The Pages

by Hugo Hamilton

  Frieda, you were married for ten years.

  It’s none of your business.

  Your husband is a writer.

  Frieda looks up and smiles.

  The visitors are waiting for me outside, she says. They have nice legs and nice hands, but they have no heads.

  Was it a happy marriage?

  Russia is the biggest swine of all, she says.

  She begins making faces. Grimacing and laughing out loud. She suddenly shrieks and starts reciting lines of poetry, linking a variety of remembered verse together in a long stream that makes no sense. She throws in bits of Goethe with Schubert’s Winter Journey. Lines of Rilke followed by lines of Heine. Shouting literary junk around her at the walls, defending herself with these powerful words and saying there are people watching her – Christian eyes and Jewish eyes staring at her.

  Doctor Maria waits for her to calm down.

  Frieda, tell me about your wedding day.

  In a coherent moment, she begins to speak about herself unguarded.

  I was on my own, she says. In Paris, in Marseilles, one of those cities. He was away on assignment for the newspaper and I was left with his manuscripts and the voices of people in the next room and the smell of liver in the curtains and the different languages in the streets and nothing to do but talk to the violinist and ask him to hold me.

  You met somebody?

  It was a comfort.

  Did you have an affair?

  I told my husband when he came back. I confessed everything.

  She is crying now.

  It’s alright, Frieda. You were lonely. It was a mistake. You told him what happened.

  The baby, she says. I had to abort.

  You were pregnant?

  We had no children. He’s infertile. He’s told the whole world that he can’t have children. It was not possible for me to have the baby. Are you in your right mind? Keep a baby in a hotel bedroom and go on travelling, what kind of mother would I be?

  Doctor Maria holds her hand.

  It’s alright, Frieda. Everything will be fine.

  Doctor Maria has many more questions. Was it one of those backstreet abortions? Was it done in the hotel bedroom? Did he come back from one of his assignments and find her lying on the floor in a pool of blood?

  By now, she has dropped back into her silence again, staring out the window, waving her hands around. She cannot sit still and begins pacing up and down the room.

  Doctor Maria puts it all down succinctly in the case notes – she has been ill for one and a half years. Married for ten years. Seems to have stepped outside her marriage. Marriage apparently happy, though she had a brief affair one and a half years ago, resulting in a tragic decline in her self-esteem, all of which she revealed to her husband in a big confession. Abortus. The marriage remained childless.

  When the nurses come to take her back to her room, she bares her breasts and shouts – guess what I have between my legs. As they guide her out of the consultation room, she turns to point at one of the nurses and says to Doctor Maria – you should take a photograph of that woman’s arse. It would be interesting. And insert a pencil.

  She shrieks and laughs as they lead her along the corridor. She refuses her medication and has to be held down. She lies on the bed, covering her face with the blanket. She sleeps for a long time and refuses to eat. At night she sits up for hours in a comatose state with her knees pulled back in pain underneath her.

  She likes it in the sewing room. Always sits in the same place. Calm and polite. She has made a shirt with no buttons. Says her visitors waiting outside should be sent to Germany, maybe they can smuggle back some stockings.

  On 11 May 1933 she is officially declared a ward of court – voll entmündigt. She has lost the ability to speak for herself.

  30

  He goes to visit her. Inspired by guilt for not having gone sooner. He worries about how she is being treated and cannot stop thinking about her wearing the blue striped robe.

  As a journalist, he has written about standards of care at psychiatric facilities and published a news story about a semi-paralysed patient who was placed in a bath with the hot water running, scalded to death. Difficult patients are pacified with scopolamine, he writes, morphine, cold compresses. They are terrorized with injections and abused with harmful poisons. The school of psychiatry seems slow to understand that mental patients are like normal people, they suffer emotional pain, they can be made angry, and irritated, and sad.

  He speaks to the chief psychiatrist about her condition. They have tried everything but her symptoms continue to deteriorate. He is provided with an outline of her present medical status – psychomotor inhibitions, given to agitation, absent-mindedness, sexual arousal, manic fantasies, acute paranoia and wild imagination, hallucinations. She speaks in a High German accent one minute, then falls back into a rough Viennese dialect. She is often lewd. She talks to people that don’t exist. Flies into sudden rages. Smears her food onto the walls. She has been exhibiting suicidal tendencies and frequently has to be tied down in a cot with bars at night – the patient is suffering from serious schizophrenia.

  The chief psychiatrist sits behind his desk going over the reports, hoping to unlock the secret to her suffering. Frieda, he says, reading from the report, does not allow herself to be examined. Refuses to answer questions. She is frequently silent and distant, unable to recognize people. She is troubled by the brief affair she had with a violinist and the abortion that brought an end to her pregnancy. She says there is a cesspit inside her and describes herself as perverse.

  He tells the psychiatrist that Friedl experienced traumatic sexual episodes in her early life. He confirms the pregnancy that was terminated during their marriage. Is there a possibility that her affair and the resulting abortion triggered her illness? Did this event kill off some vital avenue to happiness?

  The ghost in the marriage?

  The psychiatrist explains to him that there is no known cause for schizophrenia. There is no known cure either, but there may be some therapeutic way in which a husband can influence her condition.

  Everybody is following Freud and Jung. People in white coats exploring the unknown frontiers of desire and sexual intelligence. Every experience, every orientation, every deviation to be explained and corrected. Literature is full of women thinking about sex.

  There is a concerned look in the psychiatrist’s eyes as he discusses these clinical matters with her husband. Her behaviour has become increasingly lewd, he says, both in action and in words. Her sexual fantasies are often accompanied by an urge to be freed from all human restraints, running naked through the sewing room. He suggests a practical way of helping to alleviate those patterns of distress and arousal.

  You should try to pacify her, he says.

  Pacify?

  She may be seriously ill, but she has normal desires. There are moments when she is completely lucid. Have sex with her. Please her. Satisfy her. Only you have the power to assuage those passions.

  But is she in her right mind?

  That’s up to you to find out.

  How?

  Only you can get inside her head, the psychiatrist continues. You can enter those wild areas in her consciousness that we have failed to reach.

  She’s a ward of court.

  She is your wife.

  My wife? It’s impossible for me to imagine that the person I love most in the world can have anything wrong with her mind. It’s such a cruel contradiction. I cannot understand how a woman so beautiful can be mentally ill.

  The psychiatrist closes the case notes and offers a piece of personal encouragement.

  Look, he says, there is a degree of guessing involved in every sexual encounter. None of it is entirely rational. It’s two people agreeing to suspend disbelief. Lots of emotional trading. Lots of assertion and surrender in both
directions. We’re all crazy when it comes to love.

  How do I know it’s love?

  Love, lust, need, sexual healing, call it what you like. Make her happy.

  Here, in this place?

  You’re a writer. Use your imagination.

  He is brought to her room. He describes the corridor with a series of numbered doors, like vertical coffins. He hears the keys rattling and the door to one of the vertical coffins being opened. She sits with her back to the wall and her eyes fixed on the far corner. Her legs are folded back to breaking point underneath her. The door is locked behind him and he is left alone with her inside a padded cell. There is no furniture, no bed, nothing but a wooden stool bolted to the floor.

  31

  Over breakfast, Henning talks to Lena about her grandparents.

  Their marriage was lived in a wonderful flow of silence, he says. Her grandfather spent most of his time in the library. Now and again he would come home jubilant, having found a great treasure, some classic which he got for a bargain and instantly became immersed in. Her grandmother was a qualified fashion designer. She could have made a lot more money than her husband did as a teacher, but she didn’t like running a business. Their marriage was devoted to knowledge.

  On the wall by the door of the breakfast room there is a framed photo of them, taken shortly after they got married in the 1930s. It was done by a professional photographer. They are shot in profile. In the pose of courage. Her face overlapping his a little. His face a fraction beyond hers. Both looking out with great belief in themselves, as if they are listening to an opera, gazing into the lives that lie ahead of them with passion and resilience.

  I love that photo, Lena says.

  You know, Henning tells her, they lived the life of that picture. All through the war. All through the GDR years. Not for one minute did they stray from that sense of self-belief. It carried them through everything, good and bad.

  Lena takes one of the ripened pears from the windowsill in the kitchen. She places it on a plate with a blue design around the rim. Henning stands up and searches through a drawer. He comes back with a dedicated fruit knife and she cuts the pear into four equal shapes, like long canoes lined up before a race. She looks at the pleasing design of these boats for a moment before picking up the winner.

  Henning tells Lena that her grandfather once helped a young student when his parents got into trouble. During the GDR years, he says, the parents of one of his pupils planned to escape to the West. All their hopes were placed into that one great dream of getting out. The father managed to make it across on his own, hidden inside a truck carrying rolls of paper. He could easily have started a new life there, but he kept devising ways of getting his family out. A year later he returned under a new name with false passports for his wife and son, but the plan was naive. The trap had been set. The Stasi agents understood the force of love better than anyone. They were good at guessing human weakness. The three of them were caught when they reached the border checkpoint in Berlin. The parents were sent to prison and the authorities decided to send their son to an orphanage to be re-educated.

  Lena’s grandfather offered to keep the boy in school and find him a place to stay with a relative.

  The request was refused. Your grandfather, Henning says, kept trying even though it seemed futile. The officials he dealt with were cold-hearted. The more representations he made on behalf of the boy, the more he became associated with the couple who had made the escape attempt. They accused him of being a collaborator. They brought up a list of contraband literature which had been confiscated in his mail, as if that proved his complicity. They came to search the house, and I remember them in the library for hours, an entire morning and afternoon. It was a terrifying day, mostly for my mother. My father kept calm. He had gone through this kind of thing before. They were wasting their time. They failed to find anything. It was all too well concealed.

  Your grandfather continued pleading on behalf of the boy until they finally released him from the orphanage. It was his standing in the community that made him so persuasive. The boy, his name was Max, went to stay with our aunt in a suburb on the other side of the city. He went to a different school there. Occasionally he was invited to our house and we got to know him as a quiet type, not saying very much, waiting for his parents to be released so he could go back home again.

  Some years ago, Henning recalls, I ran into him, by accident, here in Magdeburg. He was working as a caretaker in a house where a friend of mine lives. On my way in, he recognized me and asked if my name was Knecht. He spoke about my father, the schoolteacher, giving the name of the school. He had heard that I had stepped into my father’s shoes and become the principal at the same school. It had been relocated when Russian troops took over the original building, Henning says, but then it moved back after the Wall came down and the Russians went home. We spoke for a while in the courtyard. His parents had gone to live in the West, but they were not happy there and returned to spend the rest of their days back here in Magdeburg. The escape they planned so many years ago as a young married couple may well have seemed irrelevant by then.

  Henning wonders – was it worth trying?

  Max told me he was glad they made the attempt at least. What else could they do? If they hadn’t tried, they would have spent the rest of their lives regretting it. Even though it caused so much trouble and loneliness for each one of them while they were separated from each other, he said he would tell them to do it all over again.

  These events were never spoken of very much in our house, Henning says. It was one of the many things my father got involved in over the years. I hardly remembered it until this man stopped me at the entrance to the house and introduced himself as Max. I didn’t recognize him, Henning says. As though I had expected him to remain the age he was when he came to visit us as a boy, before his parents were released from prison. Max spoke to me with some excitement in his voice – it was clear that he was delighted to find the opportunity to remember what my father had done. There were tears in his eyes. My father meant so much to him. It felt to me that I had taken my father for granted. To me, Henning says, he was my father. To him, he was the man who rescued him from the orphanage. To me, he was a man sitting in the library reading. To him, he was the man who treated him like a son while his parents were in prison. We both remembered him on a trip down the river one day in the summer, reading out a passage from Dostoevsky on deck to all the passengers.

  32

  There was a reason why Lena was sent to live in Ireland when she was thirteen. She tells Henning how her father said it was for her safety. There was no further explanation. I thought it had to do with me being a teenager out of control, she says. I had got involved in small acts of vandalism around the city after they separated. I tried to stop him getting to know anyone new. I had become a burden. An intruder in his life, watching him eat, watching him picking his teeth, waiting for him to clap his hands at the end of a meal to signal that it was time to move on. I knew too much about him, his words, his clichés, his linguistic mistakes. His German accent was an embarrassment, I thought.

  You’re going to Ireland, he said one day, it’s in your best interest to live with your mother for a while. She has a nice school picked out for you over there, you’ll love it, he said. It was just for a year, so I could get to know my mother’s side. He packed my case, each item laid out on the table and ticked off the list. That was it, she says, we were on a flight the next day, handed over into my mother’s care in a house full of drugs, looking back home across the Atlantic.

  I loved my father, Lena says. We used to have great fun together. He could be very funny. He would tease me about the way I came in from school and left my shoes and my coat lying on the floor, like a snake shedding its skin. And I would get him back about his hair, telling him he looked like a parking lot full of weeds.

  He was having some trouble at work at the time, he t
old me, but he never went into that very much. He worked in a large bakery where everything was mechanized, it was a waste of his baking skills. They mass-produced doughnuts and Danish pastries, and those subs for Philly steak sandwiches. Some of the workers began to victimize an African American employee, calling him names, throwing flour over him, telling him he looked better white, that kind of stuff. It was years later that my father told me all this. I think he was initially glad because they stopped calling him a Nazi. They turned on this black man from Houston, his name was Julian, I remember – Julian Ives. One day they covered him in dough, like human pastry, then threatened to bake him. My father intervened. He called the supervisor and the men told him to get lost, what was a Nazi doing in a place with ovens. When the supervisor arrived, the men said it was all a joke. Everybody shook hands and that was the end of it – no hard feelings. Julian was told to get himself cleaned up and he was given the rest of the shift off. They chipped in and gave him some money so he wouldn’t make an official complaint. Nothing was ever put down in any report. And then one day, Julian was found on the floor with head injuries. My father called an ambulance. The production line kept going, nothing was held up. The black man was in hospital for some time after that.

  Lena describes how she and her father used to go on the train to a suburb called Bryn Mawr on Sundays, visiting friends who spoke German. I loved that journey, she says, the time it took going through different town centres. On the way back, the train stopped every couple minutes at each station. As we got closer to the city, the train went through a series of derelict stations where it didn’t stop and I asked my father why? Don’t the people here take the train? Don’t they need to go into the city? We passed through all these boarded-up stations, no lights, lots of graffiti, like nobody lived in that part of the city any more. My father said it was the African American district and I thought they were like dead stations.