Kirsch had to admit that he usually ate in a hurry, especially when at work.
‘I can understand that,’ Fischer said. ‘Some food is better not dwelt on, especially the kind served up in hospitals. Unappetising establishments at the best of times. And a man like you is always anxious to get back to his patients.’
‘I can’t give them half the time they need. At times it’s overwhelming.’
Fischer clasped his hands together in front of him, the fingers flexing and twitching. ‘Still, it must be tempting to concentrate on the more interesting cases, the unusual ones. I expect one learns so much more.’
‘Every case is unusual. The closer I look, the more unusual I find they are. Like people.’
‘Take this case in the papers, this girl they found in the woods. Now that’s an interesting case.’
‘Potentially.’
‘The complete loss of identity, the nakedness. And yet no evidence of sexual assault. As if it was her very identity that was the target. Like something from a detective novel.’
Kirsch mopped gravy from his plate. ‘That’s just the newspapers. It’s really just a straightforward case of amnesia.’
‘Come, come. Straightforward? How do you account for it then?’
‘I can’t. Not yet.’
‘You must have a theory. Everyone I speak to has a theory, even my driver.’
Perhaps Fischer didn’t realise it, what with all the speculation in the newspapers, but individual case histories were confidential. Kirsch thought about how he could say so without appearing ungracious, but Fischer seemed to read his mind.
‘Of course. She’s still your patient, isn’t she? You mustn’t say another word. My curiosity is idle and reprehensible.’
‘It’s quite natural.’ Kirsch glanced around the room. Some of the diners had left and those that remained were comfortably pushed back from their tables, sipping coffee or brandy, or puffing on cigars. ‘Perhaps if I could have your assurance –’
‘Of course, my dear fellow, of course. I shan’t breathe a word. Call it a professional consultation. No harm in that, surely.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I hate to rely on the gentlemen of the press. One can’t believe a word they say.’
‘In that case…’ Kirsch finished with his plate and put it aside. ‘I believe the amnesia was caused by some form of trauma. But I’m not convinced the trauma took place immediately before she was found. I think she may have travelled some distance. There have been cases like it in the past, a coincidence of amnesia and sudden flight. Psychogenic fugue is the preferred term. We do know the patient is not a native German speaker.’
‘Really?’ Fischer edged closer. ‘Then where’s she from?’
‘Hard to say. Somewhere in the East, I think, judging from her accent. Russia perhaps, or the Balkans.’
Fischer nodded slowly. ‘So you agree with the police. The inspector – what was it?’
‘Hagen?’
‘Yes. He thinks the girl escaped from an asylum. There was no crime, no maniac in the woods.’
Kirsch shrugged. ‘I’ve no information either way.’
Fischer leaned back, gathering his knife and fork on his plate, and tucking his fingers into his waistcoat. ‘I have a theory of my own, one you shall no doubt disprove with ease.’
‘And that is?’
Fischer reached for a toothpick and screwed it between two of his upper incisors. ‘She’ll turn out to be an impostor.’
Kirsch laughed, though he didn’t feel like laughing. ‘How can she be an impostor if she has no identity?’
‘That will follow in time. Have you forgotten Anna Anderson? That woman they pulled from the Landwehr canal? It was eighteen months before she declared she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia.’
Kirsch knew the story. After her failed suicide attempt the woman had been taken to the Dalldorf asylum, where she had refused to give a name. Only later did she declare that she was the child of Tsar Nicholas II, and had survived the massacre of the Russian royal family by the Bolsheviks several years earlier. Though she apparently spoke neither Russian nor French – the language of the Russian aristocracy – several exiled Russian aristocrats and courtiers had confirmed her identity and pledged their allegiance. The bandwagon had rolled on, with donations being elicited and financial claims made, even after the Berlin newspapers had positively identified Anderson as a Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanzkowska, a woman with a long history of mental illness. It was said that she and her advisers had grown rich on the proceeds of her celebrity.
‘You can see the parallels,’ Fischer observed. ‘These days one only needs to attract the attention of the press to make money. And your patient has already done that.’
Kirsch didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t unheard of for people to fake psychiatric illness as a means of gaining attention, but it had never occurred to him that Maria’s might be such a case.
Fischer watched him for a moment, then waved a dismissive hand in front of his face. ‘It’s just an idle thought. Don’t let it trouble you.’ He reached inside his jacket and produced a gold cigarette case. ‘Do you smoke, Dr Kirsch?’
Sixteen
For a long time, Eugen Fischer’s theory played on Kirsch’s mind. He was sure Maria couldn’t have faked a coma, one so deep that Dr Brenner had thought her unlikely to survive. But that aside, the similarities with the Anderson case were undeniable: the amnesia, the suggestion of a near-drowning, the fact that no one had come forward to make an identification. There was even a passing resemblance between Anderson and his patient, as well as a similarity in age. And the press interest – reporters and photographers still lurked outside the clinic, waylaying staff as they went in and out – that too gave the affair the flavour of a performance, an entertainment for popular consumption. Fischer had sensed a degree of manipulation in the pattern of events and now Kirsch found he did too. Had his coming across Maria at the hospital really been an accident? The question nagged at him on his daily rounds, in the common room and at work in his office. Had he been chosen for his role in a plot of some kind? The more he thought about it, the more he felt in the presence of unseen forces, like a small planet drawn into the orbit of a massive but invisible star.
He watched Maria whenever he got the chance, between the long hours of therapy and the endless writing of reports, to see if anyone made contact. The clinic was notionally secure, patients wandering off being a constant danger, but it was not a prison. Staff and tradesmen came and went all day, as well as visitors. He watched her in the refectory, where she generally ate alone. He watched her in the library, where she went after lunch, turning the pages of the books, never settling on a page for more than a few seconds at a time. He watched her walking in the little triangle of grass and trees that passed for a garden, or sitting on the bench with the dappled winter sunlight playing over her skin. Once, from a window on the second floor, he saw a man walk over to her. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a brown felt hat pulled down low over his eyes. Kirsch climbed up on tiptoe to get a better look. He felt sure it was the reporter he had seen before, talking to Robert Eisner outside the kitchens. Or rather, he wasn’t sure, because the man’s face was hidden. In any case, if anything passed between him and Maria, it was over in a few seconds, the man tipping his hat and walking briskly away.
Kirsch asked the nurses to report such incidents and to keep back any correspondence for his attention. From then on, almost every morning, something turned up on his desk addressed to Maria, using one or other of her newspaper sobriquets: ‘the Potsdam Patient’, ‘the Lady of the Lake’ or ‘the Einstein Girl’. Some were love letters, apparently inspired by her picture in the press.
When I saw your face, I thought it was my beloved Susanne come back to me. You are so like her it is a miracle. I swear you could be her sister, though she never had a sister that I know of. She died of the influenza thirteen years ago and I have been alone since then.
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br /> One, written in an erratic hand, asked if her name was not Elsa Mühlhausen, a child snatched from her cradle at the age of six months back in 1895, and never seen again. Maria was too young to fit that bill. Another letter claimed to have met her during a seance. Kirsch thought of investigating the claim, until he realised that it was on the other side of the Great Divide that this encounter had supposedly taken place. Several letters, all anonymous, were obscene. One offered to pay Maria for performing a variety of sexual acts and enquired after the price of each one (in what appeared to be ascending order). Another contained a drawing of a young female, presumably Maria, copulating with a frock-coated man whose forehead was decorated with a Star of David. Others asked for a photograph and enclosed money. As far as Kirsch could tell, none of them were from an accomplice, or from anyone who knew Maria’s real identity, unless the accomplice was using some form of code. Not knowing what else to do with them, he put the letters in a box file and stowed them under his desk.
He visited Maria every day. Whenever he could, he brought postcards, which he propped up on the top of the wainscoting in her room; so that she was soon surrounded as she slept by the landmarks of Berlin. He arranged them according to location, with the bed as the notional centre of the city: the Tiergarten propped up against the window at one end of the room; the colonnaded façade of the National Gallery below the light switch at the other; in between, the Brandenburg Gate, the opera house, cathedrals and churches. He had an idea that if he could rekindle her sense of local geography, a sense of chronology and purpose might follow. He searched for postcards of Grenadierstrasse and the Tanguero as well, but none were to be found.
At first Maria received these additions to the decor with puzzlement or indifference; then later with flickers of amusement. Encouraged, Kirsch branched out from Berlin landmarks into other subjects: roses, ocean liners and steam engines, dogs, cats and horses. But the days went by and there was no improvement, at least as far as the amnesia was concerned. Maria tried to remember, to answer the questions he casually put to her (Had she ever been to sea? Had she ever owned a dog? What was her favourite breed?); but the harder she tried, the more confused and distressed she became. She would start to stammer, her hands twisting together in her lap. He would see the tears welling, the panic rising as she struggled for an answer, a fragment of concrete truth that would tell her she was real and alive. He would glimpse the swirling darkness beneath her feet and feel compelled to stop, to change the subject and bring her back to the present. He couldn’t banish the irrational conviction that she was slowly dying, just as surely as if from a fatal infection. Without a past, she struggled to believe in her own existence, that she was more than a flight of imagination, a ghost or a memory to be banished on waking.
The nurses reported that she still had nightmares. She talked in her sleep, they said, sometimes in a foreign tongue, sometimes in German. They couldn’t make sense of her words. Once Kirsch returned to the clinic at dead of night and sat listening outside Maria’s door. He heard her murmur in her sleep, get up and pace the room for several minutes before returning to bed. He never heard her screaming, although the nurses assured him that she did scream, especially in the hours before dawn. They wanted to sedate her, but he wouldn’t allow it. At least in her nightmares, he thought, it was possible she knew who she was.
Then one day she began to draw. She would sit barefoot at a window in the women’s recreation room, with her sketch-book propped up against her knees. The window looked out across the canal towards the arched roof of the Lehrter station. When the wind was in the west, the trains could be heard rattling over the points, their whistles echoing across the city, like the calls to prayer of some shrill, mechanised religion. She had acquired a heavy woollen shawl, which she held tight around her, her mouth and chin hidden in the folds. Perhaps because of that, or because she seemed so absorbed in her work, it was rare for other patients to disturb her.
She sketched most mornings. When she was done, she would close the sketch-book, put her shoes back on, tying the laces with neat bows, and return to her room. There, before anything else, she would put the sketch-book and the pencils in their place: on the top shelf of the battered closet in the corner.
What she drew were faces. They covered every page, faces drifting up into the light through clouds of shading. They were executed with some skill. Fine lines traced the contours of the flesh: faces gazing upward or captured in profile; old, careworn faces and youthful, expectant ones, yet all marked with the same hesitant, ephemeral quality, as if aware of their incompleteness, or unsure how they came to be trapped in their strange two-dimensional world.
Some faces occurred again and again: a child – female, he thought – with her head wrapped in a scarf, and two men. The first looked young enough to be a sweetheart or a brother. He had narrow eyes, a broad forehead and a beautiful, delicate mouth, the lips pushed together in an attitude of contemplation. She had drawn him several times, from different angles, the expression shifting, but always troubled. Kirsch wondered if this could be the stranger he had seen in the grounds.
‘What shall we call him?’ he asked her one day. ‘What name suits him?’
But she could not give him a name. ‘He’s a writer,’ was all she could say.
The other man was old. He had dark eyes, the same full lips and wild white hair, like an Old Testament prophet or a Renaissance image of God. She could not name him either.
As Kirsch looked through the sketch-book, it came to him that Maria drew nothing from life. He saw no patients, no staff. These were visions seen with the inner eye, a cast of remembered souls. The people who surrounded Maria at the clinic might as well not have been there. It was not what he had hoped for.
‘What about a self-portrait?’ he suggested.
‘Why?’
‘I’d like to have one.’
A self-portrait might help re-establish her sense of identity. It might reveal how she saw herself.
Maria shook her head. ‘There are no mirrors.’
It was true: mirrors were not allowed, for safety reasons. Over the years several had been smashed by patients disturbed by the sight of their own reflections, the shards of broken glass causing injury, or even being used as weapons. In the women’s shower room there were two mirrors left, but they were small and securely bolted to the wall.
‘What if I brought you one?’ Kirsch drew a square in the air, framing her face. ‘So big. I think I know where I can get one.’
‘If it’s what you want,’ Maria said, tugging absently at a lock of her hair.
‘It is,’ he said.
To prove it, he slipped out at lunchtime and bought a mirror in a gilded frame from a furniture dealer on the Kurfürstendamm.
* * *
There was no word from Dr Fischer in the week following their lunch. There was no confirmation of the proposed commission, which had seemed so pressing at the time, nor any further information about how Kirsch should go about it. He wondered if the anthropologist had meant what he said, and if he really had the necessary means at his disposal. He came to suspect that Fischer was just a lonely, if well-heeled, eccentric, a man who filled up his days with superficial enthusiasms, only to drop them when something more intriguing came along. Kirsch’s paper had resonated with some intellectual bugbear of his, and so he had sought out the author with all the impatience of someone with time on their hands and nothing useful to do with it. Already Kirsch regretted having talked so freely about his work and about Maria.
He had finally sat down to write his letter of resignation when Robert Eisner strolled in carrying the morning post. Kirsch still hadn’t told him about Bonhoeffer’s decision, hoping the director would in time relent, but a fortnight had gone by and there was still no sign of that happening.
‘A letter from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity,’ Eisner announced, reading the back of a stiff white envelope and slinging it into his in-tray.
/> The envelope had been sealed with wax. Kirsch put down his pen and picked up a knife.
‘You writing another paper, then?’ Eisner continued to hover beside his desk. ‘I wouldn’t have thought human heredity was your field.’
‘It’s not,’ Kirsch said, peering at the contents without taking them out. He looked at his watch. ‘I have to be going.’
He tucked the envelope away in his inside pocket and left the room.
Fischer didn’t stop at sending money. He enclosed a short list from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry of psychiatric hospitals and practitioners across Germany, Switzerland and Austria that he considered likely to be cooperative in the quest for diagnostic records. My institute is not concerned with individual cases, he wrote in his letter, so there is no reason they should worry unduly about breaches of confidentiality.
At the Adlon, Kirsch had been careful not to commit himself. Fischer, though, seemed to assume that he had done just that. He wanted Kirsch to begin approaching the institutions at once, setting out his goals and methods. I consider this work to be of the highest importance, and I feel sure it will result in a significant publication. I trust you will be able to set aside the necessary time from your regular duties.
For two days Kirsch did nothing. Dr Bonhoeffer had made clear his feelings about his first paper. For Kirsch to announce that he was about to undertake a larger study along the same lines would be tantamount to a slap in the face. All hope of rehabilitation would be lost. It was as if Kirsch was being asked to choose sides – or choose masters. But then, thanks to Heinrich Mehring and Nurse Honig, that decision had already been made for him.
On the third day, he banked the cheque.
Seventeen
Later that day Kirsch was struck down with a sudden bout of fever. It came upon him as he was riding the crowded tram from Alexanderplatz. He was hanging on to one of the overhead straps, feeling hot and tired inside his heavy overcoat, but otherwise normal, when the driver slammed on the brakes. Gasps went up. A small jam jar slipped from a woman’s shopping bag and rolled down the aisle. Then everyone steadied themselves and the tram moved off again. Kirsch bent down to pick up the jam jar which was still rolling towards him. It jumped neatly into his hand, showing him its label, which had a pair of cherries on it, red and shining, which struck him as strangely comic, given his name. He had a sensation of being watched from somewhere high above, toyed with and laughed at, as if by the ancient gods. The next thing he knew he was in darkness.
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