Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  ‘Not far now!’

  ‘I am sorry! He demands things of me. He makes me move. I must obey. I had thought this was all nonsense. Sabine promises me it was all nonsense!’

  ‘A few more steps.’

  ‘I cannot deny him. I cannot.’

  Schreber stopped and pulled away from them, standing like a boxer to whom a decisive blow has been delivered, but who will not fall.

  ‘He shows me,’ he croaked, becoming suddenly short of breath, ‘what lies beneath your clothes. Beneath your skin. The nodes where the feminine nerves meet. The places which animate you.’

  He grabbed for the girl, put one hand behind her neck and with the other he pointed—like Adam anticipating the touch of his maker—until the tip of his finger was no more than an inch from her dress at the breast.

  ‘He moves my arms. He grips my wrists. He threatens me with miracles.’

  His finger described an erratic circle in the air, like the path a bluebottle takes around a chandelier.

  ‘He promises me heirs.’

  Schreber touched her.

  When it was done, he withdrew the finger in shame, grabbing it with his other hand and pulling it back. It left a blood stain on the yellow cotton. He screwed his eyes shut and knocked the side of his head, but despite the pain, when he opened his eyes, things remained as they were.

  ‘How dare you, sir!’ the widow said, but the girl was silent.

  ‘I am sorry, please believe me! I had thought myself mistaken in all this. Sabine… she told me it was all nonsense, a passing storm. Nerves. You see? Just like anyone else. A little worse. We take the waters, she and I, at Baden. Once in the spring and again in the autumn. Sabine knows a gentleman there, a doctor… not quite, he mixes powders… very efficacious. He is the talk of the town. I take them religiously. I had thought this all a dream, but now she is gone and God has returned. It was not a dream. Everything else—that was the dream…’

  The girl’s mother dragged her and she stumbled away, toward the courthouse. Schreber came after them, equally unsteady, up the steps, drops of blood falling. The building loomed up in front of him solid and dark, but now he saw the sun, risen above it.

  Innumerable fine white filaments radiated from it, like the spokes of a wheel, like hair: a tracery that extended from one side of the horizon to the other and down from the sun in a direct path straight into Schreber. They flowed into his body, a hundred thousand or more attracted by the energy of his nerves, joining with them, entering him wherever there was sensation, hundreds on his fingertips, hundreds on his lips, thousands on his breast and down, below his belt, these nerves, these sun rays, penetrated the fabric and burned everything away from him.

  ‘Sabine!’

  In response to the commotion there came running several clerks in tall hats and black tails.

  ‘Sabine!’

  He was taken away.

  Schreber is sedated, and his thoughts turn to memories of an early morning in the orthopaedic institute run by his father.

  VI

  When he was a boy, Paul lived in Leipzig, a mile or so from Dösen. He played in the garden with his brother and sisters. He played with the children of the Institute. When it was cold he skated on the lake and in the summer he took off his shirt and swam in the same water that was frozen in winter. He exercised on the lawn, bending and turning, with his toes digging into the earth and his fingers stretched and straight. His father stretched him up, his grip around Paul’s wrists like iron, and showed him the way to move. He reached up into the sky and down toward the earth, and on rainy days the worms would rise from the soil and lie fat and pink here and there on the grass. When the sun came out the worms would lose their shine and sink back below.

  One morning, before rising, it was summer, and the boy was seven. The children’s room was painted white—the floor, the furniture, the walls, the ceiling. The shutters at the window were white. The sheets on his bed were white. His nightshirt was white. On this day he was woken, as he often was, by the crying of his sister in the nursery. She would have been a year or so old. The same thing must have happened dozens of times: little Klara crying from behind the closed door, like a lamb—soft and sad.

  Klara went on crying for a while and no one came for her. Paul lay straight as an arrow in his bed, and the others in the children’s room paid her no attention. The sound did not get through to them. Gustav might have curled slightly to the left under his covers; Anna’s mouth might have fallen further open, spit wetting her cheek and then her pillow. Her eyes might have darted under the lids. These things may have happened and they may not. Who knows?

  In any event, it was too early.

  The sky in the gap between the shutters was barely blue, and the birds singing in the garden were lonely and shrill. Paul slipped out of his bed without squeaking the springs and rubbed his eyes. He walked barefoot to the door, and the floorboards were cold and smooth. When one creaked, he stopped dead and listened for a noise from above over the sound of his breathing. When he heard nothing, he followed the gaps in the floorboards with his toes until he found one he could put his weight on. He crept on until he reached Klara’s door.

  When he opened it, he stood there, not in one room or the other, both feet on the frame, shifting from heel to heel, and he yawned. He held a breath and there was no sound for the time until he had to take another. He wondered if his sister had gone back to sleep on her own. Her crib was white and high-sided with little carved curves, and it was quite still. He watched it closely for a minute or so, looking for the rocking that would start up if she kicked her legs, or waved her arms.

  There was nothing. He turned to go back to bed, but as he did she started crying again, as if she knew he was leaving. The crib rocked and he tiptoed over to her. She looked at him and, for a moment, went quiet. He smiled and reached down to stroke her cheek—she was warm from sleeping. When he moved his hand away she kicked and cried, this time louder, so that Paul looked up at the ceiling and, without waiting, put his hand under her back. He lifted her up and she was over his shoulder. She cried for a second, but when he bounced at the knee she went quiet.

  He hummed a tune, very quietly, all the while looking up at the ceiling, and he bounced her. With his free hand he scratched himself. After a minute or two she fell asleep, so he put her in the crib as softly as he could and went back to his own bed.

  Schreber comes back to awareness. The orderly, Müller, is introduced. Schreber demands to see his doctor.

  VII

  He came to, and he was lying in a garden. It was a simple rectangle of grass surrounded by trees to every side with a part given over to the cultivation of flowers and small shrubs. A shallow bank had been carved in the earth and a wooden ramp was set into it. All around were trees and the scent of irises and hyacinths and lavender and the rustling of leaves in the wind. Schreber could feel the short-cropped grass of a lawn tickling the backs of his ears.

  It was all very agreeable.

  His first uttered sound, as he came to, was a laugh. It was a boyish laugh, as one might hear from a child who sees his sister smile in her crib, or who catches sight of a cat earnestly chasing a bird, only for cat and boy to watch the bird fly away at the very last moment.

  He stretched his back against the ground. On the warm earth between the blades of grass, the tips of his fingers pressed into soft clay.

  He left his eyes shut for a while and lay still, listening.

  He could hear nothing.

  The leaves and the breeze.

  Perhaps a bird.

  Nothing.

  He opened his eyes slowly. Above him was the sky.

  Nothing.

  He looked at the sun.

  Nothing.

  His shirt was open to the waist, and mother of pearl buttons lay scattered here and there around him. One rested on the tweed of his trousers, another b
etween the hairs on his belly, another off at a distance.

  He picked up the pearl button and turned it around in his fingers, observing it as if through a microscope, down to the irregularities of manufacture in the two holes, tracing the turns of a piece of cotton that still wound in and out. It seemed he could see down to the weft of the cotton thread, to the braiding of ever smaller filaments.

  Nothing.

  Schreber pulled the thread from the centre of the button and rubbed it between his fingertips. It picked up particles of clay and balled together in a pellet which he brought up to his eye. He flicked it high into the air, and it arced over the lawn.

  A bird sang—sparse, shrill birdsong—one note and another, separate, clear, with no import or intent other than that proper to birds: one empty note after another, run together to no purpose other than that hidden intention claimed by the bird itself, a purpose closed to the ears of man, like the striking of random keys on a piano.

  He closed his eyes again and lay on the grass, turning the button with his fingers.

  Nothing.

  An orderly stood in the doorway of the observatory—an ape of a man dressed in a white frock coat—peering from under heavy brows down the gentle slope to where Schreber’s Bath chair lay overturned.

  He appeared to sigh, then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glanced over his shoulder toward the doctors’ quarters. When he turned back he spat brown onto the flagstones of the patio and came over to Schreber.

  ‘We can’t have you lying there in the dirt can we?’ he said with his knuckles on his hips.

  Schreber blinked. The man was close enough to smell: disinfectant soap on his skin, tobacco on his breath. There was a halo around his edges, and as he breathed, the sunlight came directly over his shoulder and into Schreber’s eyes, making them water. When he put up his hand to wipe out the tears, he dropped his button. With the other hand, now blind, he patted over the bunched fabric at his groin.

  ‘And none of that either,’ the orderly said, and he put Schreber over his shoulder, bending as if it was easier for him to be stooped, and only straining when he needed to stand straight.

  Schreber pushed up too, planting his hands on the orderly’s broad, rounded back, and he pushed until he was horizontal. There was the house in front of him, and it came to him suddenly that he was not at home. He was not in his garden, dozing off lunch between the flowers. Sabine was not with him. He put one hand to the back of his head—the marram grass was cleared, shaved back to the skin and where it had grown there was a long thin cut, stitched and recently healed.

  ‘Where am I?’

  The orderly shrugged. ‘You are where you always are,’ he said, and he coughed, hefted Schreber over a little, and took a half step forward.

  ‘Why are you carrying me?’ Schreber dug his fingers into the flesh of the man’s back.

  ‘I’m putting you back in your chair.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  Müller stopped and craned his neck round, almost enough to look Schreber in the face. He took his free hand and ran it through his hair, sweeping it back and over, behind his ear.

  ‘I’m Müller,’ he said, as if the answer should have been redundant.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No, I don’t reckon you do.’

  The orderly’s hair fell loose again, half obscuring his face, only kept in check by the broken bulge in the man’s nose bone.

  They were in front of the chair now, and Müller squared his shoulders, set his knees, and prepared to put Schreber down.

  ‘I want to go home… Where is my wife?’

  Müller grunted under the old man’s weight, but said nothing.

  Schreber spoke louder, as he always did with this class of man. His eyes blinked rapidly, as if he was clearing out dust.

  ‘Do you hear me? I want to go home. It is very important. My wife is ill. Sabine!’

  Müller roughly shifted Schreber about, as if he still hadn’t heard. Schreber lost his balance and slipped until he was bent double, his face in the small of Müller’s back. In a second he was back up, pushing against the orderly again, and lifting his head as far as it would go so that he could see the house.

  ‘Please. I demand to be taken home! Angelikastrasse. Put me down immediately and take me there. Send for a carriage!’

  Müller edged forward toward the chair.

  ‘You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that.’

  ‘Get him!’

  ‘Dr. Rössler?’ Müller said, smirking where he could not be seen.

  ‘If that is the man’s name, then certainly, you must go and get him. Immediately! It is very important!’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ the orderly said, and he hefted Schreber forward hard, back into his chair. Then he stepped away, smoothed his hair, mopped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, and looked Schreber up and down. Schreber stared at him, waiting. Müller’s hand went to his chest—to that place where a man wearing a jacket has his breast pocket—but the hand, not finding what it expected, returned empty.

  Müller licked his lips and coughed. He looked off around the garden. He looked off across the fields, up the hill, to where his father lived. He thought of his brother, Karl. Then he turned and spat again, this time onto the grass.

  ‘Let’s tidy you up, old man.’

  ‘What are you doing? Get your hands off me!’

  ‘He won’t see you dressed like that now, will he?’

  ‘The doctor? Are you tidying me up to see the doctor? I am more than capable of doing that for myself.’

  Müller pushed Schreber’s hands away and pulled the old man’s shirt together. He wiped the grass from his shoulders and rearranged the rug. All the while the muscles of his jaw worked.

  When Müller spoke it was through wide, tight lips.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘See? What will we see? It is I who must see the doctor. Can you understand me? Am I making myself clear? I must see him, this… Rössler. It’s a matter of enormous importance. My wife, I must see my wife! She is very ill.’

  ‘She looked alright a minute ago.’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  Müller smiled, but said nothing more.

  Schreber frowned. The man was a fool. He tried a different tack. He said, slowly and clearly:

  ‘Take me to the doctor, now, please. I can pay you.’ Schreber searched his pockets. ‘I have money. I should have it… I must have a few marks… surely… I can get you money! I don’t have my purse, but I can get money for you. Anything. I must see my wife!’

  Müller went behind Schreber and put his big hands on the handles of the Bath chair, and soon they were inside, wheels rattling on the parquet, making for Dr Rössler’s room.

  After a long while waiting on his doctor’s convenience, Schreber is taken in to see Rössler. A mysterious Jewish gentleman appears at the window, mouthing insults. Sabine has been to visit. To Schreber’s disappointment, she has already left.

  VIII

  ‘So you are awake at last,’ the man, the doctor—Rössler?—said from behind his desk, pulling his glasses down a little from where they pinched the bridge of his nose. He leant forward in his chair for a second before creaking back, returning his glasses to their original place. He muttered something under his breath—“intransigent”? “inconvenient”? Something—and pulled together papers from here and there, making a pile.

  Inside, the light was weak and grainy, blurring the edges of the heavy leather furniture. Objects—a potted palm, an unwound ornamental wall clock, a hanging chandelier decorated with vines—they seemed part of the dark, patterned wallpaper. The dominating light came from beneath a green, glass-shaded lamp on a side cabinet. The air was milky, and smelt strongly of pipe smoke.

  ‘I demand to see my wife.’

&n
bsp; The doctor tutted and frowned, reaching across the desk for an object that turned out not to be the one he required, but Schreber went on.

  ‘You are Dr. Rössler?’ he said.

  The man paused and seemed to ponder for a second, then he rubbed the back of his neck and nodded slowly. At last he found what he was looking for and made a chirruping sound. He moved back in his chair, where he was almost completely overtaken by the shadow of a huge shelved bureau.

  In his hands was a book. That much at least Schreber was able to make out.

  ‘The Great Words of a Nerve-Case. I knew it was here somewhere.’

  The book was opened. Pages turned.

  ‘This room is very dark…’ Schreber muttered.

  Seedy. Like a Turkish brothel. He shuffled forward so that he was perched on the edge of his chair and the doctor and the book were more or less visible.

  Rössler was old, too, his knuckles bulbed with rheumatism, but the pages of the book flicked forward and backward like the wings of a butterfly in flight. He was too small for the room, with its palm and bookcase and chandelier. He resembled nothing more than a homunculus escaped from its jar, making mischief while its master was elsewhere.

  Schreber made an impatient sniff, and the doctor turned to him, inclined his head a little, and smiled as if to express his regret. The loose skin of his neck, his jowls, his long earlobes, they kept their orientation to the ground, hanging down straight.

  With a hand that was thin to the point of brittleness—like a twig one finds on the forest floor late into the autumn—he made a sign that Schreber should bear with him for only a moment or two longer. Clean white sleeves swamped his thin wrists. His skin was brown and mottled.

  He laid the book down on the table, stood up, and went to stand directly in front of Schreber. Out from behind his desk, at large among the things of the room, his stature was even more exaggerated. Like a child, or a goblin. He groaned as he bent over to get a better view of his patient, with his hands on his knees. When he peered over the top of his glasses, Schreber peered back.