The Islands of Dr. Thomas (18 page)

Miquelon
March 1915

I let him do it. I shouldn't have let him.

“Take it, Doctor, take it! Your lady will take a photo of you,” he said as he put the young seal he had just caught in the barachois, no doubt after killing its mother, into my arms. “One less,” he probably said, as he took back the bloody carcass. Seals are the fisherman's enemy. I've never really understood why. He will take the skin, which he'll put in his dory, “to keep us warm in the bad weather, there's nothing better.” The meat will feed the dogs. As for the baby seal, “it will entertain the children,” he must have thought as he ran across the sand bank to catch it.

And here I am, sitting on the capstan with the little creature in my arms. I can feel the desperate beating of its heart. The terror. Its and my own.

“Smile,” says Emma. I can't. Marthe is sitting right beside her and is dying to hold the little animal in her arms. She is not allowed. “They bite hard,” a fisherman explained. “Smile, Louis,” insisted Emma. I know I can't, but I am trying to anyway. And when I am almost succeeding, the little seal cries and its lament grabs me.

Suddenly I can hear the terrified screams of the men lying in agony at the bottom of the trenches, these strong and courageous men who had been sent to the front to kill the enemy and who, as they lay dying, called out for their mothers: “Mama.” The efforts the seal is making to get out of my arms awakes in me the memory of these bodies that shudder just before they die, their moans, their laments that they can barely get out of their throat that was constricted with the agony of dying, the geysers of blood that spurted up and half-drowned their howls. All of this comes back to me, carrying me off like a strong undercurrent, while the people before me make kind attempts to make me smile. “The poor man is never happy for long. He's been like this since he got back from the war.”

A long cry stirs in the very depths of my bowels. I want to jump down to the ground, throw myself in the water with this little animal, save the life of this innocent creature; so often I have to be satisfied with being there for them when injured men are dying and I can't do anything else for them.

Like all the other public employees of France who are posted to Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, I left as soon as war was declared in 1914. The men of the islands were able to stay home for a while yet, because they were exempted from regular military service, but it wasn't long before they joined us.

As soon as I arrived in France, I was sent to the front with my scalpel and my camera. “What more could you ask for?” one of the army officers asked me. I was put in charge of treating the injured soldiers and recording images of the German defeats. “It won't take long,” the officer concluded.

Is it fortunate that in the trenches we lose all sense of time? That the more time passes, the less important it seems to measure it? After all, what is important is to survive, when more and more death surrounds us. The best we can hope for is to die quickly and with dignity, if possible. But in the mud and the darkness, under hails of bullets and bombs and on the ground shaken by shells, it seemed to me that there was no dignity possible. I saw hundreds of men die in misery, not understanding what was happening to them or why they were fighting. “Died for France.” There was always some man in uniform to utter these words while his companions in arms would be silent for a moment, praying for his soul and thanking the heavens that they had escaped death for one more moment. In my case, I would bow my head and ask,
Why?
I never found the answer.

A few months ago I was slightly injured and sent here, to Miquelon, to recover in this calm little place which had experienced war only through the heartbreaking telegrams announcing the death of a brother, a father, a friend who “perished in the line of duty.” Here there were no shells, no retreats from the enemy or howls of anguish, no men fainting or soiling themselves at the horrific sight of the battleground, no limbs scattered along the bottoms of trenches, no clenched fists surfacing above a body buried in the mud, the wedding band still gleaming. In Miquelon, war is an abstract concept. Certainly life is hard and the ocean is often cruel. In my arms, this little creature which is afraid it's going to die cries like a baby.

“Smile!” Emma urges gently. I try. Trying is all I can do. I try to fit back into the normal course of life, pretending it has not changed forever; I try to get interested in life again after seeing all this horror. A horror I am unable to share. It would be unthinkable for me to impose on those I loved the drama they had not experienced. I do not know how to explain my devastation, my despair to Emma. She has watched my physical wounds heal and believes, wrongly, that I am better.

Like the other men who have returned from battle, I do nothing to explain. I cannot talk about it. We all live behind a wall of silence. Some throw themselves into work as soon as they get their strength back. Others, in an attempt to appease their frenzy, will throw themselves into the sea as soon as possible. The doctor that I am recognizes the symptoms but can do nothing. There is no cure for human cruelty.

The only treatment I know is to try to live, to smile, if only to avoid spreading the cancer any further. I try but today smiling is not possible. Before the war I was invaded by melancholy from time to time, but there was always a touch of beauty somewhere in my world: in nature or in the eyes of my daughter, a glimmer of light to chase away the darkness. Since I've been back, I've searched desperately for a bit of light, and have found none. Everything is sadness. Sometimes Emma hands me my camera and encourages me to go outside. For years, I could find beauty in the stark landscape of the islands, a ray of sun peeking from behind the clouds or sparkling on fresh fallen snow, the dignity of a man of the sea, the courage of a fisherman's wife. Everywhere, always, I wanted to see and show the beauty hidden under the ugliness. Today, I am no longer looking for it. In the bottom of the trenches, I ended my quest, overcome by the horrors of war.

My camera no longer holds any interest for me. My friend Dominique, who was so pleased when I introduced him to photography, feels abandoned. Together we walked all over Miquelon and photographed every nook and cranny, then retreated to the little darkroom set up in his attic. There, in the dim space lit only by a tiny window covered by a piece of red fabric, we spent hours together watching the splendours of the islands and its courageous inhabitants emerge in the prints. Today, I can rarely go outside, and I hardly ever take photos. Most of all, I refuse to shut myself off in the attic. My former refuge has become a prison. I cannot stand closed doors or, even worse, the darkness.

In my arms, the little seal is no longer wrestling with me. It has figured out that it will not escape. It is resigned to its fate. So am I. Emma takes the photo. I can tell she is exasperated. She knows that smiling is beyond me today. “The doctor is so sad ever since he came home from the war,” the fisherman will say to his wife tonight over a bowl of soup. “But I think that I cheered him up a little by giving him the little seal to hold. I wanted to take it back after the photo was taken, but he didn't let me. He said he was going to look after him.”

The Beachboys

His name was Ange-Marie and it suited him. When they called me to his bedside, it was already too late. The head of the beachboys had waited before calling me. He was sure that Ange-Marie was pretending. That's what he told me, without a shadow of regret, no doubt believing that I would simply accept his explanation. As though it was natural to think a thirteen-year-old boy who had worked non-stop for two months was lazy, normal to suspect he was faking it when he was writhing in pain on the pile of disgusting straw that was his only bed! I lit into this cruel man, who in reply walked out of the cabin, still muttering under his breath that he had better things to do than listen to me.

Since I arrived in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, how many men have I seen like this, whose abscesses, coughs, fevers I'm supposed to cure so they can get back to the hard labour of their work on the shore? They ask me, a medical doctor, to attack the symptoms without ever treating the causes.

The colleagues I have now and those who preceded us—with the possible exception of the most blind or vile— as well as the physicians who work on the naval ships or for the Seamen charities have made the same observation for years: the living conditions of the Terre-Neuvas and the beachboys are horrific and are the main causes of the serious illnesses we find on the banks and on the islands.

The ship owners from Saint-Malo and Granville and the big businessmen from the islands are responsible for the deplorable hygiene in the shacks that beachboys are crammed into. In their eyes, these men, despite being workmen who make them rich, do not deserve much consideration. Especially since for every beachboy that dies there are dozens of others waiting to take his place. So why change anything?

I arrived too late to save Ange-Marie, whom I didn't know. There are so many of them and they all look the same, with their ragged, filthy clothes and the glassy, alcoholic look in their eyes. It's hard to tell them apart. The straggly herd reminds me of the contingents of new recruits that arrived every few weeks at the front. This poor boy died holding my hand, terrified by the approaching death, his eyes glued to mine in mute interrogation. Here in Miquelon, as in the trenches, I had no answers.

Walking back up from the shore, on my way to fill out the death certificate, I took a deep breath of spring air, in the ever-present odour of salt cod, this cod in front of which everyone bows down and salutes, this cod that kills.

I watched as a flock of superb gannets rose over the roadstead. They were circling and spinning around the blue spring sky like kites carried by the wind, indifferent to the horrors of the unending war in France and to the misery of the poor boys and men who, in a dilapidated cabin, gathered around the mutilated body of this child who looked like a battered old man. Had these wild birds flying free come to take the body of the angelic child into the heavens? In any case, I saw it as one more sign of encouragement.

Since gazing into the eyes of that dying child, I know what I have to do. On the next mail ship to France, I will send a letter to my superiors at the department responsible for the Navy, with the report I have been preparing for a while about the situation of the beachboys. I only regret not being able to include some of the photos I have taken to illustrate my statements. Out of respect for the profession and for the dignity of my patients, I never took my camera into their shacks. And yet, I am sure that these images would speak much louder than all the pages of my report.

For years, all the doctors who have been posted to Saint-Pierre have called for improvements to be made to the housing, the working conditions, the food, and the treatment of these young boys at the hands of their bosses. And then the doctors leave, without seeing any change at all to the situation. I will not wait any longer!

After experiencing the horrors of the battleground, which still haunt me, I will no longer tolerate the cruelty of men for any reason, and especially not for more profit. Ange-Marie Ollivier will not have died in vain. It pains Emma to see the misery around us, lavishing attention and affection on Marthe as if to transfer a little bit of the love she feels for all these poor souls to her own child. I know she will support me in what I am doing.

I no longer accept the idea of horror and cruelty being everywhere in the world, especially if I can do something about it. This morning, anger and the desire to act have shaken me out of the lethargy to which I had resigned myself. Yes, there are things I can do. I must struggle at all costs against the despair that fills me a little more each day.

Leaving

The photographer wants me to smile. His request brings back a memory from fifteen years earlier. In 1915, in Miquelon, when Emma told me the same thing.

I have been back in France for four years now, but I am still carrying within me the pain of exile, a constant homesickness for Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. I dream of the islands where I am no longer living, where I spent only six years and five months of my existence. How is it possible to feel exiled when you are in your homeland? What can I do about it, since I have no way of reconnecting with that life?

When I left Saint-Pierre, on May 17, 1926, I had no regrets. The islands were living through the Prohibition. The islands whose inhabitants had built a life from the sea had fallen into the pitfalls of gin, rum, and whisky. I no longer felt like I belonged there. There was plenty of work—illnesses had changed, but not the patients—but I barely recognized my islands from before the war.

Prohibition had at least changed one thing for the best. Since alcohol had replaced fish,
La Morue française
had lost its hold on the population. It is for this reason that I had been able to come back so easily in 1923, I'm sure.

In these islands that I no longer recognized, my melancholy grew instead of disappearing. I couldn't figure out how to shake off my sadness. Day after day, Emma waited impatiently for the man I had been before to return to her side, and Marthe hunted for her father behind my devastated eyes. I could see it in their worried expressions, the care they took not to talk too loud, not to annoy me, the way you look after a patient who must be spared any emotion or inconvenience. Their precautions exasperated me, but I couldn't do anything to improve my state of mind. I was trapped in a heavy fog and couldn't find my way out. In a leap of courage, I had started taking photos again, but all I managed to capture was this omnipresent sadness. Maybe if I could have left Saint-Pierre and gone back to my post in Miquelon, things would be better. But another doctor had replaced me there.

Our three-year post was about to come to an end. I had rather brusquely told my superiors I did not want my post to be renewed. They were surprised, to say the least. In the wake of my outburst about
La Morue française
in 1916, I had had to fight tooth and nail to get them to agree to send me back to Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. My superiors believed that I would never want to leave. However, they accepted my decision and repatriated us to France. We packed our bags in the spring. Wasn't a change of scenery supposed to be the best cure for all kinds of ailments?

I put hundreds of photographic plates into storage. Because we didn't know yet where we would be living in Europe, Auguste Maufroy agreed to store them for me until I had a permanent address. I kept about a hundred photos of the islands, of fishing, of smuggling with me, thinking vaguely about publishing a book that I could write in my spare time. But I didn't really believe it. Today, I realize that selecting photos would be a way of avoiding a true separation with the islands. At the time, I must have had a sense that I would never be back.

Our little family was living under a shadow. Emma and I barely spoke, other than to mutter a few banal words about daily life. After struggling for months to bring me back to life, my companion had given up. Who could blame her? Had she figured out that, even more than war, it was life itself that horrified me? In any case, she had thrown in the towel and left me to my nostalgic apathy. I would have liked to do something about it, if only to put a smile on Marthe's face. At thirteen, she looked worried beyond her years. But I was incapable of doing anything about it.

We embarked on a sad, grey day that matched our moods perfectly. Standing on the deck, watching
Le Colombier
disappear over the horizon, I turned a page of my life. There was no going back.

In New York, we got on the passenger ship that would carry us back to Le Havre. Marthe and Emma, marvelling at the luxury of the ship and the many distractions it offered, left me alone with my thoughts. I was relieved, both for them and for me. I preferred to be alone.

I spent long hours standing by the railing, contemplating the foam on the nose of the ship, the eternal image of the ephemeral. The sea, which had accompanied me every day of my life—from my precious childhood souvenirs of Landerneau, of sailing on dories, of medical visits to the Grand Banks. The ocean, my great comforter. During the crossing, I often considered jumping into it, like a playful child jumps into his mother's arms, to let myself be rocked or lulled by its waves, driven ahead by the powerful propellers I could feel beneath the ship. I felt so alone. Even Marthe, my dear Marthe, could do nothing for me.

One particular black night, I went to the very back of the ship on the deck right above the propellers. Far behind us, you could see the wake of the ship, a straight line that formed a hyphen between this world and the world beyond. I had decided to end it all. I could no longer battle the suffocating feeling that strangled me every moment. Suddenly, behind me, I heard the rustle of a skirt, followed by a loud voice telling me: “It would be such a shame!”

I turned around as though I were a naughty child caught misbehaving. A woman was looking straight at me. Her sad expression showed that she had guessed my intentions, although I had done nothing to suggest what I was about to do. I hadn't even moved. I had only decided to do it.

She could have talked, in an attempt to diffuse my melancholy. Instead, she simply smiled and reached out her hand, which I took without a moment's hesitation, like a drowning man grabbing onto a buoy. As I felt her hand, the lump of despair that cut me off from the world burst open. In the dark night that enveloped us, I felt, for the first time in a long time, flooded with light. I smiled. I was no longer alone. A door had opened.

How difficult it is to explain what happened to us both, in that instant, unless it is to say with certainty that our lives had changed, that we had each found an anchor, and that no one and nothing could take us back to the past.

That evening, we were two days away from Le Havre. For nearly forty-eight hours I thought about the future, looking in Emma's and Marthe's eyes for a link that would still join me to them, waiting for the moment that my reason would take control again, when I would see that my emotion was simply a product of my fatigue and I would go back onto the road laid out before me. In vain. I felt that I was linked to this woman that I didn't even know but with whom, finally, everything seemed possible again.

On the grey wharf of Le Havre, I set down the little suitcase that contained my books and the precious glass plates. Then I helped Emma, ever stoic, and Marthe, who was crushed, to gather their belongings and set off to the train station. I should have felt ashamed, hesitated and cried out to them to come back. Instead, as I watched them leave, I felt such relief and peace that it was as if I had wings. After ten years of darkness, life was starting over.

Four years have gone by since then. When I look into the lens or at a photographer who is asking me to smile, I know that I have no regrets. I am alive. Without this unexpected encounter, I know that this wouldn't be the case. But in order to open the door to my future I had to close another one on the past, and I know in doing so I caused unforgiveable pain to those I loved.

Emma and Marthe live at the other end of France. Emma studied medicine and opened a medical office in a little country village. Marthe is attending a school hardly bigger than the one in Miquelon. Wheat fields have replaced hills, and ponds the beaches on the west shore and those of the Grand Barachois. She has a black cat like the one she had in Saint-Pierre, the one she had in the picture I took of her in the snow. Emma writes to me from time to time, telling me about their daily life. That's it. She doesn't hold any grudges. She knew, long before we got to Le Havre, that I had slipped away from her. My daughter, however, can't forgive me and refuses to see me. To protect her, we won't divorce. Because of this, there will be no place for me and my companion in high society in France.

This is the price of happiness: absence, exile, the inability to build a proper life in France where, in any case, I do not feel at home. My companion lived across the Atlantic as well for many years and shares my discomfort. Our place is in France, even though we find it too limited. My career, her daughter and mine are all here. Our shared happiness justifies the sacrifice.

I would have had to write to get back some of the glass plates I left in Saint-Pierre. I would have to write to Auguste Maufroy. I can't imagine how uncomfortable it would feel to think of this envelope being placed in the mail bag, sent across the ocean to the islands, and arriving on his desk. My name would be whispered throughout the town: “Heavens! A letter from Doctor Thomas!” That doctor no longer exists. My friends from that life would no doubt have little respect for the one I have become.

In any case, the photos would simply remind me of unbearable memories of another life: Marthe playing with her little cat in the snow, Emma horseback riding in the Goulet, a photo taken with Dominique, the beachboys in Folquet, the salt works of Pointe au Cheval, snow-covered Cap Blanc, coming back from hunting in Miquelon...