Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  ‘Not that I’m saying she’s got you out of the way down here on purpose, but being as she’s had a stroke and mightn’t be expected to look after a normal husband, let alone a barker, well, where’s her choice? You lot—you loonies—all you think about is yourselves and your mad ideas. Well, I have to tell you, it’s harder looking after you buggers than it is being mad yourself. Do you know that? Who do you think clears up after you? Who do you think has to listen to the gibberish you come out with? It’s hard enough for me—who doesn’t care what happens to you as long as I get my money—but those wives and children? What about those poor sods, watching you lot go to rack and ruin? It breaks my heart to think of it.

  ‘So you’ll understand if I don’t feel too sorry for you, won’t you, Judge? Not to mention I don’t like judges. Not after what they did to Karl. You didn’t know him, I suppose, my Karl. Did you? No? Guillotined. Fitted up. Tried and chopped.

  ‘So, there you go. I’m not one for judges. In general. That’s not to say I blame you, Judge. I don’t. I know you had nothing to do with it. You didn’t did you? No? Just you have that manner. High and mighty. Holier than thou. Even down here. Even when you’re waist deep in your own shite you try it on. Reminds me sometimes.

  ‘Anyway, are you going to eat that porridge, or am I going to have to help you? It’s good. Same as the stuff they get upstairs. Bit less milk and a bit more water but the same oats. Plenty of salt, so there’s no need to turn your nose up at it. I have it myself, when I have the time. When I’m not wiping old boys’ arses and listening to their rubbish. There’s another one like you down the hall. He thinks God has a thing for him too. It’s quite common. You ask the other orderlies about it. There’s always some silly sod who reckons God has a plan for him down here. You’re not the worst. Christ, no! You’re bad, don’t get me wrong, otherwise you wouldn’t be down here, but you’re nothing compared to some of them. We had one a few years back, just after we opened, he thought he was God! Convinced of it. Didn’t last long. Got cholera. Since then we’ve had the drains redone.

  ‘Right—I’ve got to run along so we’ll have that porridge started and finished right now, or I’ll have to take measures. No use pretending you’re asleep either. I can tell from the way you’re breathing that you’re pretending. It’s not as easy as it looks! Everyone gets it wrong. You, for example, breathe too slow and regular. And you’re too still. You’d know, if you’d ever worked the night shift down here, and if you’d ever done the night checks, that no one sleeps that still. Least of all you lot! It’s all legs twitching, and twisted blankets, and gob wide open, and choking sounds, and farts, and all of that. No one sleeps nice and quietly on their side. So sit up, before I sit you up, and get your teeth round this porridge, because that’s the easiest way for both of us, and I wouldn’t want my natural good-heartedness to be temporarily overcome by my hatred of wig-wearers, even retired ones.’

  Schreber has a visitor. There is a disagreement between them.

  XX

  Schreber’s shirt itched at the collar—too much starch. His jacket was heavy and damp. It smelt of hand-rolled cigarettes and beef dripping. Cheap beer. He put his hand in the chest pocket and pulled out a tram ticket.

  ‘What is today’s date?’

  Müller put the brakes on the chair and came round to the front. He set his feet apart, put his hands on his knees, and took a long look. Schreber waited for a reply. Müller made none. Instead, he licked the corner of his handkerchief and with it he wiped a smudge from Schreber’s cheek.

  ‘That’ll do… not perfect, but…’

  ‘The date?’

  ‘Fifteenth.’

  The date on the ticket was the fourteenth.

  ‘Was it raining yesterday evening?’

  Müller put one foot on the front wheel of the Bath chair, to stop it moving, and pulled Schreber toward him by his lapels.

  ‘For a man who won’t eat his porridge, you really do weigh a lot.’

  ‘When you took my jacket, was it raining?’

  When Schreber was standing Müller dusted him down, patted him flat and, as a last touch, took his comb and ran it through the old man’s hair.

  ‘Not bad at all…’

  ‘Herr Müller, you cannot fool me.’

  ‘Amazing what a bit of spit and a hankie can achieve.’

  ‘I know that you have been wearing my clothes.’

  ‘Now, Herr Schreber, are you ready for your visitor?’

  Once in Rössler’s office, Schreber could not sit still. He peered over his shoulder, back at the door. He jerked towards the window. He looked down at the floor underneath the desk. He felt in his bones a sensation like that pain one has while moving from boyhood to adolescence—an ache—and with it, not quite completely distinct from it, was the idea that he was about to do something wrong. Guilt in advance for something he had not yet decided to do.

  He shuffled, setting off a crackle of static between the fibres of his clothes and the red velvet seat cushion. Through the window the garden was vivid green. He licked his lips and when he coughed it was like he’d let off a firecracker. He turned to look at the door. Nothing.

  He bit his lip and stood up. Half a dozen steps and he could unlatch and open the window. Very easy. He paused, and in that time he saw every object in that room: Rössler’s eye glasses upside down on a pile of papers; his pen beside them; the grit left by wine in the bottom of a wide-bowled glass; the trace of an outline snaking up that same glass almost to the rim where the wine had dried away; the smudge of Rössler’s lips; his neck-tie, curled like a snail shell and put on the table; the scuff in the rug where the doctor rested his feet and the weft aligned in the opposite direction to the rest of the fabric; a segment of orange on a saucer; a ball of paper marked by the shadow of the ink on its inner surface, words written in reverse and transformed by crumpling into nonsense and already discarded anyway. On top of it all was the insistent sound of Schreber’s breathing.

  Then the door handle turned and he sat down quickly.

  All the things before him faded into the background except one: the door knob. It was dull pewter and secured by screws to the turning mechanism. The knob was marked, perhaps by the workmen who had attached it, scratched and dulled by their tools. Schreber sniffed. The door only opened a little, but he could hear Rössler, his tone strangely subdued. If he leaned forward he could see the knuckles of the doctor’s right hand—his ring, with the eagle crest, that sometimes he rotated one way and then the other when he was talking, or when he was thinking and was not to be interrupted.

  He stood in the doorway and said:

  ‘We are doing our best for him, Frau Jung, but the progress, if there is any, is very gradual.’

  Schreber didn’t hear the response, but the door swung toward him by six inches so that Rössler’s arm was visible, his wrist appearing out of his sleeve, thin and then bulbous like a burr on a branch. Then, without warning, the door almost closed, the catch resting on the door jamb, where it knocked on the wood in response to every breath of wind. Schreber sniffed.

  Frau Jung?

  He turned to the window again. Half a dozen steps… but now, rather than see the room and its every detail, he saw nothing clearly. Everything around him lost colour and detail and became a whirl, such as is seen when observing a zoetrope before the proper rate of turning is achieved. Objects were a smear of something on the retina, nothing that could be made sense of. He shut his eyes and massaged them, and in the blackness he saw women and girls, and then one girl in particular, a girl he had seen when coming upon her unannounced—he too young to be the source of concern, only a boy—with her foot on a stool, her petticoat raised up to her thigh, and between her legs only darkness. She chided him, ‘Get out, little boy,’ but with a smile, and her legs opened wider if anything, her hand running down to it, pulling across her drawers. He turned and ran.

 
Schreber sniffed and the door opened again. This time it came wide, and Rössler was standing in the doorway. Without his glasses he looked very old indeed, the eyes like black marbles, lost in their orbits. When he brought his hand up to his face he found nothing to push up, and he had to let it fall back down by his side, loose and unfulfilled.

  ‘We need another chair…’ he said.

  Rössler went to that part of the room where he sometimes ate meals and took the chair from the round folding table temporarily draped with white lace, and moved it beside Schreber’s, at a distance of perhaps six feet.

  Into the room came a woman.

  She was familiar, something in the sweep of the skin that led from the bridge of the nose to the cheekbones, and also in the deep set of her eyes, and the bulge above her eyebrows, and the hairline that took the beginning of the hair so far back that it started to become masculine. She was familiar. Like someone he knew: not that person, whoever it was, but like her. She looked at him as if she knew him. It was not how Rössler looked at him: not like a doctor, who examines a man every time he sees him as if it is the first time, to make certain that there is not something important in the appearance that he might otherwise miss. Even while a person speaks, the doctor watches everything, down to the colour of the lips and the clearness of the eye. This woman’s attention had nothing of that quality, but instead she made contact directly with him, only breaking it to give the most cursory glance around, as if assuring herself that she was safe to ignore everything else. Her expression gave Schreber to believe that she was pleased to see him, as a woman might be pleased to see someone she loves and who has worried her by his absence.

  Who was she?

  Rössler stepped between them, briefly, and then stood at a point equidistant, like the priest does at a wedding, or the referee at a boxing match. While they looked at each other, he mediated, outlining the rules of engagement, and then he left with his words still ringing in the air: that she might get his attention by use of the bell on the desk, and that an assistant would come at the shortest of notice, she need only call out.

  Neither of them moved for several moments, and the connection between them was not broken until the woman broke it, and for all that time Schreber could not understand who she was, although she looked just like someone. His mother? His father? His sister? But she was an old woman.

  ‘Is there anything you want to say, Paul?’

  Schreber shifted his attention to her mouth. Her lips were smooth and pink, like Anna’s, only the skin that connected them to her face was lined. She was like Anna, only drained somehow. The flesh of her face was dried like a flower that is pressed between the pages of a book, the water drawn out so that, if there is ink on the pages—if it is a book that has been used in extremis, a book of psalms used where no proper pressing book was present—that ink is blurred, and the words are only just comprehensible: so my redeemer liveth, or some such nonsense. She was the same, like Anna, but pressed and dried. Like the flower book, the room around her seemed incomprehensible now she was here, as if the missing vitality had leaked out, had been drawn out by the room, smudging everything.

  ‘Are you Anna?’

  Anna sat in the seat opposite Schreber and crossed her hands on her lap. She smiled, but said nothing. She watched him and he watched her, his words hanging in the air unanswered. She wore black, though to mourn whom he could not tell. When she moved her hands her dress rustled, and when she breathed there was a rustling too—dry and sharp and quiet—coming from somewhere deep inside her.

  ‘What do you want from me, Paul?’

  The words fell dead in the room and Schreber could not think of a reply.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She squirmed in her chair. Rustling. Camphor.

  ‘You called me here,’ she sighed. ‘You begged me to come, if I’m to believe the doctor. He tells me a lot of things. Things I do not understand.’

  ‘I don’t want you for anything,’ whoever you are…

  ‘Then why ask for me to come? Do you think I’ve nothing better to do?’

  ‘I am sorry.’ Schreber smiled at the woman. Would this be an end to it? If he rose now and walked to the door would she simply take her leave of him?

  If he went to the window?

  He got to his feet, but the woman did not join him.

  Instead, she was picking over every detail of him. Schreber saw himself in the mirror above the fireplace: a sallow-faced fool with wide eyes who twitched like a bird, and fidgeted. His clothes were inches to big for him, the shirt not even touching the skin of his neck, his arms poking through the sleeves, and the lapels of his jacket meeting and crossing where they should have been a finger’s width apart. And beside him was this woman and it was obvious, immediately, who she was. His sister.

  Schreber nodded.

  Anna.

  His elder sister.

  She turned to see where he was looking and met his gaze in the mirror.

  How must he look to her? Standing beside her in the mirror… a believer of tragic nonsense? Could she see her brother in this man in front of her? Was he like the boy he had been? It was clear that he was not. He would never regain that lively attention that had so characterised him, even as a boy, and that questioning mind, and now here was only a parody. She might easily walk out of this place and never return.

  ‘Do you remember that day, Anna?’ Schreber said, ‘When he came to get us? He was in his uniform. He took you first from the schoolhouse and then both of you came for me? Mother took the little girls to town for new dresses and Gustav was in the woods with the turnverein? Do you remember? I don’t know what fancy took him, or whether he had no choice, but he took us by carriage to his club. Do you remember that day? They all thought we were marvellous, the militia-men, and I sat on his one knee, and you were on the other. That big wooden table, picking sweetmeats off a metal dish, while they sang songs. Do you remember?’

  She smiled and nodded.

  She must remember it: her father and her brother and the sound of song, a marching song—“Fridericus Rex”—the men puffing out their chests, and her mouth full of candied figs. She would have seen the smile on her brother’s face, as if he had been born a prince. Perhaps she felt it too, in the company of these strong men whose buttons shone and whose faces were red, caught up in the manliness of their song, its martial theme undercut by the winks that met her whenever she caught their eyes. Their father’s attention was turned around the room, and not on them, so content was he for them to be part of his world. They were contained by his aura and within arm’s reach so that he felt no need to watch for transgressions, and they felt no need to commit them. Paul tried to sing, picking up the lines that were repeated, joining in with the chorus, his mouth open so that she could see the chewed mess inside. It escaped the attention of his father, and the other men did not care, so why should she? So she sang too, a few lines, and this made the men clap, and they egged her on, and when they stopped she volunteered a little recital of her own—The Little Dog that Swims in the Rhine—and they all clapped along, and from there the memory faded, and Schreber was singing under his breath that very song, and in his eyes there were tears.

  ‘“The Little Dog that Swims in the Rhine,”’ she said.

  ‘I am kept in a cell, dearest Anna. Can that be right?’

  She sighed and crossed her hands once more over her lap.

  ‘You are very ill, brother.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Your illness has returned, and you must be treated as the doctor sees fit. It is only by virtue of my knowing the Gerhardt widow that you are not in jail. The first year we had hope… But now your doctor…’

  ‘He is a fraud.’

  ‘He is not.’

  Schreber nodded and there was silence again.

  ‘What were you thinking of? To abuse the Gerhardt girl in th
at way! I still do not understand.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Hardly! They were intent on having you prosecuted. I had to beg—do you understand?—beg. When will you realise…’

  ‘She was nothing. A plaything.’

  Anna pursed her lips and stared at the back of her hands.

  ‘Do you intend to write?’ she asked, and the question was so carefully spoken, so stripped of inflection or weight, so studiously neutral, that Schreber understood even without hearing her thoughts that it was the question she had come here to ask.

  He answered plainly.

  ‘I cannot. When I try, I find the paper suddenly gone. Or the pen. Or I awake somewhere else, on a different day, and my thoughts are elsewhere.’

  ‘Very good. I will not hide the fact that I am relieved.’

  ‘Let’s not discuss this matter again, Anna. It is as nothing.’

  ‘To you perhaps.’

  Schreber returned to his seat and took his sister’s hand. She pulled away, at first, but then thought better of it, putting her other hand atop his.

  ‘I am sorry to have caused you trouble,’ Schreber said. ‘My intention was honourable. I hoped to help you understand… I am a little surprised it has caused you such worry. Isn’t it just the thing we used to sit and talk of? Astronomy, theology, politics? And it is only one book! Think of the many, many books of our father’s that are published. I have the publisher’s contracts if you wish to see them. They are at home in the bureau. I have taken great care that Father’s work be given its best advantage, and they sell wonderfully well. There is a good income to be had from them still, to this day. Do not concern yourself over the words of one nerve case. Mere supposition… nothing when compared to his great words.’

  Anna brought a handkerchief up to her nose and blew it.