by Keith Korman
“Just noises in the dark,” the younger man murmured. He saw a score of bodies slipping quietly through the trees, like the Gathering in the girl’s dream. The loose throng filtered steadily into the clearing until they surrounded the elderly man. Herr Professor looked inquiringly up to the window. “Herr Jung, do you know these people? Have I met them before, at a concert or a lecture? Am I supposed to know them?”
“Tell him at a lecture,” the girl prompted.
No, that wasn’t right. For suddenly he knew exactly who the people were. A mob, a gang of ingrates. They were patients the man had failed and people he owed money. There were pompous committees who banned him and a man who had picked his pocket in a department store on the Ringstrasse. A furtive lad who sneaked after him in a Parisian pissoir, hoping for a romantic liaison, and a buxom waitress he tipped badly the day before. People who hated him for no reason and a sad girl with blue eyes he once mistakenly thought he loved. There were even some dead people, come back to say one last word before going off once and for all.
“They’re all your old friends,” Herr Doktor said quietly. “Come to say hello.”
A murmur of approval ran through the crowd.
“Are you sure?” the elder man asked doubtfully.
“Of course,” Herr Doktor reassured him. The mob was moving now, wading over the shallow stream, closing in around the edge of the clearing. Herr Professor dropped the flute and backed away from the dying fire.
“If they didn’t like the music, they didn’t have to listen,” he called up to the window. “It’s the only song I know how to play!”
It was too late to be sorry. Already an arm of the mob had cut off the elder man’s escape. He turned round and round like a wobbly top. His burgundy cravat fell off.
“Help me, Jung!” he cried to the window. “Only you can stop them. Only you!” But the old man’s plea died in a muffled shriek as the ring closed in. Twenty hands tore at him,- pieces of his top hat went flying. Shreds of his coat and shirt flew off. The bodies pulsed over him as bits of his pants came flying out. And then, as suddenly as the tearing started, it stopped.
The gentleman huddled whitely on the ground, stripped and naked, with red weals along his flanks where the mob had torn the expensive suit from his limbs. His body was hideous: middle-aged legs like stringy old meat, belly sagging from too many dinners, his buttocks wrinkled and pathetic from a sedentary life. A faint stripe of black hair ran down his jutting spine. A body better clothed, better sitting behind a desk.
Beside him lay the discarded skin of the devoured stag. The mob had yanked it from the standing stone and left it on the ground like the scab from a cut. The elder man hugged it over his pitiful nakedness. Rain began to fall … fat drops that puffed the pile of coals. Soon the rain came harder, gray sheets turning the clearing to muddy milk. The last thing Herr Doktor saw was the bony white legs crawling across the clearing. They vanished into the black mouth of the cave as the heavens poured down.
Back in Fräuleins room, the raindrops thundered against the glass, obliterating everything from his head. She had dressed like the Queen of Sparta, winding a sheet around her hips, and painted her lips very red: they glistened as they parted to kiss him, opening to devour him. But-but-but, he stammered, what about Herr Freud in the cave? He tried to hold her off with all his strength, but her arms encircled him, touching here and there, her eyes commanding him to silence.
“The old man’s finished,” she whispered in his ear. “Now there’s only you….” She pressed into his arms, limbs molding along his length. And her mouth came. She was kissing him, kissing him again and again —
* * *
“Carl?” A rough hand yanked his shoulder. “Carl, wake up.”
Emma leaned over him in bed with an annoyed expression on her face. “You were shouting in your sleep. Shouting and —”
He grabbed her by the arms and drove her body into the mattress. “Never wake me again. Never!”
The woman frightened to silence. A bead of sweat ran down his face.
The drop fell on Emma’s throat. There was a pause and a waiting. Her thighs rubbed together, pressed along his flank.
“Can’t help it …,” she said meekly.
Gray light came in the window. Geschrei sat on the sill, looking calmly at them in bed, while the sound of rain on the roof pattered over their heads. A green glassy sheen had come into Emma’s eyes,-she wriggled deliciously under his hands. He held her elbows close, feeling her move beneath him.
“I just can’t help it,” she repeated sullenly. She made a tiny, futile effort to escape. But the gesture only made her seem more vulnerable, exposed. Her eyes were heavy-lidded. The corners of her mouth turned down in a mischievous way. I just can t…
They were on the verge — she wanted it. The blood coursing through, a mindless insane heat. He knew she’d spit and claw, but she’d take it any way he chose to give it. Fast and rough or long and easy — like a duchess or a slut — just so long as they couldn’t help themselves, so long as it was soon. She parted herself for him, presenting herself, guiding him, melting all around. She was ready.
Ready now.
Chapter 6
The Master of Her Face
Herr Doktor did not manage to arrive at the hospital in time for rounds with Bleuler and company. As he often came late, no one remarked upon it. So the workday began without him. The act of spreading Emma and making her shout into the pillow had devoured him. Afterward, he dozed for half an hour and woke ravenous.
In a café near the hospital, he sat under an awning in the bracing May mist, plowing through rolls and coffee, three soft-boiled eggs, and four slices of ham in ten minutes. He even made notes on the napkin about his wonderful crazy dream. A rivalry between him and the old man —- what delectable nonsense! No, the message of the crazy dream lay in his own prehistoric childhood…. Nanny Sasha scratching red weals down his father’s back. Prehistoric childhood. Damn good phrase, remember it! Besides, if he had nutty dreams after wild dinner parties, whose fault was that? He and the girl had essential things to talk about today, whatever his nightmares.
High time she moved out.
Fräulein woke in the cold gray light. Her bare feet touched the floor and she shivered, a wave of creaky cold passing through her…. What had she dreamt last night? Her bed still bore the warm imprint of her body. If only she could read the mute riddle of the wrinkled sheets. But no, her sleeping brain had been wiped smooth, and soon so would the bed.
A strange, forlorn sound rose from the garden: a low musical note, rising and falling and tapering off. The player played a kind of flute. Something primitive, like a Jew’s harp, only with a hollow, haunted strain. A dreadfully familiar melody, which tugged you to stop and called you to its song.
She knew the music, had heard it before. A composer named Bee — no, but … She faintly tried to carry the tune. Flashes of last nights dream came to her, all confused with the dinner party. A mountain outside her room. Herr Doktor wearing a bathrobe. An orange house cat. Or had she simply seen the cat sitting on the parlor chair as she lay exhausted at the evening’s close?
The playing stopped. She gave the window a shove, and it opened with a groan. “Keep playing!” she called out. “Play more!”
No one answered.
She drew her head inside with a defeated sigh…. To sit by the window in silence, to wait for the player to play again. The tune wove in and out of yesterday: getting dressed,- the way the crystal glittered on Frau Emma’s table. Even the loathsome borscht, the dollops of sour cream, the bloody drops splattering her neck. How everyone talked with blank, empty phrases. The hand that nearly twiddled —
Yes, she had been very lucky to escape without doing anything crazy Very lucky Then remembering the blue paint in m-m-m’s awful kitchen. The ticking cuckoo clock. The gag spoon. The frothing bowl of gizzards.
“It’s not the clock that’s cuckoo! It’s me! It’s me!”
She shut the wind
ow. Clouds like floating mountains hung in the sky. She couldn’t recall the song at all now.
“Enroll in medical school at the university,” Herr Doktor told her. “I’ll write you a recommendation. And you can move into town. The rent on an apartment is considerably cheaper than your room here. What’s more, the hospital is doing nothing for you that can’t be done better on the outside. You won’t have to move immediately. I’ve paid your bill through the end of next month.”
Fräulein sat in the chair by the window. Her hand began to twitch on her thigh in a halfhearted twiddle.
“And cut that out!” Herr Doktor said harshly, a little surprised at his fury. She winced at the hardness of his voice, but she had controlled it before and did so again. The twiddle defied her for a few seconds, then frittered off to nothing. Fräulein looked dismally about her room. A sort of sorrow came to her eyes, as though she would be saddened to bid the room farewell. The clean brass chamber pot. The copper tub. The flowers on the dresser and the icon of Christ on the wall, with bits of leaves and sprigs from the garden tucked in the frame.
“Take it all with you/’ Herr Doktor told her. “The bed, the dresser, everything. It’s a start. A way to begin.”
She clutched something close to her, wrapped in a scrap of sheet. One of her books. The one from home? The one hidden in the trunk all this time? The way she stroked it reminded him of Geschrei the cat and the ancient mountain dream. He wished she’d stop petting the book like that, almost sexually. The edges of the cover were frayed and worn: she must really have loved that book, poring over the pages until finally they fell apart. What subject? What title? She noticed him staring and ceased to stroke it.
“I still want to see you,” she implored.
“At home. You’ll come to my house. I have an office there too.”
A cold look came into her face. She carefully wrapped the bit of sheet around her precious possession, then thrust it inside her steamer trunk, stowing it away with a firm, bold movement like a rejection and a reproach all in one.
With shocking bluntness she said, “You’re afraid of what people think, afraid of how it looks between you and me. At first it didn’t matter,- Î acted crazy all the time. So if you came to see me ten times a day, who cared? How could there be an affair between a wolf and an egg? There can’t. But now I brush my hair. I sleep in a bed. I wash out the tub. Î eat my vegetables. Î go in the pot and clean it out. I’m respectable again. And so we’ve got to be respectable. You’ve got a position to think about. A reputation. How does it look spending day after day with a young lady in a garden?”
He had no answer for that. Struck dumb like a big ox. For long moments they sat together, just staring.
It began to rain, and as before, the forlorn sound of the strange woodwind floated up to the window. Herr Doktor stiffened with a growing dread: the very sound of the flute in his mountain dream now haunting him in broad daylight. If he went to the window, would he see a clearing? A cave? Gentleman Freud in traveling clothes, playing the lonely flute? Telling him, It’s the only song I know … ?
The girl struggled with the window. He wanted to warn her off, but he felt nauseous and woozy “Just like last night,” she hissed, straining at the sash. “He came into my room.”
“A gentleman?” Herr Doktor choked.
She wrenched the stuck window. “Yes, with a beard!”
Herr Doktor shrank to her bed,- her dream in his dream, his dream in hers … “In fine traveling clothes?” he whispered. She struggled frantically, “Yes! I told you. He came through and went down below. He played the music!” Herr Doktor sat weakly on the bed, marrowless. Impotent to stop her. The girl groaned with a final effort. The window rattled open. She flung herself out to the waist. The tune broke off.
“Oh, that’s you,” she said, a trifle disappointed, A muffled reply rose from the garden. “No, I like it. It just reminded me of something. What did you call that thing? Oh … I see,”
He wiped his damp neck. A wave of relief flowed through him. How could two people have the same nightmare? Maybe one day he would understand, but not now, not now. Below, the gardener’s young helper stood on the muddy sod. He held a wind instrument in his hand, about the size and shape of a sweet potato and nearly the same color. He put it to his lips and began to blow. The sound in the damp air was simple and lovely and sad. Much like the older man’s call-song in the dream, a melody of broken love, lost forever.
Fräulein rested her head on the window frame. “He’s playing an ocarina,” she said softly “The street musicians at home play them for kopecks in a hat. But I never knew what it was called. An ocarina … playing Bizet. I was right. A composer named B Suite number two, ‘L’Arlésienne.’“
“He told you that?”
“Just the suite. Î saw the name Bizet on a tin phonograph cylinder. F-f-flatter used to wind up the machine and play the thing until he wore it out.”
The gardener’s helper played the melody again. Fräulein touched the window. “He told me he likes to play for the flowers in the rain. He says they hear the music and come up out of the earth to see what’s making such sweet noise. So he always plays them something sweet when they drink and something sad to make their petals brighter. Do you think that’s true, what he says — a sweet song draws them up, a sad one makes their petals brighter?”
Who knew if it was true or not? Just as true as you wished.
“I never told you, Fräulein” — the words so difficult to say — “how very lovely you looked last night.”
After a few days Fräulein asked Nurse Bosch to help her find an apartment in town. Several trips proved fruitless. The apartments were either too expensive or too dreary. In one case she found a place with bay windows, a cushioned love seat built in, and hooks for hanging plants. The bathroom had clean black-and-white tile on the floor and up the walls, and a porcelain sink that sparkled. She liked that apartment. She could have been happy there, but it was not to be. Fräulein became so excited she began to twiddle. The landlord saw her and immediately refused to cooperate. As he explained to Nurse Bosch in private, he had a good reputation and genteel tenants, and he intended to keep it that way. No one could be expected to house diseased people.
Fräulein sat silently all the way back to the hospital, twiddling half the ride. Once in room 401, she refused dinner and went straight to bed. Later Zeik brought her a slice of chocolate cake from the kitchen. “Put it on the floor,” said the huddled lump. Another week passed before she ventured out again.
But behold! a few days later, at the warm end of May, they did find a nice apartment, a place on Fesselstrasse, street of the chainmakers. Zeik helped her with the move. But just as she had to learn about her hospital room, Fräulein had to learn about life beyond. How to talk to people she knew slightly and ones she hardly knew at all. How to pick fruit off a stall in the marketplace and choose meat out of a butcher’s glass case. How to count her change and wait politely for the churlish shopgirl in the coffee shop — all the while revolted that people never wore their truthful faces in public and trying not to see them as blank dummy heads speaking in blocky phrases.
There were some failures. Vegetable sellers who barked irritably for no reason or shopkeepers who habitually counted out the wrong change, then refused to recognize their error. And after trying times like these, she went home to her flat and crawled into bed. Staying there as the day blurred into night. But Zurich was a big city, with plenty of shops….
And now she had friends.
Nurse Bosch came to see her. Zeik also. Even the gardener’s helper. He always brought his ocarina to play — and one day, in a burst of pink embarrassment, the fellow admitted he didn’t know how to read. So twice a week she taught him his letters from a children’s primer she found in the bookstalls near the Limmat.
Her apartment had one room with its own private toilet, a bathtub, and a narrow bathroom window looking out over the roofs and chimney pots. When she poked her head out the tiny w
indow, she saw the blue sky rising to infinity and off in the far distance the spike of a black church spire. In the main room she put her dresser, the hospital bed, and her steamer trunk. She also bought a four-franc table with wobbly legs from a one-eyed junk seller. On the top a pair of lovers had carved their initials in a rude heart with an arrow: K& W. She wondered whose names the letters stood for. And if they loved each other so terribly much, why had they carved their vows on the comer of a table now lost and belonging to a stranger?
A black gas range was crammed in next to the kitchen sink, and nearby stood a squat icebox. The iceman came every day if you wanted: four centimes a chunk to keep the milk sweet overnight. Her front windows looked out onto a flagstone courtyard. She could see carriages rolling by in the street through a low, arched passage. Tenants were expected to take their garbage out onto the sidewalk and leave it in barrels by the rain gutter. She bought her first pack of cigarettes in a wood-lined tobacconist’s shop and learned how to smoke.
When the gardener’s helper came he brought her a bottle of May wine but drank most of it himself. In this way, he studied his letters well at the start of the visit but played his ocarina better at the end. She could see he had an immature crush on her, but she never encouraged him, and for his part he never said a word. Herr Doktor saw no harm in it. No one saw any harm in it. What could be more natural for a young man taught his letters? Stranger by far was a young woman of twenty living alone. But with the university so near, such things were not totally unheard of,- a few university ladies might be in similar circumstances. Though none, certainly, fresh from a private room at the Burghölzli.
After a few days on her own, Fräulein traveled to Herr Doktors home for her first private session. The maid let her in as on the night of the dinner party. She learned many things that first time: first, just how deeply her personal situation with him had changed. Herr Doktor now saw other patients at his home, making appointments for two or three a day.