Pilgrim (11 page)

The song was drawing to its close, the strains of it fading into the mist—until one final note hung in the air, and was gone, as if dissolved.

Tatiana let go of Dora’s hand.

Beside them and before them, others were turning away.

If only there was music always,
Dora thought,
there would be no need to speak.

Tatiana blinked. She stood as if waiting for permission to move.

Dora led her forward. She was looking for an empty tub, but everywhere she looked the tubs were
occupied. Orderlies and nurses stood or sat beside their patients, turning on taps and wielding hoses as though they stood and sat in gardens, watering wilted flowers in the hopes of bringing them back to life.

At last, they came to an empty tub and Dora planted herself behind the Countess, knowing there would be a moment of panic before her patient could be persuaded to disrobe and climb down into the depths.

The tubs were four feet deep and lined with Connemara from Ireland, its marbled streaks and curlicues green as any seaweed flowing in a tidal pool. The waters here were salted and softened, giving off Atlantic vapours and shining with phosphorescence. The whole effect was of standing on a rocky shore on a warm and misted day.

There are no waters on the Moon,
the Countess had said.
No waters—no tides—nor anything but dust and ashes. We bathe in ashes!
she had cried triumphantly.
We bathe in ashes and powder our bodies with dust!

Dora had wondered how they slaked their thirst.

There is no thirst,
the Countess had told her.
No thirst, no hunger, nothing human. No wants. No desires. No yearning. Nothing. We are free.

How sad that must be, to have no yearning, Dora had replied. You must want
something.

Never. Nothing. Only to dance. To float beyond the pull of gravity.

There must be a great deal of happiness there if you want so much to go back.

The Countess had turned away at that, but only for the briefest moment.

Dora placed her hands on Blavinskeya’s shoulders. It was time to remove the robe and lead her to the steps which descended into the water.

“Undo,” Dora said.

Obedient and uncomplaining as a child, the Countess undid the cord and buttons of her robe and moved away from Dora. Dora folded the robe on her arm and watched the Moon Lady climb down the steps.

Dora moved forward, one hand ready to steady the Countess should she fall. The feet were tiny, arched and supple—the legs and arms were plump and round—a dancer’s arms and legs—and the buttocks were firm as porcelain moons. The breasts…Dora closed her eyes. She could not bear to think of them.

Blavinskeya descended into the water with a sigh.

Watching her, Dora sat on the edge of the tub. Below her, the Countess was seated on a built-in bench with her arms spread wide and her head thrown back, eyes closed, lips parted—almost as though she expected to be embraced.

It was impossible. To love someone and not be able to kiss, to touch, to embrace.

Impossible—and yet, endurable.

15

Pilgrim was seated in a Bath chair with a tartan rug across his knees. He was dressed in blue pyjamas, a grey hospital robe, white stockings and chamois slippers lined with fleece. His wrists were bound with
surgical gauze and lay exposed in his lap—a reminder of his brief stay in the Infirmary.

Kessler had taken him, under Doctor Furtwängler’s instructions, to the glassed-in sun porch which overlooked the gardens. In the far distance beyond the trees, the mountains on the far side of the Zürichsee could be seen, but not the lake itself. Now he sat in perfect silence, expressionless and seemingly without emotion. The mountains meant nothing. The sky meant nothing. The sun, beyond its zenith and deep in its decline, was a stranger to him. He had understood it, once, and even considered it his friend, but now it lacked a name and could not be identified.

My wrists hurt.

Ached.

He did not know why.

He remembered nothing.

Bandages.

White.

Snow…?

He knew the word for
snow
and recognized its presence beyond the windows.

He also knew the words for
mountain
and for
window.
But not the words for
city—buildings—houses—people.

Men and women?

Perhaps.

There were other patients—one or two in tall-backed wheelchairs, others leaning against the wall or by the windows. They seemed to Pilgrim not unlike the figures on a chessboard.

Chessboard.

Has the game commenced?

Game.

This is a game. Someone will move me. A hand will descend.

Fingers.

I will be brooded over.

Someone will cough.

The fingers will touch me. Almost lift me. But not.

They will decide I am safer where I am.

Pilgrim looked about him at the others.

Three pawns, one Bishop, two Knights, a King and Queen.

The King and Queen were separated, the Queen alone and vulnerable, the King protected by his troops, who formed a wall.
White.

White King, White pawns, White Queen.

Where were all the black pieces? None was visible—all were white. And when would his opponent make the next move?

Doctor Jung came and stood behind him, lifting his finger to his lips so that Kessler would not speak.

Kessler nodded and stepped aside.

Jung came forward on the diagonal, moving to Pilgrim’s right, nodding and mouthing words of greeting at various familiar attendants who were standing near their patients.

It was four o’clock.

The sun was moving towards its final position before descending behind the mountains. A low,
winter sun, with a curious, almost midsummer redness to it. Orange.

There’s an orange out there,
Pilgrim thought.
Perhaps it’s part of the game. A player. Or a manipulator. God.

A god.

That was it.

God was a ball of fire in the…

What? What? What? Oh, what is it called?

Jung could now see Pilgrim fully in profile. He said nothing. He watched.

Pilgrim shifted his hands. His wrists had stiffened.

They’d been frozen in the snow.

They will die.

Part of me will die.

How wonderful…

Jung took note of the fact that Pilgrim’s lips had parted, but saw no words being formed.

Twilight. The best of times. The time between.

Jung thought this in Pilgrim’s behalf, remembering what Lady Quartermaine had said about the
permanent twilight
of his first eighteen years.

Perhaps there had been no thoughts of suicide then. It seemed, from what Jung had gleaned from his long study of schizophrenia, that its onslaught most often took place at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Nineteen, perhaps, or twenty.

Had Pilgrim lived so long in the shadow of this disease? It seemed impossible—no one could survive that long without detection. He must now be fifty or fifty-one years old. No. The onslaught—if, indeed, there
had been one—must have come later—and if so, then it was most unusual, given the norm.

But something certainly had happened when Pilgrim was eighteen. A trauma of some kind—an accident—a sudden death—a disease—the violent breaking of a relationship. Something. And that trauma, whatever it was, had been the progenitor of his present loss of self-possession. And the loss of self-possession, whatever else it was—whether an illness or not—was certainly a
condition.

There it was again—Lady Quartermaine’s
bête noire
—the unacceptable suggestion that Mister Pilgrim was ill.

But he was.

Jung knew that for a certainty.

The man in the Bath chair now under scrutiny could not be anything less than ill. No mere momentary depression or despair had thrown him into this state. His posture alone belied that possibility, given his rigid back and neck, given his motionless feet that might just as well have been shackled—and the stiff, automatonic movements of his hands.

Jung made his way towards the windows, where he stood with his back to the light and was thus unrecognizable. The light, however, was streaming over Pilgrim in his chair. He might have been the stone-carved figure of a king. His hawk’s nose, his wide staring eyes, the shock of his hair where it touched his brow and the mouth with its lips so eager to speak and yet, unable.

Jung nodded at Kessler, giving the signal that Pilgrim should be taken to his rooms.

As Kessler kicked the brake and began to move the chair, Pilgrim cried aloud—or thought he did:
NO, DON’T
! and pointed at the sun. H
E HAS NOT DIED YET
!

But all was silent; not a sound, excepting the mouselike whispers of the turning wheels as Kessler pushed his patient back towards the dark.

16

The Countess Blavinskeya lay back in her bath. Her feet, gnarled and ruined by dance, were floating way, way off in the mist. Once such tiny, perfect feet. Her mother had always said so. And her father. And her brother.

Alexei.

He put his hands beneath the covers and held my feet in his icy fingers, pressing his thumbs into my soles and whispering:
round and round and round we go and where we will stop, no one can know.

A long, long while ago.

Was it?

Yes. A long, long while.

It doesn’t seem so. I can still feel the cold of his fingers.

You were just twelve years old.

Twelve? I don’t remember. I do remember I was a dancer. That I know.

Yes. And a good one. Even when you were ten, everyone said you would become a great ballerina.

Yes—and I did.

Tatiana could feel the aureole of her hair spreading out around her shoulders, stranding down to her breasts, her nipples rising to its touch. Dora Henkel had told her not to untie the ribbons, but Tatiana had turned away and floated out of reach.

There was salt in the water.
A healing agent,
according to the therapist, and a
relaxant
—a word that Dora had not encountered before.
It simulates weightlessness,
the therapist had said.
This in itself encourages relaxation.

Certainly, the Countess looked less tense than she had—sleepy and pendent in her Sargasso Sea of hair. Dora sat back and smiled.

According to Doctor Furtwängler, Blavinskeya had been a dancer at first in St. Petersburg, and after with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But something had happened—the Doctor would not say what—and her career had been ended some months after her marriage to the Count Blavinsky. That same year, she had been elevated to the rank of ballerina. Choreography for a new ballet had been created for her by Fokine. Music had been composed by Stravinsky. Work had even begun on sets and costume designs, but something…

Something had happened.

Something had happened and Tatiana Blavinskeya had gone to live on the Moon. She had gone, she said, to seek her mother there.
My mother—Selene, Goddess of the Moon.

The gods themselves were in love with Selene. All the gods. But she fell in love with a man—a mortal—and was banished from her kingdom. She and her mortal lover were married
in the presence of the Tzar of Russia!
So the Countess said. And in time, they had two children: Alexei Sergeyevitch and Tatiana Sergeyevna.

At first, all was well. To hear the doctors tell it, since both Doctor Jung and Doctor Furtwängler knew her story so well, it seemed that Selene and Sergei Ivanovitch, her husband, had lived in a fairy tale.

But something—something had happened.

Something, but no one knew what.

Doctor Jung insisted that the Countess knew, but would not or could not tell it. Not so, Doctor Furt-wängler. Doctor Furtwängler’s version of the story was that nothing had happened. She had been ill and could—and would—be cured.
There is nothing wrong with Tatiana Blavinskeya that time and patience cannot put right. No one lives on the Moon. It is impossible.

On the Moon,
Blavinskeya had told Dora Henkel,
we are weightless. That is why I love the water so. It is like going home—as if I could float all the way from here to there.

As for her husband…

No.

She would not discuss the subject of her marriage. There were no children.
How could there have been?
she had said enigmatically.

Count Nicolas Blavinsky was dead. Someone had killed him—perhaps, it was rumoured, her father.

Tatiana parted her lips and drew a strand of her hair between them. She stared out vacantly into the steam, but there was no one there she wanted. Everyone she wanted had disappeared. Only those she did not want persisted. Her brother, her father, herself.

Alexei put his hands beneath the covers and held my feet, while someone…

Who?

While someone watched.

Oh, what? What? What—what—
WHAT
?

Tatiana began to thrash in the water, biting the strands of her hair clean through.

She made a moaning sound, but no words. She began to choke.

Dora Henkel ran to the far side of the tub.

“Countess! Countess!” she hissed.

She was not allowed to raise her voice, for fear of alarming the other patients.

“Quickly,” she called out,
sotto voce.
“Someone help me.”

Two attendants came running—an orderly and another nurse.

The orderly climbed down into the tub and pinioned Tatiana’s arms. In spite of his strength, she went on thrashing her legs and kicked at him with her heels. Still, he held on while Dora Henkel and the other nurse drew the Countess up and out of the water, where they immobilized her in a makeshift straitjacket of towels.