Hinze continued. ‘I discussed this episode with my colleague Dr Jung. You know of him?’
‘Of course,’ said Schrödinger. ‘One or two of my friends have even been analysed by him.’
‘He left the Burghölzli long before I arrived,’ said Hinze, ‘but I got to know him through the Psychological Club, where I read a paper about Nietzsche. Since Jung is himself a Nietzschean, I was fully aware that my paper would arouse controversy.’
Schrödinger had little appetite for an account of professional rivalries, about which he already knew enough from his own sphere. The waitress was returning to their table, her peasant-like features and rounded breasts a welcome sight to Schrödinger. She came and stood close to him while asking Hinze if he would like anything. Hinze appeared mildly annoyed by the interruption, but Schrödinger, to his delight, noticed that the waitress had inadvertently positioned herself in such proximity that the merest motion of his leg would bring it into contact with hers. And by placing his hand on his own thigh before moving it, he found his finger alighting upon the side of her knee, where she allowed it to stay.
‘Shall we order another bottle of wine?’ Schrödinger suggested, only so that the waitress would remain a little longer at the end of his finger.
‘I shall have no more than another glass,’ Hinze told him. ‘I have work to do later on.’
‘Indeed,’ said Schrödinger, ‘there is much for all of us to do.’ And his finger slid invisibly along the back of her thigh and then into empty space, as she left them with a nod.
Hinze said to Schrödinger, ‘You know about Jung’s theories, then? And his battles with Freud, who initially supported him? Freud and his Jewish colleagues have made some profound discoveries; but while Freud was granted the commandments of the unconscious, he knew there still must be a Messiah. He thought he had found it in Jung.’
‘And do you agree?’ asked Schrödinger.
Hinze gave a mocking frown. ‘I think I might call Jung our John the Baptist.’ Then he said, ‘What about physics? Do you not have a similar situation with Einstein? From what I hear, he has only found half the answer, perhaps leaving Aryans to make the final step. Quite a challenge for you!’
Schrödinger remained silent.
‘Well,’ said Hinze, ‘let me tell you about the meeting of the Psychological Club where I spoke of Nietzsche, and that strange incident when he played Manfred at the piano. Jung sat there, looking very thoughtful as I explained how Nietzsche’s choice unconsciously fore-shadowed his later vision of Zarathustra. I said to the assembled company, “Do you recall Manfred’s great love, Astarte? Amidst the Alps, Manfred summons up a vision of her – she is Byron’s own sister, with whom the poet had an incestuous relationship.”
‘ “Ah yes,” Jung piped up, pulling his spectacles down from his forehead onto his nose in order to look at me, now that he had something to say. “In Manfred and Astarte we have a perfect illustration of the anima principle.”
‘ “Certainly,” I replied. “Moreover, I can offer an even more perfect illustration of the principle.” I had prepared for this moment in advance. I said to Jung, “Do you know the passage in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, where Sterne speaks of ‘the two souls in every man – the one being called the animus, the other, the anima’?” Silence fell upon the room. I had revealed Jung to be a plagiarist, secretly passing off Sterne’s insight, unacknowledged, as his own! But then, from one corner, came the cry, “Remarkable!”; and from another, “Well done!”. Jung nodded to both men in approval, then said to me, “I was not aware of the passage in question, Dr Hinze, and I am so grateful to you for unearthing it. For we have here one of the clearest examples so far discovered of my theory of the collective unconscious.” Murmurs of congratulation ran round the congregation before me; I was considered the bringer of good tidings.’
At that moment, the rotund Dr Schwarzkopf and his elegant wife Helga came into the room which was slowly filling with other diners. ‘Ah, there you are!’ Schwarzkopf declared as Hinze and Schrödinger stood to greet the couple. ‘My apologies for our delay, which was entirely my own fault, and not, I can assure you, my dear Helga’s.’ Dear Helga bore the face of a woman who’d been kept waiting. ‘I had to attend to one of our patients,’ Schwarzkopf explained. The company all sat down, and pleasantries were exchanged. Frau Schwarzkopf asked after Schrödinger’s wife, expressing sorrow at her absence.
‘Professor Schrödinger has come here to think, my dear,’ said Schwarzkopf. ‘That is correct, is it not?’
Schrödinger nodded and felt renewed relief that his lover had failed to join him as planned. She would have been welcome here at the dinner table, and her relationship with Schrödinger would have elicited no comment whatsoever. But after the mistake of the forgotten book with its enclosed love letter, Schrödinger was glad to be alone.
‘Just the four of us, then,’ said Schwarzkopf. ‘I believe, Dr Hinze, that you Jungians consider the number a good omen!’
Hinze shrugged, and Schrödinger explained they had been in the middle of a story about psychology.
‘In that case,’ said Frau Schwarzkopf, ‘you must please carry on.’ Her ample cleavage had already established itself as an item of interest for Schrödinger when Hinze began to repeat his narrative, eventually reaching the point at which it had been interrupted.
‘By discovering Jung’s idea in an earlier book,’ he said, ‘I had supposedly validated an even more important idea of his, which is that memories are unconsciously shared between people.’
‘That is hardly original,’ said Schwarzkopf.
‘Certainly not,’ Schrödinger agreed. ‘In my student days I made a very detailed study of Semon’s mneme theory, which says something similar.’ He raised his glance from Frau Schwarzkopf’s bosom to her face, and said to her, apologetically, ‘Perhaps we should not allow ourselves too much philosophizing in mixed company.’
‘On the contrary,’ she said. ‘I consider it the greatest privilege of our existence here, that we can devote ourselves – men and women alike – entirely to matters of the mind.’
‘As you wish, my dear,’ Schwarzkopf laughed. ‘But while we cultivate our minds, let us not neglect our bodies. Or each other’s bodies!’
Schwarzkopf slapped his thigh and threw Schrödinger a manly wink, which only confirmed to him that Schwarzkopf and his wife no longer shared a physical relationship. Schrödinger knew Frau Schwarzkopf to be the more cultured of the two; for despite her husband’s impressive medical credentials from Berlin, he was, Schrödinger felt, at heart little more than a horse doctor or army sawbones who had risen through German ranks made thin by the battlefields of the previous decade. Frau Schwarzkopf was the one who had filled the library, provided the musical instruments, and hung the walls with paintings inherited from her grandfather. Even the villa itself, he guessed, was her family’s gift to her jovial, harmless husband.
The waitress returned and once more stood close to Schrödinger, while Schwarzkopf confirmed with her the arrangements already made for their meal. Again Schrödinger’s fingertips stretched out, like the horns of a snail, until they were allowed to trace a small, inquisitive circle on the waitress’s leg before she departed.
‘Now then, Professor Schrödinger,’ said Schwarzkopf, ‘let me suggest to you some walks you should try.’
‘Darling, you have interrupted Dr Hinze’s story,’ Frau Schwarzkopf reminded him. ‘I’m sure Professor Schrödinger is as eager to hear the rest of it as I am.’ And with this remonstration, she invited Dr Hinze to continue.
‘Well, there I was at the Psychological Club,’ said Hinze, ‘describing how Nietzsche played the piano one New Year’s Eve.’
‘Speaking of which,’ said Schwarzkopf, interrupting, ‘don’t you think we ought to ask for something more pianissimo next door?’ The whirling counterpoint in the adjoining room had dulled Schrödinger’s aural sense so much that he had almost stopped hearing it, like the guns at the Italian front
when he served there. But Schwarzkopf stood up and marched next door, his movements ignored by Frau Schwarzkopf, who instead inspected the cutlery on the table while Schrödinger stared at the expensive necklace that lay across her bosom. For whose benefit, he wondered, had she put it on? Must it not be the most stifling existence, for a handsome and intelligent woman to inhabit a hotel for the condemned?
The piano playing had stopped; words were being exchanged. Schwarzkopf’s voice could be heard as it rose to a growl, but the only reply was a single loud chord, hammered petulantly as the pianist stormed off. Schwarzkopf returned.
‘Music is all very well in its proper place,’ he said to the others as he sat down. ‘But not when people are trying to have a decent conversation. And why did it have to be that infernal Bach? If it had been something nicer, I wouldn’t have minded. But please, Otto, don’t let me interrupt you again. Helga, I’m sure, will not permit any further intermission before you reach the final act.’
Hinze then picked up the tale. ‘Nietzsche, a lonely young student, played music evoking an incestuous love affair. Manfred, having summoned up the deepest forces of nature, sought neither power nor immortality, but only the sublime gift of forgetfulness. Nietzsche rose from the piano and went to sit on the sofa. He could think only of his recent failures: the novel he was unable to finish, the musical compositions he could improvise so easily, yet not preserve. Then he looked up, towards his own bed. And there was someone lying on it!’
Schwarzkopf gave a start. ‘Someone on Nietzsche’s bed? Who the devil was it?’
‘A man,’ said Hinze, ‘that’s what Nietzsche wrote in his diary; a man moaning and gasping, as if close to death, a man whom Nietzsche could not recognize, but whom he nevertheless could plainly see with his own eyes.’
‘The young fellow must have been too free with his brandy and cigars,’ Schwarzkopf suggested.
‘Shadows surrounded the ghostly invalid,’ Hinze continued, ‘attending the ghastly patient’s final moments, murmuring to him from every direction. And then, in an instant, the entire vision evaporated. This, my friends, is the hallucination that the twenty-year-old Nietzsche recorded in his private journal. How then, I said to Jung and the others, are we to interpret it?’
Frau Schwarzkopf had followed this story with rapt attention, her hands clasped beneath her delicately pointed chin. ‘And what did Jung say?’ she asked.
‘Nothing about cigars, I suspect,’ her husband muttered.
‘Jung was pensive,’ Hinze explained, ‘then said that in choosing to play Manfred, Nietzsche revealed his struggle with his own sister, who ultimately became his carer and literary executor. To reconcile himself with this anima, Nietzsche would one day discover – while walking in the Engadine mountains – his own shadow, Zarathustra.
“‘Very well”, I said to Jung, “but how could this destiny already have been present, when Nietzsche had his vision? And who was the dying man?”
‘ “It was Manfred,” Jung declared. There was an audible intake of breath from one or two of his followers, who might have reached a different conclusion if left to think it through for themselves, but Jung said he was quite familiar with the sort of paranormal event that Nietzsche witnessed. Some years earlier, Jung experienced sustained spiritual visitations, of which he has written extensively. His children regularly saw ghosts in their house; and Jung acquired a spirit guide named Philemon, who had the wings of a kingfisher and a club foot.’
‘The wings of a kingfisher?’ Frau Schwarzkopf exclaimed, softly and with evident fascination. She was by now leaning more closely towards Hinze.
‘I don’t think I’d like to meet this Philemon chap!’ Dr Schwarzkopf laughed.
Hinze continued, ‘Jung told me he transcribed his conversations with Philemon in several notebooks; and that once, after painting a picture of the kingfisher-spirit, he went for a walk – and what do you think he found? A dead kingfisher. As you will know, Professor Schrödinger, kingfishers are seldom seen around Zürich, so it was a coincidence that is hard to explain as dramatic or even psychic. Where had the bird materialized from?
‘When Jung told us this anecdote, his friends tried to fit it into Nietzsche’s story. Someone pointed out that Byron had a club foot, just like Philemon, but he was quickly told by his superiors that the observation was irrelevant. Nietzsche’s dying man, they concluded, arose from the guilt Nietzsche felt towards his sister, whom he both loved and hated.’
The waitress and a male colleague had brought more wine and an asparagus soup which was being discreetly served while Hinze continued his story; now told, it seemed, largely for the benefit of Frau Schwarzkopf, whose lips had fallen slightly open, as if in unnoticed anticipation of a kiss.
‘Jung believes that human consciousness has a collective basis,’ Hinze explained. ‘This is how, for example, when he began drawing random figures as part of his own therapy, he discovered that he had produced the Eastern mandala. In Indian philosophy, the collective unconscious is Brahman.’
‘We know this from Schopenhauer, of course,’ said Schrödinger.
‘Certainly,’ Hinze agreed. ‘It is a thread that runs through all the philosophy of the German Volk since the time of Kant. There is a world of knowable phenomena, and another that is unknowable; the transcendental, noumenal realm of the “thing in itself”. This is where we find what Fichte called “self”, Schelling called “nature” and Hegel called “spirit”. It is what Schopenhauer called “will”, and Nietzsche called “the will to power”. This is what the Vedic philosophers called “Brahman”, and what Jung now calls “collective unconscious”. And it is what I call “universal mind”.’
Dr Schwarzkopf raised his eyebrows. He had already let Hinze talk far too long; but it was a licence that offered the company some amusement, even at Hinze’s expense, since the analyst was now beginning to reveal the true scope of his ambitions, none of which had initially been apparent to Dr Schwarzkopf when his young colleague had first applied for the post. It was only through Frau Schwarzkopf’s recommendation, in fact, that Hinze was ever appointed. Well, listening to Hinze lecturing them while they supped their asparagus soup, thought Schwarzkopf, was no worse than being subjected to too much music from the now silenced instrument in the next room. Hinze’s narrative was a music that had its own logic, its own internal significance, and above all a tenor that was soothing and undistracting, like those nice Brahms waltzes Schwarzkopf enjoyed so much after a hard day’s work.
‘As soon as Nietzsche experienced his vision,’ Hinze was saying, ‘he began to interpret it for himself. The dying man on his bed, he decided, was the expiring year. Time personified. It was a message to Nietzsche to stop wasting his energy, and get on with the creative act of living.’
Frau Schwarzkopf was nodding. ‘Yes. The creative act of living. That is a beautiful message – and Nietzsche was lucky to receive it so early, and so clearly.’
‘I’m sure we could all benefit from such nightmares from time to time,’ Schwarzkopf observed, finishing his soup.
‘According to Jung,’ said Hinze, ‘Nietzsche’s vision exemplifies the process of individuation – a term which Jung in any case has coined from Nietzsche. For most people, the life crisis occurs in the thirties or forties; with Nietzsche it was unusually premature.’
Frau Schwarzkopf said, with a playful smile, ‘Do you think, then, that we are all now in our time of crisis?’
Her husband patted her arm. ‘I can assure you, my dear, that I left such nonsense behind a long time ago. Plumbing the depths of one’s soul is the business of youth, when there is nothing better to worry about – no work or children or business affairs.’
The other three were silent. Then Hinze said, ‘I offered Jung a different version of events. How is it, after all, that a man can paint a kingfisher, then go out and find one? How can we sit here, speaking of piano music, when suddenly the piano springs into life in the next room?’
‘Is that what happened before we arr
ived?’ Frau Schwarzkopf asked.
‘Most assuredly,’ said Hinze. ‘Was it only a coincidence? Or is there some deeper meaning, some transcendental explanation? I believe there is, and it can be found in Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche said that since we are destined to repeat our lives endlessly, we must embrace our fate and live without fear. Our species is still hardly better than the apes from which we descend; but a new species will arise, or is already arising – the Übermensch – for whom eternal recurrence holds no terrors. Nietzsche describes a shepherd boy, lying helplessly on the ground while a snake’s black tail dangles from his mouth …’
‘What a loathsome image!’ Schwarzkopf exclaimed. Frau Schwarzkopf, Schrödinger noticed, appeared on the contrary to be fascinated.
‘Zarathustra encounters the stricken boy,’ Hinze elaborated, ‘and tells him: bite off the snake’s head! Take hold of fate, conquer fear, and you will conquer death itself. For really, there is no death; only an endlessly repeating cycle of existence.’
Frau Schwarzkopf said to him, ‘Do you truly believe, Dr Hinze, that the four of us have sat round this table an infinite number of times in the past, and will do so again and again forever?’
‘I do, madam.’
‘So that the rest of this evening has already happened, and we cannot change how it will end?’
‘That is correct. Nietzsche proved it to be the case, using – I believe I am right in saying, Professor Schrödinger – valid arguments of physics.’
Schrödinger slowly nodded. ‘My colleague Professor Zermelo has, it is true, provided some support for Nietzsche’s idea that the universe must repeat itself.’
Frau Schwarzkopf’s face had acquired the dreamy look of someone seduced by an idea – by the thought, in fact, simply of being seduced. She had found, in Hinze’s table talk, the metaphysical vindication of her own idle, frustrated existence. If a man should seize her tonight, it was only because he had seized her countless times before, and would do so again; and the thought of it made her body light, her stomach and breasts weightless, as if floating in a warm pool. Then, as though a grey cloud were suddenly piercing the sun’s light, she said, ‘But if the idea is true, does it not make everything we do ridiculous and pointless? If everything is doomed to repeat itself, then we’re like characters in a story, hardly real at all.’
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