by Keith Korman
Yet all this thinking had brought her no closer. Perceiving hidden messages was one thing; taking care of crazy children another altogether. Max had youth and strength in his favor: arranging forged papers, negotiating trains and steamships, passing through customs, avoiding the police, all well within his powers. Certainly easier for him to start life again in a strange country, learn a new language, but what of the long haul with whatever child? The loneliness and doubts through the endless nights and struggling days? And what of therapy? A mere two years’ experience at the clinic was hardly sufficient, and he had never undergone analysis, Max possessed all the raw materials to become the bedrock of a sick child, to help a broken thing build itself from scratch — but had never been refined. And no time was left to do it now.
Frau Direktors other intern could not have been more different, with all the required skill, experience, and insight, but perhaps she’d been refined too much. Madame Le Boyau, of Paris, had been a practicing analyst longer than Frau Direktor herself,- a mangy dowager now, Madame had a ruined face of lines and jowls. A monkey’s face, toughened and embattled from years of listening to the ceaseless demands of other people’s problems. Troubles she could no longer help them solve.
Too many of her patients had been whiners and shirkers, unfit for analysis: people who expected their problems to be analyzed and enjoyed like the rarest food and wine…. Madame Le Boyau had allowed herself to become the maître d’hôtel in the restaurant of their minds, serving up one dish or another for them to taste or reject. And like the propriétaire of a chic restaurant, she tried to make their dishes pleasing and palatable. A light, calm soufflé for the widowed Society Neurotic, her furs and lovers both wearing thin, A bracing cocktail for an insecure Writer of Plays, a scribbler spoiled by too much money and easy acclaim, yet suffering gnawing pangs that his talent was a fraud.
In case after case, Madame Le Boyau served up delicacies to people who were under the impression that because they possessed nearly everything important in life, and a few luxuries besides, they had arrived. So why were they miserable? Madame Le Boyau’s therapy no longer held any answers. She had merely grown accustomed to their fees,- protecting them from the ugly struggle of life, taking their good money, but giving nothing in return. She even stimulated their doubts when they showed signs of leaving her, with a word here, a gesture there, weakening their will, letting them pay and pay. And as often as required, she promoted the feeling that they were really accomplishing something when they paid Madame the hour-long visit….
In truth, Madame had only really cared for her last and final patient, À pretty, polished young man of twenty-two in a terribly desperate state. She called him her fleur du mal. He was the worthless son of a well-to-do manufacturer, who had shown little interest in the family business and little aptitude for anything else. At last he found a position with an elderly and respected art dealer. The situation seemed perfect for a boy of genteel temperament, bred to the better things in life, with exquisite taste and an eye for objets d’art. His father was satisfied,- at least the boy had a future. Bonne chance!
When the young man appeared in Madame Le Boyau’s office he had been employed by the art dealer for about a year. He claimed to be suffering from insomnia and opium addiction. He wrung his ivory hands and hung his head. “Save me!” he begged her. “It’ll kill me! For the love of God, please save me!”
What would kill him? Employment? A wealthy art dealer?
At once a curious change came over him. He no longer groveled but became superior, patronizing. “Did you ever wonder,” he asked coyly, “what young men are good for? Or how a dilettante with no prospects secures a position? Oh yes, I have some talent, a good eye, but he doesn’t need that. An old man needs a young man to do what he no longer wishes to do for himself. A personal secretary, A court jester. I provide his distractions, his entertainment, I’m his procurer,”
What in heaven’s name did the boy mean? And so he indulged her, spinning out his tale a little longer. “In the beginning he had me do simple tasks for him. Run errands, catalog shipments — the busy work of the gallery. Then he drew me in. First we stayed out all night, eating and drinking. Then we tried opium together….We went to a brothel. Soon we became habitués,- the proprietress knew us well. She arranged for specialty tastes, boys or girls or both. First in the brothel, then other days bringing them to a private apartment he kept….” The young fleur paused for what seemed a long time, then flushed sheepishly and shrugged.
“After a month of this, I knew what he wanted without even having to ask. And it became clear why he hired me…. ‘A pretty poppet/ he might murmur when I arrived at the gallery in the morning. But soon it wasn’t necessary to say anything. He kept a small icon of baby Jesus on his desk, the same way people keep pictures of their wives. When he wanted his distraction, the icon always faced me as I came in the gallery door…. And Î knew what to do.” Yes, the lad knew his task. To steal out in the black of night into the crumbling corners of the city, where people lived like rats in hovels a few feet above the storm drains. And once there, the young man found a child to purchase. The poor were always willing enough to part with an extra mouth. And so the procurer left the hovels with his pretty poppet, meeting his employer by arrangement in the apartment across town.
“Sometimes after a night of his pleasure, he let the child run home to its parents with an extra wad of francs.” The young man’s voice darkened. “But sometimes not. And I waited through the long hours of the night until he had done with his possession. Until it was no longer a thing to possess.”
“And what happened to the child?” Madame demanded.
“That was my last duty. I took the body down to the Seine. And spent the rest of the week in a friendly brothel I knew, drinking and smoking opium. Trying to forget…. He’s a charming man, really, if you meet him. This wasn’t the first time he’s trained a procurer. He’s mastered the art of going inch by inch. It seemed like you were hardly moving at all, until you looked over your shoulder and saw how far you’d really come.” The young fleur fell silent. Madame’s eyes had taken on a look of doubt. “I daresay you don’t believe me. Well, I suppose I could scrounge up a body for you if you want. I hid one in a rotting boathouse on the river.”
Madame was dumbfounded. She hadn’t even the presence of mind to ask, How many times? She didn’t want to know. This pink-faced boy revolted her.
But would she hand him over to the Prefecture of Police? Madame said nothing. Where was the proof? A body in a boathouse? Perhaps he’d seen it there and woven a fantasy for her….
At once she brought all her old powers to bear on this young fleur, helping him to dissect himself. The young man did, in fact, shortly leave the art dealer and soon thereafter cease his opium smoking. But as to his sick story — true or false? Had he invented it for reasons she could not fathom? Should she turn him over to the police or let him delve a little further? She hesitated, letting him explore…. One day she felt sure the tale was true — the next, equally sure it was false. And so she let him disassemble himself, allowing his fragments to fall where they would. She led him to the dark, weedy pool where the fleurs du mal cluster, and there she bid the boy stare into its still water and drink….
By allowing the young man to go on talking and talking, Madame picked at the scabs of his troubles, forever opening his sores so as never to let them heal. Of course the story of the wicked old art dealer was true! Of course she should have turned him over to the police. Was she crazy? No, she was exacting justice of her own making: for when the young Narcissus gazed deeper and deeper into the fetid pool, he saw at last his own dark reflection in its loathsome depths. In the end he saved Madame herself from the Prefecture of Police,-he took his own life. They found a note implicating the art dealer. Madame Le Boyau’s name did not come up. She was safe.
In a roundabout way Madame Le Boyau had avenged the little possessed poppets, while revenging herself on the hollowness of her own practice
. But she had failed miserably in losing the one patient with serious enough troubles to be worth caring about. And she had doubtless added to the crime: the respectable art dealer went on with his perversions as the young man had talked and talked — how many more children had there been? Was not their fate her fault too?
This, then, became her disaster.
She had taken a police matter into her own hands for her own ends and caused more harm than good. In failing to unmask the deepest source of the young man’s troubles, she had merely led him to a sour backwater of his mind and left him there to die. But she had unmasked herself as a fraud: so weary of her own life that she thought nothing of watching another destroy his. And just as guilty as the art dealer. Worse, in fact, because all along she knew better.
With the last few shreds of common sense and common decency, Madame Le Boyau took steps to close her practice of thirty years and refer her few remaining patients to the other analysts of Paris. She had some funds, more than she could spend, and cared little for comforts. She wandered across Europe on a slow sightseeing tour to nowhere. Along the way she conceived the idea of writing a monograph on the psychiatric institutions of the Continent. And so she visited place after place, talking with doctors and their staffs and making her notes. In reality she was searching for a place from which to start afresh. A place where she could find once more those qualities she had banished to the attic of her self. And since her chance arrival at the Rostov Institute, Madame had indeed begun to lower again, as though healed by her work with the clinic’s children. She had even mentioned her desire to undergo yet another analysis this late in life,-perhaps with Maximilian. For his fragile looks appealed to her, strangely reminiscent of that other fleur, lying in the ground a continent away. Madame had found her home at last. She deserved another chance.
But in all frankness Frau Direktor had no illusions about these people. One too inexperienced, the other too old to see the process through. The young man a kind of cripple, with the scar of an old wound that could never really heal. And the old woman a kind of dangerous charlatan, whose tricks had nearly done her in…. Yet both had shown that one quality essential to their work by amputating their sickly parts — cauterizing their frailties and turning them to strengths. Disarming their follies and taking charge of their fate. Perhaps each could take a child to her precious Herr Doktor in Switzerland?
Ach, Madame would be lucky just to save herself….
Chapter 2
Variations on a Theme of V
No child baffled them more than their Marie.
The clinic’s most puzzling charge had come up for discussion nearly every day for countless weeks past. Marie … the “promising child” now crippled by an unforeseen madness. Once she had been a bright, intelligent girl of nine, kindly and cheerful. The child’s mother told Frau Direktor how Marie had long studied the piano, taken to music as children sometimes do, learning whole pieces at a time. Every day without fail, mother and daughter sat for an hour as Marie practiced her scales or tried to master new phrases. Then one afternoon, while taking the ferry across the Don, she was struck down by an inexplicable fainting fit. When the child revived, she no longer spoke.
Instead she began mindlessly repeating snatches of tunes. She hummed or sang bits for a few bars and then abruptly changed to something else. A few more irritating bars off-key, then off again to a new piece. À chaotic jangle of broken melodies, never singing one long enough to bring out its form, but enough to make one want to hear the rest. Infuriating the way a dripping faucet inevitably drives you mad. Yet occasionally her mother thought she detected snatches of familiar melodies. Was that the first three bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Or something else, in three-quarter time — a waltz, perhaps?
State physicians hinted darkly at some kind of mental, emotional cause. They prescribed medication, which either put Marie to sleep or made her sing all the more stridently. Travel abroad to seek medical help was out of the question. Though if Marie’s father had been alive, he might have had some influence. As a merchant ship’s captain, he traveled half the year, but had been lost at sea some months before the child’s fit.
The mother was a pretty, pinched woman — prone to melancholy airs. À wan, pale spirit who could go for days without speaking a word. She frankly told Frau Direktor her marriage with the girl’s father had been in name only. In the months he sailed the Indian Ocean or the China Sea, she shunted Marie from neighbor to neighbor and back again (staying with her “aunts,” they called it), the child spending nights away from home while her mother sought a furtive kind of satisfaction with the men she entertained: men, Marie soon knew, who were not her “uncles.”
An unbridgeable chasm grew between husband and wife, yawning wider with each voyage. While Marie’s father was away, he was away. And when he returned, well … he slept in the house and ate in the house and went about with his daughter. Alone. The marriage became a noose, slowly strangling both parents with each passing year. Still, they made no break, waiting as couples often do. They were still waiting when his ship went down at sea.
After the child’s fit, the mother tried to take her daughter in hand. But dealing with a brat who squalls random snatches of melodies went far beyond the mother’s powers. Shouting and threats had no effect; they merely changed the frequency and tone of Marie’s idiotic rant-ings: from La-la-la to Li-li-li, from Na-na-na to Ni-ni-ni. Marie’s mother was reduced to brute force,- she hit on the idea of rationing the amount of water the child drank. Little by little she allowed Marie less and less. No water with meals, no water before bed — just half a glass in the morning. After ten days, Marie drank only the barest minimum required for life. The result: the little girl sang herself hoarse after her half glass in the morning and then went quiet as a church mouse for the rest of the day. At first her mother thought she had succeeded in some way. But soon Marie began starving herself. Her hair fell out, sores appeared on her mouth, her skin went gray. The girl’s clothes hung like limp rags. Marie was dying….
The mother grew terrified, seeing her mistake. She tried letting the girl have water again, tried coaxing her to eat — but to no avail. Marie kept on as before, drinking little, eating almost nothing. In desperation her mother cornered the state doctor in his office, screaming shrilly at him, “Cure my baby! Cure her, damn you! Do something!”
The doctor was exhausted from an endless day. Whose crazy mother was this? He had treated dozens of little girls that week already: Marys, Maries, Marinas —- which little girl? The tirade grew worse, ranting now — they were all witch doctors, ghouls,- it was the pills they gave her. “Poison! Filth!”
“Get out of my office,” he shouted at her. In moments a pair of meaty orderlies forcibly ejected Marie’s mother from the building. But even as she brawled in the street, with her dress ripped, and one orderly clutching a kicked shin, the state doctor remembered this Marie and dashed downstairs. He sent the orderlies off and calmed the mother. She must forgive him, he was not such a bad man, “but in our place we see so many children, please understand.” He sighed, then in low tones he told her about the Rostov clinic, “I know the di^ rector—-you can have a letter of introduction….” State doctors weren’t encouraged to refer large numbers of cases there, but in view of how badly the girl’s condition had deteriorated, perhaps the Children’s Psychiatric Institute might do some good.
When Marie first arrived, the staff thought she was mute. Now free of her mother’s deprivations, nothing changed immediately. But after a week or so she began to eat a little more. And drink. As for her apparent muteness, they all soon learned better.
Marie was dying of thirst!
The little girl liked nothing better than sitting in a warm tub half the day, drinking the bathwater as she let it soak into her. Drink the bath and pee in the bath. And then drink some more. After an hour Marie’s skin was puckered and the water smelled a trifle cloying. But Madame, who supervised the child’s bathtimes, solved the problem by openin
g the drain a crack and letting the tap water flow half a turn. Soon Marie drank from the tap exclusively, the water from her body passing harmlessly into the warm tub and down the drain.
As soon as her parched vocal cords drank their fill, the inane toneless singing began once more. Clearly Marie sang some kind of mu= sical notes, but no one could place them, they were so garbled, so atonal…. Max alone thought he detected the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
And then one night, as Madame tucked the little girl into bed, Marie finally spoke two words, whispering them into an empty corner of the room.
“Go away,” she said.
At first Madame thought the child had cruelly dismissed her. But when she withdrew, the girl’s off-pitch bleating became frantic,- she hacked on till she nearly choked. No, Madame realized … Marie didn’t want her to go away. For when the old woman returned to the child’s bedside her frantic stutterings subsided and she let Madame stroke her hair. Snuggling sideways under the covers as she always did when calming down, letting Madame pet her until the toneless singing lapsed into silence and Marie fell into a restless sleep.
The little girl now ate regularly. Her hair no longer fell out but grew in dark and glossy. And Max had become a favorite of hers, reading to her at bedtime. As he read, her toneless singing dropped to a dull hum. She even played with toys: a doll in a periwinkle-blue cotton dress and a small model tugboat that she took into the bath and sometimes even to bed. At the time she spoke those first words, Go away, they all felt the child had indeed come a long way…. When Frau Direktor went back over her case notes, she saw Marie had been with them a year.
Typically, no one was ready for the child’s lapse when it came a month ago…. One day Marie reverted to silence. All the old troubles reappeared,- she refused water and no longer wanted to bathe. Her eating fell off. Max made the clever suggestion that Marie’s silence was in fact a demand for the opposite — that is, noise, sound. Music.