The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  The hospital was not unlike a French school, with a small courtyard dotted with some sad trees and a bench or two. There were a few cars parked there. One could tell at a second glance that this was a human scrapheap, not an institution where lives were fought for and heroic recoveries made. This was a place where lost causes were fed, clothed, maintained to no purpose but the satisfying of medical and ethical honour. Sure enough, a small brass plaque by the entrance confessed with Gallic candour that this was La Retraite St Martin de Tours, Hôpital des Incurables.

  The place was strangely quiet. As a blue-robed nurse-nun hybrid led him up several flights of stairs and along a long corridor, Edward entertained the fantasy that his sister might be the sole patient; helpless queen bee of a near-deserted hive. He had braced himself for moans, wracked coughing, the clatter of hysterically rejected bed pans, but found instead a silence broken only by the occasional mournful sneeze or murmur. He might have been in a scrupulously hygienic library. By way of a meagre concession to the season, a few Christmas decorations had been set up. A scrawny tree was hung with a few faded Christmas cards. Some irregularly cut paper stars had been pinned to patient’s doors in unconscious parody of backstage tradition.

  ‘Regardez, Madame. Il y’a quelqu’un,’ said the nurse, breezing into a small room and tidying the bed with a few practised twitches of her small hands. ‘Votre frère, je crois.’

  She left them alone. There were bars on the window. Edward instinctively walked over to touch their cold metal before turning to look back at the bed. His first reaction was of tremendous relief mixed with irritation. He had come all this way, suffered all this anxiety, for nothing!

  Miriam was slender and had long, brown hair, glossy and ringleted. The woman in the bed had a clumsy crop, and her hair was shot through with grey. She was also immensely fat, her eyes reduced to two black dimples in a complexion of slack, off-white dough, her mouth a girlish rosebud on an old face.

  ‘Er. Pardonnez-moi, Madame,’ he muttered. ‘Je ne veux pas vous déranger. On avait tort.’

  He threw her a desperate smile and turned to go, but his hand had scarcely touched the door handle than he became aware of a hoarse, effortful sound coming from the bed. He turned to find the gross, immobile face contorted by an attempt to speak. As her mouth worked and brows furrowed, the little, sunken eyes turned on his, beseeching as a dog’s. She lifted a great, pale arm, like something from a butcher’s window, to reach out, then let it fall on the blankets as if the inappropriately delicate hand at its end were too heavy to raise. He glimpsed the tattooed digits on her tender underarm skin. They had blurred slightly like writing splashed with tears. She might only have been asking for a bedpan but he turned back swiftly and took the seemingly proffered hand in his.

  ‘Ehh,’ she kept wheezing. ‘Ehh –. Ehh –.’

  Then he saw it. For a moment, when she frowned with concentration, there was a flash of Miriam’s pretty crossness, a small petulance no sooner recognised than smothered in fat.

  ‘Miriam?’ he asked. ‘Meine Liebe?’

  ‘Ehh –. Ehh –.’

  ‘Eli,’ he prompted her and a nervous laugh burst from him. ‘Eli. I must have changed a lot. I can hardly speak German any more, I’m so out of practice.’

  Now she sank back on her pillows with a relieved sigh, as though beaten to the solution of a brainteaser, and released the only words he would hear her say. It was a shock hearing his childhood name given its German pronunciation again.

  ‘Eli,’ she said then, with an unmistakably sarcastic turn to her lips, she added, ‘Bruderlein.’

  She gave a slight return of pressure on his hand and answered his stare for a moment with – perhaps he was being fanciful? – something like affection. Then it was as though the familiar face had slipped away from his reach, back beneath the surface of an impenetrably gloomy pool. Once again he was in a room with an unrecognisable, somnolent, grossly fat stranger. The difference was that now he knew his sister was trapped inside her somewhere. No. Not trapped. Hiding.

  He kissed the pale hand, noticing for the first time that the top joint of her ring finger had been cut off. Her rings had gone. She used to wear two. He tried to hide his disgust. He looked back at her face. It was hard now to believe she had spoken at all. Had he imagined it, unable to face the alternative?

  ‘What did they do?’ The doctor, a faded young man, who hid his bad teeth with an unsmiling manner, scornfully ground out his cigarette in a full ashtray. Smoke wreathed about the bronze Christ that hung, lifeless, on a crucifix on his cluttered desk. ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t want to know, Monsieur.’

  ‘But I just asked you. Je vous en prie.’

  ‘In her case we can only guess at the half of it. She spoke so little in the early days, and then only in German. I have never heard her speak. If you look beneath her hairline you’ll find evidence of … of surgery.’

  The steely word sounded doubly cold in French. Edward stared. Discomfited, the doctor picked at a dog-eared file before looking up again.

  ‘I’m quite sure she was a healthy woman. Had she been sick in any way, she would have been killed. All the sick ones were. In that camp they were conducting experiments and for the, er, results to be accurate they would have needed healthy specimens to start with. As a scientific control, you understand.’

  ‘But how did she end up here? Can she walk?’

  ‘With assistance. But her muscles have wasted badly since her arrival. I think she was found on a train.’ He glanced through the file for confirmation.

  ‘A train?’ Edward stammered.

  ‘Yes. In the Gare du Nord,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘Without a ticket. She was asleep in the goods van. She had clearly been living rough for some time. Her only identification was the tattoo and that’s by no means infallible since it is blurred.’

  ‘I saw. On her left arm.’

  ‘She may have tried to burn it off. Not all were tattooed. The system broke down towards the end, when they started to speed things up. She must have been in the earlier intake. The nuns took her in here. Her details were passed on to the authorities and I suppose the rest was done by your Jewish friends. She’s been here for a year now. No. It’s longer than that. Nearly two.’

  Edward thought of the hours, weeks, spent in that small room, pictured her again as the heavily sleeping, still centre of the hospital’s daily fussing.

  ‘Has she … Has she changed much since she’s been here?’

  ‘I’ve only been here for a year, so I can’t say precisely. She will walk, after a fashion, if led and supported, but with so many cases like hers, you know …’

  The doctor’s voice petered out and he shrugged. He held out a packet of cigarettes to Edward, who declined. Taking one himself, the doctor tapped it on the desk before setting it to his lips. The gesture, one could see, was habitual, like the way he shook the matchbox before opening it. Edward observed the small ritual, the shabby office, the man’s unwashed shirt collar and imagined the ignominious exam results, the cheese-paring, the disappointment turned crusty with use. He understood that the man was less a doctor than a kind of under-gardener, whose undemanding, tedious task was the tending of so many unregarded, vegetable lives.

  ‘So she’s no worse,’ Edward said.

  ‘And no better. She eats. She shits. She sleeps. Did she respond to you? Say anything? Try to move?’

  Edward saw now what he had to do.

  ‘No,’ he lied. ‘I held her hand. Talked to her. Said her name. Nothing. But it’s definitely her. Her name is Miriam Pfefferberg. At least, that’s her maiden name.’ The doctor frowned and Edward realised his rusty French was at fault. ‘I mean,’ he explained, ‘her name when she was a girl. It’s been eleven years. For all I know she was married in between.’ Exhaling smoke with a sigh, the doctor made a scribbled note in the file before him. Edward stood.

  ‘Thank you for all you’ve done,’ he said. The doctor shrugged again. He didn’t stand. ‘I’ve got some
business in town now,’ Edward told him. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. To see her.’

  The doctor did not see him out. The institution seemed to function on a skeleton staff. There were no nuns in sight, but Edward waited in the corridor, on the pretext of running himself a glass of water at a sink, until he was quite sure that he was unobserved. Then he slipped back to Miriam’s room and closed the door behind him.

  In his brief absence, his lie to the doctor had been made fact. The fat woman in the bed did not register his sudden reappearance. As he approached her narrow mattress, she continued to stare at the ceiling from her off-white pillows, with no hint of intelligence behind her stare. She continued to breathe slowly and evenly through her open mouth, giving no more sense of an urgent will to live than did the sleek inertia of a closed sea anemone or the remorseless, slow rippling of an upturned slug.

  Edward stood over her, daring her lifeless eyes to brighten again, turn on his, daring her to laugh from the tension of sustaining such a convincing charade. He thought of Sally and their new home. Could he take Miriam – this creature that had once been Miriam – back to The Roundel? Install her in a bedroom? She would have to have the little one with the bars on the window, of course. Could he devote himself to her unrewarding care?

  He touched the slack skin of her cheek, half expecting his fingers to leave an imprint, the texture was so waxy. How could she stare for so long and not blink? He imagined her left untended, her eyeballs, cheeks, hair, slowly coated in the silent dust of neglect. Someone cut her nails regularly at least, or they would be clattering claws by now. He took her left hand and turned it to read the blurred figures with which the skin on her arm was punctured. She might have been living like a vagabond when the nuns took her in but, after years of inactivity and regular washing, her palms were soft and uncalloused as a duchess’s. The hair was a shock. Miriam had always worn it pulled back into a long plait or coiled on her head. Not content with cropping it, the nuns had brushed it into a kind of Struwwelpeter mop about her scalp making a fat face fatter. But so many years had passed since he had last seen her that it was possible she had changed her style herself. They had let her eyebrows grow as bushy as Rosa Holzer’s, so that they threatened to meet in the middle, and no-one had bothered to pluck the hairs from the little discoloration above her lip. In effect, the nuns had let her grow more like a nun.

  As he began to slide the pillow out from under her head, he promised himself he would stop at the least sign of struggle. He held her head for a moment to prevent it falling back with a jolt, and found her hair dry and brittle beneath his grasp. Then, standing so that he was invisible from the little window in the door, he lowered the pillow over her unseeing eyes. He held it fast for what seemed like five minutes, emptying his mind, by a huge effort of will, of everything but the need to listen for footsteps outside. She did not flinch. She made no sound. Influenced by images of Othello and the Princes in the Tower, Edward had always imagined smothering as a violent, operatic act, requiring strength and a fearful resolution. In the event, her body was so still that the action felt peculiarly redundant, as though she had been dead long before he began.

  Sure he had held it there long enough, he began to lift the pillow off her, then was startled at a sudden movement in one of her hands. He gasped, but before he could uncover her face again, her hand had swept up and tugged the pillow down against it, urging him to continue. Her fingers spread out like a murderous spider, squeezing the down and linen so hard that a crude outline of her profile became visible. With a groan that must certainly have been audible outside, he lunged back onto the pillow with all his body’s weight, one hand on either side of her face. Tears coursed down his cheeks, dripping onto the bed and running ticklishly beneath his shirt collar. Or were they drops of sweat? He looked up at the wall as he continued to press downwards, and saw the crucifix over the headboard. From nowhere a childish tune came into his head, a Schubert tune, from a sugared childhood:

  Sah ein Knàb ein Roslein stehn, Roslein auf der Heiden,

  War so jung und morgen shon,

  Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn …

  It circled so persistently and with such clarity that afterwards he would never be able to decide if he had been singing it aloud or merely mouthing the maddening thing in his mind. All he knew was that when he reached the end, he could safely take the pillow from her face.

  Roslein Roslein Roslein rot.

  The melody was childishly sure of itself, the words, despite dark hints at a violation, unruffled as a Sunday picnic in June.

  Roslein auf der Heiden.

  It was done. He looked down and saw that her hand had fallen away to her side. The deed was his alone now. As he began to lift the pillow to put it back behind her head, there were sudden footsteps in the corridor and the rattle of a trolley. Thoughtlessly, Edward dived under the bed, knocking his brow painfully on the metal bedframe. He crouched as close to the wall as he could. He found he was still clutching the pillow but it was too late to return it to the bed. Instead, he tossed it quickly from him to make it look as though it had merely tumbled from the mattress.

  The door handle rattled, the door opened and two stout ankles appeared, couched in unexpectedly florid shoes. An orderly, therefore, not a nun.

  ‘Chérie? Tu veux de la soupe, chérie?’

  Two more feet came in. Men’s feet.

  ‘Elle dort,’ said the man roughly. ‘On la laisse. En tout cas, la grosse n’en a besoin. Viens, alors. Moi, j’ai faim.’

  Edward winced at the realisation that one of them might stoop to pick up the pillow and find him cowering there like a wicked child. But they turned and left the room, the woman already continuing some story about Jacquot et sa sale connasse de mère. He waited, acutely aware of his own painfully accelerated breathing, then crawled out and stood. He dared to turn back to the bed. It was true. She might have been asleep. In her very fatness she seemed healthy and comfortable, haunted as he still was by newsreel footage of those the Nazis had reduced to starveling revenants.

  Leaving the hospital without being seen was surprisingly simple. He waited until the corridor was clear, made for the staircase and left the building. Except for the occasional shout or laugh from a patient, the place could have been deserted, the orderlies all at lunch, the nuns all at prayer. No bells rang. No-one ran after him.

  He boarded the train unhindered. On the way back into the city, passengers met his eye and he gazed straight back at them. He felt no guilt, so firmly was he convinced that what he had done was right. The woman in the bed, the stranger, presented such a pathetic change from the Miriam he loved, that it might, ironically, have felt like murder, motiveless murder. But it did not. In place of guilt, he felt sorrow, a distant rumble of it like far-off thunder. He had done his mourning for her long ago, in the unbearable ache of her unexplained absence, as the welter of unspeakable possibilities became crudely probable with the progression of the war. Now his feelings were out of synchrony with events.

  Finding her carcase in the hospital bed, he had felt a staggering wave of recognition, not of her face but of her fate; the crazy-paving logic of the war-tossed.

  ‘Of course! This is what they would have done to her. This is where she would have ended up.’

  Why Paris? Had she known where she was going or merely boarded train after train, rattling around Europe like some large forgotten parcel, living off God knows what, until someone thought to apprehend her? Or had she, perhaps, felt some dim, glamorous prompting in what remained of her brain? She had been touched, perhaps, by a dusty memory of obedient childhood hours spent walking the Louvre, disobediently returning the bold, enquiring stares of Frenchmen behind her mother’s back, itching to slip away from the dead weight of archaeology to go window-shopping for elegant fripperies in the Faubourg St Honoré?

  Edward sought to fill the remainder of the day with harmless tourism. He found a cheap hotel overlooking the Donjon and took a long, scalding bath. In a café nearby, he
ate a late lunch afloat on three tall glasses of strong beer. Fortified, he went shopping for Sally. She cherished notions about the unequalled luxury of French underwear – notions doubtless caught from her mother and too many romantic films. Driven away from specialist lingerie shops by their oppressive femininity and requirement of a more sophisticated French vocabulary, he braved the bewildering variety on display in a department store. A motherly creature with a silver crucifix hung against her black blouse helped him choose a selection of slippery articles in ivory and black. She summoned a second, younger assistant, whom he confirmed was roughly Sally’s size, and held the things against her for him to admire.

  Clutching his purchases, he drifted into a dark church to draw breath but found it noisy with the work of stonemasons repairing the chancel. Back on the streets he spent an hour trying to find a synagogue, but the few people he asked shrugged, ignored his limping French altogether or gave him a hostile stare.

  On an impulse he bought himself a cheap ticket to a performance that evening of Phèdre. He went in tribute to Miriam, who had loved Racine. The scenery was shoddy, the costumes unconvincing and the wigs had seen better days. It was a shock to discover that he had grown so used to the relaxed, English style of performance that the high French manner now seemed absurdly stiff and unnatural. Somewhere, unnoticed, however, the spell of the old words worked. The solemnity of the language in the face of turbulent emotions and barely speakable revelations created a small, still space he found soothing. The grandeur and decorum were a firm shoulder on which he could lean and feel safe.

  The following morning, he was meticulous as any cold-blooded murderer in his return to the hospital. He laid no suspicious trail by checking out of his hotel, but left his bag unpacked and paid for another night he had no intention of spending there. He bought flowers. Wasteful flowers for the corpse. He ate a pastry on the train – a coffee religieuse. Arriving at the hospital he made straight for Miriam’s room but was headed off by a nun who led him gently to the same, chain-smoking doctor.