Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  On the board are a jug of water, a bottle of wine, three glasses, fruit, saucisson, cheese, a pot of honey and some bread, and even a posy of golden clover and agrimony.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ he says. ‘If it’s all right with you, we’ll have lunch straightaway. It’s already midday. The meal may be frugal but it’s none the less festive. Because today is the fifteenth, the day of Mary’s Assumption. In honour of which I’ve brought a bottle of wine, a very good wine, a Pouilly Fumé. And you know what? It’s also my birthday. I was born on the night of the fifteenth of August, but so long ago I can’t remember the exact year any more. It was towards the end of the last century. It was a tradition, or rather a blessing, in my family: all the children were born on the fifteenth of August. And I had a lot of siblings – nine boys, would you believe? Who all came into the world under the protection of the Virgin. So this birthday isn’t just mine, it’s also that of my eight brothers. All of them have died now, gone to pay their respects to the Immaculate Mother of God. Soon it will be my turn. Ah, what a beautiful day!’

  Dazed by the chatter of this tiresome votary of the Virgin, Magnus is not sure whether the beautiful day he has just referred to is this one, or that of his forthcoming death. But he does not care either way, and the presence of the talkative monk irritates him. Yet he dare not drive him away. He politely beats a retreat, pleading tiredness in order to seek refuge inside the house where, he hopes, the intruder will not, after all, have the gall to follow him. But the fellow is not to be put off, and resumes his chatter with exasperating cheek.

  ‘Sorry, my son, but I haven’t got time to wait any longer. So you think I came on a whim, do you? I’ve been watching you for a long time, since the day you moved into this isolated house, nearly three years ago. And not a day’s gone by that I haven’t seen you, passing here or there … But you’ve never noticed my presence, although I live mostly nearby. The number of times I’ve slept in the stable beside the barn where you spend hours shut up inside! There is still straw in the mangers, and I like to come and lie down in it, it’s warm and smells goods. The animals have left behind a little of their warmth, their gentleness, their wisdom … Anyway, you prefer the barn. Why not? But enough’s enough. Haven’t you had your fill of emptiness in that barn of yours?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ replies Magnus, annoyed to discover that he has been spied on by this old busybody. ‘Leave me in peace!’

  Brother Jean does not give up. He returns to the fray. ‘Peace! It’s not by isolating yourself that you’ll find peace. For that’s what you are: isolated, not a recluse. Lonely, not a loner. I know what I’m talking about, I’ve been living as a hermit for some thirty years, close to my monastery. I’d never have been able to keep going if I had a heart as bleak as yours. The heart of a sequestered man.’

  ‘Sequestered?’ echoes Magnus, who does not know this word.

  ‘Confined, detained, imprisoned, walled up …’ explains the monk, and immediately continues with what he was saying. ‘I keep bees. My hives are not far from here. I take the honey to the monastery, and receive food and clothing in exchange. I need very litte. Less and less. Soon I shan’t be needing anything at all. That time is near, which is why I’ve come to you.’ Then abruptly changing the subject, he asks, ‘So what about your name, did you remember it?’

  ‘Magnus.’

  ‘Ah? Are you sure?’ says Brother Jean with a dubious look, as if he already knew the answer and the one he had been given was incorrect.

  This response once again disconcerts Magnus, who is well aware he has a borrowed name shared with a teddy bear, and that this very morning he obliterated another name, which might have been his.

  ‘Why do you doubt my name?’ he asks.

  Evading the question, his interlocuter says, ‘Names! Bah! People sometimes change them in the course of their life, as if the one they were given at birth wasn’t the right one. I had to give up mine when I entered the monastery, and I wasn’t given any choice. My name used to be Blaise. It was taken away from me. You’ll be called Brother Jean, they said. So Jean it was. Like the Baptist who fed on locusts and honey, or the Evangelist. Now there’s someone who was enlightened by a visit from the Angel of mystery! The Angel of the Word … Yes, the Angel of the Word, who made him eat up the little book of fire. In my opinion, that book was a beehive comb dripping with honey. I’m just a very insignificant Jean, and the Angel of the Word split my lip by sealing my mouth with his secret … But for some time now I have had the feeling this secret is stirring … yes, it’s stirring in my mouth, on my split lip … it’s like a taste of wind…’

  ‘What are you talking about? What secret?’

  ‘As if I knew! Who is familiar with the gift of God?’

  ‘Certainly not me!’ exclaims Magnus. ‘And it’s no concern of mine. I’m not a believer.’

  ‘So much the better,’ retorts Brother Jean, who takes everything in his stride. ‘That makes you freer. Free to be surprised by what I, on my own, have not yet been able to experience. That’s why I need you.’

  The gift of God! A charming fantasy. Magnus can make no sense of Brother Jean’s vatic utterances, but his irritation has subsided. He no longer has any desire to argue with this innocent whose persistence is matched by his eccentricity. All he wants is to rest and have something to eat, hunger suddenly overtaking his tiredness. They sit down side by side in the shade of the lime tree. A small cloud of bees swirls round them. They empty the bottle of Pouilly, sharing the contents of the third glass that Brother Jean had filled with the Angel of the Word in mind, or any other visitor who might turn up. More talkative and more crazy than ever, he draws a parallel between the ingenious system devised by Vauban for beseiging a fortified town, using zigzag trenches, and the delicate labyrinth of paths leading the soul towards God. Then he elaborates another parallel between the ripening of fruit by the effect of heat and the bringing to maturity of his death by the effect of time, a process he feels is about to reach completion.

  Magnus listens with only half an ear. He is feeling tired again. His companion starts singing, his voice still tuneful. He intones the litany of the Virgin in Latin. Then he rises and calmly announces, ‘I shan’t be coming back again. Next time, you’ll come to me. I can rely on you, can’t I?’

  Magnus reminds him that he does not know where he lives, if indeed he lives anywhere.

  ‘Not to worry, I’ll send my bees to fetch you. All you have to do is follow them.’

  And as on the previous day, he trips off amid a buzzing of insects.

  Magnus watches Brother Jean go, the figure of an elderly child in perpetual flight. A wood sprite who frolics with bees, who wields words illuminated like the pages of an old missal. Magnus feels as if he has been unwittingly introduced into a fairy tale. An antiquated tale inadvertently inserted into the rambling story of his life. It was charming, but he thinks he would have preferred to be invited into a completely different narrative: he has outgrown fairy tales. The secret of the Angel of the Word! He would be content to see the more modest secret of his early childhood finally explained, and even more so the secret of the vast nowhere into which the dead disappeared. The gift of God! But it is the gift of life that Magnus wants – and for the gift of life to be returned to those who have been robbed of it.

  Insert

  Once upon a time … This is how all stories that have never happened begin. Myths, fables, legends.

  The story told has dissolved into a distant past, like vegetable matter in marshland, or bodies in humus, giving rise to will-o’-the-wisps that flit through the darkness, skimming the ground. Likewise do the elements of myths and fables act in the obscurity of our thoughts.

  Once … an imprecise word referring to a past to which no date can be put. Or the one particular occasion on which an event took place.

  Once upon a time … So which is it? A once and for all occasion that did indeed happen or a once of eternal vagueness, for ever unresolved? Its temporal
status remains ambiguous.

  Once upon a time … A ritual formula that leads into a story, like a little hidden door opening onto an inner courtyard or a secret corridor. But in what sense have they never happened, these stories unrecognized by History, which admits into its corpus only established proven events whose relation to reality is exclusively diurnal. What do we know of what happens in the night time of reality? The imaginary is reality’s nocturnal lover.

  The corpus of History is a body – whose flesh is language, words spoken and written – and like all bodies it is opaque, and therefore casts a shadow. Once upon a time is this shadow it produces, a counterpart of more fluid, shifting words and utterances.

  Once upon a time: corpus of a deeper, more intense memory than that of History; seedbed of reality, which by morning has forgotten this pre-seeding, retaining only the visible palpable traces of it.

  Presently, there are sometimes stray characters who seem for ever to roam reality’s darkness, and who migrate from one story to another, constantly in search of some word that would finally give them full access to life, even at the cost of their own death.

  The time may come when characters encounter each other at the intersection of stories that have lost direction, stories yearning for new stories, ever and always.

  Fragment O

  The summer is nearly over. Brother Jean has not reappeared. He must have been having impish fun among his hives. Magnus hardly gives him any thought, but since that lunch they had together he has no longer felt the need to shut himself up in the barn. More importantly, he is thinking of leaving this place, this solitude. He is ready to move on. The monk was right, he has had his fill of emptiness and seclusion. The heavy silence deposited inside him is beginning to clear, to stir. And this sun-ripened silence, as Brother Jean might say, is impelling him to be on his way again.

  He is preparing for his departure, this time in tranquil indifference, no longer in the haste of grief and shame.

  They turn up one morning in a sonorous cloud. They fly swiftly through the air, undulating, at the height of a man. Magnus sees this golden brown ball rushing towards him. He takes fright, thinking he is being attacked by a swarm. But the cloud halts one metre from his face. The buzzing is agitated. Magnus recalls what Brother Jean said, that he would send his messengers when the time came. Yet he hesitates to take seriously the hermit’s whimsical promise.

  The little cloud hangs there, wavering, buzzing louder and louder, then retreats slightly. Magnus takes a step forward. The bees move away an equal distance. He takes another step forward. The same thing happens. Then he starts walking, resolutely following their lead.

  He is led along paths he has never taken before, shortcuts across fields and through groves. His guides move fast, he can hardly keep up. He crosses the river at a point where it is very deeply embanked, via a wooden footbridge that pitches at every step. He enters a forest, comes to a clearing. He recognizes it as the one where he once rested, to which he never found the way back again.

  The bees disperse, returning to their hives. Brother Jean is sitting in the middle of the clearing, with his back resting against the mossy niche. He is wearing a voluminous black cape with a gaping hood on the back of his neck. ‘Goodday to you, son!’ he greets Magnus as on every previous occasion. ‘Come and sit next to me.’

  Magnus sits down beside him. He says nothing, asks no questions. He waits for his host to start the conversation. But the monk, usually so exuberant, remains silent, and does so for a long time. The forest around them emits a murmur of multiple sounds with the underlying humming from the hives in the background: the rustling of foliage, the swishing of grass, the chirping of insects, the splashing of a stream, the cracklings of dry twigs; little piercing cries or piping calls from the birds; the whistling and sighing of the wind; and now and again the barking of dogs and echoes of human voices in the distance.

  Brother Jean looks up at the foliage of a beech tree, and pointing at a few leaves that have just detached themselves and are beginning to fall to the ground, he murmurs to Magnus, ‘Listen!’ The oval-shaped leaves, already brown, come slowly fluttering down. Three of them, caught in a rising air current, hover in the tree-top, like coppery commas dancing in the well of light shafting through the mass of branches. Vagabond commas punctuating in total freedom a luminously unadorned text. But all of a sudden they come tumbling down, the air current having moved on to blow elsewhere.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ asks Brother Jean.

  Magnus has watched this vegetal farandole closely. He can describe it visually but not aurally. The little fellow settles back into silence. Magnus realizes that as long as he is unable to distinguish the soft sigh of a falling leaf against the background of the various sounds of the forest and the basso continuo of the hives, his companion will say nothing. The hours slip by, the air gradually cools. The scene of red leaves falling recurs a countless number of times. So many erratic silent commas.

  Magnus gives a slight start, turns his head to the left. His gaze catches the moment a translucent yellow leaf, as fine as an insect’s wing, reaches the ground a little way off from him. His hearing perceived it before his eyes, better than his eyes. ‘I’m listening,’ he says to Brother Jean. But instead of finally breaking the silence Brother Jean pulls the hood of his cowled robe over his head and huddles up, with his hands flat on his knees, his forehead bowed. Thus wrapped in his black chrysalis, he dozes off. His head nods, eventually falling on Magnus’s shoulder. His breathing falters, becomes deeper and slower.

  That is all – no blazing light, no agitation in that drowsy body, no throaty rattle or muttering from his lips. Just this breathing rising slowly, amply, from the depths of a body concentrated not on itself but on self-oblivion, on an excavation, a hollowing-out of the self. And this breathing grows lighter, easier. It is as soft and penetrating as the sound of an oboe. A sigh of light escaping from the darkness. A vocal smile quietly ringing in the air. An exhalation of silence.

  That is all, but so totally have these two men surrendered to listening to this breathing and so united are they in their surrender, Magnus is overwhelmed by it. This tenuous song wells up as much from his own body as his companion’s, it caresses his flesh under his skin, flows in his blood. This caress felt from inside his body stirs him, amazes him, and engulfs him in himself more powerfully than any caress exchanged in love-making. This very fleeting embrace derives from way beyond anything he has previous experienced. It is radically new, a mental and carnal abduction of thrilling delicacy. It is life itself embracing him from within, and with one impulse he encompasses it with all his senses.

  Brother Jean rouses from his somnolence, lifts his head and snorts. His breathing has returned to normal. And Magnus does likewise. They are attuned. They get to their feet. Brother Jean pushes back his cowl, uncovering his head. His face bears the trace of the intentness of mind he has just exacted of himself – his face that of a very aged infant wakened by a dream mounting inside him whose amplitude he cannot contain, his brow creased by this upsurge of pure energy, his eyes clouded with a vision already receding.

  ‘Go home,’ he says. ‘Come back when you’re needed. It won’t be long, tomorrow, or in a few days’ time. You’ll know when to return and what you must do. You can find your way now.’

  He walks with Magnus to the edge of the forest. ‘When it’s all over,’ he says, ‘go and tell my brothers at the abbey. Take them my robe, it’s theirs by right. That’s where I was given the habit. It doesn’t belong to me.’ He gazes at the landscape for a moment. ‘I’ve enjoyed my life,’ he adds, ‘and loved this countryside where I’ve always lived.’ Then he turns to his companion, gives him a quick hug, and flits away towards the clearing.

  Palimpsest

  There is a spirit that man acquires over the course of time. But there is another spirit that enters man abundantly and rapidly, more rapidly than the blinking of an eye, for being itself beyond time this spirit has no need of time.


  Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

  … he will see that there is no limit to his intellect, and that he must search deeply … in the place where the mouth is incapable of speaking and the ear incapable of hearing. Then, like he who sleeps and whose eyes are closed, he will see visions of God, as it is written: ‘I was asleep but my heart waked, it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh’. And when he opens his eyes, and still more when another speaks to him, he will choose death rather than life, for it will be to him as if he were dead, for he will have forgotten what he saw. Then he will study his spirit as one studies a book in which great marvels are written.

  Rabbi shem Tovibn Gaon

  God never does the same thing twice. And when a soul returns, another spirit becomes its companion.

  Rabbi Nahman of Bratlav

  Fragment 29

  Magnus returns two days later. He has been given no particular sign, he simply has the clear conviction the moment has come. When he enters the clearing he notices a long black shadow projecting from the niche, which bears no relation to the size of the niche or to the sunlight. It is a narrow trench, quite deep, with a spade set beside it, and the neatly folded robe.

  An intense buzzing rises from this trench; it is seething with thousands of bees. And now suddenly they all take flight, shooting up like erupting lava. The quivering, twisting column climbs into the treetops, then fragments and scatters in an amazing shower of gleaming yellow. Every bee returns to its usual task.

  At the bottom of the trench lies Brother Jean, with his rosary wrapped round his hands, which are crossed over his breast. His body is completely covered with bee-glue, and glimmering with a reddish lustre. A few bees, exhausted by their work of embalmment, are lying on the body, sprinkling it with gleams of pale gold.