Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  22

  Poplars grew on either side, haughty, self-contained trees that cast no shadows. It was a cloudless day, and even though it was only May the sun glowed as if it were trying to burn a hole in the sky.

  Chanele was dressed far too warmly. And she had, quite out of character, spent a long time thinking about what to wear that day, she had stood by her own wardrobe as if by a stranger’s, had tried to see herself with the eyes of a stranger, no, not a stranger, different eyes, eyes that might be the same colour as her own, who knows, it was possible.

  It was possible.

  When Hinda had her tonsils taken out that time, she had been given a paper doll by way of consolation, the cardboard figure of an angelically blonde girl in a white blouse, surrounded by a whole wreath of different dresses. Its colours were slightly faded, because the sheet had been in the window of the stationer’s for a long time, but that only made the dresses all the more elegant. You could cut them out and fold them up and put them on the paper girl, so she looked different every time and had different plans, going shopping in town one time, another time going to a ball or to her own wedding.

  Faced with her own wardrobe, Chanele had felt like that cardboard figure. A toy.

  In the end she had opted for a grey travelling outfit, a practical dress for all weathers one could put on all by oneself, and on which even small flecks of dust from the locomotive would not be noticed. The dress had big, brown pockets with brown borders on either side, although they were only for decoration and you couldn’t put anything in them. She hadn’t brought a suitcase; she had only packed a bag of absolute necessities. ‘You’re travelling like a serving girl,’ Janki had said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, I have to do this one all on my own,’ she had replied, and perhaps that had been a mistake.

  The poplars stood on either side like sentries.

  In the little hotel whose address Janki had written down for her, she had not at first been given a very friendly welcome. Hoteliers are used to gauging the importance of a guest by the amount of luggage they have. But then she had given her name, and the porter, a cheap popular edition of Herr Strähle, had personally ushered her into his room with ‘Bienvenue, Madame Meijer’, and ‘Quel honneur, Madame Meijer’. Janki seemed to be a valued guest here, even though his business didn’t bring him to Strasbourg very often.

  But what did she know about Janki’s business?

  The room smelled of withered flowers, as if at a goyish levaya. For a whole sleepless night the dress hung before her eyes on its hanger, an alien body that she would just have to slip into the following morning to become someone else.

  She just didn’t know who.

  The fabric was far too heavy. Everything was far too heavy. The shirt stuck to her body, like the wet canvas that Golde had wrapped her in back in the old days when she had a fever, so tightly that she couldn’t move her arms, that she got scared and tried to wriggle free, to hit her arms out and tear at everything. Until Golde turned it into a game, a test of courage. Mimi, even if she was perfectly healthy, was also wrapped up, and then the two girls lay side by side, and every time Chanele held out longer than Mimi did, every time, and was so proud that she forgot her fear and even her illness.

  In the hotel they had told her to take a cab, it was too far to travel on foot, but she still had them explain the directions to her, through the city and out of the city. She had brought nothing but her handbag, a simple linen bag with which Mimi would never have been seen dead.

  The bow-fronted houses here leaned curiously into the street. Chanele bought an apple from a market stall, but then threw it into the gutter after the first bite. She stopped for a long time in front of the cathedral and couldn’t have said a thing about it afterwards.

  When she had reached the edge of the city, where the houses grew smaller and the vegetable gardens bigger, she also stopped in places where there was nothing at all to see. She wanted to gain time, she wanted to postpone the encounter for which she had waited so patiently.

  As a child, of course, as a child she had dreamed of it, she had imagined herself into all the fairy stories, she was the child who was lost, the one who was found, she had put her foot in the glass slipper and it had fit, it had fit her and her alone, she had slept for a hundred years behind a hedge of thorns until the prince came and recognised her as his princess.

  As a child you can simply dream up things you don’t know.

  But she was now forty-one years old.

  Without being aware of it, Chanele had begun to count her steps – ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight – and once she was aware of it, she couldn’t silence the voices in her head.

  Ninety-nine, a hundred.

  In the military, she knew this from Janki, they counted like that to make unbearably long marches manageable. ‘I’ll survive for another thousand steps. Another hundred.’

  Back in the days when she had marched by Janki’s side from Endingen to Baden, and from Baden to Endingen, her journey had never seemed so long.

  The avenue was not designed for people who came on foot. It was a road for coaches and horses, for noble men and grand gestures, a path from the past.

  Past.

  She had once asked Golde about it, just once, and Golde had sucked her lower lip into her mouth and stroked her hair and said, ‘It was the Lord God.’

  Whenever someone doesn’t know the answer, it’s always the Lord God.

  Perhaps she should pray.

  But a prayer just because you’re scared is nothing but counting your steps to make a difficult journey easier.

  Shema. Yisrael. Adonai. Eloheinu.

  A hundred and thirty-four. A hundred and thirty-five. A hundred and thirty-six.

  If Salomon were here now, he would find a meaning for each number.

  What is the numerical value of fear?

  The avenue between the trees which provided no shade rose slowly to a mound behind where the row of poplar trees seemed to sink into the ground, only the trunk of the first, then the haughty branches of the next.

  From the mound you could see the asylum.

  Little remained of the castle’s former elegance of the castle. An ungainly building of yellow and red brick spread out from the old white stone façade, the wealthy associate of an old established firm. The red bricks were arranged in the form of gable windows and turrets, so that the new building, for all its modern functionality, had a vaguely castle-like quality, as if it were mocking its neighbour and its old-fashioned demeanour.

  Most of the windows were barred.

  There were unhealthily bare, apparently dried-up patches in the expansive, deserted, stubbly lawn, although there had not been many really hot days that year. The borders of the long-untended flowerbeds, mossy and overgrown, marked vanished forms on the ground, sunken graves in a long-abandoned graveyard.

  There was no one to be seen for far and wide. Only one old man raking leaves, with unchanging, concentrated movements. When Chanele approached, she saw that there were no leaves there.

  ‘Excuse me . . .’

  The man ignored her.

  ‘Can you tell me?’

  He went on scratching away at the ground.

  ‘I’m looking for . . .’

  The same spot, over and over again.

  Perhaps the old gardener was hard of hearing. Chanele touched his shoulder, and he started screaming, the breathless, terrified screams of a little child. Arthur too had often screamed like that when he had woken from a bad dream.

  Chanele tried to calm the old man in the way that had worked with her youngest. She put her arm around him and repeated several times, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here.’

  The man only screamed all the louder. Apart from two brownish stumps his wide-open mouth was completely toothless.

  ‘Our Néné doesn’t like being touched.’

  The woman in the starched, pale grey linen uniform must have been watchin
g from a window. With two pointed fingers she removed Chanele’s hand from the screaming man’s shoulder. Then she bent for the rake that he had dropped and held it out to him. ‘There are lots of leaves left, Néné, you keep on working.’

  And sure enough: the man calmed down. He gasped for air a few times, gathered his breath for one last scream and then suddenly seemed to forget his panic. He started raking again. Carefully and regularly and always on the same spot.

  ‘I’m staff sister Viktoria,’ said the uniformed woman. She rolled her Rs the way people from the Baltic do. Her face was friendly, but it was a professional friendliness that she had put on with her uniform.

  ‘My name is Meijer. I have come from Baden . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said the staff sister, and her tone left no doubt that she knew everything that went on here. ‘We expected you sooner.’

  ‘I walked from the hotel.’

  But that wasn’t what the staff nurse meant. ‘We wrote the letter weeks ago.’

  ‘I’ve only just received it.’

  ‘There was a lot of work involved in finding out your details. A lot of work.’

  ‘I’m grateful to you.’

  ‘With good reason, Frau Meijer. With very good reason. The files from the French days are extremely chaotic. You go on working, Néné!’ She turned away, walked a few steps towards the brick building and then stopped again. ‘Come,’ she said, and her friendliness was no longer such a perfect fit. ‘I have other things to be getting on with.’

  After her long march, the corridor in which Chanele waited was pleasantly cool. The light came from a series of narrow openings very high in the wall. The brightness penetrated the room in well-defined beams, like in the women’s gallery in Endingen synagogue when the colourful glass windows were opened.

  Except that there were no bars over the windows in the synagogue.

  And the walls weren’t freshly whitewashed and bare, as if in a prison.

  The bench to which staff sister Viktoria had shown her was right against the wall. To keep from dirtying her dress, she had to sit with her back ramrod straight. She tried to shift forward, but the legs of the bench were fastened solidly to the floor. So she stood up again and walked back and forth on aching feet.

  Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.

  A display case was fixed to one wall, like the trophy cupboard full of laurel wreaths that Chanele knew from the Guggenheim inn back in Endingen. The hooks behind the glass door were empty. She tried to open the box, but it was locked. The inscription had been scratched from an enamel sign, and all that remained was an arrow pointing into the void. On each of the many doors, at eye level, there was a lighter, faded patch where there had once been a sign. Chanele thought of a story from Janki’s days as a soldier. He and his company had once had to pull road signs out of the ground and burn them to confuse the advancing German troops.

  Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.

  Somewhere far away someone began to speak. Chanele couldn’t even have said whether what she heard was German or French, or a language that didn’t exist, but she understood very clearly that the voice was trying to persuade someone, was talking away at someone who didn’t want to listen, constantly presenting new arguments, listing reasons, delivering proof and then, when the other person stayed mute, beginning to plead, to beg, to wail and at last to weep, to whine. And fall silent.

  Everything was still once more, so still that she could hear a beetle that had got lost beating against a window time and again in search of an exit.

  She had no watch, but it was already the afternoon.

  She had had the impression that the corridor simply stopped at its furthest end, but there must have been another one off to the side. From it a man now emerged, looked searchingly around and bore down on her with clumsy haste, a bear walking on its back legs. Even before he had reached her, he started to speak.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It isn’t usually my way to keep guests so long . . . Not that we have the opportunity to welcome many guests here. Far too few. Most of our patients are . . . Out of sight, out of mind. Regrettable, but one cannot hold it against people either. Sometimes it’s hard to bear when somebody . . . I am Dr Hellstiedl. Hello, pleased to meet you. And you are . . .? Stupid of me. Staff nurse Viktoria told me . . . Frau Meijer, of course. Interesting spelling. I know e-i, a-i, e-y, but I’ve never seen the name spelt like . . . From Baden, is that right? Baden in Switzerland? Very nice. Then please come to by office, so that I can . . .’

  He had opened one of the many doors and disappeared into his room, before Chanele had had a chance to say a word. Then he stuck his head out of the door again, like the jack-in-the-box that Hinda had always liked to play with, and which had frightened Arthur every time, and finished his sentence, ‘. . . make the necessary preparations.’

  Dr Hellstiedl’s unease, Chanele soon noticed, had nothing to do with impatience. Rather, he was constantly distracted by his own thoughts, found each new idea worthy of note and kept interrupting himself as a consequence. Conversing with him was a little like following the conversation at an animated dinner party, a dinner party where the conversation was more intelligent than it had been at Janki’s goyish evening.

  When she entered the office, he was standing by an open filing cabinet, flicking through the cards in an index box. Papers and books lay around on every available surface, and in among them were objects whose function in this room could be explained only if one used a great deal of imagination: a pine cone, a soup tureen, knitting needles with the beginnings of a sock.

  ‘Meijer,’ Dr Hellstiedl murmured. ‘Meijer, Meijer, Meijer. I will shortly . . . Just one moment. The classification system of my French colleagues . . . Although I don’t believe that each people has typical qualities . . . It is more the external circumstances that create the appearance that . . . Meijer, Meijer, Meijer. Please sit down!’

  Chanele stood where she was, because even the chair by the desk, the one meant for visitors, was covered with papers.

  ‘And my predecessor – a most capable specialist, I never had any doubts on that score – cleared out everything French so painstakingly when he took over the clinic that now . . . Even the signs on the doors. An excess of thoroughness, which in a patient one would see as . . . One might really wonder whether patriotism should not be considered an illness . . . Although presumably it would be incurable. Meijer. Meijer. Meijer. Where on earth is the . . .?’

  At last they sat facing one another, and Dr Hellstiedl had abandoned his search for the index card.

  ‘An interesting case. A most interesting case. Although of course all cases are fundamentally . . . One is inclined only to take the most spectacular . . . Did you know that in London they used to take the whole family to see the mentally ill as if going to the theatre? A spectacle, in fact. The asylum was called Bedlam. Bethlehem. Suffer little children to come unto me. A very interesting case, our Ahasuerus.’

  ‘Ahasuerus?’

  ‘I shouldn’t allow the giving of nicknames to the patients. I tell the nurses off and then do it myself. Only human, I fear. But these nicknames are often very appropriate. Insights are not always expressed in intelligent terms. Perhaps it’s wrong of us to give our children names when they are born. We might be better off waiting until we know them better.’

  ‘François,’ thought Chanele. ‘Shmul.’

  ‘Ahasuerus.’ Dr Hellstiedl ploughed through the chaos on his desk. ‘He already had the name when I inherited the institution from my predecessor . . . It probably wasn’t a nurse who came up with it. They’re more inclined to think of simple . . . We have an inmate that they call “Fox”. One woman is called “the queen”. But “Ahasuerus” . . . The eternal Jew. An intellectual reference. He lives and would like to be dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Of course. How stupid of me. You don’t even know . . . So: Ahasuerus. You will forgive me if I don’t further explain . . . Although of course . . . Your name is Meijer
, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hanna Meijer.’

  ‘With e-i-j, of course. Unusual spelling. I should . . .’ Suddenly he tapped his temple, so clumsily that he knocked off his glasses and had to look for them again amongst his papers, and said, ‘How stupid of me! You grew up with foster parents . . . didn’t you? And you’ve taken their name? So why am I looking under . . .? There isn’t going to be a card for “Ahasuerus”. And right now the correct name isn’t coming to . . .’

  ‘Are you sure it’s him?’

  ‘We assume so. The dates tally. But we have no precise details left from those days. Our French colleagues were here in those days, and my predecessor . . . A most excellent specialist, but unfortunately also very rigorous. Well, there is nothing to be done about that now.’ Dr Hellstiedl sat down at his desk again. ‘To answer your question; we assume that it’s him. And of course we hope that his encounter with you . . . I’m no devotee of shock therapy, by no means, but if such a shock is of a purely emotional kind . . . So I would ask you not to say anything at first. Just don’t say a thing. Sit down with him and let him . . . Perhaps there are some outward signs that . . . Such cases are sometimes basically frozen in an experience, and their memory has remained correspondingly fresh. As if time had stood still, if you know what I mean. We know very little about these mechanisms. One would need to . . . Let’s do it like this: I will take you to the section – all men from whom we expect no progress – and let you go in on your own. Don’t worry. There are no aggressive or dangerous patients in there.’

  ‘So I’ll be alone when . . .?’ Chanele said, and her mouth was dry. ‘How will I recognise him?’

  ‘He’ll probably be lying on the floor. He often does that. Sometimes he lies there motionless for hours. We used to try and get him out of that compulsive state. Forced him onto a chair and even tied him to it. My predecessor . . . I gave instructions for him to be left alone. He doesn’t do anyone any harm, and perhaps . . .’ With a gesture of resignation he pointed to a crowded shelf. ‘We have so many books, and we know so little.’