Pilgrim (49 page)
Consequently, Forster had presented himself on five
different occasions, requesting that he be allowed to visit with Mister Pilgrim, only to be told each time that
Mister Pilgrim is otherwise engaged. He is receiving treatment…he is under heavy sedation…he is in the baths.
Whenever Forster telephoned, he was told the same. The excuses were legion. And clearly, none of his messages was being transmitted. When he tried to leave a note, he was told:
you may, but you should be aware that all written communications to or from patients are monitored—for the sake of the patient’s mental stability.
Mental stability.
Psychiatric modes and methods were a complete mystery to Forster. He thought of them as mumbo-jumbo and therefore that his employer had somehow been kidnapped into a system of seance, hypnotism and the darker aspects of voodoo. All this to say nothing of the dreadful possibility that Pilgrim had managed at long last to kill himself, and the clinicians, fearing for their reputations, were plotting to disguise his success as being the result of some disease. All of this had placed Forster on the point of despair. He felt a growing certainty that at some moment soon he would be forced to take matters into his own hands.
Though not a devoted reader as such, Forster was devoted to the tales of Sherlock Holmes. Otherwise, books were not by any means Forster’s constant companions. Holmes was a different story. Reading of his exploits was pure heaven. Part of Forster’s fascination with the great detective lay in his ingenious use of disguise. It was every child’s dream to be someone else and Forster had never lost his fascination for it.
A person can be anyone he wants to be
, he came to understand from his reading of Sherlock Holmes,
so long as he believes.
This was Holmes’s great secret. Disguise means nothing if it is purely physical. This way, Forster understood that merely to grow a moustache and dye one’s hair was bootless unless the man beneath the disguise was a
red-headed braggart
or a
suave survivor of the Indian campaigns
or a
slumming member of the upper classes who has strayed down the social ladder in search of cocaine and opium.
He had attempted to play all three and, to his disappointment, had discovered there was a fourth incarnation which suited him best—namely,
the bank clerk on holiday abroad
. Only this incarnation was acceptable, so he had found in encounters such as that with Leslie Meikle—though from time to time, he daydreamed of being a bank clerk who had embezzled a million pounds.
And so it was as the bank clerk that Forster had been roaming the town, casually gathering information about the Burghölzli while trying to devise a way of communicating with his employer without revealing his true identity.
Using his binoculars and the several vantage points available to him, Forster had also been keeping a record of Pilgrim’s comings and goings for almost three weeks.
Then Pilgrim had disappeared from his windows and balcony—on Saturday, June 1st—and when his absence from view had gone on for three days, Forster
at last became alarmed to the degree that he had begun to plot a means of rescue.
He must somehow gain entry to the Clinic, playing the role of the bank clerk. He had gleaned the names of a half-dozen other English patients in residence, by keeping his ears open in the dining-room, bar and lounges of the hotel. He would claim to be a brother or a cousin to any one of these.
And then—as if by his usual arrangement with death—Pilgrim had risen from the grave and shown himself at his windows on Monday last—the 10th of June.
It was on the following Thursday that Forster had met Leslie Meikle. The photographs she had taken would be used to inform Pilgrim of the changes he should expect to see in his valet’s appearance, when they next met—whenever that might be.
By then, Forster had already begun plotting how to achieve that meeting. Now that Pilgrim had reappeared, the next step was practical but difficult to achieve.
Communication.
The only other books Forster had read besides Arthur Conan Doyle’s were books on the subject of pigeonry. In London, at Cheyne Walk, Forster had asked for and received permission to build a dovecote, where he raised and nurtured a variety of pigeons. The birds were receiving, at this moment of his absence, the ministrations of Mrs Matheson, the housekeeper/cook, and of her nephew, a young lad of fourteen whose name was Alfred.
Alfred also worked in the garden and slept in the cubby-hole beneath the back stairs. He was dark-haired and seemingly dour, but he loved the birds in his care and had a natural affinity with their needs and desires. He knew precisely when—and when not—to attend them, when they required their moments of freedom and when the shutters must be closed to protect them against the night and early morning visitations of pigeon hawks, owls, rooks and even the occasional ferret.
Forster had a deep affection for this sullen, silent boy, whose demeanour reminded him of his own at an early age—the tragedy of loss, when all that he had known and trusted was swept away in a fire that took, besides his home, his parents and his siblings. In Alfred’s case, the reflection of this tragedy was in the vengeful destruction of his mother, his brother and the roof above his head by his drunken, abusive and molesting father. Whatever atrocities of sexual perversion Alfred had suffered had never been revealed in so many words—but they could be told in his eyes and in his sad refusal of male friendship, which Forster had attempted to offer him. And yet, the boy had stayed. He loved his aunt, Eulalie Matheson—he loved “his” gardens and he loved, above all, “his” pigeons.
On the roof of the Hôtel Baur au Lac there was a dovecote of some size. It housed more than thirty birds. And it provided Forster with an idea.
Whose can it be?
he had asked, only to be told it belonged to the sous-chef in the hotel’s kitchens—a man called Dominic Fréjus.
For a time, Forster was too perturbed to inquire further. Were the birds supper? This would be unacceptable. Forster was one of those carnivorous creatures who could bear everything about the consumption of meat but the killing that provided it. To
know
one’s prey was akin to murder. To
choose
one’s prey was worst of all. And so he watched and listened and kept a tally.
When, after two weeks of this, it was clear the pigeons in the dovecote were not declining in number, he at last approached Dominic Fréjus and asked if he might observe the birds at close quarters.
The sous-chef had no problem with this and ultimately allowed Forster to take on one of the feedings.
On the 14th of June—the day after Forster’s encounter with Leslie Meikle—he spoke at length with Fréjus in the early morning hours concerning the various types of pigeons collected in the rooftop dovecote. Rock doves; ringed doves; homers and racers. And the doomed passengers, a pair of which Dominic Fréjus had imported from North America in the hopes that he could breed them.
“Alas,” he told Forster, “they will not breed in captivity. It is, for me—as for them—a great tragedy. In North America, they are all but exterminated.”
Forster had bowed his head and allowed a moment’s silence as if
in memoriam.
Not that he felt no sorrow—in fact, he felt it profoundly. But he was on a quest—and he needed an ally. To this end, if Dominic Fréjus was sympathetic, he had found the perfect coconspirator.
“I need,” Forster said, “six homing pigeons.”
“I have but four,” Fréjus told him. “Why do you need them?”
“To correspond with a friend who is receiving treatment in the Burghölzli Clinic.”
“Ah, yes.” Fréjus smiled. “A victim of the yellow wagon.”
“What is the yellow wagon?”
“It is the wagon used to collect the Clinic’s specimens.”
“I see.”
“You have not observed it?”
“No.”
“You will, in time. It passes almost every day through the streets. Mostly, its clients are the families of crazy people, but on occasion it carries people off from the parks and from the steps of the Cathedral. Religious fanatics, you know—or the incapacitated who have drunk themselves into a corner. And so—you want my homers?”
“Only to borrow, if I may. They will, of course, return to you—but I am hoping they will do so bearing messages for me. My friend is devoted to birds, and at home in England we often correspond by this method. I thought it might cheer him up.” Forster considered this an inoffensive lie and felt no compunction in telling it.
Dominic Fréjus leaned forward where he sat on the parapet of the hotel roof and looked at the
bank clerk
, slowly nodding his head.
“It would be a good thing,” he said, “to brighten the
days of one who is ill.” He smiled. “Of course, you will need a cage,” he added.
“Indeed.”
“But you need not worry. I have such a cage in which I transport them on our excursions into the countryside. I release them perhaps a mile, two miles away and they find their own way home. The exercise is good for them. I trust they will be fed by your friend?”
“Of course. I shall send some mixed grain along with them.”
“In that case, you may have the use of my homing pigeons, if I may have the use of fifty francs.”
“Done,” said Forster—and they shook hands.
On Monday the 10th of June, Pilgrim had been discharged from the violent ward and returned to his rooms on the third floor.
He wore white, having requested that Kessler bring the white suit, white shoes and even a white straw hat. His tie on this occasion was green—a colour that, for Pilgrim, denoted freedom. He also carried his walking stick.
“We look,” Kessler told him, “as if we were about to depart for Venice.”
“Perhaps we are,” said Pilgrim. “Destination: San Michele, Isle of the Dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kessler, bearing the last of Pilgrim’s toiletries, his pyjamas, bathrobe and slippers plus shaving utensils in a canvas bag, followed his ward along the darkened
corridors where all the doors were closed until, at last, they came to a corridor where all the doors stood open.
Pilgrim reached up and pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes. He had waited so long for the sun that when he saw it he was dazzled.
On arrival at number 306, he allowed Kessler to precede him, and to fling open the succession of doors until it seemed there could be no more room for sunlight but only the sun itself.
Pilgrim went immediately to the windows and opened them one by one, stepping back to let the air and a soft breeze enter.
There were the pigeons—there were the doves.
“Bread,” said Pilgrim, laying aside his walking stick.
Kessler went to the bureau and produced a brown paper bag full of crumbled toast and croissants, raisin loaf and rolls.
Pilgrim said: “soo-soo-soo. There, there,” and began to scatter bounty.
From his windows at the Baur au Lac, Forster had watched this scene through his binoculars. Pilgrim in white and the cretin Kessler standing in the background, folding clothes.
Another twinge of nostalgic regret pulled at Forster’s memory—the thought of all the mornings he had laid out Pilgrim’s suits and jackets, shirts and ties and shoes and all the nights he had pulled down the covers of the bed and set out pyjamas, robe and slippers. And
Agamemnon, the regrettable but charming little tyke, whose favourite trick was to crawl beneath the covers and lie in wait for his master. Such a long while ago, it seemed. Such a long, long while ago.
Pilgrim removed his hat and slowly began to fan his face with it—back and forth, back and forth in the manner of a lady watching her flock of daughters from the sidelines at a ball.
He turned away. Apparently there had been a knock at the door. Kessler was laying down the folded clothing. The figure of Doctor Jung made its entrance.
Forster swung his gaze to the right until he had managed to bring the sitting-room into view. Jung appeared to be agitated.
It was both fascinating and maddening not to be able to hear what was being said.
Had Pilgrim done something wrong? Why was Jung so clearly angry?
After a moment, the anger—so it seemed—began to melt and a kind of resigned fatalism took its place—a throwing up of hands—a sequence of shrugs—a wiping of the brow and then dejection, Jung’s head bowed, his body stilled.
Pilgrim said something.
Jung replied.
Then Jung spoke to Kessler and Kessler bowed in that beastly, cringing Germanic way that Forster could not abide—the resigned subservience of the soldier to his commandant, the burgher to his mayor, the slave to his master.
Stand up and square yourself!
Forster wanted to shout. In fact, he actually spoke the
words aloud. “All you have to do is say:
yes!
You don’t have to kiss his boots!”
Jung departed.
Forster waited for the sound of a closing door, but of course it never came.
Then Pilgrim returned to the bedroom, threw his hat on the bed and pulled a chair up closer to the windows open to the balcony.
He looked towards the mountains.
His face was a mask of anguish.
Forster lowered the binoculars.
What can have happened?
What could it be? Had someone else died? Or was it, as too often, that someone had not?
Jung had returned, though not contritely, to the fold. He was there to stabilize and solidify his relationship with Emma, not to forget or to forego his affair with Antonia Wolff. The latter was now an undebatable fact and Emma would have to live with it or leave.
She had chosen to stay.
I can make my own life
, she had said. And she would, though it would not be the life she had craved and had once thought was in her grasp. She was to have been the undisputed centrepiece of Carl Gustav’s domestic life—his wife, his companion, his intellectual equal. And the mother of his children.
She had delighted in their academic arguments, in
providing him with research and in entertaining his friends and colleagues at what everyone had called the most stimulating and rewarding dinner parties in the psychiatric community. Freud had sat at their table—Adler, Jones and James. The poet Ezra Pound and the young Thomas Mann, who had only just published
Death in Venice
—and Gustav Mahler, in 1910, who had come to Zürich to conduct his stupendous
Symphony of a Thousand
, with its tribute to Goethe’s
Faust
. Carl Gustav, of course, had particularly gloried in this latter visit because of his claimed, if distant relationship to the great German poet, whose words had provided the choral finale of the work.
