by Simon Ings
Pál plucks and frowns, frowns and plucks. Shaving off that sharp high E does nothing for the pounding in his head, but he is determined to prove his mettle among his countrymen.
Dr Loránt Pál, psychiatrist and medical pioneer, is coming to Britain at the invitation of a small, well-connected philosophical society, to practise a new form of somatic therapy: a treatment for melancholia and schizophrenia that involves the careful application of electricity. Undaunted by the worsening international situation, Pál has managed to finesse his way across Axis Europe with a medicine bag full of apricot brandy. But who would have thought – after running the gamut of so many greasy fascisti – that his heaviest binge and his hardest persuasion would be expended trying to get a berth on this miserable tub? The quartermaster shielding the British Naval Attaché had insides of lead and a brain of pure tin.
‘Read the letter,’ Pál demanded, exasperated. ‘The letter, it says—’
‘What’s this?’ The quartermaster held the paper at arm’s length and squinted. ‘Ah, now, you see, here’s your problem, this isn’t a chit. It isn’t any use if it isn’t a chit. (Ooh, ta, don’t mind if I do.)’
The final irony came when Pál, several bottles the poorer, was finally able to present his chit to the guards officer and climb on board. He couldn’t believe his eyes, seeing who had got here before him. How often, blinking from the cheaper seats of the Pesti Vigadó, has he yawned away through evenings of their Mahler? Or, in the early hours, tripped over their sprawled, sausage-stuffed corpses in the Fészek Club or the Café Japan? The Budapest Municipal Orchestra! It really is too rich, a cosmic joke, that he should be entering Britain on this boat full of musical Jews!
Cue a rollicking csarda that has even the fussily intellectual prima puffing syncopations upon his cigar. What gypsy folk memory must Pál be drawing from that he stirs, electrifies and finally breaks this violin’s humble heart? A favourite encampment among wooded hills? Dark tresses in the night-time? Tracing the cool gold chain around a hot fourteen-year-old Romany ankle? A reading of grubby cards, with their intimations of fortune and tragedy?
No, just professional annoyance. Pál, in talking about his work and his plans, has once again allowed himself to be eaten up by the knowledge that the bloody Italians got there first.
Electricity.
Of course.
Why did von Meduna never pursue electricity? Ladislas von Meduna, Hungarian innovator and Pál’s first and best teacher, is the true father of convulsive therapy, but a really reliable means of triggering seizures eluded him. Why did he waste so many years casting about for something chemical? Strychnine, caffeine, nikethamide. Even wormwood. (The csarda collapses, swooping, outrageous, atonal, as Pál recalls how the great von Meduna returned unexpectedly one night from the kávéház, soaked to the skin, a bottle of absinthe under his arm and a dangerous light in his eyes.)
Still, does it really matter that it was the Italians who put the ‘e’ in ECT? Using electricity to induce the seizures is, when all is said and done, an operational detail. No matter what the trigger, it’s the seizure that’s the thing: the brain stem’s primal I Am, ringing through the addled cortex like a bell, setting everything in harmony again.
Speaking of which…
Loránt Pál works his bow across the strings as though he were weaving a rug. Smoke curls appreciatively from the prima’s cigar. Racial purists like Kodaly and Bartók can brandish staves all they want at this ‘restaurant music’. Authenticity be damned; in a time of crisis and with a sea-crossing only hours away, Pál’s gypsy fiddling is as poignant a taste of home as a plate of sausages and lángosh.
It is morning, and after a night spent at anchor, the ship is under way. Unescorted, painfully vulnerable to U-boat attack, the SS Arethusa zigzags its way towards Devonport where the WVS are waiting with tea urns.
The hours pass.
Past noon: from her room in her parents’ Edwardian terrace in Maida Vale – a room little changed from the one she played in as a child so that her feet dangle from the end of the bed at nights – Miriam Miller, Girton graduate, bluestocking factotum of a small philosophical society off Gower Street, looks up at a sky full of dirty air and ties a perfect blue bow at the neck of her starched white blouse.
The hours pass.
Evening: in a Devonport dock shed echoing with the ghosts of donkeymen and trimmers, Miriam Miller meets Hungarian medical genius Loránt Pál. ‘Extend every assistance’ the telegram has instructed her.
Pál, true to form, ruins everything, slumping down the gangplank drunk, his clothes drenched in the miasma of apricots, and his mind, what there is of it, stuck like a gramophone needle halfway through a story both incomprehensible and vulgar, something about electric shocks; about how he was gypped by a couple of Italian quacks, and how they ‘made a complete balls of everything’. Miriam leads the boy – he seems hardly old enough to drive, let alone offer medical treatment to another human being – to her borrowed car, brushes his hand angrily off her lap and starts the engine.
Miriam is a good driver. Had the Society not acquired an unexpected usefulness to the war effort, she might have spent the war travelling. (Pál is sawing his arms now as though he were playing a fiddle. He starts to sing.) Were it not for the Society, she might be seeing the world from behind the windscreen of a bullet-riddled ambulance. She might be undressing in a room with a bed long enough for her chaste, lanky body, watching a sunset unbloodied by Battersea smoke.
Pál, oblivious to her little tears, accompanies her: dreadful, cod-Verdi recicative, as he lovingly rehearses his Italian competitors’ initial, unsuccessful trials…
‘Feerst, we feed theese wy-eer intoo thee mawth,
‘Then wee feed theese wy-eer intoo thee arsehewl,
‘Then wee FRY-UH THEE HAART!’
One year later: 1941. In a pleasant upstairs room belonging to the Society, émigré medical practitioner Dr Loránt Pál assembles his new couch.
It is a robust, extremely heavy piece of engineering. Poor little Miss Miriam Miller: when she opened the door to all those delivery boys, the eyes nearly started out of her head. More equipment? More noise? More interruption? Is it not enough that the lights gutter whenever that nasty little Svengali charges up his self-built therapy unit?
Pál lays out the pieces of the couch over the Persian rug in the centre of the room. The daylight is fading fast. He enjoys the green-brown penumbra of evening – the way the shadows of trees dapple the dark, scratched wood of his desk, and seem to animate the photographs he has hung about the room; photographs he brought with him, stuffed and crumpled in his doctor’s bag, all the way from Budapest. Daimlers and horse-drawn fiacres. Society women with their little dogs. French and English nannies pushing their sailor-suited charges. Seeing these pictures dapple and shift in the light of evening, Pál fancies he can almost hear the hooves of a fiacre’s tired horse on the soaked wooden boards of the pavements below the Corso; the obsequious whisper of the barrel-bellied Fö-úr, leading him to his table at the Fészek Club.
Pál shakes off his reverie and tears the brown paper from off a shaped headrest. Oh, but this is splendid. He moulds the handsome red leather block in his hands, and appreciates the neat, discreet stitching: acme of the farrier’s art. He can’t help a mischievous smile as he recalls poor little Miriam, stood there at the foot of the stairs while the delivery boys paraded up and down. Opening and closing her mouth like a fish. What did she imagine these parcels contained? Exhibits?
Eyes straining against the dying light – he hates, and will hold off as long as possible, the yellow claustrophobia of electric light and blackout blinds – Pál slots and bolts the couch together. The piece has been manufactured precisely according to his instructions. How delightful it is, to have his idea come to life like this in his hands. He turns a brass wheel. The back of the couch rises. Another wheel: the pads supporting the legs articulate smoothly downwards; the headrest inches forward. Another: the pads supporting the
torso part and curve to accommodate the larger patient. Pál sighs. Bliss. He casts around for the canvas bag containing the restraints.
Though he went along to that mews house in Notting Hill armed with several original ideas regarding the immobilization of his clients, in the end he left these details pretty much to the craftsman’s discretion. The chap was astonishingly expert in these matters. In his bright, chilly studio, on high stools beside an angled drafting table, the two men contemplated the design in silence. Pinned to the table, the shape of Pál’s couch-to-be seemed to hover in front of the paper. It had been rendered in an exploded orthographic projection which suggested something sleeker and more streamlined than a mere piece of furniture. A space plane, perhaps, from the Flash Gordon serial.
‘A sheepskin lining will provide security and comfort,’ the craftsman opined. He was a big, liquid man with a big, liquid face.
Pál wasn’t sure what to say.
The man bit his lips, then let go; the lips emerged, wet and red, and – has he got this right? – did the man actually wink at him?
‘Compression fractures of the spine are my biggest concern,’ Pál explained, confused.
The man closed his eyes and trembled. ‘Yes. Yes.’
‘Then there is the matter of the gat.’
The man’s eyes sprang open. ‘The what?’
‘The gat. Or something, normally it is a gat – is this the right word? Excuse me. A rubber piece to bite on. To stop from swallowing the tongue.’
‘Oh. Oh, yes. Yes.’
Another silence.
‘Why—?’ More biting of his lips. ‘May I ask what will, ah, occasion the, ah—’
‘The application of electricity.’
The man’s enthusiasm for Pál’s work was very gratifying. ‘Oh, yes! Yes!’
Pál takes the straps out of the bag and reads the accompanying notes. Eccentric as he was, that strange jelly of a man has done an excellent job. It is no laughing matter, this business of immobilization: there’s precious little point to Pál’s therapy if his every other client ends up in a wheelchair.
Pál threads a braided calico tape experimentally through metal loops on either side of the headrest. Won’t this strap interfere with the placement of the electrodes? Ah, no, he understands now, this part crosses that, comes over the skull to this attachment point here…
Pál, shaking his head, succumbs to a little light melancholy. Here he is, pioneering the most exciting advance in psychiatry this century, and all he can think about is how to lace these silly straps. How can a mere couch excite him, he who has the secrets of the human psyche to explore?
Life is like this, he has found. Petty details moss over and obscure the dramatic features of one’s life. Pál puts down the bag – it really is too dark to work now – and climbs on board the couch. It is firm, cool and comfortable. Good. So now, perhaps, it is time to think about other things.
Closing his eyes, he wills himself back to the moment that ought to define him, and which, in dark moments, he replays behind his eyes, reminding himself of who and what he wants to be.
He remembers the morning von Meduna first administered camphor to a human patient.
For four years the man had barely moved. A catatonic stupor had rendered him little better than a vegetable. Extreme measures seemed justified, if not positively welcome: anything to break the tension. The man’s mother, ashen-faced, had gravely bestowed her consent.
Pál recalls the forty interminable minutes while they waited for the seizure. The terrible tension in von Meduna’s face.
It came, at last, with a terrible violence.
Steadily, von Meduna tested the patient’s reflexes, he examined the pupils of his eyes, he spoke as steadily as he could. No one was fooled. Meduna’s sweat spattered everyone and everything.
Pál remembers von Meduna’s achievement chiefly through the look on the great man’s face as the seizure took hold: a look that stared the world straight in the eye and would not look away – no, never – not until the world itself was changed.
As for the patient – what does Pál remember of the patient?
Very little. Only one little memory survives. But such a one! Pál chuckles to recall the chap’s friendly little wave, a few days later, as he trotted, fully recovered, down the steps of the hospital in his borrowed clothes and into the arms of his mother.
At the open door of Pál’s consulting room, a stifled cry.
Pál sits up.
Another, sharply indrawn breath.
Miriam stands in the doorway. ‘I—’ she begins, fighting for breath, ‘I thought no one…’ She is blinking against the last of the daylight. The sun is very low now, it is shining in her eyes.
‘Hello, Miriam.’ Pál slides smoothly from the couch. Miriam, he has decided, is a good-looking woman, if only she would learn to relax a little. He tries his warmest smile.
Miriam raises her hands to cover the blue bow at her neck. From where she is standing, Pál’s smile is invisible. He is reduced to a silhouette. His solid shadow rises and straightens against the blood-red window, the rust-red room. His form is as distinct and mobile as a spillage of ink on a metal plate. Pál indicates the couch. ‘Miriam, dear Miriam, would you care to experience my device?’
With a scream she barely bothers to stifle, Miriam runs back to her office and slams the door.
‘“Poofter! Nancy! Queen!”’
Mr Anthony Burden shrinks in his chair as he recalls his shame.
A year has passed. It is the summer of 1943, and Pál finds himself engaged in work far different from the sort he expected from his London practice. Arriving in England, he had imagined wards of raving lunatics, bomb neurotics, crazed suicides and padded rooms. The mass panic the authorities expected has never come to pass. The people of London, through a combination of denial and habituation, have turned their backs on the Blitz: ‘Business as usual’. Such stray neurotics as pass Pál’s way are usually referred to him by interested sponsors at University College Hospital, down the road, and he has an uneasy sense that he is their circus dog; they want to see what tricks he can perform.
At least this chap has referred himself. Still, Pál wonders, who exactly is this Anthony Burden? Does he really want to be expending his professional energies on the sort of frayed intellectual that haunts the Society’s library?
From Mr Burden’s own account it is impossible to understand why he was never called up. He says that he ‘tinkers’. That he is ‘a tinkerer’. Eventually the words Dollis Hill crop up in conversation. Pál, a stranger here with no great appetite for general knowledge, does not understand their significance at first. Later, following some phoned enquiries, he establishes that his client works at the Post Office Research Station. So Burden is no mere ‘tinkerer’.
‘Oh, you know, I have these schemes, good enough that I can flannel my way through meetings. They never get me anywhere, they’re not important.’ Melancholics churn out this self-abnegating rubbish by the yard. In truth, Burden is an expert in telecommunications, in wireless telegraphy, in switching systems. This is why his occupation is reserved.
Loránt Pál records his enthusiasm in his notes: ‘The man is an ASSET.’
For Pál, no shirker, the treatment of Anthony Burden now acquires a special urgency. Yes, he would like to see more of him. Yes, he will be happy to arrange further appointments. For this will be no mere ‘treatment’. This, at long last, will be war work!
Pál writes in his journal:
AB presents the classic symptoms of melancholia. He is agitated. He is underweight. He cannot smile. Already there are manifest signs of the patient’s lack of personal care. His appearance is dishevelled beyond even the generous norms of English eccentricity. His face is a mass of razor cuts (first hints of hesitation marks?). His fingernails are black. The hands, sooted, unwashed, tremble in his lap.
Anthony Burden gulps and sobs – a little boy’s stereotypical boo-hoo. Impossible to gauge what actual emotions un
derlie such a display. ‘She knew!’ Really it is very embarrassing. ‘She never even saw my face, she never even cared to see my face, and still she knew!’
Thrown out of gear by the astonishing lewdness of Mr Burden’s tale, the youthful therapist instinctively tries to make it less than it is. ‘Perhaps she meant it as a joke,’ he offers. A friendly act, and of absolutely no therapeutic use to his client whatsoever. Concentrate! Pál admonishes himself. Concentrate. You are new here. Every client is a test. Even this one.
‘A joke?’ Anthony Burden echoes, doubtfully.
‘Yes. A joke. Maybe she was teasing you. I mean—’ Pál can only plough on, with false jocularity. ‘You did in the end decide to try and take her up the, ah, passage…’ He feels a blush spread across his cheeks, hot enough to prickle. He wishes he felt better prepared for this. It’s not as though he wasn’t forewarned. When a previously buttoned-down civil servant blunders raving into an ARP patrol in the middle of the night without his trousers…
In a small, intense voice: ‘This makes me a faggot, doesn’t it?’
Pál weaves his hands about in front of his chest like an Anglican priest explaining the Trinity. ‘Um,’ he says. He knows next to nothing about the invert personality, and cares even less. ‘Ah,’ he says.
In fact, Pál feels a great deal of sympathy for Anthony Burden. The man’s sexual indiscretion was unpardonable, of course, but to have your co-respondent turn around afterwards and look into your heart’s deepest, darkest place! To have her drag that repressed Thing, pallid and blinking, into the harsh light of day: ‘Poofter! Nancy! Queen!’
If only the woman had had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. Then Mr Burden might even have had his little peccadillo with nothing worse to follow. It was a strange time, after all, in a city made stranger by bombing. He could have put his sordid little knee-trembler behind him – or found a more conventional way to satisfy his taste for anonymous encounters. The red-lit room. The sink in the corner. Money on the table. As things stand…
