Although Brunner was only thirty, he thought, she was somebody you could rely on when it came to death. She had a remarkable gift, so who cared if her assessment of day-to-day life—particularly where men were concerned—was a bit loopy? Perhaps I’ll get multiple sclerosis too, he thought, a more accelerated version than Jacqueline du Pré’s, and I’ll soon need a hospice ward. He made a snowball and threw it at the “No Parking” sign in front of the entrance to the hospital. It hit the edge.
It was breakfast time on K1. Magdalena was standing by the food trolley in the middle of the corridor, spreading jam on bread, mixing muesli, and pouring hot chocolate. The children who were allowed out of bed came over, took what they wanted, and ate at the large table in the day room. All of them were still in their pajamas, some were running around barefoot. The smaller ones were helped by two trainee nurses, neither of whom looked older than fifteen. Horn felt a momentary need to stand there and watch. It was similar to the desire he would sometimes feel to stop his sons from getting older.
The window in his room was open, and it was damn cold. Bianca, the cleaning lady, had forgotten all about her work and was no doubt enjoying a coffee somewhere with her colleagues. If he were to challenge her she would not show the slightest remorse. He turned the heater right up. Limnig, the senior consultant in radiology was said to be having an affair with one of the younger cleaning ladies. Limnig was an unremarkable-looking man who, besides the possible uses of spiral CTs, liked talking about Anglo-American writers, such as Faulkner, Updike, or Alice Munro. Beatrix Frömmel, the head X-ray assistant, had hated him since the cleaning lady story surfaced; the others in the team couldn’t care less about it. Horn was sure that none of them read Faulkner or Alice Munro. He considered how Irene might react if she found out he were having an affair with a cleaning lady, but a clear answer eluded him.
During the morning meeting there was a long discussion of the euthanasia law that had been passed the day before with the votes of the Business Party and the Nationalists. Brunner was absolutely appalled; she had tears in her eyes and stressed over and over again that she would refuse to become the tool of a commercial-fascistic utilitarian ideology.
“Come on, nothing like that is going to happen here,” Leithner said, trying to pacify her.
“People will come to us and demand it,” she said.
“So you’ll just say, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t do that here.’”
“They’ll say, ‘What are you waiting for, come on and put an end to it!’”
“Then those people will have to go somewhere else.”
“It all sounds very simple,” she said. “But what are we supposed to do? Look after people and then, right at the end, send them off to die somewhere else?”
“Either, or,” said Cejpek. It was clear he was getting impatient with the discussion.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brunner said.
“Either we do it ourselves, or people go off to Switzerland, Hungary, or the Netherlands.”
“People don’t go anywhere if you treat them properly.”
They discussed the feasibility of a binding ethical code in medicine, relatives’ right to object, and that form of assisted dying that was regular practice outside of the law. Horn noticed how little the subject interested him; he found himself thinking, I hope I don’t fall asleep, and I hope I don’t think aloud. Then his mind wandered.
He thought about his house, the covered terrace that was still not yet paved, his plan to change the heating fuel from oil to woodchips, and Irene’s desire to pull down the larger of the two barns and build a pool in the smaller one. He used to tell other people he would never have an old house again; only a romantic and a clueless townie such as he could have allowed himself to end up with this one. Deep down, however, he knew that the strangely angled building suited him down to the ground—all that talk of being a clueless townie was pure affectation. He had been wondering of late which of his sons would end up taking the house over, but before he could come up with the mere hint of an answer he was so badly struck by the idea of being an old man that he was unable to think it through any further.
Brunner nudged him. Leithner was giving a lecture on the previous month’s departmental workload and outlining his serious concerns, especially regarding the psychiatric beds. “Christmas comes every year,” Prinz said. Horn was astonished, since Prinz never came to his aid. Nobody gets anywhere with cynicism, Leithner said. Prinz thought that was the main point of Christmas: a show of cynicism. Horn had rejoined the meeting. He said that at present he had ten beds occupied; more than 80 percent capacity and close to the annual average. But Leithner was slow to be assuaged. In the past few weeks he had seen a serious dip—a hole even—and he, after all, was the one who bore the responsibility. Horn sighed. Your classic Austrian consultant, he thought: opportunistic and a coward through and through. Broschek sometimes said that her boss behaved like a true masochist because he reveled in the prospect of impending doom. Then Cejpek would sneer that doomsday must be pretty close, as the pestilence of the psychoanalytical worldview had already infected the departmental secretariat. I know nothing about Inge Broschek, Horn thought, examining the somewhat anorexic-looking, forty-year-old woman sitting next to Leithner with her pen and notepad. He bent over to Brunner.
“Has Inge Broschek got a husband?”
Brunner looked at him dumbfounded. “What do you want from her?” she asked.
He grinned. “Nothing,” he said. She did not appear to believe him.
Linda had come back from her vacation and had ten times as many freckles as before. She was now wearing a T-shirt with Campbell’s soup cans on it.
“Where’s your Christmas sweater?” Horn asked.
“At the cleaner’s,” she said. “Because of the ketchup that came with the spare ribs.”
He felt this sudden worry that the stains might not come out, and then thought this an absurd reaction. He tried to imagine Irene in the soup-can T-shirt. The picture that came to mind was very nice, even though he knew she was not fan of pop art. The hollows of Linda’s collarbones lay appetizingly in the neckline of the T-shirt, her small breasts sat in the two outer soup cans, and the sleeves went right down to knuckles.
“Is anything wrong?” Linda asked.
“Where did you get the T-shirt?”
“In London, in the museum shop, in that old power station.”
“When were you in London?”
“Last autumn. For a long weekend.”
The casualty sister flies to London for the weekend with her aggression-suppressing forester boyfriend, he thought, and I still haven’t seen the new Tate Modern.
“Did you like London?” he asked.
The first thing you noticed, she said, was that everything was enormous and so far away from everything else. Even the distances from one bridge over the Thames to the other were immense, she thought, but her Rheinhard had wanted to take the tube as little as possible, despite the fact that the terrorist attack had been some time back. Another coward, Horn thought as he walked away. He looked back over his shoulder at Linda and wondered what it was she liked about someone who was afraid of everything but trees.
The floral arrangement on the table of the casualty room had completely dried up. He removed the candle and threw the twigs into the trash. He remembered how Irene had insisted on climbing up to the dome of St. Paul’s even though she was pregnant, and how at the top she had been totally out of breath yet had beamed with delight. They had spoken of the future, about the child, about her chances of being accepted by various orchestras, and about his training as a specialist doctor. There had been no talk back then of Furth. For a moment he wondered what to do with the candle, then he put it in his pocket. Red with golden stars. Irene sometimes said that she had nothing against kitsch in small doses.
Elena Weitbrecht, the supermarket manager with the tics, had an extravagant shake in her right hand. After a short examination Horn was sure she was faking
it. I really don’t want to know why she’s doing it, he thought. He left her on the same medication, mentioned a period of observation, and instructed her to return in a week. She seemed half satisfied with that. He saw a twelve-year-old boy who had for some months been avoiding school by devising intricate compulsive rituals. He had driven his whole family to despair; Horn referred him for a psychological test. The retired builder with a hypochondriac somatization disorder was prescribed a daily Prozac pill.
Horn still had two files in front of him when Ley made a sudden appearance in the doorway. Horn could see at once that he was seriously ataxic, even at rest. After he asked him to come over to the desk, Ley staggered in a wild zigzag across the room.
“I need to be readmitted, Dottore,” he slurred, endeavoring to smile. His eyes were red, with pinpoints for pupils.
“What have you taken?” Horn asked.
“My mom also thinks that I need to be admitted.”
Horn felt his anger rising. “Where is your mother?”
Ley pointed to the door.
“Fetch her in.”
In vain, Ley tried to pull himself together. Horn waved his hand at the boy and went to the door himself.
The woman was sitting in the farthest corner of the waiting area. This time she was wearing an olive-green tweed suit that was two sizes too small for her. From the secondhand shop, Horn thought.
“What are you doing?” he asked in a loud voice. She looked at him with a worried expression. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you bringing him in?”
“He’s been like that since New Year’s Eve,” she said. Then she fell silent.
Horn took her arm and pulled her into the room. Her son was still grinning. Horn forced her to look at his pupils and gave a short lecture about the effects and side effects of opiates. “But Dottore, I didn’t take any of that opiate shit,” Ley protested. Horn tugged up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt. “You’re scratching me, Dottore!” Ley tried to pull his arm away from Horn.
“In America, I would sue you.” The young man could scarcely keep his body movements under control. His mother stood there, ignored the needle pricks, and looked at the floor.
Horn could suddenly feel that he had crawled out of bed shortly after five o’clock, and since then he’d had to deal with the apprehensive greediness of an abbot and a senior consultant, a cleaning lady who did not care if he froze, and a casualty sister who had made him face the fact that for the last twenty years he had not once thought of just jumping on a flight to London. He stood up.
“Go home, both of you!” he said. The woman lifted her head.
Ley said, “You can’t do that.”
“What do you mean I can’t do that?”
“I need to be admitted to a ward.”
“As urgently as you need an appendix operation,” Horn said.
Ley shrugged then opened his eyes wide and clung to the edge of the desk.
“He’s taken everything under the sun; he’s in a complete state,” the woman said.
“And all of it since he was last discharged?” She nodded. Horn made a gesture of resignation.
Meanwhile, Ley had managed to get up. As he was unable to fix his eyes on Horn, he looked somewhere at random. He began to yell. “You bastard! What do you plan to do with me?”
“I’ve told you already. I’m sending you home.”
“You want to operate on me, you fucking pervert!”
“Nobody wants to operate on you. You’re totally paranoid. You’re going to go home now, you won’t take any drugs for three days, and then you’ll come back and see me again.”
“Did you hear that? He wants to operate on me,” Ley said to his mother. The woman took a small step toward Horn.
“His father will kill him.”
“I don’t believe you,” Horn said. There are spiders, he thought, who inject their saliva into you, then they suck your insides out, and before you can do anything you’re a pale, empty shell.
“He’ll just beat him and beat him.”
“And you?”
“He’ll beat me too.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not going to let them do it to me!” Ley dragged his mother to the door. He’s sucking her insides out and she’s doing the same to him, and in truth there’s not much left of either of them.
“By the way, where’s your nose ring?” Horn called after him. Ley stopped just outside of the room, supported himself on his mother’s arm with his left hand, and with the right felt his face to check. He seemed to think about it for a few seconds, then made a dismissive gesture with his hand, and the two of them disappeared.
Linda peeped over the reception counter. “Sorry. They just barged in.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Horn.
I spoke to him like an adult, he thought. Either I find it really important to keep my distance, or my unconscious is mixing him up with his mother and I’m addressing him like I do her, without thinking about it.
“You’re to give your ward a call,” Linda said.
I don’t like junkies, Horn thought. That’s the truth.
Liu Pjong’s wailing cascaded down the stairwell as far as the ground floor. Sometimes misery was kind enough to announce itself before you met it face to face. Sebastien Stemm, the surgical head nurse, who bumped into him at the entrance to the operating wing, offered a sympathetic “Have fun.” “Thanks,” Horn said. Right from the start Stemm had been a great help when dealing with the resentment that existed toward psychiatric patients in the hospital. Some people said that it was because he had a schizophrenic half-brother; others said that was not true at all. Either way, Horn thought that Stemm was a decent human being.
When he opened the door to the ward the first person he saw was Ernst Maywald standing in the middle of the corridor. Next to him was Katharina, and right at the back on the left, Caroline Weber was sitting by the wall, closing her ears to her screaming baby. In the background, Frau Pjong’s voice surged rhythmically back and forth. Madness forms clusters, Horn thought. “Please send them all out,” he said to Christina, who had just come out of the sisters’ room. She nodded and handed him the restraining belts. “Liu is in her room,” she said.
Raimund and Hrachovec held Frau Pjong down on her bed. When she saw Horn arrive, her eyes flared and she screamed even louder.
“She wanted to have the baby,” Hrachovec said. He was sweating and red in the face.
“Frau Weber didn’t want her to,” Raimund said. Horn could see a fresh bite mark on his right arm; in one place it was bleeding slightly.
“Have you had a tetanus shot?” Horn asked. Raimund grimaced and nodded.
The moment that the belts were fixed to the bed frame and fastened around Liu Pjong’s wrists, she calmed down. Horn decided to put her to sleep anyway, and sent Raimund to prepare a Dormicum infusion. He discussed with Hrachovec what they would do afterward. They had to notify the patient support service and the court, irrespective of whether a transfer to the clinic would be necessary or not, and they also had to inform Richard Jurowetz, the woman’s partner, of what had happened. They agreed that he would find it most difficult of all. “He loves her,” Hrachovec said, and for a second it sounded quite funny.
While they were attaching the intravenous tube and setting the flow speed of the infusion, Liu Pjong lay there with her eyes closed, silent. It was only when Horn got up and requested Hrachovec to remain by the bed for a little longer, that she said, “Well, it is my child, and she’s named Liu like me. Anybody who says anything different is lying!” Hrachovec seemed to want to say something in reply, but Horn put a finger to his lips.
“When she’s asleep, take the straps off,” he whispered to him as he left the room.
Outside, Caroline Weber’s husband had arrived with warm clothes for his wife and daughter, a brand-new baby carrier, and a chocolate cake for the ward team. He said good-bye to them all and thanked them profusely.
“He’s scared,” Christina said when the three of them had left.
“I’d be scared too,” said Raimund. This thing with Liu Pjong and the Webers and the baby reminded Horn of something, but he could not say what.
He thought of Irene and Michael as he walked out into the stairwell. Perhaps she’s also been thinking that our son’s a type of devil, he thought, and I’ve paid too little attention to him. Neither of us has ever asked ourselves what he’s afraid of.
“It’s not easy for you, either,” said Ernst Maywald. Horn shrugged. He could not think of anything suitable to say. Katharina was looking out of the window. The screaming did not seem to have unsettled her much. Horn pictured her standing right by her grandfather’s grave, in her coat with the friendly squirrel, a slight hint of defiance in her face, and he imagined her thinking of swords you could defend yourself with, and of helmets with visors which protect your head. He remembered now that Luise Maywald had called him and asked whether he did not have a spare slot any earlier. Unusually, Katharina only had three classes at school that day. Her husband could dash out from work, bring her to the session, and she herself would collect her afterward. He remembered that he’d said yes almost at once, and he thought he had done that because the woman had gotten on his nerves. Mothers did that to him sometimes.
The Sweetness of Life Page 20