A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  As for the rest of the day and the outcome of the Battle of Wagram, Marcel knew nothing for two weeks, as an Austrian blade had removed the left side of his face and left him on his knees, clutching at his still-intact teeth and jaw with bloody hands.

  That night the stretcher-bearers got him to a dressing station where he lay, weak with shock and loss of blood. It was several days before he was in a proper military hospital, where it was found that his wound, though serious, was not infected and a surgeon asked if he would like to have his face repaired so that it as nearly as possible resembled what it had been before. The alternative, he said, was for him simply to clean and stitch what was left so that Marcel would look like one of those noseless beggars by the Paris roadside. Marcel told him to do whatever he thought best.

  Three months later he was honourably discharged from the army and returned to the Lagarde family home.

  * * *

  He had written ahead to warn them of his wounds and to give them time to prepare a feast for the return of the Prodigal.

  That evening, the family gathered in the parlour and Marcel began to tell them what had happened since he left the village more than two years before. It was difficult for him to speak because a part of his tongue had been sliced off, but he wanted them to know what it was like to march all night and, when you arrived at some foreign field half dead with exhaustion, to be asked to fight – to be expected to be at your most vital and alert, as a matter of life and death, to run, kill and pick up your dead. He wanted them to understand what he felt for the men he had been with in the chaos of battle in Austria and in the tedium of barracks in the damp foothills of the Vosges.

  However, his father interrupted him to talk about the new mayor, a builder by trade, and to tell him of the money he had himself made by selling a parcel of land to a man from Cahors. Madame Lagarde said nothing, but stared at her son with a baffled expression.

  Marcel tried once more to interest them in what he had done. ‘The emperor himself gave us our orders on the third day,’ he said. ‘I saw him up close. He’s quite short, not much bigger than old Mole. But he has a terrible glitter in his eyes. The generals worship him, but they’re afraid of him as well. Marshal Bernadotte was relieved of his command in the middle of the battle.’

  ‘We should tell Clémence that you’re back,’ said Madame Lagarde. ‘I’m too tired to stay up talking now.’

  ‘I’ll send a message with the coach to Uzerche tomorrow,’ said Monsieur Lagarde. ‘What are you going to do now you’re back, Marcel?’

  ‘I’m going to train as a pharmacist.’

  ‘And who’s going to pay for your training?’

  ‘I have some pay from the army.’

  ‘And when that’s run out?’

  Marcel lost patience. ‘Then I’ll become an actor at the Comédie-Française. Or if that doesn’t make me enough then I’ll exhibit myself in a travelling show.’

  What in fact he did was to spend many hours with Jeanne. He was not recovered enough to find work, so after a morning walk would settle himself in the parlour to read. When Jeanne had finished cleaning the house, she came and sat with him to do her sewing in the light of the broad window that overlooked the road.

  ‘What are you reading?’ she said to him one day.

  ‘The Bible,’ said Marcel. ‘I expect you studied it at your orphanage.’

  ‘We didn’t study anything. We worked and prayed, that’s all there was time for.’

  ‘There was a fellow I met in the army who told me some stories from it,’ said Marcel, ‘so I thought I’d read it.’

  Even the most religious Catholic families in the Limousin were unfamiliar with the book, taking their guidance from the sermons of priests and the example of the saints. Marcel was reading it for the first time, and with an astonishment he felt compelled to share with the nearest person, who happened to be Jeanne.

  He read it as an adventure, his wonder increasing with every page. The brother’s murder in the field, the son sacrificed by the loving father’s obedience to a disembodied voice, the child floating in a basket among bulrushes, the sea rolled up and divided into towering walls of salt water, the old man gazing over into the land he would not live to enter … Above all, the cruel, unforgiving god and the inexhaustibly valiant men who struggled for life in the barbaric world this deity had made.

  He took to reading it out loud, while Jeanne listened with a puckered mouth and a suspicious eye. Who were these Israelites who thought themselves so chosen and so great? Since she believed in a supernatural spirit ever present and invisible, she was not much impressed by the burning bush and the manna from heaven; Israelite miracles seemed to her garish and false. She had in any case no clear sense of other countries or peoples. Even France was vague to her beyond the borders of the Limousin, and she suspected that the idea of ‘France’ had been invented by Parisians so they could grow fat on the riches of real places – Brittany, for instance, or the Languedoc.

  Marcel tried to explain the whereabouts of the Holy Land. He pointed to it on a globe in his father’s room, but then saw that Jeanne had no idea what this turning tin sphere was meant to represent. As he read aloud the story of the fiery furnace where the flames left the three men untouched, he found his throat thicken with awe. But when he looked across to the window at which Jeanne was sewing he saw that these extraordinary events meant nothing to her – because they did not relate to anything she had herself experienced.

  Yet as the days went on, there came a slow alteration in Jeanne’s attitude: she started to look forward to the readings, even while they appalled her. The stories of the Judges were the first to open a crack in the shell of her resistance. Samson she regarded as a fool who deserved, for his vanity and lust, to die in the dust of the temple he pulled down on his head. But when Jephthah prayed to his cruel god for help before his battle against the Philistines, there was something in his anxiety that she understood – especially when he tried to make his request more acceptable to God by promising to sacrifice, in the event of victory, the first living thing he saw on his return to camp. Jeanne had almost forgotten the vow when they came to the point in the story where Jephthah, returning victorious after the long day, was greeted by – of all creatures – his only child, his daughter running out to embrace him.

  ‘Is this God of Israel true?’ she asked one day.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s not the real God, is he? He’s not our God.’

  ‘I think he’s meant to be a version of Him,’ said Marcel. ‘But before He had a son.’

  ‘Our Saviour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No one truly understands. We don’t really know how our minds work or why we are alive. That’s why people have faith.’

  ‘I know how my mind works,’ said Jeanne.

  ‘Not really. Not even the philosophers know. I have seen a man’s brain on the battlefield and it looked just like something in the butcher’s shop in Treignac.’

  Jeanne told him to stop talking nonsense.

  Marcel smiled. ‘One day there may be someone who understands everything, every little bit of how our minds work, not just like a philosopher but like a scientist.’

  ‘What on earth would be the point of that?’ said Jeanne. ‘It wouldn’t alter anything.’

  They seldom had such exchanges. Usually when Jeanne looked up from her sewing to Marcel’s face, she thought only: this is not Marcel, this is someone else. The left side of his face was covered with skin that the surgeon had taken from his back in an operation he had learned on a visit to India. It looked to Jeanne as though the surgeon had run out of human skin and grafted on a section of pig near the forehead, where the bristle grew unnaturally thick. The graft, however, had taken well on the cheek and neck; it was Marcel’s back, where it came from, that was slow to heal and needed daily dressing. Jeanne was the only person willing to perform this task, which she did with Marcel lying face
down in his bed. When she had cleaned the area, powdered it and covered it with a fresh dressing, she would rub her hand briefly in the curls at the back of his neck, as she had never dared do when he was a child. She would not look at his face when he rolled over, though, because to her he was not the same person.

  Marcel began to grow stronger; his spirits lifted when he looked across at the old servant and saw how she was being changed, a little, by what she heard him read. The kings of Israel seemed hateful to her, and she longed for their downfall with a peasant spite that made him smile. She never liked David, and it was no surprise to her when he began to cast a lustful eye on Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, as she bathed naked. She exulted when David arranged for Uriah to be killed by placing him in the front rank in battle, not for dislike of Uriah but because it confirmed her low opinion of David. She was not concentrating when Marcel read of the subsequent visit of Nathan the Prophet. Nathan told a story about a rich man who had everything he could desire, but then decided what he wanted most was a single ewe lamb that belonged to a poor man. He took it for himself. When King David heard the story he was appalled. Clearly not seeing that it was a parable, but believing it to be a true report, he commanded Nathan to tell him who this man was, so he could punish him most severely.

  Looking up to find Jeanne’s eyes on him, Marcel paused for a moment before he read out Nathan’s terrible answer: ‘Thou art the man.’

  Jeanne’s mouth fell open to show her brown teeth. Marcel watched the dawn of understanding start to break across her face, then cloud, then lighten again. ‘He means … the lamb … the wife …’ Marcel said nothing, but nodded as she pieced together the meaning of what she had heard. It was the first time he had ever seen Jeanne at a loss for words. No high-sounding proverb or low country saying could tidy her thoughts away for her.

  It pleased Marcel to see that even someone as resistant as Jeanne could be touched by the words of a book; it was a relief to him, since he had begun to wonder if it was he alone who was susceptible. Only the day before, in the quiet of his own room, he had read of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan in the Mountains of Gilboa, then David’s lament for them. It had for the first time made real to him the battlefield and the men he had himself seen die. ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon your high places: how are the mighty fallen!’ he read, and the large book began to shake in his hands. He saw in his memory – clearly for the first time – the escarpment of Wagram, covered with the bodies of men he knew. ‘How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, you were slain in your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan … How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!’

  Sitting at the desk in his cold bedroom, Marcel put down the book so he could hold his head in his hands. Beneath his palms he felt the borrowed skin of his face, though only his right eye could shed tears.

  The passing years did nothing to diminish Jeanne’s reputation for ignorance. If anything, her fame became more widespread. Schoolboys on their way home hoped to see her working in the front garden so they could call out, ‘What’s the capital of France, Jeanne?’ A red-headed lout once shouted, ‘What’s the king’s name?’ The gang hooted when she stood up from her task and said, ‘King Louis. I know that, you little guttersnipe.’

  This was almost ten years after Monsieur Lagarde’s stroke. He survived for a further five, the last three of them entirely in his room with his unread books of philosophy, nursed by Jeanne.

  After her husband’s death at the good age of seventy-seven, Madame Lagarde, who was ten years younger, seemed to wake and stir. With some money he had left her, she bought new dresses from the draper in Uzerche during a stay with Clémence and her two children. She returned home with a trunk full of purchases, moved back into the marital bedroom and set about redecorating the house with the help of young Faucher, old Faucher’s son. Jeanne watched suspiciously as rusty shutters were mended and roof tiles replaced. Madame Lagarde took all her meals in the parlour, sold her husband’s books and declared that her life would begin again. Only a few months later, however, she disappeared. Jeanne took the coach to Ussel, where Marcel was working as a pharmacist, to tell him the news. Marcel returned with her and organised a search party among the villagers. At the end of the second day, they found Madame Lagarde’s drowned body in the river, one of her dresses – a complicated affair with lace petticoats – having become tangled in the roots of the poplar trees she had so often stared at from her upstairs window.

  Although there were murmurings in the village about Madame Lagarde’s strangeness and her melancholy moods, no one actually believed that she had drowned herself on purpose. There were no stones in her pockets, no sign that her death was anything other than a grim accident, such as occasionally might befall a grieving and distracted soul.

  Jeanne brooded on the death of her mistress. Although she believed the words of the priest who exonerated Madame Lagarde from all sin as he buried her in the hallowed ground of the village cemetery, Jeanne felt in some small way tainted by association. This unease hung over all the last period of her life, which began when Marcel moved back into his parents’ house, bringing his wife Hélène and their three small children. Jeanne, who had been living in Clémence’s old bedroom upstairs, returned to her cold place on the ground floor. It pleased her well enough to have a new generation of children to look after, particularly the baby, whom she bounced up and down on her knee, chanting rhymes that had emerged from the deep countryside to lodge, somehow, in her brain.

  She made no judgement on what she had seen in her life, but each experience affected her idea of what the world was. Clémence and Marcel had shown her that people change and are not the same all their lives. Madame Lagarde taught her that sometimes they cannot change. The orphanage, the dairy and Monsieur Lagarde made her think that all that really counted was good fortune.

  Marcel was kind to her and gave her money for the work she did, though she was too old and worn out to do much. As her eyesight failed and she could no longer sew, she was left to sweep the floor and tend the children when the parents were not at home. She still prayed morning and night, and this communion with her god was the liveliest part of her slow day. At night she pulled the blanket over her head. She had no thoughts then, and she did not dream.

  One day she was too tired to go outside, but stayed by the fire. She liked to watch the shape of the flame in the logs. All her life she had been fascinated by the sound of the fire as it spat and licked at the wood, carving new shapes with the sharp edge of its heat, no two ever the same. Then she fell asleep in the chair and died.

  Between the orphanage and the dairy there were ten years in which Jeanne – a growing girl, then a young woman – laboured where she could find work. She gained her unusual strength by helping the men build dry stone walls in the fields and by harvesting the crops in August. In winter she went to religious houses and asked for shelter in return for scrubbing and sweeping. Sometimes the abbot or the Mother Superior would take pity; at other times the double doors were closed in her face, even when it was snowing on the road. She grew accustomed to sleeping in outhouses, in cellars, on sacks or on bales of straw. When the spring came at last she could again find work on the land.

  She tried not to make friends because she feared to become reliant on another. One winter when she was about twenty-five years old she found work at a monastery – not in the main cloisters, where no woman was allowed, but in the laundry. The others working there were women like herself, and a few who were soft in the head. Their conversation was coarse and Jeanne learned from it that human beings could behave in the same way as the animals in the field. The thought repelled her, but the wash house was warm from the steam of the water in the large wooden vats where they pounded the linen.

  Because of her strength, Jeanne was at first made to carry the heavy cauldrons, which she and another woman did by inserting a length of wood beneath the iron handle and hoisting it between them on their sho
ulders like a yoke. Then she would refill it with buckets they carried in from a well in the yard. A friendly monk, Brother Bernard, would sometimes keep an eye on their progress. One of the girls sang the song ‘Frère Jacques’ whenever he appeared in the yard and one day he obliged them by joining in the last line with his bass voice – ‘Din, dan, don, din, dan, don’ – till Jeanne and her companion were squealing with laughter.

  It was a cold winter and the ground froze hard. It became slippery beneath the wooden clogs of the women as they crossed to the wash house in the morning. There was nothing to distinguish one day from another except the visits of Brother Bernard. Jeanne found herself looking up expectantly each time the laundry door opened. She felt she was competing for his attention with Mathilde, who had now changed the words of the song to ‘Frère Bernard’. He was younger than most of the monks; he had black curly hair and a puzzled, wounded look in his eye, Jeanne thought – like a dog that had been chained up too long. He smiled at the women and encouraged them in their work, but then fixed his eyes on some indefinite point in the distance, as though there was something there that only he could see.

  When they took their break in the middle of the day he came and sat by the well, bringing apples or walnuts from the shelves of the refectory. He told Jeanne and Mathilde stories from the lives of the saints, but he never asked them about their own past.

  One day, on an impulse, fretting at this lack of true exchange between them, Jeanne said, ‘Why did you become a monk, Brother?’

  He did not walk away angrily or rebuke her, as she feared he might, but said mildly, ‘It was my destiny from a young age.’

  Bernard began to visit every day and to stay for a long time talking to the washerwomen. He told them about the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the five thousand and the time Jesus felt some vital strength leave his body in a crowded street and demanded to know who had touched him. A weeping woman knelt down and confessed that she had touched the hem of his garment in order to stem her ‘issue of blood’.