by Daša Drndic
JAKOB KLODEL. Both wrists deformed by breaks, long ago. Age: fifty-three. Of medium height, fragile constitution, asthmatic. Hospitalized due to hallucinations. Under medication becomes calm and compliant, but is reluctant to communicate. The fingers of the left hand are contorted, the right hand is unusable. Avoids company. Spends his time in the hospital garden, comes into the building only at meal times and when it gets dark — to go to bed. Widower. Responds to questions meaningfully and rationally, with no excessive words. Gives exact information about himself. Shows no sign of mental derangement, but does not wish to leave the hospital. Two adult children. College-trained painter.
When I look at my right hand, it’s as though it's not mine. I don’t recognize it. It’s big. I don’t have such a big hand. Everything else around me is small and far away. I sometimes have a bird’s head without a beak. The left side of my body doesn’t belong to me. I can’t feel it. I am separated from my left side. My left side is a lot bigger than my right, where only the hand is huge. When I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself. These disproportions make it difficult for me to shave. And to go up and down steps. I could topple over, my body is unstable. When I walk in the garden, I stagger as though I’m about to fall. No, I never have fallen. I know that I’m imagining all this. I’m completely outside the left side of my body. The left side of my body lives a separate life, I watch my left side from the right, my right side, apart from the hand, is quite all right, it’s with me.
Yesterday that left side was in Paris; it was hurrying to an exhibition of paintings by my friend Paul Genet. But it got lost. Yes, I know that I’m not in Paris. I missed the metro stop, that is, my left side got lost. It ended up in a street lit by a blue-neon light with a lot of elegantly appointed shop windows. Then it went down an incline and into Paul’s apartment. What do you mean, who did? My left-hand body. Paul’s apartment consists of a lot of small rooms painted a dirty-green color. The walls are bare, without a single picture. Where are your pictures? I asked Paul, but he didn’t reply. Maybe he wasn’t even there. Those rooms of Paul’s are like cells. Behind the door of every room, there’s a washbasin. I think it would be better if there were a desk or at least easels in the rooms. Excuse me? I can’t paint, I don’t have my equipment here. And my arms are broken.
Maybe this is all connected to changes in the universe. The earth is turning more slowly than before. I must measure its extent. The earth’s distance from the moon is also in doubt. That’s why people live longer these days. People live too long.
Magnetic resonance carried out. Blood count within the limits of normal. Endocrinological tests, no observations. EEG shows no symptoms of epilepsy. Citalopram prescribed, for two weeks. Mild symptoms of depersonalization. Then olanzapine, 10 mg daily. After three weeks, hallucinations and symptoms of depersonalization in further remission, citalopram increased to 60 mg.
Mild compulsive, repetitive actions.
MARGARETA LOPEK. Twenty-seven, unmarried, qualified psychologist. Sought help, complaining that she could not feel her body. I’m empty, she said. It’s as though I was hollow, as though my body was somewhere far away, with no bones or organs, just covered with skin, as though that body belonged to someone else. Excuse me? I don’t know to whom. Now I wear all these gloves, about twenty on each hand, so that I can make a note of how far my arms reach. I’m dead. I can’t feel anything.
M. L. also complains of increased anxiety over social interaction. I feel terrible with other people, I’m all tense, she says.
Tests, laboratory and neurological, within the limits of the normal. Mild depression confirmed and occasional (mild) panic attacks.
This has been going on for four years, says M. L. My thoughts are increasingly confused, I’m confused. I’m losing touch with reality. It’s like watching my own life on TV. I don’t feel any emotions. I don’t recognize my voice. My voice isn’t my own, the voices of my acquaintances reach me from a great distance and are completely unfamiliar to me. Sometimes my hands change size, one moment they’re small, very small and short, then they grow and I levitate. I’m very light. No, I don’t have suicidal thoughts. No, I don’t want to kill anyone. Sometimes I have something, like, visions and then I watch myself as in a mirror. I don’t feel the objects I touch, someone else is touching them. I’m outside my body. And when I move, I have no control over my movements, I feel like a robot. I have to touch myself to be sure that I exist, that I have a body. Like now, I’m following our conversation from a distance, you’re here, she’s opposite you, while I’m there, at the other end of the room. Sometimes I’m high up, stuck to the ceiling. Today I’m heavy, immobile, and you’re a stranger, you’re sitting a long way away and you’re very small. Tiny. I hear my voice, but what I’m saying is losing its sense.
Fragmentation of the personality.
Take the family history.
ADAM MARSKI. Russian by birth. Born in 1957. Appears balanced. Until hospitalized, a conscientious and hardworking secretary in the solicitors’ office Kroulek & Makela. Family history shows no mental or neurological disturbances. In his forty-eighth year, along with other eccentric behavior, began to make unusual grimaces. His jokes are inappropriate and he becomes angry without justified reason. He neglects himself — he loses two incisors, but does not see a dentist.
My incisors moved by ninety degrees, they stuck out of my mouth horizontally. I tried to put them back in their place with my fingers, to push them into their natural, vertical position, but they fell out.
He lets his hair grow for a year and in his fiftieth year starts to consume sweet things in immoderate quantities. He bathes increasingly infrequently. On April 13, 2004, he does not come to work, and appears the next day with stories about a possible suicide. Placed in the Psychiatric Department. Anxious and confused. Worried about paying a debt that his wife says he paid long ago. In hospital constantly demands, and then consumes, vast quantities of cake.
I was preparing to give a lecture in the largest hall of the Law Faculty. The lecture was supposed to be about dogs. The entire academic and legal elite had gathered. I went up to the rostrum and said: This is of no interest to you, how about some cake, and then we’ll have a smoke.
With time he could no longer distinguish his belongings from those of other patients, so he appropriated them, stole them one might say, without permission. The doctors put him in isolation. He is given neuroleptics, antidepressants and lithium. The symptoms do not subside. After detailed tests — neurological, laboratory and magnetic resonance — no serious deviations from the normal are discovered. There are mild disturbances in his short-term memory, his concentration declines, as does his capacity for abstract thought: he is capable of repeating various proverbs, but not explaining their meaning. He often lies on the floor and at regular intervals raises his leg and leans his foot against the closed door of his room. He often fixes his gaze on an object, such as the pencil between a doctor’s fingers or the identification label on the doctor’s chest. He converses in an official tone, without emotion, even with his wife. He often asks for additional quantities of food. He enters the doctors’ office, takes everything within reach and salutes as he leaves. His behavior and speech become mechanical. Expected outcome: catatonia with occasional manic-depressive attacks.
It’s raining hard. I’m standing with Lidija on a narrow crossbar high, very high above the ground. Lidija jumps, I stay hanging. I shout from up there, I ask Lidija: How is it down there? How are you? A heavy fall, says Lidija. Lidija is my wife.
When did that happen?
Just now.
See the childhood and sexual life of Adam Marski.
PETAR MURAN. Forty-two, homicidal mania, but in the department he does not try to kill anyone. Under observation at night, alone in his room. He often mentions two men whom he (allegedly) killed while serving a prison sentence. Sentenced to two years for embezzlement. On his release from prison he was direct
ed to the Psychiatric Department. He considers the murders absolutely normal. They were perfect murders, he often repeats. I killed them with a wooden pole, one blow to the back, without a drop of spilled blood. I simply put them to sleep. Who? Both of them.
He is not capable of carrying on a conversation of more than five minutes. He jumps from topic to topic. Otherwise calm and nonaggressive, occasionally even cheerful, often helping other patients. Always, day and night, he holds a bent nail in his mouth. The (imagined) murder was carried out in an uncontrollable instinctive impulse. He has hallucinations:
Last night my mother died in my arms.
Your mother died thirty-six years ago.
You’re mistaken.
BREDA MARETTI. Forty-one years. Obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Spends three hours in the bathroom twice a day. Showers several times in succession, brushes her teeth for twenty minutes; after she has combed her hair and put on her makeup, she brushes her teeth again. Although she gets up early, she does not get to work before eleven. The same thing is repeated before she goes to bed. When she is under pressure, when someone hurries her, the ritual is additionally drawn out.
Examine family relationships. Suppressed hatred for a loved person? Fury and hatred redirected at her own ego. Latently suicidal (for now).
There are lots of terrible little bugs in my clothes. I try to shake them out, but they cling. They won’t fall off.
Last night I was woken by a voice that kept repeating: Aurora, Aurora. Perhaps I wasn’t asleep, perhaps I was awake. But around four o’clock in the morning, it was already getting light, a voice really did wake me. That is, I was woken by the ghastly screams of a woman on the street under my window. The woman was shrieking, or rather begging, I want to go home, take me home, I want to go home. I wondered whether anyone was going to help the woman. Then I thought, perhaps it’s me shouting, perhaps that woman is me.
TEOFIL PAR. Sixty-eight. Brought back to the Psychiatric Department after a hernia operation. Somewhere just before midnight discovered hanging from a radiator in the Surgical Department. He had wrapped the cable of a mobile X-ray unit around his neck. After sixty minutes of resuscitation, existential functions restored to Teofil Par. He was put on a respirator, but at 1.20 — exitus.
BREDA KUKOLA. Thirty-eight. There was a flood in the hospital’s boiler room. The water was knee-deep. When the workmen came, at the end of the boiler room they saw a woman wearing nothing but blue leather gloves. The woman was floating through the room. First we thought it was a doll, said the workmen. The dead woman’s clothes and her bag were found by the door. Her relatives were summoned, and they confirmed that she was Breda Kukola, the mother of a small child, who had disappeared four days earlier. The boiler room door was locked. It is not known how Breda Kukola got into the boiler room.
DANIEL BARTIS — in a catatonic stupor. Wherever he is put, he stays. He does not speak, he does not move, he does not look at anyone. He does not respond to questions. In spite of this, his heart rate is 100 bpm. He dies a year after being admitted to the hospital. That morning he has no issues. He sits immobile for six hours by the open window, facing the mountain in the distance. Then he gets up, lies down on the floor and dies.
VERONIKA SEL. Twenty-nine. She walks in the garden beneath the window of Sigmund Olson. Between the thumb and index finger of both hands she holds a small plastic doll on a swing. She sways the doll to the rhythm of her steps and softly sings a children’s song, probably a lullaby. Sometimes, in the hospital garden, Veronika Sel walks with her palms pressed together in prayer, silently moving her lips. She goes from patient to patient, begging. Have you got two euros?
Her voice is the voice of a child, thin and squeaky, jerky, as though she lacks breath. She takes care of her personal hygiene, she is nicely dressed, but never puts on shoes, she always wears slippers. Her slippers are checked, felt, mouse-gray, with a metal buckle at the side. Before, just after she arrived, Veronika Sel would walk around with books in her arms, rocking them as though soothing a nursing baby. She would approach patients with a smile and offer them chocolate bananas or little tarts that she bought in the canteen. Here, children, she would say, help yourselves.
At her relatives’ request she is allowed home.
Six months later Veronika Sel returns to the Clinic. The transformation of Veronika Sel is frightening. She is dressed in black rags and unwashed, on her head is a wig of long, sharp synthetic filaments, also black, which falls over half her forehead. On top of the wig she has tied a black scarf stuffed with layers of backcombed artificial hair. She smiles and walks bent over. Veronika needs to be reset, says Sigmund Olson. I’ve bought her some Seka and Braco chocolate. Now, instead of slippers, Veronika Sel wears black winter boots that come up to her knees, but it is summer, with temperatures of 38°C. Veronika Sel looks frightening, like a witch, but happy. She’s fallen into bezna, says Sigmund Olson. We must get her out.
What’s bezna? I ask.
Bezna is darkness, gloom, blackness. It’s unseeingness. In Romanian. I’m Romanian, says Sigmund Olson.
Sigmund Olson is of Danish origin.
BENJAMIN KATT, volunteer in the War of Independence. Having had some psychological issues, and at his own request, Benjamin Katt is placed in a Dominican monastery on one of the Adriatic islands. Here Benjamin mostly walks, dives and reads. He is most impressed by Vsevolod Garšin’s stories “Four Days” and “Red Flower.” The inner monologue of a soldier who lies for four days beside an enemy soldier he has killed in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 is continued in the almost identical story of Benjamin Katt in 1992, on a battlefield in Croatia. Benjamin Katt has similar obsessions to the patient in the story “Red Flower,” who wants to save the world from evil. Unlike Garšin, who sees evil in three poppy flowers, Benjamin Katt dives obsessively, collecting shells, whose insides he destroys. In addition, Benjamin Katt self-harms. I’m checking my blood, Benjamin Katt keeps repeating to the doctors. I think that I’ve been exchanged for someone else and now I don’t know whether I’m alive or dead, he says.
Benjamin Katt makes strange movements with his hands. The skin on his extremities is dry and cracked. He scratches and plucks at his skin for hours. Then he rubs thick layers of body cream over the wounds and wraps them in bandages. He has a tic in his left eye, so it looks as though he is winking. It will turn out that Vsevolod Garšin and Benjamin Katt share a distant relative, unknown to the world. Garšin killed himself by jumping from the fifth floor of the building in which he lived. Although he mirrors Vsevolod Garšin’s biography, Benjamin Katt will not kill himself.
CHARLOTTA BEN. A letter from my friend the psychiatrist Armando Trevi from Pula:
On July 24, 2013, the following news item appeared in the local newspaper:
The body of an unknown woman between thirty and forty years of age was found on 23.7 around 11 a.m. in the sea on the Pula Riva, opposite the former Admiralty building. According to Pula resident Karlo Donat, who was the first to inform the emergency services, the body was floating a few meters from the shore, face immersed in the water. Unofficially, we learn that no traces of violence were detected on the body, and that it is confirmed that the cause of the woman’s death was drowning.
It would never officially be established why the female person quickly identified as Charlotta Ben had drowned, face immersed in the water. I attended the autopsy of Charlotta Ben in my capacity as psychiatrist and forensic scientist, and therefore it was not appropriate for me to report what I knew about Charlotta Ben. Besides, that news item was already out of date, fresh dramas were arriving every moment, and few cared about Charlotta Ben, there was no longer anyone truly close to her.
Two months earlier, that is, at the beginning of May 2013, the red-haired Charlotta Ben, an unmarried sculptress, comes to my office and says, Gertrude maintains that I need help. Two days ago, after a sudden flash of bright light, I became suddenly blind and now I can barely make out shad
ows.