These Good Hands Read online

  THESE

  GOOD

  HANDS

  THESE

  GOOD

  HANDS

  Carol Bruneau

  Copyright © 2015 Carol Bruneau

  This edition copyright © 2015 Cormorant Books Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Bruneau, Carol, 1956–, author

  These good hands / Carol Bruneau.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77086-427-6 (pbk.).— ISBN 978-1-77086-426-9 (html)

  1. Claudel, Camille, 1864–1943—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8553.R854T44 2015 C813’.54 C2014-907691-6

  C2014-907692-4

  This is a work of fiction. Though inspired by historical events and individuals, the story and its characters are products of the author’s imagination.

  Their resemblance to persons dead is figurative, as is the novel’s institutional setting. Any resemblance to persons living is coincidental.

  Cover photo and design: angeljohnguerra.com

  Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking

  Printer: Friesens Printed and bound in Canada.

  The interior of this book is printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

  CORMORANT BOOKS INC.

  10 ST. MARY STREET, SUITE 615, TORONTO, ONTARIO, M4Y 1P9 www.cormorantbooks.com

  For Joan, Helen, Sara and Elizabeth

  Only in our doing can we grasp you.

  Only with our hands can we illumine you.

  The mind is but a visitor:

  it thinks us out of our world.

  — RAINER MARIA RILKE

  I

  I SOLEMNLY PLEDGE MYSELF ...

  MONTFAVET, VAUCLUSE

  21 AUGUST 1943

  21H00

  No journey’s end could’ve looked better, I must say. Rattletrap nerves — mine and those of other travellers, especially those wearing yellow stars — all the way here from Lyon. Might as well have been a freight train, cars no better than boxcars really, jam-packed with hordes heading south — hordes. Grumbling oldsters, crying babies, the gamut. And just what I needed: a couple and theirs sharing my compartment, the poor little thing screeching its head off each time we stopped and soldiers boarded to check us all over.

  It felt like we were a herd of cows being sent to market, even those of us with everything in order — which my papers were, thank you, thanks to the nuns. So sweet in their gloomy way they’d been, huddled on the platform seeing me off, the sisters and their chilly kisses. The steamy swoosh of trains tugging at their wimples. Not to say I wasn’t grateful, especially for their lunch — stale baguette, some questionable jambon — to tide me over. Sustenance for my “mission,” as they called it, this move after nursing under their watch, their guise, ten years more or less inside their “cocoon.” My training under them completed so long ago it mightn’t have even happened: making beds, washing linens, peeling potatoes; a month at the san, another at the fever, another at the mental. By some fluke I’d been spared any longer than that in maternity, obstetrics just not for me. Getting capped was like getting crowned, though our coronation hardly eases the workload!

  The child’s wailing gave me pause at each bump and sway. Spare me, I thought more than once, fending off nerves that had little to do with the purpose at hand: professional development, this new phase. After the nuns’ prodding — “Time to flex your wings, broaden your horizons, Mademoiselle Solange” — I was more than ready for it, out of passion for the profession, of course, not personal gain or advancement.

  Amen to that as the train pulled in, the station a blink-andyou’ll-miss-it siding in the woods. The evening was wet and dark by the time we disembarked — a partial relief if not a full one. Shouldering guns, two Nazi officers herded people onto a waiting train, an express bound for Marseille. Herded, I say. A woman and her idiot daughter, an old couple, and a fellow carrying what looked to be a newborn. After a scuffle and a get-a-move-on, they were loaded lickety-split. I watched the cars lurch away, and soon enough was alone — the only arrival?

  As I hoisted my suitcase, something rustled underfoot: money, a Yankee dollar bill. But when I grabbed and unfolded it, sweet Mother, there it was, printed on the back: Ce Dollar a Payé La Guerre Juive. L’Argent n’a pas d’odeur … MAIS LE JUIF EN A UNE. Talk about mistaking chocolat for feces! Worse than finding a severed foot left in the OR drapes, I thought, ripping it up and watching the pieces flutter away.

  I decided I was home free, until a gendarme demanded my identification, taking his time to scour my credentials, check my photo, and eventually give a nod. France is hardly ours anymore, it seems. I lugged my bag into the station and asked for directions from the stationmaster, who scowled up — “Can’t miss the place” — from under a fresh poster of Maréchal Pétain in his bright blue uniform. A bit of colour at least, the place as drab as any in the middle of a war.

  The station’s light was the only one for miles, it appeared, when I started walking. So much for Provence, lovely Provence. Rain whizzed down as I headed up the road and turned left as instructed. The only shelter to be found was beneath the overpass. A newly painted swastika glowing from its concrete made me think of the nuns — fools for Christ sheltering “Catholic” Jews, devotion the one thing the enemy can’t confiscate, I guess. Without devotion the less saintly of us would wither at our first bedpan.

  The winding road ahead, the only road in sight, was quite deserted. I hoped it was the way, cursing my suitcase. Along the ditch gurgled a walled stream choked with runoff, a miniature canal — bringing water to farmers, or for the pleasure of children sailing sticks? All I knew of this place and these parts was that absinthe had been invented here, imagine; and the church, the sisters had happily briefed me, was dedicated to Our Lady of Bon Repos. Tranquility, rest. A lovely start so far, hair plastered to my head, travelling clothes all but pasted to me, soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone.

  Finally, by a tall stone wall the road forked. Could this possibly be it?

  Montdevergues, the hospital was called — Mount of Virgins — though there was no mountain in sight, none that could be seen for the wall, and the trees, and the darkness. As good a place as any to start afresh, I suppose, with a name like that. “Things aren’t as desperate farther south, it’s safer, the pay’s no worse; and there’s the air,” was the nuns’ glowing commendation.

  In the rain the plane trees were stocky skeletons, leafy arms reaching up. The smell of wet fields, of mud and manure, was everywhere, as well as a peppery scent, lavender perhaps? As good a place as any to treat les aliénés, I decided, reaching at last a breach in the wall, a pair of gates like those to some fine walled city. The fellow who came and unlocked them to let me in pointed me towards the directeur’s villa, set just beyond some bunker-like buildings, a church spire rising dimly behind them. No trouble spotting the house with its pretty shutters and walled garden — a spot easily pictured in finer weather, filled with pe
ople sipping lemonade under waving palms, as civilized as could be. The rain and the dark blotted out the rest: pavilion upon pavilion, each with their rows of windows, hunkered behind the tree-lined allée. Barred to keep the world out and the lunatics in — those I was being called to help.

  When the girl who answered my knock fetched Monsieur Directeur from his dinner, the trip’s rattle and cramp caught up and held me in its polite little thrall. Monsieur offered me chicory-flavoured coffee and a limp croissant, and had me sign papers assigning me to Pavilion 10. The same girl then showed me to the dormitory, where I was given a room to myself, hallelujah, though it was hardly more than a cell from when the Sisters of St. Charles ran this place too, what, five years ago? An iron bed with a doughy mattress, a row of hooks for my clothes — and a souvenir bottle of Lourdes water, if you please, if the label could be trusted. Miracle water emblazoned with a picture of the Blessed Mother. What more could a girl want?

  The nuns’ former presence hummed from the walls as I unpacked, everything but some spare stockings and toiletries and other little oddments such as my cigarette case. Not that I smoked, though I could’ve used une clope on the train ride, especially following the sisters’ repast. But enough. I’d made it. Far too beat to seek out some supper, I managed to hang up my uniform — the rest of my things could wait — before settling in for a quick review of some rather ancient notes.

  It gave me a chuckle to see my childish handwriting:

  A FEW GUIDING HINTS AS YOU COMMENCE TRAINING.

  1. Consider every situation through the eyes of those in authority. They have the responsibility for, and the good of, the whole institution in view.

  2. Analyze your own motives. Ensure that they are pure and unselfish, and that at all times you mean to do the right as right has been shown to you.

  3. Pay attention. Inattention is fatal to the nurse.

  4. Small things have tremendous importance in the field you have entered.

  5. Exactness and accuracy acquire new meaning. Lack of these qualities can have far-reaching and tragic results.

  6. Keep in mind that you exert an influence for good or bad. Be a builder for good.

  In keeping with this, my old instructor and supervisor, Sister Ursula, had constantly recommended a daily examination of conscience. An examination in writing, no less, which seemed to flout Florence Nightingale’s observation that feelings “waste themselves in words” and are better put into actions which yield results. Indeed, I thought, stuffing the notes back into my suitcase. A good idea but ridiculously impractical. Sister could’ve taken a cue from our own legendary Maman Bottard, who was head nurse at Paris’s Salpêtrière for a half a century and a little too busy nursing the demented to sit around doodling. A saint if ever there was one: white-haired Marguerite, stern and mannish in all her pictures, unlike Florence the sylph walking the wards with her famous lamp, so genteel and pretty, and who, for all of her action, managed to write up a storm. In other words, do as I say, not as I …

  And which would one rather be? Wasp-waisted and tending cholera victims and amputees when not wielding her pen, or the patron saint of epileptics, hysterics and worse, who never ever took a day off? Hmm. Let me see. I’m not in this for the sainthood, merely to do a job and do it well.

  Just then, I have to say, the idea of writing anything rankled. Still, finding a pen and jotting down all this blather on the day’s adventures calmed me. Not that I’m in the habit of this sort of thing, for goodness’ sake. But, it struck me, it strikes me — the seeds that weariness plants in the mind! — such nightly note-taking could serve as a record, a reflection, of professional progress. “A Record of My Path to Martyrdom.” God, I hope not. Sincerely. Because right now all I’m aiming and longing for is a decent sleep.

  2

  ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS

  AUGUST? SEPTEMBER? 19—?

  LINES ARE WALLS and walls are lines and what are days but boxes of air? Pen and ink, pencil on paper pin down the hours: squiggles separating something from nothing. My life a study of squiggles, lines. Lines on paper equal lines cut in marble? You tell me. Though writing sets you free, they say — my brother says, or used to say. So long since I’ve heard his voice, I dream it? Its sound and the scratching down of sentences as he wrote and wrote and wrote. His lines straight but mine crooked, crooked as the streets … the streets of —? Le Marais? Montmartre, because meandering and steep! Unlike this room. Slanting shadows, corners: bars of sunlight thrown across the floor. So much kinder are the curves of a body, a face, a river.

  The only comfort, my only comfort, is that he’s there, somewhere. Cracks in the clouds whisper it, their blue the colour of my eyes. The colour of the Mediterranean. Darker than sapphires, he would say — magnifique leaking from his pen, a word that turns my heart to a boulette, cold and hard, with no pockets of air. Could the warmth of hands soften it? Palms shape it, fingers score it, in order to lay every last feeling down?

  Better just to write, as I have by the hour, by the year. Letters, letters — so many letters, unanswered. Walls, because of walls. People are walls. Yet I take up my pen. By the hour it pokes and scratches a peephole to see out of. A small one. A one-way view, alas. Though when I speak to you, you listen. Let us begin with walls, I tell the paper. Moving a pen much neater than shaping mud, or merde, as the case may be.

  Yet they come, my jailers, as they always do, to wrench the sword from my hand. Time to rest, they say, and bolt the window — as if this prisoner had Rapunzel’s hair! The only rescuers the clouds out there tearing themselves apart.

  Enough for one day, Mademoiselle. You know the rules. Lights out.

  And blue becomes purple, and purple black. More lines tomorrow, if tomorrow must be. Shaped into letters, the bond between paper and ink. More work, always more work, for the one who would not rest, the one who would send you a kiss. For there it is: the task to capture what outruns rocks and clay.

  3

  … BEFORE GOD AND THE PRESENCE OF THIS ASSEMBLY …

  MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM

  22 AUGUST 1943

  22H15

  Somehow, who knows how, I overslept. The dorm was practically empty by the time I woke, famished, twenty minutes before shift. All was quiet on the grounds too, despite what I knew of hospital routine. At least the rain had stopped, giving way to steamy dawn — a dawn rowdy with chirping birds — and Pavilion 10 wasn’t all that hard to find.

  “It’s that way,” the one person I encountered pointed out, while asking what day it was.

  On a knoll behind the church, a pair of lofty whitewashed buildings backed onto the wall and the treed slope behind it, cypresses barely stirring in the faint breeze. Set apart from its lookalike, Pavilion 10 appeared a bit formidable, though hardly daunting. Still, after climbing the path and pressing the bell, I was nearly three minutes late.

  The nurse who let me in introduced herself as Head, her voice mildly sarcastic as she made allowances for my first shift: “Ah, Mademoiselle Poitier, good of you to come. Let’s not waste any time getting acquainted.” I’d never been late a day in my life, of course.

  The corridor I soon found myself in featured none of the usual ladies’ auxiliary efforts to brighten things, no pictures of flowers or fruit. It smelled — not medicinal but stale: notes of excrement and ammonia, to be precise, not unexpected. But, oh, Mother, the noise was unexpected, especially following the stillness outdoors. Cackling laughter, bellowing, wails and sobs — the way hell might sound if one believed in it.

  My new Head was a big, soft-looking woman with eyes that looked as tired as the woodwork. Evidently pleased to have me, she soon displayed Monsieur Directeur’s good cheer. “Pavilion 10 is all female, even the doctor,” she said, rummaging through papers in the nursing station — a desk behind thick glass with a photo of Maréchal Pétain in all his grandfatherly glory beaming above it. “Not a soul here in trousers,” she reiterated. “It’s a good place to begin your stay, among the easy ones. There are three o
f us to care for sixty, who are mainly either epileptic or imbecile and quite manageable.”

  She ran over the schedule. At 06H00, doors unlock. We spongebathe and dress the guests, comb their hair, and examine them for cuts, infections, bite marks, etc. In some cases, we inspect their evacuations. De rigueur, more or less. At 06H30, the ones who work in the laundry have to be taken there, my new superior adding — surprise, surprise — that it helps to work quickly. Full baths on Fridays. Every day but Monday, patients have chapel at 07H45, and breakfast at 08H15. The same as what I’d been generally used to in Lyon, except she emphasized the curative air, as if our charges are tubercular.

  Then she inspected me, giving my nails, hair and cap the onceover before finally fixing on my apron, which was slightly less than crisp after its night in a suitcase. Ignoring the screams from farther up the hallway, she repeated the need for neatness, but added I’d find the rules somewhat relaxed. Odd, I thought, since the place was steely-bright as a gun factory, all hard edges and light — sterile enough, but not even a nun’s idea of a spa. “You’ll find the basics apply,” she promised, in case I’d misunderstood. “Sometimes the work takes different turns. But keen observations count most.”

  Jingling the thick ring of keys at her waist, she gave me a cursory tour. First stop, she unlocked a utility room, a cubbyhole where a teakettle and a hotplate — for our personal use — shared a shelf with syringes, stacked bedpans, and kidney basins. A decent supply of greyish linens adjoined a cabinet filled with leather cuffs and anklets, and hanging from a rack, like freshly laundered shirts only a little yellowed with use, were straitjackets — camisoles de force — dangling buckles and straps. Next to these stood the medicine chest, which had a special key and was stocked, I was shown, with the very best of drugs, Veronal and Aspirin.

  More screaming and loud sobbing issued from nearby. “Nothing urgent,” my supervisor said, showing me into a dim room filled with Utica cribs, five in all. Fitted with lids of metal and wooden strips, they reminded me of baskets, the type men might take fishing, only a little larger. I’d read about them, of course, though seeing them was something else. “You’re familiar with the cot? Invented by one of our own, a Frenchman,” Head seemed happy to point out, “before the Yanks laid claim to it.”