today, I do not quite know. But I expect you do!

  We are still living at Madame Maurel’s, very frugally, so Jacques is saving money from his private practice, which is going very well. His patients seem to be nervous young women for the most part, rather well-off and beautiful, but I try not to mind. Jacques is happy, I think, but to tell the truth I am a little worried about him.

  He works all the hours of the day in a kind of frenzy. He is still the same lovely kind man, of course, and he is faultlessly tender and solicitous towards his wife. I look forward to our evenings together – or to be more accurate, I look forward to our nights together, because that is almost the only time he can spare me. In return for giving private lessons in anatomy, he receives four hours’ tuition a week in German from a young student in the rue d’Assas. I go as well for the conversational practice on Wednesday, but Jacques is doing it properly with grammars and textbooks – and with remarkable results. In the evening, after bolting down Madame Maurel’s dinner, he reads in German until the early hours, when he comes to bed at last. (I sometimes pass the hours playing the piano with little Mademoiselle Tavernier). J assures me that what he has read is opening up whole new worlds for him. He is still, I know, a disciple of the blessed Charcot at heart, but he says that German is the language of the new sciences.