Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  The corridor stretched off ahead. Schreber, all at once, stood up on the footplate of the Bath chair like a charioteer.

  ‘Take me out of this place!’

  Müller grabbed the waistband of Schreber’s trousers and pulled him back down.

  ‘That’ll do, Judge, thank you!’

  Schreber grunted.

  How dare he? This lump! He grit his teeth and stood up again, and now his blanket slipped onto the ground and became tangled up with the chair’s wheels. The whole apparatus, in the blink of an eye, was tipped forward, emptying Schreber onto the floor.

  The orderly was too slow: Schreber hopped away from the mess, turned and raced off down the corridor toward the French doors that opened onto the garden. His stocking feet slipped on the polished wood and his thighs resisted the unexpected exertion, but he wasn’t dead yet! He hadn’t rotted away yet! He was a living man, and hadn’t his father taught him to always keep himself in good fighting condition? He had, and he left that slant-browed dullard standing with his eyes wide and his chin on his chest. Doctors and orderlies! They should know their place.

  ‘Judge! Get back here!’ Müller hissed.

  Schreber kept running and now the ape was after him, arms swinging, hair loose. There were the glass double doors that led out onto the lawn—no distance at all—but as Schreber made for them here was the Jewish gentleman he had seen through the window, stock still, barring his way.

  Schreber came to a stop, skidding with his arms outstretched. Müller closed the distance between them.

  ‘Be a good Judge,’ he muttered, ‘and stay where you are for old Müller…’

  The gentleman looked on impassively, blocking the exit, and now Müller was only a few feet away. Schreber turned to face the orderly, and the only thing between them was a bust on a marble plinth. When Müller went left, Schreber went right.

  ‘Give it up, Judge! There’s a nice warm pot of coffee for you in your room, and yesterday’s paper. It’s kale and sausages for lunch…’

  Schreber stood up straight and made out that he’d seen sense, but when Müller relaxed and came to take his arm, the judge sprinted off around the bust—Friedrich?—and ran straight at the Jewish gentleman, who thought for half a second, then smiled and stepped aside at the last moment with a generous sweep of the arm.

  ‘After you, ball-crusher,’ he said, and left the smell of his hair oil in the air.

  Schreber was out into the garden.

  The bright daylight made him blanch. For a second he stopped, but here was Müller, hissing.

  The garden of Schreber’s block was surrounded on all sides by dormitories, but there was a narrow alley leading off the southeast corner which gave onto the rest of the estate and, spying this, Schreber made for it, starting now to feel his old limbs loosening.

  But Müller was too wily for him. Keeping close to the dormitory wall, he was more than halfway there before Schreber had covered any distance at all.

  ‘Give it up, Judge!’ Müller tried again.

  ‘I want to go to Sabine!’

  ‘We’ll talk about that when you’re safe in your room.’ A wet smile and palms held facing out.

  Schreber backed away. Back at the door from which he’d come, the Jewish gentleman was watching with interest, and now, beside him, looking away, was a second orderly, uniformed in the same long white coat that Müller wore, but because this man was so much taller, his arms protruded from the sleeves by several inches, just as his ankles did from the trousers. Müller put two fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistled. The tall orderly jerked to attention, and when Müller by gestures made him understand that Schreber was to be restrained, he too came forward, arms out and hands like a scorpion’s claws, two pincers ready to grab and keep him, opening and closing.

  ‘Let’s have you back in your chair now, eh?’ called Müller. ‘Before there’s any more trouble.’ He swept around toward Schreber, always blocking off the alleyway, which Schreber could see over the orderly’s shoulder and which now seemed the brightest part of the world.

  The tall one was too close. Schreber moved away from each of the orderlies in turn, and if it hadn’t been for the tree that met his back, he would have given it up there and then. He turned, at first thinking it was another orderly, sneaking up on him from behind, but he found only a thick round trunk and before he had properly considered what it was that he had decided to do, he was up it.

  Slowly at first and then quicker, he climbed until he was twenty feet or more from the ground, looking down like Pentheus spying on the Bacchae. Müller was left standing on the patio, his eyes snapping to and fro between the window of Rössler’s room and the old man.

  Schreber slipped off his socks, taking no notice of how the branches became thinner and more flexible as he went up. Why should he? He’d done this a thousand times as a boy, reaching for the ankles of Gustav, and never quite catching them as his brother giggled and taunted and went higher and higher.

  The words of doctors and orderlies were nothing, and they blew away in the wind like the seeds of a dandelion. He wound his arms around the trunk and his bare feet pushed so his toes splayed and gripped the rough bark, staining his trousers moss green.

  Hadn’t he always been careless that way? Because he knew that if his mother gasped to see him so high, his father held her elbow and kept her at a distance, behind a wall, or the window of the drawing room, protected from sight by the natural reflectivity of glass. His father would have lectured her on the necessity of a boy’s coming to understand and conquer little dangers, and as long as the sun shone and Gustav laughed, there was no fear that could stop Paul. Even when he realised how high he had come it was nothing, because if it was safe for Gustav then wasn’t it safe for him too?

  So Schreber went higher and higher, escaping somehow from the place below him. If he grazed his shin then what of it? He was no sissy. He was not soft, but instead, like all good boys, he was tough, and wasn’t this what those sorts of boys did? He knew that it was.

  When once he saw his father watching him, he hoped that it confirmed his father’s good impression of him, that it strengthened his hopes for him, and dispelled the worries of his effeminacy that had been provoked by other things—like when he played with the undergarments of the girls’ dolls. Anna had led him astray, giggling, only for the doll to be taken from both of them. When it was returned later there was a crack in her head, as if she had been wounded right through the porcelain. Then, if one was not perfectly gentle, the gap came wide and it was possible to see inside, where there was nothing.

  ‘What did you think? That she was a real girl?’ Gustav said, and he laughed.

  Anna cried like she cried when she was left alone, when the boys went too high and she could not follow. For one thing, her dress was too big, all bone and frills, and she dared not get it messed up. They would insist on climbing so high, so that even the sight of it made her weep and they were egged on by her tears, laughing together.

  Schreber reached up through the dense leaves and the tangles of twigs and jutting branches and when Müller came to the tree trunk, wheeling the Bath chair, the blanket shoved back onto the seat, keeping low to the earth so that Rössler mightn’t see him, Schreber laughed to see it. Despite it all he laughed. He laughed harder when the idiot looked up. He was so small down below and his face was pale with amazement and dismay, because Schreber was almost at the top of the tree, which was at least two hundred years old and God knows how high.

  Schreber was scratched bloody. He pulled himself up, through the canopy, and at the very top the sun was blazing.

  ‘Get down here, you silly bastard!’

  The words reached, but only barely. The wind blew in Schreber’s ears and the rustling of leaves was like the waves on the shore and the movement of shingle up the beach. When Müller’s words came to him, he ignored them. Instead, from wher
e he stood swaying in the wind, he searched the horizon for sign of her—for Sabine—over the roofs of the asylum, and of Dösen, and of Leipzig. They were laid out like gingerbread houses before him, their windows sugar glass in frames of icing. The scent of spice filled the air, hundreds of tiny houses all laid out in imitation of the places of the town: the bakers, the butchers, the town hall, making his mouth water, and between them roads of liquorice laid in sheets, and on one of these, surely, Sabine must be travelling. Carriages made of cake. That one? At a great distance, barely a speck, smaller than an ant—drawn there by all that sugar! Could it be her?

  ‘Sabine!’

  He waited for her reply, but there was nothing.

  ‘Sabine!’

  Nothing, and now, when he looked down, the expression on Müller’s face, the tall one gone—who knows where?—was a caricature of an angry man in miniature, like a Greek theatre mask with the mouth turning down in a mirror of the line formed by the man’s brow.

  Schreber’s skin was prickling. He looked at his forearm, rotating it first clockwise and then back again. There were tiny scratches, and they swelled up like bee stings.

  Sabine was nowhere to seen.

  He leaned forward, as if that small change in distance would clarify things, as if it would allow him to see her.

  It did not.

  He leaned further still, and still she was not there.

  He leaned until only the ends of his fingers held the thin branches and shifted so one leg was free, in the air, and the tip of the tree trunk, little more than a branch itself, curved toward where he was searching, taking him closer.

  But she was not there.

  When he went further, he slipped from the tree and fell.

  As he lies on the grass for the second time that day, Schreber’s attention is taken again by the mysterious Jewish gentleman, whom Schreber is now convinced he knows from life outside the asylum.

  X

  From the ground he traced his fall through fizzing stars. Past branches cracked and stripped of leaves, all the way into the sky, nowhere was a limb sufficiently thick to have slowed his fall. The branches swayed—or was it his vision?—and the arrangement of the canopy slowly effaced his path, until he could no longer see the blue sky.

  It was clear that he should have broken his neck.

  His head vibrated even as he lay still, and if he concentrated on the sensations present at the top of his spine he could feel what must have been a substantial displacement of the vertebrae, a gap between two bones that should have been snugly together. Those nerves that ran along the length of his back felt stretched, as if they had been broken apart and stitched back. When he tried to move, the whole mechanism shook with pain.

  Then, from nowhere, there was the Jewish gentleman.

  He was smoking a cigarette, and when he took it from his mouth he performed a prim bow. Now Schreber thought to remember him. Suave and slim. Wasn’t he always somewhere? Keeping his distance, never seeming to move or follow him about the place, but always there when Schreber thought to check—when he felt the rising of the hairs on the back of his neck?

  Hadn’t he once caught sight of a shadow as he walked down a corridor, and this Jew was there? Or when he yawned or sneezed, so that his eyes blinked shut involuntarily, and, when they opened again, he felt the world as something new, and he looked around to see where he was, then wouldn’t this Jew appear?

  Wasn’t this Jew always there, in the street, watching? Wasn’t this the Jew Sabine had pointed out in the Opera, who had coughed through the overture to Der Freischütz? Wasn’t this the Jew who had taken the carriage meant for Schreber at the station when he returned from visiting his mother? Hadn’t he seen this Jew at the newspaper stand, waiting, smoking, wearing a cheap hat with a scuff on the band? Wasn’t this the Jew who had been inside a carriage while its driver, a dog-faced Slav, had taken the whip to his horse, striking it across the shoulder and nose, its skin already white with foam, while it chewed and pulled against the harness, the carriage inching back and forward and welts came across the horse’s face, its hair stripped? Didn’t blood come from the end of the whip when the Slav brought it back over his shoulder in preparation for bringing it down again, so that a drop landed on Sabine’s glove, and Schreber was outraged enough to hold the driver’s wrist? There was anger in the Slav’s eyes, that a man should be prevented from disciplining his own beast, whether the animal understood it or not. Skin brown, tanned by the sun and by his work. In the lines that ran beside his nose down to his mouth there was dirt, and he stank of sweat and black bread—sour and musty. Schreber held his wrist and the man turned, much more broad than Schreber was, broader even than Schreber and his wife combined were. His wrist was thicker than Schreber could easily hold, and it was clear from the look in that man’s eyes that he considered using the whip on them. The Slav grit his teeth and, behind him, in the carriage, wasn’t there this Jew? Sitting there, watching, eyes heavy and pensive, skin clear and pale, no expression to be seen except that of careful interest in the proceedings, and of constant mild amusement? An observer, like he was now—exactly as he was now—watching Schreber, monitoring those things that he did and those things that were done to him, listening to every word that was spoken to him and that he in his turn spoke, and finding something in it all that was faintly risible? This was the same man, surely. It was the same man, wasn’t it?

  Didn’t the sight of this Jew strike fear into him? It did.

  Even though he was just a man.

  But hadn’t Schreber held that Slav’s arm? That man who was no more than a beast himself? Whose leather shirt was specked with horse blood, and who could have taken Schreber’s neck in one hand and choked him before imagining the consequences? Wasn’t this the way with men of his class, probably already drunk? Couldn’t Schreber smell the alcohol on his sweat? The tang of the stuff, excreted constantly, causing the delicate skin at the corners of his eyes to smart. Didn’t Sabine raise her handkerchief to her face, the blood-stained glove there for the man to see?

  Didn’t Schreber say to him, “The honourable man shows restraint,” and let his wrist go, dropping his hand to his side?

  Hadn’t he done this? The Jew in the carriage, only then did he turn away. When the driver curled his lip he said something under his breath in a language that Schreber had never before heard. Its meaning was obscure, but the thick guttural mess expressed something beyond simple meaning: that the driver took Schreber for an idiot. If he had the opportunity, this Slav would have whipped them both, the stuffed shirt and his wife, until they wept on their knees. It was only the presence of passersby, and his being in a strange country and of the class of man not to expect easy treatment from the authorities, that stopped him. He turned his broad back and lowered the whip, and punched the horse below the eye. He barked at it, and the Jew in the carriage knocked on the wall with the end of his stick. The driver took his place up top and cracked the reins hard. A spray of sweat from the horse’s flank went up and Schreber and Sabine had to step back from the edge of the road. When the carriage jerked away, the man in the rear was looking out, and wasn’t this Jew’s face the same: identical to the image of the man still pictured in his mind?

  When Schreber turned to face him straight on, looking to compare his thoughts with reality, he saw no one.

  There was no one.

  It was a while before Schreber noticed Müller at his feet. He was standing as still as the tree trunk behind him, and had he been but a shade paler, he would have been as white as the alabaster bust of King Friedrich they had recently passed in the hallway.

  Schreber tried to say something, but his throat was dry and closed, and the effort made the world spin. No sense came out. The gasping noise he made in place of words had Müller inching forward, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, clearly convinced the old man was either dead or on the verge of death. The sound was so like a death rattle t
hat Müller fell to his knees.

  He crept forward like a baby.

  ‘Judge?’

  Schreber reached up his hand and Müller shut his mouth, swallowed and looked back to the asylum. Whatever it was he saw, or did not see, the orderly shuffled quickly forward, grabbed Schreber’s hand and held it to his chest.

  ‘Can you move?’ he said.

  Schreber tried and found that he could.

  ‘Shall I put you in your chair?’

  Schreber shook his head making it throb and causing a veil to descend over his vision, which only shutting his eyes seemed to cure. When he opened them again the veil was not passed, only lessened.

  ‘Sabine…’

  Müller licked his lips and touched his chest in that place where a man places a flask of spirits in his jacket pocket, cursing himself when his fingers, again, found nothing.

  ‘Let’s get you inside before…’

  ‘No… Sabine…’

  Müller looked at him and then back again at the asylum.

  ‘I couldn’t see her… like little ants… it was the sugar…’

  Müller touched his chest and the names of the saints played silently on his lips. He whispered a prayer to Karl, his martyred brother, his father’s favourite, and he promised him: ‘If he lives, I’ll never drink again.’

  Schreber tried to sit up, but only made it a short way before falling back. The veil came down again.

  Müller grabbed him by the shoulders to prevent any further sudden movement.

  ‘I’m going to put you in your chair. Judge? Can you hear me? Judge? If it hurts, sing out, but I’ve got to get you inside.’

  Müller placed Schreber in his chair much more delicately than he had before, but the shifting about caused pain. The world whipped around, impossible to steady, until Schreber shut his eyes.