The Miracle (34 page)

With regret, he considered the child woman he adored in slumber beside him. What he was feeling contradicted all that he felt for her. She, this dear one, was a person of unblemished faith in a fairy story that she fervently believed could restore her to normality and living. He, by necessity, remained an enemy of that faith that was now misleading his people into compliance with inevitable treachery and certain continuous enslavement. To free his people, he must destroy the symbol of faith that might lead to their deception and endless thralldom. By his act of destruction, he would also destroy forever Natale's foolish hope and her love.

But, he saw, it must be done. He owed himself -- and the loss he must endure -- to an even greater love.

Oh, Natale, Natale, when it is over and I have succeeded, try to understand.

But, he knew, she would never understand.

At the same time, it suddenly occurred to him, considering that he had been forced into hiding, that he might never succeed. The police were everywhere, and might continue to be everywhere until the eight days had ended.

How could he blow up the grotto if he did not have the means of bringing the explosives into the domain?

Then, an idea, an inspiration came, a means, something he could do tomorrow. If it worked, he might succeed, and turn away the Virgin Mary forever.

Wednesday, August 17

At ten minutes to nine in the morning, Michelle Demaillot, of the Sanctuaries Press Bureau, was briskly leading the way across the Rosary Esplanade of the domain to the Medical Bureau. Following her were the town's latest arrivals. Dr. Paul Kleinberg, and his dependable nurse, Esther Levinson.

It was Kieinberg's first real view of any portion of Lourdes in the daylight. Despite the sight of so much religious statuary, the number of invahds in wheelchairs and stretchers, and his misgivings about the shrine, he had to admit that the parade ground, or whatever it was supposed to be, offered up an aura of pastoral peace and serenity on this sunny summer's day.

Dr. Kleinberg and his nurse had caught the last Air Inter flight from Paris late yesterday, and when they had left the plane at the Lourdes airport it had already been nightfall. The press lady, with her car, had been waiting. During the short drive to their accommodations, Kleinberg, who had come straight from his Paris office to Orly Airport to this Pyrenees village, had been too exhausted to bother to glance out the car window as they had passed through Lourdes. At the Hotel Astoria, in the Rue de la Grotte, ordinary single rooms had been reserved for them. After telephoning his wife, Ahce, in Neuilly, to tell her and the boys that he had arrived safely and to let her have the number

where he might be reached, he had gone straight to bed and slept without a break for nine hours.

Now, as they walked, Kleinberg noticed how rigid and aloof his nurse was. Knowing her, the orplumed daughter of German parents gassed and cremated in the Nazi holocaust, he knew how uncomfortable she was when confronted by any sort of fanaticism, poHtical or religious. Kleinberg felt no similar discomfort in these surroundings. His parents had moved from Vienna to Paris long before the rise of Hitler, and had become naturalized French citizens. He himself had been born a Frenchman, and despite a persistent degree of muted anti-Semitism among a minority in France, Kleinberg felt that he belonged and was a part of this land. His knowledge of French culture was broad, although his acquaintance with the Catholic shrine at Lourdes was limited. He had read about Bernadette and the apparitions and the grotto from time to time in newspapers and magazines, and also had read with mild interest about the occasional cures attributed to Lourdes.

Besides such casual reading, Kleinberg's only knowledge of the holy town had come from his careful perusal of three books involving Dr. Alexis Carrel—one of the books was about Carrel, two written by him—each going into the great physician's one visit to Lourdes in 1903. Kleinberg had acquired and read the Carrel books after he had been invited to join the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, which was assembling in Paris to review and ascertain the so-called miraculous cure of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Edith Moore, suffering from a sarcoma.

Kleinberg had been unable to assist the committee because of a previously scheduled medical meeting in London, but upon his return to Paris the Lourdes, people had contacted him again. The members of the International Mediced Committee had been favorably disposed toward granting Mrs. Moore's case miraculous status, but had withheld their final approval until they could have the vote of a specialist in sarcoma. Kleinberg was one of the two foremost specialists in France treating malignant growths. The other. Dr. Maurice Duval, whom Kleinberg knew and respected, had been too involved in experimental researches to cooperate. So there was only Kleinberg to bring in as a final consultant, and he had been reluctant to become involved in anything of a religious nature. Yet, learning that Dr. Alexis Carrel had once visited and investigated Lourdes, Kleinberg had given the matter some second thoughts. As a student at the Cochin School of Medicine, attached to the University of Paris, Kleinberg had admired the writings and career of Dr. Carrel. Kleinberg recalled that the scientist had kept

an open mind about Lourdes and spent some time there. Kleinberg reread Dr. Carrel, and verified his student recollections. The great Carrel had, indeed, treated Lourdes seriously.

So Paul Kleinberg had agreed to accept the invitation of the International Committee, and go to Lourdes to review the incredible cure of the woman named Edith Moore.

"Here we are," he heard Mademoiselle Demaillot announce.

Where were they? Kleinberg stopped, and looked about to orient himself. They were on a sidewalk on the opposite side of the Rosary Esplanade. They were at the double doors of the entrance to a building made up of rugged large stone blocks. Above the entry, white lettering on a blue sign, were the words: medical bureau/secretariat.

"Let me take you inside," the press lady was saying. "I'll introduce you to the bureau head. Dr. Berryer, then leave you with him."

Kleinberg and Esther followed Mademoiselle Demaillot inside and found themselves in a spacious anteroom, with two office doors on the right. The press lady gestured off to the second door. "Let me tell Dr. Berryer's secretary you've arrived."

After the press lady had disappeared into the office, Kleinberg and Esther took their bearings. The walls of the anteroom were decorated with what resembled the artifacts of a medical museum. After a quick glance, Esther avoided a closer look at the artifacts, and immediately occupied the comer of a sofa, sitting tight-lipped, eyes on the floor. But Kleinberg was more interested. He began to go around the anteroom, studying the displays.

The large display on the nearest wall was a framed, glass case and bore the name de rudder at the top. Closer inspection of the glass case revealed two copper casts of a man's leg bones, one showing the tibia seriously broken, the other showing it fully healed. Kleinberg read the explanatory legend. Pierre de Rudder, of Jabbeke, Belgium, had fallen from a tree in 1867, and in the fall had broken the tibia in his lower left leg. The bone had a three-centimeter separation or gap at the fracture point, and would not heal. For eight years, de Rudder had been a cripple. Then, after a visit to a rephca of the Lourdes grotto in Belgium, de Rudder had been instantly and miraculously cured, his sundered bone totally put together again. After his death, twenty-three years later, three doctors had performed an autopsy on de Rudder. They had found that the three-centimeter gap had, indeed, closed. 'The broken bone edges fitted closely. The bone preserves a very obvious mark of the fracture, but without any foreshortening." De Rudder had been declared Lourdes' eighth official miracle cure in 1908.

Kleinberg wrinkled his nose, and saw his unconscious reaction

reflected in the glass of the case, and assessed that his reaction was more of surprise than of doubt.

Since their escort had not yet reappeared, Kleinberg continued to wander around the anteroom, studying the framed photographs on the three walls, and the printed histories of most of the officially recognized miraculous cures of invalids who had sought help from the Lourdes shrine. The earhest was dated 1858. The last one framed and hung was a picture of Serge Perrin, who had suffered "recurring organic hemiphlegia, with ocular lesions, due to cerebral circulatory defects." He had been miraculously and fully cured at the age of forty-one in 1970, and his miracle cure officially recognized in 1978. Kleinberg knew there had been more cures since then, but perhaps the Medical Bureau had not yet had time to mount them.

Kleinberg heard his name called, and wheeled around.

The press lady was advancing toward him. "Dr. Kleinberg, it appears that Dr. Berryer will be a little late for your appointment. There is a message, and I contacted him by phone at his meeting, and he promises he will be here in ten or fifteen minutes, and offers his apologies."

"No matter," said Kleinberg.

"Maybe you'd prefer to wait in his private office? I'll show Madame Levinson to the examination and X-ray rooms, where you'll find her after your interview. Then I must leave you both."

"Thank you. Mademoiselle Demaillot."

He allowed her to show him into Dr. Berryer's office, and watched her leave. Once he was alone, he set down his medical bag, and again tried to get his bearings. It surprised him to see how small and Spartan was Dr. Berryer's office. No more than eight feet by eight feet, with a desk and chair in the middle, two chairs for visitors, a cranmied bookcase. All neat, no disarray. Kleinberg noticed a mirror, and planted himself before it to see if he was presentable. He frowned at the brown receding hairline, at the smallish hooked nose made more prominent by the sunken cheeks. The bags under his eyes had been earned, and were all right, and his sharp chin was still one chin at forty-one. He straightened his knit tie, squared his narrow shoulders, and decided that he was as presentable as he would ever be.

He took a chair to await his tardy host, and realized a feeling of unease, which he had not felt outdoors. It was the displays in the anteroom that had thrown him off a trifle, all those miracles, all so unscientific and alien to his nature. He wondered how one like Dr. Alexis Carrel had coped with it.

Dr. Carrel had been severely criticized by fellow scientists for deigning to pay attention to a religious center that claimed miracles and

for having confessed that he might have actually witnessed a miracle himself. Carrel's colleagues in science—persons who had once respected him as a member of the faculty of medicine at Lyons University— turned against him for having given credence to Lourdes by visiting it and by having given serious consideration to the inexplicable cures that were going on there. Carrel's colleagues condemned him as "a credulous pietist."

Dr. Carrel had defended his interest in the so-called miracles in the press: "These extraordinary phenomena are of great biological, as well as religious, interest. I consider, therefore, that any campaign against the miracles of Lourdes is unjustified and opposed to the progress of medical science in one of its most important aspects."

Actually, rereading the controversy so many years later, Kleinberg could see that Carrel had been uncertain about the cures at Lourdes and had incurred the anger of the clerical community just as he had provoked the scientific community. For one thing. Carrel had been unhappy about the Medical Bureau. "There is a rosary on the examining table, but no medical tools." Carrel had been equally unhappy about one of Dr. Berryer's predecessors, Dr. Boissarie, who had published best sellers about his medical study of the cures. "He has written these works as if he were a priest rather than a physician," Carrel had complained. "He has indulged in pious consideration rather than scientific observations. He has shunned rigorous analyses and precise deductions."

But the sudden—miraculous?—cure of a French girl, Nfarie Bailly, swept most of his reservations aside. He had tried to defend what he had witnessed before the scientific community: "At the risk of shocking both believers and non-believers, we shall not discuss the question of belief. Rather, we shall say that it makes little difference whether Bernadette was a case of hysteria, a myth, or a madwoman. . . . The only thing that matters is to look at the facts; they can be investigated scientifically; they exist in a realm quite outside of metaphysical interpretation. . . . Science, of course, must be continually on guard against charlatanism and credulousness. But it is also the duty of science not to reject things simply because they appear extraordinary or because science is powerless to explain them."

This from the man who had become a giant at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for suturing blood vessels, who had experimented in 1935 with an artificial heart designed by Charles Lindbergh.

Sitting there in the stillness of Dr. Berryer's office in the Medical Bureau, Kleinberg closed his eyes. Do not reject things simply because

they appear extraordinary. Dr. Carrel's own words. At once, Kleinberg felt more relaxed, less disturbed about the miracles heralded in the anteroom and by his very presence in the playground of the Virgin Mary and the site where he was to reafl&rm the miraculous cure of a woman named Edith Moore.

Kleinberg heard the office doorknob turn, and came to his feet as a preoccupied, squarish older man barged into the room.

"Dr. Kleinberg?" the man said, offering a handclasp. "I'm Dr. Berryer, and pleased to meet you. Forgive the delay, but bureaucratic matters can often take more of one's time than medicine."

"No need to apologize," said Dr. Kleinberg affably. "I'm delighted to be here."

"Do sit down," said Dr. Berryer, going around his desk and standing over it to review the various messages waiting for him.

Kleinberg sat down again, and waited as the head of the Medical Bureau swept his messages into a comer, and settled into his swivel chair.

"So glad you could make it," said Dr. Berryer, "knowing how busy you must be."