She could not sleep. It was too bright. Moonlight streamed through the uncovered windows. And there was the noise. The other patients roared out in the night. They had bad dreams. And even when they weren’t having nightmares there was a constant undertow of protest – they muttered and spat and grumbled even in their deepest slumber. The woman in the next bed, the large one with the spectacles, salivated noisily and ground her teeth. The beds were close enough together that every bodily function was clearly audible – farts, the growl of stomachs. And they snored like furnaces. She lay sleepless and listened to the cacophony, loud and livid as a nocturnal forest. In their slumber they railed against their fate; perhaps because only in their sleep were they allowed to give vent to their pent-up frustration and rage uncensored. And it was the only time they left her alone. Only at night as she lay listening to their animal sounds, burrowing deep into the febrile muck of dreams, did she feel anything for them. It was a mournful kind of fellow feeling, tinged with her own disdain.
They were roused roughly in the dawn by the peel of a school bell wielded by Nurse Malinovsky. The morning call was the last task of her day. They were herded down the corridor in a long line, each according to her number. Oh yes, not only did she own a name now, she also had a number, 15B, the latest admission, the last into the showers. She watched, horrified, as the women ahead of her were pushed two to a tiled stall and a jet of cold water was applied mercilessly. Nurse Malinovsky checked for lice in their hair and soaped the underarms and crotches of the vacant imbeciles, who rocked and swayed placidly in the footbaths. The others squealed and shrieked and pawed one another as they tried to catch the leaping bars of carbolic soap, which turned into fish in their hands. 15B watched long enough to know that this she would never tolerate. She would not strip in front of these creatures. She fled back to the ward. Nurse Malinovsky followed her.
‘What is it, Fräulein?’
She shook her head violently, shrinking from the nurse’s outstretched hand.
‘The showers are part of the treatment here, Fräulein. We find that immersion is often beneficial for the despondent, it invigorates the spirit. And it’s vital for hygiene. I can tell you have standards in that area but for the others it’s something that must be imposed. You understand?’
She warmed to the nurse’s conciliatory tone. This woman was a lady.
‘We won’t insist for today, but it’s important not to let yourself go, particularly in here.’
The din from the showers blossomed damply.
‘I must go and tend to my water rats.’
Breakfast was not much better than lunch. Lumpy porridge, cold tea – they were not allowed anything hot in case they threw it over one another. And their distance from the kitchens meant that all food arrived tepid and looking as if it had already been partially digested. She ate at her locker again. She would not grub around with the rest of them. The nurses did not insist. She had learned her first lesson about Dalldorf. Resistance must always be quiet. Anything showy or noisy would land her in the company of the really mad in the lock-up wards. If she kept herself apart she might not be infected. She must not end up like these poor demented creatures, whom she both despised and pitied.
After breakfast the women were supposed to make their beds, but except for a few even this task was beyond them and the nurses usually took over, turning in corners and thumping the limp pillows to make them seem fat. The patients were lined up again, this time for their daily exercise. They were paired off. She got the pigtailed dwarf, who insisted on holding her hand, swinging it gaily as they were led outside. The dwarf’s palm was aged to the touch, but clammy as a frightened child’s. Their destination was not, as she expected, the verdant stretch of green visible through the French windows, but an exercise yard at the back of the building, fenced in by a tall palisade. Nurse Bucholz led the charade, a risible attempt at leg-shaking and arm-swinging and leaping on the spot, followed by a trudge twice around the perimeter. Nurse Bucholz tried to keep them in step by blowing fiercely on a whistle to up their ragged tempo. The dwarf took four tripping steps to each one of hers; it was like being chained to a malevolent infant. When it was over, she rushed to wash her hands, scrubbing them almost raw to remove all trace of the evil little creature, a hag in a child’s body. It was the first and last time Fräulein Unbekannt would participate in communal exercise.
They were put to work, each according to her malady. The delirious washed, the imbeciles hung out to dry, the melancholy ironed. She was determined that she would never join them. She would not drudge and slave. She was better than that. She must rise above the common throng; how else was she going to get out of here? Initially she was excused from work detail because there were further tests to be done. As she sat on the bed in the deserted ward she wondered what further humiliation they had planned for her. Within the hour Dr Hanisch and Nurse Walz appeared, sidling up to her slyly, and she feared the worst.
‘Fräulein,’ Dr Hanisch said tentatively, ‘I’m afraid that it is necessary for us to conduct another physical examination …’
She wrapped her arms around herself.
‘Of an intimate, female kind …’
She knew what he was saying. He would rape her. It was what all men wanted.
‘It will be very quick,’ Nurse Walz said, ‘it won’t hurt.’
What place was this, where women shepherded degradation with sweet words and lies?
‘Lie down, Fräulein,’ the nurse said, pushing against the rigid clasp of her body. She flailed wildly, catching Nurse Walz’s nose. Blood streamed from her nostril. The nurse backed off, leaving a bloody trail on the bedclothes. Dr Hanisch snapped his fingers and two orderlies emerged, shouldering their way to the bedside. One grabbed the patient’s arms and forced them over her head, the other clamped his hands around her ankles. Dr Hanisch forced her legs open. She felt him enter her. Cold, metallic, he was using his rifle barrel. She screamed. One of the orderlies clapped a hand over her mouth. He tasted of bacon rind. She waited for the rupture. She felt inside the cold face of some sharp instrument, a mirror perhaps. Were they trying to see right inside her? Dr Hanisch withdrew. The orderlies released their grip. No wonder all the women here were mad, she thought. He had done the same to them. Nurse Walz, still nursing her bloody nose, drew over a cloth screen – as if it made any difference now – and she and the doctor moved away. She could hear them whispering.
‘Well,’ Dr Hanisch said, ‘it would appear our mystery woman is no saint. Not a virgin any more.’
‘Perhaps there is a young man?’ Nurse Walz said.
She drew the coverlet up over her pulsing innards as Dr Hanisch reappeared.
‘Fräulein, perhaps we should send for your young man?’
What young man would want me now? she thought.
‘Your fiancé?’
A vision of blood appeared before her eyes. Blood and death.
‘Fräulein?’
She curled into a tight ball.
‘None of that,’ she shouted. ‘No fiancé, do you hear? None of that!’
‘She speaks,’ Dr Hanisch said quietly.
‘I will say no more,’ she spat back.
SOME WEEKS PASSED and Fräulein Unbekannt was, for the most part, left alone. Every so often she would be subjected to another round of fruitless questions by Dr Hanisch, though he did not lay a finger on her again. But there was the hostility of Ward B to deal with. For both the doctors and the insane, silence was a provocation. The dwarf woman, in particular, would spend hours staring at her, trying to touch her and speaking in a childish babble, a language only she understood. Her face would become animated, her beady eyes would light up and she would wave her hands about. She smiled gleefully, her shoulders hunched up, her large domed forehead wrinkling as she wiggled her eyebrows. When she got no response she would shout and wail, squeezing out large childish tears, her tongue lolling on her fat lip.
‘She doesn’t want to play, Hanna,’ Nurse Bucholz would s
ay as the Fräulein recoiled from the touch of the dwarf’s scaly claws. ‘Come, let’s go out into the garden. You can play there.’
When they weren’t leading her into danger, as Nurse Walz had done, the nurses were kind to her. They treated her with a kind of wary respect; they allowed her to walk in the garden alone; they did not insist that she work. She felt she had been granted a special position, above the others, as if her present condition, nameless and without a history, marked her out as superior.
‘Believe me,’ Nurse Malinovsky confided in her one night, ‘it makes a change to have a patient who doesn’t know who she is. In the lock-up wards alone, there are three Empress Sissies.’
The Fräulein blanched.
‘No matter she’s been dead for years. But we have to still treat them as royalty. Kiss their hands and the like.’
‘Sissi, did you say?’
‘Yes, you know, the Austrian princess, murdered in the street. Terrible business.’ The nurse chattered on, not noticing the Fräulein’s abstracted discomfort. Something had reverberated, a name, a notion.
She often sat with Nurse Malinovsky during the night. The nurse would take her to the kitchens, strictly out of bounds for patients, and make her cocoa. The two women would sit companionably amidst the dull sheen of stove and pot, and Thea – she had even trusted her with her first name – would natter about her life. She was engaged to be married to a doctor. She was doing night duty to save extra money for the wedding, a large affair to be held in Charlottenburg.
‘My mother, bless her, is looking forward ever so much to the wedding. There are six of us girls and she’s anxious to get us off her hands,’ Thea said one evening. ‘Is your mother still alive, Fräulein?’
Mother, mother. She racked her brain. Even the smallest question was a test. She repeated the word to herself. Mother. Even the word itself seemed strange. All words seemed strange.
‘I dreamed of her last night,’ she said suddenly.
Sometimes a shard of knowledge would cut through the mist she was in. The truth was she was troubled by dreams every night. In this one a woman – whose features she did not recognise and yet whom she knew to be her mother – appeared, dressed in a rich black coat with a fleecy collar. She was stepping into a carriage outside a large, imposing house. Inside the carriage a handsome young man was waiting. He had a silver smile, but instead of teeth he had a mouthful of pins.
‘How strange,’ Thea murmured. ‘What could it mean?’
She did not tell Thea Malinovsky of her other dreams, the bad ones. Fire and water. From which she would awake with a scream buried in her throat but nothing emerging but a vast and hollow silence. It was this that terrified her most – the deep emptiness within. As if she were an echo chamber, a dark and aching void, filled with the sharp fragments of other people’s dreams. She was afraid the patients of Ward B were infiltrating her darkness. They could not reach her during the day so they chose the night to send her their horrors and secrets, their ghosts and frights. It was another reason to stay vigilant. She willed herself to stay awake until dawn when the night terrors would creep back to their rightful owners – the mad occupants of Ward B.
She liked to walk in the garden in the mornings when the other patients were at work. She was allowed to ramble down the gravel driveway as far as the huge iron gates that separated the asylum from the outside world. Beneath the shade of the oak trees bluebells flourished and wild poppies waved in red delirium. The large house that contained the lock-up wards looked from this angle like a fine manor, while Ward B with its French windows thrown open could have been a summer pavilion. For a few moments she could imagine herself as the mistress of this grand establishment, the doctors and nurses as household staff. It allowed her to believe that she was in charge of rather than imprisoned by Dalldorf. It was a pleasant daydream until she remembered the dull-eyed occupants of Ward B; then the fantasy fell away. And she could never fully surrender to such fancies. The dangerous outside world, shimmering vividly outside these walls, had a habit of intruding.
She was returning from a stroll in the grounds one morning in late May, and looking forward to a little nap in the ward before the patients returned from the laundry for lunch, when she was accosted on the driveway by Nurse Walz.
‘Ah, Fräulein,’ she said, relieved. ‘I’m glad to find you. There are some men to see you.’
‘Men?’ She knew no men.
‘Policemen,’ Nurse Walz said.
The two women walked together towards the director’s stuffy office. Since she had struck her, she noticed Nurse Walz was careful not to touch her. The director was standing at the door.
‘That will be all, Walz,’ he said, grasping the Fräulein by the elbow and guiding her inside. He closed the door emphatically. Two men in overcoats stood by the director’s desk. They were blunt-looking men. One had a bristled pate, the other, a much younger man, had a lock of oiled hair which fell into his eyes. A camera stood on a tripod in the middle of the room. She felt a cold, creeping panic overtake her.
‘Sit!’ the director said, pointing to a chair standing a few yards in front of the camera.
When she hesitated he caught her roughly by the arm and forced her to sit down. She covered her face with her hands.
‘Fräulein,’ the younger man said. ‘We only want to take a picture of you, that is all. My word of honour.’
‘Let’s get on with this,’ his gruff companion said.
‘This will help you, Fräulein. And help us to find out who you are. We will post these pictures all over Germany. Someone is bound to come forward,’ the young man said, brushing his greased hair back from his forehead.
She did not believe him. Why did they persist in telling her lies? They were here to punish her. The young man stepped back behind the camera and ducked beneath a black hood. A hood! They were going to shoot her.
‘Now, Fräulein,’ his voice came out distant and muffled, ‘why don’t you give us a smile?’
It was a trick. It was bad luck to show your teeth to an ill-wisher. She tried to cover her mouth. The director, who had been standing behind her with a restraining hand on her shoulder, caught her wrist and bent her arm back behind the chair.
‘We can tie her,’ he said.
‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ the young man said, his flushed face reappearing from behind the hood. Then he disappeared again.
‘Look this way, Fräulein,’ he said from behind his cloak of darkness.
There was a blinding flash, a smart explosion, and everything turned brilliant white, then flared into splotchy darkness. She waited for the fire – first the explosion, then the fire, but none came.
‘Lovely,’ the photographer said, mistaking her rictus of terror for a smile. The director released his grip and she slumped in the chair.
‘You may go now,’ he said.
‘There is just one more small matter,’ the older policeman said. ‘Over here, Fräulein.’
The director prodded her and she stepped towards the desk. The policeman grabbed her hand and dabbed her forefinger onto an inked pad. Then he pressed it firmly onto a little cell printed on a white card lying on the table, which at the top bore her new name, Fräulein Unbekannt. So she was a criminal. She looked at the blackened smudge of her fingerprint. As she bent over it, it looked like the tiny map of an unexplored country, the tracery of rivers, the whorl of mountains, the swirling vortex at the centre. It made her dizzy. She straightened and it reverted to a messy black mark, a child’s legacy in mud. They were fools! How could this tell them anything about her?
She did not want to know anything more about herself than her face and afflicted body had already betrayed. That way her crime, whatever it was, would not be discovered. And without a crime there would be no punishment. The last thing she wanted was the arrival of some stranger, who would point a ghastly finger and declare – you’re mine. When she wasn’t being pestered by official interrogation, or subjected to Nurse Malinovsky�
�s questions inserted slyly into their night-time conversations, she was left to drift, free to be anybody she wished, or nobody. She was surrounded, after all, by a bunch of crazy women who all knew who they were. Hilda Scharrel knew who she should be and it tormented her. She was the bespectacled woman in the next bed. I am Hilda Scharrel, she would declare on waking in the mornings to anybody who happened by, Frau Hilda Scharrel.
‘Yes, Hilda, we know,’ Nurse Bucholz would say resignedly. ‘Now off with you to the laundry.’
The Pretender Page 4