The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  Werner worked the winch. As soon as the gallery floor was whole again, I set the curtain in the corner, even as Gaston, Ludwig, and Pietro began reconstructing Totentanz. It took them a mere half-hour to assemble the frame, affix the canvas, and screw the cable in place. Assisted by Conrad, they carried Ilona’s chef d’oeuvre to the west wall and hung it on the spikes.

  Acting on an unspoken consensus, we arrayed ourselves before our peace machine, until the maimings and the pain, the thundering guns and the bursting shells, became too much for us to bear, and we turned away.

  “Consurge, daemon!” cried Ilona, gesturing toward the Ecstatic Wisdom forgery. Like a lethargic phantom, the scrim rose slowly from the floor. “Vola!” It floated toward the west wall. “Vola!”

  The scrim pressed itself against the canvas and, surrendering to the power of Totentanz, became sufficiently opaque to camouflage the canvas. Our Grandmaster, space traveler, and paranoid retrieved the velvet curtain, straightaway draping it over the stretcher frame.

  “Together we have written a new and shining chapter in the history of Western art,” said Werner.

  “And a new and shining chapter in the history of Western ethics,” I said. “The sleep of reason breeds monsters. The light of knowledge breeds gods.”

  “Perhaps,” said Conrad. “And yet I fear the ink is not yet dry on our new and shining chapters. There is still time for Caligari to smear the pages.”

  Energized by hope, hobbled by anxiety, Ilona, Werner, Conrad, and I stepped onto the parapet overlooking the Moselle River footbridge. It was Saturday morning, the 26th of December. Hoarfrost glazed the sedge-covered hills. The bell in the clock tower tolled seven times, the last two peals melding with the shriek of a locomotive whistle.

  “Herr Direktor is back in business,” said Conrad, focusing his field glasses on the train station.

  “In England they call this Boxing Day,” I said. “From now until sunset, the wealthy will give Christmas parcels to servants and tradespeople.”

  “During the Marne, every day was Boxing Day,” said Werner. “We crated up whatever was left of Karl or Herman or Rudolf and sent it to Division Headquarters.”

  The troop train rolled onto a siding, brakes squealing, boiler chuffing, and an instant later a column of unarmed German recruits came pouring from the coaches like Achaeans exiting the Trojan horse. Goaded by their superior officers, they headed for the footbridge.

  “The Berliner Morgenpost publishes deployment timetables, though of course each unit’s final destination is censored,” said Conrad. “This regiment is part of the newly formed German Fourteenth Corps.”

  Suddenly Caligari was on the scene, waddling toward the chained oaken doors to the museum, one hand gripping his cane, the other holding a metal key that, struck by the sun, blazed like an Olympic torch. He opened the padlock, allowing the chain to slither to the ground. From his overcoat he produced a second key, then unlocked the museum doors and disappeared into the gallery.

  “We have nothing to fear,” I said, struggling to believe myself. “The forgery is flawless.”

  “Only God is flawless,” said Ilona. “It’s the first thing you’ll notice about Him if he ever gets around to existing.”

  Caligari returned to daylight, having evidently raised the curtain on Totentanz in its Ecstatic Wisdom disguise. His placid countenance suggested that he’d detected nothing untoward. An instant later the recruits began entering the museum, there to experience Ilona’s sorcery as the scrim, shedding its opacity at the bidding of Totentanz, became a window on the Devil’s backyard.

  I borrowed the field glasses, then studied the first half-dozen soldiers to exit the gallery. Determined not to betray the conspiracy into which the painted but loquacious Hans Jedermann had drawn them (my angst was quickly turning to optimism), each man had worked his face into a credible facsimile of Kriegslust, even as his gait became a persuasive impersonation of Soldatentum. Did Caligari realize that today’s patrons were merely feigning bellicosity? If so, his demeanor revealed no sign of suspicion or alarm.

  “Ilona’s magic is working,” I insisted, passing the field glasses to Werner. “Her genius is equal to Caligari’s.”

  “When this war is over,” said Ilona, “I shall allow the Louvre to acquire my painting.”

  “How do we label the condition of these men?” said Werner, training the glasses on the museum doors. “What is the opposite of shell-shocked?”

  “Truth-struck?” I suggested.

  Conrad nodded in assent. “Very good, Francis. Castration by barbed wire is a reality not easily denied. Nothing could be more factual than dismemberment by a grenade.”

  Occasionally, on leaving the gallery, a private, corporal, or sergeant would lift his head toward the parapet and stare at Ilona, his gaze betraying admiration shading into adoration.

  Perhaps this benign witch has not shown me the way home, but she has turned me from the path of annihilation.

  “They sense you are the artist,” said Werner.

  “These schoolboys are your children,” I said.

  “And after he bids farewell to his trench,” said Ilona, “if any soldier needs a letter of transit signed by his mother, I shall be happy to provide it.”

  Four more trains arrived that day, so that by sunset the rest of the German XIV Corps, 3rd Regiment, most of the French XI Corps, 5th Regiment, and at least six hundred reservists from the British Expeditionary Force had seen the war through Hans Jedermann’s eyes.

  Although it was too early for reports concerning mysterious outbreaks of pacifism in the trenches, I carefully scrutinized the next day’s New York Herald, learning more than I wanted to know about the Battle of Artois (an offensive through which Marshal Joffre hoped to discourage General Falkenhayn from sending divisions off to fight France’s valued ally, Russia, on the Eastern Front). The next four editions of the Herald likewise provided no clues to the efficacy of Totentanz. But then came the issue of Friday the 3rd of January, 1915, proclaiming an event that for Ilona, Werner, Conrad, and myself would admit of but one explanation.

  Massive Desertions on Western Front, shouted the headline. Thousands of German, French, British Soldiers Seek Sanctuary in Nonaligned Nations, ran the subhead. The story corroborated our interpretation in full, for the fleeing troops belonged to the very regiments whose psyches we’d massaged on the day after Christmas. Among the many soldiers who’d sought and found refuge in neutral Holland to the north, neutral Weizenstaat to the east, and neutral Switzerland to the south, several had given Herald correspondents thoughtful (if rather baroque) accounts of their conversions.

  “This isn’t a war, it’s a cabaret act staged by Mephistopheles,” a German corporal opined.

  “Our lieutenants and captains are honorable men, but our generals spend their days spreading horse manure on a garden of delusions,” a French private asserted.

  “And meanwhile the ruling elites sit around in Paris and Berlin,” a German sergeant added, “sipping rosé and schnapps and devising clever reasons why the slaughter must continue.”

  “My heart is courageous, but my intestines are finicky,” a British Tommy explained. “They refuse to be spindled around a bayonet.”

  In mid-January our pacifist insurrection hit a snag when armed patrols deployed by Holland, Weizenstaat, and Switzerland started detaining fugitive soldiers at their respective borders, there being a limit to how many hot-eyed armistice addicts these circumspect nations were willing to absorb. Meanwhile, military police from the armies of Marshal Joffre, General Falkenhayn, and General Haig had started tracking down deserters, alternately throwing them into prison and shooting them on sight.

  And yet the great Totentanz revolt continued, for as winter progressed the deserters learned how to lose their pursuers in the frozen depths of swamps and woodlands. Defying the harsh weather, galvanized by their newfound political principles, these roving bands of pacifists appropriated the Ardennes and the Schwarzwald like Robin Hood and his
Merrie Men camping out in Sherwood Forest. While hunger was not unknown among Ilona’s children, most managed to feed themselves by poaching, fishing, foraging, plundering henhouses, and eliciting civilian acts of charity at gunpoint.

  The longer Totentanz continued to occasion vacancies on the Western Front, the more vulnerable we all felt to detection by Caligari. As a logical precaution, Conrad kept his distance from the rest of us. And while Werner continued to attend my art classes in the guise of Leutnant Zimmer, he otherwise eschewed the company of Ilona and myself.

  Among us four conspirators, it was the Spider Queen who proved the most sensitive to the moral ambiguities inherent in our scheme. “To be honest,” she told me, “there are times when I imagine us taking down Totentanz and restoring the real Ecstatic Wisdom, leaving Caligari none the wiser.”

  “Taking it down?” I said, attempting to sound perplexed, although in fact I knew exactly what she meant.

  “By shaping the souls of unsuspecting schoolboys, are we not indulging in a species of hubris as monstrous as Caligari’s?”

  It was Saint Valentine’s Day. The big news from the forward lines was the Battle of Champagne, whose masterminds had arranged the sanguinary irrigation of a terrain normally devoted to growing grapes for wine.

  “I understand your distress, Ilona,” I said. “But let’s remember we’ve delivered thousands of soldiers on both sides from untimely deaths.”

  “And yet we must ask ourselves: do those saved lives belong entirely to the young men who are living them—or have we simply replaced Caligari’s sleepwalkers with puppets of our own? I have no answer, young Francis, and neither does Conrad or Werner, and neither do you.”

  Later that afternoon we tried to lose ourselves in one of our collaborative painting sessions. Standing shoulder to shoulder before the easel, we grasped our mutual camel’s-hair brush and directed it toward a stretched canvas to which we’d applied a slate-blue undercoat.

  “When I agreed to create a peace machine for Herr Slevoght,” said Ilona, “I assumed we would soon pump so many pacifists into this war that all the divisions would become unglued and an armistice would follow. Now we know military justice will catch up with most of those same pacifists. Every time I read that a deserter has been shot, I want to throw myself out a window.”

  “I know the feeling well,” I said as a scarlet lightning bolt appeared on the blue field. Evidently our collective psyche was in an Expressionist mood. “The impulse always passes. I’m not sure why, but it does.”

  “Young Francis, we must vow to subtract all windows from our lives, likewise pistols, ropes, and shaving razors.”

  Together we superimposed a scarlet heart on the lightning bolt. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  “Were it not for la cura amore,” said Ilona, “I would have gone insane by now.”

  Throughout the rest of February and well into March, the chronic Battle of Champagne played out in a roundelay of feeble assaults and ineffectual counterassaults. Marshal Joffre’s regiments would compliantly advance, then fall back, then stoically advance, then fall back, then advance, then fall back, each sputtering engagement more futile than the one before. Taking note of all these Sisyphean theatrics, Sir John French decided that a full-bore attack was required. The English general’s plan called for a division of the British IV Corps and two regiments of the Indian Corps to aim their artillery at a crucial sector of no-man’s-land, sweeping it free of barbed wire with surprise barrages, then drive General Falkenhayn’s troops out of their trenches with grenades before reinforcements could arrive. As the pièce de résistance, the British and Indians would take the village of Neuve Chapelle back from the Germans, who were rumored to have secluded a secret weapon in the nearby Bois du Biez prior to testing it in battle.

  From my perspective the most significant event of Wednesday the 10th of March, 1915, was not the start of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle—indeed, only after the fact did I learn of Marshal French’s decision to launch an offensive on that date—but rather a message from Conrad stating that, twenty-four hours hence, Dr. Caligari expected Ilona and me to join him for coffee in his office. My lover and I found Herr Direktor’s summons ominous in the extreme. Having finally discovered the peace machine (or so we assumed), he intended to hand us over to some international tribunal or other, so that the justices could execute us for conspiring to deprive the generals and princes of their absolutely marvelous and entirely terrific war.

  Taking deep breaths, mimicking the carriage of an innocent man, I strode into Caligari’s salon, Ilona right behind me. Our host occupied a plush burgundy sofa. Two strapping bodyguards, one tall, the other taller, both dressed anachronistically in the ornate uniforms of Turkish janissaries, stood with folded arms beside a low teakwood table holding a silver coffee service and a plate of cakes and strudels. Speaking not a word, Caligari gestured us into a pair of fine leather chairs, whereupon the taller janissary filled two porcelain cups with a coffee whose fragrance hinted of a Viennese heritage.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever permitted a lunatic in my office,” said Caligari.

  “Might I suggest that the term ‘lunatic’ is not useful in Ilona’s case?” I said. “I’m not convinced it’s useful in anybody’s case.”

  “Who wants cake?” asked the shorter janissary.

  Ilona and I mumbled in the affirmative, and the bodyguard got to work.

  “Dr. Verguin no longer believes Fräulein Wessels’s spider fixation portends a psychotic break,” said Caligari. “In our medical director’s view, Ilona’s arachnophilia is completely cured. What is your opinion, Mr. Wyndham?”

  “Speaking as Ilona’s art therapist, I’m willing to let her walk free of Träumenchen,” I said, taking a large swallow of splendid coffee. “Speaking as her inamorato—”

  “It would be foolish to discharge me,” said Ilona. “I’m still the Spider Queen of Ogygia.”

  “If you were truly mad, you wouldn’t know it,” said Caligari.

  “Then I’m the Spider Queen of Ogygia, and I don’t know it.”

  “You are Ilona Wessels of Holstenwall. I shall instruct Nurse Roussel to prepare the paperwork.”

  “I’m not yet ready to leave,” said Ilona, sipping coffee.

  “This is a mental institution, Fräulein, not a boarding house.” Caligari turned and waggled a silver spoon in my face. “How are your other students faring?”

  “Ludwig Ruttluff is planning a flight to Neptune,” I said, finishing my coffee. “Pietro Barbieri still suffers from pantophobia. Gaston Duchemin remains an eternal spectator at Paulsen versus Morphy.”

  “What about Viktor Zimmer?”

  “Shell-shock cases are always challenging, but I do see improvement.”

  “I have a suggestion regarding Leutnant Zimmer. Why not restore his real name to him? Why not call him Werner Slevoght?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, nausea surging through my digestive tract.

  “She knows what I mean.” Caligari jabbed the silver spoon in Ilona’s direction. “Was it not Slevoght who persuaded you to paint an embarrassingly moralistic picture and conceal it beneath a forgery of Ecstatic Wisdom?”

  Ilona grimaced and closed her eyes. “I miss Herr Slevoght,” she said at last, “who was nearly Francis’s equal as a painting master, but I do not fantasize that he has returned. Last month I dreamed he’d died in the Battle of the Marne. These visions of mine are often pathetic.”

  “Prophetic,” I said, reeling with dread. “If Pietro’s condition were contagious, Signore, I would say you’ve contracted a touch of paranoia. I might even hypothesize—”

  My tongue seized up, went numb, became a dead snail in my mouth. Seeking to clear my mind, I lurched out of my chair. My knees buckled, and I collapsed on the Persian rug as, one by one, the candles of my brain guttered out.

  After an indeterminate interval I awoke, dazed, queasy, and lying on my back. My skull reverberated as if enduring an artillery ba
rrage, though the cause was surely whatever drug Caligari had put in the coffee. A grid of iron bars hovered before my gaze, each interstice the size of a hopscotch square: the ceiling of a cage, I speculated—a theory I confirmed by standing up and apprehending to my dismay that four additional grids surrounded me. I was not alone in the cube. A dazed Ilona stood in the far corner, flanked by Werner and Conrad. The astringent odor of oil pigments told me we were in Caligari’s underground atelier.

  “Our peace machine stayed in operation much longer than I would have predicted,” muttered Werner.

  “Caligari told me we were betrayed by his cat,” said Conrad. “Our mystic went looking for his lost Cesare down here and happened upon his magnum opus hidden in the alcove.”

  The alienist sat outside the cage on a wooden stool, the seat creaking beneath his considerable rump. He was paring his fingernails. I saw no sign of whomever had helped him imprison us, but I assumed his Turkish soldiers had done the deed.

  “You’ll be pleased to hear you occupy a privileged vantage, front row seats at a spectacle of great political and aesthetic significance.” With his cane Caligari directed our attention to an immense rectangular object propped against a workbench and draped with two bed-sheets pinned together to form a white curtain. “Leutnant Slevoght, allow me to applaud your ingenuity. For several months you managed to beat me at my own game.” He grasped the white curtain and yanked it away. Below lay Ilona’s duplicate of his epic, its war-loving schoolboys momentarily obscuring her own panorama. “As for the real Ecstatic Wisdom, it’s back where it belongs. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the tramping of boots and the singing of anthems. By this time tomorrow, a platoon of my janissaries will be guarding it around the clock.”

  Caligari rose and disappeared into the shadows, returning straightaway with a cylinder strapped to his back: a 1.2 meter Fiedler flamethrower—I recognized it from my Totentanz research—complete with fuel supply, rubber hose, and steel nozzle. He ripped the linen scrim away, revealing Ilona’s picture, then flung the fabric into the air. As the counterfeit painting floated on an updraft, he aimed the nozzle and depressed the lever, causing the propellant gas to drive a stream of flammable oil through the hose and across the burning wick. A jet of fire leapt from the nozzle and struck the scrim, instantly reducing it to smoking threads of carbonized fabric.