Episode 110
Polina returned.
At the news that the Valdemaera family carriage, its long journey at an end, had crossed the threshold of the mansion, Ezekail hurriedly wrapped up his regular meeting with his subordinates and returned home.
As it happened, the two of them were walking slowly through Valdemaera’s spacious garden. It seemed Polina was explaining the layout of the mansion so that her husband, having arrived in an unfamiliar place, would not lose his way.
The sight overlapped perfectly with Lizan guiding him through the Derosa mansion, creating a walking route for him. Ezekail stopped for a moment and watched the two of them.
Polina’s husband was a man whose golden-brown curls fell in a stylish disarray. At a glance, Ezekail understood why Polina had treated her husband so distantly when they were attending the faculty of medicine; the atmospheres the two gave off were utterly different. No matter how one looked at them, they seemed to have nothing in common.
If Polina, as a doctor of the most typical sort, possessed a precise, measured strictness and reliability, her husband gave off the impression of a free-spirited, leisurely artist. He did not seem at all suited to the faculty of medicine, where human lives were handled. And yet, it was rather unexpected that he had been Polina’s rival, competing with her for first and second place.
But because they were so extremely different, there were also parts of them that somehow looked alike. The sight of them walking side by side, hand in hand, was unmistakably that of a friendly, comfortable couple of the same generation. At a few words from her husband, Polina, whose expression was usually blunt, burst naturally into laughter. Her husband kept leaning his body toward his wife so much that Polina had to correct his grip on his white cane several times.
Though Ezekail had heard the man could not see, he did not seem to feel much inconvenience. Skillfully tapping the ground with his white cane, he strolled at leisure through Valdemaera’s garden as though he had simply come out for a walk.
If I could live like that with Lizan—if only I could—there would be no greater happiness.
Ezekail looked back on his days at the Derosa mansion. They were memories that now felt distant as a dream.
Even before it had been officially acknowledged, everyone belonging to the Derosa annex had regarded Lizan as his lover. Madam Serva, too, had advised him that it would be good to teach Lizan how to manage and run the mansion.
……That was how it had been. At the time, he and Lizan had probably not been so different from that couple.
Back then, he had lived each day with emotions far richer than now. Even though he could not see, he had been happy from time to time. And so he had thought that once he opened his eyes, he would become happier still. He had believed that as long as his eyes were healed, he would never again look back on the dark period that had brought him to his knees.
Ezekail had never imagined that the day he would miss those times would come so quickly.
“Ah, Major. Allow me to introduce you. This is my husband, Ethan.”
Polina, having spotted Ezekail standing tall, approached with her husband. On the man who came closer with steady steps, Ezekail could see, just as on Polina, the traces of flames that had clawed across the center of his face.
Ezekail lightly touched the man’s cane to let him know where he was.
“I am Ezekail of Valdemaera.”
“It is an honor to meet you, Major. Your reputation precedes you. I am Ethan Yvonne. Thanks to you sending a carriage all the way to our home and arranging good lodgings for us each time, I was able to travel here comfortably with Polina. Thank you.”
“As the one extending the invitation, it’s only natural to see to a guest’s comfort.”
Polina’s husband, who had introduced himself as Ethan, exchanged greetings with Ezekail in a cheerful tone.
“Is Miss Lizan doing well?”
Polina asked after Lizan.
“Lizan said she wanted to be examined, so I had another doctor see her first. But according to that doctor, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong with her on the surface.”
“Is that so?”
“The doctor suspects that Lizan is deliberately keeping her mouth shut and pretending she cannot speak. But that can’t be true. Lizan has no need to resort to such deception. So I kept thinking about what the problem could be……”
During Polina’s absence, he had exerted the full extent of the imagination granted to him, calculating several possibilities for how to accept a situation in which someone who had spoken perfectly well, and whose vocal cords had not been completely ruined, had suddenly become unable to speak.
Perhaps the doctor had turned out to be a quack,
or perhaps there was some new problem that could not be examined with the naked eye,
or, if it was not that……
Ezekail opened his mouth cautiously.
“Is there perhaps a case where someone feels such a great mental burden about speaking that, on the contrary, they become unable to speak?”
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If my voice comes back, what am I supposed to say?
He had thought he had tried, in his own way, to understand just how great a burden had been placed within the message Lizan had left behind, but it seemed he had not understood at all.
Ezekail carefully pulled a chair close and sat, making sure not to make a sound. This time, he had deliberately come only after hearing the news that Lizan had fallen asleep.
“So, Major, you believe Miss Lizan’s symptoms are a kind of mental illness……”
“It isn’t a mental illness.”
After hearing the conjecture Ezekail put forth, Polina pondered for quite some time. And the moment he heard the words mental illness from her, Ezekail firmly denied it.
What the world called mental illness referred to those possessed by ghosts—so-called madmen. Such people were isolated in a single room of the house, their very existence erased, and lived confined for the rest of their lives, or else they were abandoned on the streets. Usually, people who did not wish to expose the disgrace of a reputable family chose the former, while those whose circumstances were too poor to have the means to care for anyone chose the latter. But whichever choice was made, the result was the same. Those confined ended their lives in a single room, and those abandoned were dragged off to asylums and met their end there.
But Ezekail had no intention of sending Lizan to an asylum, nor of locking her in a room.
“Lizan doesn’t behave violently or strangely. She simply cannot speak, that’s all.”
“Yes, that was not what I meant either. First of all…… well, how did such an idea occur to you?”
The idea was surprisingly simple.
Ezekail was a soldier who believed in the psychological effect commonly referred to as mental fortitude. There had been many times when, even in unfavorable battles, he had encouraged his men by saying that they were winning and needed only to hold out a little longer, retaking fortresses or bolstering his subordinates’ morale enough to turn the tide of battle.
We can do it, we are doing well, we will succeed—when he encouraged his subordinates and stirred positive will in them, they often achieved results far beyond what anyone could have imagined.
Then what would happen if, in the exact opposite way, one brainwashed oneself into believing, “I can’t do it”? If one believed that one did not know what to say, and did not want to say anything at all.
It was an almost delusional imagining, but who knew? Did the strength of a person’s mind not sometimes create mysteries that reason could not explain?
“……It is a difficult problem. In any case, I am a doctor who treats symptoms visible to the eye, so it is difficult for me to carelessly judge whether your view is right or wrong, Major.”
Polina was the first to shake her head. Ethan, on the other hand, agreed with Ezekail’s opinion.
“You’ve said something very interesting. I think it’s possible.”
The man spoke clearly.
“There are still many realms in the world that have yet to be revealed. Dreams, for instance. We do not know by what mechanism they work, but some people are said to foresee the future through dreams, and others create music or novels through them, don’t they? If a person’s mind can act upon dreams, what reason is there that it cannot act upon the body? I don’t find it particularly strange.”
“Ethan, the human mind isn’t a field that belongs to medicine. You can’t see the affected area with your eyes, and you can’t prescribe medicine for it.”
“That may be true now, Polina. But who knows? One day, when the white death or the black death can be overcome by medicine, perhaps the day will come when the human mind can be examined and healed just as bodily diseases are diagnosed. Whether that takes two hundred years or three hundred, I don’t know……”
Even as they lightly argued, Polina did not let go of Ethan’s hand. Ethan, too, instead drew Polina even closer to his side.
“I hear you were a commander who led many battles that seemed miraculous, Major. To put it simply, I think a miracle is a case in which the mind positively overwhelms the body. If so, could Miss Lizan’s muteness not be the mind negatively overwhelming the body?”
The mind had negatively overwhelmed the body……
With a distant feeling, Ezekail looked down at Lizan’s sleeping face.
What could he possibly compare to the sort of pressure that would make someone decide it was better to lose language itself?
He did not even have the confidence to fathom it.
An old pain overtook Ezekail once more. Out of habit, Ezekail rummaged in the inner pocket where his medicine bottle was, then clenched his fist.
Lizan, you are suffering from a pain for which there is no medicine, so I alone cannot dare rely on medicine to find peace. I must not be that selfish toward you.
He clenched his molars tightly.