Human Traces (22 page)

and there was a sense in which he might breathe more easily without him. Jacques, to his shame, found himself irritated by the way Thomas had managed to qualify before him. The reason was simple enough: Thomas had gone young to Cambridge University while he himself was still struggling to acquire a belated baccalaureat through the lycee in Rennes; then he had chosen to prolong his student days by acquiring clinical experience as an intern. His years on the wards of the Salpetriere weighed as heavily in the scale as Thomas's in the English asylum; his access to Charcot and the school of neurology was worth infinitely more than Thomas's course in despair from Faverill and McLeish; yet still he felt he must pass the time when Thomas was away in profitable study if he was to catch up and begin their true partnership as equals. He enjoyed Thomas's company as much as ever. He had only to begin to phrase a thought for Thomas to have anticipated its completion not in a way that deflated him, but with a sympathy that inspired him to move on; yet when he was with Sonia and Thomas at the same time, he sometimes felt uneasy. He did not wish to exclude Sonia from their talk, but resented Thomas for distracting his attention from his wife; at other times, he wished Sonia had not been there because he loved her so much that he found his eyes and his thoughts always drawn first to her face; and what now was left to prove by gazing at her? Occasionally, he suspected that the brother and sister enjoyed a subtle intimacy, something historic, which for all his superior closeness intellectually to one and sensually to the other he could never share. He loved them both, but it became clear to him that he had not thought through all the implications of the 'folie a trois'. He thanked God for the Salpetriere. Their tactical decision to study and work apart until they felt ready to unite had been vindicated by the good fortune of his being present in a hospital making history. For all the renown brought to it by Charcot, the Salpetriere was still viewed by many students as eccentrically placed, away from the main buildings of the Ecole de Medecine, and dealing only with chronic incurables from whom nothing could be learned. Most students completed the Ecole de Medecine course in four or five years and barely set foot in a ward; when they rushed back to Bergerac or Bourges they sometimes found their first client was also their first patient. Jacques, on the other hand, felt drenched in clinical experience, as he had felt saturated in his years of anatomy by the effluent of the dead. His manner of examination was based on that of Charcot: rigorous optical scrutiny and minimal touch. He knew the human frame so well already that every tremor, every tic and follicle was a clue to his eye; his waking gaze was for ever filled with skin, and his mind with rapid speculation as to what lay beneath. When, on a chilly October evening, he went to be examined on his thesis, he found it difficult for a moment to focus his mind on physiology in the abstract, with no swollen joints or mottled dermis to inspect. He climbed the familiar external stone steps of the grey building that housed the amphitheatre, and then the internal stairs to the numbered room. Of the five examiners waiting inside, two, Pierre Marie and Georges Gilles de la Tourette, were known to him. A copy of his thesis on gout and rheumatism of the joints, printed at appalling expense by Ecole de Medicine printers, lay before them on a long oak table. The lit gas lamps gave the room an ecclesiastical glow. Jacques licked his lips and thought of Abbe Henri. His mind was for a moment filled with a view of the wind-whipped larch above the beach at home and the calls of the seabirds over the heaving waves. He thought of his mother. "You have completed four years as an intern, Monsieur?" said the chairman of the examiners, a grey-bearded professor from the Ecole de Medicine, unknown to Jacques. "Yes, Professor." "And I see that you completed the final four medical examinations in the space of the last eighteen months." "That is correct." "And you are now twenty-seven years old? So it has taken you, I think, nine years to reach this point. After a somewhat... unconventional beginning. Do you regret that you have protracted your studies by working as in intern here?" "On the contrary, the clinical experience has been invaluable. And to have studied here at such a time, with Professor Charcot, has been a privilege." "I understand you have taught some first-year students. Has that been satisfactory?" "I believe so. My motives for undertaking the work were not entirely selfless." The chairman smiled. "I think we all understand why interns have to teach a little. Especially as you are a married man, I believe?" "Recently, Professor, yes. My wife is English." "And do you speak English fluently?" "I do. I am also learning German." "Commendable. I understand that you have undertaken some private consultations under the guidance of Dr. Babinski." "Yes, though of course I have not been able to charge, so they have been merely educative." "Indeed, Monsieur. But soon. Now to your thesis. "The chairman picked up the printed papers from the table. "Most student theses are a formality or worse. They are copied from some more or less reputable textbook and are no more than a rite of passage before the wretched youth hurries back to his home town. You, sir, as befits an intern, have presented us with a serious piece of work." There was silence in the examining room. Jacques, who had until that point felt nothing but a desire to behave in a correct, professional way, now felt the squeeze of panic in his gut. Two of the other examiners cleared their throats and moved their chairs closer to the table. They began to question him on the causes of gout. "You have read Charcot on the subject?" "Indeed, Professor." "You also make considerable play of an English physician called... Let me see, Garrod. Though I am not sure if he is translated." "I read him in English." The examiner raised an eyebrow in what looked like scepticism, and Jacques rushed to justify himself. "Less than ten years ago he wrote a paper suggesting the precipitation of sodium urate in or near the joint is the principal cause. We have not yet found a way of verifying the thesis. No test yet appears sensitive enough. In this respect, I suppose one might call it a bridesmaid illness, like Parkinson's or hysteria." All this information was already in the thesis, he suddenly remembered; but the examiners smiled a little and he gave himself room to hope that they would pardon his repetition. They asked him to differentiate in detail between gout and rheumatoid arthritis and questioned whether there was any real distinction. He had been so involved in hysteria that it was a long time since he had thought clearly about his thesis; he began to talk more rapidly than he intended: he could hear the Breton accent of his childhood hammering the words 'hyperextension deformity of the inter phalangeal joints of the fingers'. He saw Babinski smile. He felt a thread of sweat on his spine. He was going to fail. After nine years, he was going to fail at the last. "You have entertained us with your thesis, Monsieur," said the chairman eventually. "Your way of speaking has if you will permit me to say so something of the autodidact. The way that you pronounce certain medical terms and the passionate desire to persuade..." "Forgive me. I do not come from Paris. I speak like that because ' "No, no." The chairman waved his hand. "I did not mean to criticise. Your written work shows no such traces. This, my dear sir," he said, picking up the thesis in his hand and shaking it towards Jacques's face, 'is a piece of utterly first-rate scholarship, one of the most interesting works on this subject that I have ever read. You may now stand up because the committee wishes to shake you by the hand." Jacques made an effort to close his mouth as he pushed himself up out of the hard chair and moved down the line of doctors with his hand extended. "My fellow-examiners and I congratulate you. Our official verdict is one of "extremely satisfied"." "Thank you, Professor." "Young man, you may now allow yourself to smile." "Thank you," said Jacques again, making his way to the door of the interview room, where he turned and bowed. "Thank you." He groped his way down the staircase, still unsmiling, too dumbfounded to think. Then, once he was out in the open air, he began to run. He ran across the huge open courtyard of the Salpetriere with his coat flapping behind him and the tears flying backwards from his eyes. His heart was filled with Sainte Agnes. "Oh, Olivier," he said out loud, job, my dear brother, I am coming for you. I am coming to get you." Thomas was standing in front of the Riemenschneider altarpiece of The Last Supper in St. Jakob's Church in Rothenburg when he heard his voice. It was fainter than ever, little more than a whisper. It had the sleepy, reassuring tone that was so familiar. "Giving him the bread.. You are watching him... Good boy, good boy..." Although it was still in external space, it was no longer on the other side of the room; it was in his ear, it was almost back inside his skull, and he felt certain that this would be the last time he was ever to hear it; indeed, it whispered to him: "Adieu, Thomas, goodbye, God be with you, goodbye." So intent was he to catch its dying words that he did not hear a real voice, that of Nadine Valade, his sixteen-year-old charge, who was calling up to him. He turned from the Altar of the Holy Blood, and saw a figure at the top of the stairs to the gallery. It was a girl of about Nadine's age, but, unlike Nadine, quick and slender, wrapped in a long coat with a high fur collar that hid all of her face except for her dark, glowing eyes, that looked at him for a moment. Thomas felt himself pierced by them. The voice was gone. He turned back towards the altarpiece, in the hope of recapturing it. There was no sound; and when he looked back to the stairs, the girl too had vanished. He felt weak. Something seemed to have been taken from him, some vital force. This was what Jesus must have sensed, when the woman with an issue of blood touched his garment, unseen, in the crowd. He gazed back at Riemenschneider's carving. Christ, with a pitying expression, held out the piece of bread to Judas, thus marking him as the one who would betray him. Thomas tried to identify the other apostles, with their curly wooden beards and long, carved hair. John, 'he whom Jesus loved', was presumably closest to him, and his brother James, perhaps, on the bench alongside. The floorboards of the upstairs room were cut in section to allow a view into the three-dimensional carving. Was that Peter, with the bulging eyes and the clutched wineglass? In the panel on the left, Christ rode a tiny donkey into Jerusalem; on the right, with mountains in the background, he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Who were these primitive Galileans in their stiflf robes? What had they to do with a church in Germany almost two thousand years later and with himself, living in the newest second of the present? They had doubtless imagined themselves to be the final word in humanity, as, at the moment they sat down to their supper, they were: like him, they rode the front edge of time into the darkness of the future. What he knew, and they could not have known, was that their species would change and that he, a modern man, would have developed in such a way that he was not human in quite the same way as they had been. Looking at them, he saw beings in transition. One of them was endowed with a valued gift, which the others revered; but as he gazed at the muddled passions of the work of art, it seemed suddenly clear to Thomas what Christ's gift was. It was not that he was more developed or refined than the fishermen who were his Apostles; it was that he was less so. He alone possessed something their ancestors had lost: the power to hear voices and thus to commune with the unseen. He looked again. What was so pathetic in the faces of Christ and of all the carved figures was their sense of absence. God was not there. Christ's eyes raked across the timber sky above Gethsemane, but he did not see Him. None of them had seen their god, and only one had heard him. 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.