One sunny morning early in the year 1900, I was bathing in a mountain cascade when I was overcome by the intuition that I was being observed. I looked around and saw by the water’s edge a white, very white, almost spectrally white man in his early thirties, wearing a khaki suit and a pith helmet. On his face he sported a monocle and a curled ginger moustache, expertly waxed. Behind him a mule swayed under the weight of an enormous pack. We blinked at each other for a moment before the man uttered the last word I expected to hear.
‘Mère.’
And then he blushed.
Only one person had ever called me by that name.
‘Lucien?’ And then I recognised him – the face of the child burst through the face of the adult, through his pale green eyes above all, and thirty years of separation evaporated in an instant.
That evening, we sat around a large bonfire lit in Lucien’s honour, in a clearing deep in the woods surrounded by my beloved people. They watched and listened, wide-eyed with wonder, as we talked long into the night. The occasion was distinguished at first only by the bliss of our reunion. I told Lucien about my years living in the highlands, and how I had devoted them to teaching my people about the Law and trying to revive the crossing among the children. Lucien explained that he was now a writer employed by the Société de Géographie to travel throughout the world. He wrote articles that he would send back to France to be published in magazines and newspapers. He had come to Oaeetee specifically to find me. In France, he said, I had become somewhat notorious for my exploits.
‘What exploits?’ I asked.
‘Why, your life as a savage, evading the police, and fomenting rebellion.’ I was aghast to learn of this. ‘In Paris, you are known in certain circles as the Queen of the Cannibals.’
When they heard this, the people laughed. ‘But I am no such thing,’ I said. ‘And my people are not cannibals.’ I began to describe the pleasures and the rigours of mountain life.
‘The truth of the matter is not important,’ he replied. ‘It is the legend that counts. And according to the legend, you are the leader of the oldest, most stubborn colonial rebellion in the empire. Even old King Mehevi is curious about you.’
Curiosity was not a quality I readily associated with the King, who had launched several punitive expeditions upon my people over the years, as a result of which we had endured great hardships. These, combined with disease and the natural scarcity of our surrounds, had depleted our numbers. ‘What does Mehevi have to do with it?’
Lucien explained that, upon his arrival on the island, he had been granted an audience with the King, during which the monarch had, as was customary, enquired about his intentions for visiting the island. ‘I know why you are here,’ the King had said. ‘I know why you have come.’
‘So you know about Madame de Bressy,’ Lucien had replied.
At this point, Lucien said, the King’s demeanour had changed. ‘Of course,’ said Mehevi. ‘I’ve known all along.’
‘You know about Alula? And Koahu?’
‘Yes!’ the King exclaimed. ‘Yes, yes, I know, of course I know. But there are aspects to the story that remain confused for me. Tell me everything you know, young man.’
At this point, Lucien told me, he proceeded to tell the King the story of how I had known his mother, about Charles and Jeanne and the Baudelaire Society, and the stories I had told her about Koahu and Alula.
‘You told him everything?’
‘Should I not have?’ He discerned the distress on my face, which even my scars could not hide. ‘But you don’t believe those primitive superstitions, do you?’ I realised that his mother had taught him to be as sceptical as she was.
‘It’s not a matter of belief, but of fact. All of these things did happen.’
‘Well,’ Lucien replied, ‘you needn’t worry about Mehevi any longer. He has fallen gravely ill.’ The day after their exchange, he said, the King appeared to have descended into a mania and was confined to bedrest. His malady was unknown to the doctor. The news about the King’s illness took the people by surprise, for he was famous for his strong constitution, but they were even more surprised by the next revelation: the French had taken immediate advantage of the King’s illness to declare him unfit to rule and – pointing to the treaty Mehevi had signed with them all those years ago – annexed the island. The new Governor, who was none other than the old Resident-General, took up residence in the former Royal Palace, which was now called Government House, while the King was confined to the old Residence-General, now called the Royal Palace, where he lay in his regal bed, a king in name only.
‘What was the nature of the illness that befell the King?’ I asked. Lucien replied that he seemed to have lapsed into a kind of trance from which he would not be awoken. The only thing Mehevi could say was a single word, an exclamation that he repeated over and over, much to the discomfort of his attending priest: Sacrilège! He would shout it so loudly and so often that it had hastened his removal from power. The King now lived, in his enfeebled condition, shouting, ‘Sacrilège! Sacrilège!’ over and over, day and night, from the comfort of the royal bedroom.
A shiver ran the length of my entire body. I thought of Charles shouting Crénom! over and again until the day he died.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Lucien, ‘when you first met him, how did the King react to what you told him about the crossing and about me?’
‘He was most fascinated, and deemed it a story worth telling in great detail.’
‘And – think back carefully before you answer me – how did his manner change upon hearing the story you had to tell?’
Lucien paused to remember the occasion. ‘Perhaps,’ he finally replied, ‘if there was a change, it was a subtle one. It wasn’t anything he said so much as his bodily attitude. Yes, now that I think about it, there was a change in his demeanour. Especially in his eyes. His gaze became more inquisitive and searching, as if he was trying to hold my own. But I could not return it.’
‘Why not?’
‘There was something about it that made me nervous, something terrible. And besides,’ he added, ‘Maman always taught me never to look too long in a stranger’s eyes.’
I asked Lucien to make a solemn vow not to repeat a shred of what he had just told me to another living soul. When we finally turned in for the night, I could barely close my eyes. I rose from my bed and went walking in the moonlight. I was deeply troubled by what Lucien had told me – by the prospect of Mehevi, of Joubert’s soul, unleashed upon the world. For I knew that Mehevi must have crossed with someone – someone in the habit of peppering his speech with the word sacrilège. But why?
When I had arrived on the island, and for most of the two decades I had lived upon it, I had been quite certain that I would die there, that there would be no more crossings for me. I had tasted enough of life’s bitter fruit. I had caused too much harm. I had lost too much. But Lucien’s appearance dashed all of these notions. More than dread, I felt a great mischief might be unleashed upon the world – a mischief for which I was responsible. What if the Law had been right after all – only not in the manner I had expected? What if, when I had crossed with Joubert more than a century ago, I had indeed planted the seed of the world’s destruction, precisely as the Law had prophesied? What if Mehevi was the evil flower of my sin – a soul with no conscience, only rage, an adept of the most esoteric forms of crossing, roaming free in the world, motivated by terrible, unknowable desires? And what if I was the only person in the world with the power to curb his vengeance?
So it was that, several days after our encounter at the waterfall, after farewells marked by sorrow, we descended from the mountains to the lowlands and I returned to Louisville for the first time in nineteen years. As we journeyed, I turned the conversation back to the subject with which I was most preoccupied: Mehevi’s crossing. I asked Lucien to cast his mind back to his arrival. Had he met anyone, in Oaeetee or on the ship on which he had sailed here, who habitually exclaimed sacrilège? A
fter a moment of remembrance he replied: ‘I well remember the captain of the ship that brought me here. His blasphemies were a running joke among the ship’s crew, and the passengers too. All day long one heard him shout, “Sacrilège! Sacrilège!”’ Lucien looked at me. ‘Do you think this is related to the King’s condition?’
‘Perhaps,’ I replied, but of course my worst suspicions had been confirmed. I was convinced Mehevi had crossed with the man. ‘When we return to Louisville, I will no doubt be arrested and imprisoned. I fully expect to be banished from the island. While the wheel of justice turns, I’d like you to run an errand for me. See if you can learn where we can find this captain.’
Word of my return spread quickly. On the outskirts of Louisville, greatly enlarged since my departure two decades earlier, a crowd had gathered, of islanders and foreigners both, lining the streets to witness the spectacle of the surrender of the Queen of the Cannibals. We marched, Lucien and I, all the way to the old palace, now Government House, accompanied for the last portion of the journey by an escort of mounted gendarmes. As soon as we arrived, I was handcuffed and placed in the charge of two gendarmes. In theory, I was under arrest, but as there was still no prison on the island for European women, I was detained instead, as I had been nineteen years earlier, in exactly the same room at the Hibiscus. The hotel had barely altered in all that time. Only the faces of the women working by the hour had changed.
The following day, I was to be taken to see the Governor, who was also the island magistrate. But when his aide-de-camp – no longer Lieutenant Perrault, who had left long ago, but a Lieutenant Thibault – knocked at the door and saw that I was dressed only in a tapa cloth, as islander women dress, he escorted me instead – by way of the bank, where a substantial sum of money was still deposited under my name – to the clothier. There, I purchased a set of clothes worthy of a European lady: a chemise, bloomers, a corset, a busk, a corset cover, a decency skirt, a bustle, an underskirt, a suit, a taille and garniture, leather shoes, a hat, gloves, a parasol, a nightdress, a veil, and a trunk in which to store it all.
The next morning I was marched once more to Government House. The Governor, no longer the Colonel Mirabelle of nineteen years earlier but Colonel Marie-Georges Duhamel, informed me that I was to be deported at my own expense, accompanied by Lucien, on a schooner leaving Oaeetee three days hence, bound for the Sandwich Islands, and then San Francisco. I asked to see Mehevi, the former king. The Governor refused. ‘His Royal Majesty, Mehevi, King of Oaeetee, is not receiving visitors.’
I returned to my room at the Hibiscus and spent the next several days under lock and key. The girls working in the other rooms were banished. This time there would be no duping the guards.
Deprived of my liberty, I became like a wild animal caged in a zoo. Lucien finally came to visit on the second day of my incarceration, apologising for my compromised condition and promising my freedom as soon as we had left the island.
‘What did you learn about the ship’s captain?’
‘He left the island a week ago on the same ship that brought us here.’
‘And what is its destination?’
‘Marseille.’
My worst fears were realised. I would have to leave the island. I would have to make another crossing. I would have to return to France. I would have to attend to the monster of my making.
I opened my eyes in my sixth body and blinked several times. Through the window, the oceanic Iowa prairie through which the train was whistling was drenched in the golden light of dusk. Madame Édmonde sat before me, her body rocking with the motions of the train. Her face was marked with that stupefied expression I had come to know so well: the look of a fish that has just been taken out of the sea, no longer flopping about but simply wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if it cannot quite grasp the strange turn of events that has befallen it. Only, with the scars on her face, it was a strange, monstrous fish she resembled, a fish from the darkest depths of the ocean.
No one is harder to mesmerise than a mesmerist. It was only near the end of my story that I felt the resistance in Balthazar loosen a fraction, and the possibility of a crossing finally open. The change was almost imperceptible, but there it was: as I recounted my story, looking him directly in the eye all the while, I felt that familiar swelling of desire, that peculiar wanderlust of a soul wishing to escape its prison, which we all feel at one time or another, especially when captivated by the charms of a storyteller.
Now, here she was, no longer me but rather inhabited by that young man’s wonderstruck spirit. Édmonde’s mouth opened and closed slowly. I leaned forward to try to catch what, if anything, she was saying. After a moment, I heard it. It was unmistakeable. ‘Behold!’ she whispered, ‘Behold! Behold! . . .’
{103}
Hippolyte Balthazar
Born 1876
First crossing 1900
Second crossing 1917
Died 1917
‘HE TOLD ME he loved me and wanted to marry me.’
Her words, hoarse as they were, seemed almost miraculous. They were the first words she had spoken in almost three weeks. We were twenty-three minutes into our first session. It had taken her all that time to answer the question I’d asked at the beginning of the session: What seems to be the matter? I’d been waiting patiently for her reply since. She looked down at her hands, which were fretting on her lap. Two tears hurried down her cheeks and softly plopped on the lap of her woollen skirt. In every other respect she was perfectly calm.
She cleared her throat. ‘He was one of the most mutilated men I’ve seen,’ she continued in a clearer voice. ‘A frightful mess.’ Another pause. ‘He had the most horrific burns and blisters all over his body. He was clearly not going to survive. The doctors and other nurses had left him for dead.’ The words were starting to flow now. ‘Sometimes, when a patient is a lost cause, there’s nothing else to do but administer painkillers and concentrate on the men who still have a chance of making it. But I took it upon myself to care for him all the same. He’d been in the ward for two days, on a lot of morphine, but in agonies. And, despite all that, whenever I was with him, dressing his wounds, he talked. The skin of his lips had been shredded and scorched in the mortar attack, but somehow despite the pain he managed to speak in a whisper. I had to put my ear close to his mouth to make out his words. He just needed to tell someone, anyone, what had happened to him. Not just how he was wounded, but who he was, where he came from. He was Australian, just a boy, really. He must have lied about his age when he volunteered. I couldn’t understand why anyone on the other side of the world would volunteer for such a hell as this. I even remember the name of the place he was from: Ballarat. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I try to imagine what kind of place Ballarat could be. I imagine it to be flat and bright and very quiet, with great trees swaying in the breeze.’
‘You speak English?’
‘I speak four languages. My father was a diplomat.’
I looked down at my notes. Madeleine Pernety, I read. Volunteer nurse since May 1916. Born 1898, Saigon, Indochina. Father French, colonial official, deceased; mother Indochinese, deceased. Symptoms of shellshock and neuralgia. Admitted 10 February 1917. ‘What did you say, when he declared his love to you?’
‘I said, “That’s what they all say, when . . .” And I had to stop myself short. But it was too late. He guessed what I was going to say.’
‘What were you going to say?’
‘I was going to say, When they’re about to die. But he finished the sentence for me anyway.’
She was reclining on the couch in front of me, but she wasn’t really here at all. She was back by the soldier’s bed, reliving the moment. Her recollection of an incident that had occurred weeks earlier was, at this moment, more real to her than the fact of her lying on a leather couch in a psychologist’s consulting room in the Villejuif military asylum in the suburbs of Paris.
‘Then what happened?’
‘I left him to attend to a
nother patient who’d begun making a lot of noise in the meantime.’ Another long pause. I said nothing. ‘Then we heard the whistles of the first mortars and all of a sudden everything was on fire. The casualty ward was in a converted barn, you see. I dived into a corner and curled up into a ball, thinking I was about to die myself. By the time it was all over there was barely a ward left. The barn was in ruins. But I came out unscathed. Not a scratch.’ She sat up and turned to look at me. ‘Not a scratch, doctor. I had some ringing in my ears that lasted a few hours, and that’s it. The Australian died, as did the others – twelve soldiers, two nurses and a surgeon. I was the only survivor. And then it was all over.’
‘And you had your first seizure that night.’
‘Yes.’
I’d treated scores of men for shellshock since the start of the war, perhaps more than a hundred, but Madeleine Pernety was the first woman to have walked through my door. Women weren’t supposed to suffer from shellshock, yet Madeleine exhibited all the classic signs: catatonia, insomnia, chronic nausea. And seizures – trembling that lasted a quarter-hour or more, trembling that became so violent she would have to be restrained.
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘he’s not the first soldier to have died on your watch. What was it about this particular soldier that you’re having such a hard time forgetting?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it that he told you he loved you?’
‘No. That happens all the time.’ Her hands began fretting again.
‘How often?’
‘I suppose men have told me they love me about twenty or thirty times.’
‘What about you, Mademoiselle Pernety, have you ever told a man you love him?’
‘Just once.’ Another long pause. I clocked it: four minutes. ‘We were engaged to be married. Then, when the war started, he was called up. He died in April 1915. At Ypres.’
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