Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Now is the time to do it. To end it.’

  ‘It is the perfect opportunity.’

  I must find my coat and go. I must pretend to be normal. Pretend I do not know about the horse-man. There he is. He is looking at me. He can see my thoughts. Why does the Sovereign let him see them?

  ‘Now then. Kitty, why don’t you sit here on this side, and Daisy you sit next to Kitty and I’ll sit next to Olivier. There we are. Everybody happy. Off we go, Josef!’

  ‘So he’s got himself opposite the fair-haired one. She’s not wearing her glasses, though, is she?’

  ‘He likes her in her glasses. He likes to think of her naked with just the little reading glasses on.’

  ‘He likes to fuck her from behind, like a dog. In his mind. In his imagination!’

  ‘She wouldn’t really let him. Only pigs let him.’

  ‘I brought some cakes, Sonia.’

  ‘Thank you, Kitty. I think Jacques said it’s about an hour. Josef has arranged to change horses at the stables in town.’

  He will take instructions from the ostler. I have seen him before. He is a Bavarian. He wants to kill me before the Monarchy returns. I must keep touching my fingers, keep touching the door of the carriage.

  ‘Daisy, would you like some cake, or shall we wait until we stop? We can have a cup of chocolate while Josef changes the horses.’

  An hour. An hour with the horse-man. What is an hour to me? I have no idea of time. Sometimes time laughs at me. I saw a clock laugh at me once.

  ‘What exactly is this ceremony, Sonia?’

  ‘Well, you know that the track for the cable-car is ready? They are going to try it with an open truck. With just some old railway sleepers on it.’

  ‘When they first talked about this cable-car I somehow pictured it being up in the air, suspended on the wire.’

  ‘No, no, you silly girl! It is just pulled up on rails. The cable is attached to the underneath of the car. It is terribly simple. It is like one of Daniel’s toys. But don’t tell Herr Geissler I said that.’

  ‘And how do we get up to the top?’

  ‘Josef takes us as far as he can up the track, then we change to mules for the steep bit. It takes another hour from there, I think.’

  We are changing horses already. That was not enough time. We are in town, and there are too many people here.

  ‘Do you want to get down and stretch your legs, Olivier?’

  I must stay in the carriage, don’t let the Bavarian see me. My thoughts are being shown. Keep inside. Keep my head low.

  ‘He is too scared to get down.’

  ‘Even though the fair girl’s got down and he wants to watch her.’

  ‘Wants to see her hips in the tight skirt and think . . .’

  ‘Too frightened even to want her.’

  ‘Come on then, Josef. Let’s get moving, shall we? I told my husband we would be there by four. Come on, Kitty.’

  I am not managing well. This man Josef. I fear today is the day he has chosen. I saw his face in the horse’s face, when it whinnied and stamped its hoof on the cobble. It was his devilish features beneath that mane. It was like the face of the old mare . . . God, I remember the old mare in the stable where I lived. Why did I live in the stable? In the name of God, why there? Perhaps I do not remember it right. Or the nuns.

  ‘. . . so bossy, Sonia!’

  ‘Katharina, I can assure you I am not bossy. I have to organise a household full of . . . Eccentrics, shall we say. And none more eccentric than your husband, I might add. Someone has to be in charge.’

  ‘Let us ask Daisy for her impartial judgment. Don’t giggle, Daisy. Tell me, do you think Miss Sonia is bossy or not?’

  ‘Miss Sonia is . . . Miss Sonia is ever so well organised.’

  ‘There you are, Kitty! Look. There is the beginning of our railway line, our own “spur” as the men like to call it leading up into the foothills.’

  ‘Why don’t we take the train, Miss?’

  ‘Because there isn’t one yet. There is only a line.’

  This journey is over too soon. These seen-women with their silly chatter have made it pass quickly. We are stopping too soon. Josef will hand me over now to the Germans. Touch my fingers, touch the door, touch my fingers, touch the door.

  ‘Of course I can ride a mule, Sonia! I am not just a Viennese flibbertigibbet, you know. I was more or less brought up on a farm.’

  ‘Daisy, you take that one, he looks friendly. Olivier, you get on this one, because I know for sure that you were brought up in the countryside with horses and dogs. Josef will lead the way.’

  We are in beech woods and they are very dense. I like beech trees, but the forests are easy to hide in. Higher up there will be larch and pine. And there will be bears and wolves. These stupid people do not understand how dangerous these mountains are. They eat wild boar but do not ask themselves where it comes from. From the beech woods. I am tired of this riding. This stony track. I am so very very tired.

  ‘He is frightened of the lampman.’

  ‘He knows today is the day. There is no time left.’

  ‘He is not worth killing. He will have to kill himself.’

  The forest is getting thicker. I want to be above the tree-line, where the Germans cannot hide, but maybe this mountain is not high enough. The Sovereign must stop showing my thoughts to the man in the hat. I am worn down by the ceaseless, ceaseless voices.

  ‘Getting colder, isn’t it, Daisy? Do you feel it?’

  ‘Yes, Miss. I can see the buildings at the top. Is that Dr Rebière waving?’

  ‘Yes! Come on. Let’s hurry up to the top.’

  ‘My donkey won’t go no faster!’

  ‘Kitty, you go first through this little bit, then it’s round to the right, past the old chapel. You’ll see them waiting.’

  Who is this man talking? He is like my brother, but my brother is . . . Is a child. I am so tired.

  ‘Hello, everyone. You made it. Come and see our wonderful cable track. Thomas is waiting with a bottle of champagne. This way, my love. Come, Olivier. Over here. Isn’t it a wonderful view? The whole of Carinthia, almost. See those mountains? The SchladmingerTauern. And down in the valley over here is Wolfsberg and right up there are the Fischbacher Alps. Thomas!’

  ‘Come and see our wheel. Jacques, bring them over. See this, Queenie? This mighty wheel will pull the car up the sheer side of the mountains. The truck is waiting at the bottom. Look.’

  ‘No! It makes me feel sick.’

  ‘Don’t be silly! Can’t you see how beautifully smooth it is? That’s why we chose this incline, because there was so little grading for them to do. I do hope it’s going to work. I am feeling a little apprehensive, though not as much as Geissler. Kitty, my love, come and look.’

  ‘It is magnificent, I must admit. It would be hard to feel melancholy with such a glorious view.’

  ‘Exactly. And you can see how the builders are progressing with the main house? It should be ready by October. Just in time.’

  ‘Kill yourself. This is a good place.’

  ‘He could throw himself off. But he’s too scared.’

  ‘Olivier, hold the champagne a moment. I want to show Sonia something. Here take it. Thank you. Now look, my love, this is where the cable comes up and this is where the safety cable runs and this is where the platform will be where the passengers will step down.’

  ‘It is wonderful, Jacques.’

  ‘We will lift the poor creatures up. We will raise them above suffering, will we not, Thomas?’

  ‘I do hope so, Jacques. We have worked hard enough to build our promontory – it is the height of our ambition.’

  ‘The peak of enlightenment.’

  ‘Josef, can you fetch the champagne from Olivier? Then Sonia, would you break it on the wheel.’

  He is coming for me, the hat-man is coming for me . . . He is coming.

  ‘Kill yourself. Kill yourself.’

  ‘Just run and throw yourself.�
��

  ‘Too cowardly to do the right thing.’

  He is coming for me, he is coming!

  ‘Run and kill yourself. Just run.’

  I will, I will, I will, I am running, I am running, I am running, I am . . .

  ‘Stop him! Thomas! Stop! Stop!’

  . . . I am running, I am running, I am

  It took them two days to recover Olivier’s body, which lay among the rocks that had been tipped down the sharpest fall, next to the cable-car Incline. Men were lowered on ropes, as they had been when laying the dynamite charges, but Olivier’s body was hard to reach and harder still to raise. Eventually, two workmen managed to secure ropes beneath his armpits and tie a sort of noose round his back; three mules at the summit turned the windlass and began to drag him to the top. Olivier arrived at last, over the lip of the mountain, his clothes shredded by the friction, but otherwise oddly unmarked by his fall. It appeared that his neck and left leg had broken; there was some blood that had clotted and stained the white of his beard around the mouth. His eyes were open but their gaze was empty. Under Hans’s instructions, the body was then taken down by mule to where Thomas waited with Josef’s horse and trap to take it back to the schloss.

  It was the practice that any psychotic patients who died at the clinic should undergo post-mortem, to see what Thomas and Franz Bernthaler could learn, but Thomas presumed Jacques would rather his brother was not subject to this indignity and had the body despatched to the morgue at the city hospital while they made arrangements for the funeral.

  Jacques sat quietly in the drawing room of his and Sonia’s apartment. The shock of the incident, its brutal surprise, at first made it impossible for him to think deeply about it. When at last he could do so, he found that he felt a most peculiar sensation of solitude.

  His father was long dead, his mother he had never known; and though he had ‘lost’ his brother years ago, when he drifted into madness, Olivier had remained his only link to the family of his birth, to that small group of humans that had been his first and irreducible unit of allegiance in the world. Now he was like the last survivor of a platoon. It had a name, a number and a history, but no existence: what had seemed indestructible, his base and point of deepest loyalty, had been dissolved before anyone had made out what it was for; suddenly it was too late, and there was something unsatisfactory about it that left him utterly alone.

  Sonia comforted him, wept with him and watched carefully over him; but, much though he loved her, she was not of his flesh and blood. In Olivier’s skin and veins had been particles of inheritance that they shared with no one else, and that had been the nature of their existence and its challenge: to make of their lives whatever they could, beginning in their narrow Breton world. That challenge now was ended; there was no one left for him to report back to on his progress; and without that narrative, the game, whatever might happen to him in the future, was barely worth the playing, because no one else, however much they loved him, really cared.

  ‘We should have a post-mortem,’ he told Thomas. ‘I remember asking myself once what Olivier’s brain might look like. If he can tell us anything that might help others, then we should certainly look.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I should like to be there. I would like to see this story through to its end.’

  ‘As you wish. I shall send Josef to the hospital to tell them. I will make arrangements for the funeral the day after.’

  Thomas meanwhile looked back at his record of the last conversation he had had with Olivier to see if they could illuminate his sudden leap to death. Were there signs a better doctor would have seen?

  What Olivier appeared from his hasty notes to have said was, roughly:

  – I have no present.

  – Go away!

  – I will watch water.

  – Daughter, no daughter.

  – The Germans want me . . . I know the movements of the French king . . . They have sent their spies for me.

  – The man with the hat is a spy.

  – My skin is black.

  – I think the sky is never green.

  And that seemed to be all. There was an emphasis on colour, on spying and . . . And nothing else at all that Thomas could see. Olivier’s mind had long since been unable to make sense, so surely these ramblings were nothing more than the obiter dicta of a broken mind? Yet Thomas could not quite believe it. He felt there was more to his friend than that, and he felt that he should have found it.

  It was seven in the evening, the appointed time, and the small, bad-tempered servant manhandled the body from its refrigerated bed, banging the head as he did so, labouring beneath the weight before he finally wrestled it into place on the marble slab. Jacques, Thomas and Franz Bernthaler looked on, their faces concealed behind white masks.

  Around the walls of the dissecting room were specimens in glass jars: livers, aortas, larynxes. At the far end was a wooden board on which were hung saws, chisels, knives and other banausic instruments of the trade.

  The prosector was the senior pathologist at the hospital, a man called Holzbauer. He approached the table briskly, rubbing cream he had taken from a tub into his hands. When the corpse had been arranged in the anatomical position and he had checked the identity, he began to examine the surface, dictating notes to his student as he did so. The skin was covered with abrasions from the fall and the ascent. Then it was time for the incision. Although Jacques had seen it countless times before, he found his fingernails deep in his palms as Holzbauer took the large scalpel to each shoulder and cut a ‘V’, meeting at the breastbone; without pausing, he carved straight down to the pubic bone, perhaps three millimetres deep, diverting a fraction as he went past the navel. Working with a smaller scalpel, he began to ease the V-shaped section of skin from the chest wall. He held the first triangular corner of skin taut between forceps, from which it occasionally slipped, and used stroking motions of the knife to separate it from the cutaneous layer. Bits of fat or waste were occasionally deposited with the forceps in a metal mixing bowl near the cadaver’s head. As the section of lifted skin grew larger, he was able to grip it in his hand, dispensing with the forceps; and when he had cut both sides clear he folded the flap up over Olivier’s face, so the hairs of his chest pressed those of his beard. Jacques was glad not to have to look at his brother’s features any more. Poor boy, he thought. He had a desire to embrace him, before he became no more than separate pieces it would be absurd to kiss. He reached out and briefly held the cold thick hand.

  There was a slight smell, not unlike that inside Meissner and Trattnig, the expensive butcher behind the market square in town. With what looked like a pair of secateurs such as Sonia carried in the garden, the prosector cut the sternum and front ribs away, revealing Olivier’s heart and lungs. With a scalpel, he cut delicately through the sac round the heart, reported no blockage in the pulmonary artery, then went down to the tail of his ‘Y’, slicing back the muscle from the abdomen till it fell away on either side, so that all the inner organs from neck to groin were exposed. Jacques felt that he was looking at what he himself was made of, and noticed that the mixing bowl was gradually filling up with waste, with the detritus of his brother.

  The next stage was the most difficult, and reminded him of what Olivier himself, at a time when he was first starting to go mad, had shown him when they went hunting with guns and killed a roe deer. After some ritual marking of his virgin younger brother with blood from the testes, Olivier had taken out the guts entire and thrown them to the dogs.

  Holzbauer glanced towards Jacques as he detached the larynx and oesophagus, then went into the cavity to free the remainder of the chest organs from the spine. He left them in place while he detached the diaphragm and freed the abdominal organs. The contents of the upper body were now held in place only at the pelvis. Holzbauer looked over once more before slicing through this last tie. He stood back for the servant, who mounted a dissecting table over Olivier’s legs, then removed the enti
re bloc of organs en masse and placed them on it.

  His brother was in pieces and Jacques could see through the empty body cavity to the spine. And this was all, this was all, he thought, as he gazed at the innards on the tray: the great delusion of the human being that he might himself be something more than matter.

  The prosector continued with impressive legerdemain to separate the organs. He withdrew from a leather sheath beneath his gown something that looked like a carving knife, which he used in single, deft slices. Only the adrenal glands above the kidneys gave him pause for a moment. Franz Bernthaler went to work on the liver and spleen, while the servant opened the intestines over a stone sink, beneath a running tap.

  Jacques found himself stifling a protest. Surely this invasion of his brother’s privacy was too much. It was a moment before he could name the emotion that gripped him at the sight of the servant rinsing Olivier’s intestines: it was, to his great surprise, embarrassment.

  Since Olivier had eaten nothing on his last day, having hurled his breakfast plate from him, the stench of gastric acid, when Holzbauer opened the stomach, was less than Jacques had known it, though still enough to make his own stomach turn beneath his gown. Franz was busy weighing and slicing the pancreas and the kidneys; he took samples to be examined microscopically and placed them in small glass jars.

  Thomas whispered in Jacques’s ear, ‘Are you all right? Do you want to stay for the brain? You can always look at it later, back at the schloss.’

  It was such a forlorn sight, thought Jacques. Though Holzbauer had been as neat a performer as he had seen, there was blood on the floor beneath them, blood in the gutters of the slab, and small pieces of flesh stuck on the hooks of the scales. Even the chalk that the student had used to write up the measurements on the blackboard was red-tinged, while some of the statistics themselves were pink and smudged on the black background.

  There was no escaping the matter of his brother, the red and stinking material of his being. The hulk of his body now was like a half-built fishing vessel in the boatyards at Vannes: though beautiful, it was desolate, and already spoke of shipwreck.

  The servant poured the organs back into the cavity, where they made undignified slippery noises, as when Herr Trattnig heaved a large order of lights from a tray on to the scale, while the servant packed them irritably with his hands and replaced the chest plate over them. The prosector nodded to the student, who leant over the body and began to sew up the ‘Y’ with thick stitches, like those on a canvas sail.