by Keith Korman
Frau Direktor managed to borrow an old phonograph and a slightly scratched recording of Beethoven’s Fifth. Alas, though Maximilian swore he saw a glimmer of pleasure in the girl’s eyes — no real response. A clever idea, but wrong. And Marie worsened…. But when the girl’s case arose for the umpteenth time at yet another end-of-day discussion, it seemed that Madame had finally latched onto something. The old woman had the annoying habit of staring out the window as she talked. Plucking an endless chain of cigarettes from a platinum case and smoking them in a stout, businesslike holder, which she clenched between her teeth, she glanced outside with watery eyes as her words floated across the room on a wretched cloud of Balkan tobacco smoke….
“Let us recall Marie’s only words to date. A command; ‘Go away.‘“ Her cigarette glowed as she inhaled. “But is this really a command? What else do we know about Marie? That she was a fine young pianist. That her mother entertained men. That before her father went down with his ship he brought his daughter presents and gifts from foreign lands, lavishing all kinds of attention on her. So much attention the mother admitted growing spiteful and angry. And lastly, that when Maries father went off to sea, the mother took many of the gifts away — only to return them for show when the father came home again. Given and taken away …,” Madame mused to herself. “Given and taken away …” Suddenly her eyes narrowed, “Marie’s words are not a command but a description, ‘Go away describes the unhappy state of her home life, in which the father was always going off. Yet they also apply to the hard evidence of his affections, the toys and gifts — which vanished and returned…. And finally the words ‘Go away’ apply to her mother, whose secret sexual life entailed that the girl be sent off to strangers, so the woman might be free. In fact, Marie may have wished that all the inconveniences of her life had simply ‘gone away.’ And now it appears the words also describe what the child managed to accomplish. Like her father before her, she too has gone away from home. Gone away and come to us,”
Max sat up sharply, struck. “But in your case, she didn’t want to be left alone in bed. She didn’t want you to go away!”
Madame Le Boyau opened her hands in agreement, allowing yet a new twist on the child’s words. “Ah, well, there now, so you see … old Madame has detected a method to the madness.” She discarded the stub of a cigarette in an ashtray by her elbow, then coughed gently into a pretty Swiss handkerchief, She glanced into the hankie, but whatever she saw did not surprise her, and she put the frilly thing away,
“Let us consider the child’s most striking symptom. The muddled droning. What a stunning signal of her unhappiness. Marie stutters music because she used to study it. And as for Beethoven’s Fifth, well, it’s a very famous piece of music….” Madame touched her throat, massaging it. “Pardon my singing.” Then she belted out a fairly credible pounding of the Fifth Symphony’s opening bar:
“Dah-dah-dah-dah!”
She paused to regain herself. “We’ve all heard it, no?” A sly smile came into Madame’s crinkled eyes, she ruffled her shoulders like a molting bird. “Tell me, what are Marie’s favorite toys? Boats. Ships. Vessels. All touching upon her father. And lately she has even played at shipwreck. Is she sailing the sea in her own toy boat, I wonder? And if she finds the Korkov, on which her father served, how would she signal him?”
“By radio?” Max tried.
“But if the radio is broken. Or the ship is at war?”
“Then the ship is silent. Mute …,” Max answered. “Just like our little girl”
“Bravo!” Madame clapped her hands. “And when ships are silent, how do they signal each other?”
“Morse code!” Maximilian cried at once.
“Morse code,” Madame agreed. “Ships at sea flash silent signals across the waves with blinkers. In the chaos of a storm with the radio down, or in a state of war, ships flash signals to each other. Dah-dah-dah-dah! In code that’s Dot-dot-dot-dash. The sign for the letter
V … Breaking through the storm of Marie’s chaotic, stop and go singing, it comes again and again. She is calling out the code sign
V … V … V!”
“Consider the many ways we can read the sign V,” Madame went on. “It is the Roman numeral for the number five. As in Beethoven’s Fifth. It is the common abbreviation for the Latin word versus. As in ‘this against that.’ It is the first letter in the name of the female love goddess, Venus. And to my mind, the symbol V is the most common pictogram of the female genitals —”
“Oh, really now!” Maximilian growled skeptically. “That’s positively absurd…. What are you saying? That when Marie was five years old she heard Beethoven’s Fifth and talked to her father in Morse code? Then had some mysterious experience with her vagina? Thought her parents were lost souls at sea or, worse, like ships at war? As in mother versus father?” Maximilian leaned back in his chair, slowly stroking the side of his face. “I forgot to include the volcano Vesuvius somewhere.”
Madame stared wide-eyed at the surgeon for a moment and then shook with laughter. “No, no, no, my dear Max, but that’s a wonderful tale. Who knows? Maybe some of it is true. A mysterious experience with her vagina! I like that, coming from a man. Vaginas are mysterious things by and large. I daresay many men have found them so….Which is unfortunate. For the vaginas, that is. Of all mankind, only Tiresias the Seer was both male and female in his lifetime. And he said:
If the parts of love’s pleasure be counted as ten, Thrice three go to women,- only one to men!
“The Seer was obviously a blind optimist,” — Madame sighed — “more than ready to believe in the best of all possible female worlds. His name in ancient Greek means ‘He Who Delights In Signs.’ And his remark clearly indicates that at least one mysterious sign of V is more pleasing than others. In the case of vaginas, unquestionably true. But I’m afraid you’ve got me wrong, Max: what I meant to show was not coherency but coincidence.
“And here I have been a trifle unfair with all of you, for there is still one coincidence, one sign I have not shared. Our sweet chambermaid, Petra, found a clue in the pocket of Marie’s jumper before it went into the wash. Good thorough girl, that Petra — always checks the children’s pockets before she accidentally boils some precious artifact which might have been left there on purpose … Does anyone recall Marie’s mother remarking she heard a waltz in the child’s droning?”
Madame opened her cigarette case and took out a slip of worn, red-colored paper. “A concert ticket to the Rostov Orchestra. Notice the seat — one of those secluded boxes above the pit, number five. Notice the program printed on the ticket,- it is written in an abbreviated form to save space:
BTHVN V, SATIE VALSE “VEUX.”
“What a considerable wealth of information is crammed into that brief line. The first item on the program is clear enough — Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was to be played. But what of the second offering? Valse “Veux”? Easy if you know a little music. A short piano waltz by the composer Erik Satie, his most famous waltz (valse, if you will), entitled, ‘Je te veux’ … I want you …”
“Je te peux,’’ Maximilian said softly, feeling the words on his tongue. “I want you.”
“As between intimates.” Madame’s voice sank. “Lovers.” Her last word stood alone. “Yet how many more V’s have appeared! One more in the word 'valse.’ Another in the word 'veux', want. A hidden V in the ‘First Ring Box Number Five’ … Artless, did we call the child’s ranting? How eloquent, 1 say! Call it, rather, Variations on a Theme of V. Variations hidden from our eyes until we learned to see. From Beethoven’s Fifth to the Morse code sign for V to a program of raises in a Rostov theater — the Black Water Theater, I think they call it. Ominous, no? Prophetic, even. Was this little red stub the last memento from a father and daughters final waltz?” She shrugged. “And was Petras finding the ticket simply an accident? Hardly!” she snorted. “No, Marie saw it as a kind of test. Of us, if you will. Would we throw away the ticket in our ignorance? Or discover t
he precious stub and decipher its message? Yet for its message to be heard, the ticket must pass from hand to hand until someone reads it who understands. The child is saying, ‘Petra, here is my ticket. Show it to your cousin Henrietta, who makes the beds,- show it to Kurt the orderly, and Hanna the nurse, and Freda the cook. Please, Petra, I want them all to see.’“ Madame’s eyes went hard, cruel. Raising her voice as though speaking to the deaf and dumb, “Show it to them all! To you! And you! And we.” She slapped her chest, exploding into a fit of coughing. Then waved away Maximilian, who rose up in alarm. She lay back weakly in her chair, eyes half shut, pale and sick and altogether wasted. The silky cigarette croup rumbled in her throat. “Je te veux … I want you. Her father, who else? But as for the child’s recent lapse into silence and starvation? And why her fainting fit on the ferry, which started it all — this Î do not know,”
Sitting with her interns that evening, Frau Direktor could see the Black Water Theater in her mind. She knew it well. The wonderful old place had fallen into ruinous decay — like everything around them now. She’d seen the crossboards nailed to the doors and the broken windows staring down in wide-eyed blindness. The posters plastered around its huge front columns were peeling off like scabs. The management of the Black Water Theater had come under some kind of official cloud. Squatters lived within. They had torn up the seats and used the stuffing for their clothes and the wood for their fires. Now those first ring boxes were like little caves in the side of a cliff. With the electricity shut off, cook fires flickered in all the private boxes, tier after tier.
She remembered statues of gilded plasterwork. Gods and goddesses rising up in an arch over the proscenium, making love until they reached the top…. Now the gold paint flecked off in patches, showing them not as gods at all, but merely white plaster underneath. The cherubs nearest the stage had their noses broken. Time had been when people came by carriage, and footmen stood at the door to every box. When box seats in the first ring were lit by candles, and heavy burgundy curtains hung at the back. Sitting there, you were cozy and secluded, and when the orchestra played, the sound flowed everywhere, like the fragrance of roses in winter. Close your eyes, and it filled your head. The warm romance of father and daughter sitting up there alone. Listening as the music swirled into the padded little box. As the waves of sound surged over them like surf pounding a cliff, only to fly apart into a thousand silver drops, white pearls falling back into the seething black.
“In many ways Marie and her father were abnormally close,” Frau Direktor told her interns. “More and more so each time he came ashore. I believe the father had no other woman. And because Marie was a child, she had no other man. What veiled bonds held them, which no one saw or felt but them alone?”
Frau Direktor watched Maximilian’s face gradually darken, one particular V crawling into his mind again. Was all this just some lurid incest knot between a lonely evil man and a helpless love-starved girl? Frau Direktor nodded sadly to herself. It could be. Such dark things there were in the world. Hidden wishes. Secret loves. And people make up fairy tales — stories they want to see come true. Wounded children most especially.
Especially Marie.
“Madame’s bit of evidence hit closest to the mark,” Frau Direktor said at last, “when she saw that V stood for Venus and versus. I now recall that Venus is one of the goddesses portrayed along the arch of the proscenium in the Black Water Theater — and also Neptune, god of the deep, water and seashells streaming from his hair. Father and daughter rising above the multitudes. Was it so hard for the child to see herself in the gold statue? Or see her father in the other, holding his golden hands above the world? If we had listened more closely to Marie, would we have heard Satie’s love waltz ‘Je te veux’ in the frayed snatches of the child’s endless songs? The tune, itself is halting and slow, with more rests between the notes than notes themselves. A little like the girl herself, singing bits of broken songs, songs that always shift — and therefore never end … Unfinished. Unresolved. I hear the song of her stop-and-go. An endless repetition; Stop and go, stop and go.
“Didn’t the mother tell us, Marie clamored to be taken for a ferry ride every chance she could? Marie adored the rides. Of course she did! With her father out to sea, she played Venus searching the waves for Neptune. Once on board the ferry, the girl actually traveled upon the water for the man she loved. Yes, a pathetic search, a hopeless search — but while her father lived, a search it was.
“Yet when her father died, do you imagine Marie no longer wished to find him?” Frau Direktors words rose and twisted into Madame’s cigarette smoke. “Of course not! When Marie’s father was lost at sea, the child wished to find him more than ever!”
Then, in a hush, “But the father no longer sailed the ocean,- he had sunk below it… and to search for him in the cold black water, Marie must go below the waves herself. 'To find him, she must drown….'
“The father is lost. The mother adulterous. The family a failure. Marie had a bitter choice. To die, searching for her father beneath the waves — or give him up, losing him forever. Is it any wonder the girl had an insane fainting fit on the deck of the ferry? Any wonder she revived hours later unable to speak, ranting bits of V! V! V! Follow her father or lose him forever? When the mother denied the girl drinking water, Marie took starvation as her final path. This, then, is the last hard road to us.
“Strange fate. For in this place she can have as much water as she wants. Gallons and gallons. Endless baths where she can sing the stop-and-go to her heart’s content. Indeed, with us Marie is able to drown in water if she pleases. And so her search continues — soaking in the water and drinking from the tap. Hoping against hope that one day shell find her father’s body; if not on the seabed, among the sunken wrecks of other families, then perhaps at the bottom of her own bathtub….
“So her fainting fit on the ferry and her current regression to silent starvation are tied together. Marie fears abandonment. Fears we will leave her. For if she gives up her most critical symptoms, silence and starvation, if she becomes better, if she is ‘cured,’ then her time with us must come to an end. Back to her mother once more. Who took her toys away, who shuttled her off to any available ‘aunt.’ Marie’s current silent starvation is her life rope. While she clings to that, she will never leave. For we have become her family now. And so must never part.
“Never go away …”
A worn sigh escaped from them that bygone evening. Not the search and discovery but the final seeing of a thing tired them so. After the effort of holding out, resisting, refusing to see the answer for so long. More than enough for one end-of-day discussion. And why not? Only a short week ago, Frau Direktor and the others fully expected many, many more. Always another meeting, another moment for reflection, stretching out in an ocean stream of talk. Their own endless stop-and-go.
Chapter 3
No More Fairy Tales
And what of this could Frau Direktor put in a cryptic letter to that eons-distant friend? The letter might get there, or it might not. A child might arrive safely with Max or Madame — or might not. For in a few short days their world had changed. Almost overnight, it seemed, the clinic staff had struck camp. No rattle of work in the kitchen or footsteps in the halls. Kurt, their silent giant of an orderly, who for years attended the children in every conceivable way — from discovering the whereabouts of a lost sock to fetching the special glue to mend the broken arm of a doll — simply stopped coming to work. Hanna, their hook-nosed nurse, who could coax a thermometer into a chattering, feverish mouth, cure a case of rampant diarrhea, or find the right salve for a bruised knee — now she was gone. Their cook, with the face of a boiled lobster, and her Serbian dishwasher, with arms mottled from the suds — one who prepared and cleaned up an endless cycle of despoiled meals and the other who always found the special treat each child secretly loved (from a mandarin orange to an anchovy) but never told anyone, placing the dainty on the tray with a wink and a nod — they to
o were gone.
And the clinic’s giggling imp of a chambermaid — good, thorough Petra — who made sixteen beds a day, who washed the wetted sheets and soiled clothes, who swept the floors and straightened the rooms, putting a hundred tin soldiers back in their box without losing the one-legged infantryman under the dresser, and who always placed the stuffed tiger on the pillow just so …
All gone,
Flown up into a winter sky like sharp little chimney swifts who feel an earthquake coming in their thin bird bones,- hovering over the earth until the tremors subside and it is once more safe to land. Marie’s fears were coming true despite all their efforts to understand. Soon to be put in a box and sent home. All the children sensed it. Where's Kurt? I wanna see Hanna, Petra, are you there?
And it struck them now, like a slap in the face — that their maid had never been merely a housekeeper, their cook merely a préparer of food, or their nurse the fetcher of clean bedpans, but the nimble fingers and willing backs that allowed the directorial “brains” to float above the daily cares. Abandoned now to the chosen elite, the clinic had become a leaden weight.
Especially when the place was unkempt and there was no time to clean it, with mouths to feed and no hands to cook, when they felt lost and tired and too weak to care.
Even crazy children knew. Their clinic was doomed.
After a few days without support staff, Frau Direktor, Madame, and Max — consumed with cooking and cleaning — faced the brutal fact that three adults could not manage a dozen troubled children (nearly all of them prone to fits and rages) when housekeeping was thrown in too. You could tend to the furies or make the beds. Not both.
Maximilian had missed shaving a spot on his chin several days running, giving him the appearance of someone sporting a new and bizarre style of beard. Bits of food clung to Madame Le Boyaus clothes, and she had torn her dress. In addition to cooking, she’d been changing the sheets of the chronic bed wetters — sometimes more than three times a day — later crawling about on her hands and knees to straighten the rooms.