Obedience, page 12
Bernard, unsteady, was helped back up the hill by three of her sisters who supported her under the arms so that she could walk. The soldiers slipped away, as though they had not been there. The rest of the village stayed for a while, talking quietly, and finally made their way home unwillingly, indignant, slowed by the rankling feeling that justice had been cheated. A little later, two nuns appeared back at the deserted wash house to collect the ruined sheets and to clear up the mess. They were still there at dusk scrubbing blood from the stone; stubborn dark stains remained for some years, blotchy and brown. Marie-Hélène’s mother was never thanked for her intervention, nor was the incident ever mentioned to her again by anyone from the convent, but two days later the family found a large ham on their doorstep when they woke.
Marie-Hélène’s story was detailed and convincing; when she was finished she looked away from her teacher for a moment, out through the long windows to the clustered village squatting in the rain beyond.
‘Thank you,’ said Thérèse, the sound of the water falling from the roof making her words musical.
Marie-Hélène nodded. ‘I’m sorry now that I said about it, the first time. I shouldn’t have. It was just… Anyway – I’m sorry.’
‘Well, it’s all cleared up now, for good.’ Thérèse was brisk. ‘It needn’t be mentioned again. We’ve got to the bottom of it and it’s forgotten.’
Marie-Hélène still would not turn back fully into the classroom. ‘Yes, Sister,’ she said meekly.
‘These things are for God,’ said Thérèse.
But when her pupil had gone, pulling the door softly behind her, Thérèse sat for a long time, drawing dense spirals on her wooden desk with the chalk. There was the sound of young children playing close by, and a tractor at a distance, whirring. The rain continued to be loud, resolute. The thrill of the story had already faded. But the sadness of it, the melancholy of satiation, was a surprise and she could not shift it.
Thérèse could not calm herself. At the end of the evening, her prayers would not hold steady, and she did not go to bed. She tried rearranging her small collection of things, as yet little more than a shelf of souvenirs along one wall of her cell. But somehow this unsettled her the more and with the summer light fading, and no permission to have her lamp on, she took instead to walking the short length from window to door, marking out a straight line by following a fracture in the floorboards. It was a long dusk but Thérèse was still pacing when dark finally came.
She opened her door gently and slipped down the corridor. The damp of the day lingered there, making the air thick. She walked slowly, so as not to make a noise, passing in turn each of the identical grey doors pressed into the long wall, brushing past the prayers, sobs and night terrors that punctured the silence. At Bernard’s door it was quiet. She dared not knock, knowing even the tiniest rap would be heard as it echoed into corners far away, so she pushed lightly until there was enough of a gap for her to stand half in and half out of Bernard’s cell, the door frame rigid against her shoulder. She was unsure of exactly what she was going to say.
The room was not dark. Two candles were lit on the small table to the side of Bernard’s bed. One of them was burning low and would soon be out. Both stuttered, casting unsteady shadows. Bernard was kneeling on the bed, her nightgown unbuttoned and rolled carefully down to her waist. Her heavy daytime chain hung around her neck, its crucifix nestling in the cleavage between her breasts. She was still, her head bent forwards, as though exhausted or asleep, or perhaps praying. But even by the light of the candles Thérèse could see the great red weals on her arms, shoulders and back, shining with new blood, the skin torn over old wounds. The cuts criss-crossed her flesh, making it seem unnaturally white and fragile, the webbing of the scars meshed more darkly around her, holding her together. On the bed beside her lay the whip, carefully knotted and tied from lengths of leather, the handle worn.
Thérèse stood in the gap in the door, watching. But nothing happened. Bernard remained perfectly still and quiet. All Thérèse could hear was the sound of her own regular breathing. At last a noise from somewhere above her – the cracking of a beam or a floorboard – made her start back from the door. It was impossible to look again, knowing this time what she would see. She stood very still for a moment, watching the moon rise red through the small barred window at the end of the corridor, and then she pulled Bernard’s door shut, went quietly back to her own cell and prayed.
The following morning, Thérèse asked Sister Assumpta to stay behind in the chapel for a moment.
‘I need help, Sister,’ she said.
Sister Assumpta nodded gently, as though this were to be expected, and waved a hand towards the bench beside her. Thérèse did not sit down.
‘I… I have something to tell you,’ Thérèse went on, knowing it sounded like a confession. She smiled. Sister Assumpta turned the page of her prayer book and bent towards the altar, benign and quiet, a middle-aged servant of God. Thérèse began her story.
‘Of course,’ Sister Assumpta said at the end of it, without looking up from the pictures of her prayer book. ‘I know.’
‘You know that Sister Bernard…’
Thérèse could not finish.
Sister Assumpta sighed. ‘Sister Bernard has much to ask God’s pardon for,’ she said.
‘But flagellation?’ Thérèse whispered the word.
‘Sister, it is not for us to judge another’s relationship with God,’ Sister Assumpta said, more sternly than Thérèse expected. Sister Assumpta looked up from her prayer book now and Thérèse could not understand whatever it was that showed in her face. It looked something like envy.
‘But what should I do, Sister?’
‘Do?’ The idea was cut down by the disdain of Sister Assumpta’s tone, but she flattened her voice again carefully as she went on. ‘Sister Thérèse, we are a close family here. We are not all as young as you are. We have lived through many things. We are aware of Sister Bernard’s imperfections. We are, God forgive us, none of us perfect.’ She closed her prayer book, and stood up to leave, looking especially hard at Thérèse now. ‘There is nothing you could tell us about Sister Bernard that we do not know. There is nothing to be done.’
Thérèse could not quite believe this. But she bowed to Sister Assumpta, letting her pass out of the chapel ahead of her, and she never again ventured out after her own cell door had been closed. Yet sometimes, even with others around, preparing for late prayers on a winter night or taking her turn to lock the outbuildings, there was something, a smell in the air or a tone in the unsteady darkness, which reminded her of Bernard slumped on her knees. At these times Thérèse wished she had gone on and disturbed Bernard from her reverie, touched her perhaps, held her even in the places where the flesh was intact. All kinds of things, she thought, might have been different then. But she found that after each time her memory came back to her in this way she spoke less often to Bernard, who seemed in any case always entirely absorbed in her chores.
It was not until several years later that Bernard was finally called into the Mother Superior’s study.
‘A letter has arrived for you, Sister. It is marked personal,’ said Mother Catherine, so curled with age that she could hardly be seen behind the desk. The letter lay in front of her, unopened, the envelope crisp.
‘Take a seat, Sister Bernard, if you would like.’
Bernard hesitated. The convent was smaller now than when she had arrived. The order was aging and in decline; many of the old routines had changed or even been forgotten. Discipline had slackened. Mother Catherine, wheezing noisy breaths, seemed no longer to care about what her nuns might be doing. She spent the entire day and most of the night in intense contemplation of bitter mysteries; the nuns spoke of her now in whispers, knowing she would soon be called to her rightful reward. But still her study reeked of the power of the Church. Its calm, warm silence disturbed Bernard, the watchful gaze of the Sacred Heart testing her in ways she did not understand.
‘Could I take my letter to my cell, Mother?’ she asked, not sitting down.
‘I think it better that you read it here.’
So Bernard read the letter standing in silence and slowly, because the writing was confused in places and because the thump of her heart was making her vision swim.
Philippe introduced himself without flourish as her son. He had tracked her down, he said, with difficulty. Although his adoptive mother – his ‘real’ mother, he had called her – had been happy to tell him all she knew about his personal history, this had amounted to very little. As no formal adoption had taken place, with no agency involvement and no paperwork, she had only been able to tell him the story of a baby made available by the diocese and a kindly parish priest suggesting that it might prove a consolation to young parishioners lately bereaved of their second child and without natural hope of another. Philippe’s ‘real’ mother had not asked too much at the time, for fear of finding out something that might put the promise of the baby at risk, and in the intervening years the priest had died, and the diocese had become determinedly silent.
He explained how he had found her, visiting every parish in and around the town, talking after Mass to the priests and the older parishioners, making himself amiable, slightly forlorn. He had kept notes, recording in a small black notebook all the possible clues that might help him track down his mother. He had been thorough. And eventually he had found rumours he could cling to, half-memories, stunted stories. He had found her out, his mother but not his ‘real’ mother, the nun who had given birth one bloody morning in spring, on the floor of the village wash house. He had hesitated, he said, before writing to her, on account of her vocation. She might not, he appreciated, want to rekindle her shame. She might want to forget him. He would understand. He was in any case, he assured her, in all respects other than biological heredity, already a son to someone else. He hoped soon to be a father. This had made him anxious about his own paternity and conception, that was all. It had taken hold of him, the need to know himself. He wasn’t sure why. He hoped she didn’t mind.
‘Is it bad news, Sister?’ asked Mother Catherine, as Bernard crumpled the letter in her fist.
He must have visited Bernard’s parish without her ever knowing, sitting perhaps a pew or two behind her habitual place in the second row, listening to the old priest intone the Mass, watching with her the host lifted above the solid stone altar in trembling hands and joining her in the ragged chorus of hosannas.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
One Sunday, to Bernard a Sunday like any other, she had shared communion with her son, and God, grumbling in her ear, had never let on.
‘I would like to see the letter. If I may.’
Bernard handed it over. Mother Catherine uncreased it carefully, her bony fingers clawing at the paper, and she read it through with her face close to the page, peering. It took some time.
‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘Unexpected.’
There was a pause.
‘You would not want to respond, Sister,’ she asked, though not as a question.
Bernard, who could hardly make out anything above the roar of God, shook her head.
‘Our sins find us out – always, in the end. We cannot hide our true nature from God.’ Mother Catherine looked hard at Bernard with something like satisfaction. ‘I’ll keep the letter, shall I?’
‘If you would, Mother,’ said Bernard.
Bernard thought about her son as she went about her chores. She turned over every word of what he had written, finding nothing but stony ground beneath. Then one day, a long time later, from the phone booth by the fountain in the village, during office hours, she rang the finance division at the local town hall where Philippe, in his letter, said he had worked.
‘I have an enquiry about… pensions,’ Bernard said.
‘Yes, madame. And how old are you?’
‘Fifty-seven.’
‘And do you work?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Have you ever worked?’
Bernard did not think about the long hours of painful labour she had submitted to the glory of God. ‘Not really,’ she said.
‘Very good. Please hold the line while I connect you,’ said the voice.
In time Bernard was put through to a young man who knew about pensions. It was not Philippe, and he was unable to help her with her financial planning once she told him that she was a nun. But he was polite and she had imagined him sitting behind a neat desk in the well-lit offices of the town hall, perhaps only a room or two away from her son.
Over the next few years, irregularly, Bernard made calls to the finance office. Each time she rang she changed the nature of her enquiry so that she was put through to a variety of departments, none of which could ever help her with her imaginary query but all of which were unfailingly polite and cheerful. To her relief she was never able to speak to Philippe himself. But over time she discovered that he was a team leader within the accounts department. This was already a responsible position and from there his career continued to flourish. Bernard’s son became a successful man. Sometimes, when she thought about this, she felt the swell of too much breath, but mostly she hated him the more. She imagined him having everything he could wish for – a big house with vines and fruit trees, a car with space for the children, holidays each summer at the coast. She thought of him always in the sunshine.
Hurrying across the kitchen early one morning to reach a pan of foaming milk, rising, almost boiling, Bernard knocked a jar of pickles from the crowded shelves. Disgusted by her clumsiness, God yelled at her, pestering her to go into the storeroom to find some old newspapers in which to wrap the sticky shards of glass. She cleaned the pan and wiped up the worst of the mess before going down the narrow steps into the dark storeroom, the smell of drying onions and hung garlic thrown up in the dust as she pushed the wooden door. She took two papers from the top of the pile, long stored and fading, and hurried back, flaying them sheet by sheet to wrap the broken jar. She had almost calmed God’s wrath, was almost finished and was adding a final layer of paper for extra safety, when she glanced down to see the obituary of Philippe Pourcel, town hall director of finance and victim of lung cancer.
It was the name in bold type that caught Bernard’s attention. Pourcel was a local name, common on shop fronts and garage signs, but even so it was enough to suspend Bernard’s hand, shaking, over the wrapped pickle jar as she read down the short entry. She read slowly and awkwardly, tripping over words, but nonetheless there was enough to convince her that the dead man was indeed her son. The obituary made much of his long service to the town’s finance department. It listed, briefly, some of his professional achievements. She looked hard at the unappealing photograph of the man she had never seen. She was able to come to few conclusions.
Bernard tore off a strip of newspaper including the obituary and used the remainder of the page for the final layer of wrapping. It was almost time for morning prayer and she was hurried. When the bell rang to summon her, she wedged the torn piece of paper deep into her pocket and set the wrapped jar carefully on the refectory table until she could find time to take it to the bins outside. She bustled along the corridors to the chapel and was not late, although all the rest of her sisters were already assembled and on their knees. Kneeling herself, choosing a worn corner of the chilly floor away from the rest of the pews, Bernard took her rosary into her fingers as usual and was about to begin the morning office with the others when she realized that God was silent. Not pausing, not waiting, inhaling, pondering, choosing a phrase, licking His lips or considering her pleas. Just silent.
This took Bernard’s breath away. She fainted.
It was the first time she had ever been to the doctor. In the dark waiting room at the front of the house she sat next to a farmer who advised her pleasantly on the best way to birth a calf. Opposite, perched on a low cane stool, was a boy with a bulging goitre which pushed his head up at a strange cocked angle. He winked at her. But the silence filling her head was so pristine that she was hardly aware of any of this; she did not know where she was.
When her turn came to go through into the surgery at the back, she sucked in so much air so suddenly that she exploded into a coughing fit that she thought was going to kill her. The doctor, less alarmed, sat back in his chair and waited. He found something on his cuff to interest him. When the coughing subsided, he asked her to unbutton the front of her habit so that he could listen to her chest. He came round to her and bent towards her, pressing the side of his face against her bare flesh. The skin of his ear was warm, unexpectedly soft, like summer butter. Bernard wondered if most ears were like his. Her own, as far as she could tell, were more sinewy, like spinach stalks. He asked her to breathe, long and slow.
He pressed her tongue with a stick and examined her throat. He looked closely at her eyes, pulling at the thin skin below them. Finally he shone a light into each of her ears.
‘There’s no infection, Sister. Nothing I can see.’
‘No,’ said Bernard, unsurprised.
‘Do you have soreness, or discharge, something on your pillow?’
