In Matto's Realm: A Sergeant Studer Mystery (14 page)

Was it surprising that Studer's thoughts went to the
apartment that he'd been to look at on the floor
below? There, too, the loneliness had been almost
palpable, the loneliness of an old man abandoned by
his children.

"Loneliness," Laduner repeated for the third time.
"Labourers on eighty rappen an hour can experience
it just as much as those on a comfortable salary, and it's
just as much of a torment ... Pieterlen felt he was
faced with a moral dilemma. With eighty rappen an
hour, was it right for him to bring a child into the
world? People in a well-paid position will point out that
in the old days he would only have been getting thirty
rappen an hour, and people then were happy with
that. That's all well and good, but we're not living in
the old days. It's not our fault if our expectations are
higher today. And Pieterlen wasn't suited to the role of
a labourer with eighty rappen an hour and a large family. Perhaps he wasn't suited to the role of father at all.
If, consequently, he believed he had the right to kill
his child, then it was an act that, although difficult
to comprehend and horrifying, was determined by
certain facts: the fact that Pieterlen had a particular
personality, that he had acquired a twisted philosophy from reading books, that he was incapable of conforming to the rules of society and looking for a less tragic
way out of his dilemma.

"What you must understand, Studer, is that I have
been moved by the things that have happened to this
man. Despite his schizoid personality, which, in my
diagnostic wisdom, I recognized, Pieterlen was a
decent fellow. And when he asked me to be his guardian, I agreed. Perhaps one of the reasons was that I
could not for the life of me understand why a deed
with a perfectly obvious explanation, which, unless I
was completely wrong, ought to make sense to the
legal mind, even when expounded by someone of my
limited intellectual capacity - why such a deed (you
remember: his wife in bed, the light with paper
wrapped round it, pulled down to the floor, the towel)
- why such a deed, which only took a few minutes,
must be atoned for by being locked up in a six-by-tenfoot cell for ten whole years ... A certain sense of balance within me refuses to accept that. The punishment
end of the scale sinks down, while the end with the
crime shoots up in the air. A punishment for what? For
killing the child he himself had fathered, perhaps
because he was afraid of the responsibility? Because he
thought more of himself and his own well-being than
of his offspring? But - if you'll allow me the question,
Studer - what about a drunkard who beats his child up
so badly that it dies? That's not murder, committed
wilfully and with malice aforethought, but grievous
bodily harm with fatal consequences. Isn't that so? A
maximum of two years in prison. But the child the
drunkard beat to death already had feelings, felt pain,
was frightened, suffered. God knows, if a person like
that was put behind bars for ten years or life I'd have
no objections. You will probably argue that the man is a victim of his personality and background, but it's
an argument that leaves me cold. We don't want to
start getting sentimental. Anyway, I've come to terms
with the Pieterlen case, you can believe me ... Until
this evening, that is, and now everything's coming out
again ...

"You read that second initial assessment? Well,
Pieterlen arrived here two months later because he
had been declared incurable and was being shunted
back to his home canton. I saw him during my evening
rounds the day he arrived. It was a scene I'll never
forget. He recognized me, but he didn't say hello.
There was a frozen smile on his lips. He was sitting on a
bench in the long corridor of 0 Ward - the day room
hadn't been built then - staring into space, when I
suddenly appeared before him. He stood up, put his
hands behind his back and gave me a ceremonial bow.
He looked in a bad way. The next day I examined him.
His lungs were a bit the worse for wear, nothing serious. For three days he didn't say a word to anyone, he
just sat in a corner, looking through magazines or staring at the floor. And when I came by on my rounds he
stood up, hands behind his back, to bow to me. On the
third day he had an argument with a warder, he
became incredibly abusive. I think it was about a pair
of socks that didn't fit. The next morning - they're
particularly touchy at that time of the day - he
smashed a window. I had him transferred to D. During
the night he was so agitated he had to be put in the
bath. We don't use straitjackets, as you know, so what
else can we do with with someone who is worked up?
Warm water is calming. Two nurses were left on watch
- and they knew I keep a sharp lookout for bruises.
That's always the first thing I check up on when I
do my rounds in the morning and I know that an overexcited patient has had to spend the night in the
bath.

"Another digression, Studer. I'm sorry, but it's
necessary. Have you ever thought about this? We or, to
be more precise, I, can describe the mental state of a
murderer at the time of the murder in a report, I can
analyse his motives, his emotions, the mechanisms ...
Fine ... And I know, as I've told you, that we are all
murderers in our dreams, in our thoughts, but there is
something holding us back, we don't actually go from
thought to deed. But what happens if we do cross the
barrier and become murderers? Does the act have
such an effect on the murderer that his whole outlook
on life collapses? I'm not talking about murder committed under orders here. . ."

Again there was the strange emphasis, just as when
he had read out "his wife was in his power", but
Laduner went on quickly, as if he wanted to blur
something.

" ... as in war or during a revolution. In those cases
it is the leader, whoever he is, who bears the whole
responsibility. What I'm talking about is the one-off
murder, a murder committed under the influence of
some strong emotion. Don't you think that after the
deed the murderer thinks, feels, acts, sees, hears differently from before it? Unless there is remorse, which
is a rarer response than people generally think. It's on
a different plane, on the religious plane, if you like,
and today religious people are as rare as people with a
sense of responsibility. What passes for religion is at
best, as I told you all those years ago in Vienna, something like cod-liver oil. It's supposed to strengthen us,
but it's unpleasant to take and it doesn't help much.
Nausea is definitely the dominant effect and the nausea
is stronger than the positive effect on our health.

"Someone's whole outlook on life collapsing! When
we discuss schizophrenics, we talk of an apocalyptic
mood. The mountain splitting open, a disaster for the
mountain world ... a murder, a disaster for the whole
of humanity. We psychiatrists assume - and everything
seems to point to this being correct - that schizophrenia has an organic origin. A disorder of the glandular system, to put it in layman's terms. Can't be
diagnosed in the early stages, at best just the predisposition. The most we can do, as in the Pieterlen case,
is to say that a mental illness is likely to occur later on.
No more than that. But if we're so ingenious, then we
ought to be able to get the legal gentlemen to understand that in a case such as Pieterlen's they're not dealing with a criminal, but with a sick man; that Pieterlen
killed his child for reasons that we can just, if only just,
understand psychologically, but that show that the
barrier I mentioned was not there.

"Well, I did try to get the public prosecutor to
understand. So it was the public prosecutor's fault, at
least to some extent, that Pieterlen was handed over to
us in such a sorry state. Pieterlen the child murderer
had fled to a realm where I could not follow him. You
see, my metaphor is not entirely accurate. With
schizophrenia we don't always think of a mountain
that has been split open, sometimes we think of a pond
that is fed by a spring within it, but has no supply from
outside. Sometimes it looks like flight to an alien
realm, and we are left knocking at the gates (very
poetic, don't you think, Studer?), and sometimes it
looks like a common-or-garden obsession, and we start
thinking about the witch trials of the Middle Ages and
the Franciscans' exorcisms, and we wish we had a herd
of swine handy so we could cast out the evil spirits into
them.

"In Pieterlen's case the symptoms were pretty
extreme: stiffness of facial expression, of gesture, of
affective rapport, if you understand what that is. It
meant that the bridge between him and me was
broken, and not only between him and me but
between Pieterlen and the whole of the outside world.
What there was instead of the outside world I can only
guess at. There were coffins there, his child was there,
the prosecutor was there - Pieterlen said there was a
smell of brilliantine - quotations from books emerged
... But all of this didn't exist like memories, which we
are able to keep at a distance; for him this past was
present, it was there, it spoke to him, it was alive: a
nurse could became the prosecutor, and Pieterlen
would fly into a rage, a patient could become his wife,
and Pieterlen would caress him. And sometimes the
devil was there, a very literary devil, not unlike
Goethe's Mephistopheles, and Pieterlen resisted the
devil's suggestions, and sometimes he listened to
them, rapt, like a saint in an ecstatic trance. There was
no order there, it was illness ... I'm a doctor; it was not
my business what would be done with Pieterlen if I
could cure him. My sole concern as a doctor, and I say
this in all humility, was to bring Pieterlen back from
the realm he had fled to and silence the voices that
were tormenting him ...

"A course of so-called sleep treatment seemed indicated. There were things that spoke against it, but I
still decided to try. I stuffed him full of sleeping pills,
which put him into narcosis for ten days. The idea was
to stop the images running through his mind, the
voices. I wanted to drown the images in sleep. Talking
to you, I'm putting things in quite simple terms; if colleagues were to hear me talk like this, they'd find it
funny. The only one who might not grin would be my old boss. He looked like an elderly gnome with a long
white beard and his arms were so long that when he
bent a little as he walked, his hands knocked against
his knees.

"During this long narcosis -Jutzeler helped me, you
know, the staff nurse in 0 Ward, none of the others
would have been capable of it, conditions in the clinic
in those days were as chaotic as before the earth was
divided from the waters - during the narcosis Pieterlen
lost weight. That was to be expected. When he woke
after ten days of sleep he spat in Jutzeler's face and
bit my hand. Not a serious bite, he was too weak... .
Jutzeler had to be there all day to look after him, to
play with him, to go for walks with him, to encourage
him to draw. I had great hopes of his drawing. A mind
like that, returning from another realm, surfacing
again, it's like a retarded duckling, you want to give it
swimming lessons ...

"To put it briefly. it was a fiasco. I tried to fatten him
up. He went on hunger strike. Force-feeding, a tedious
business. I thought he was going to die on me."

A sigh. A match flared. Laduner took a long pull on
his cigarette.

"Then, suddenly, he started to eat like a horse,
stopped coughing and put on weight, over a stone in
ten days. His favourite occupation was smashing
windows. Perhaps in his disturbed state of mind he
imagined he could get rid of the glass wall separating
him from things and people. And the voices continued
to torment him. He had a whole repertoire of bizarre,
obscene nicknames, all of which referred to the public
prosecutor, whom I had the dubious honour of
representing.

"After three weeks Pieterlen was glistening with fat
and, despite all precautions, the bill for repairing windows was still rising. The carpenter who fixes windows for us here was spending all his time in O. So I
tried another course of sleep. I didn't want to put
Pieterlen in the bath; actually I was quite pleased he
was smashing windows. At least he was doing something, even if it was destructive. How can you go about
rebuilding, Studer, if you don't destroy things first?
Window-panes or other obstacles?

"And the sleep treatment worked. He woke up and
looked round, like Tannhauser emerging from the
Venusberg, but it was a real awakening, and he stayed
awake. That was four years ago.

"I see that my psychiatric disquisition has not had
too soporific an effect, Studer, so I will permit myself
another little digression: a murderer has been found
guilty by a number of `good men and true', who have
sworn on their honour to give a fair judgement, and
condemned to ten years hard labour. Fine. In prison
the aforementioned murderer goes mad. In these
humane times a sick man isn't punished any more.
He's handed over to us and we make him well again, if
our psychiatric skills are up to it. Make him well? Let's
say we try to straighten him out. So he's put into our
power, the power of the much-maligned psychiatrists.
In prison he really has gone mad, so it's no longer the
case that he might go mad. The verdict has been
quashed. Fine. We decried psychiatrists believe that he
is resocialized, that is, he could be released; the probability of him committing a similar crime - in this case
infanticide - is, let's say, one per cent. But we are not
allowed to release the man. We cannot make a formal
application for him to be released until the time is up
that he would have spent in prison. We have to keep
him here until then. Logical, yes?

"Now you're going to object ...

Studer had no intention of making any kind of
objection whatsoever. He was still clutching the arms
of his chair and his only thought was, when are we
going to come out of the dive? But he clenched his
teeth and clung on bravely; he felt sick.