The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Generals are like stinging nettles. Cut one down, another pops up. The army’ll get who it wants. There’s always someone.’

  Kirsch’s future father-in-law had been a guarded supporter of Franz von Papen, the present Reich Chancellor, and what the Berlin press deridingly referred to as his ‘cabinet of barons’, a fact that had given rise to some tense moments around the Siegels’ dining table. Under the pretext of restoring order and national unity, the one-time cavalry officer and amateur racetrack rider, whose long face strikingly resembled that of a horse, had used the army to remove the state government of Prussia. It was clearly the first step in dismantling the despised republic in its entirety. But the economy had continued to deteriorate and the violence was still getting worse.

  Kirsch’s breath flared against the cold glass. Once again, men in uniform were making all the decisions, just as they had during the war. No one seemed to think it odd, despite the outcome of that particular conflict. And why should they? Square bashing and boot polish were the principal prerequisites for good government. Everyone knew that.

  There was movement outside the hospital, a burst of harsh light and shadow. The reporters hurried forward, casting aside their cigarettes.

  The police inspector was gaunt and lanky. Most of his energy seemed to have been absorbed by his moustache, which was thick and lustrous. He scowled as another flashbulb went off in his face, refusing questions with irritable shakes of the head. Kirsch stood on tiptoe as he reached the kerb.

  ‘What’s up?’ Eisner said, peering around his newspaper.

  By the car, the police inspector turned and faced the reporters. It looked like he was going to take questions, after all.

  Kirsch dug his hands into his pockets. ‘Think I need a breath of fresh air,’ he said.

  It was starting to rain. Fat drops, large but infrequent, smacked against hat brims and overcoats. The police driver turned on his headlamps as Kirsch hurried across the road.

  ‘I am assured by Dr Brenner that the patient is in no immediate danger. Physically she appears quite healthy.’ The inspector coughed and cast a resentful glance at the sky. ‘For the time being, however, she remains disorientated.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ a reporter shouted. ‘Has she gone mad?’

  ‘It means she is disorientated.’

  Another reporter smirked as he wrote. He seemed to enjoy some advantage of professional rank; the other reporters kept quiet and listened when he spoke.

  ‘Inspector Hagen, have you made any headway in finding her attacker?’

  The inspector frowned. ‘Mister Lehnert, we have no firm evidence that she was attacked. Her injuries are minor, and consistent with a fall.’

  ‘In the woods? What did she fall from, Inspector? A tree?’

  The other reporters laughed.

  ‘She is yet to make a complaint,’ Hagen said, ‘of any kind.’

  The reporters couldn’t believe their ears. It was a cue for them all to shout at once.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious she was kidnapped?’ Lehnert demanded. ‘Otherwise, where are her clothes?’

  ‘We haven’t found them. But that doesn’t mean –’

  ‘Is it the police’s hypothesis that the victim was out for a swim?’ The other reporters laughed again, louder. ‘Or is it your contention that she was sunbathing up this hypothetical tree?’

  The reporters could hardly contain themselves. Inspector Hagen shook his head in disgust, clearly regretting his decision to say anything.

  In recent years the detective powers of the civilian police had become an object of derision in the German press. Their poor record in hunting down serial murderers was largely responsible. First there was Karl Denke, a minor church functionary and purveyor of smoked pork from Münsterberg, whose meticulous records catalogued thirty murders, and whose cellar had been found to contain barrels of smoked human flesh, bones, cured skin and pots of human lard. In Berlin itself, there was Carl Grossmann, a one-time butcher and door-to-door salesman, who had confessed to the murder of twenty-four young women, all newly arrived migrants to the city, whom he had hired as a succession of housekeepers before killing, dismembering and selling them for meat in discreet paper parcels. Then there was Georg Haarmann, a police informer from Hanover, who had befriended young migrant workers at the railway station. He would take them home, sexually molest them and then kill them by tearing out their throats with his teeth, an atrocity he committed on at least twenty-five occasions, by which time human skulls were washing up on the banks of the Leine River. Haarmann too had seen no reason to let the bodies go to waste, and so had skilfully dismembered them, boiling up the flesh and selling it on the black market as potted veal and pork. Like the others, it was said, his eventual arrest had been accompanied by much discreet vomiting around the town.

  What interested Kirsch was the killers’ lack of remorse. Whether or not they were insane was a matter of debate. Beyond serious doubt was their inability to empathise with their victims or their families. Examination revealed that they were able to experience only a limited range of emotions altogether. Theirs was a condition of emotional poverty and isolation from the mainstream of human life. An American psychiatrist called Partridge had proposed calling such individuals sociopaths, on the grounds that the causes of their condition were social, a conclusion he had reached after studies of juvenile delinquency.

  Kirsch was interested to know if the condition was reversible, but the press had fixed on more immediate issues. In their reports and editorials the incompetence of the civilian police was the constant theme. Intentionally or not, the effect was to provide implicit justification for the existence of paramilitary groups who frequently took the law into their own hands.

  Lehnert and the other reporters were still laughing. Red-faced, the inspector turned away, then immediately turned back again, levelling an angry finger. ‘You may indulge in whatever fantasies you like, gentlemen. I shall deal in facts. The young woman has undergone an ordeal of some kind, but it is not clear that any other parties were involved.’

  He climbed into the back of the car, refusing to answer further questions. The passenger window on the far side was partly open. Kirsch rapped on the glass.

  ‘What’s her name, Inspector? Have you found out her name?’

  The inspector looked at Kirsch, took in the white coat, realised that he was not another reporter. His expression softened. ‘I’m afraid not, Doctor. She says she doesn’t remember.’ The driver cursed as the interior of the car was lit up with a blinding flash. ‘If you ask me, she’s –’

  But Kirsch never heard what she was in the inspector’s opinion, because the car had already pulled away.

  Later that day, a fight broke out in the refectory. It was not the first. Since the start of the election campaign, the patients at the clinic had exhibited signs of increasing agitation. The bitterness of the contest and the vehemence of its rhetoric had somehow inflamed them, despite their having only sporadic contact with the world outside.

  National Socialist propaganda in particular cast a spell. Several of the patients proclaimed themselves to be leading members of the party (though they were plainly not), and demanded that the other patients submit to their authority. Others denounced what they claimed were traitors in their midst, calling for purges and retribution. Almost every day Franz Scheck, a dentist and manic depressive, stood at the top of the stairs and proclaimed himself Führer, vowing to take revenge upon the devils and Jews of high finance who were orchestrating Germany’s ruin, on one occasion concluding his remarks by casually urinating upon the upturned faces of his audience. Some patients were roughed up, appearing at mealtimes with split lips and swollen faces, but it was impossible to identify the guilty parties. Kirsch suspected that some of the orderlies were involved. Several times he had been forced to rebuke them for shouting or excessive force. He had tried to remove a notorious bully called Jochmann, but his notes to the director requesting acti
on went unanswered. The isolation cells filled up, sedative doses were doubled and still the nights were punctuated with outbursts of demonic ranting, accompanied by whistles and cat-calls that echoed round the building. With the director struck down with flu and his deputy fixated on his insulin experiments, the sense of disintegration was palpable.

  More than a week had gone by, and still Kirsch had heard nothing further about Nurse Ritter’s injury and the alleged assault upon Nurse Honig. He began to hope that the issue had blown over; that he might not be dismissed after all. So far, he had told no one about his precarious position, neither his family nor Alma. He knew they would worry. And what was the point of that, when it might turn out that there was nothing to worry about?

  He spent all day on his cases, noting their progress or the lack of it, planning his responses. The threatening atmosphere had affected everyone. Even his more amenable patients treated him distrustfully, as if wary of speaking their minds. Again and again, he found himself thinking about the Einstein girl, lying in her hospital bed. He could have speeded up police inquiries by revealing what he knew, which included her likely address off Wörtherstrasse. At least that way they could have established her identity. But how would he explain being in possession of such knowledge? What would the newspapers make of it, not to mention his fiancée and her family? It was not the kind of knowledge a man in his position was supposed to have.

  He wished the girl would recover her memory, and soon. He wished – though he was not yet ready to admit it – that she would recover her memory of him. But if she did remember him, then what? What could possibly happen next? Nothing, of course. Nothing good. He was a professional man, about to be married. His future with Alma was all mapped out. This was his chance for a new beginning, for family life and children – wholesome, bright prospects that would purge his system of the past. What good was the Einstein girl next to that, this stranger whose misadventures had somehow found their way into the newspapers?

  She was nothing to him, with or without her memories: a fantasy lover, devoid of all substance – except that when he closed his eyes and thought of her, the pull he felt, the hunger, seemed substantial, urgent and real like nothing else.

  Seven

  They had moved her away from the women’s wards and into a room at the top of the building with bars on the window and a door that could be locked. It was a place reserved for highly infectious patients, or ones who were considered a threat to the smooth running of the hospital for any other reason.

  ‘Dr Brenner thought it best,’ the nurse explained as she showed Kirsch in, ‘after everything that’s happened. She’ll be gone soon anyway.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  The nurse shrugged. ‘Dr Brenner says there’s nothing more we can do.’

  Peeling grey paint and faded anatomical drawings covered the walls. Above the bed hung a small wooden crucifix, with an old garland of flowers around it, shrivelled up and faded to the colour of straw. A solitary electric bulb was screwed into the ceiling. The nurse’s footsteps retreated down the corridor.

  The girl was asleep on the bed, her head turned away from the door. They had cut her hair. It gave her a youthful, tomboyish look, a different, androgynous kind of beauty. The split lip had mostly healed and the bruising on her face had gone down, leaving shadows around her cheekbones and beneath her eyes. She seemed more fragile than ever.

  Her injuries are minor, and consistent with a fall. That was what Inspector Hagen had said.

  Kirsch took a step closer. The girl let out a sudden, terrified gasp. Her whole body bucked and twisted, as if she were shackled and desperate to wrench herself free. A sob rose from her throat, then, just as suddenly, she was still again.

  Night terrors, he knew all about those. Recently, more or less coincidentally with the Stoehr case, they had returned: horrible visions he could only recall with difficulty by day, but which he felt lying in wait for him at night. He had taken to staying up later and later – reading, drinking, walking the streets from bar to bar – so as to postpone the moment when they might return. The best sleep, the most oblivious sleep, was the sleep of utter exhaustion.

  He sat down beside the bed and reached for the girl’s hand: it was smooth and soft, not the hand of a housemaid or factory worker. Nor were there any scratches, just a graze and some swelling on her wrist. He felt for a pulse, surprised at how cool her flesh felt. The room was too cold. With his coat on, he hadn’t noticed. He eased her blanket up higher, folding it under her chin. Then he took her hand again, looked at his watch and began to count, wondering as he registered the tremulous beat, how Dr Brenner could have allowed his patient to be injected with barbiturates, whatever the circumstances. They could easily have put her back into a coma. She might never have woken up again, might have died without anyone even knowing who she was.

  There were bruises on her arms. The catheters had irritated her veins: they stood out darkly, like the tendrils of an invading tumour.

  Seventy-two beats per minute: a little fast, but no cause for concern. The unsteadiness of the pulse was more worrying. He looked into her face, realised that the lids were no longer fully closed. Behind the dark lashes, there was movement among the tiny points of reflected light.

  Her eyelids flickered, then opened.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said.

  She sat up sharply, brought her hands to her mouth, hurriedly felt her lips, the outside and the inside, pushing her fingers between her teeth. She was terrified.

  ‘Just a bad dream,’ Kirsch said. ‘You’re safe now.’

  She took her hands away, looked at them, then at him. He searched for some hint of recognition in her eyes, but saw none.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  She shrank from him, pulling the sheets up to her chin.

  ‘If you want the book you’re too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘I don’t have it any more. I sent it back.’

  ‘What book are you talking about?’

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Slowly she shook her head. ‘It was just a dream.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She didn’t answer. Her gaze drifted towards the window, a blankness in her face now, a descending stillness Kirsch had often seen in dementia patients and others in the grip of psychosis. The gravitational pull of the interior world; in certain states it became irresistible, distorting the geometry of conscious thought, its straight lines and perpendicular angles. Memories ran in circles, unable to reach a destination. Without the discipline of chronology, they crossed over and doubled back, undoing the indispensable logic of cause and effect. From a presence to a half-presence to no presence at all, that was his perception of it – of insanity generally: a kind of leaving. It was how loved ones experienced it too. The patient remained physically present, but his or her mind travelled a different road, one that no other human being, even the closest, could follow.

  He had to reconnect her to the outside world, to bring her back into the living present.

  ‘Let me introduce myself,’ he said. ‘My name is Dr Kirsch. Martin Kirsch. I work at the Charité Psychiatric Clinic.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘Across the road.’

  ‘Kirsch.’ She kept her gaze on the sky, which was turning blue in the twilight. An ambulance set off from the hospital, alarm bells clanging. ‘You’re not what I expected.’

  ‘You were expecting me?’

  ‘You’re in the book. I thought you’d be older.’

  She was clearly confused.

  ‘We met once, briefly,’ he said. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

  She frowned, swallowed. ‘Have I lost my mind?’

  Kirsch picked up the accent again: Slavic, was it? Or from somewhere further south: Greece perhaps, or Italy?

  ‘Of course not. Under the circumstances it’s natural that you should experience some …’ He groped for a palliative term. ‘… disorientation. Do you have any idea how you got here?�
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  ‘In an ambulance. I remember the bells.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘They t-told me I was found. In the woods.’

  ‘But you don’t remember that?’

  She shook her head. ‘Amnesia. Isn’t that the name for it?’

  ‘Loss of memory, that’s right.’

  She nodded. ‘I have amnesia.’ As she said the words, her chin lifted, as if the condition were some source of comfort. ‘Can you make me better?’

  She looked at him, a hard clarity in her eyes.

  ‘The thing is …’ The frankness of her stare was disconcerting. ‘I’m not your doctor. You’re not my patient. Dr Brenner is in charge of your case. I was just …’

  The girl frowned. ‘Just what?’

  ‘Curious.’

  Kirsch thought of the reporters outside and wished he had said something else. The girl looked down at her blankets. Her fingers absently traced the line of her throat.

  ‘You must be thirsty,’ he said. ‘Would you like some water?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he went to fetch a glass from downstairs. But by the time he returned her eyes were closed. One of her feet was uncovered, sticking out from under the blanket into the chill air. The ankle was still swollen and there was dried blood around the toenails. He remembered the first time he had seen her, her foot extended over a wide black puddle on Grenadierstrasse, laughing as she kicked up the water. She had been on her way to post a letter. But who was the intended recipient? A lover perhaps? In which case, where was that lover now? For that matter, where was her family? Why had they not come to claim her? How was it that she was alone?

  Carefully, he pulled the blanket down and tucked it under the mattress. ‘Sleep now,’ he said, but she was asleep already.

  He found Dr Brenner in the Anatomy Department.

  ‘Her amnesia is retrograde. She remembers everything that’s happened to her since she came out of her coma, including what the medical staff told her this morning. What she can’t access reliably are memories pre-dating the coma. When I asked her about her past, she seemed unable to answer.’