As for those who populated the yard at the Burghölzli, there was a common theme of violence—but little else that might have put them there. Some were incurable addicts who, suffering the panic and pain of withdrawal, had struck their nurses and keepers. Some were suicidal—one ate glass, another ate stones. Others were guilty of multiple attempts to escape—men and women who variously disguised themselves as corpses or hid themselves in laundry hampers or dressed themselves as doctors or nurses. There was a woman who had forced herself on a male patient, becoming pregnant in the process and now attempting by various means to abort her child.
Just a normal, everyday selection of human foibles and failures, Pilgrim had remarked. Just another roll-call of waste.
On the afternoon of Saturday, June 15th, the sun was so appallingly evident that Pilgrim took his umbrella with him into the exercise yard and used it as a parasol.
White suit—black shade, he said to Kessler.
Some of the patients had managed to dissuade their keepers from keeping this rendezvous with good health. Pilgrim had not succeeded. Kessler was adamant.
Pilgrim noted a patient he had not previously seen.
“What is her crime?” he asked.
“She has only just arrived,” Kessler told him. “Yesterday, from your own London. It is my understanding she kept a brothel.”
“She looks it,” Pilgrim said tersely.
The woman was over made-up, with violent red hair and kohl-lidded eyes. Her lips were purple, and though she wore a simple enough dress, she kept pulling it down to reveal her breasts. She would burst all at once into song: “she was poor but she was honest—victim of a rich man’s game. First he loved her, then he left her, and she lost her maiden name!”
At last, her keeper had to remove her from the yard and lead her back inside the building.
“It’s the same the whole world over!” she bellowed as she went. “It’s the poor wot gets the blame! It’s the rich wot gets the gravy—ain’t it all a bleedin’ shame!”
Pilgrim was tempted to give the woman a round of applause, but he refrained. She had troubles enough without being accused of soliciting sympathy amongst her fellows in the yard.
The prison yard.
Pilgrim stared bleakly at the towering stone walls.
He thought about the singing madwoman and her brash and blowsy manner. She could not have really kept a brothel. If she had, they would not have admitted her to the Burghölzli. Perhaps an actress. Perhaps a society matron—perhaps even, a great and titled lady. Stranger things had happened.
We are all locked into other people’s perceptions of who we are, he thought. We are none of us free to live our lives unseen.
He recalled a poem of Wilde’s that described a brothel seen from a street in London.
The dead are dancing with the dead, Wilde had written. The dust is whirling with the dust…
Pilgrim said to Kessler: “may we sit down?”
“Of course.”
They did so in a corner.
High above them, a peregrine falcon circled in the sky.
Peregrine, the wanderer.
Pilgrim thought of a similar word. Pèlerin.
Pilgrim.
Me.
7
Grief and failure have ways of prompting generosity—or what Jung thought of as generosity, though it was more like magnanimity. I will give Mister Pilgrim Lady Quartermaine’s letter, he had decided as a result of the Countess Blavinskeya’s death.
He refused even to think the word suicide, because to grant that the woman had died of her own despair would mean admitting that Jung himself was partly responsible for her death. He now saw that he should have fought harder to allow the Countess her Moon fantasies, rather than giving her over to Furtwängler and what Jung perceived as his colleague’s bungling care.
By this somewhat convoluted route, he reached his decision to allow Pilgrim to view the letter that had been intended for him in the first place. If nothing else was working, Pilgrim might be shocked into revealing the source of his own fantasies and their role in his impulse to end his life. But I was protecting him, Jung added in haste. I was saving him the pain of having to witness his friend’s last words. At the time, that was perfectly legitimate.
Of course it was. Almost as legitimate as your having invited a certain young woman into your life in a moment of what you insisted was personal need that otherwise threatened to jeopardize all your work because—how was it you put it at the time? You couldn’t concentrate? That was it. You couldn’t concentrate unless there was sex.
Oh, be quiet.
I’m only reminding you. The word legitimate was used. I was only clarifying. Justifying…
Vilifying!
Well, if you put it that way, I won’t mention it again.
Please don’t.
I’m just trying to keep you honest, Carl Gustav. At least with yourself, if not with others. Emma, for instance…
I refuse to listen. You will drive me mad.
Perhaps that’s my intention.
Stop it.
Played any new games lately? There’s a new one I think might interest you…
Leave me alone.
It’s called Tombs at Twilight and in it, you find a suitable graveyard, of which there are dozens in Zürich and environs. And there, just at sundown, you go and sit in a mausoleum with the dead. Very stimulating—very invigorating for the mind…
For God’s sake, stop!
Provides all kinds of fascinating imagery and endless food for thought. As well as food for worms, of course, your being in the company of corpses. Think of words such as decay and failure. The possibilities are infinite. Decay. Failure. Loss. I could go on for hours.
Don’t.
Decay. Failure. Loss. Cowardice. Mendacity…Tombs at Twilight, Carl Gustav. Think about it. I will leave you now. Goodbye.
Jung was seated on the open deck of the ferry when this interior conversation took place. On his lap, the music bag sat unbuckled. Inside, he carried his notebooks, extra pens and the letter from Sybil Quartermaine to Pilgrim, which he now drew out as much as a distraction as for any other reason. Anything—anything to rid himself of the damned Inquisitor and his dark insinuations.
You will drive me mad…perhaps that is my intention.
He withdrew the letter from its envelope and glanced at its pages one by one. What could Lady Quartermaine have meant when she wrote that what mortals call “death” was not, for us, even a remote possibility? And who were the Envoys—the Messagers, who seemed to presage her death? And also, what and where was the Grove in which she had presumably expected there would be some sort of meeting? It was all so completely mysterious and yet it appeared that she had believed Pilgrim would understand all such references. To Jung, however, her declarations signified the twinning of Lady Quartermaine’s possible madness with that of Pilgrim.
At the Clinic, having put on his white smock, he went at once to the third floor, fully intending to go straight to Pilgrim. On passing Suite 309, however, he noted that the doors stood open and, curious, he went inside.
There, he found Schwester Dora folding and packing all of the Countess Blavinskeya’s ballet costumes—wrapping each of the items carefully in tissue paper before depositing it in a cardboard box, many of which were laid out on various tables and chairs and the bed.
“Good morning, Schwester.”
“Good morning, Herr Doktor.”
Dora, her hands full of tulle, bobbed in his direction. He could see that she had been crying.
“This is all so sad,” said Jung, surveying the rooms with their bright windows shining on a whole world of what now were only the mementos of a dead woman who, while alive, had invested each and every one of them with magic.
There was one whole box devoted exclusively to pointe shoes, each pair tied with its own ribbons—white shoes, blue shoes, red shoes, pink shoes.
“I am keeping the pair she died in for myself,” Schwester
Dora told Jung—and showed him where she had laid them to one side, together with Blavinskeya’s cashmere shawl. They were blood-stained. “I am also taking the photograph of Madame as the Queen of the Wilis. It is in a silver frame, embossed with her husband’s crest—a two-headed eagle—but I think no one will mind. There is no one left to mind, except her cruel father and her dreadful brother. They can have the costumes—or perhaps her mother, if we could only find her. She disappeared, as you know, into some other life so as to escape poor Madame’s fate.”
“Yes. I will see what can be done. It seems a pity to otherwise waste all this beauty.”
“The father and the brother were monsters, Herr Doktor. Are monsters. You must be aware they have never paid for their crimes.”
“Yes—unfortunately, yes, I am aware,” said Jung.
“Madame was raped by her brother—repeatedly—when she was only a girl. Did you know that?”
“Yes. Of course I knew it, though I wish I didn’t.”
“Repeatedly. And then…after all that, her sad, sad husband was killed by her father and nothing was done. Nothing. The Tzar protected them. They are too high and mighty to be prosecuted. This is not European. This is not Swiss. It is not just. And it drove her mad. It drove her mad—my lovely lady. It drove her mad.”
Schwester Dora sat on the bed amidst the boxes and wept. “Oh, what shall I do without her? What shall I do?” she said, and dragged a handkerchief from her pocket. “She had become my whole life.”
“We must learn not to become so attached to our patients, Schwester,” Jung said. “We will lose them all, one way or another, over time—either when they get well and leave us, or when they die. It is the way of our profession.”
“I loved her,” Dora said quietly. “I loved her plain and simple.”
“Yes,” said Jung. “I know you did. And she loved you. She was devoted. She told me this many times.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Many, many times,” he lied. “Without you, she would have had no happiness at all.” This much was true.
“Thank you for telling me that, Herr Doktor. I will have that now to live with.”
Jung, not quite knowing what to say next, merely shrugged and made a careless gesture with his hand.
“Why did the father kill Madame’s husband? Why? She loved him so much.”
“Apparently the husband was unfaithful,” Jung said. It had never been an image he particularly relished whenever the subject arose in his sessions with the Countess. The Avenging Father was something of a nightmare figure—not unlike the image of the evil magician in fairy tales, who rose from the dark and always took his victims by surprise.
“I must leave you, Schwester Dora,” Jung told her all at once. “Mister Pilgrim is expecting me.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you for stopping to speak. I am grateful.”
“You are more than welcome. I extend my sympathy for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
Schwester Dora rose and bobbed once again, and the last Jung saw of her as he turned in the doorway was the reach of her hand as she extended it to the shoes she had claimed for herself. She raised them to her cheek and caressed them the way one might have caressed the hand of a dead child. She sat then in sunlight, surrounded by all that was left of a woman who had perished reaching for the Moon—the dresses she had worn in her now forgotten hours of triumph. And the shoes. And the shoes. And the shoes.
8
On Tuesday, the 18th of June, the homing pigeons were delivered to the Clinic by a man who gave his name as Fowler. There were four of them in a cage and there was also a sack of grain tied with a red ribbon. They were to be taken to Mister Pilgrim, the patient in Suite number 306.
Old Konstantine required Mister Fowler to sign his name in a ledger in which the concierge kept track of all deliveries.
“Pigeons,” he remarked. “Most unusual. We’ve never had pigeons delivered before. Not in my time. Are they to be eaten? Has Mister Pilgrim dietary needs we are unaware of?”
“No, sir,” Fowler replied. “They are to be his pets.”
“Well, then,” said Old Konstantine, “that’s a relief for them, no doubt. Dogs we have, cats we have and a cage of finches, but never pigeons.”
“They are Mister Pilgrim’s favourites.”
“Have I seen you before, Mister Fowler? The voice is somehow familiar.”
“Perhaps all Englishmen sound alike,” said Fowler.
“Still, I am sure I should have remembered such a magnificent moustache. It is probably just the voice that has tricked me.”
Fowler gave Old Konstantine a two-franc piece, tipped his hat and departed.
The concierge lifted the cover of the birdcage and was met with pigeon stares. “There, there, there,” he said. “We’ll get you up there just as fast as we can.”
He then rang his bell, which brought a young assistant.
“These are for number 306—Mister Pilgrim.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mind you don’t drop them,” Old Konstantine said. “In spite of their reputation, birdcages cannot fly.” It was his little joke.
9
And so my dearest friend, I address you for the last time…Pilgrim had gone back to the beginning of Sybil Quartermaine’s letter and was starting to read it again when he suddenly stood up, went to the desk in the sitting-room and took out paper, pen and envelope.
Sybil, Marchioness of Quartermaine, he wrote.
Goodbye.
He tore this up and started again.
On the balcony, the dance was over and only a few birds remained in the sun—a pair of doves, a trio of pigeons.
Pilgrim sat at the desk and wrote.
18th June, 1912
Dear Sybil,
I am in a kind of purgatory. As I was certain, I am permitted neither to live nor to die. I am caught in this—I think they call it a “madhouse”—and would be anywhere but here. Now they have me walking in a walled-in yard. I don’t know why, though I suspect I must have misbehaved in some way. I broke some wax recordings, as I recall. I also broke some instruments. Musical instruments—a ’cello—perhaps a violin. Is this a bad thing, given that music solves nothing—saves no sanity—prevents no violence on its own? Looking back, I am sorry I was ever the advocate of any form of art—but music is the worst of them—roiling and boiling—overly emotionalized on the one hand, overly intellectualized on the other. Bach and Mozart indeed! Bach inevitably makes me think of fish in a barrel! Round and round and round they go and nothing ever happens. Nothing! Tum-de-dum-dum. Tum-de-dum-dum and that’s all! Tum-de-dum-de-bloody-dum-dum! As for Mozart, his emotions did not mature beyond the age of twelve. He never even achieved adolescence, let alone puberty. His music merely combines a popular talent for slapstick and a commercial talent for tears. No—not tears. For sobs. Beethoven—pompous; Chopin—sickly sweet and given to tantrums—tum-de-dum-dum-bang! And Wagner—a self-centred bore. And this young Turk Stravinsky—the name says it all: discordant, rude and blows his music through his nose!
There.
Shall I go on?
Literature. Will it put an end to war? War and Peace itself is nothing better than enticement to create new battlefields. The Russians are all such blundering fools, their only ally in defeating Napoleon was winter. Will someone attempt to repeat the exercise? Of course they will—the dreadful book is an open invitation. Tolstoy himself was a soldier at Sevastopol and gloried in it—then he pretends to hate it—after which he ends his life as a mad proponent of world peace, for God’s sake, while he drives his wife away from his death bed. And I am crazy? Me?
Yes. So they tell me.
Someone knocked at the door.
Pilgrim set aside his pen.
Kessler came out from the bedroom, where he had been cleaning Pilgrim’s boots, and opened the way to the vestibule. Pilgrim could barely hear the voice that greeted him. Cage…pigeons…grain…Fowler…
When the orderly ret
urned, he carried the birds. The young assistant, who was Italian-Swiss, followed with the beribboned sack of grain.
“Just here?”
“Just there. And thank you.”
“Is money required?” Pilgrim asked.
“No, sir. The young man works for wages.”
The Italian lad retreated. A door closed—then another.
Pilgrim had risen to inspect the sack of grain.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Am I to feed on this?”
“I think not, sir. I suspect it is for the birds in this cage.”
“Birds?” said Pilgrim.
“Birds,” said Kessler. “As if we needed birds.” Having said this, he retreated to the bedroom and his boot-blacking.
Pilgrim undid the ribbon and rummaged in the sack to see what sort of grain it was. Corn, millet, rye and oats. And a note.
Pilgrim tore it open and read:
To a fellow fancier:
Sir:
These are homing pigeons and can be the bearers of messages. You will see my present likeness in the enclosed photographs. I trust you will approve.
It has been some time since we met and it has occurred to me you might wish to abandon your current quarters. If this is true, some instruction would be useful. I know nothing of your surroundings. A diagram would be helpful—a map or some such description.
A motor car is available.
I am nearby at the Hôtel Baur au Lac.
I shall await communication.
I am watching.
Every day, I can see you.
Faithfully yours,
H. Fowler
Besides the photographs there was a small velvet pouch which contained several metal capsules with clips, appropriate for attaching to the pigeons’ legs.
Pilgrim Page 39
