Brother Jean rouses from his somnolence, lifts his head and snorts. His breathing has returned to normal. And Magnus does likewise. They are attuned. They get to their feet. Brother Jean pushes back his cowl, uncovering his head. His face bears the trace of the intentness of mind he has just exacted of himself — his face that of a very aged infant wakened by a dream mounting inside him whose amplitude he cannot contain, his brow creased by this upsurge of pure energy, his eyes clouded with a vision already receding.
‘Go home,’ he says. ‘Come back when you’re needed. It won’t be long, tomorrow, or in a few days’ time. You’ll know when to return and what you must do. You can find your way now.’
He walks with Magnus to the edge of the forest. ‘When it’s all over,’ he says, ‘go and tell my brothers at the abbey. Take them my robe, it’s theirs by right. That’s where I was given the habit. It doesn’t belong to me.’ He gazes at the landscape for a moment. ‘I’ve enjoyed my life,’ he adds, ‘and loved this countryside where I’ve always lived.’ Then he turns to his companion, gives him a quick hug, and flits away towards the clearing.
Palimpsest
There is a spirit that man acquires over the course of time. But there is another spirit that enters man abundantly and rapidly, more rapidly than the blinking of an eye, for being itself beyond time this spirit has no need of time.
Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav
… he will see that there is no limit to his intellect, and that he must search deeply … in the place where the mouth is incapable of speaking and the ear incapable of hearing. Then, like he who sleeps and whose eyes are closed, he will see visions of God, as it is written: ‘I was asleep but my heart waked, it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh’. And when he opens his eyes, and still more when another speaks to him, he will choose death rather than life, for it will be to him as if he were dead, for he will have forgotten what he saw. Then he will study his spirit as one studies a book in which great marvels are written.
Rabbi shem Tovibn Gaon
God never does the same thing twice. And when a soul returns, another spirit becomes its companion.
Rabbi Nahman of Bratlav
Fragment 29
Magnus returns two days later. He has been given no particular sign, he simply has the clear conviction the moment has come. When he enters the clearing he notices a long black shadow projecting from the niche, which bears no relation to the size of the niche or to the sunlight. It is a narrow trench, quite deep, with a spade set beside it, and the neatly folded robe.
An intense buzzing rises from this trench; it is seething with thousands of bees. And now suddenly they all take flight, shooting up like erupting lava. The quivering, twisting column climbs into the treetops, then fragments and scatters in an amazing shower of gleaming yellow. Every bee returns to its usual task.
At the bottom of the trench lies Brother Jean, with his rosary wrapped round his hands, which are crossed over his breast. His body is completely covered with bee-glue, and glimmering with a reddish lustre. A few bees, exhausted by their work of embalmment, are lying on the body, sprinkling it with gleams of pale gold.
Magnus seizes the spade and fills the grave. The sweet smell of the balm mingles with the dank bitter smell of the humus.
He takes Brother Jean’s robe back to the abbey. But the habit is so worn, patched up all over, it is good for nothing but rags.
He attends the old monk’s memorial service. The abbot gives a brief summary of the career of Blaise Mauperthuis, who entered the monastery as a convert at a very young age, early in the century, becoming a monk a few years later, and eventually a hermit. But a hermit resembling those bees he so loved (to the extent of choosing to lie among them in the depths of the forest); one who was always gravitating towards the monastery, bringing his pots of honey and news of the trees, birds, and wild beasts to which he became closer than to his religious brothers. Brother Jean, an outlandish monk, who was said to have displayed in equal measure eccentricity and sensibility, ingenuousness and a refusal to forgo his independence. But the abbot bows before the mystery of every vocation, and he concludes by relating with some humour a few anecdotes about this bee-loving friar who as he grew older had acquired the habit of addressing all men, even his superior, with a joyful “Goodday to you, son!’ and all women with a ‘Goodday to you, daughter!’ He remembers the day when Brother Jean turned up at the abbey in a great state of agitation to report that someone had stolen the statue of the Virgin from the clearing where he had set up his beehives. At first this theft had upset him, then having thought about it he reached the conclusion that it was all right for the robbed niche to be empty, and he decided the absence of a statue would now celebrate Our Lady of the Empty Space. Delighted with this idea, he had asked the abbot if he would come and bless the non-existent statue. Everyone in the congregation bursts out laughing at the account of this incident that took place a few months ago, and Magnus joins in the hilarity that long resonates in the church.
He closes the door of the house. That of the barn remains ajar; the lock has been broken for ages and he has never seen any point in fixing it. The wind blowing in through the open door has completely effaced the name he wrote in the dust. Not that this matters any more. The name is written on the cortex of his heart. A name as light as a bird nesting on his shoulder. A name burning in the small of his back, urging him to be off.
He is not running away any more, he goes to meet his name, which always precedes him.
His bags will not be heavy, he is taking practically nothing with him.
He has buried Lothar’s death mask at the foot of the lime tree under which Brother Jean set up the table for lunch on the fifteenth of August. Lothar, and also May and Peggy, could have joined them at their table that day to share the glass filled in honour of the Angel of the Word. Such a glass is ever replenished, ever to be shared.
As for the teddy bear, left too long on a shelf in the wardrobe in his bedroom, there is nothing much left of him: the moths have been at the wool of his face, mice have nibbled his paws and ears, and filched the stuffing from his stomach. Magnus drops the tattered bear into the waters of the Trinquelin, a little stream that runs past the abbey. Magnus the bear drifts away, his buttercup eyes glinting with cold water and sunshine.
The only book he takes is the one that has opened inside him with the breathy sound of an oboe, playing in a constant undertone in his mind, his breast, his mouth. The pages of the book quiver in his hands, fall one by one under his feet.
To be gone, sings the book of marvels, the book of the unsuspected, to be gone…
To be gone.
Fragment?
Here begins the story of a man who…
But this story eludes all telling: it is a precipitate of life, suspended in reality, so dense that all words fragment on contact with it. And even if words resistant enough might be found, the telling of it, at a time removed, would be thought the wildest fantasy.
‘To be gone! To be gone! Cry of the living!..
To be gone! To be gone! Cry of the Prodigal!’
Saint-John Perse, Winds
Translator’s Afterword
When translation rights in Sylvie Germain’s first novel Livre des Nuits (The Book of Nights) were offered to British publishers in 1987, I was asked to write a report on it. Reading it was a thrilling experience: this wonderful book told an enthralling story with remarkable lyrical intensity and great imagination, and there was nothing like it in English, which made it an ideal candidate for translation.