The Lost Prince (62 page)

“We must follow,” the doctor said, now making a move toward the automobile.

Again, Will held out his hand to stop him. “Don’t worry,” he repeated. “Arnauld knows what he is doing.” And Will looked at his watch. “We have forty-five minutes.”

“I need to call the hospital,” Dr. Knoffler said, fully agitated.

And Will said he could do that if he wished, but it was not necessary. “Let us go find a coffee.”

Dr. Knoffler got into the automobile to do what he could to follow the small speck of oars and rower along the lakeside, and Will found a coffee in a nearby café.

On schedule, Will was back on the dock, where Dr. Knoffler was joined now by another doctor from the hospital, both frowning and looking alarmed.

“Look,” Will said, pointing off across the glassy blue lake. There coming toward them was the tiny speck of a two-oared boat, gliding across the surface. As it came closer, they could see the smooth muscles of the rower in totally synchronized movements. Will Honeycutt looked at his watch and said coolly, “Forty-five minutes.” The two doctors watched, now in a combination of relief and approbation.

As Arnauld approached the dock, they saw on his face the same blank look they all were accustomed to, but this time it had the slightest hint of something new beneath it, something like euphoria.

When Will met with Dr. Jung that afternoon at his house in Küsnacht, he was the one with the look of euphoria on his face.

“There is life in there,” he said in a burst of enthusiasm, recounting the details of the morning boating exercise.

Dr. Jung looked concerned for a moment, obviously reluctant to deflate the younger man’s hopes. “Muscle memory,” he said finally. “It is not what it appears to be.” And then he looked serious. “Did you read the reports?”

By then, Will had begun reading to Arnauld. “That is my plan,” he had said to Jung the day he arrived. “Arnauld has gone into a deep introverted paralysis.” The American used language he knew the Swiss doctor would understand. “His feminine has been severely wounded, his anima. It has been imprisoned deep within, and it is my job to go in and retrieve it. I intend to read to him until he comes out. I think you will find me tireless in that regard.”

Jung smiled at him patiently, not rejecting what Will had to say but not accepting it either, having in his hand by then a letter from his friend Eleanor, a full description of this “eccentric genius,” Will Honeycutt from Boston, who ought to be given a chance.

“I intend to read to him day and night, from his own writings, his beloved Homer, and from that small black volume he has been clutching in his hands ever since Mrs. Burden left.”

“Ah,” Jung said, “
City of Music
.”

“Yes,” Will Honeycutt said, “
City of Music
by Mr. Jonathan Trumpp.”

So Will Honeycutt read to his Viennese friend every day, all day and into the night, reading over and over the man’s letters to his friends and his parents, the works of Homer in an English translation, and the work from his cherished little black book
City of Music,
and on the rare occasions when he did tire, he found a Burghölzli intern to keep up the pace. Arnauld seemed to listen attentively to whatever was being read, responding to none of it.

On the third day of this reading regimen, Will Honeycutt said to his unresponsive friend, “Now, I have a treat for you.” He held out the child’s
picture book of the
Odyssey
that was dear to Eleanor’s son. “This is from Standish,” Will said. “He thinks you will like it very much.”

He opened the book slowly and laid it in Arnauld’s lap. Arnauld did not move, and Will began turning the pages, looking for some sign of attention. “Look here,” he said, as he came to young Standish’s favorite page. “Here is the Cyclops,” the reader said, and Arnauld’s eyes seemed to flicker for just an instant. “And here is Odysseus escaping under the belly of one of the sheep.” Again, just the hint of a recognition. It was an exercise that would be practiced every day.

“Herr Esterhazy seems to follow with special care the pages of the children’s book of the
Odyssey
as Honeycutt turns each page and points out the story behind each drawing,” one of the nurses reported to Jung in the second week. “One can almost make out a smile on the patient’s face as he follows along with the mythic adventures.”

But Jung remained unimpressed.

It was during these first few days that Will Honeycutt introduced his friend Arnauld to the three-ring binder and the typewriter, which he had acquired from the Burghölzli administration. “You will write,” he said to his friend, as more of a command than a suggestion. “Every day. You will write a page and then use this hole punch”—he held up the hole punch he had found—“and place the page in the binder. If you rewrite a page, adding more detail, you will drop the former page into this box. And you will call this expanding and evolving volume your Random Notes.” Will left nothing to chance.

Arnauld barely acknowledged the commands, but we do have evidence that he began the process in a very rudimentary fashion. Since none of the pages are dated, we do not know the timing, but from the complexity of thought expressed alone, we can establish the sequence. The very first page, the one at the very bottom of the box of discarded pages, contains only two words: “ARNAULD WIEN.” The next sheet in the pile reads, “ARNAULD WIEN MUSIK MALEN SKULPTUR CAFÉ.” And on what we can assume was the third day, on the third typed page we read, “MY NAME IS ARNAULD. I GREW UP IN VIENNA, A CITY OF MUSIC, PAINTING, AND CAFÉ LIFE.” And from that page forward, all the entries were written in English. And finally, after a few more
rudimentary pages found in order in the box, there is the page that remained permanently in place at the front of the volume, as the second page of what was to be called, per Eleanor’s instructions, his Random Notes.

When asked later by one of the doctors, “Why do you write in English, Herr Esterhazy?” the patient Arnauld responded, reportedly, “Because Korzeniowski wrote in English.”

At some point in the early days of the binder, his Random Notes, he typed the first page that remained at the front of the collection for the remainder of its life, and remains today. The page is yellowed and worn because it is the only one that was never revised and replaced. It says simply, “To my son.”

Similarly, the back page was placed in the early days and never removed. It was the photograph of the debonair lover given to Arnauld by his cousin Miggo. Will produced it one morning and held it up to Arnauld. “Do you recognize this?” Will said, and his friend only stared blankly, perhaps showing the most minute hint of a smile. “I believe this is your alter ego, and it belongs in your Random Notes.” Will took the hole punch and made three holes, the photo then took the binder and put the photo in place, where it too would stay permanently. Some days when Will
arrived in the hospital room, he found his friend sitting silently with the binder open to that last page, simply staring at it and showing that hint of a smile. “Inside every shy man,” Will would say as he took up his position in the nearby chair preparing for his daily readings. Even in the early days in the Burghölzli, it appeared that the photograph brought great pleasure.

During those early days also, at Will’s request, the doctors found at the university a graduate scholar of ancient Greek, and she came every day and read for an hour, mostly from the
Odyssey
. It was during one of these hours of Greek two weeks into the routine that Will Honeycutt noticed something that the ever-realistic Dr. Jung agreed was a more than slightly significant sign of hope. On that special afternoon, after seemingly endless days of nothing even close to progress, Will Honeycutt saw an almost imperceptible change as the young woman from the university read a passage near the end of the Greek
Odyssey
. Will called Jung and had him sit in on the next afternoon, and the two men watched and listened. Arnauld Esterhazy’s lips were moving as he listened. He was reciting from memory the words of Homer.

“Now,” Dr. Jung said as he and Will left the hospital room, “we have something.” And that evening the Swiss doctor wrote his friend Eleanor in Boston, “There is life in there. Our friend Mr. Honeycutt has indeed gone in deep and found his Eurydice.”

The next day, Will Honeycutt had changed his strategy. When he arrived in the morning, the hour before they left for the boathouse, Will handed Arnauld the Chapman translation of the
Odyssey
and said, “Here, you read.”

At first Arnauld only stared at the open book in his lap, the familiar blank look on his face, then when Will Honeycutt tapped a place on the page and said with firmness, “Here, begin here,” slowly the miracle happened. Arnauld Esterhazy began to read. Will smiled but showed no surprise. “Keep going,” he said, “we have the better part of an hour.” The passage Will Honeycutt selected for Arnauld was chosen not by accident. It was, it turned out, one of great significance.

The selected passage described how the gods had captured the winds in a bag and left them on deck so that Odysseus could sail home to Ithaca directly and without incident, and then how his men, suspecting that
their leader was keeping treasure from them, opened the bag, released the winds that blew their ship way off course and away for ten long years of adventure from which only Odysseus would return.

Later that morning when the single shell glided away from the dock of the boathouse on the Zürichsee, Will Honeycutt did not move from where he stood watching. He remained there for the full forty-five minutes, watching the boat glide away until it was a tiny speck in the distance and then waiting with total confidence until it reappeared, again as a tiny speck, rowing home.

TO TELL STORIES

B
y design, the readings had shifted to the
Iliad,
in both the Chapman translation and the graduate student’s Greek. “We will talk about the war,” Will had said to the patient one morning when there was a break in Arnauld’s reading. Will’s tone was gentle and respectful, but firm. “Very scientific,” one of the doctors said in his first report, “surprising from one untrained.”

“We will talk about the shelling and the mangled bodies and the rats and the lice and the blood.” Arnauld looked at him blankly and blinked, giving in the subtlest of facial expressions his permission. At first Will was guessing, reconstructing from reports he had read, and he admitted later from a good deal of imagination. He knew nothing of war firsthand, but he had read voraciously. He knew of the appalling conditions of a military whose strategies had become hopelessly outdated with the advent of heavy artillery, barbed wire, and machine guns. And he knew from Eleanor the descriptions from her companion Jodl, who had interviewed countless Italian prisoners and knew as much as most survivors about the grueling and pointless campaigns and the horrifying conditions.