THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  He met her backstage behind the Great Hall for their rehearsal dinner. She tilted her head and peered closer at his suit—she recognized the stiff black collar, the gold phoenix embroidery. It used to be her father’s. She remembered watching him give his twelfth address to the kingdom in that suit, the stage lights dancing with his gold and giving his words a gentle seer’s touch: and so I have seen, and so it will be. “Francis,” she said, “Where did you get that?”

  “Oh! The Master of Ceremonies gave it to me,” Francis said, beaming. “He thought it would be appropriate for me to wear.” Because he would be the man of the royal household now.

  “You don’t… mind, do you, darling?” He was frowning. “You don’t mind seeing it again?”

  Francis was always so worried about her mental constitution. Not so worried that he would agree to delay the wedding, but worried that going to the city would remind her of being carried over the cobblestones to her doom by Commander Cesare’s horse carriage. But it was all right. She had stopped counting the days since her father died. And he hadn’t died in the black uniform, after all, but in a white nightgown dotted with acidic vomit.

  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  Then a pair of palace guards moved toward the giant oak doors and gently nodded at the couple to be ready. From what felt like the other side of the world came the Master of Ceremonies’ booming voice: “Ladies and gentlemen! Rise and make way for Her Royal Highness Princess Jane and the Honorable Senator Francis!”

  The doors creaked open and they walked hand-in-hand into the gilded, high-domed Great Hall, to the thunderous applause of nine hundred well-dressed loyalists: the scrappers and chameleons that had somehow endured her father’s rule and the failed coup and the counter-coup. She knew when she saw their pinched smiles and overly rosy make-up that they had been forced to do terrible things in order to keep their seat at court. She did not want to know what. The most important thing, she told herself, was that they looked at her, and thus at her father and mother and all the members of the monarchy before them, with love.

  “You seem preoccupied, darling,” Francis whispered over the main course: boiled yearling lamb. The jesters were telling an elaborate story about a tiger trying to descend from a mountain that she had long since lost track of, and wasn’t very funny. “Is something wrong?”

  “What are we going to do about the Empire Beyond the Sea? I know that my father wanted to build up our coastal reinforcements.” She gave him a prodding look. How she hoped that her father’s last will and testament would not force her to marry a weak man. “Well?”

  Francis used his fingernail to scrape a shred of meat from between his teeth. “Yes, darling, the Senators are debating that. It takes time. There are many factors to consider…”

  She sighed and drummed her pink fingernails on her nearly-untouched plate. On the floor of the Great Hall, the tiger-jesters were pantomiming dying.

  After the desserts were brought out—delicate, wobbly soufflés—and the speeches were made—“All our very best wishes for a wonderful life together, Princess Jane and Senator Francis!”—the banquet tables were rolled away so they could practice their wedding dance. Francis was all smiles but Jane was elsewhere: floating skyward, swimming toward God the Beautiful. Then sadly a bang brought her back to Earth, where a trio of soldiers was running toward the unhappy couple. Lightning spliced through Jane as she thought of the last time soldiers stormed the palace and in a spasm of fear she involuntarily clutched the closest thing at hand, which was Francis.

  “There’s a note,” the soldier said, waving an envelope. “We found a note in Caligari’s trunk!”

  It was to this soldier’s immense credit that he did not call that dead, dreaded man his General, considering Caligari had presided over every military Salute to the King that she could remember until he decided that he would rather be the King instead. Francis grabbed the envelope and ripped it open, eyes nearly popping from his head as the crowd held its breath. Someone shouted, “What does the bastard say, Senator!”

  “It thanks the loyalty of a friend,” said Francis, frowning. “A friend in the royal court. A friend buried so deep that they could never be found.”

  ***

  The royal court turned itself over and twisted itself up, like a snake eating its own tail, in the search for Caligari’s secret friend. Accusations were made, marriages were broken, children were disowned. The corridors surrounding Jane’s quarters were lined with nobles and commanders and clerics declaring their abiding love for Jane and her father and all who had come before them. Their absolute hatred of the wretched Caligari. Within a day their stories had evolved to include salacious details about the punishments they had endured at Caligari’s hands for refusing to denounce the royal family. “I was whipped!” “I was burned!” “I had my skin removed!”

  Eventually, Francis said it was time to put a stop to this and get to the truth. Unfortunately, they had cleansed the kingdom of all trace of Caligari, including his beloved courier songbirds that had helped him organize the coup, and the only man left to interrogate was Commander Cesare, the best-guarded prisoner in the Iron Dungeon. They had kept him alive—barely—as a reminder to the military to toe the line, to remember that civilian law could be just as cruel.

  Jane did not think this would accomplish anything. Commander Cesare had already been interrogated and given up nothing. She had told Francis as much, but Francis acted as if he hadn’t heard her—said only that she was safe and Cesare was never getting loose, which had nothing at all to do with what she’d said. So Francis had Parliament authorize the use of harsh tactics—military tactics—and Jane threw up her hands and went to bed, wondering why with he couldn’t also simply tell Parliament to authorize the build-up of coastal reinforcements.

  All night, the Senators raised objections and made speeches and defended their records and insulted each other. Jane could hear them arguing all the way from the House of Parliament, and she tossed and turned in the same bed that Commander Cesare had stolen her from however long ago that was. Stuffing her ears with cotton to keep their droning out, she miserably thought of a little yellow songbird she’d once had that her nursemaid had trained to sing at night to the burn of her lantern. If not for that miserable Caligari, she’d still have the thing. And now come to find that Caligari had a traitor working for him in the royal court?

  With no hope of sleep, she put on her coat, went out the western gate, and went down to the cold, dank Iron Dungeon herself. It was nearly dawn, and the torturers had departed. She had not seen Commander Cesare since he was sentenced to life imprisonment for trying to kill her—he had looked at her so mournfully in court, quite unlike the beast that had dragged her from the palace. He had changed his mind, she was quite sure of that. Some glimmer of grace, some touch of the Sun, had stopped him from destroying the royal line and pushed him to surrender instead.

  He was even more mournful now. More sorry now. They had not been kind to him, the torturers.

  “I hope you told them what they wanted to know,” Jane said. She glanced at the rusty tools hanging from the blood-stained walls. “I could arrange for more to be done, you know.”

  “It would be in your right, my Queen,” he said with a gap-toothed, upside-down smile, and just like that she knew that he had told them nothing, like the good soldier he was. Loyal unto death, even if for the wrong side.

  “I’m not Queen yet.” The coronation, Francis promised, would directly follow the wedding.

  “Soon.”

  Jane stepped up to him, close enough to smell the bitter copper in his wounds. “Tell me who the traitor is. Who in the royal court was working for Caligari? They’ve all insisted they’re innocent. I can’t send them all to join you here.” Although as soon as she said it, she wondered why not—if Francis could have Cesare tortured, then surely she could put a few of the most unpleasant nobles—the ones who she kn
ew had sneered at her father when he was still alive—down here to encourage the others to toe the line, as Francis said. Nearly without thinking about it, she started to run her own velvet-shod toes across a wet groove in the floor.

  Warm blood dripped from his torn torso and onto her cheek. “There is a room inside the palace,” Cesare whispered. “A secret room, one not even the servants know. That’s where you’ll find Caligari’s friend, my Queen.”

  A secret room? The thought of those mealy-mouthed, glad-handing advisors digging with claw hammers into a wall that should have only moved for her, burrowing their way into brick that had been painstakingly laid to protect her ancestors, made Jane nauseous. “I know everything inside this palace. Everything here belongs to me now.”

  “So find it.”

  Jane ground her teeth and turned away.

  “My Queen—”

  She snapped her head back. “What now?”

  “Kill me,” he said. “It’s only fair.”

  Until that fateful moonlit night, she had only seen Commander Cesare once: standing rigid and dutiful behind General Caligari at her father’s fifty-sixth birthday. She remembered thinking how unusual it was that he’d brought his musket into the Great Hall. Their eyes had locked, as if trying to understand which was predator and which was prey, while Caligari bestowed his congratulations and heartfelt wishes for another glorious year for the royal family—his lies.

  “A Queen always follows her people’s wishes,” she said, and put her small hands around his neck. His hanging body jolted like a fish in the hull of a boat as she squeezed as hard as she could, rummaging for his pulse. She had chosen strangulation on the grounds that she could back out of it, if it was too much—but then she wondered how Cesare had planned to kill her, before God reached down and stayed his hand, and it wasn’t at all too much. It was just right.

  ***

  The morning after, Jane announced to Francis over their egg cups that she was going into the city. “I will take a carriage,” she said, before words of protest could come out of his open mouth. “And soldiers, of course. So you don’t have to worry about me.”

  Two hours of preparation later, and a very noisy entourage hurtled down into the twisting city—one carriage, eight horses, six soldiers, countless muskets. Jane drew the curtains of the carriage and saw the hooded masses on bent knee, their faces gripped by grippe or consumption or lockjaw. Sunken-eyed children offered her flowers as tokens of their allegiance but the carriage bounced by too fast for her to grab them. When Francis first explained the new powers of Parliament—when she was little, Parliament was just a group of men in fancy clothes that sang the virtues of everything her father said—he said that they were only going to make sure that the ordinary people had a better life. But as usual, Francis didn’t seem to be doing much.

  Jane wound her procession all throughout the city in search of the sound of animals. There were vulpine yellow dogs caked in mud who did not know that she was the would-be queen, and the occasional mule with a buckling knee, but she was looking for something else. Eventually they found a little old woman sitting on the banks of the Green River surrounded by rickety towers of cages filled with snarling or sleeping little animals. The old woman grinned when Princess Jane stepped out of the carriage. “Sweets for the sweet?” the old woman asked, gesturing at her wares.

  There were scales, tails, beady eyes and matted fur. Many of them liked to bite. But at last she found the thing she wanted: a little blue songbird with a little white heart. It had to have been smuggled in from beyond their borders. The soldiers shifted uncomfortably. “Will it sing at night?” she asked the old woman, who said, “It will sing whenever you want it to, my sweet.”

  Francis was furious, of course, when he saw that her birdcage was no longer empty. He asked her, as if she were a child, if she knew what this stupid bird signified. Yes, she knew, General Caligari loved birds—used birds, Francis said, used birds to send messages—but wasn’t a bird more than that? Hadn’t a bird meant something beautiful before General Caligari? Something about freedom? Something true and eternal?

  Francis stared at her as if she had lost her head. Perhaps he would have liked her better that way, she wondered, the Princess without a Head. “But everything has changed,” Francis said, and she could tell that he was trying to speak gently with her. Maybe if she was a Senator like him, he would have screamed it. “Parliament has to authorize military action now. The civilian police keep the peace now. And we have no birds in the capital because birds mean something different now.”

  Had this fool never heard the sweetness of a bird call, Jane wondered. She watched her new innocent playmate nibble at sunflower seeds and said, “Shouldn’t you be more worried about finding the traitor in the court? General Caligari’s friend? That seems to me to be a much more direct threat to my safety than this little one. Or doesn’t that note worry you anymore?”

  For a moment, Francis looked again like the schoolboy chasing after her father’s footsteps—anxious, uncertain, eager to please. She wondered how and when he had become a Senator. She wondered how and when he got so close to her father that her father had asked—in the twilight of his life—for his only daughter to marry him. “We are very close to finalizing a plan of action,” Francis said, almost sadly. “Please be patient, my love.”

  “Well, who do you think it is? The military affairs advisor, isn’t that what you said? Why don’t you just take him down to the dungeon and ask him?”

  Francis clenched his fists and hissed, “Because I don’t have any proof, Jane. This is a people’s republic, we can’t just…”

  She made a sound of shocked displeasure. This was not language she recognized. These were not words her father had spoken. She wanted the little people’s lives improved, of course, but did Francis really want those mewling, hunchbacked masses to move into the palace? They wouldn’t know what to do with the crown if they had it. They would barter the silver for cows and burn the art for a cooking fire. “The people serve the crown. The people want the traitor caught.”

  “Yes, of course, Jane, so do all of us. But there are certain rules we have to follow now.”

  “What rule did you follow when you had Commander Cesare tortured?” Everyone had assumed that he had died of his state-sponsored injuries. Francis was too proud, she suspected, to admit that Cesare’s life had been ended by someone outside of his control. “Hmm?”

  “He was a criminal. A known associate of General Caligari. He tried to hurt you…”

  She turned her back and raised her hand, dismissing him. What did soft-handed Francis know of pain? She heard him sigh, quite disrespectfully, before departing. Several hours later, while her real bird was sleeping, he sent up the chambermaster with an entire box filled with birds—tiny, painted, wooden toys that could be wound-up for one meaningless, mechanical song. “Look at how precious and perfectly easy to control they are,” the chambermaster said, his hands curled like the talons of an eagle, “Handcrafted by the finest artisans in the kingdom…”

  Jane smashed them all to bits and sent the chambermaster away with a box of woodchips.

  ***

  Though the bird—she named him Alan, after a long-gone childhood friend—faithfully sang her to sleep that night, it was gone when Jane woke with a start near the witching hour. Stolen from her room just as she had been, once upon a time. Had Francis dared enter her room while she was asleep? Or sent the chambermaster? She wasn’t sure which would make her respect him less. But though her heart sank at the thought that poor Alan was dead, it uncurled like an orchid when she heard his call. It was very faint, like a heartbeat. But she knew, as a mother knows, that the poor thing was calling for her.

  Her first thought was to go to the Iron Dungeon, but she lost the birdsong as she crept toward the western gate. Wrong way. Alan was still inside the palace walls. His cry grew stronger as she wandered past the ki
tchen and the pantry and the chapel, and when she couldn’t quite decide which dark path to take she would rap softly on the wall to coax out an answer. Though she briefly lost the signal when she took a turn toward the music room where her mother had tried to force her to learn to play the harpsichord, she found it again when she walked backward and turned to pass the red salon where her grandfather’s mad first wife had ended her days.

  At last, the birdsong grew loud enough that she could hear distinct trills and chirps. It had brought Jane to one end of the royal gallery lined with the proud portraits of her ancestors—how strange, she thought, that their faces were oily blanks by night. Her father’s study loomed, foreboding and forbidden, at the other end of the forty-meter walk. She had not been inside that room since she was a child, before burgeoning womanhood had kept her out. And she just knew that Francis had already filled it with his stiff university books about republics and rules and rights—all the inconsequential nonsense that could barely last a season in the long stretch of civilization. Her father’s books were the tomes of empires, written by devout scholars by candlelight on the aggressive assumption that human history was charted in increments of centuries, not weeks.

  The golden handle to the study door gleamed in the darkness, not beckoning to Jane but daring her. And though she did walk bravely toward it, the birdsong rose and fell before she could pass the gallery’s halfway mark. Alan was buried in the wall, she realized, between the portraits of her Great Aunt the Grand Duchess and her Great Grandmother the Royal Consort.

  How had those monsters put the poor creature inside the brick? She pressed herself against the wall as if to hug him through it, and much to her surprise, the wall budged. The secret room. She pushed it by another few degrees and then slipped her way inside a narrow passageway. Poor Jane, a voice very much like her mother’s whispered in her ear, are you really ready for the truth?