The Islands of Dr. Thomas (16 page)

She turned and walked right back down the boulevard, sat down at the same café, ordered an Orangina, and took her Clairefontaine notebook out of her bag to try to put her thoughts in order. Forgetting the unrelenting noise of horns and odours of exhaust fumes, she tried to untangle this new reality, ignoring the fact that, in this moment of doubt, she had turned to writing the way a drowning man grabs a buoy.

François looked at her from afar. She was completely immersed, chewing on the already misshapen end of her pen. He was surprised that she did not even see him coming. He never failed to notice her worried look when she was waiting for him, then the spontaneous smile she offered the instant she saw him, and every time, it went straight to his heart. In the fleeting instant of recognition, a feeling of serenity came over him. What was going on today, behind her furrowed brow and uncertain eyes, that kept her from greeting the precious happiness they shared?

He came close, and she still did not notice. He placed his hand on her shoulder and it was only then that she became aware of him. She looked at him with an expression of such utter sorrow that he collapsed into the chair across from her.

“What's wrong?” he asked in a worried tone. “Did someone bother you?”

“No, nothing like that. Don't worry.”

“Don't worry? Come now, what's going on?”

Where should she begin? How could she explain to him that her life's dream was just an illusion? I have to tell him something, she thought, as she saw François becoming increasingly worried.

She told him about her walk, and the way it disturbed her to see the students who had been so fortunate coming out of the Lycée. “I know they aren't having trouble figuring out what they want to do after they get their diploma.”

He could not help smiling a little. He was relieved, despite feeling Émilie's vulnerability. So the self- reflection he was expecting to provoke by taking her to the Pantheon had occurred in front of a Lycée.

“You too know what you want to do.”

“I don't, and you know it! I tell you the same thing every time you ask me, that I have no idea!”

“I know what you tell me,” he said gently, “but I also know that it isn't the truth.”

Her jaw dropped.

“A girl as intelligent, as sensitive as you are, who knows how to interpret photos, thoughts, the expressions of a man like Doctor Thomas...Come on, you can't tell me that you don't have enough imagination to dream of your future!”

He put his hand on her shoulder, at the base of her neck, where the heart beats so quickly in moments of great emotion, and he held her tightly in order to give her courage. Then he waited.

“Even if I have an idea, I realized this morning that I was dreaming in technicolour. How do you expect me to measure up to these students who have had every advantage to learn, to discover things? Until this week, I didn't even know what a theatre looked like, a real museum, or la Sorbonne,” she added, with growing bitterness.

“Really, none of that matters! If it did, every genius in France would've been born in Paris and studied in the Latin Quarter! How do you think I got ahead? By telling myself that because I had only seen frame houses with tambours and siding, I could never be an architect? Do you think the orthopedist started out saying that his dream would never come true because he had never seen the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital and that the only thing he knew about medicine was the medical centre in Saint-Pierre? You're feeling sorry for yourself, that's what you're doing.” He paused for a short moment before delivering the final blow. “Really, you can do better than that.”

He was angered by her lack of confidence. She could not bear the idea of disappointing him any further by letting him think she had no hopes for the future, so she murmured: “I do have an idea.”

“There! I knew it. Tell me...”

“I want...Well, I'd like...”

“Come on, say it!”

He had never seen her at a loss for words.

She sat up straight in her uncomfortable chair, looked him straight in the eye and, no longer the need to whisper, announced loudly and clearly: “I want to be a writer.”

“Well then, what are you waiting for? Do it.”

He did not even seem surprised. As if it were that simple! As if she had said: “I want to be a teacher.”

“You're not shocked?”

“Why would that shock me? If it's what you want to do, and I don't doubt it for a second, I say go ahead. Do it! The most important thing is knowing what you want.”

“Do it.” She had never believed those two words could have such a powerful effect. She was expecting something completely different, along the lines of: “It's a nice idea, but don't you think you're being unreasonable?” Or perhaps, “Maybe later, but first you need to get a job.” The same trite phrases that her parents would say, she was sure of that.

“Do it.” It was as simple as that. No ifs or buts. Two words that gave her wings. But on the other hand, they meant there was no escape.

While all this was bouncing around in her head like a ball on the Zakpiat Bat, where men on the island played the game of Basque pelota, François looked at her calmly. It was as though he was watching doors open wide in front of her eyes. He saw in her eyes the lightning-fast rising of hope.

Knowing that he had to give it time to work itself out, he pushed back his chair and stood up, inviting her to do the same.

“Let's go. The doctor is waiting for us.”

“Twenty-three thousand photos, exactly,” announced the curator. “Twenty-five years of work.”

“And there is not a single person in any of them,” she whispered in François' ear. She looked at the crosses, statues, calvaries—all silhouettes against the leaden skies.

Doctor Louis Thomas, who had followed the Terre-Neuvas across the sea, the soldiers out to the front, the freedom fighters in Spain, and the prisoners in concentration camps, had spent the last part of his career on a lifeless art in which Man was present only in the frozen expression of his pain and his naive hope for a better world.

“Perhaps he had lost his faith in humanity...” said François.

“Surely that is true, to some extent. But not completely. He chose to show that men dream of the world beyond, of what is most beautiful, most pure. He could have chosen to take pictures of nature...”

“Really, though!” cried François, exasperated. “Here is a man who took part in all the struggles, whose thirst for learning is insatiable, who fights
La Morue française
to defend the poor beachboys, sails for months around the banks, puts war on trial in his photos, never shies away from taking a risk...and here this man ends his life like this, in a kind of solitary contemplation. You can't say it's not strange.”

“It certainly is,” agreed Émilie, pensive.

Sitting in the curator's office, surrounded by cases upon cases of prints, negatives, and films, they were trying to outline the shape of this impressive collection.

“Look at this angle, this atmosphere,” he exclaimed with admiration. “What talent!”

“Calvary in the Fouesnant forest, 1956,” she read. “During his last years, near the end of the collection.”

When they returned to François' office, an urgent message from his researcher was waiting for him. François hurried to call her back.

“I just found some information about the doctor. He died in a hospital in Saint-Nazaire two years ago. He has an adopted daughter. I just contacted her.”

“An adopted daughter?” he cried, looking at Émilie with astonishment. “And you talked to her?”

“Yes, and she offered to bring us some material Doctor Thomas left her.”

“What kind of material?”

“Glass plates of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, she told me, and some personal papers.”

“Did you make arrangements to meet her?”

“Yes, tomorrow. She lives in a suburb of Paris and she seemed thrilled that someone was interested in her father. She couldn't wait to talk to us. She said he had suffered a lot from the fact that there wasn't much interest in his work.”

François hung up the phone.

“The mystery is unravelling,” he announced. He was clearly relieved. He took her hand to tell her the latest news.

The next morning, a woman in her sixties arrived at the office. She was very tall, very elegant, with beautiful grey hair carefully pulled back into a tidy bun, and her face was so gentle that it seemed to invite strangers to confide in her.

Émilie could read all this in the instant it took the visitor to introduce herself, make herself comfortable in an armchair, and place an old leather bag at her feet.

“It's his briefcase,” she confirmed, following Émilie's gaze. He had it the day we arrived in Le Havre—him, mama, and I in 1926. In it, you'll see, there is a series of glass plates, a few albums, and some papers.

“Excuse me,” said Émilie, taken aback. “But you said you disembarked in Le Havre with him. So...” she was a little embarrassed to ask. “So his wife and his daughter didn't travel with him?”

“Oh yes, they were there. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. Marthe, their daughter, was my age, thirteen. Mama and the doctor met during the crossing, and when they arrived on the wharf, he left his wife and daughter to come with us.”

“That's incredible!”

“Yes,” she admitted, with a sad little smile. She turned to François. “My mother and I were coming back from a trip to Canada. My father was Canadian. He and my mother separated soon after I was born and she had taken me to meet him. In the months before the trip, I could feel my mother becoming very depressed. And then, after a few days on the ship, everything changed. From one day to the next, she had completely changed. When we got to Le Havre I figured out why.”

“And the doctor?”

“I met him for the first time the day we arrived. In the morning, when we were packing up, my mother told me that she had met someone who made her happy. Then she introduced me to the doctor. He was quite embarrassed. I think he was worried about how I was going to react. And the whole thing had probably made him quite upset.”

“I'm not surprised!” François burst out without thinking.

“Yes, I know,” she sighed. “But for my mother and me, all we had was each other, for so long. I adored her and she had been so unhappy that when I saw her so light-hearted, so energetic, so excited, I was relieved. The doctor had such a good face; I could tell he wouldn't do anything to hurt us, and that we would be happy together.”

“What about his family?”

“Oh, it was terrible. On the wharf, my mother and I were on one side, his wife and his daughter on the other. Even though she was upset, Mrs. Thomas stood straight and tall; she was very dignified. But Marthe's expression was unbearable. Put yourself in her place. The doctor tried to talk to her, to explain, her mother encouraged her to listen, but there was nothing anyone could do. ‘From now on,' she told her father, ‘you no longer exist.' Then she turned her back on him and walked away. The doctor let her go, but I saw him staggering. And my mother, as discreetly as possible, took him by the hand. Mrs. Thomas and her daughter climbed into a car and the three of us watched them leave. The doctor squeezed my mother's hand so hard his knuckles were white. I took my mother's arm and together we formed a wall against his pain.”

“And after that?”

“We went our own way. From that moment on, we were a family. We were so close, so happy together. I only understood later, during the last few years of his life, that the doctor's new life had saved him from despair.”

“Did he ever see his first family again?”

“He saw Mrs. Thomas, who had become a doctor herself, during the war. She had taken refuge in Algeria, and he had spent long periods of time there when he was in the Resistance. Marthe always refused to see him. When he was dying, I contacted her, hoping she would be able to forgive him, but she refused to come, just as she refused her inheritance. She had had such a sad life, lived alone, never wanted to start a family.”

“The doctor must have been so hurt by that.”

“Yes, it was a wound that never healed. His daughter's pain was a burden on him, although in the last part of his life he was more serene. He talked to me about her in the last few days of his life.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“She died several years before he did. He took care of her, all by himself, with an extraordinary devotion. They meant everything to each other. After Le Havre, they were never apart, not for a single moment. They were both passionate about photography, and they went all over Brittany together, making an inventory of religious monuments throughout the region. That was the doctor's last project. When mama knew she was dying, she was really worried about what would happen to him. She was afraid he wouldn't want to go on without her. At the time, her reaction seemed excessive to me, but I realized afterwards how close he had come to ending his life on the ship in 1926. That's when I understood the role my mother had played at that time.”