Within twenty-four hours the first files arrived from Kirsch’s colleagues. Some were delivered in person; others were stuffed into his pigeon-hole outside the common room, with notes attached. These are the cases from the past three years. I shall go into the remaining cases directly. By the end of the second day they made a pile two feet high. In the event, none of his colleagues protested. None of them asked for a more complete explanation, or even when they could expect their files back. The data flowed unquestioned and unconstrained. Kirsch found further notes inside the files, clipped or pinned to the reports, volunteering additional information: On several occasions the nursing staff have found Herr Göschel with alcohol. Furthermore, I can report that his father has the complexion of a man who drinks. Others were even more conscientious: This patient’s intellect is technically superior to that of an idiot. However, I have it on good authority that at least one of the siblings is mongoloid.
By the end of the week, Kirsch had all the files he needed to compile a comprehensive list. He doubted if anything like it had existed before. Matched to the public records of births and marriages, it might be possible not only to follow the progress of past mental illness, but to predict where mental illness would occur in the future. It would be tempting to intervene. Prevention, after all, was better than cure, especially since cures were not available. If psychiatric institutions across the country were as thorough, congenital insanity might one day be eradicated altogether, like the dodo or the bears that had once roamed the great German forests.
That evening after supper Kirsch sat alone in his office, waiting for the clinic to quieten down. The weather did not help. A strong gusting wind rattled the windows and shrieked over the roofs. Rain fell in short, intense bursts. Storms always unsettled the patients. Many found them terrifying and had to be sedated. With others the wildness of the elements unleashed something wild inside them. They shrieked and babbled and danced. The storm was a champion, a transient deity at whose feet they worshipped. Occasionally bad weather provoked violence or self-mutilation. Kirsch was called to several disturbances on the men’s wing and ordered that the lights be kept on for an extra hour.
Around midnight the dormitories at last fell silent. Making as little noise as possible, Kirsch went down to the kitchens and fetched a trolley. He loaded it with files and dragged it down the back stairs into the basement. By the dim electric light he set about stoking the boiler, piling coal into the furnace with a rusty shovel. It was dirty work. For a long time the coal seemed reluctant to burn, producing only black smoke that billowed in his face and left sooty smudges on his spectacles. It took another nine journeys to the top of the building to collect the old files. He could not take too many at once. The trolley would become heavy and difficult to manoeuvre, its iron wheels thumping down on the stairs. The noise echoed through the building like artillery. It was another exhausting hour before he was ready to start.
His own files went first. In the move from his old office they had become disordered. He had found some of Mariya’s sketches mixed up with correspondence from Eugen Fischer. Other case notes had been split up and scattered. But it didn’t matter. He was going to burn them all. To have been a patient at the Charité, regardless of the diagnosis, or how brief the stay, was now something to be hidden; and this was the best way to hide it. His research went too, including the records he had gathered and analysed for his paper in the Annals of Psychiatric Medicine.
‘I expect you don’t approve,’ he said aloud to the shadow flickering on the wall behind him. But the shadow did not answer, although from the way it moved across the sooty brickwork, he had the impression it was shaking its head.
When the evidence of his work in psychiatry had been reduced to a heap of embers, Kirsch threw on the other records, file by file, bundle by bundle. The old papers, in particular, were slow to burn. They hissed and popped like cooking flesh. The furnace choked on the ashes so that Kirsch had continually to rake them over to keep it from going out. He worked on into the night, until the sweat ran in streaks down his face. The last thing to go into the flames was his white coat. He would not be needing it any more. He had already written the letter of resignation. It was lying in Dr Bonhoeffer’s pigeon-hole, waiting for his arrival in the morning.
He cleaned up in the washroom as best he could and then made his way into the women’s wing. One of the duty nurses could be heard snoring at the end of the corridor. The other was nowhere to be seen. Kirsch went to Mariya’s room, knocked gently and let himself in.
Mariya was sitting at the end of her bed with the lights off, staring out at the night. She had her boots on and Max’s old overcoat draped across her shoulders. Her sketch-book sat in her lap.
‘Are you ready?’ he said.
They went out through the kitchens. It was nearly five o’clock, dawn a hint of blue in the furrows of distant clouds. A taxi was waiting. They rode east in silence through the empty rain-washed streets. Kirsch felt hollow and strangely elated, the two feelings separate yet proportionate, like object and reflection. For the first time in years, he was no longer a psychiatrist, no longer a man of medicine; and Mariya was no longer his patient.
She sat beside him, her face silhouetted against the pulse of passing street lights. Again it struck him how little he knew about her. Every answer prompted more questions; and no matter how many questions he answered, the core of her, the essence, remained beyond his reach. In that elusiveness there was a kind of power. He saw now how he had been seduced by it, drawn to explore the limits of his understanding, to behold the infinity of what he could never know. If there had been no Einstein girl, what would have become of him? It was a question he had asked himself often. But still he had no answer.
They let themselves into Herr Mettler’s and went up the stairs without turning on the lights. Above them, water was coming in through a hole in the roof, the drips landing in a metal bucket on the second-floor landing. The room smelled of damp. It had been unoccupied and unheated for too long. Kirsch got down on his knees and tried to light the fire. Scraps of old newspaper lay under the coals, but, like the old Charité files, they did not catch easily.
‘We’ll soon get the place warmed up,’ he said, striking a third match.
Mariya sat down on the bed, looking around the room at the drab furnishings and the possessions – the doll with its china face, the hairbrush and hand mirror, the shoes behind the door – that were supposedly hers. In a moment her gaze would come to rest on the spot where she and Kirsch had held each other and kissed, the spot by the window where the floor was bare and the boards creaked. It took an effort of will for Kirsch to keep his back to it, not to refresh the memory of that moment with a few incidental details: the pattern of the curtains, the height of the ceiling, the fittings on the window. For a few minutes it had felt like a starting point, a second chance against all the odds. Now the shared memory of that moment weighed down on them, rebuking them for their unrealistic dreams.
In the fireplace a tongue of flame drifted over the surface of the coal. A minute ago Kirsch was cold; now his skin was burning.
Mariya tucked her hands under her thighs. ‘Am I done with the clinic now? Am I ever going back?’
‘No. You mustn’t go back there, not ever. It might seem like home to you now, but it isn’t safe any more. This country isn’t safe.’
In a few days’ time she would have a new passport and an address. Kirsch had already explained the situation to the Yugoslav embassy. They had agreed to look up Mariya’s records in Belgrade and inform him of the essentials by return. He would give her enough money to go home, wherever home was. There she would find neighbours, colleagues, friends. They would tell her what she needed to know.
‘The important thing is that you leave,’ Kirsch said. ‘The sooner the better.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ve resigned.’ Kirsch stood up. ‘I wasn’t doing any good there.’
‘But what will you do?’
&
nbsp; Kirsch had to brace himself against the mantelpiece. The dizzy attacks didn’t usually come on until the middle of the day. He had learned to anticipate them, to avoid being where his debilitation might be observed. But this time he had been caught off guard. ‘I may set up in private practice somewhere.’ He forced a smile. ‘It’s what old army doctors do.’
‘Somewhere? Not here?’
‘I’m finished with Berlin too.’
He wished he could explain: about the ministry’s list, about the paper he had written in the Annals of Psychiatric Medicine, about his brother Max and the war memorial; most importantly, about Dr Schad and the test for neurosyphilis that had proven positive. He was tempted to share it all, if only so that she would understand why he could not go with her. Why, in whatever life awaited her, there could be no place for him. But another part of him was wary of burdening Mariya with too much understanding. Her feelings for him had surely faded by now. With luck she would come to think of him as a cold, clinical man so fixated on the functions and operations of the mind that he had lost the capacity to feel. It was better that way, simpler, cleaner.
‘It’s about time I had a change of scene,’ Kirsch said. ‘Twelve years is too long in one place.’ He patted his jacket and fished inside it for his wallet. His head was starting to swim. It was all the smoke and the night without sleep. ‘Here’s some money to tide you over. The shops open in a couple of hours. Try Grenadierstrasse. You’ll find everything you need there. Herr Mettler can direct you.’
He held out the notes. It felt awkward, as if there were something sordid about it. ‘I’d better go.’ He put the money on the chest of drawers. ‘I’ll be back as soon as your passport arrives.’
It was a struggle to walk normally, to keep his head upright. By the time he reached the door, his vision was so cloudy he could not find the handle. He heard Mariya’s voice behind him, but for once he could not grasp the meaning of her words.
He just had to find the handle and he would be out in the hall. Out of sight, out of mind. He didn’t want her to see him staggering like a drunk.
‘Get some rest,’ he said. His jaw and his tongue were heavy too. ‘For the journey. It’ll be a long journey.’
He was in darkness now, a churning granular mist of tiny squares and triangles, like schoolbook doodles. He would be able to keep his feet if the mist cleared just for a moment, if someone brought some light. But then he was falling. Instinctively, he raised his arms to protect himself, but his hands smacked against iron bars. A bedstead. He hung on to it but the bedstead was falling too. He looked down and saw water flowing beneath him: a wide black river, tiny points of light moving on the glassy surface. He wasn’t sure if he screamed out loud or only in his mind.
Someone took him by the wrists and pulled him up onto the jetty. It was Eduard Einstein. Perhaps it’s a quantum story. That was when Kirsch knew he was in a dream.
As he lay on the ground, breathing hard, Heinrich Mehring took out a pocket handkerchief and carefully dusted his hands. The handkerchief came away blackened with ash.
‘Your case, Dr Einstein,’ he said and turned away. In the distance a woman was crying.
Kirsch learned afterwards that the fever lasted three days. It came and went, changing in intensity and effect. His waking hours were fragmentary and confused, his dreams often lucid. Memories became unreliable, subject to constant revision. People he thought were dead appeared at his bedside, calmly explaining the reason for his mistake. The living he saw laid to rest and buried beneath wooden crosses or granite headstones that bore a host of names. Through sweats and chills and searing headaches, he fought to maintain an idea of place and time, an order of concrete things that he could believe in, a catalogue of the indisputably real. He clung to his sense of the external world and his place in it, gripped with the fear that to let go would meaning losing them for ever.
Mariya cared for him. If nothing else, he was sure of that. Almost always when he woke she was there, sitting by the bed, bringing him food on a tray or lying asleep on the floor with a blanket over her. More than once he opened his eyes to find himself back at Frau Schirmann’s with his books and papers around him, but he learned to distrust those visions, not least because of the people who were often in the room with him, although seemingly oblivious to his presence. One of them was Eduard Einstein. He rummaged through Kirsch’s papers, frantically searching for the letter he had stolen from his mother. Members of Kirsch’s family also appeared, even his elder sister Frieda, whom he had never before seen in Berlin. They sat in the shadowy corners of the room, his father behind a newspaper, like mourners at a graveside vigil.
In a dream he asked his brother Max to fetch Colonel Schad. They were back at the clinic, down in the basement with Mehring’s equipment all around them. But some time later Colonel Schad actually appeared. He told Mariya to open the window, because the room was too hot, his voice reverberating, as if in a brick bunker. Kirsch wanted to tell him that there were no windows. They were in the basement. Then he felt the room grow cooler and found he was back at Herr Mettler’s again.
‘No more than twenty-three degrees. And not too many blankets.’ It was definitely Schad’s voice: brisk but mellow. ‘Plenty of fluids – clear broth is excellent – and aspirin twice a day to thin the blood. I shall return in two days. Oh, and take this for his mouth. One application every few hours.’
An instant later Schad was gone – another dream, Kirsch assumed. Or a hallucination. It was hard to tell the difference. But then Mariya was beside him, gently dabbing his cracked lips with petroleum jelly. Her fingertips were cool – her touch, he recalled, was always cool – and he could feel her breath on his cheek. He was sure both sensations were real, but he was afraid to turn and look at her, in case she too disappeared.
Max appeared in a dream, sitting on the end of his bed, leafing through his copy of the Einstein book. Mariya had brought it with her from the clinic.
‘I don’t think she read it,’ Kirsch said.
Max did not look up. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t need to. What were you thinking?’
Kirsch wanted to ask what he meant, but Max was already gone, taking the book with him.
The last time he saw Mariya was at least a day later. She was standing by the window. Moisture clouded the glass and brought a sharp chill to the air. The old travelling trunk had been dragged into the middle of the room. The lid was open.
‘Mariya?’
His voice came out as a croak. Mariya did not look up. She was peeping round the curtains at the street below.
He cleared his throat. ‘What’s the matter?’
She came over to the bed. A bowl of soup lay cooling on the table. ‘Nothing. You must eat.’
‘What were you looking at?’
She picked up the bowl and a spoon. ‘Herr Mettler says it’s just another newspaperman.’
‘A newspaperman? What did he look like?’
‘It’s nothing.’
She refused to discuss it further until he had finished the bowl. After that he needed to empty his bladder; and after that he needed to sleep again.
‘I’m going out for a while,’ Mariya said, as she pulled the covers over him. ‘To get some things. I won’t be long.’
As far as Kirsch could tell, she never came back.
Forty-five
Colonel Schad returned to Wörtherstrasse just as he had promised. By that time Mariya had been gone for hours. He couldn’t shed any light on her whereabouts.
‘Perhaps she went in search of new lodgings. Got tired of sleeping on the floor, I expect.’
He was listening to Kirsch’s lungs with a stethoscope. He seemed satisfied that he was over the worst, at least for the time being.
‘She would have told me,’ Kirsch said. He swung his legs off the bed. ‘I must find her.’
Schad put a restraining hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re not going anywhere, Dr Kirsch. In your weakened state a chill could be fatal.�
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‘Something’s happened. She may have got lost or …’
Kirsch tried to get up. He felt clear-headed but hollow, like a papier-mâché doll. Where were his clothes, his shoes?
‘Martin.’ Schad was looking at him, a look of forbearance on his face. ‘She knows what you have. The disease. I don’t know how. I didn’t tell her. Perhaps she guessed. But you can’t be surprised if she feels a little distance would be …’ He sighed. ‘I did warn you. Even loved ones assume the worst.’
Kirsch caught his reflection in the wardrobe door. With his shirt open, the marks on his body were plainly visible. They had spread across his chest, joining up into long curved lines like the claws of a giant crab.
‘I think I told her,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t meant to.’
Schad grunted and reapplied the stethoscope. ‘Well, that’s very commendable.’
It was obvious to Kirsch what Schad thought: that Mariya had been his mistress. But being wrong about that didn’t make him wrong about everything.
‘These fevers may come and go,’ he was saying. ‘It’s to be expected. Your system is fighting the infection. This time it won, I’d say.’
Kirsch thanked him and asked for a bill, but Schad wouldn’t hear of taking payment. He was happy to oblige for old times’ sake.
‘Besides, it’s the young lady you should thank,’ he said. ‘She’s quite the little nurse. You were in very good hands there. No doubt about it.’
As soon as Kirsch could stand, he went looking for her. He went from rooming house to rooming house, all through the eastern districts. There was no sign of her. In the days that followed he tried the hospitals, the clinics, the asylums. Many people had heard of the Einstein girl; nobody had seen her. He made enquiries at police headquarters, even looked at snapshots of unidentified females found dead around the city. He trailed from dive to dive around Alexanderplatz and along the Kurfürstendamm, armed with his photograph from Die Berliner Woche. As a last resort, he tried to recruit the Berlin press. They had once been fascinated by the story. Here at last was a new twist. But the editors he talked to were not interested in reporting Mariya’s disappearance, or disappearances in general. ‘These days we have more important matters to focus on,’ one told him. ‘We are privileged to live in historic times.’
The Einstein Girl Page 32