Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  He ran down the village street to the blacksmith’s, where he found Olivier lying in a pool of blood on the ground, surrounded by a ghoulish crowd. Charcot stood above the dead body with the smith’s hammer in his hand, proclaiming his responsibility for the murder. At his feet were the remains of several glass test-tubes which he said he had found in Jacques’s room. ‘It’s better this way,’ said Charcot. ‘Now go back to school, Jacques.’

  In the schoolroom, Sonia kissed him, and he awoke with an immense feeling of forgiveness and with tears of relief on his cheeks, feeling that something had been completed and resolved.

  This dream, he felt sure, was not just a random assembly of images. Without knowing it, he had been profoundly anxious about something and his dream had removed that troubled knot. Could you be relieved of a distress of which you had been unconscious? Everything he had understood in his studies under Charcot told him that you could. The chances of such a cogent and beautifully therapeutic dream having arisen at random seemed absurdly slight, while the arguments to the contrary, though hypothetical, were compelling. In an essay he had just finished reading, Schopenhauer argued that the intellect organises sense impressions it receives during the day in the only way it knows how: by time and space and cause. So many are the external stimuli of the busy day, however, that the mind has no time for the murmurings of the sympathetic nervous system. With the body asleep, however, and no news coming in from outside, this internal information at last gains access to the intellect, which organises what it receives as best it can, along its same limited lines. In a development of this idea, Hildebrandt, a writer he also found convincing, argued that one of the main side-effects of sleep was to remove a daytime censor who prevented immoral thoughts from reaching consciousness; and the Frenchman Maury had agreed that once a man’s waking will was removed he became, in dreams, the plaything of the thoughts and desires he could only suppress by day.

  This, Jacques thought, made fair physiological sense; more difficult to resolve was the question of why and how dreams disguised what they were trying to say. Did they always have an exact language or code? Perhaps not all dreams were meaningful; perhaps the messages of the nervous system were unclear and the poor brain could only do its best with the rough material it was offered.

  The simplest fact, however, was to him the most convincing. In a hypothetical model of a human, you would expect the brain to sleep along with the rest of the body; for it to work away all night was bizarre. Because we dream from infancy, he thought, we accept the function as axiomatic, but in fact it is against objective probability. And mechanisms which survived millions of years against logical expectation did so for only one reason that he knew: they were favoured by natural selection because they served a purpose. Non-dreamers had become extinct.

  So he placed the dream at the side of his mind, where the functions of interpretation could do their slow work over the coming days, while he got out of bed, dressed and went out to his work at the hospital. If he might one day use dreams as a route into the unconscious minds of his patients, it would be a good idea if he began by analysing his own, and a week later, he felt he had finally understood what the dream was telling him. The beautiful young woman – so strange to him yet so at home in the house – was his mother. He had until now felt unworthy of Sonia and unsure of her deep affection because Sonia had never met his mother. Equally, his mother had never blessed the match. He had wondered guiltily whether his physical desire for Sonia was based on some ideal of womanhood represented by his mother. In the dream, Sonia had told him that even if this were the case, it was permissible, and that tender feelings for two women could exist together.

  The second part of the dream was more perplexing, until he saw that Charcot, the older man of authority, resident in Sainte Agnès, was not himself but a representation of the true father-figure, old Rebière. Presumably the test-tubes served some crude symbolic purpose, and Charcot/Rebière’s smashing of the tools of Jacques’s trade showed his resentment of the way his son had abandoned him and tried to assert his superior virility by moving up in the social hierarchy. More particularly, it illustrated Jacques’s guilt at having done so. This guilt was connected to Olivier, and this was the tightest knot to untangle. Jacques eventually concluded that, however much his daytime censor had stamped out the thought, he must at some time have wished Olivier dead, because he blamed him for the death of their mother; or at least if he did not actually blame him, he was murderously jealous of Olivier for having known her. In this light, he could see that his own overpowering ambitions as a doctor sprang not so much from his professed desire to find a cure for Olivier and his like, but from a determination to show to both his father and his brother that he had no need of them, and in fact was better off with both of them dead.

  If this was true, he unhappily concluded, then it must follow that his discoveries and the fame that followed them would be a kind of revenge on the two of them for having enjoyed the privilege that he himself had most desired – that of knowing his mother.

  When Jacques said goodbye to the Salpêtrière in the spring of 1890, there were motor cars on the streets of Paris and he was thirty years old. He felt as though he needed to run faster each day to keep ahead of the changes he saw about him. No sooner had the German sage Wilhelm Wundt declared that ‘psychology’ was to be a new discipline, not merely an offshoot of philosophy, than an American called William James was said already to have published the definitive book on it. Jacques cabled the publisher in New York for a copy and left instructions with Madame Maurel that she was to send it on to him in Carinthia as soon as it arrived.

  Although she had been impatient to leave, Sonia found herself reluctant, at the last moment, to say goodbye to the boarding house in whose attic rooms her life had been refound. She shook hands with Madame Tavernier and her pug-faced daughter and wished them well; she felt Pivot’s scaly hands grip her wrists as he kissed her on both cheeks. For Carine, who was nowhere to be seen, she left an envelope with a small sum of money.

  The contents of their room were squeezed into a trunk and three suitcases, which were piled onto the back of the cab that took them to the Gare de l’Est; Sonia intended to have more clothes and some furniture sent out from Torrington when they arrived. When they finally settled onto the train, she sat back with a sigh that was too full of anticipation to be called contented. From a handbag, she took the photographs of the schloss that Thomas had sent her from Carinthia. She was excited by the possibilities they offered, and anxious to make her mark on the place as soon as possible. Thomas had negotiated the terms of the lease and instructed some builders in structural repair work, but she did not trust him with the interior; if it were left to him, he would simply have the patients’ rooms whitewashed and some cheap brass numbers nailed to the doors.

  ‘He has taken a lot of photographs, hasn’t he?’said Jacques.

  ‘Yes. He has a new camera. It has a hundred pictures on a roll and apparently when you’ve finished you just send the whole thing back to them to develop.’

  ‘I like the building. It looks beautiful.’

  ‘It has possibilities.’ Sonia smiled.

  The train rattled on towards Alsace; the landscape through the flashing window became hilly, then covered with pine trees as France began to roll out into Germany, while Sonia closed her eyes against the gentle rocking of the carriage. There was another, more profound, more fragile reason for her joy, but she did not feel she could yet tell Jacques: a providence that had appeared first cruel, then contrary, should not be provoked. She crossed her fingers, nevertheless, over her lower abdomen, and as night began to fall over theVosges mountains she could not help but picture the life that she believed was stirring beneath her hands. She felt her womb lift up and flood with love towards the being who was growing unbidden, all unseen inside her.

  The journey took them three days, travelling far to the east because the Alps barred their straighter route into Carinthia. They left Munich after
dinner on the second day and arrived early the next morning in Vienna, tired and rattled by the ceaseless jarring of the train. They wired ahead from the post office to warn Thomas of their arrival; Sonia imagined him airing the beds and instructing the housekeeper to prepare her best supper, though she had little idea what the cooking would be like. She studied the map in Baedeker and ticked off the names as the local train crawled through the rustic stations, puffing idly while the Carinthians piled on board with their baskets of eggs and string-wrapped parcels of ham and cheese, pushing Jacques and her, exhausted, into the corner of the carriage. She had a moment of anxiety: they seemed to be travelling away from Paris, discovery, Pasteur and the first nights of Debussy, into an autochthonous peasant world ringed by mountains, drenched in ignorance. She glanced anxiously at Jacques and hoped he was not regretting the move, but he was gazing from the window, apparently fascinated by what he saw, and she recognised that, however he had been changed by the intellectual blizzard he had weathered in Paris, he was still faithful to the vision he had shared with Thomas that night on the beach at Deauville – a vision that was now only a few minutes away from becoming real.

  At the busy mainline station, they were met by a tall, cadaverous man who introduced himself as Josef, the lampman at the schloss; he wore a black felt hat with a curling brim and a dented crown. He brought apologies from Dr Midwinter, who had been called to see a patient in the village, but would be back in time for dinner. ‘The Executioner’, Sonia silently christened Josef, as he loaded their baggage on to the roof of the closed trap and invited them to climb inside. It took another hour and a half before at last, as the dusk was throwing shadows at their feet, they had their first glimpse of the schloss.

  Sonia gripped Jacques’s arm; only a grim effort of self-control prevented her from telling him that it was in this ochre-painted house with its white plaster decorations and red tile roof, with its comfortable evocation of Torrington but its own distinct and foreign character – that it was here that she would bear his child. She ran into the large hall and called out for Thomas. He emerged from behind a plain oak door, the last on the right, and came striding over the stone flags, gathering her in his arms and lifting her off her feet.

  ‘Let me show you upstairs,’ he said when the greetings were over. ‘I have made arrangements for you and Jacques to have the rooms on this side, so you will have a view towards the mountains from your sitting room.’

  ‘Is that a grey hair?’ said Sonia, running up the broad staircase to keep up with him.

  ‘I hope not,’ said Thomas, reaching to the side of his head. ‘I instructed the barber to get rid of any. Here. This is your apartment. Do you like it?’

  Sonia walked up and down, through the four connected rooms which ran from east to west across one half of the house. The polished wooden boards needed more rugs and some of the fruitwood furniture was not to her taste, yet the suite as a whole, light and touched by a resigned, family elegance, filled her with such joy that she could not answer. In her mind, she had made the east room into a nursery, had repainted it and installed a rocking horse; she wondered if she would be close enough to hear the baby when he cried at night.

  ‘Well?’ said Thomas. ‘Queenie, I am going to expire if you will not tell me. I have taken such a risk for all our sakes. I have spent so much money too. And you trusted me to do it. Please tell me if I have made a terrible mistake.’

  Still Sonia could not speak, so she laid her head on Thomas’s chest and held him tightly to her. Small tears were squeezed from her closed eyes and she wondered if it was wise to be this happy. Thomas stroked her hair and smiled; he pressed her no further about what she thought.

  When they went downstairs, Sonia was surprised to find that they were not alone for dinner. Thomas’s most recent letter had told them about the people he had engaged to help at the schloss, but it had not arrived by the time they left Paris, so he was obliged to explain their function as well as introduce them.

  In addition to Josef, who was in charge of the horses, the grounds and the outside buildings, there was a scarlet-faced woman called Frau Egger, who was the housekeeper, and a young man called Hans on whose employment Frau Egger’s appeared to be conditional.

  ‘I would also like you to meet two friends of mine who arrived from England last week. This is Daisy, who is going to start off as a maid, at least until we have engaged some more people. And this is Mary, who came with her. Mary is blind, but she is anxious to be of service and I have started to train her in the art of massage, at which she shows considerable aptitude.’

  Daisy shook hands with Sonia. ‘I have heard so much about you, Miss, when I was in . . . That place.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Sonia remembering Daisy’s photograph. ‘It is extremely good to meet you also.’

  Frau Egger brought in a tureen of soup and they began to eat. The dining room took up two thirds of one side of the house, the remaining third being given to the kitchens and scullery.

  ‘Everyone could eat in here,’ said Thomas. ‘I think we can sit sixty with ease and I doubt whether we will have more than fifty patients.’

  ‘How many more staff shall we need?’ said Sonia.

  ‘A great deal,’ said Thomas. ‘We shall probably need a nurse to every two patients and many more domestic staff. It is a very large establishment, as you will see in the morning. The courtyard has twenty-two rooms on the higher level and fourteen on the ground floor. I wanted Jacques to be here, though, before I took on any medical people and, Sonia, if you still agree then you shall be in charge of the domestic side.’

  ‘She talked of nothing else all the way from Paris,’ said Jacques fondly. ‘Now let us drink a toast to the schloss and to its success. To the health of our patients and the prosperity of our venture.’

  ‘Hans,’ said Thomas. ‘Will you please bring more wine?’

  Sonia had a slight headache the next morning, but it did not stop her being down to breakfast at eight and then beginning her inspection.

  The schloss had originally been built, Thomas explained, two hundred years earlier, as an abbey. The main house was built in a traditional style to house the abbot, clearly a man of self-importance. A chapel with a rectangular courtyard, about seventy metres long and thirty across, and two smaller courts had been attached to the house by a covered cloister, but a hundred years later a fire had destroyed the chapel and damaged other buildings. The property, after being deconsecrated, had passed through two families before being bought by a coffee merchant from Trieste in 1862; he had repaired and rebuilt the principal courtyard and restored such of the smaller ones as had been damaged. He had envisaged turning part of it into a concert hall and theatre, but had died before he was able to begin the work. Thomas had bought a lease of ten years from his heir, a nephew, at advantageous terms dependent on their paying for repairs and improvements themselves.

  The main house revolved about the great, stone-flagged hall. On the north side of it, opposite the dining room, were four rooms of approximately equal size which would act as waiting room, office and two consulting rooms; the broad, uncarpeted stairs swept up to a landing that ran the width of the building in each direction: Jacques and Sonia’s apartment was to the south; the rooms on the north could be allotted to Thomas and to various staff. The walls were painted in white distemper and many had waist-high oak panelling; despite the simplicity of design, there were unexpected turns in the corridors and half-flights of stairs, where among the Biedermeier furnishings a wooden calvary might suddenly appear framed in a recess, or an old wine press would be serving as an ornamental table. Downstairs, double doors opened out from beneath the main staircase on to the cloister behind.

  ‘It is peculiar,’ said Sonia, running her hand over the wainscot. ‘Despite the size, it feels like a family house. How long had it been empty?’

  ‘About five years. They were relieved to find a taker. The only other possibility was to turn it into a hotel. Beneath the cloister here are enormous
wine cellars which I thought we could make into laboratories. Now we come through this gate here into the main courtyard. The grass needs cutting and the fountain has stopped, but the buildings are in good repair.’

  This part of the schloss, it seemed to Sonia, was like a large house that had been unfolded and turned inside out, so that instead of the rooms being joined together, back to back and looking out, they were only half-attached to one another and could therefore look in over the central lawn as well as out towards the lake on one side or the mountains in the west.

  ‘Obviously the rooms on the first floor have a much better view,’ said Thomas, ‘but that is an advantage because we can charge more for them. And it is ideal to have all this space on the ground floor for people who cannot climb stairs. We want to let some of these rooms go free to cases we take from the asylums.’

  ‘Will your rich ladies mind eating with the lunatics?’

  ‘Tact, my dear Sonia. We shall find a way. We cannot just serve what you call rich ladies. Nor is it merely Christian charity to take on others; it is scientific, because among the poor we may find more interesting cases. Come this way. Here is one of my favourite parts.’

  A smaller courtyard opened from the southern end of the main one, its white walls covered in creeper and its inward-looking wooden shutters splattered crimson with geraniums growing from the window boxes. In the centre was a small square of grass with a stone fountain.

  ‘Peaceful, is it not?’ said Thomas.