Pilgrim (50 page)

Even thinking of it now, Emma was elated by the memory of sitting in the grand concert hall wearing her elegant rose-red gown and her seven long strands of pearls. And the tiny figure of Mahler, caught in her opera glasses, stirring up the souls of both the living and the dead—sweeping the whole of existence towards the heavens…

Oh, what wonderful times Carl Gustav and I have seen and shared and treasured,
she thought.
And now…?
Who could tell. She must share him with Antonia Wolff, which she would—though never without vigilance and sorrow. All to say nothing of the fact that, as always, she must share Carl Gustav with his work.

On the night of Pilgrim’s release from the violent ward, Jung had returned to Küsnacht in a state of great agitation. Something had happened which at first he would not discuss. This failure to communicate was now the norm.

Ever since the sinking of the
Titanic
in April, Jung had developed an irritating habit which Emma could hardly bear to watch. Wetting the index finger of his right hand, he would use it to pick up every last crumb of food from his plate, having stated at the outset that
all survivors must be offered rescue.
The cruel white surface of his dinner plate was now the cruel white surface of the North Atlantic—ice floes and all. Little mounds of mashed or riced potato would be all that remained of his meal by the time he was through playing Lifeboat. He never finished off these latter, perhaps because he feared they would freeze his tongue.

Emma was resigned to sitting out this rescue operation. Once, back in April, she had rung the silver bell for Lotte before the de-crumbing had been completed. As Lotte had reached for Jung’s plate, he had locked it to the tabletop in an iron grip.

“Leave it,” Emma had said. “I will ring again when the Doctor has finished.”

Now, she was worried. Not only had Carl Gustav wandered in the dallying sense, he was wandering increasingly in other ways. Lifeboat was not his only game. There were building games with pencil fortresses erected on his library table—virtually hundreds of pencils piled in interlocked squares and towers—great green and yellow
castle keeps
and
outposts in the wilderness
. There was the pebble game—modelled, so Carl Gustav claimed, on the Japanese game of Go—played not with single stones, but miniature piles of them. There was the dungeon game by the garden shed and a graveyard game in the flowerbeds.
The minuscule graves were all left open, as if the dead had risen; and the
dungeon
was a three-sided tent made of sticks in which he had placed a footstool, where he would sit for whole Sunday mornings or Saturday afternoons. He called it his
wigwam
, but it was not. It was his dungeon in the dark, with its back to the shed and its sides overhung with the branches of a rowanberry tree.

These games were never discussed, merely developed and practised. It was Emma who had named them.

On the night of June the 10th, dinner consisted entirely of vegetables—cauliflower, mushrooms, stuffed tomatoes and creamed spinach. The tomatoes were an innovation which Emma herself had concocted:
scoop out the centres, replacing them with raisins, wild rice and a sprinkling of crushed peanuts
. Frau Emmenthal had broiled them on a bed of early basil leaves. They were delicious.

Carl Gustav was not impressed. He pushed his food around his plate, feeding from its corners only, staring at it vacantly, looking away to consult some figure in space—or seemingly so—and locating his focus by means of closing his eyes, tilting his head, reopening his eyes and gazing into whatever distance was consequently offered

Suddenly he said: “there will be no Moon tonight.”

It was a complete non sequitur.

Emma laid her knife and fork aside and raised her napkin.

“What makes you say so, my darling? The calendar tells us…”

“I don’t care what the calendar tells us. There will be no Moon.”

“Yes, dear.”

“The Moon is dead. Furtwängler has killed it.”

“I see.”

Emma was becoming practised in this form of response—the non-committal reply that left all the doors standing open. She knew that Carl Gustav would explain whatever he was proposing and she knew that it would either be madness, pure and simple, or it would lead to some psychological dilemma he had encountered amongst his patients. There had recently been instances when his opening sentence had caused her heart to stop:
no more dogs—they have all departed
; and:
if you could dance with the Devil, which rhythm would you choose?
And:
did you know that Robert Schumann mutilated his own hands in order to improve his extension?

Two of these openers had proven to be simple introductions to problems either solved or unsolved in the lives of his patients. The line about dancing with the Devil had never been explained. It lay there between them, begging an answer Emma dared not give.
The tango
, she would have said, but Carl Gustav left the table to shut himself up in his study before she could reply.

Tonight, the Moon had died.

Emma waited.

“I went in this morning expecting to spend the day with Mister Pilgrim,” Jung began.

“Yes. You said so as you left.”

“When I got there, he was not immediately available. And so I went to check on some of the others—Miss Schumann-hands, the Penless Writer, et cetera. And—oh, dear God…”

All at once Carl Gustav pushed his chair away from the table and sobbed.

Emma stood up.

Wait.

She waited.

Carl Gustav removed his glasses, fumbled for his handkerchief, found it and pressed it to his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t—I just cannot bear it.”

“Oh, my darling…” Emma went to the far end of the table, pulled out a side chair and sat down facing him on an angle. She took his left arm in her hand and gently held it. “What—what has happened?”

“Blavinskeya…the Countess…”

“No. Please don’t tell me. Not that lovely, wondrous woman…”

“Yes.”

Jung could not stop crying.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“But my darling—you did everything you could. Everything. It was that maniac Furtwängler. He simply refused to let her go. Oh, God—how very sad. How wrong. How sad.”

They sat for a moment in silence.

Lotte entered.

Emma waved her away.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Jung had begun to fold his handkerchief—squaring it—squaring it and squaring it again. Emma, at last, removed it from his hands and handed him her own.

Jung then fell to his knees and laid his head in her lap, embracing her waist—the smell of her own cologne rising from his fingers.

“She was my prize,” he said. “She was my undeniable proof that all of us cannot conform to all the rules of normalcy. We dragged her here and held her here against her wishes and—yes—I was a part of that—yes, I was part of it, until I understood she did not belong amongst us. Wasn’t it—isn’t it—wasn’t it wonderful! All these other lives that people live and need to live—and yet, we call them
crazy
.”

“Some of them—most of them are, Carl Gustav.”

“I know that. I know—but she was crazy all the way to sanity. She lived up there in the sky, alive—
alive
—until we anchored her. Dragged her down to
this
—this dreadful place where everyone is mad and nothing works and the world ends every day. I should never have let her go. I should have insisted. She was mine, but Furtwängler claimed her. And the moment I was distracted by Pilgrim—I lost her.”

“You must not blame him. Not Mister Pilgrim.”

“I don’t. I’m only saying—if I hadn’t been distracted, this would not have happened.”

Yes, Carl Gustav. If only you had not been distracted.

Emma placed one hand on the back of his head.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

“In the night—last night,” he told her.

“Yes?”

“In the night, last night, she went onto the upper balcony—you remember—four storeys up—above the portico…”

“Yes.”

“Somehow, Schwester Dora had lost control of her. I don’t really know exactly how. It might have been that she went to get a cup of cocoa, something as simple as that. Whatever it was, however long she was gone, it was long enough for the Countess to escape. God knows how she knew her way to the balcony. God knows why or how there was access. The building has been designed to prevent such things, but somebody failed her—left a door open—a window unlocked. God knows.”

Jung sat back, but remained on the floor at Emma’s feet.

“Go on.”

“In her report this morning, Schwester Dora—for whom I feel so sorry—oh, how she loved the Countess! In her report, she told us that Blavinskeya had been restrained by Doctor Furtwängler—drugged and restrained and abused.”

“Abused. Good heavens!”

“Not in any physical way, but she was yelled at, according to Schwester Dora—yelled at repeatedly and, in other sessions, submitted to Furtwängler’s
whispering campaign.
His god-damned whispering campaign. I’ve told you about it before—his insidious whispers in the patient’s ear while the patient is drugged and asleep:
you do not live on the Moon—you
have never lived on the Moon—the Moon does not exist—come down—come down and join the human race…!
Come down, come down and join the human race. And so…”

“She jumped.”

“She jumped.”

Emma reached out and emptied her husband’s wine glass.

“How do we know she wasn’t reaching for the Moon?” she said. “I watched it myself, last night—and wished I could have reached it.” Then she stood up and said: “you must not blame yourself for this, Carl Gustav. It is right for us to grieve, but she herself would not have blamed you. It is the ignorance of incompetents—of men like Josef Furtwängler, who do not belong in psychiatry—who believe only in mediocrity—in commonality and normalcy and God help those who don’t or can’t conform to it.”

She went to the middle of the table, retrieved the carafe and poured them each a full glass of wine.

“Let us drink to the Countess Blavinskeya,” she said.

Jung stood up with some effort. His legs had partially gone to sleep.

Watching her husband, Emma thought:
all survivors must be offered rescue.

She raised her glass.

“To the Moon,” she said, “and to its latest resident.”

They drank.

They sat.

The Moon rose, resplendent, ivory white and smiling.

In the morning, before he took the ferry to Zürich, Jung retired to the garden and stayed there for some time. Emma watched him from the window, and after his departure, she went to inspect the flower beds in which he had seemed so interested.

One of his graves had been closed and covered with earth. Digging on her knees, Emma discovered the body of a single rose. She kissed it and laid it back in place, after which she scrabbled the soil so Carl Gustav would not be able to tell she had pulled it aside. The rose was pure white and had been named for Anna Pavlova.

6

Since his time in the violent ward, Pilgrim had been forced to take his exercise in the walled garden at the rear of the Clinic, where he walked in the company of other “dangerous” prisoners and their keepers. He always wore his white suit and carried his walking stick—unless it was raining, in which case he carried his umbrella. The great wet heat of the alpine summer had descended and the consequent discomfort caused everybody to move as though walking on sand through water.

“My legs hurt,” he complained to Kessler. “Are you sure this is necessary?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a rule. Every patient—unless confined—must take an hour’s exercise every day. It keeps you regular and it helps the circulation.”

“The circulation of what?” Pilgrim asked facetiously. “My spleen?”

They walked in circles—some in circles of eight, others of six and four—most, like Pilgrim with Kessler, alone with their keepers. The walls were made of whitewashed stone and were twelve feet high. Along their tops, broken glass had been sunk in cement so that its jagged edges would dissuade the inmates from thoughts of escape.

“Convicts,” Pilgrim told Kessler. “That’s what we are, out here in this yard. It might as well be a prison.”

Pilgrim thought of Wilde at Reading Gaol and of the notorious circle of prisoners, some in ankle-irons, in whose company Wilde had been forced to walk every day. Embezzlers, rapists, murderers and a multitude of men whose crimes were as petty as theft of clothing from wash lines, loitering with intent to keep warm or to feed themselves from the refuse left at the rear of restaurants and hotels.
Even,
Oscar had mused
, from my own unfinished plate at the Café Royale.

As for those who populated the yard at the Burghölzli, there was a common theme of violence—but little else that might have put them there. Some were incurable addicts who, suffering the panic and pain of withdrawal, had struck their nurses and keepers. Some were suicidal—one ate glass, another ate stones. Others were guilty of multiple attempts to escape—men and women who variously disguised themselves as corpses or hid themselves in laundry hampers or dressed themselves as doctors or nurses.
There was a woman who had forced herself on a male patient, becoming pregnant in the process and now attempting by various means to abort her child.

Just a normal, everyday selection of human foibles and failures
, Pilgrim had remarked.
Just another roll-call of waste.

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 15th, the sun was so appallingly evident that Pilgrim took his umbrella with him into the exercise yard and used it as a parasol.

White suit—black shade
, he said to Kessler.

Some of the patients had managed to dissuade their keepers from keeping this rendezvous with good health. Pilgrim had not succeeded. Kessler was adamant.