In the following days and weeks I was subjected to an endless number of baths of varying temperature, duration and method. I had water dribbled over me gently, like rain; I was wrapped in wet towels, like a package of meat to be transported; I was sprayed with a hose like a horse and rubbed dry by one of the battalion of silent nurses who populated the hospital corridors. The baths must have elicited from me some kind of physiological response, because it was they alone that stood out from the swirling mass of days in the hospital.
In the bath I could remember the things that had been nagging at me. I would rise up out of the water, like a drowning swimmer, shouting, waving my arms, gasping for breath. Words came to me and I called for help, the word ‘help’ like the alarm cry of a bird dashed against the hard white tiles. I would call other words, my own name, that important word, again and again as though another self would appear and spirit me away from that place.
Instead, the only people who came were the two orderlies, twinned in their muscular silence. They would hold on to my slippery arms, ignoring my wet skin and hair, which left damp patches on the fronts of their uniforms. Their dry, flat palms would push expertly onto my mouth, neatly holding my jaw together, covering my nose and making it difficult to breathe until the nurse arrived with her little cup. There seemed an endless supply of this medicine: no matter how many times I spat it out, sprayed it into the faces of the men, of the nurse, there came always another cup. Cup followed cup like an undefeatable army; it was useless to fight. I would allow the medicine into my mouth and from there it would slip inch by inch down my throat and everything would unravel again and I would slide down once more into that swirling, elastic world.
I began to learn that, when I surfaced, I must sit quietly in the bath and not draw attention to myself in any way. I learned to come up slowly, to creep into my own body and peer out through my eyes like a burglar creeping into a darkened house. I would look around the room moving my eyes only, and as I looked the words would begin to reattach themselves to the world. I wanted to shout with joy the moment when I had sat and looked, with my eyes turned down towards the bathwater, at the ten pink excrescences that were partly in, partly out of the water, and I discovered that I could move them at will, and their name came to me. Fingers. I would whisper the word to myself when I wanted to shout it: fingers. My fingers. I would move my lips a millimetre, feeling the way the muscles moved to shape the word and beaming with joy.
Then my eyes would move stealthily to the next object in the room and I would wait for the word to fly at me. I held all the words together in my head, shielding them, but as they gathered it became more and more difficult to keep them hidden silently within me. Eventually the name of some object in the room, or an emotion I was feeling, would come shouted out of my mouth.
I began to surface at other times too: in my bed, or walking across the lawns with the two silent orderlies. Slowly, I also became aware again of the hospital and my life before it. Anja, in particular, came back to me. I began to dream of her as I slept.
My awareness expanded to include the other people of the hospital; I began to recognise the nurses, the orderlies and Professor Pick. One day I woke to hear an echo of my breathing in the room and I realised that there was someone in one of the other beds. I hoisted myself up and saw that it was an old man with a large beard that covered the lower half of his face. The beard would have been white, but it lay on top of the bedclothes, whose bleached industrial whiteness turned the hair an unpleasant shade of yellow. We looked at each other silently for a long time.
Somehow, in that place, the usual daily social conventions lost their meaning, or, in any case, they seemed as unfamiliar and strange to me as the customs of a foreign culture. The words good morning materialised in my mind but seemed somehow wrong. I lay there and the stranger and I blinked at each other across the room. Eventually I realised that I could get out of bed and shake hands with him by way of greeting. As I got out of my bed, he did the same, and we met in the middle of the room, facing each other between the rows of empty beds.
I put out my hand, and so did the man. He was very tall and his body seemed to fit into his robe differently from mine: the fabric fell in sculptural folds from his wide shoulders like Roman drapery, and this, together with his beard, gave him the look of some prophet or ancient philosopher.
‘Promoli,’ he said to me, like a pronouncement. His voice was sonorous and the word had exactly the same intonation as the opening chords of the final movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16: the difficult decision. My head unexpectedly filled with this tune as our clasped hands pumped up and down through the air. Promoli. This was a word I had not heard before. Its syllables rolled through my head like a wave. I liked the word immediately; its shape and rocking-horse rhythm.
‘Promoli,’ I repeated, tasting the word, careful to use the same intonation that the man had used.
‘Promoli,’ he said again, but this time it was the beginning of a question: Beethoven’s ‘must it be?’ He frowned at me, waiting for an answer. His fingers let go of mine and drifted up to land on his chest.
I panicked as I felt the world slide away again from the language that anchors it and began to sweat as though I were standing before a professor in an oral examination. The man towered over me. Promoli, I thought to myself. Promoli. What is the reply? I stared at the man’s massive fingers where they brushed against his robe, level with my eyes. They were like carved objects, hewn from stone. Promoli. What was the meaning? I tried to attach it to a thing in the world, but it just hung like a loose string.
I had been silent too long and I said again, desperately, ‘Promoli,’ though I knew it was the wrong answer. My head dropped in shame and I looked down at my bare feet. I caught at the name for my two feet with relief and began to run through as many words for things as I could in order to anchor myself. I closed my eyes.
‘My friend,’ the man’s voice rumbled at me, ‘Promoli is my name. Your name is not that. At least, I have never yet met another Promoli, and I have lived a long time. Your name is …’
I still had my eyes closed and could feel the air shift as he stepped past me towards my bed to peer at the little white card. I held my breath as I waited for him to tell me my name, like waiting for a doctor’s diagnosis.
‘Brod,’ came his voice, through the dark of my lowered lids.
The word was familiar to me, but carried with it an unpleasant, musty odour of discomfort, of lack. I disliked its squareness, the way that the sound plopped from the lips straight to the floor, like a tasteless mouthful of food; chewed at slightly and then rejected. Another word scuttled about behind a screen in my mind; another, better name. I could not quite catch hold of it. It was a sharp one, mysterious, one that could take flight with clicks in the back of the throat.
And besides, brod: bread. Had I heard him correctly? I wanted to go and look at the card myself, but I was too ashamed. To be named after a food, the blandest, most basic food. It seemed an insult.
‘Brod,’ I said, watching him through my eyelashes, testing to see if it was right.
‘A good name.’ His face had a kindly expression and he nodded.
‘But Promoli, this is your name only, and not the name for any other thing in the world?’
‘I am the only Promoli.’
‘But brod. To eat?’ I mimed eating, moving my fingers to my lips, in case he did not understand. The other name came to me in a rush at that moment, it was the name too of a thing; of the jackdaw, kavka, Kafka. The k’s clicked like closing beaks, I saw it printed on a white page, the word took flight and became a bird in the tree outside, its whirring call. Kafka. A thief of a bird.
Brod and kavka are names for more than one thing in the world. My thoughts moved slowly, feeling their way. And I; I am a thing in the world connected to more than one name. There was no connection between bread and jackdaws except myself and some ink marks made on paper. I felt dizzy and sat on the edge of the nearest b
ed.
‘Yes, of course. Forgive me: Brod. I have been in this room for such a long time alone.’
Brod. Kafka. I let Kafka fly away. I offered Promoli my hand again, and he took it in both of his and held it for a long time.
__________________
* The following sections are written in a smaller notebook, which has some water damage, but the text is still legible.
26.
PROMOLI BECAME MY GUIDE IN THE HOSPITAL. HE SEEMED TO know and be liked by everyone. He showed me around and introduced me everywhere, to people I had seen a hundred times: the nurses; the silent guards whose stony faces Promoli transformed as if by magic into smiling ones; and also to other patients in rooms behind that row of closed doors in the corridor.
Promoli was on close terms with Professor Pick and claimed to be his assistant, which I did not quite believe. Yet from time to time I would see him from the long windows walking out on the lawns with Pick, their heads bent together in conversation. And at other times I saw him standing with the little group of medical students as they discussed something with Pick. It seemed inconceivable that he could be doing these things and at the same time be here in the ward with me, wearing a robe and being ordered about by the nurses.
I started to become suspicious of Promoli, worried that he was a spy of Pick’s, sent to observe the patients when Pick himself was not in the ward and then report back to him. What else would they be discussing on their rambles over the grounds? But I felt guilty about these suspicious thoughts; despite the grain of mistrust, I had immediately felt a strong sense of kinship with Promoli. Nevertheless, I observed Promoli closely for signs of illness, but could never discern any. He was always happy and energetic and never lay all day silent in the bed, brooding, as I still sometimes did.
What was he doing here in the hospital if he was not ill? I considered challenging him about it, and intended to do so many times, but at the last moment my resolve always failed me; it seemed rude and ungrateful. I had learned that the code of politeness of that place dictated that prying into the illnesses of others was taboo, and it was a topic only discussed when first raised by the sufferer himself.
There was a vast array of illness to be found in the hospital, which seemed to be populated only by men. There were those who were mute and watchful, who had retreated behind their eyes and hid themselves from you, deep in their bodies. There was a man known as The Owl, whose every second word was a hoot. Other men laughed and sang, or there were those who gave off an electrical charge of violence. There were also among the patients several holy men, who tolerated each other benevolently in their various holinesses, even those who were, or claimed to be, the same man.
There was a man who believed himself to be Saint Methodius, and was called this by other patients. When I first met him, he bowed down before me and insisted on walking backwards around me, facing me all the time as though I were a pagan king. Promoli explained to me that Methodius could see into the future and was living out his two years of imprisonment in Ellwangen, waiting for the arrival of the bishop whom he knew was coming to free him under orders of the pope.
Methodius was convinced that I was the bishop, and it took me a long time to prove to his satisfaction that I was not. I later saw him doing the same with each new arrival at the hospital and I tried to explain to him that the bishop, when he came, would not be dressed like we patients; surely he would be instantly recognisable in his robes.
‘Well of course the bishop must travel in disguise, to protect himself from his enemies,’ Methodius said. He then pulled me aside and whispered, ‘Just like I am in disguise here as a patient in a madhouse. How did you recognise me?’
One night, a commotion in the ward filtered through the heavy veil of my sleep and became absorbed into my dreams. When I woke in the morning, I looked over and saw that Promoli’s bed was empty. The bedclothes were stripped away and the mattress and pillows were folded and stacked neatly. The name-card was gone from the little holder on the bedframe. I asked the nurses about it, and the patients in the other wards, but no one could tell me. Some of the patients told me, with grisly relish, tales about experiments or operations done on the patients. Methodius gave dark hints about certain orders given by the pope, to which only he was privy. I decided to wait for Pick’s next visit and ask him about it, but days passed and he never appeared.
Without Promoli I was alone a lot more during the days; alone with my thoughts. The last few months before I had been admitted were a confusing mass of time for me. There were many things from those months that were lost from my memory, and I knew that something dark was buried there, something that caused a wild, guilty grief to rise up in my breast. I tried not to think too much about it—it was too painful—but at night-time this half-memory would appear to me unbidden, but only for a moment, like a bolt of lightning, long enough to illuminate the sleek, dark shape of the thing, but too short for me to grasp at the details.
I also had other worries. I often thought that I might have fabricated Anja, that she had sprung into the world from a fragment of myself, a form of parthenogenesis, and that she was an illusion only I could see. I feared that when I returned home I would find no trace of her. On my walks I began to favour the slope that looked out towards Prague and I would prowl along it for hours, my gaze trained on the smudged mass of the distant city. My eyes searched for landmarks that would allow me to orient myself towards the position of Anja’s house. This was an easier task in the evening, when the lamps were lit and winked out at me, and then I would tell myself that one particularly bright or friendly-looking pinpoint of light was coming from her house, from her room, or the lamp in the street outside her window. I knew that this was a fairy tale I told myself, but it comforted me all the same.
27.
I WAS STILL REQUIRED TO FOLLOW A BATHING REGIMEN, AND ONE day I was interrupted during a bath by an orderly.
‘Hurry up and get dressed,’ he said. ‘You have a visitor.’ He reached down to pull out the plug from the bath while I still sat there. ‘Move,’ he said.
The water began to shriek down the drain. I clambered out of the bath and hurriedly dried and dressed. It was a strange thing for the bathing schedule to be disrupted. This had never happened before. I felt nervous. I had had visitors before of course—my mother, Sophie and Kurt—but they were required to keep to the strict visiting hours of Sunday afternoons, between two and five. This was a Wednesday morning. It could only be bad news, I decided: a death in the family, maybe, or a serious illness. Perhaps my mother. The half-remembered sinister memory that haunted me at night appeared again, and I felt the chill of fear, the source of which I still could not identify. I hurried down the corridor in my bare feet, my gown flapping about my still-damp legs, anxious now and my heart pounding through me.
Visitors were received in an elegant little parlour at the front of the hospital, which was kept locked except during visiting hours. The orderly was waiting for me at the door with his ring of keys ready in his hand.
‘Who is it?’ I asked him, but he just ignored me, as I had known he would. He unlocked the door and pushed me through into the parlour. It felt strange to be there at such an unaccustomed hour, sacrilegious almost. I heard the door close and lock behind me. The room was very beautiful and I still remember it vividly today. It was a calm island, sequestered from all the pain and confusion that the asylum building housed. It had high ceilings and two bow windows that looked out onto a little wild park. The windows faced east, and on this morning I could see none of the view, owing to the strength of the early sun that came blazing into the room, dazzling me.
‘Hello, Max,’ said a vaguely familiar voice. I could make out the dark shape of a man outlined against the window, but I could not place the voice. The shape moved over to sit on one of the small sofas. The details of the room were still taking shape as my eyes adjusted to the light. I came around to sit on the other sofa and saw a bald man in a suit: Theodor. My heart gave a jolt. I h
ad not given Theodor a single thought for months. I felt pleased to see him and my mind flooded with happy memories of my first publication, which seemed so long ago.
‘Theodor,’ I said, extending my hand to him. We shook hands, but at his touch that familiar foreboding feeling came over me again, a guilty stain that seeped into my heart. It occurred to me to wonder why he was here at this irregular time. Then all at once everything came rushing back to me: Alexandr and Gustav, and the cheque, and Franz’s dead-looking eyes staring up at me from that room in Berlin. All the blood dropped out of my face and my arms hung limp at my sides.
Franz. What had I done? I wondered why the police had not come for me before now, and my eyes darted around the room in case they were standing hidden in the corners, unseen, ready to leap out and arrest me. And then there was Theodor, dear Theodor, whom I had deceived and stolen from.
‘Look, Max …’ said Theodor.
I knew what he was going to say. I wanted to apologise to him, but I found that I could not speak.
‘Max, I know you’re not well,’ said Theodor. ‘I’ve spoken to your doctors, to Professor Pick.’
I opened my mouth, but only some stammering noises came out.
Theodor silenced me with an upraised hand. ‘No, don’t try to explain. I wanted to come and tell you what I know.’
‘Theodor,’ I managed to get out. ‘Theodor, I’m sorry. The last months were … I don’t know what happened. I lost myself somehow. I’m sorry for the harm I did you.’ Perhaps the police were waiting outside, I thought.
He was looking at me uncomprehendingly.
‘No,’ said Theodor. ‘It is I who am sorry. I knew something was wrong, but I did nothing to help you.’
‘Help me? Why would you help me? I was deceiving you.’ I spoke in spite of myself. It was surely better for me to remain silent and admit nothing.
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