Doctor Müss took his hand. They were like that, in silence, for perhaps ten or twenty minutes; and then Brother Robert began to breathe somewhat more calmly and he said after years of silence at the monastery, the memory came back to blow up inside my head.
‘You have to be prepared for it to blow up every once in a while, Brother Robert.’
‘I can’t bear it.’
‘Yes, you can; with God’s help.’
‘God doesn’t exist.’
‘You are a Trappist monk, Brother Robert. Are you trying to shock me?’
‘I ask for forgiveness from God, but I don’t understand his designs. Why, if God is love …’
‘What will maintain you, as a man, is knowing that you would never have caused any evil such as the one that corrodes your spirit. Like the one that was inflicted on you.’
‘Not on me: on Truu, Amelia, little Julietje, my Berta and my coughing mother-in-law.’
‘You are right: but they also did harm to you. The heroic man is he who gives back good when he has been done wrong.’
‘If I had here in front of me those responsible for …’ He sobbed. ‘I don’t know what I would do, Father. I swear I don’t believe I’d be capable of forgiving them …’
Brother Eugen Müss was writing something on a small sheet of paper. Brother Robert looked into his eyes and the other gazed back, like that moment when Doctor Müss told the journalist that he had no time to waste and, without knowing it, looked towards the lens of the hidden camera with that same gaze. And then Matthias Alpaerts understood that he had to go to Bebenbeleke, wherever it was, to re-encounter that gaze that had been able to calm him because the memories had once again blown up inside his head a few days earlier.
The first thing you find, when you arrive in Bebenbeleke, is that there is no town with that name. That’s just the name of the hospital, which is in the middle of nowhere, many miles north of Kikwit, many miles south of Yumbu-Yumbu, and a good distance from Kikongo and Beleke. The hospital is surrounded by cabins that some patients had built in the shelter of the hospital and that, unofficially, serve as lodgings for the relatives of the ill when they require a stay of several days and that, gradually, generated new cabins, some of which began to be inhabited by people with little or no relationship to the hospital and, over the years, would make up the town of Bebenbeleke. Doctor Müss had no problem with it. And the hens that lived tranquilly around the hospital and, even though they weren’t allowed, often also inside it. Bebenbeleke is a town made of pain, because half a kilometre from the hospital, towards Djilo, after the white rock, there is the cemetery for patients who were unable to recover. The indicator of Doctor Müss’s failures.
‘I left the order after a few months,’ said Matthias Alpaerts. I went in thinking it was the remedy and I left convinced that it was the best remedy. But within the monastery or outside of it, the memories remained fresh.
Doctor Müss had him sit on the green bench, still untainted by blood, beside the entrance and he took his hand the way he had thirty years earlier in the consultation room at the Mariawald Abbey.
‘Thank you for wanting to help me, Brother Müss,’ said Matthias Alpaerts.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t have helped more.’
‘You helped me a lot, Brother Müss. Now I am prepared and, when the memories explode, I am better able to defend myself against them.’
‘Does it happen often?’
‘More than I’d like, Brother Müss. Because …’
‘Don’t call me brother; I’m no longer a monk,’ interrupted Doctor Müss. ‘Shortly after our meeting I asked for dispensation from Rome.’
The silence of former Brother Robert was eloquent, and former Brother Müss had to break it and reply that he had abandoned the order out of a desire for penitence and, God forgive me, firmly thinking that I could be more useful doing good among the needy than locking myself up to pray the hours.
‘I understand.’
‘I have nothing against monastic life: it was about my temperament and my superiors understood that.’
‘You are a saint, out here in this desert.’
‘This is no desert. And I’m no saint. I am a doctor, a former monk, and I just practise medicine. And I try to heal the wounds of evil.’
‘What stalks me is evil.’
‘I know. But I can only fight against evils.’
‘I want to stay and help you.’
‘You are too old. You are over seventy, aren’t you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I can be helpful.’
‘Impossible.’
Doctor Müss’s tone had suddenly turned curt with that reply. As if the other man had deeply offended him. Matthias Alpaerts’s hands began to tremble and he hid them in his pockets so the doctor wouldn’t notice.
‘How long have they been trembling like that?’ Doctor Müss pointed to his hidden hands and Matthias stifled an expression of displeasure. He held out his hands in front of him; they were trembling excessively.
‘When the memories explode inside me. Sometimes I think it’s not possible for them to shake so much against my will.’
‘You won’t be useful to me, with that trembling.’
Matthias Alpaerts looked him in the eye; the commentary was, at the very least, cruel.
‘I can be useful in many different ways,’ he said, offended. ‘Digging the garden, for example. In the Achel monastery I learned to work the land.’
‘Brother Robert … Matthias … Don’t insist. You have to return home.’
‘I have no home. Here I can be useful.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t accept your refusal.’
Then Brother Müss took Matthias Alpaerts by one arm and brought him to dinner. Like every evening, there was only a sticky mass of millet, which the doctor heated up on a little burner. They sat down right there in the office, using the doctor’s desk as a dining room table. And Doctor Müss opened up a small cabinet to pull out two plates and Matthias watched him hide something, perhaps a dirty rag, behind some plastic cups. As they ate without appetite, the doctor explained why he couldn’t possibly stay there to help him as an improvised nurse nor as a gardener nor as a cook nor as a farmhand who didn’t know how to bear fruits without sweating blood.
At midnight, when everyone was sleeping, Matthias Alpaerts’s hands didn’t tremble as he went into Doctor Müss’s office. He opened the small cabinet near the window and, with the help of a small torch, he found what he was looking for. He examined the rag in the scant, uncertain light. For a very long minute he hesitated because he didn’t quite recognise it. All his trembling was focused on his heart, which struggled to escape through his throat. When he heard a cock crow, he made up his mind and put the rag back in its place. He felt an itching in his fingers, the same itching that Fèlix Ardèvol felt or that I was starting to feel when an object of my desires was slipping out of my grasp. Itching and trembling in the tips of his fingers. Even though Matthias Alpaerts’s illness was different from ours.