The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  Kirsch had encountered phobias of this kind before, among veterans of the Great War. They afflicted men who had suffered poison gas attacks, or who had witnessed the effects of them close up, the way chlorine gas stripped away the inner lining of the lungs, causing the victims to drown in their own fluids.

  Stoehr had volunteered for military service at the age of fifteen. He had lied about his age to the recruiting officer and been sent west in time to take part in the Battle of Verdun. Kirsch reassembled the facts as best he could, though Stoehr’s recollections were often confused. In France he had gone down with dysentery from drinking water out of a shell hole full of corpses. At some point he had been decorated for bravery and promoted to sergeant. He had been shot through the hip during an assault on Fort Souville, and had laid untreated and delirious for half a day or more, listening to the pleading and the screams of other wounded men.

  After the war he had returned to his home town of Bremen, where he had worked for a year as a railway porter before following his sister to Berlin. There he had drifted in and out of casual work before finally securing a position as a nightwatchman at the Sklarek brothers’ garment warehouse. This job seemed to suit him. For once there were no complaints about absenteeism or insubordination. But then, after a few years, the Sklareks had gone out of business in the wake of a financial scandal, liquidating their stock and closing the warehouse. It was around this time, according to his sister, that Stoehr’s behaviour had become erratic and increasingly alarming. In particular, she suspected that he had killed a neighbour’s dog. After a disagreement with his brother-in-law, Stoehr had moved out to lodgings in Pankow. The next the family heard of him, he had been arrested outside the opera house.

  There was a pattern to Stoehr’s madness, if you looked for it. In his mind the epicentre of all dread, all horror, lay beneath his feet, in the churning earth and the fetid waters. The shell holes had corpses in them, he said, but there was nothing fanciful about that. At Verdun, ten months of artillery warfare had sown several thousand tons of human flesh into the soil. Sergeant Stoehr had breathed in the stench of the dead, he had crawled and fought over their remains, he had filled his stomach with their putrefied blood. Their flesh had become his flesh.

  Kirsch’s colleagues were baffled by his interest in the sergeant’s ravings. Different types of neurological disease caused different types of symptom, they believed. The character of a patient’s madness was a means of identifying which disease he had, according to a system of classification. But how that madness found expression, the particular delusions and fantasies that took hold of a patient’s mind, were irrelevant. The job of the psychiatrist was to find a cure, through trial and error if necessary, so the patient could return to his place in society. How could psychiatry call itself medicine, if it were not in the business of finding cures?

  But what would a cure mean, in Andreas Stoehr’s case? What aspect of his mind, of his thinking or his behaviour, would be changed for the better? Where did his particular illness lie, if indeed he was ill? At the root of his troubles were his experiences of war. That, at least, seemed likely. But the past could not be mended, only forgotten. And as far as Kirsch knew, inducing amnesia was not a recognised form of treatment in any school of psychiatry.

  They wheeled Nurse Ritter to the main hospital in a trolley. She was shaking too much to walk. As soon as Stoehr’s blood sugar levels had returned to normal, he was tied into a security harness and locked up in the south wing, in one of the cells they kept for dangerous patients. Kirsch checked on him every hour, but Stoehr no longer seemed to recognise him. He sat on his mattress with his knees drawn up under his chin, staring at the wall.

  Kirsch spent the rest of the morning in his office, waiting for Dr Mehring to reappear. In the commotion that followed Nurse Ritter’s injury, there had been no chance to explain his actions, why he had removed the restraints from Stoehr’s arm, why he had felt compelled to terminate the treatment. He didn’t expect Mehring to accept his explanation, but he did expect him to demand one.

  But then, his own was not the only conduct deserving scrutiny. Mehring, after all, had been absent during a dangerous procedure. The nurses he had left behind might be competent, but they could not be expected to take critical decisions. Mehring had been increasing the doses of insulin given to his patients day by day, inducing comas of increasing length and depth. Close supervision was required at every stage. Would he have dared disappear to the lavatory (with a newspaper, no less) at any other day of the week but Sunday, when there were fewer medical staff around to observe his negligence?

  The hours ticked by and Mehring did not appear. It grew dark outside. Flecks of rain tapped against the narrow, filthy window. Kirsch switched on the lights, but it was hard to concentrate on his work. He decided to seek Mehring out. Perhaps his difference in rank demanded no less, but when Kirsch went to the deputy director’s office, he found it locked. He had no more success on the wards and the recreation areas. When he asked around for Nurse Honig, he was told she had gone home.

  Mehring was in no hurry to discuss the incident, after all – at least not with him.

  Kirsch hurried back to his office. What he needed was someone to back up his version of events, to acknowledge that Stoehr’s seizure had been a genuine cause for concern. And he had to talk to them before Mehring did.

  In his office he picked up the telephone. The operator put him through to the Emergency Department.

  ‘I wanted to enquire about Nurse Ritter.’

  ‘She’s sleeping now. We gave her Luminal. She was in a lot of pain.’ At the other end of the line Dr Oswald Brenner sounded faintly exasperated. ‘She just has the five stitches, but they’re deep, and there’s extensive bruising. As far as infection goes, it’s too early to say if we have a problem.’

  Kirsch remembered the crunch of cartilage and the spray of blood – blood surprisingly bright coming from such an anaemic-looking woman.

  ‘Is there anything she needs? Anything I could –’

  ‘Rest. That’s what she needs. We’ll take another look in the morning.’

  Kirsch remembered Nurse Ritter’s face when Stoehr started foaming at the mouth: she’d been scared. It was the one glimmer of hope that she might see things his way. ‘I don’t suppose she’s said anything about the incident?’

  ‘We asked her about the circumstances. It’s standard procedure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She was bitten, I understand. By some maniac.’

  ‘A patient, yes. Although he wasn’t … I don’t think he knew what he was doing.’

  Dr Brenner grunted. ‘We’ll get to the details later. I’ve advised her to stay in overnight.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘Just a precaution. Bite wounds are often dirty, and therefore susceptible to infection. Especially in this case.’ There were voices in the background, the sound of hurried footsteps. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me –’

  ‘Just one more thing: has Dr Mehring been in? I’ve been trying to find him.’

  ‘He was here a while ago. I told him what I’m telling you: if you want to talk to Nurse Ritter, you’ll have to wait until visiting hours tomorrow.’

  Four

  It was after five o’clock when his train pulled into Alexanderplatz. An hour of rain had driven the crowds from the streets. Most of the campaigners had given up for the day, leaving the soggy remnants of their literature plastered on walls and lamp-posts. By the exit, a solitary gang of girls were handing out leaflets and shouting ‘Germany Awake!’ in ragged unison. They looked out of place with their plaited blonde hair and sunburned faces. Most of the leaflets were tossed into the gutter.

  The number 69 tramway snaked its way north towards the Schönhauser Allee, but he passed the stop and kept walking. He didn’t go the shortest way home, but instead took a detour along Grenadierstrasse, by day a busy thoroughfare of small shops and market stalls, by night a haunt of streetwalkers and scavenging cats.r />
  Kirsch felt at ease on Grenadierstrasse. In the winter months the air smelled of roasting chestnuts and burned sugar. The shops sold things no department store would stock: animal skeletons, prescription medicines, nuggets of amber and red gold. Bearded men gathered beneath the awnings – to gossip probably, though it did not look like gossiping, the way they shook their heads and frowned as if at the untimely passing of a friend. On the shop signs and nameplates the Hebrew lettering was jagged and monumental, as if bearing the import of divine edicts, or the codes of a secret society. No one knew him there, and the chances of running into a colleague, or anyone in his circle of acquaintance, were slim. The district was too shabby for that, and too foreign.

  At the far end of the street, opposite a cheap hotel, was a corner where rainwater always collected, making a huge puddle beside the pavement. It was there, on a Monday one week earlier, that he had first seen Elisabeth.

  He had been walking back from the S-Bahn at about five o’clock. He had just bought some Salvarsan from his usual supplier and had stopped in front of a shop selling gramophone records. He was peering through the plate-glass window at the discs fanned out across a crush of red velvet, when he caught her reflection as she walked by. He had only a fleeting impression of her face – full, parted lips, dark eyes – but the realisation that she had been looking at him (or was it at the records?) gave his heart a gentle jolt. He turned. She was walking towards the edge of the pavement, the unbridgeable puddle barring her way. She wore a plain brown cloche hat, and a coat that was too bulky to be fashionable. She looked like a poor country girl just off the train, come to work as a housemaid in the great city. Tucked securely under her arm was a thick white envelope, with an address written on the front.

  Anyone else would have walked around the puddle. But instead, she extended one foot over the water – Kirsch could still picture the heavy black lace-up shoes – and leaped across, landing with the grace of a ballerina. And when her trailing foot caught the very edge of the puddle, making a gentle splash, instead of fretting or cursing, she laughed.

  She carried on across the road, hurrying a little as a taxi cab trundled by on Hirtenstrasse. Kirsch watched her intently, hoping the balletic leap had been for his benefit and that she might look back, if only to witness its effect. But in a few moments she had vanished among the crowds and the traffic, leaving nothing behind but a feathery swirl of mud in the water.

  He stood now on the same spot, looking down at his reflection, dark against the street light glare.

  The shop owner had eventually noticed him and opened up specially. Kirsch had found it hard to concentrate on what to buy. In the end, he took a recording of piano music by Artur Schnabel because the owner recommended it, and then set off home. Perhaps it was the gathering darkness, perhaps he simply wasn’t concentrating, but after a while he found himself on a street he didn’t recognise.

  There was nobody around to ask for directions so he pressed on, passing a pumping station and a synagogue before turning down an alley that he thought might bring him out onto a main thoroughfare. He had reached the corner, could just make out the walls of a cemetery ahead, when a window opened above him. Then he was looking at her again.

  She had a small iron balcony, just big enough for a clothes horse or a couple of pot plants. She leaned out and picked up a bottle of milk, thumbing open the stopper and bringing it to her nose. She wasn’t wearing her hat, but even in the half-dark, he knew it was her. She had the look of a southern European, a homely broadness in the face, eyebrows that any Berliner would have plucked into unnatural arches. It came to him that she had just run out to post the letter she had been carrying and gone home again while he’d been in the shop.

  She pulled the window shut.

  ‘Excuse me! The Schönhauser Allee? Is it this way?’

  He was surprised at his own boldness. His heart was pounding. All the nerves of a schoolboy asking for a first date.

  Hesitantly, the window opened again.

  ‘Fräulein?’

  She stuck her head over the balcony railings. On the floor above a light came on.

  He pulled off his hat. ‘I seem to have lost my way. To the Schönhauser Allee? I’m sorry to trouble you.’

  She studied him for a moment then pointed up the alley. ‘One hundred metres. Go right and then left.’ She spoke with a foreign accent.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

  He saw her smile as she looked down at him. For a few seconds – it couldn’t have been longer, though it seemed like it – they were both very still. Then she closed the window.

  Standing on the corner of Grenadierstrasse, he wondered at his behaviour that night. He had been lost. It had been sensible to ask for directions. But that wasn’t why he had done it. Something had changed outside the music shop. The intensity of his feelings had been a revelation: exhilarating and disturbing, equally.

  He feared – no, he knew – it was an intensity he had never felt with his fiancée, for all her innumerable virtues. He had long ago ceased to believe it could be felt, at least by him.

  He followed the same route now. A glance at a street map had revealed his original mistake, the turning he had missed. He went by the pumping station and the synagogue, before heading towards the cemetery and into the alley at the corner of Wörtherstrasse. It was a route he took most days – healthier than being packed onto a tram full of people coughing and sneezing. And, like every day, he stopped outside the rooming house to look up at the girl’s window.

  For three days now, he had seen no light.

  The Café Tanguero was doing good business for a Sunday, but the girls sitting round the dance floor were seeing little benefit. The tables were taken up with couples taking shelter from the rain. The smell of wet wool and leather mingled with the fug of cigarette smoke and spilled beer.

  Kirsch took a seat at the bar. At the far end of the room, beneath a flaking pastoral fresco, an old man in a chalk-stripe shirt was squeezing the bandoneon. The tune was slow and sad, but then one of the girls leaned over and shook him by the knee, and he switched into a polka. She called herself Carmen these days, though Kirsch had it on good authority that her real name was Ludmila and she came from Warsaw. She had recently re-styled her appearance, ditching the unfashionable bob for a Latin look, hair pulled back tight and fastened behind. It was a style that complemented her black dress and long lace-up boots.

  She caught his eye and walked over to the bar. ‘Back again? You must like it here.’ She elbowed her way in beside him and put a hand on his wrist. ‘Let’s have a dance.’

  It was a familiar sequence: for dances the customer paid with a round of drinks, usually expensive ones, cocktails or cognac – or a kümmel if money was tight. That part was for the house. Then, after the drinking and the dancing, there was the option of a less euphemistic transaction, involving a trip to a room or a cheap hotel somewhere in the vicinity.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t dance.’

  ‘Of course you do. Everybody dances.’

  Two of the other girls had taken to the floor and were slinging each other around, trying to attract attention. The raincoats and umbrellas had dripped onto the boards. The girls slipped and slithered, shrieking with forced laughter.

  ‘Not me.’

  The barman placed the glass of beer in front of him. Carmen pouted. Her hand was still on his forearm. She slid it up to the elbow and down again. ‘You shouldn’t tell lies. It isn’t nice.’

  There was a smell of liquor on her breath. She was already tipsy.

  ‘Lies?’

  ‘I’ve seen you dance.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten. You took long enough to get up the nerve.’

  It was true. The previous week, a busy Thursday, he’d wandered into the Tanguero for a nightcap. The girl from Grenadierstrasse had been sitting there in the corner, wearing the same baggy coat and rustic shoes, earthiness and innocence bundled up toget
her like the ends of her laces. The moment he saw her, he felt his pulse quicken. She sat watching the dancing, a drink in front of her, nobody else at her table. Eventually, he had asked her to dance. Without saying a word, she had stood up and offered him her hand.

  He still couldn’t recall very much about what happened then. He didn’t remember the music or the crowd or the other dancers. He remembered the girl’s shoulder, dark pleated fabric below the yoke of her dress; the vanilla sweetness of her hair; the way her body felt light – light enough that he could have swept her up with one arm, or thought he could. A couple of times she stumbled against him. The steps, it seemed, were unfamiliar and required her to concentrate.

  ‘Shall we sit down?’ he asked her after the second time.

  She shook her head, refusing to be defeated.

  ‘Are you here alone?’ he asked her, as the number drew to a close.

  She nodded.

  ‘Me too.’

  They held their position, each looking past the other’s shoulder.

  ‘Aren’t you from here?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Then why? Why are you here alone?’

  He was at a loss to answer. Around them, couples were breaking apart or coming together, leaving the floor or walking onto it. Before he could say ‘I don’t know’, the music started up again. He remembered that she looked at him then, just before the room was plunged into darkness.

  It was another power cut. A groan went up, mingled with ironic cheers. The staff, who had become accustomed to such interruptions, began lighting lanterns above the bar. The band started up again, more raggedly than before. Kirsch felt the girl’s forehead brush against his cheek.

  In the darkness he kissed her.

  It only lasted a second, perhaps two. He felt her break away, startled or disgusted. He felt stupid and ashamed of himself. But then, before he could stammer an apology, they were kissing again, longer and harder. In his arms her body was a dark, gentle heat.

  The lights flickered and came back on. The crowd at the bar was even bigger than before. And there, elbowing his way through, was Robert Eisner with one of the nurses from the Charité. Of all people.