Secret Dreams (23 page)

But no screech came and in twenty seconds he sat before her in the uncomfortable chair that dug into his ribs with wooden fingers.

Fräulein Schanderein stood in the corner, cloaked head to toe in two blankets clutched together. Outside her window the branches of the maple tree shivered in the wind. An ice storm the night before had lacquered one side of the tree trunk so it glistened with ice. The midday light turned the tree's frozen sheath to silver, with blue sky reflected along the bark. No more leaves clung to the tapered branches, just bare translucent fingers. Was she looking at the beauty of this too?

He glanced at the bed. The sheets, free at last of her body, were yellowed and grayed with constant use. He saw the place where she had torn the strips of swaddling to make the gifts. Almost a perfect square hole in the center of the top sheet. Most amazing. She'd done it without scissors or shredding the sheet completely. He must try it at home sometime. But why give up the sheets now?

He almost laughed. Of course, of course!

“Ja, Fräulein — it's about time, no?”

He got up and said, “May I take them off the-bed?” The briefest pause. “Very well, I'm going to take them off the bed.” He stripped the mattress, wrapping her sheets into a damp ball.

“And may I go to the door, ja?”

He opened the door.

“Bolzen! Come here, please.”

Apelike, Bolzen lumbered to the door. He tried to peek around Herr Doktor into the room.

“Bolzen, Î didn't ask you to stare into Fräuleins room.”

Bolzen latched his eyes to Herr Doktors tie, then took the yellow sheets as they were thrust into his paws.

“Please have these washed and ironed and returned within the hour. I'll wait for them here.”

“Very well, Herr Doktor.”

Bolzen disappeared. The girl and he were alone once more. She had not strayed from the window. And now he realized he had sat without asking permission. The sun had shifted, making the ice on the bark gray and opaque. A peculiarly splayed branch reminded him of something. It looked so familiar, the way the taloned fingers curved and hooked. For some reason he imagined Orderly Bolzen doing the washing and ironing. Bolzen in a white apron and washerwoman's dress, Bolzen sweating over a hot iron … And then he recalled the dancing animals that ran around the border of his childhood room. My God, he hadn't thought of them in years. Wasn't there a dancing bear in a pink tutu? Bolzen the bear. Wasn't there a monkey too? What was the monkey supposed to be? Oh yes, he remembered now: the monkey was a doctor in a white coat with a stethoscope.

What did those taloned branches remind him of? It had something to do with his childhood room. Or a dream …

Bolzen knocked on the door. He had returned with the sheets. The hour had passed. He took the sheets from the orderly,- they smelled fresh and starched. He began to spread them over the bed, first the bottom sheet, then the top —

The hairs on his neck rose. Something wrong. Wrong with the sheets. He felt the mummy stir and gasp, “Ah
—-
! Ahh —!” building to a howl.

Wrong sheets! No hole in the top!

Bolzen had given him a fresh pair, not the same pair. These weren't
her
sheets. The gasps came faster now. “Ah —! Ahh —! Ahhh —!” Soon a shriek.

‘Til get them! I'll get them!” he stammered. “Wait! Just wait a moment!” Frantically he tore the fresh sheets off the bed and plunged headlong into the hall. Orderly Bolzen was reading a magazine in the chair. He looked up, surprised to see Herr Doktor barreling down on him with the sheets balled in his fists. “Where are the sheets?! These aren't her sheets! Give me her sheets!” Bolzen sat in the chair, too startled to argue.

Herr Doktor plucked the magazine from his hand and flung it aside. He shook the balled sheets under the orderly's nose. ‘“‘What were you doing for an hour? Sleeping? Drinking? These are new sheets from the linen room. Not the ones from her bed!”

Bolzen tried to say, “Yes, yes, they are —” But Herr Doktor hammered him down. “Where's the hole? There's no hole!” Bolzen cowered. He didn't know — God, he didn't know.

“So we're going to find her sheets,” Herr Doktor ordered. “Wherever they are. In the laundry room. In the wash bags. The tubs. The baskets. Right now!”

Bolzen found himself dragged off the chair by his coat lapels and plunging down the stairs. Madly trying to remember! What the hell did he do with those damn sheets from 401? Did he even bring them to the laundry, or did he throw them away somewhere? What had he done after that bolt of schnapps from his bottle in the boiler room?

They turned the laundry upside down — tearing through the baskets of sheets and towels, fishing through the sopping tubs, dumping out the stuffed wash bags. They scrounged the lower depths of the hospital like rats, until Bolzen finally remembered where he had tossed them. Mashed in a corner, near the black, oily door to the boiler.

Herr Doktor marched the orderly and the sheets back to the laundry. All other work came to a halt. The sheets with the odd square hole were bleached and washed and ironed dry. Orderly Bolzen looked uselessly on.

In thirty minutes they were back outside room 401. Inside the room you could hear the faint gasping, “ah —-ah — ah —” as the girl waited for their return. She kept gasping as Herr Doktor made the bed. He put the sheet with the hole on top and smoothed out the wrinkles.

“I'm leaving now,” he said.

The mummy's faint gasps faded away. For a moment they stood together in silence. Outside the window, the sun had shifted again, turning the ice-clad tree shiny black. The branches were like antlers.

Àh yes, antlers … In his father's house, Àntlers on a plaque over Nanny Sasha's bed.

Before Herr Doktor left for the evening, he went once more to the girl's room and stared through the viewing slit. She had the sheets off the mattress and twined about herself. She draped the one with the hole over her shoulders like a poncho, while wrapping her head in the folds of the other, making the whole getup some kind of eyeless burnoose. But in a trick of the light or her clever winding, Herr Doktor saw a black hooded cowl where her face ought to be, a shadowy void instead of wound sheets.

When he got home that night, Herr Doktor had a glass of whiskey from a bottle his wife, Emma, kept in the parlor for guests. He never drank much, so the stuff slid into him like a liquid club and he slept the whole night through in a black sleep.

The “incident” with the sheets took up more than thirty minutes of his time. The head of the Orderly Section protested. The old washerwomen in the laundry room protested. There were even protests from other physicians when they found their private patients in an agitated state later that day. And to top it off, Junior Physician Jung had lost his temper at a valued member of the staff. Shame on him.

His Note-of-Procedure regarding it all promised to be a small book in length. The whole point of which boiled down to why young Herr Doktor thought this highly uncooperative girl (who had yet to utter a single word in four months) was more partial to one set of bedsheets over another.

Somewhere in his justification he disclosed the nature of Fräuleins gifts in the hospital's meat cooler. The result? Yet another protest from the kitchen staff. Why did the girl's excrement have to be kept, and kept in the kitchen? Another report. Through it all Herr Doktor tried to demonstrate the establishment of a limited, slim line of communication with the creature. And some members of the executive staff even disputed this, saying that most of Herr Junior Physician's claims of dialogue were mere stuttered salvos ired at a mute imbecile. Or worse, that Herr Doktor was only talking to himself. And yet… here he was saved.

Since in all fairness the patients original condition
had
changed since her entry to the hospital, and in view of Herr Junior Physician's outstanding record so far at the Burghölzli …

Direktor Bleuler kept all the reports and various protests on his desk in a single pile tied with a blue ribbon. And there the pile languished in an impenetrable lump.

Another note had dropped on the top of the pile. This one from the hospital librarian, reporting that Herr Doktor was checking out an inordinate number of medical texts. Should anyone call for them, the texts were most likely in his possession. In fact, he had already informed her not to expect one book returned and had paid full price for it — Kohl's
Biology
, a standard text for first-year medical students.

How curious … what could Jung possibly want with a first-year medical text? the Direktor wondered.

Herr Doktor had brought Fräulein Schanderein Volume I of Kohl's
Biology
and left it by her meal plate on the floor. How dismaying then, the next day to see its cover torn off and pages missing. But he had the feeling her act of destruction established her possession over the thing. As she had with her room, her body, the food she ate, her excrement. And now the book he gave her. For if a book was damaged, clearly it could no longer be returned and must remain.

He brought her other books: Leaman's
Anatomy
, Grunfeld's
Neurology
, Eisens
Psychology
(a very thin text), but she never touched them. They stood in a stack by the door.

Then one day as he made to leave he heard the sound of a heavy book falling to the floor. She had pushed a thick volume out from under the covers. The anatomy text. Here again the book had been handled, the pages folded or crushed, the spine cracked.

Reading … ?

“You know, Fräulein, I'd be happy to get you any
sort
of book.” But the girl said nothing, made no sign. He thought of a trained chimpanzee given a fork and spoon by its master. The chimp eats with the spoon for a while, then sticks it up his nose. The audience howls. Was she like that, dumbly pawing the pages of the books he brought her?

December had been unusually mild. A dusting of fallen snow had all but melted. With the window closed, the air in room 401 began -to get fetid. Perhaps Fräulein S had ceased to wash from the sink,- he smelled the tang of her perspiration. One day in the middle of December, he went to remove her chamber pot, as usual But now the mummy on the bed began to shake and tremble, gasping, “Ah —! Ahh — ! Ahhh —!” So he hastily put the pot back in its place on the floor. It was about a quarter full, with a mixture of stool and urine. The gasps came again when he tried to remove her meal plate. And so he left the partly eaten meal on the floor. The onset of a new stage? That night he wrote in his case notes.-

When he looked at the last sentence of his case notes, he wondered if there was not something to it after all. Yet what was he waiting on? Should he write the man in Vienna? With a dull ache in his throat and a leaden hand, he began to draft his letter to Herr Freud … but after only a few lines abandoned it, a scrawl of unfinished phrases. The curtains in his hospital office were drawn tight against the cold. Soft creakings came against the glass, soft patters. He drew back the curtains and saw the moon shine briefly through torn clouds. The silvery light caught the snowflakes as they leaped upon the glass panes before their ghostly vanishing…. The mahogany wainscoting of his walls and the dark beams on the ceiling shone redly. He sat in an armchair of dark-green leather, as if in a quiet grove of trees, while the snow whirled without.

What kind of tale to tell? À child's toilet-training tale.
Wunderbar
. He opened the window a crack. A few flakes danced into the room, holding their form for a moment before melting on the sill. So it was to be a snowy Christmas. And ja, he wanted to get her something, but what? Good question, What do you get a girl who has nothing? Some people in the hospital said openly Fräulein had made no headway whatsoever. That everything Herr Doktor claimed was an illusion. He folded his arms over the desk and rested his head. A snowflake blew into the room and coldly kissed the back of his neck,

* * *

After two more days her single chamber pot nearly brimmed over. Several dishes were strewn over the floor, overlapping each other. God, the smell! You got whiffs of it in the hall. And when inside the room, you breathed in shallow puffs. After twenty minutes it became unbearable. And then the flies! Three or four little black devils. In December! Amazing!

He hoped these were the adventurous few lured up from the warm, dark reaches of the basement, where they lived all year round, and not some winter breed, spawned from maggots in the meat. They were puny, drowsy things, buzzing lazily over the patient's refuse. One always crept across the top of his shoe. Whenever he flicked his foot it flew off, then darted back. How he hated them!

“May Î get you another chamber pot?” he finally asked, having at last the sense to think of it.

Now came the long open-ended pause he had almost grown used to, the silence saying, Leave it here and get me another one. So after a few more moments he rose, going to the door and calling out:

“Bolzen,
Achtung!
Please fetch another chamber pot. Thank you.”

A little while later, Bolzen came back with a clean chamber pot made of polished brass, with a broad lip curving inward so someone could squat comfortably. When Bolzen knocked, Herr Doktor announced, “I am going to open the door now. Bolzen has brought a fresh chamber pot.” As the door swung open, the smell struck the big orderly physically, a spasm of revulsion wrinkling his face. He thrust the chamber pot into the room blindly and stomped down the hall without waiting to be dismissed.

The smell was that bad, then…. Perhaps he had grown used to it. Better expect another protest soon and be ready with another report. He thought he caught a flicker of movement on the bed. He felt minutely examined, peered over, as if the patient was staring with one eye through a clever fold in the sheet. But when he looked directly at her, he saw nothing but the sightless burnoose.