Secret Dreams (18 page)

He said this mouthful in the blandest manner possible,- by the end of it, Frau Schanderein was trembling from neck to bosom, her mouth working as if to spit bile from her lips … But her throat made only cracked sounds. Her husband's face had gone strangely pale. He suddenly looked right at her, stricken, imploring her to speak. Do something … Say anything.

“Examine us!” the woman cried. “But we're not the sick ones. She is!”

“That may be,” Herr Doktor went on calmly, ignoring their discomfort. “But nevertheless I will have to arrange for full physical examinations so we can look for any signs of hereditary or congenital defects that might contribute to your daughters condition. Defects that you yourselves might not even be aware of. Signs of past exposure to venereal disease. Syphilis. And the possibility of gonorrhea. Which in your case, madam, will require a pelvic examination.”

The parents' outrage gave way to a long moment of stupefied numbness. “Venereal disease …,” the woman said in a bare whisper as if she'd never spoken the words before.

Whatever possessed him to pursue this line? he wondered bitterly. Oh yes — the way the parents looked. So smug and satisfied, so secure in themselves. He wanted to scrape a bit of that away. Well, at least some of it had gone now. The man and the woman were glancing furtively at each other, fearing something of their own transparency.

Herr Doktor took two lined writing pads from his desk drawer and two sharpened pencils from a laboratory beaker by his elbow, put one pencil on each pad, which he slid across the desk.

“These notepads are for you. Please write down your full medical histories, listing any diseases, chronic ailments, or bouts of sickness you may have had. Also, Frau Schanderein, please note the date of your last internal pelvic examination, if any. And you, Herr Schanderein, the date of your last prostate examination, if any. And lastly, please list the series of your daughter's attacks and the dates they occurred. If you can remember what activities precipitated them — family outings, school life, activities, whatever — that might be helpful. I'll leave you alone now. The lavatory is down the hall to the right. I'll send Nurse Bosch by in a little while if you'd like something from the cafeteria. If you need me, I'll be outside your daughter's room. Or the floor orderly will know where I am.”

The two of them stared dumbly at the pads, paralyzed. He paused at the door with an afterthought, addressing the husband:

“I am of the deep suspicion, sir, that Frau Schanderein and yourself have ceased to live as man and wife. And that it has been some time since your last relations. Did you cease relations before your child's first attack? Or was it later, as the dismal prospect of caring for your daughter
indefinitely
began to weigh on your marriage? Please note any contributing factors this state of affairs may have had on your daughter's condition.”

Herr Doktor was glad to be able to finish this last bit without any objections. The parents had not turned to look at him as he paused by the door, but now Herr Schanderein bowed his head slightly. A gesture of supplication, of pleading, of imploring Herr Doktor not to leave him alone with himself or his wife.

Frau Schanderein appeared outside the girl's room ten minutes later, saying simply, “We'd like to talk to you, Herr Doktor.”

Back in his office, the yellow pads lay empty. He saw the Schandereins were terrified of writing, of putting their hands to the blank empty sheets as their own banality welled up to meet them. But they were willing to talk now, tell him anything — anything but write. Their story came out in broken bits, falling before him like the dislocated pieces dumped from a puzzle box. Lies, truths, half-truths, half-lies, foolishnesses, incoherencies — he let them run on. It was good to hear them speak. He made some notes: the specialists they had consulted, the number of attacks, snatches of family medical history, all the little innocent things he had wanted in the first place.

Nothing really helped, but in giving of themselves this tiny bit, they were giving him their daughter. He felt it, like a silent agreement being struck: the girl was changing hands. Just their saying, “This is who we are/' was a token of faith, like an offering. Please, Herr Doktor … please take care of her. And he was satisfied they meant it.

By the end, the Schandereins were actually leaning toward each other in their chairs, adding to one another's stories as they spoke. And when they had finished, Herr Doktor Jung poured them each a glass of sherry from a green decanter he kept on the bookshelf. The man tossed it back in one gulp,- Frau Schanderein took it down deeply in two. Herr Doktor saw them out of his office with the sugary sweetness still on the tip of his tongue. He put the yellow pads away, the sharp pencils back in their beaker. He dusted off the two pamphlets and the dream book, putting those away as well. He never saw the Schandereins again.

Later in the day, a gang of orderlies fetched the girl's steamer trunk from the parents' hotel; they lugged it, sweating and grunting, up to the fourth floor. The big trunk sat in the hall beside her door, where it remained untouched and unopened for a very long time.

Frau Schanderein also sent along a bouquet of flowers, addressed to “The Good Herr Doktor Jung,” with a card that read:
Thank you for your continued effort
. He was tempted to throw the flowers out his office window, but something stopped him. So he tucked the card between the pages of his early case notes and gave the flowers to Nurse Bosch instead. Who in turn gave them to Tom Thumb, the dwarf, with his first prescription of petroleum jelly. To the small fellow's undying gratitude, Herr Doktors request had been approved — provisionally.

Every day he went to the patient's room. Every day the patient shrieked. And every day he leaped out again. The ritual went on, unchanging, as summer waned. In the early days of October, the garden below the girl's window turned to fire and flame. When the wind blew on a bright day, bread-loaf clouds raced across a Spanish sky, and the red-gold light from the faces of the tingling aspen leaves flew up into the patients window, dancing about the whitewashed walls of her room.

The hospital staff went about its normal routine: patients were admitted or discharged, meals were cooked and served, the dirty dishes carted off, bedpans filled and emptied, cases diagnosed, reports written, filed, then forgotten. And whenever a certain Herr Doktor tried to enter his patient's room, a murderous shriek rang out and the young fool leaped back into the hall as if stung by a wasp.

Days passed. And weeks … Then one morning when Herr Doktor came for his visit he noticed the patient had opened the window. A dun-colored sparrow perched on the sill. The bird pecked at a crumb and then looked brightly around the room. It chirped once, twice, thrice! The girl, wrapped in swathings from head to toe, now sat facing the bird as it bobbed for crumbs at the open window. The hair on his legs stood up; a creeping invisible hand going down his spine and between his buttocks:

She hadn't shrieked the bird away!

He turned from the viewing slit and removed his glasses. Someone passed in the hall, speaking to him, but he didn't hear and nodded his head, hoping the person would go away. A bird on the windowsill … a harmless little sparrow … Was it only
people
the girl didn't like?

An oily sweat broke out on his forehead, and he mopped it off with his handkerchief; he must look into the room again. He hastily cleaned his glasses with the same rag, smearing them worse than before. He looked into the room. Ja, a sparrow on the sill. The patient still facing it. Fact: the girl was discriminating. Actively choosing her company:
I'll bam this, not that
.

And her company was a bird.

Yet all else remained as before. The thing on the bed like an immovable, shrouded idol. A statue of a person, hung with a drape. Just like a real statue, waiting … waiting for someone to pull the drapery off and reveal her stone form to the world.

No! No! No!

How easy to get it all wrong. The patient wasn't waiting like a wallflower at a dance. The patient was saying: No
one
—
Absolutely no one —
can come inside unless I say so.

All these weeks and days of September gone … What an obvious statement! He wanted to hit his head against the wall. Her silence was not withdrawal! The dead mummy was not hiding but aggressively exercising her authority over the immediate space of her hell. The air around her body, what people saw of her person, her bed, her room — the girl's silence a stifled shriek of…
defiance
.

And now her parents' words came back at him. “She was always trouble. Always putting her nose where it didn't belong, sneaking up on us when we were in bed.”

“How old was she then?”

“Three or four,” Herr Schanderein said.

“And what did you do?”

“Nothing,” Frau Schanderein said.

“You ignored it?”

“Of course not,” the woman said, annoyed. “We simply locked the door. Locked her out.”

“But didn't she stand outside the door and cry?”

“Children cry all the time,” the woman said. “Who remembers?”

“And so you left her there in the hallway. Alone.”

“Yes,” said Frau Schanderein, with a hint of a smile. “A child has to learn.

Herr Schanderein glanced at his wife sourly, savoring a private reproach. “She liked to get the little bugger mad,” he said.

Frau Schanderein didn't contradict but thrust her dignified bosom at him. “And why not? When you were always ready to be Herr Küssen-Küssen.”

Herr Kiss-Kiss she called him, in soft-mouthed contempt, as if her husband kissed all manner of unclean things — rotten fruit, soiled rags, sewer grates. But now it struck Herr Doktor as he stood outside the daughter's door how the whole business had come full circle. Once little Fräulein Schanderein had been kept out when she wanted to get in. Now she made
him
the little bugger waiting in the hall.

It had taken two orderlies to carry the girl bodily into 401. Was this a girl on the verge of entering medical school? In America, maybe, but certainly not in Europe. Here you had to walk and talk and present yourself. No shriekers. No mutes. No huddled mummies alone in their rooms.

Yet she allowed a sparrow … The bird had succeeded where the man had failed. What distinguished a sparrow from a man? Fool … of course! The sparrow was an animal. Not able to ask politely, “Fräulein, may I come in, please?” Only people asked permission when they wanted to enter. And the girl knew it. Any child knew it — if she'd walked unbidden into her parents' bedroom. Or been locked out, stranded before a bolted door, begging for attention yet studiously ignored. Any child would know enough to ask, “May I come in?” But no, no, not the birdbrained junior physician, not the highly educated, self-important Herr Doktor, who doesn't even know enough to knock-knock-knock!

Oh, God, three weeks of barging into the room. Days and hours of barreling in and getting shrieked out — squandered! More time wasted standing stupidly in the hall each day, watching the wrapped mummy on the bed. All leading up to thirty seconds of watching a dun-colored sparrow peck at some crumbs. He shuddered with embarrassment, at his own stupidity. He wiped a sweaty palm across his forehead and back over his scalp. Then spoke through the door:

“Forgive me, Fräulein, for-being-so needlessly rude these past weeks.”

An orderly mopping the floor at the end of the hall leaned on his mop to listen. Herr Doktor breathed deeply and plowed ahead.

“I realize now, Fräulein, that I must apologize for rudely entering your room without permission. I apologize. Please forgive me. And all of us who have thoughtlessly thrown ourselves at you.”

For three weeks then, orderlies and nurses had also barged in several times a day, to bring the girl's meals, to remove the dirty dishes, and to replace a bedpan or chamber pot, as necessary. “Fräulein,” he said squarely to the glass viewing slit. ‘‘Henceforth, I promise these daily intrusions will end.”

He glanced at the orderly leaning idly on his mop.

“Don't you have anything better to do?”

Without a word the man went back to mopping the floor in a desultory, spiritless way. He could tell the orderly's ears were perked for any more juicy bits to repeat later. So now, there would be new opinions formed when a certain junior physician denied the hospital staff access to the room of the New Victim in 401. Unfavorable opinions. Imagine the gall — barring nurses and orderlies from a private room!

Christ, how stupid! Was she even listening? And why say “I'm sorry” when he probably couldn't do anything about the comings and goings of the daily routine? There must be a way to bring the girl food without intruding. Cut a slot in the door? No, too much like a prison. And what of clean sheets? A hospital was nothing if not a place where clean sheets came whenever they're wanted. Forget about clean sheets for now. Eating and eliminating were the main problems at hand.

And then he saw how it was to be done.

“I'll bring the meals myself,” he said to the viewing slit.

So far he had not looked into the room. He imagined any minute a shriek erupting from within to cut him off, shatter the momentary calm, crush the tiny crumb of understanding he had gleaned about the girl…. At last he dared a glance through the glass viewing slit. The sparrow now gone. The mummy on the bed had curled itself up like a dog. For the first time he saw part of the patient's body: grimy white socks on her feet, the socks matted and twisted so the heel came about in the wrong place. Could a sock get that dirty in only three weeks? Or had the same pair been on the girl's feet since the middle of summer in Rostov? He wondered what else he might find under the mummy's wrappings. The girl's underclothes, hanging in looping gray shreds beneath. Bedsores. Scabies. Fleas …