“Well, Karl,” I say as I take out my notebook and pen and settle myself at the wooden worktable at the foot of my bed, “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“No,” he says, with his head still down. He dips his pen and resumes his scratches.
We are quiet, then. I sit, staring at the portrait of the royals and try to think how to begin. I want to let Dr. Frank know of some of the things that are happening to me, but I need to be believed. I sigh—a bad habit of mine—and Karl looks up.
“Sorry,” I say. He returns to his work. I get up and go to the window, but in the dark there is little to see. The perimeter lights blank out the world. Not even the stars, which have been a joy to me since childhood—they speak of wider concerns than my own—can penetrate that harsh brightness. I tell myself they are up there, that nothing important has changed, and then, I suppose, I sigh again.
Karl puts down his pen with a snap. I hear it roll across the table and onto the floor. I turn with a fresh apology on my lips and he says, “Well”—he says it, in his accent, vell—“you’d better tell me what’s troubling you.”
I attempt to speak, but I can’t. Words, I’m beginning to find, are not always available to me when I need them. Emotion is like a tide, and it overwhelms; or perhaps it’s more like a suddenly undammed stream sweeping all before it. Dr. Frank says I have to not let it build up—but how to do that here and survive?
Karl scrapes back his chair and rises to his feet. He’s a tall, muscular man in his forties, with the stooped shoulders of someone who has worked hard for a long time. He clears his throat and steps towards me. “I wanted”—vanted, he says—“to tell you how sorry I am.” He gestures to the portrait of King George and Queen Elizabeth and their daughters. “What is going on is terrible.” He shakes his head. “They have no right to bomb innocent people.”
“Thank you,” I say. I advance and grip his outstretched hand. Only a few nights before, the nightly blitz of London had been particularly heavy. The radio reported that the Queen herself had gone out to inspect the damage.
He points again to the portrait. “They are very brave.” It is true: The King and Queen have affirmed their intention not to leave the city for a safer domicile, but to stay and show commonality with Londoners.
“You’re not a supporter of Hitler?” I ask him. I feel it has to be said. It is better out in the open.
“Me? Pah! No, never. That is why I left Germany. I am a pacifist.”
“A conchie! I’d never have guessed!”
“It is why”—vhy—“I have so much trouble here, with some of them. It has nothing to do with Hitler.” His hands are fists in the pockets of the heavy wool work trousers he wears. We fall silent. Soft hand-sewn leather slippers shoe his feet—I can see him stretch his toes: He always leaves his boots at the door, unlike Winchell who spreads dust and shavings from his work in the carpentry shop, everywhere. Winchell wears an old blue suit with only an undershirt beneath the jacket. I dress in what I have—student’s clothes—corduroy trousers, a blue or grey shirt and sweater-vest. I also have a green cardigan, with leather patches at the elbows, that belongs to Georgina’s son—she says it pleases her to see it worn—and I am wearing it now. I make myself—with some trouble, after what he’s said about his pacifism—meet Karl’s eyes.
“My trouble,” I tell him, “is with one of the attendants. He has taken against me. He has threatened me. Even a peaceful man such as yourself will know one must stand up to bullying when it first shows.”
Karl’s eyes are blue stones. “Cooper. It will be him, I think. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“They do not like you to have your own opinions. They are angry if you speak of philosophy. I dislike both Churchill and Hitler. I made the mistake of saying so one day: ‘You people are barbarians!’ I told Cooper.” Karl laughs.
“What did he say?”
“He said nothing! But I was taken off the work party I was on, polishing the gates at Government House, and sent to heavy labour. Now I dig ditches or break stones to build field walls.” He shrugs. “I do not mind. I am strong and it is good to remain strong.” He smiles at me, removes his spectacles, blows on them, and buffs them with a handkerchief.
“So?” he says. “And you?”
I tell him about my run-in with Cooper.
“That is bad,” he says. “You must watch out for him.”
“I have to let Dr. Frank know what’s going on, so he’ll stop it! Attendant Cooper can’t be allowed to threaten patients like that!”
Karl peers at me over the top of his spectacles. Standing there near him, I feel small and very young. “Come and see what I am doing,” he says. I walk with him to his worktable. He hands me several sheets of his writing. “Read this.”
I begin to read: Her husband had left her. She did not blame him, because no man wanted a wife that was unable to bear him children. After the doctors had confirmed what for years she did not wish to believe, his answer had been terrible. “Adopted children are not like one’s own…” I glance farther down the page. With an emptiness of heart and mind she had stepped off the elevator, striding towards the entrance of her apartment.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“I practise my English,” he says. “It is a romance. I call it The Romance of Stanley Park. Maybe someday it will be published—it is no worse than some of the books I’ve read—if not, no matter.”
“But why? Why do you write it?”
“It harms no one. It keeps my mind occupied. It stops me thinking about the war and…”—he surveys me and smiles gently—“it stops me thinking about where I am.”
I nod. But still—if he were going to write, why not write something useful, something that could change things? I am going to say just this, but he whispers, so that I have to step near to hear him, “I have not heard from my family. I do not know what has happened to them. I’ve sent letters, but there is no reply. Perhaps they do not even send my letters from here, and even if they do…Well”—vell, as he says—“you must know the kinds of things that might have happened to them. My mother is a Jewess.”
I return to my own table. Darkness pools on the floor: Our two bedside lights are all that keep it at bay. I think about Dr. Frank’s desire for truth, for facts. I wonder if truth and facts are the same thing. The fact is that Karl is an enemy alien, the truth appears to be that he is a better man than Attendant Cooper. Than most people. The facts are that I have a family near me and want them far away, that Karl’s beloved faraway family are, in all likelihood, in mortal danger. What do these things mean?
I have to find facts I can give Dr. Frank that will help with my fundamental predicament—the misunderstanding that has landed me here—and also protect me in the interim. I am under no illusion that a direct challenge to Dr. Frank’s judgment concerning an employee such as Pete Cooper will get me very far: I need to show him truth in a way he can accept so that he will trust me, understand me, help me unquestioningly whenever I reveal my need. There arises unbidden, before my inner vision, an image of the director as the three monkeys: hands over eyes, hands over ears, hands over mouth. The hands must come down. What will do it?
“Karl,” I say, interrupting my roommate who is again hard at work—the stack of completed pages beside him is several inches high—“what will you do when you finish your book?”
“Well”—vell—“I will start another one, of course.”
“How will you know what to write?”
He gives me a small indulgent smile. “The idea will come.” He continues writing.
Knowing that my continued questions may not be welcome—clearly it pains the German to be reminded of his circumstances, and relief lies only in the world he has invented for himself—I ask anyway. “What is Dr. Frank interested in? Do you know? The farm, of course, and cases like mine, and being proven right over the opinions of other doctors…. Ron Signet says he is writing a book.”
“Everyone is writing a book,” Ka
rl says.
“Yes, but there must be something he wants, something I can help him with that would help me!”
“So,” Karl says, pushing his chair back, “you are an optimist.”
“What else should I be?”
“A realist, Sandy, like me. I do what I must and no more.”
“Yes, you do, you are writing your book!”
“Only for myself, not to change the world.”
“I know the world can’t be changed, not like that,” I say. “Thinking it could be was what brought me here.”
“Ah.”
“You’ll have heard I struck my father?”
“You were angry with him?”
I take in the yellow light outside the window. The harsh, unreal illumination of my imprisonment. “Not with him. With someone else. It’s a long story.”
“Which Dr. Frank is getting you to tell?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And telling it will set you free?”
“Telling it so that he can see the truth, yes.”
“I would be very careful, Sandy,” Karl says. “Nobody here is your friend.”
“What did you do to get yourself here, Karl?” I ask him.
He smiles. “I let the birds out of their cages in the park the day war was declared.”
I remember a dream I’d had and which I’d told to Dr. Frank. I’m travelling in an open truck with a young woman. We come to some rocks and she shows me a cave. We crawl through it and go back in time—emerging on a plain where early experiments in flight are taking place. I remember that I help design the wings of the experimental craft by watching birds fly.
“Not thinking again of leaving us, are you, Sandy?” Dr. Frank had said. He’d told me the dream was a Freudian desire both to return to the womb and to escape. Then he said it could also be, mythologically speaking, a warning about flying too high; that I needed to stay on the ground, rein in my imagination. Remember Icarus.
“Couldn’t it mean what it means?” I’d said.
“And what’s that?”
I didn’t answer, but what I’ve realized since then is that I could build a similar machine; it isn’t much different than the gliders I’ve flown. I could build it and wait for the right time to try it out. There are certain things I know I can do.
In the meantime Karl has a thought. “There is one thing that could be useful,” he says. “When we had our talk, when I first came here, Dr. Frank said that he, like me, wanted to make the world a better place, that he was for peace and not war.”
“He is opposed to the war?” I find this unbelievable. Dr. Frank has us working hard to support the war, and it is my desire to be a fighter pilot that has gained me his sympathy.
“Not this war, but war in general. He does not like men to die needlessly. It is a waste of resource and talent. It was a philosophical statement.” Karl pauses. “He expressed a wish for the betterment of mankind. He believes in justice and progress. We talked about related matters, such as capital punishment which he said should only be for murderers of policemen and children. He said that even murderers can be rehabilitated.” He dips his pen in the ink. A blob runs down the nib and onto a fresh sheet of paper. Karl swears in German. He blots the paper then says to me with finality, “Dr. Frank is a practical man. If he does not believe it is right to harm the innocent, show him—don’t tell him about it, like this instance with Cooper, but show him that you have been wronged and he will help you. Dr. Frank is on the side of justice—as he sees it. Let us call him a humanist.”
“It will be a case study.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“I must present the evidence. Something for his book.”
“Perhaps.”
I think for a minute. Karl has closed his eyes. He might be about to write, She felt as if she had just come out of a dream. “Do you think there’s anything in what Pete Cooper says about the ghost of Alan Macaulay haunting the East Wing?” I say.
I catch the glint of Karl’s glasses as he lifts his head. “I do not believe in ghosts,” he says, “but if there were a place for them, it would be there.”
—
Today is my twenty-first birthday. I have come of age. The entire world should be open to me. I stifle a sigh. I could be graduating, this month, with a degree from the university; I could not only have shaken the dust of my father’s choice for me—Damascus Road College—from my feet, but be embarking on a professional path. I think about all the reading I have done since boyhood, the books that kept the spark of my true identity alive, and I marvel at the thirty-two booklets called the Treasures of Truth that make up the entire curriculum of Damascus Road. The phrases “blind adherence” and “vain imaginings” and “threadbare answers” come to my mind, and I realize that these are echoes of arguments with my father. How is it, I ask myself, that I have exchanged one form of bondage for another?
But then, because on this of all days I deserve some happiness, I think about flying, and the golden light of the morning prairie as it unfolds at dawn, and about others I know who must show courage in difficult circumstances—Georgina, for instance, whose family situation is painful, and Karl, who is all alone.
—
I sleep fitfully. After my conversation with Karl, the other men return talking noisily about their evening. Winchell makes rude comments about the nuns, Bob laughs too loudly. When it is lights out, I hear Bob sobbing into his pillow. My own thoughts whirr. I want to ask Georgina her opinion of what I should do about Attendant Cooper and his threats and how to convey my position to Dr. Frank, but I have no way to get in touch with her. I’m not allowed to telephone; I can write, but there is no guarantee—as Karl has indicated—that the letters will be sent, and they would, in any case, be read before they went. I wonder how Georgina is doing. I know she is lonely with her son away in the RAF. Because of this, she has moved from Vancouver to her father’s home, but this, as she says, is a mixed blessing. Her husband, a Great War pilot and hero, died ten years earlier. They’d lived in London and had gone to many parties attended by members of high society. Her wedding dress was made of white silk sent by her husband’s brother from India. She’d loved her husband, but his family hadn’t stood by her, and after her husband died, she and her son had had to return to Canada. There was the lumber baron, her father, in his big house on the inlet, but there were difficulties there—a jealous older sister who had tried to turn the father against her, and the father, himself, bedridden and on the verge of senility. Once, the sister had Georgina taken to a clinic because she drank and visited nightclubs. Georgina calls this “provincial”—but I can tell that she had been frightened. “There’s no room for bad girls, Sandy,” she’d told me. “Nor bad boys,” I’d replied. But somewhere inside me I know there’s a difference: bad boys are punished; bad girls can be made to disappear.
It was lucky for me that Georgina had been on her way to her father’s the night we’d met on the ferry. I would have been a goner if she hadn’t intervened. I wonder, not for the first time, from where or from whom she’d been coming, as the inlet crossing is certainly not the route from Vancouver. It isn’t my business, but I wish I’d asked her. What if we had met earlier? Could the entire episode with my father have been avoided? Sometimes I think about the workings of Fate, and what it means, and whether within it hides life’s purpose.
—
I have a dream that night that I decide to tell Dr. Frank. In the dream I am a woman and meet a small boy. Since he is on his own, I invite him to accompany me on my travels. I am sitting with him and a young girl when he says, “I want to make a baby with you.” I say to him, “What you need is a girl.” He nods. I say, “I will be your mother.” He nods again. Later in the dream I tell him that the pain will go when he finds someone to love him.
I believe this boy is a messenger come to say I should marry Georgina, and that it will be difficult to persuade her, but Dr. Frank says it is an oedipal dream, and is about my desire to marry my own
mother. Or, mythologically speaking, the boy is an incubus sent to torment and tempt me with sex; that the incubus must be cast out.
“But Dr. Frank,” I tell him, “either way the solution is for the boy to be loved.”
Dr. Frank shakes his head. “I won’t waste time arguing, Sandy,” he says.
There will be no more dreams for Dr. Frank.
FIVE
June 2 and following, 1941
A female nurse I do not recognize stands at a door I have never seen unlocked in my visits to the East Wing. I come here, in a rotation with other workers, to dispose of waste. It is not a pleasant job, and we wear masks and gloves and we do not talk about what we see or smell when a bag bursts open.
It is early morning, early enough that the white-and-green corridors are almost silent and the odours of disinfectant and porridge are at full strength. I gag on the bile that rises from my empty stomach and try not to listen to the rhythmic banging that comes from the direction of the solitary cells. Ron Signet gives me a smile and a farewell jingle of his keys, and the nurse leads me inside.
The room is darkened: Heavy green drapes are drawn across the windows, but I believe, from the general orientation, that the window faces south. In which case, beyond it are the dairy barns and the slaughter house; perhaps with a glimpse of the riding ring where Ron Signet’s daughter rides Rosie, the sorrel he gave her for her birthday. Most mornings Ron and I stand on the rise behind the rabbit hutches and watch: That is, he watches, and I take the opportunity to do my exercises: five minutes of deep breathing, one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, one hundred jumping jacks. I have asked for, but so far have not received, my Indian clubs.
“Settle down, Sandy,” Dr. Frank says, coming in and shutting the door behind him, “there’s nothing to be afraid of here.” I work hard at controlling my breathing.
What It Takes to Be Human Page 4