Secret Dreams (17 page)

“But I thought, Frau Schanderein,” Herr Doktor reminded her innocently, “you came here to enroll your daughter in Zurich University Medical College.”

The woman went silent for a moment, staring at him flat-eyed as if what he said had not penetrated. At last she changed the subject entirely, saying with satisfaction, “Then you're admitting you don't know very much about the disorders of the brain. Or much about a cure,”

“Admittedly, Frau Schanderein," he said, “we face a very troubling state of affairs.”

There was little more to be said; the interview clearly coming to an end. Frau Schanderein thanked him politely for his time, rose to shake his hand, and led her husband from his chair. Herr Doktor got up to show them out, bowing at his office door. Herr Schanderein took his hand. “We'll be in touch in a couple of days to see how you're coming along,” he said hopefully. The man gently pressed Herr Doktors hand like a silent apology, as if to say, I'm sorry, terribly sorry for this whole episode.

When they had gone, Herr Doktor sagged behind his desk. What an impossible woman! Mystifyingly obnoxious,- and worst of all, she had managed to ruin his shirt: the perspiration under his arms had turned sticky, body-sour. Why attack everything? Him, his science, the hospital … ? As if she had to wreck the foundations of his whole world before she'd allow him the privilege of examining their daughter. No, far preferable for Frau Schanderein to prove the whole works useless before anyone laid even a shred of doubt upon her parenting. After all, didn't everyone know nervous hysteria was all but incurable? Rendering questions about their family life totally irrelevant?

And as for any diagnosis …

Disorder of the brain or elusive infection? Surrender the girl or whisk her off to Vienna? Doctors or Gypsies? Who cared? So long as in the final analysis the good Frau Schanderein wasn't found guilty of any wrongdoing.

The pamphlets and the book he had offered sat ignored on the desk. He hefted the heavy one back to the shelf. Then changed his mind, deciding to leave it be. Gathering dust in reproach if the parents ever returned.

This was the case that launched a saga of notes. And though in time he wrote hundreds of pages, at the beginning, at least, most were like this:

Sept. 15: Visited Patient, Was not allowed in room
.

Hardly an indication of what really occurred. In fact, he had not been able to “examine” the patient at all — except from the corridor. Small glass viewing slits in the room doors allowed anyone standing in the hall to peer inside. Almost everyone working at the hospital had gotten into the habit of taking sidelong glances into the rooms as they strode by: a patient would never know whether he or she was being watched or not. When Herr Doktor caught any of the staff peeking in that way, he always barked at them to look in properly or not at all.

As for Herr Junior Physicians own looking in, after a week he had still not managed to gain entry to the New Victim's room for more than a few seconds at a time. At first, of course, he had stood outside the patient's door and peered through the viewing slit, He saw a whitewashed room with a wrought-iron relic of a bed jammed in one corner by the window. Over the bed hung a Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary, Even though it was September and quite warm, the window was shut. He noticed several indolent flies dreamily bumping their heads against the glass in a fruitless effort to escape into the wild before winter came. As a general rule, the hospital left the private rooms unlocked, though supervised, and supplied each with both a bedpan and a chamber pot: the first in case the patient didn't wish to rise from bed, the other in the event a second use was required. Herr Doktor thought highly of this arrangement, as though the staff were demonstrating their readiness for any occasion.

The Schanderein girl sat on the bed. She had wrapped sheets and blankets so tightly around her body she looked like a mummified corpse, one of those neolithic bodies you saw in Ice Age grave holes, sitting head to knees, hands clasped around their withered legs. How did she breathe? As little as possible, he decided. And then that day he opened the door,

The Schanderein patient shrieked, the shriek so piercing that patients in nearby rooms sent up a wail themselves. The sound of the shriek lanced through his brain, flashing like a blinding light behind his eyes. At once a fierce headache gripped him. He fled the room and, before he knew what he was doing, slammed the door against the sound. The shrieking went on for several moments, rising and falling, and then ceased abruptly.

His first thought was:
If I can't go into her room, what the hell am I going to tell the parents?
What an impotent thought.

He glanced furtively up and down the hall to see if anyone was watching.

But no one cared enough yet. Soon there would be a time when his standing in the hall brought Nurse Bosch and smug young orderlies strolling insolently down the corridor, not even bothering to hide their sneering smiles at his pointless vigil. But the taunts came later.

The first day with the girl felt like an eternity. The quality of her shriek totally unnerved him. Not just the noise, not just the intensity …

What then?

As if the mummy on the bed were being stabbed with a hot wire. You felt the outrage in the shriek. Despair. Violation.

And so, barred from the room, he had plenty of time to study his new patient through the glass viewing slit in the door. He contemplated the folds in her swathings and watched for signs of movement. Meals were brought, spurring a shriek, and left hastily just inside the room. The pawed-over meal plates were taken away as quickly. But it was not clear whether the meals were eaten.

One night in the first week he happened to pass the patient's door. The light from the hall shone into the dark room through the glass viewing slit. The bed lay empty, the mummy gone. Then he heard the soft slurping and feverish gobbling. He spied the mummied form crouching on the floor, grabbing food off the plate. The gobbling ceased. A shriek came. Had the girl sensed him standing in the hall? Felt him listening in?

“Excuse me!” he said hurriedly at the viewing slit. “I won't sneak up on you again.” The shriek had wakened others on the floor. À grumpy orderly padded from room to room in the confusion, checking to see that everyone was all right.

“Wake them up, why don't you!” snapped the orderly as he made the rounds. “There, there, Mitzi —- go back to sleep. Hush, Tante — it's only a noise….” And one by one his charges quieted down.

“The only sound sleeper on the floor is you,” Herr Doktor retorted irritably as the orderly clattered down the stairs.

Once Herr Doktor tried standing in the patient's room no matter how loud she screamed. Awful mistake. The noise from the girl's throat, even muffled through her mummy wrappings, rose octave upon octave, higher than the shriek of a jungle bird, higher than he ever imagined a human voice could go. He stood it twenty seconds or so, until his hands started sweating and his head caught fire with the sound. He fled the room.

Now his actions had become quite celebrated, and he often found an audience waiting for him when he arrived for his daily visit. On the miserable day of his trying to wait out the girl's screams, he found Nurse Bosch smiling mildly at him from the end of the hall. He had half a mind to walk to the end of the corridor and slap the smug piggy smile from her fat piggy face. The fact was he
had
to flee the room, for as the girl's shrieks rose and rose, he had an image of the blood vessels in her brain pumping more and more until one of them ruptured and burst.

As for Nurse Bosch, she too seemed to think the prospects for this New Victim were far horizons of wasted effort, with the patient leaving her private room when the money ran out, finally reaching the horrid dayroom —- to be watched sadly from afar by an older and much wiser Herr Doktor.

* * *

Sept. 22: Visited Patient, Was not allowed in room
.

Entries for the rest of September would say little more.

What could he have lost by giving up and saying, She is incurable — there is nothing to be done? Incurable. Nothing to be done. The words echoed like a Hindu mantra in his head as he sat with the Schandereins for the last time in his office. They had allowed that the Burghölzli was as good a place as any to leave their daughter. They would send sufficient money for her upkeep. Herr Schanderein seemed particularly adamant that she be kept in a private room and was willing to pay any price to assure this.

“Can the hospital arrange for her steamer trunk to be fetched from the hotel? It's very large. You'll need a couple of men.”

Frau Schanderein seemed almost indecently satisfied with Herr Doktors failure to come within a yard of her daughter, a failure that plainly confirmed a conviction she had nurtured for some time: since no one was able to do anything for the girl, there was obviously nothing to be done. As the interview began, Herr Doktor found himself staring unconscionably at Frau Schanderein's figure as she sat proudly before him. A fine woman, she took pains to show it off. Her dress was made of china-blue silk, an evening shade like the light of the sky just as the sun goes down, and woven into the silk were the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, at tilted angles to one another. The embroidered motif was a tiny one, each mask no larger than your thumbnail, so you had to look closely. It struck Herr Doktor that the masks were placed on her breasts exactly where her nipples would be. The thought of the laughing and crying faces at her breasts was arousing and horrifying at the same time. The woman was haughty and menacing,- she repulsed him, but her breasts did not. Somehow she had separated them off from the rest of her. He imagined her luxuriously peeling down the front of the china-blue gown as they all sat there. Showing off her splendid self and offering up the rest of her, making him fall for them, press his face into their yielding warmth …

How could he
think
of such a thing? This was the parent, the guardian, perhaps the very maker of that shrieking thing on the bed in 401. He tried to shut out the invisible spell she cast around herself, to tear his mind away from the all-consuming scent of her womanness. He felt it wafting about the room. Was her husband immune? Or had she long ago ceased to arouse the man? In their first encounter Frau Schanderein had been provoking and clever, trying to trip him up. But now that Herr Doktor had fallen, having failed to examine their daughter, she could afford to turn the coy side of her face to him, the smile of victory. After all, Herr Doktor had proved to be no threat, Why not seduce the young man, preen a bit, fluff his feathers … ?

God, what was he thinking? As the fog lifted from his head, he noticed her indulgently touching the edges of the pamphlets left for them the week before. She ran her finger across the dream book, leaving a streak in the dust.

“They really ought to send a girl to tidy up,” she remarked casually. Almost like saying, Dust them off and put them away, my good man — they shan't be any use to us.

As for the fare-thee-well Herr Schanderein, Herr Doktor saw no trace of the remorseful weeping man of their last meeting. Now assured of his daughter's comfort in a “room of her own,” he was at peace, all his responsibilities properly discharged. He sat cavalierly,-a thin trail of smoke rose beside his head. His dark hair swept back, gleaming,- his lip curled about the pipestem clamped between his teeth. A handsome man … In fact, the two of them made a smart, striking couple. He, something of a pirate — and she, an Empress de la Valse: regally sensual and remote. A beautiful, unattainable woman whom you saw across a ballroom floor in a rival's arms.

Yet Herr Doktor found their business wearing him down. After all, why in hell should he squander his energy just to prove the naysayers and doomsayers right all along? But even as he stared at Herr Highwayman lounging contentedly in his veil of smoke and Frau Empress with her untouchable bosom thrust out, all the weariness turned to cold, hard anger…. What right did they have to be insolent? What lurked behind the social posture? That was their daughter down there in 401, A shrieking invalid on a bed.

Their own
daughter!

If only Herr Doktor could find the place in their brains where the simple answers lay. But their minds were closed to him. He saw in their faces the Empress and the Rogue relishing their freedom, tasting the clean air outside the sickroom, away from the endlessly repellent task of caring for their daughter. Was this one of the reasons they had come so far? he wondered. To abandon the girl in a strange land from which there was no return? Yes, he was jealous of them,-jealous of their freedom — for leaving him behind with that mad thing in room 401.

Should he refuse the girl and make them take her back?

Who in the hospital would care? Not a soul.

Diagnose her. Pronounce her incurable and hand her back to the parents. They deserved getting their Shrieker back. Deserved the long suffering life of tending to an invalid. The endless mess, the cleaning up, the ceaseless watching and never sleeping. The slow wasting away. For a sweet moment he relished the thought, turning it over in his mind. There'd be other cases coming along, better cases….

Then he saw the girl on the bed in her room once more. À wrapped thing in blankets, not moving, hardly breathing. Barely alive … Give her back? To the makers and breakers of that screaming wretch in 401 ? Send her back to
them?
What a heinous, detestable act. A wicked utterance blossomed on his tongue,- he picked up the dream book and dusted it off, saying calmly to Frau Schanderein:

“Since examining your daughter has proven so difficult, as you yourself anticipated, madam, I think we must take the possibility of an organic infection all the more seriously. Therefore I must examine you both, in order to determine whether an infection is at the root of your daughter's troubles. And whether the Burghölzli should be involved in her case at all.”