Night Calypso

by Lawrence Scott

  ‘This boy need to be in school. Take him into the school with you.’

  ‘Not today, Beatrice, not today. Look Jonah is here.’

  The put-putting pirogue came around the point from Sanda’s Bay. Vincent was on the jetty collecting the rope. ‘No whales today?’ Vincent shouted his absurd question.

  Jonah laughed. It was the ritual greeting. ‘I keeping a lookout, Doc.’

  ‘Don’t get swallowed up.’

  As they pulled off from the jetty, Vincent looked back at the house. The morning sunlight was now catching the faded red roof. The salt in the sea blast had rusted the nails and hinges in the doors and windows. The spouting was perforated where the rust had disintegrated altogether. Vincent often wondered what was holding the place together. How would it withstand its newcomer?

  Theo appeared at the window in the gable of the house. It was odd to have someone looking out at him. He waved, but there was no response from the boy. He just stared. Vincent turned to face the open bay. He hoped that the boy would be safe.

  The Convent

  ‘Are you all right, Sister? I heard a noise. You weren’t at Matins.’ Sister Marie-Jeanne put her head around the door of Sister Thérèse’s cell.

  ‘The window is shattered! There’s glass everywhere!’

  ‘Yes, for about ten minutes, just before Matins, there was a sudden squall off the gulf. You know how they rip up the coast. I was awakened and closed my windows in time. It’s died down now.’

  ‘I was in a deep sleep.’

  ‘Mon Dieu! You’re bleeding. Your face.’

  ‘Am I?’ Sister Thérèse put her hands to her face. Her fingertips were pierced with splinters. ‘I feel quite faint.’

  She then realised that she was standing on broken glass, sharp shards around her feet. In the dawn light, at the window, she saw her hands were cut. She could feel the glass dust encrusted on her palms as she pressed against the sill. The two glass windows must have become unhooked by the wind, then banged shut and shattered.

  ‘My hands.’ She held them up for the other nun to see.

  She leant out of the window to secure the shutters once more. There were daggers of glass sticking out of the window frame. She saw that her hands were bleeding. There was blood on her white cotton nightgown, on the sleeves, and down her front. It was only as she began looking for something to stop the bleeding on her hands, that she felt the extent of the broken glass. Glass dust was all over her bed and the floor of her cell. She could feel the soles of her feet pressing on splinters.

  ‘The windows must’ve crashed repeatedly. Why didn’t I wake? The force must have thrown the glass into the cell, scattering itself everywhere. I must’ve fallen into a very deep sleep before that. Not to have heard the impact!’

  ‘It’s extraordinary how the glass is everywhere, like shattered crystal. I’ll get a broom.’

  In no time, Sister Marie-Jeanne was back from the end of the corridor where the brooms were kept, sweeping up the glass in the cell.

  Sister Thérèse was at the window looking out. ‘Have you seen…’ Then she broke off.

  ‘What?’ Sister Marie-Jeanne came and stared over Sister Thérèse’s shoulder.

  ‘Nothing. Must’ve been a dream.’

  ‘Come now. Yes, you’ve probably had a bad dream, what with the window shattering. You’re in shock. The squall was very powerful, like one of those small hurricanes we had last year.’

  ‘Can’t you see it?’ Sister Thérèse insisted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Sister Marie-Jeanne was sweeping up the last of the glass and shaking out the sheets from the window. Then she went out of the cell down the corridor to the laundry room.

  As Sister Thérèse stood alone in her cell, the mood of the night came back to her; what was dream, what was real, still indistinct. An insistent voice returned.

  What is your name? The voice of her dream had woken her. And then, falling back to sleep, she was being instructed. Your name is Madeleine Weil. She woke again startled, hearing the harsh voice which came from her dream, but sounding clearly in the cell, awake, like her. She was being interrogated. She could not remember by whom. No, she insisted. ‘I’m Sister Thérèse of the Order of Martha and Mary.’ She answered the voice repeatedly. ‘I am Sister Thérèse from the convent at Embarcadère Corbeaux on the island of El Caracol. Then the questioning was terminated. She listened attentively again. She thought that what she heard was thunder, and she waited for it to sound again.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sister Marie-Jeanne entered the cell without knocking. She did not know what to make of the accident. ‘Let me just finish sweeping up all this glass. And this blood! Where is it coming from? I need to wipe it up.’ She left the cell again to go and fetch a mop, saying, ‘When I return, I’ll get you to the infirmary.’ She tried not to raise her voice as she entered the silent corridor, because of the other sisters at Lectio Divina in their cells.

  Sister Thérèse was in her own world. The night returned to haunt her. She remembered the salt breeze lifting the rough, white cotton curtain at the jalousies. The sound in the wind was, Weil. The sea sucked at the rocks beneath the cliff. The sea too, she thought, said, Weil. A sheet of galvanise banged, dislodged from its nails on the roof of the small cloister below, shouting Weil! Weil! Under the lifted curtain, moonlight lit the pitch pine floor. The glow of the dim nightlight in the corridor, outside her cell, slid under the door. The shadow of the curtains rose and fell. Far away, again, there was that sound like thunder; like the thunder that followed long after she had seen the sheet lightning opening up the sky all along the west coast of Sancta Trinidad, beyond Gasparee, the island of centipedes. The thunder echoed Weil, Weil, Weil, in her still-dreaming ears.

  ‘Sister Thérèse!’ She turned from the open window. Sister Marie-Jeanne’s voice jolted her back to the early morning. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You seemed in another world.’

  ‘Did I? Let me help you.’

  ‘All done for the moment. Come with me to the infirmary and let me make sure that all the glass is off your hands and face. Maybe we’ll find one of Sister Luke’s remedies for shock.’

  In the infirmary, the morning sun lit the glass cabinets and sparkled in the vials of medicine. The sinks and enamel bowls gleamed. The scrubbed floors were smooth beneath Sister Thérèse’s bare feet. She had left bloody footprints on the clean floor. She had not seen her tracks on the corridor.

  ‘Here’s some Arnica. Let it dissolve on your tongue,’ Sister Marie-Jeanne whispered.

  ‘I’ve left blood on the floor.’ Sister Thérèse stood in her bloodied night gown. She felt faint. ‘Papa.’ Then, she fainted.

  The seconds seemed like the whole night before.

  The wind had picked up and was howling in the caves on the insides of the cliff below the convent. Weil! She was standing at the window of her cell, as she used to stand at the window of her bedroom in Provence, looking at the full moon and the orange tree in bloom. The moon was right overhead now, bathing the bay with its white light. As she stared at the open Chac Chac Bay, the rippling tide, phosphorescent beneath the moon, she could not believe what she was seeing. She thought it was a trompe-l’oeil. It lay on the green surface, as slender as a pencil, gunmetal and gleaming. It was quite still, not making a sound. She still could not actually believe that she was seeing what to her eyes was a warship. The small waves broke along the clean lines of the vessel, scalloping the edges with shinning white, watery lace.

  The beam from the lighthouse above Monte de Botella passed over the bow and deck, on which she could see two prominent guns. She stood and stared. What was she looking at? Her heart was in her mouth. Was it actually there? Her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. The warship was a kind of apparition. It had slid into the bay, soundless in the dead of night. Then she realised that the ship was closer to the cliffs than she had first thought. It was tucked into the bay,
hidden.

  She had always been told that the water was many fathoms deep off the rocks. The wind had died down. She thought she could hear singing. It was ever so quiet. Then she lost it with the surf’s percussion. There it was, unmistakable, a man’s voice. She picked out the figure of a sailor in a white uniform, standing in the stern. With repetition, she caught the tune and the words. ‘Ja, ja, die Liebe ist’s allein, die Liebe, die Liebe ist’s allein!’ It was then that the beam from the lighthouse lit up the Swastika on the bow, and on the pennant which flew at the stern beneath the sailor. The tinkling of the rigging, the knock of metal on metal, a jangle in the breeze, accompanied the song.

  Sister Marie-Jeanne was kneeling beside her. She had the smelling salts under her nose. Sister Thérèse revived with the inhalation. ‘Sister, you fainted.’

  ‘My foot, my foot. I’ve cut myself.’

  ‘You cried out for your father.’

  ‘He’s a doctor.’

  ‘I see. Of course.’ Sister Marie-Jeanne examined her foot. There was a large gash near her ankle, now bleeding profusely. No wonder there had been all that blood. She worked fast with bandages. She tore strips of cotton from old sheets, like they used to when they had to staunch the flow of blood with the patients at the hospital.

  ‘This may need stitches. We’ll have to get a message to Doctor Metivier. I’ll have to speak to Mother Superior. Let us bandage it tightly. See whether there’s any glass visible. Use some disinfectant. The doctor can examine it more thoroughly when he comes.’

  ‘It’s more shock than anything.’ Sister Thérèse tried to strengthen herself.

  ‘If you’re sure, Sister.’

  ‘My father. I fear for my father.’

  ‘Your father? Why this morning?’

  ‘There’s going to be a war. I’m sure. They hated me. They’ll hate him.’

  The nun did not want to pursue Sister Thérèse’s fear. She did not fully understand it. She guided her back to her cell.

  Sister Thérèse stood at the window in her bloodied nightgown, with her cropped head and with her scars on her feet and hands. The wind had died down. But, there, still testament to its own reality, was the German destroyer, gunmetal grey and gleaming on the lit sea, its Swastika appearing and disappearing as the wind tore at the pennant in the stern. She turned from the window into her cell. ‘Have you seen the boat, the warship in the bay?’

  ‘What?’ Sister Marie-Jeanne exclaimed.

  ‘Look. It’s German. See the Swastika.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Last night, there was a sailor singing a love song.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s not singing now. If you had been here and stood long enough for the beam from the lighthouse to fall on the bow, or where the pennant flutters in the stern, you would’ve seen the ensign of the Swastika. The sailor has probably changed his watch. The new watch does not sing love songs.’ Sister Thérèse smiled with her explanation.

  ‘Sister? Part of your nightmare?’

  ‘Yes, die Liebe ist’s allein.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Love, it is love alone, c’est l’amour seul.’

  Sister Marie-Jeanne continued tidying the cell.

  Next to the rough wooden bed with the fibre mattress was the prie-dieu with a small wooden crucifix on the wall above it. The Jew who had died for his people. Sister Thérèse saw it like that now. There was a bare table with two books: The Imitation of Christ and The Lives of the Saints. She had hung her habit over the chair at the table. Her spare one hung from a nail behind the door.

  She surveyed her small private world from where she was standing as Sister Marie-Jeanne restored order. This was all that there was. There was not even a mirror. But she used to steal a look of herself in the glass of the window, and even once in the flat surface of the water in the bucket when it was her turn to do corridor duty, sweeping and mopping. ‘Sister Thérèse Weil! Where are you, my girl, with your head in a bucket? My child!’ Mother Superior seemed to be there whenever she was performing some transgression.

  ‘You have a rest now, and I’ll go and inform Mother Superior of your accident before she leaves for Saint Damian’s.’ Sister Marie-Jeanne closed the door quietly behind her.

  When she had arrived from France, a year ago, Sister Thérèse had come straight from the Porta España harbour to Saint Damian’s, on El Caracol, in Jonah’s pirogue. When she woke in the night she often went back to her departure from France and her father, then to her arrival in the Antilles. It shocked her at these moments, what she had done. She was sick for home and her Papa.

  Before leaving France for the mission she had been made aware, by her father, of what was going on in Germany. From this distance, she ran over in her mind the escalating danger that he had described in his letters since Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Over the last five years, he had kept her in touch with what he saw as having a long history in Europe over the centuries. ‘Anti-Semitism,’ he had said, ‘is deeply ingrained in European Christian culture.’ He explained it to her carefully. It was a wonder that he had married a Christian, and a Catholic at that, who prayed during their Good Friday services for heathens and Jews to be converted.

  In the novitiate, at Tulle, she remembered the other novices and her novice mistress playing down the significance of the anti-Jewish laws in Germany. She was more than once cautioned about the contents of her father’s letters, censored by the novice mistress. ‘You must remember, Sister, that we are taught to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’

  Her father’s visits alarmed her. His stories of how Adolf Hitler was building the German army frightened her, no matter what the novice mistress said about Caesar. There was the movement of the German army into the Rhineland, Adolf Hitler’s treaty with Mussolini and the fascists in Italy. And, the year that she had left for the mission, Adolf Hitler’s withdrawal from the Treaty of Versailles. A good history student, she could work out the significance of that event. Her father’s letters filled the gaps made by the absence of newspapers in the cloister. Mother Superior and the novice mistress were the only links with that kind of information. She depended on their transmission, however censored it was. When her father came to visit she found herself torn. ‘But Papa!’

  ‘What do you expect?’

  Then she thought that it was part of her father’s anti-Catholic feeling that he had at first not wanted her to join the convent, and after she had, had wanted her to leave.

  Sister Marie-Jeanne had been dispatched by Mother Superior to send a message via the nuns’ boatman to Jonah to bring Doctor Metivier to the convent. Sister Thérèse was to be examined by Dr Metivier in the infirmary. She waited there for his arrival. She sat in her bandages, wounds on her face, hands and feet. The infirmarian, Sister Luke, was there to witness the examination.

  Vincent received the news with interest, he had not been called to the convent before. He had hardly begun his duties at Saint Damian’s when Jonah found him in the pharmacy. ‘They want you in the convent, Doc.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Message from Mother Superior!’

  ‘Well, it must be now.’

  On the way over to Embarcadère Corbeaux, they saw the German training ship leave the bay. Their pirogue rocked in the wake. These events distracted Vincent from the apprehensions he continued to have about Theo, since leaving him with Beatrice. From this distance, he thought he saw the figure of the boy at the end of the jetty in front of his house. But then, he could not be sure.

  ‘Good morning, Sisters. You’ve been to the wars, Sister Thérèse?’ Vincent Metivier smiled as he entered the infirmary and found the two nuns. ‘Now where are all these cuts and abrasions? Can I have some warm water? Lint, clean bandages, cotton wool and disinfectant.’

  The infirmarian put the kettle on the small kerosene stove. She began tearing an old sheet into strips. ‘We’re very short on lint and cotton wool, Doctor.’

  ‘What you can s
pare.’ Vincent held Sister Thérèse’s face, turning it sideways, so that he could have a better look at her cuts. ‘There are still little splinters of glass. I’m going to swab the small cuts on your face. Anything in those dark eyes of yours?’ He smiled. ‘Let’s get that glass dust out. What on earth happened?’

  ‘The window shattered in my cell.’

  ‘Must’ve been an almighty crash.’

  ‘Yes, the squall. I was in a deep sleep.’

  ‘The sleep of someone with a quiet mind.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I mean, yes. I usually sleep well.’

  ‘But, not last night?’

  ‘No, yes. Yes and no.’

  Sister Luke held the enamel basin under Sister Thérèse’s chin as Vincent soaked some cotton wool in the warm water, clouded with Dettol. He worked the splinters of glass out of the cuts and abrasions on her forehead and cheeks. ‘Can you remove your veil?’ Sister Thérèse looked at the infirmarian, who nodded her approval. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask. But you may have been cut on the head which would be dangerous. I need to check. Any pain there?’

  The infirmarian helped to unpin her veil and remove the tight skull cap to reveal her cropped head of black bristle.

  Vincent examined the skull expertly with his fingers. ‘That seems fine. Nothing to worry about there. Thanks. Now, if you could roll up your sleeves, so that I can have a good look at your arms. Let me have your hands.’ He held her palms in his. ‘Swab.’

  Sister Luke held the basin, while Vincent worked on the cuts on the arms and wrists. ‘This is a nasty one. You must’ve put your hand on a sharp splinter. Painful. You’re not aspiring to the Stigmata are your Sister?’

  The infirmarian coughed disapprovingly at Vincent’s sarcastic teasing. Sister Thérèse looked up and smiled. She knew what he was like in the hospital, teasing and always on the brink of impropriety; like her Papa, when she had witnessed him with his patients. It was his bedside manner.