by Alex Pheby
In his dream, the room was full of them: less-than-men, hundreds crowding the hall. It was not just the similarity of their dress that was obvious—all of them in the same shirt and jacket, the same collar and cuffs, the same dark trousers tightly pressed—they had faces that repeated, expressions that repeated, selves, it seemed to him, that repeated. As he stood on the platform and looked down at them, elevated by his position, they cheered for him as the assistant to the Landrat came with the votes. The Socialist by his side, the only man who was different at all, reached to shake his hand, mouthing “Good luck!” He couldn’t take his eyes from the men below in the crowd. He could see the same face—a waxy-faced man, with red cheeks and a curling moustache, dotted amongst the others—first a handful of times, but the more he looked, the more he saw him. That man was restricted to a very limited set of movements and expressions: a wave, a cheer, a nod of the head, a turning toward a companion, a whispered exchange, and then returning to the wave to begin the sequence again. When he looked closer, fully half of the men there were identical to this man and ran, out of sequence, the same set of gestures. In the pit of his stomach the nervousness he had felt, that he had been assured was excitement by the party men, the nervousness that had kept him awake for days and that had become as much a part of him as hunger, or the need to evacuate his bowels, that feeling changed into something else. It was something more intense, something felt in his bladder, and on the backs of his knees, and in the eagerness of the muscles of his thighs to be moving. Fear—there was no other word for it. Though the lighting in the room remained unchanged, the objects around him brightened while the air dimmed, giving everything an afterimage, like the negative of a photograph. It was not as clear or as obvious as that alteration, but there nonetheless and with an oppressive atmosphere that tickled the backs of his eyes.
He looked toward the exit through the throng of men who were all now identical and beginning to move in sequence. It was as if they were clocks all running at a different tempo, a fraction of a second out of time with each other, but whose dials were coming, by accident, to read the same time, down to the second. The coming together of their movements coincided with the progress of the Landrat up the steps to the stage, and when the Liberal leant over to shake his hand it was only with the greatest effort that Schreber was able to take it. Sweat pooled beneath the collar at the back of his shirt, and his mouth was utterly dry. It was clear that at the exact moment the returning officer would speak, so would the men of the crowd come to synchronicity.
So it proved, the moment of congruence resulting in their becoming still, in a gesture of listening, and the room was silent. Schreber could hear, loud as a bass drum, his heart beating, and the breath like a hurricane coming faster and faster from between his lips. Though he was sure he must have been seen and heard by everyone, no one paid him the slightest attention, and instead they watched the man in the centre of the platform.
He spoke.
Schreber lost the ability to understand words, and though he recognised they were German, the language of his father, he could not extract the meaning of them. It was as if they were in a confusing dialect, or spoken too quickly by a man with a heavy accent. Everything was partial and fragmented, of enormous significance, but with no meaning. The feeling in his stomach was intense to the point of hysteria, literal hysteria, as if a fearful woman’s organ had been placed inside him and was flooding his body with the humours that brought so many of that sex to irrationality and emotional incontinence. He could feel it in himself, he who had been chosen by these clockwork men as an exemplar of something else: of masculinity, of continence, of fortitude and strength, of knowledge. Wasn’t he a man who took after his father? They held him to be a great thinker—a great man—an opinion Schreber would never have disavowed. But he knew, as his family knew—even his mother—that the same man had been weak, bowed down by pain, despite his stoicism. Now if they could only see inside Schreber, their new ideal, who stood before them as a symbol of power and authority, inside him was the febrile machine of a woman’s weakness. He could feel it, that terrible alien device that separated one sex from the other, making difference in them. That thing sent out its nerves throughout his body, experienced as pain and weakness and fear, exciting his own manly nerves, overtaking them, so that he felt all those things that a woman felt in place of those things that were right and proper to a man—calmness and inviolate courage. If they could have seen inside him, these men with their identical moustaches, they would have stopped listening to the Landrat and would have ridiculed him instead. They would have punished him, as he had been punished by his father on that day when he was found with Klara clutched to his chest. Her gentle sucking at his flat breast had filled him with an unaccountable joy, a joy that must be punished, a joy that was despised. The great hand coming down across the backs of his legs, and the flaming redness on his father’s cheeks was like the redness in the cheeks of these clockwork men.
More words were being spoken, calculations made on the lips of the men in the crowd, men reacting, the turning of backs. If it hadn’t been for the potency of that organ within him that now shook his knees with fear, he would have understood what was being said: that the Socialist had won, by an enormous margin. He would have found despite it all, despite what he should have desired, that he was relieved. He would have been happy to have the burden of these replicas’ expectations removed from him. As it was he heard nothing, felt nothing, except womb-fear running in his blood, and the presence inside him of something that was not present before. Something that must be removed.
He lost his balance when he tried to run from that place, to escape from these clockwork men and return home. He fell heavily to one side, knocking his head against a chair. Despite that, when he was taken home and poulticed, and left alone in bed, he could not sleep. Inside him the womb leaked into his nerves the knowledge of his loss, the disappointment on the face of the men who came home with him in the carriage, possessed again of their own faces and vowing to try again.
This disappointment felt like pleasure: to be left alone, to do what he preferred to do without the pain of being something for someone. The pressure of this woman’s organ within him was good now, and something else—something like the feeling he had felt with Klara—a sensual delight, spread where the pain had spread. This was the other side of womanliness, once the requirement to be rational was over. To give himself up to something external: the world, the body. He lay in the darkness between the starched sheets, beneath the blanket, and he ran his hand over his skin, thinking first of nothing. Then, pricked with guilt and remembering the requirement to sleep, the necessity to sleep on doctor’s orders, the obligation to relax his body and mind, and knowing that, like hunger, the other requirements of the body could be satisfied, their tensions released, by giving in to them, he gave in to the womb in him. He let his hands travel where they wished without restraint, the building up of pressure like water behind a dam, which, when there has been rain, can become too great for the dam-wall. It must be vented. The memory of the day—of the election, of his failure, of his fall, of the clockwork men—all these things were dispersed by the simple act of running his hand across his body. If that was to strengthen the organ within him then what was his option? He must sleep! The doctor had told him to sleep no more than an hour ago, and who could sleep with this sensation playing through his body?
It was an impossibility.
In the morning, when the sun rose and the light was too much, he shut his eyes.
His attention turned inwards, and he saw images of his organs like the plates in a book of anatomy; except where those were paradigms, these illustrations were the opposite: instances of corruption and the degradation of form—diseased, putrefying matter, only barely recognisable—engravings such as those a doctor might show his students or those of his patients that he wished to frighten into the observance of some otherwise onerous course of treatment.
When he shooed them away and took Sabine’s hand, and, with an expansive wave, indicated where the house was to be built, the children moved only a small distance back and watched them both. One boy indicated by gesture that his friend should come near, subtly, in a manner that was designed to escape Schreber’s attention, but which did not. The friend was older, and, though they shared the same bow legs, where the younger was mischievous this boy was vicious, having, it seemed then, more understanding of the gulf that existed between his own low standing and that of the couple who stood before him.
It seemed that the older boy was prompted to anger by his jealousy, and this was written on his face—in the grit of his teeth and the scab above his eye. Schreber took Sabine’s hand and led her back to the carriage. He walked straight-legged and calmly, as if on a stroll through the park, as if the set of their backs and the confidence of their slow progress were proof against any violent ambition on the part of the older boy. When his wife was safely inside, Schreber turned, and a clod of wet mud landed on his chest. It had been thrown at his back, but this was much better, and the rascals whooped to see that a simple act of defiance had become so much more, spiced by the old fool’s frowning dismay. The mud splattered up onto his face, into his beard, and Schreber took one step forward to the sounds of his father’s outrage. Sabine grabbed him by the arm and whispered:
‘They are animals, these people.’
‘Then we have the advantage of them,’ Schreber replied.
Other boys had come, like a pack of dogs, and one was stooping to pick up more mud. Schreber stood his ground, but Sabine urged him back to the carriage, pulling his arm when he would not come and pleading with him under her breath in words that Schreber could not hear for the rushing of the blood in his ears.
Dogs. Not worthy of his time.
He returned with Sabine to the carriage, and as the driver cracked the reins and the wheels dragged and slipped in the mud, eventually pulling away, the boys ran after them, shrieking and singing their victory. It was only the bowing of their bones—the imperfection of their development, the variation from the proper manifestation of the body brought on by their inadequate nutrition—that slowed the children and allowed the carriage to draw off, and for their laughter to fade.
Sabine congratulated him on his choice of site for the house. The carriage was back in the street, and she made a modest request regarding the design of the new place. She would like a carved lintel over the front door—musical notes from her favourite opera—a show of delicacy of feeling and of respect for her theatrical career, written in stone, an answer to any of her critics, though no one had ever thought to criticise her in Schreber’s company. As she spoke, Schreber saw the curve of those boys’ shin bones and their skin ingrained with filth and putrefaction, forced as they were to live like beasts. He saw how these boys would develop into adulthood, having seen so many of their type before him in the courts, and, above the sound of his wife’s opinions on the disposition of the laundry room and the maid’s quarters, he wondered whether there wasn’t something bodily to which he could attribute their poverty. Was the bowing of the legs a sign in itself of a lack of something which was reflected later in their moral insufficiencies and their tendency to crime? He looked down at his own limbs, and he saw they were straight, so utterly at odds with those boys. Hadn’t his father had always taken pains to ensure straightness? Of posture and of thought? The straight-keeper, that little device which would have benefitted those boys and taught them the error inherent in despising one’s superiors. It blinkered them to the requirement that they better themselves, or allow themselves to be bettered. Stern discipline. As Schreber used upon himself, every minute of every day. Straight posture. Straight thought. Straight action.
Now, in his cell in the silent early morning, here were his bones, despite all his efforts, bowed into semicircles, and it was brought home to him how he had, in his pride, ignored his own brute animal nature in considering himself above those boys, those pups, dog-bred in the gutter. He had brought down punitive judgement on them and their fathers. On that day and on every other day that he sat in judgement. Bolt upright in his chair. Now what? Was he to be judged by a higher authority? Was his flesh to be found weak and guilty? It was.
The evidence was presented to his mind’s eye, etched on a copper plate, inked and pressed onto the finest paper. Illustrations of his bones and organs, one after the other, in sequence and degraded. They were held up, compared in their detail to his understanding of the body’s proper form, understanding taken from his father’s extensive library, from his own amateur interest in the particulars of all the sciences—medicine no less than law—as was right for a man of intellect. The evidence, as it was presented to him, was incontrovertible. His body was sick, every aspect of it, from his thigh bone, fractured and rebuilt a thousand times, shortened and thickened, to his hip joint, widened to make room for the thicker thigh and opened out to be like that of a woman.
Then there came the most important plate. There was an octopus, laid upon his bowel. Its tentacles stretched everywhere, up into his chest and down toward the base of his spine, joining with the nerves. Within it there grew something, and if there was a source of his degeneracy, here it was. Its tentacles reached everywhere: thin fingers intertwining with his flesh and nerves and there was not an inch of him that was not compromised, like those children who played in the muck.
Out of the blue, Rössler comes below to take Schreber above. They discover pertinent facts, but neither of them are in a position to recognise them.
XXII
The door opened and there was Rössler.
Although the doctor had never seemed to take any particular care over his appearance in the past, he seemed excessively worried about soiling his clothes, and as he stepped into the room he fiddled with his white shirt cuffs and kept as much distance between himself and the walls as he could. He watched where he placed his feet.
‘Herr Schreber, could you come with me please?’
Schreber looked warily around the cell, but did not move.
Rössler sniffed. ‘Right away, please.’
Where was Müller? Schreber looked past the doctor. No sign of the man.
‘Herr Müller is… indisposed,’ Rössler said. ‘Please…’
He held out his hand, but when Schreber came forward the doctor saw better what state the man was in and retracted it. He muttered something about Müller under his breath.
‘I will have one of the other orderlies bathe and dress you.’
Rössler turned and left, leaving the door wide.
‘This place has the atmosphere of a Turkish brothel…’ Schreber said. He rubbed his fingertips together. His nails and skin were clean and he had a fresh pair of pyjamas and a dressing gown.
Rössler smiled. ‘Would you like me to open th
e blind?’
‘What do you want of me? Am I to go home?’
‘Perhaps, Herr Schreber. Perhaps.’
Schreber leaned forward in his chair.
‘When?’
Rössler smiled and made a noncommittal shrug of the shoulders.
Schreber sat back. ‘In a week? Perhaps a month? I have been left to rot…’
‘Not at all. This is how we proceed here, Herr Schreber. Sometimes it is necessary to strip a man back to his foundations before we can begin to treat him.’
Rössler smiled as if this was perfectly reasonable. Schreber watched that smile, but said nothing.
‘To be sure of what it is that we are working with. Like a surgeon cuts away the dead tissue before he sutures a wound. Do you understand?’
Schreber made no movement of any kind.
Rössler coughed and flicked through his papers.
‘One must undress for an examination…’ he muttered.
‘Do you wish me to undress?’
‘No, Herr Schreber. It is an analogy.’
‘Underneath my skin there is an organ. It looks like an octopus. In it are children. They are God’s.’
‘Is this an analogy?’
‘No. Do you wish me to undress? It can be seen under the skin.’
‘That won’t be necessary. You have no natural heir, Herr Schreber. Is that right?’
‘This place has the atmosphere of a Turkish brothel…’
‘Yes. I’ll open the blinds.’
The doctor pushed himself back in his chair. The back legs caught on the carpet, tipping the chair back slightly. Rössler tutted and lifted the chair, standing so that his thighs did not leave the cushion, his body bent forward, taking tiny steps back until there was space for him. Then he allowed the chair to return to the ground.
