Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  ‘It is like the grave. I will not be buried.’

  Müller moved Schreber’s finger down, and the arm with it. When he let it go, it stayed where it had been put, but Müller’s hand went to his chest and from a pocket he took a flask and drank from it. Whatever was in it made Müller blink and swallow hard.

  ‘The doctor believes,’ he said, after a cough, ‘that with a different regime, one without all the fanciness, you might be able to sort yourself out—that is exactly what he said to me, verbatim—and when I’ve bedded you in he will come down and check on how you’re getting along. He said,’ and here Müller did a little impression of the doctor, crouching down, ‘after no time, perhaps as little as a week or a month, you will find yourself better.’ Müller smirked and stood back up straight. ‘In any case, you’ll be down here nice and quiet, not up there making a nuisance of yourself and acting like Lord Muck and grabbing your betters by the collar. Right?’

  ‘I will return to my rooms in a week? He said this?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’ Müller took the flask out again and shook it by his ear, listening to the sound of a little liquid, sloshing backward and forward.

  ‘In a week, then?’ Schreber said.

  ‘If there’s a room, and all being well.’

  ‘And what of my medicine?’

  Müller looked back at the door. There was the trolley and on it were bottles and glasses. Müller pursed his lips and swallowed.

  ‘That’s my concern.’

  The orderly was different down here. Larger in the dark than he was upstairs in the light, the breadth of the doorway and almost as high.

  ‘Is there a lamp?’

  Müller shook his head slowly.

  ‘Light comes into the room through the grill above the door. When I want you to have light, you’ll have light, and when I don’t want you to, you won’t.’

  ‘There is no wardrobe, no wash stand, and no desk.’

  ‘You won’t need them, because you’ll be wearing a gown, and I’ll bring in a bath and a bucket if you need one. You need to rest your nerves.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘You aren’t supposed to.’

  ‘He promised me I’d be going home!’

  ‘I don’t think he sees it like that.’

  ‘Send message to my wife that I must be taken home immediately, whatever the consequences.’

  ‘Well, you’d need to talk to Rössler about that. And he isn’t here. And he doesn’t come here, either.’

  ‘This is not acceptable! I want my wife!’

  Müller backed out of the door, keeping Schreber at arm’s length with no more effort than would be required to stop a child from crossing in front of a tram. He turned the key in the lock and left, whistling. He didn’t miss a note, no matter how hard Schreber banged on the door with his fists. No matter how loudly he shouted after him, or what names he called him, he whistled and as he took the first step up the stairs, setting the wood creaking, he sang:

  ‘Oh, why did Mother Nature make

  Me only a lady’s chambermaid?’

  Schreber ran to the wall into which the window was set. He reached as high as he could manage, but his fingers were still inches short of the glass. He looked around for something to stand on, knowing before he did it that there was nothing. He stepped back, and through the glass he could see the sockless ankles and calves of a boy in shorts with stiff leather dress shoes two sizes too big. Schreber shouted up to him.

  ‘Hey! Boy!’

  The boy’s shoes rubbed the skin at his heels as he trotted backward and forward, blistering them. He was carrying something from the cart to his master. Back and forward. Time and again.

  ‘Boy!’

  No sign of recognition, just bare legs and the occasional glimpse of his shorts when he stooped or bent at the knee.

  The glass was too thick.

  Schreber took off his shoe and hurled it as hard as he could at the window. The glass did not break but the sound did at least attract the boy. He stopped still and the shoes edged from side to side, turning slowly to face the source of the sound. One shoe tapped the glass with its toe. Schreber picked up his own shoe and threw it back again. The boy stepped back.

  ‘Help me!’

  Suddenly, at the window, a face appeared—a boy’s face—smudged black as a negro’s. He looked around, searching, puzzled. Schreber waved his arms and the boy saw him. There was a moment when their eyes met and then the boy’s face split in a smile, his teeth and the whites of his eyes bright like the white keys of a piano next to the black. Schreber smiled back at him and gestured to the window that the child should open it. The boy began to laugh and Schreber, too, felt like laughing. He tried to make his intentions known, miming the opening of a window and the more he mimed the harder the child laughed. He nodded and laughed and pointed and Schreber mimed all the harder, acting out how he would climb up and out of the window, or allow himself to be pulled up by a rope. The boy nodded and shook with laughter, sitting down cross-legged in front of the window, and if Schreber let up his act, the boy tapped on the window and waved him on. When Schreber got out of breath and had to take a rest, the child gestured to someone off stage and then there were two black faces at the window, the second one much older—his grandfather?—and when this man smiled his teeth were not white but were tobacco brown—those that had not been lost.

  Schreber mimed the opening of the window again, and the two faces laughed together. Then the boy stuck out his tongue. It was pink and wet and he waggled it up and down.

  Schreber stopped his miming.

  The boy put fingers in either side of his mouth and pulled so that it became wide and he rolled his eyes. The grandfather knocked on the window, and when Schreber turned a little to look at him he pulled his top lip up and his bottom lip down, and swayed from side to side. When he tired of this he made a pained face and banged on the sides of his head with his fists. The boy and his grandfather laughed and laughed, and Schreber watched them with only one shoe on and his toes becoming stiff with the cold. They wanted to see more, and they banged on the window, but then they were moved away. By an orderly? By Müller? Schreber could not see.

  An hour later, a workman came to board over the window.

  As the day went on and Müller did not return, Schreber waited.

  This could not go on! Sabine would be told, and when she realised what was happening she would come for him. It was simply a matter of waiting.

  What light came through the cracks in the window boards gradually blurred into darkness. He made a clicking sound with his tongue, by accident. Nothing. In the general course of a day that click would not have been noticed. It would have been masked by other sounds of more interest and import. It was a body sound: like the creaking of bones, or the rustle of flesh on flesh when dry fingertips are rubbed together, but in the absence of anything else this clicking of his tongue boomed. The meaningless clicking of his tongue—a vacuum accidentally caused between that organ and the palate as he swallowed with a dry mouth—echoed. Schreber made the clicking sound again. And again.

  What is to become of the whole cursed affair?

  If there had been anyone there to hear him, they would have been struck by the impression that Schreber was imitating a beetle—a cricket or a scarab—and when night fell Schreber was still clicking to himself.

  The body will rot and the head (will go on living).

  In the night there was a crowd, it must have been six, seven, at least, all hooting and shouting. Women too, singing. Lasciviousness. Ribaldry. Knowing cackles and lewdness, and the women standing for it. Enjoying it.

  Someone banged on the door with the metal tip of a cane, and Schreber pulled back so that his shoulders curved and fitted into the right angle two walls made.

  There was silence. He moved further, so that he was presse
d into the corner.

  More silence.

  They moved on to the next door.

  Now banging.

  Müller, drunk.

  Shouting.

  Singing.

  The next door opened.

  ‘Where is he, the old fool?’

  ‘Get him up!’

  ‘I can’t see him! Where are you? Oh, my lord!’

  There was laughing. Apoplectic laughing. It went on for an age, and each time it seemed to stop it began again. Women and men. Dirty laughing and banging.

  Then the door shut and it was muffled.

  Schreber sprang up.

  Enough of this!

  He stood below the window and rubbed his hands together.

  Whooping and clapping.

  He inhaled sharply and jumped, stretching up. His fingers met the sill of the window before he came down—it was no more than an inch deep, nothing to hold onto.

  He brushed off his shirt and tried again, this time succeeding in gripping one of the bars. Was there give in it? There was give in it! Only a little, like a tooth one suspects of being loose, but enough. He dangled by one arm from the bar. A little give!

  ‘Judge! Your breakfast is here.’

  A tray slid through into the cell, and while the hatch was still open Schreber could almost see the world outside the door—polished flagstones, another door across the corridor—and then the hatch closed, and it was gone. Müller’s eye appeared at the peephole.

  ‘Come and get it, Judge.’

  Dry toast, porridge, and a glass of water.

  Schreber stayed where he was.

  ‘Well, you play it like that.’

  The eye retreated and silence returned to the room.

  Schreber scrambled over to the window and was up again, swinging from the bar. And now a little dust! Falling into his eyes as he looked up.

  Müller’s eye was back at the hole.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  Schreber dropped to the ground. He wiped the dust from his eyes and put his fingers to his lips.

  ‘Nothing to say, Judge? Sulking? I suppose you think you’ve got good reason to sulk, left alone with no mattress, and your own company. Don’t blame me. Rössler said you ought to go for a little while without your little comforts, on account of how luxury and rich food, such as what you’ve been getting upstairs, can contribute to confusion and bad temper brought on by indigestion. Poisonous influences. Making you misbehave. That’s what he said. Giving you a false impression of yourself. Making you think you’re better than you are. Walking around the place with your nose back like you’ve got shit on your lip.’ Müller chuckled to himself and Schreber could tell he had been drinking by the edges of his words, which were dull and heavy. ‘I don’t want to be here either, do I? By rights I should own this place. Karl should. We’d work the land together. But no. Expensive lot, you lawyers. And bloody useless. So now I’m Rössler’s man. I just do what he says, and if he says that Herr Schreber should be on dry toast and porridge and that I shouldn’t rush to get him his mattress, then I just do what he says. You understand that, right? Just following the law? Right, Judge? Nothing personal. Blind justice…’

  The eye blinked and retreated, returning almost immediately, pressed up as tight as it would go.

  ‘What’s the point of me coming down this end of the corridor anyway, if I’m not supposed to aggravate you? Leave him to his own devices, he said. Let him get settled, he said. Stop aggravating him, he said. So that’s what I’m doing.’

  Müller stopped talking, but the eye remained, turning circles. When it left, the talk returned.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, just because you’ve been stuck down here. I remember you, don’t worry about that. I’m always thinking about you. About what you’ve done. What you are…’

  Beneath the door Schreber could make out Müller’s boots shuffling back and forward.

  ‘You want a blanket? Have a blanket.’

  The hatch opened and a neatly folded blanket was shoved through.

  ‘Don’t say I don’t do anything for you. That’s a good blanket. It’s got holes in it, but so what? You think you deserve better? That’s the best you’re going to get. Anyway, doesn’t seem right to put the good ones down here when they could be better used upstairs where the boys are more likely to notice the difference. Not like your lot, who can’t tell the difference between a blanket and a nice fur rug. And even if you can, then so what? So what?’

  The blanket lay there by the tray, and Schreber made no move toward either of them.

  ‘Boy down the corridor passed on last night, God bless him! You hear all that? Some problem with his chest. Banging on it like a drum he was! His mouth was open, and his eyes were popping out. Quite a sight, I can tell you! We all thought so… Nothing I could do for him. The doctors won’t be woken. They’re very determined about that. So I didn’t even ring for them. He’s still in there. The men from the city are coming for him. Sent a boy round to his family house and it turns out they moved on a couple years back and no one knows where they went. Shame. Isn’t that a shame? Right?’

  Müller went quiet and the eye disappeared, but Schreber wasn’t fooled. He could see his shadow beneath the door.

  ‘Come on now, Judge, it’s time for your porridge. You can’t tell me you’re not hungry. You haven’t eaten for days and even you must be feeling it. No? Suit yourself, I’ve got work to do.’

  Schreber didn’t move. He heard the orderly’s breath catch on the back of his throat and whistle through the gaps in his teeth. His mouth would be half open, as it always was, waiting for a reply that would never come.

  Dust!

  After a long silence there was the sound of an argument—half of it: Müller’s side—loud and hard, and punctuated with derisive laughter. Perhaps, very faint, the protestations of another man, which came at last to nothing.

  There had been a time, not so long ago—two years? Three? Certainly not more than three—when Sabine had said to him: “Is that where an eagle makes its home?” She indicated the top of a tall tree at some remove, and Schreber gave her a little lecture on the birds of the region, Bohemia, and on the constancy evidenced in the mating habits of certain species of those birds. Though he was not a man given to excessive shows of public affection, he took her by the waist and drew her to him and kissed her, thinking to draw a comparison between their love and that noble fidelity displayed by the eagles. Though she pulled away and made a fuss of her dress and the arrangement of her skirts, she smiled at the corners of her eyes and Schreber felt in himself a perfect and wonderful contentment for the span of several moments, long enough to watch a bird swoop between two distantly spaced treetops, and for Sabine to correct the disarray he had unwittingly brought about.

  He reached up with his other hand and, holding two bars now, he planted his feet against the wall and pushed until it felt as if his arms would come out of their sockets.

  ‘Well, Judge, what you were expecting? Where Rössler’ll tell you with a harsh word, down here I use a tug on your ear, or a little slap, just so you know where you are. It’s nothing personal, it’s just easier that way. I’ve got to keep you in line. Otherwise it’s all talk, talk, talk. Half of it doesn’t make sense, and the other half goes round in circles, and there’s not much you can say to a jab in the ribs with a night stick is there? When you are doing things you know you shouldn’t. Like hanging from the window. And you might get a bit of a shove when it’s needed, friendly like, to get you to do something your peculiar way of looking at the world says you oughtn’t to do, but what we all know you have to do anyway. Like eat.

  ‘Upstairs I’d talk you round. Give you a choice bit of ham, or a nice boiled egg, because if you’re up there that’s the kind of thing that might work on you. Because you wouldn’t be one of the dyed-in-the-wool l
unatics. Down here, though? If you don’t eat your porridge by yourself, Judge, then one way or the other you’ll find someone will make you. If that means I have to force the spoon past your teeth and hold your nose until you choke, then that is what I will do. Nothing personal. Doctor’s orders. I do what I’m told. A man’s got to eat his porridge, whether he thinks he’s got a stomach or not.

  ‘Take the new boy next to you. William, his name is. Ironmonger. Now, he reckons all his food is painted on his plate. You give him his dinner and he looks at you like you’re the one who’s mad, not him. He won’t be told. So what is there to do? Should I stand there and talk him out of it? I haven’t got the time, Judge, even if I thought he’d listen. Which he wouldn’t. So I pinch his snout until he has to open his mouth to breathe and when he does, I shove something in there and clamp it shut. He doesn’t like it! Why would he? But he has to swallow in the end or I won’t let him breathe. Simple. I’m in and out in a couple of shakes and on to the next. A clever sort like yourself can see the sense of that I’m sure, Judge.

  ‘What else can I do? I can’t let you all starve to death. The doctors don’t take kindly to it. They won’t come down here—that’s more than their lives are worth—but they do expect those that they send down here to come back up when they’re called for. They want them alive and paying their bills, not dead and returned to the loving breast and all that. I suppose you think I’m a bit cynical? Well, we’ll see how you feel in a couple of months.

  ‘I’ve got boys who’ve been down here since the place opened. The doctors don’t see them anymore, haven’t done for as long as I’ve been here. I give them their medicine, and they don’t get better. They never get called for, no one comes to see them. What’s the point of that? Except that someone’s paying the bills? Keeping the buggers out of the way, so that they don’t cause a fuss at home. I’m sure you can sympathise. Didn’t go down too well back at yours, I suppose, all that bellowing and touching yourself up when you think no one’s looking. Dressing up in the missus’s knickers and giving yourself one in the manner of Onan from the Bible when you think she’s calling on a lady friend. And then she comes back early? They don’t like it, these prim and proper types. Frightening the guests with your talk of devils, and phantoms, and ghosts, and all that other scary stuff. Not the done thing at all, is it?