Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘What do you see in them?’ he said innocently.

  ‘They are Jacques’s friends. You know how it is. I am not sure how fond you are of Kitty’s old friend from Vienna, what’s her name, and her husband—’

  ‘Indeed. But I see them only once a year and Kitty admits that it is a duty even for her. But Frau Drobesch—’

  ‘Roya. You knew her before, did you not?’

  ‘Yes, a little. Many years ago. She was a friend of Valade’s daughter. But Jacques does seem unusually . . . Attentive.’

  ‘She is more lively than her husband.’

  ‘Indeed. He is certainly a man of astonishing self-importance. What exactly is a “hofrat” anyway?’

  ‘I think it is a sort of councillor or courtier,’ said Sonia. ‘He spends a good deal of time inVienna offering his opinion on affairs of state.’

  ‘I think he is a man whom no one has ever told to pipe down. Brought up by adoring women, I suspect.’

  ‘Indeed. So naturally one gravitates towards the wife.’

  ‘And do you like her?’

  ‘Oh, Thomas, don’t be ridiculous. I am a doctor’s wife. We must go out sometimes. I do not criticise each person I meet. We dressup and dine. And the wine is good.’ Sonia looked at her feet.

  ‘And does it concern you at all that Jacques seems so rapt in her company. One would not have thought that intellectually—’

  ‘How do you know what they talk about? She is quite a cultivated woman. She speaks many languages and reads the newspapers and—’

  ‘But, Queenie, you know what I mean.’

  ‘This is quite improper, Thomas. I trust Jacques absolutely. He has never given me grounds to doubt him. I love him, you see. I love him without question.’

  ‘I know. But—’

  ‘I believe that the friendships Jacques has with other people are not, ultimately, any of my concern. Jacques may talk to a beautiful woman without betrayal. I trust and believe that I am the only woman that he thinks of in an amorous way.’

  ‘And if you were wrong?’

  ‘If I were wrong, Thomas, there would not be very much that I could do about it. In which case, it is better to retain one’s belief and one’s dignity.’

  Thomas was not reassured by this explanation, but if Sonia did not regard Jacques’s friendship with Roya as her business, then it certainly was not his. He returned to his books and began to prepare a lecture to be delivered in the spring of the following year. He shortened the horizon by choosing the date of his mother’s birthday.

  He then wrote to the owner of the Schloss Seeblick, who was in the process of turning the buildings into a hotel for the increasing tourist trade, and booked the North Hall for his lecture on May 12, 1909. By this time he would have to have organised his life’s thoughts on madness and humanity.

  The talk was advertised throughout Carinthia, and a notice was placed in the Viennese press. It was entitled: ‘Why Are Humans Mad? Dr Thomas Midwinter, co-founder of the celebrated Schloss Seeblick andWilhelmskogel Clinic, reflects on 25 years in psychiatric practice. North Hall, old Schloss Seeblick, 7 p.m., May 12th 1909. Please be seated by 6.45 p.m. Proceeds from admission to the St Ludovic’s Public Hospital Psychiatric Research Department.’

  The audience began to arrive soon after six. Lemonade, cakes and coffee were served to them on the lawn of the main courtyard. They were much the same people as those who had gathered for the orphanage musical evening: the wealthy bourgeoisie, the most indefatigable local socialites and those who liked to be seen at events denoting ‘culture’. For Thomas, there was also a representation from the university, the hospital, the local newspapers and the medical press. Hannes Regensburger had promised to come down from Vienna.

  ‘You look absolutely beautiful,’ Thomas said to Kitty, who was organising the refreshments.

  ‘Thank you. I like it here. It always makes me feel happy. It is a beautiful evening and my favourite chestnut tree is in bloom.’

  ‘“Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village madman—”’

  ‘The very one. And I have the prospect of listening to a thrilling lecture from my husband.’

  ‘It is not that thrilling, it—’

  ‘My darling Thomas, I spent four nights typing it out for you. I even corrected your German in a couple of places. I ought to know how interesting it is.’

  ‘And do your shoulders and hands hurt now? Do you dream of—’

  ‘Hush. Stop it.’

  ‘In any event, I may depart a little from that text.’

  ‘I have complete faith in you, Thomas. Oh look, there is Frau Drobesch.’

  ‘So she is. Talking to Dr Rebière, I see.’

  ‘Thomas, if you are going to be mischievous, you had better go away.’

  ‘I am sorry, Kitty. I am a little apprehensive. I shall go and collect my thoughts.’

  ‘Good idea. Charlotte. Come here. I need you to take these round. Where is Martha?’

  Without asking permission, Thomas went down the cloister to the main house.

  He paused for a moment at the double doors that he had pushed open so many times. He knew that he was susceptible to the past and wondered if it was a good idea to revisit. He pushed the door gently and gasped. The smell of the polished wood, pot pourri and old books was exactly as he remembered. All the years of hope came rushing up to meet him, and his heart turned over when he trod once more on the worn flags of the hall. His consulting room . . . And Jacques’s, where he had incredulously read the case history of his future wife, standing motionless in the window. He pushed open the bare wooden door. The bookshelves were empty; the room had been half-repainted, then abandoned. He remembered Sonia arriving from Paris for the first time, the suppressed excitement in her step as she accompanied him upstairs to the room that would one day be Daniel’s nursery.

  Thomas found tears starting in his eyes. He went down to the cellars, where they had first daringly installed electric light. His and Franz’s workbench was still there; there were even a couple of empty chemical bottles. He went to the end of the cellar and pushed softly at the door; he knew the twenty paces that would bring him up behind the cupboard in the South Court and had no need of a candle.

  Once there, looking carefully about him, to make sure he was not disturbing anyone, he climbed the stairs to his and Kitty’s old apartment. The bedroom was empty, but he could see her still, a twin at each breast, looking up at him defiantly, proudly, a fever spot on each cheek. There: I have done it now, her face seemed to say.

  He sighed from the pit of his heart. He thought of the sands at Deauville. Oh Daisy, oh Mary, oh Faverill, Olivier. Oh dearest Katharina. And Charlotte, Martha . . . What a long, long road it has been. And now I must explain it all . . .

  His courage was failing him. What on earth did he know? What could he ever know?

  He looked at his face in the looking glass on top of the chest, the Biedermeier one that had always been there. He saw the same eyes, the same wide brow that he had seen each day since his mother first sat him on her lap one cold morning in Lincolnshire and pointed to his face in her dressing-table mirror.

  You idiot, he thought. You fool.

  He took a flask of brandy from inside his coat and drank it off. Now go on, he said out loud. Go on and tell them.

  He went downstairs and walked briskly over to the main courtyard, where Kitty was waiting for him at the door into the North Hall.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She straightened his tie. ‘I love you,’ she said, kissing his cheek.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You smell of whisky.’

  ‘Brandy. Never mind. Are they all in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let us proceed.’

  The chatter of the audience subsided to a respectful silence as Thomas walked up to the dais.

  He put on the glasses that presbyopia had made him wear for reading, gripped the edges of the lectern, coughed once and began.

  ‘Ladies and gentlem
an, when I first entered the profession of mad-doctoring, or alienism, as it was then called, I was asked to register the new arrivals at a large county asylum in England, my native country. They were all mad – demented, manic, deluded, nonsensical – and it was a question only of finding a bed in a numbered ward and forgetting all about them. Bang. Shut the door. Goodbye. There is an old English ballad of a woman doomed to try to keep the waves of the sea off a small rock by means only of a broom: one little brush against the rising tides. That was me, that was our asylum and there was nothing we could do to cause the seas to fall.

  ‘Since that day twenty-three years ago I have given all my working life to treating the insane, and most of my resting hours to studying brain tissue beneath a microscope. I dream in histological patterns. I have read all the prominent work of my American and European colleagues, particularly the British, as they pushed forward their researches on different fronts; in this very place, the Schloss Seeblick, I have seen modest successes, some triumphs, few cures and several disasters.

  ‘When I first became a doctor, I worked hard to distinguish what we call the organic element of madness – by which we mean the observable disease or malfunction of cells – from the psychological, by which we meant the effects of the events in the life of the patient on his thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

  ‘We still dispute these things, and perhaps we always shall – at least until such time as we develop a magical apparatus for peering into the brain with such clarity that the function of each “neurone”, as Herr Waldeyer-Hartz has christened them, is apparent to us. Meanwhile, progress has been pitifully slow.

  ‘The greatest advance in my life as an alienist came just three years ago, when a German zoologist called Fritz Schaudinn discovered the microbe for syphilis and thereby showed that a peculiar range of symptoms, from problems of the aorta to severe psychiatric delusion, were caused by a single germ. Some of the most floridly mad people in my English asylum – the Kings and Bonapartes, theVirgin Marys and Boadiceas – were not really “mad” at all; they had venereal disease. Goodbye, then, good people, goodbye to the lunatic asylum: you are not wanted here and – who knows – perhaps one day the physicians will find a cure for you.

  ‘Quite early in my career as an alienist I became familiar with a pattern of symptoms that first showed in young people – slightly earlier in men than in women, for some reason – and usually involved the hearing of voices, among other delusions and behavioural abnormalities. This complex of symptoms had been christened “hebephrenia”, was known to my partner and me as “Olivier’s disease”, then universally, following Emil Kraepelin, as “dementia praecox”. Patients had a poor prospect of recovery; indeed, their symptoms generally grew worse over time. When they presented themselves to me at first – young, often intelligent, bright-eyed and scared by what had happened to them – I could believe them to be suffering a reaction to a terrible event. By the time they left me, most were like the chronic patients of the old Salpêtrière in Paris: shuffling, spastic, incoherent, their mental functions seemingly burned away. To put it in doctor’s language: they came in psychological, and they went out neurological.

  ‘Less than two years ago, in an article entitled “Die Prognose der Dementia Praecox (Schizophreniegruppe)” published in a German psychiatric journal, the professor of psychiatry at Zürich University, Eugen Bleuler, proposed that this disease should be rechristened “schizophrenia”. I think there is almost no chance that this confusing word will be widely adopted by the medical or the lay world; it seems to imply some sort of split or double personality, when in fact the “personality” of the patient is more often than not tragically unified – straitjacketed, indeed, into its singular delusions. The last thing these poor people need is to have the nature of their suffering further mystified by a clumsy piece of nomenclature, as though they were suffering from nothing more than a nervous indecisiveness!

  ‘However, it is not the word that worries me; it is the thrust of Professor Bleuler’s argument, which is to suggest that his “schizophrenia” is a psychological reaction to problems in the patient’s life – to the same difficulties that you and I might have, though perhaps the patient’s problems are a little more severe or he is a little less robust in dealing with them. The delusions, meanwhile – the cacophony of voices in his ears – not in his head, dear ladies and gentlemen, but sounding from external space on the drum of his ear and then in the auditory area of his brain – these voices, says Professor Bleuler, are no more than clues to the psychological basis of the distress. The inference we are to make is quite clear, I think, and it is this: that such people can be treated by psychotherapy – by talking, in other words – and in Professor Bleuler’s eyes the best form of such talking cure is that which is at present fashionable with the Viennese School.

  ‘Some years ago, I went to Vienna and was fortunate enough to hear a lecture by a doctor called Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose and throat specialist who had developed an interest in psychology and believed that parts of the nostril corresponded to parts of the female reproductive apparatus. To this end, he rubbed the inside of the nose with cocaine to relieve pain in the uterus. He also believed that two magic numbers – alas, I have forgotten which two – provided, in combination, in square or among their factors, a key to all mysteries of human biology, as well as to the workings of the cosmos. Goodness, how I do wish I could remember what those two numbers were.

  ‘I corresponded with Dr Fliess after his lecture and took the liberty of pointing out some of his simpler errors, particularly with regard to the entry of stimulants into the bloodstream via the mucous membrane. He was a game and combative correspondent, however, and while we seldom agreed and never formed a friendship, we did continue to write. Dr Fliess became more than ever excited by the advance of theViennese School. He felt that doctors who had started as physicians or, in one instance, as a neurologist, were now in a position to turn their back on such humble apprentice work. Instead, keen-eyed mountaineers upon Mount Darien, they were now ready to pronounce a Universal Theory of Human Behaviour.

  ‘Under my insistent teasing, Dr Fliess showed me a letter he had received from one such practitioner, whose name I shall not repeat for fear of giving it further réclame. This doctor had formulated a general rule of human behaviour, namely that all young male children must pass through a period of sexual desire for their mothers. Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a bizarre thought – though the theory itself is nothing like as bizarre as its genesis, which the letter to Dr Fliess, received by him on October 4th, 1897, described thus:

  My libido toward matrem was awakened . . . on the occasion of a journey with her from Leipzig toVienna, during which we must have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her nudam.

  The doctor does not remember if he spent the night with his mother, but thinks he ‘must have’; he does not remember if he saw her naked, but thinks there ‘must have been an opportunity’. He certainly does not remember being aroused. Yet on the basis of three blanks of memory, he asserts that he was indeed stimulated; on the foundation of a trebly unremembered experience, he postulates a universal human axiom. To give the theory grandeur, it is, I believe, intended to name it after the mythical Greek character, Oedipus. The crux of the Oedipus story – the whole narrative point of it, you might think: that the poor man had not the faintest idea who his parents were – would seem to me to disqualify him entirely from the question of a child’s everyday struggles with the two people he knows best.

  ‘I have never travelled by train from Leipzig to Vienna, though I am fairly certain that, had I done so, I should not have stripped naked in the carriage – whether I was accompanied by my daughters, by my wife or merely by Josef, the old lampman. It would be cold, inconvenient and unnecessary. I can assure you of one thing, though: that if I had no recollection of it, I would not base an argument about my own mind on it, let alone extrapolate from my forgetfulness a dogma for hal
f humanity.

  ‘There are two tragedies here. One is the failure of science in a medical man. It is more risible, perhaps, than tragic. But then, when you consider some aspects of what is suggested, it does become tragic – because anyone who has observed young boys will have noticed that there can, sometimes, be a tactile relationship with the mother at certain ages, and an amicable competition with the father for her attention. It is a sort of commonplace, a fireside truth, quite interesting in its way; but by no stretch of the imagination could it form part of the basis of a treatment for the biologically insane.

  ‘And this is the site of the second tragedy: that this homespun insight, for what it was worth, has become degraded – as beliefs invariably are – by politics: in this case the politics of a “school” of medicine that must have the universal key, the only answer. Small truths, homely facts, when they are applied to the world as representative of all the world, cease to be facts and become superstitions. Thus has this little thought become elevated, made sacrosanct and set to work as a dogma in a school of “medicine”, which, so far as I know, will be the first such school since the time of Hippocrates to base its treatment of the sick on the withholding of medicine.