by Reif Larsen
Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “Your entire framework is based on the unobserved theory—”
“Observation is precisely the problem. Observation, as we understand it, is the nemesis of understanding,” said Bohr. “We’re obsessed with this act of witnessing—yet witnessing is an action that irrevocably affects the subject. As it turns out, we can only witness the witnessing.”
Jean-Baptiste left that evening—damp and bewildered, his core shaken by the steadiness, the utter generosity, of Bohr’s belief in the uncertain. On the train back to Paris, he sat in a state of agitated confusion, nursing a brandy as the lowlands slid past. Yet he had never felt more alive. It was as if he had suddenly jumped orbits and could now feel the heat of the sun against his skin.
• • •
“I DIDN’T OPEN IT,” his wife said as soon as he came through the door. She pointed to a telegram from Saigon that was propped up on the dining room table.
He sat down, laced open the envelope, read the fifteen words, and then read them again.
It was midafternoon, but the sun had already begun to sink. Jean-Baptiste left the house and walked through the cold and empty streets, following a familiar path through the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. The dew had frosted in the grass. In a hickory tree, a lone raven pecked at its feet, its brethren having left long ago for balmier skies. At some point, Jean-Baptiste placed his hand on the surface of one of the gravestones. To his surprise, he found the stone warm to the touch.
“What will you do?” Leila asked when he returned. Her voice revealing the slightest tremor.
“There’s nothing to be done,” he said. “I must go and take my place.”
His father, André de Broglie, was dead.
3
Leila did not try to dissuade him. She packed her possessions into a pair of steamer trunks, and together they made the long, grueling trip to La Seule Vérité. A journey is never measured by its distance alone, but rather by its chapters: they took the overnight train to Marseille; then a steamer to Saigon, stopping in Alexandria, switching boats first in Bombay and again in Singapore; then a riverboat up the Mekong, pausing in Phnom Penh for supplies before heading on to the plantation that was to be their new home.
Eugenia welcomed her son’s return, if only for the company he provided. She had never harbored the same grand illusions about the de Broglie lineage as her husband did. For her, the rubber plantation, even during its heyday, had been something to tolerate rather than celebrate. Deafness was a shroud that had taught her to study life’s details while always ensuring she could never fully touch them, and this distance had afforded her a shrewd kind of wisdom. As Tofte-Jebsen writes, “She haunted a stage not of her own design” (110). Eugenia had known for a long time that her only son’s heart was not in the business, but she could not bring herself to release him from his burden. Selfishly, she wanted him close, to suffer as she had suffered.
If Jean-Baptiste ever resented the millstone of his familial duty, he did not express it. He buried his father on the hilltop, next to his grandfather, in a quasi-Christian ceremony that also incorporated local animistic funeral rites performed with incense and flowers freshly cut by André’s distraught workers. They had clearly loved him. When Jean-Baptiste walked past them they would bow, tears in their eyes. At first he tried to go out of his way to be friendly with them, telling jokes, querying them on their work, even joining them for the early-morning tap, but after being met with only confused silence, he eventually stopped trying. Knowing he could never fill the gulf left behind by his late father, Jean-Baptiste delegated responsibility for the day-to-day rubber operations to a young, wily Algerian man named Raouf, whom he brought in from Phnom Penh, meanwhile busying himself with a series of complicated projects that became less and less relevant to the family business.
The combination to the vault containing all of the ledger books had somehow been lost. Jean-Baptiste considered blowing open the door but instead had it moved by fifteen men to the basement, where it would stand unopened for forty years. He bought another safe, the same model, and put it in the old safe’s place, though he never used it.
“If they have come this far, a safe will not stop them,” he said to no one in particular.
His first item of business was to construct a telegraph line. The line would cut east through the jungle, meeting with National Road No. 7 down to Kratié, before heading twenty-five kilometers south through the rice fields into Vietnam, to the northern station at Saigon. The construction of the line took six months and came at an enormous expense: Jean-Baptiste hired two teams of three hundred laborers to work from either end and spent nearly a quarter of the family’s savings on the project. When it was finally finished, he sat in the telegraph room beneath the stairwell in the main hall and breathed deep. The smell of blood in the wires.
Jean-Baptiste tapped out a message to Monseigneur Lemaître, the astronomer-priest in Brussels, and imagined the electromagnetic flashes hurtling their way through the thick foliage. The quiver of signal. The promise of contact. He was a part of the world now.
Under Lemaître’s distant instruction, Jean-Baptiste built a domed rosewood observatory on the hilltop shared by his grandfather’s and, now, his father’s gravestones. The dome rose up like a moon, a wooden effigy to the invisible planets suspended above. Two months later, the telescope arrived from Paris, lashed like a cannon to a barrel-stave barge that was filled with bleating livestock. The device was installed inside the observatory with much fanfare, an ancient Khmer man bowing a high-pitched tune on a three-stringed fiddle, and awed locals came from miles around to look through its eyepiece at the rings of Saturn. Jean-Baptiste began taking meticulous notes on the rotation of the constellations, the regularity of comets, and a star that Lemaître had informed him was about to disappear, had in fact already disappeared—they were watching a death from the past, echoed across the great expanse. After barely a full moon cycle, however, the novelty of the telescope had worn off and Jean-Baptiste grew bored with his astronomical observations.
Fig. 4.4. Jean-Baptiste de Broglie to Georges Lemaître, telegram, July 16, 1938
From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 113
One morning, he was leafing through the pages of a French science journal when he came across a dazzling array of radiographic photos: bony hands with wedding rings, open-mouthed skulls, a bullet lodged inside a buttock. He had stumbled upon his next calling.
“These rays have a very high frequency—four times that of visible light, and so they can penetrate where light cannot,” he wrote to Lemaître. “I mean this with no offense, but to see inside the depths of a human body is even more exciting than glimpsing the heavens. It’s almost enough to make me believe in God again. To think: it’s all right here, right in front of us. We need only make it visible.”
He constructed a giant but erratic Tesla coil in their wine cellar and then connected this to a footlong cathode ray tube that he had ordered from Tokyo. The results were far from immediate as the coil sparked and churned, causing the radio receiver in his study to erupt into static, and the cutlery in the corner of the cellar to take on an ethereal glow. It was not an exact science: he blew through three transformers and constantly overwhelmed their fragile power supply, which had been tenuously wired only a year before from a hydroelectric dam on a tributary of the Mekong. Gradually, though, after much experimentation, he began to home in on the correct amount of voltage needed to operate the X-ray tube with some precision.
His wife became his primary subject. At first, the intensity of the X-rays was either too powerful or too weak, the images coming out white and misty, as if her body were suspended in an English fog. In time, he figured out how to master the machine. The first clear photograph was of her hand, with the darkened orbit of a wedding ring just visible—a re-creation of the photo he had first seen in the journal. Ignoring her protests, he hung this in their bedroo
m.
“I feel like I’m witnessing my own death,” she said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You’re witnessing your life.”
Despite her hesitancy at being documented so intimately, he X-rayed every inch of her skeleton again and again. Fully clothed, she lay on the examining table as he unveiled her with his machine. He could hear her breath before the X-ray sprang noisily to life, shuddering, groaning, sending its stream of photons flying into her body. Afterwards, he would develop the images alone in the red-tinged darkness of his closet, the negatives emerging wet with solution, his hand trembling as he handled the proof of his wife’s conquest. He had ventured where no one had ventured before, including himself, for their actual lovemaking was a passionless, fumbling affair, done under cover of night. Jean-Baptiste hung the ghostly X-rays of his wife’s bones in the hallways, the drawing rooms, even the bathrooms—an ethereal gallery of possession.
Meanwhile, Leila suffered. From the beginning, his wife had been a poor match for the tropics—she pined for the familiarities of home, for the comforting spray of the sea during her walks along the bluffs. She could not grow used to the heat, the damp, the insects, the constant smell of cooking rubber, the natives that watched her every move. Her melancholy was stoked by a long correspondence with her mother in which she savored the most banal news from their village. A dog had borne puppies. Her niece had made a paper hat for Bastille Day. The house at the end of the pier had collapsed during a storm. Jean-Baptiste could not appease her homesickness, even as he imported maps of the Seine’s curvatures and the Channel Islands, novels, fine linens, silverware, oil pantings, and custom-made marionettes crafted in the finest workshops of Paris. Their drawing room became an elaborate museum of his placations, but no earthly object could quell her misery. Yet when Jean-Baptiste offered to take Leila to Paris and Normandy for Christmas, she refused, oddly, saying there was too much to be done at the plantation. In the end, she spent the holiday doing nothing except writing her letters back home and reading the same Russian tragedies over and over again.
Leila and Eugenia tolerated each other, but in private each complained of the other’s shortcomings. Eugenia viewed her daughter-in-law as a spoiled priss who lacked both backbone and a sense of humor, while Leila saw her mother-in-law as a terrifying, controlling matriarch who heard more than most hearing people and cared only for her spooky portraits of phantasmagoric flowers. Leila had done her best to learn Eugenia’s obscure language of signs, but it was as if Eugenia willfully chose not to understand Leila when she signed, shaking her head and insisting that her son act as their translator.
Leila’s despair grew with each passing year, for despite their awkward attempts beneath the mosquito nets, no child came therefrom. Jean-Baptiste’s mother was strangely content with the absence of any progeny, despite the uncertainty that such a scenario brought to the question of inheritance.
“You must at least be where you are,” Eugenia signed to her son. “And she is no place at all.” Though the matter was a delicate one, a doctor from Phnom Penh was brought in to examine Leila. He could find nothing wrong.
“Sometimes one simply cannot,” the doctor said over tea. “It’s the way of things.”
Jean-Baptiste became intent on fixing the problem, not necessarily because he wanted a child but because there was a problem to be fixed. Having heard the amazing tales of traditional medicine passed among the workers, he eventually sought advice from a kru Khmer, a local shaman. Jean-Baptiste was not enthusiastic about the fact that their inability to conceive would almost certainly become common knowledge among the workers, but in his mind the potential for success outweighed this invasion of privacy. The kru Khmer, after visiting with Leila one afternoon, prescribed a fertility tea made of palm root and Psychotria bark.
Even Raouf weighed in on the matter: “You must have more sex.”
“Thank you, Raouf, but this is none of your concern.”
“You must have much more sex.”
Tien, a hardworking young foreman whom Jean-Baptiste had come to trust, delivered the shaman’s tea to Leila each morning, laying down a paper-thin orange tablecloth and pouring the kettle with much formality. He would sit with her while she sipped the tea and nibbled the lemon cakes that were baked to temper the bitter taste of the bark. In this way, Leila began to learn Khmer. The mornings were marked by Tien’s lilting singsong voice entwining with her laughter. She was a fast learner, and soon they spoke only in his native tongue, the tea left to simmer, untouched.
“Khnhom sraleanh anak,” she said to Jean-Baptiste. “This means ‘You look like a beautiful flower.’”
After encountering a group of young students walking upstream to the regional lycée, Leila became excited at the idea of using her newly acquired language skills to teach the children French. Jean-Baptiste, relieved that his wife had expressed interest in anything besides the Normandy postal system, arranged for Tien to shuttle her by riverboat up to the school three days a week.
It was an instant revelation. Her whole demeanor changed. She began standing upright, carrying herself with a newfound determination. Her eyes burned, full of life. Once again she started to dress smartly, taking particular care with her hair and makeup. She was now often gone late into the evening, returning home exhausted and content.
“They know so little,” she breathed beside him in bed. “But then, they also know so much. Sometimes I don’t know who’s learning more—me or them.”
“My darling,” he said. “I am so glad.”
His wife now taken care of, Jean-Baptiste turned back to his own projects. He briefly flirted with the idea of building a cyclotron like the one he had seen during the conference in Copenhagen, but after some investigations, he resolved himself to the impossibility of its creation in such a remote location. Soon after this, the telegraph line to Saigon stopped working. Somewhere in that vast jungle, there had been a breach in the wire. The telegraph room in the main hall fell silent. When an engineer was sent out to ride the entire length of the line and came back without locating the rupture, Jean-Baptiste resigned himself to defeat. If the world would not have him, he would not have it.
• • •
“HOW’S SHE GETTING on at the school?” Eugenia signed to Jean-Baptiste as they all sat at the dinner table one evening.
“Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “Really, how am I supposed to know this?” He turned to Leila, who was sitting beside him. “She wants to know how you are faring at the lycée?”
“Oh,” said Leila. “Fine.”
“Very well, thank you,” she signed to her mother-in-law, though Eugenia looked on blankly.
“That is, the children are wonderful,” she said aloud.
“Ask her which child holds the most promise,” Eugenia signed to her son.
“Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed back. “Ask her yourself. She can sign. You know this.”
“They are all clever,” Leila signed helpfully. “They make me happy.”
Eugenia shook her head, swallowing a small bite of pork shoulder. “There’s always one who stands above the rest,” she signed to her son. “Tell her to be truthful with us.”
“I couldn’t follow,” said Leila. “What did she say?”
“I said you must not lie to us. We are your family,” Eugenia signed.
“What’s she saying?” said Leila. “I can’t follow when she goes so fast. Something about the family?”
Jean-Baptiste sighed. “She’s excited for you. She said she wishes she had your patience.”
Eugenia bristled but said nothing. Leila, aware that she was being sheltered, resorted to her nervous habit of turning her wedding ring in circles. Jean-Baptiste rose from the table and switched on the Zenith. A symphony by Schubert came on, full blast. The strings pulled and churned. The radio had become an instrument of retaliation, a playground beyond his mother’s perception.
> • • •
IT WAS NOT LONG after this that Eugenia followed her daughter-in-law to work. She waited for Leila to disappear down the river, then unmoored one of the dugouts and paddled after them. She had never been out in the river alone before, and she found navigating the boat difficult, for she could not balance her strokes to make it travel in a straight line. The bow always wanted to go one way or the other. Though the red waters appeared glassy, the current was deceptively strong. By the time she had rounded the bend, she was already sweating into her dress, and her boots were soaked with river water brought in by the bite of the paddle.
She looked for Leila’s boat at the school’s dock but could not find it, nor did she see Tien coming back her way. She continued slowly upriver, past the school and its overgrown landing strip, and she was just about to turn around, thinking she had simply missed them in passing, when she saw the boat, tucked into a little cove, half hidden by the sagging branches of a river palm. With some trouble, she beached her dugout close by and stepped out into the muck. She saw no sign of Leila or Tien anywhere, so she carefully followed the path up from the cove some ways into the forest. Thinking she had made a wrong turn, she decided to turn back to her boat, but then she spotted the outline of a hut through the dense foliage. She approached, quietly, pausing outside. Lacking any aural faculties, she did what she always did: she turned to her other senses. Eugenia sniffed and smelled it immediately: the distant, sweet fragrance of opium, a scent she had not smelled since her days in Saigon. Above her, the forest moved, birds twittered, twigs crackled, but inside her head there was only the silence and the wet fragrance of the drug, and she closed her eyes and she was a small girl again, staring at her mother lying on the bed next to a man who was not her father. The heat, the stillness of the room, the light from the blinds streaming across their bodies.