side them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?”
“But you wouldn’t betray the nation to an outside enemy.”
He said, “Well, if it was a choice between the nation and humanity, or the nation and a friend, I might. If you call that betrayal. I call it morality.”
He is a liberal. It is exactly what Dr. Katin was talking about on Sunday.
It is classic psychopathy: the absence of normal affect. He said that quite unemotionally—“I might.”
No. That is not true. He said it with difficulty, with pain. It was I who was so shocked that I felt nothing—blank, cold.
How am I to treat this kind of psychosis, a political psychosis? I have read over De Cams’s book twice and I believe I do understand it now, but still there is this gap between the political and the psychological, so that the book shows me how to think but does not show me how to act positively. I see how F.S. should think and feel, and the difference between that and his present state of mind, but I do not know how to educate him so that he can think positively. De Cams says that disaffection is a negative condition which must be filled with positive ideas and emotions, but this does not fit F.S. The gap is not in him. In fact that gap in De Cams between the political and the psychological is exactly where his ideas apply. But if they are wrong ideas how can this be?
I want advice badly, but I cannot get it from Dr. Nades. When she gave me the De Cams she said, “You’ll find what you need in this.” If I tell her that I haven’t, it is like a confession of helplessness and she will take the case away from me. Indeed I think it is a kind of test case, testing me. But I need this experience, I am learning, and besides, the patient trusts me and talks freely to me. He does so because he knows that I keep what he tells me in perfect confidence. Therefore I cannot show this journal or discuss these problems with anyone until the cine is under way and confidence is no longer essential. But I cannot see when that could happen. It seems as if confidence will always be essential between us.
I have got to teach him to adjust his behavior to reality, or he will be sent for ECT when the Section reviews cases in November. He has been right about that all along.
9 OCTOBER
I stopped writing in this notebook when the material from F.S. began to seem “dangerous” to him (or to myself). I just reread it all over tonight. I see now that I can never show it to Dr. N. So I am going to go ahead and write what I please in it. Which is what she said to do, but I think she always expected me to show it to her, she thought I would want to, which I did, at first, or that if she asked to see it I’d give it to her. She asked about it yesterday. I said that I had abandoned it, because it just repeated things I had already put into the analysis files. She was plainly disapproving but said nothing. Our dominance-submission relationship has changed these past few weeks. I do not feel so much in need of guidance, and after the Ana Jest discharge, the autism paper, and my successful analysis of the T. R. Vinha tapes she cannot insist upon my dependence. But she may resent my independence. I took the covers off the notebook and am keeping the loose pages in the split in the back cover of my copy of Rheingeld, it would take a very close search to find them there. While I was doing that I felt rather sick at the stomach and got a headache.
Allergy: A person can be exposed to pollen or bitten by fleas a thousand times without reaction. Then he gets a viral infection or a psychic trauma or a bee sting, and next time he meets up with ragweed or a flea he begins to sneeze, cough, itch, weep, etc. It is the same with certain other irritants. One has to be sensitized.
“Why is there so much fear?” I wrote. Well now I know. Why is there no privacy? It is unfair and sordid. I cannot read the “classified” files kept in her office, though I work with the patients and she does not. But I am not to have any “classified” material of my own. Only persons in authority can have secrets. Their secrets are all good, even when they are lies.
Listen. Listen Rosa Sobel. Doctor of Medicine, Deg. Psychotherapy, Deg. Psychoscopy. Have you gone native?
Whose thoughts are you thinking?
You have been working 2 to 5 hours a day for 6 weeks inside one person’s mind. A generous, integrated, sane mind. You never worked with anything like that before. You have only worked with the crippled and the terrified. You never met an equal before.
Who is the therapist, you or he?
But if there is nothing wrong with him what am I supposed to cure? How can I help him? How can I save him?
By teaching him to lie?
(UNDATED)
I spent the last two nights till midnight reviewing the diagnostic scopes of Professor Area, recorded when he was admitted, eleven years ago, before electroconvulsive treatment.
This morning Dr. N inquired why I had been “so far back in the files.” (That means that Selena reports to her on what files are used. I know every square centimeter of the scope room but all the same I check it over daily now.) I replied that I was interested in studying the development of ideological disaffection in intellectuals. We agreed that intellectualism tends to foster negative thinking and may lead to psychosis, and those suffering from it should ideally be treated, as Prof. Area was treated, and released if still competent. It was a very interesting and harmonious discussion.
I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.
I wanted to watch the Area tapes to get perspective. To prove to myself that Flores is by no means unique or original. This is true. The differences are fascinating. Dr. Area’s Con dimension was splendid, architectural, but the Uncon material was less well integrated and less interesting. Dr. Area knew very much more, and the power and beauty of the motions of his thought was far superior to Flores’s! Flores is often extremely muddled. That is an element of his vitality. Dr. Area is an, was an Abstract thinker, as I am, and so I enjoyed his tapes less. I missed the solidity, spatiotemporal realism, and intense sensory clarity of Flores’s mind.
In the scope room this morning I told him what I had been doing. His reaction was (as usual) not what I expected. He is fond of the old man and I thought he would be pleased. He said, “You mean they saved the tapes, and destroyed the mind?” I told him that all tapes are kept for use in teaching, and asked him if that didn’t cheer him, to know that a record of Area’s thoughts in his prime existed: wasn’t it like his book, after all, the lasting part of a mind which sooner or later would have to grow senile and die anyhow? He said, “No! Not so long as the book is banned and the tape is classified! Neither freedom nor privacy even in death? That is the worst of all!”
After session he asked if I would be able or willing to destroy his diagnostic tapes, if he is sent to ECT. I said such things could get misfiled and lost easily enough, but that it seemed a cruel waste. I had learned from him and others might, later, too. He said, “Don’t you see that I will not serve the people with security passes? I will not be used, that’s the whole point. You have never used me. We have worked together. Served our term together.”
Prison has been much in his mind lately. Fantasies, daydreams of jails, labor camps. He dreams of prison as a man in prison dreams of freedom.
Indeed as I see the way narrowing in I would get him sent to prison if I could, but since he is here there is no chance. If I reported that he is in fact politically dangerous, they will simply put him back in the Violent ward and give him ECT. There is no judge here to give him a life sentence. Only doctors to give death sentences.
What I can do is stretch out the diagnosis as long as possible, and put in a request for full co-analysis, with a strong prognosis of complete cure. But I have drafted the report three times already and it is very hard to phrase it so that it’s clear that I know the disease is ideological (so that they don’t just override my diagnosis at once) but still making it sound mild and curable enough that they’d let me handle it with the psychoscope. And then, why spend up to a year, using expensive equipment, whe
n a cheap and simple instant cure is at hand? No matter what I say, they have that argument. There are two weeks left until Sectional Review. I have got to write the report so that it will be really impossible for them to override it. But what if Flores is right, all this is just playacting, lying about lying, and they have had orders right from the start from TRTU, “wipe this one out”—
(UNDATED)
Sectional Review today.
If I stay on here I have some power, I can do some good No no no but I don’t I don’t even in this one thing even in this what can I do now how can I stop
(UNDATED
Last night I dreamed I rode on a bear’s back up a deep gorge between steep mountainsides, slopes going steep up into a dark sky, it was winter, there was ice on the rocks
(UNDATED)
Tomorrow morning will tell Nades I am resigning and requesting transfer to Children’s Hospital. But she must approve the transfer. If not I am out in the cold. I am in the cold already. Door locked to write this. As soon as it is written will go down to furnace room and burn it all. There is no place any more.
We met in the hall. He was with an orderly.
I took his hand. It was big and bony and very cold. He said, “Is this it, now, Rosa—the electroshock?” in a low voice. I did not want him to lose hope before he walked up the stairs and down the corridor. It is a long way down the corridor. I said, “No. Just some more tests—EEG probably.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked, and I said yes.
And he did. I went in this evening. He was awake. I said, “I am Dr. Sobel, Flores. I am Rosa.”
He said, “I’m pleased to meet you,” mumbling. There is a slight facial paralysis on the left. That will wear off.
I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched, the winter rose.
The White Donkey
There were snakes in the old stone place, but the grass grew so green and rank there that she brought the goats back every day. “The goats are looking fat,” Nana said. “Where are you grazing them, Sita?” And when Sita said, “At the old stone place, in the forest,” Nana said, “It’s a long way to take them,” and Uncle Hira said, “Look out for snakes in that place,” but they were thinking of the goats, not of her; so she did not ask them, after all, about the white donkey.
She had seen the donkey first when she was putting flowers on the red stone under the pipal tree at the edge of the forest. She liked that stone. It was the Goddess, very old, round, sitting comfortably among the roots of the tree. Everybody who passed by there left the Goddess some flowers or poured a bit of water on her, and every spring her red paint was renewed. Si{a was giving the Goddess a rhododendron flower when she looked round, thinking one of the goats was straying off into the forest; but it wasn’t a goat. It was a white animal that had caught her eye, whiter than a Brahminee bull. Sita followed it to see what it was. When she saw the neat round rump and the tail like a rope with a tassel, she knew it was a donkey; but such a beautiful donkey! And whose? There were three donkeys in the village, and Chandra Bose owned two, both of them grey, bony, mournful, laborious beasts. This was a tall, sleek, delicate donkey, a wonderful donkey. It could not belong to Chandra Bose, or to anybody in the village, or to anybody in the other village. It wore no halter or harness. It must be wild; it must live in the forest alone.
Sure enough, when she brought the goats along by whistling to clever Kala, and followed where the white donkey had gone into the forest, first there was a path, and then they came to the place where the old stones were, blocks of stone as big as houses all half buried and overgrown with grass and kerala vines; and there the white donkey was standing looking back at her from the darkness under the trees.
She thought then that the donkey was a god, because it had a third eye in the middle of its forehead like Shiva. But when it turned she saw that that was not an eye, but a horn—not curved like a cow’s or a goat’s horns, a straight spike like a deer’s—just the one horn, between the eyes, like Shiva’s eye. So it might be a kind of god donkey; and in case it was, she picked a yellow flower off the kerala vine and offered it, stretching out her open palm.
The white donkey stood a while considering her and the goats and the flower; then it came slowly back among the big stones towards her. It had split hooves like the goats, and walked even more neatly than they did. It accepted the flower. Its nose was pinkish-white, and very soft where it snuffled on Sita’s palm. She quickly picked another flower, and the donkey accepted it too. But when she wanted to stroke its face around the short, white, twisted horn and the white, nervous ears, it moved away, looking sidelong at her from its long dark eyes.
Sita was a little afraid of it, and thought it might be a little afraid of her; so she sat down on one of the half-buried rocks and pretended to be watching the goats, who were all busy grazing on the best grass they had had for months. Presently the donkey came close again, and standing beside Sita, rested its curly-bearded chin on her lap. The breath from its nostrils moved the thin glass bangles on her wrist. Slowly and very gently she stroked the base of the white, nervous ears, the fine, harsh hair at the base of the horn, the silken muzzle; and the white donkey stood beside her, breathing long, warm breaths.
Every day since then she brought the goats there, walking carefully because of snakes; and the goats were getting fat; and her friend the donkey came out of the forest every day, and accepted her offering, and kept her company.
“One bullock and one hundred rupees cash,” said Uncle Hira, “you’re crazy if you think we can marry her for less!”
“Moti Lai is a lazy man,” Nana said. “Dirty and lazy.”
“So he wants a wife to work and clean for him! And he’ll take her for only one bullock and one hundred rupees cash!”
“Maybe he’ll settle down when he’s married,” Nana said.
So Sita was betrothed to Moti Lai from the other village, who had watched her driving the goats home at evening. She had seen him watching her across the road, but had never looked at him. She did not want to look at him.
“This is the last day,” she said to the white donkey, while the goats cropped the grass among the big, carved, fallen stones, and the forest stood all about them in the singing stillness. “Tomorrow I’ll come with Uma’s little brother to show him the way here. He’ll be the village goatherd now. The day after tomorrow is my wedding day.”
The white donkey stood still, its curly, silky beard resting against her hand.
“Nana is giving me her gold bangle,” Sita said to the donkey. “I get to wear a red sari, and have henna on my feet and hands.”
The donkey stood still, listening.
“There’ll be sweet rice to eat at the wedding,” Sita said; then she began to cry.
“Goodbye, white donkey,” she said. The white donkey looked at her sidelong, and slowly, not looking back, moved away from her and walked into the darkness under the trees.
The Phoenix
The radio on the chest of drawers hissed and crackled like burning acid. Through the crackle a voice boasted of victories. “Butchers!” she snarled at the voice. “Butchers, liars, fools!” But there was an expression in the librarian’s eyes which brought her rage up short like a dog on a chain, clawing at the air, choked off.
“You can’t be a Partisan!”
The librarian said nothing. He might well have said nothing even if he had been able to say anything.
She turned the radio down—you could never turn it off, lest you should miss the last act, the denouement—and came up close to the librarian on the bed. Familiar to her now were the round, sallow face, the dark eyes with bloodshot whites, the dark, wiry hair on his head, and the hair on his forearms and the backs of his hands and fingers, and the hair under his arms and on his chest and groin and legs, and the whole of his stocky, sweaty, suffering body, which she had been trying to look after for thirty hours while the city blew
itself apart street by street and nerve by nerve and the radio twitched from lies to static to lies.
“Come on, don’t tell me that!” she said to his silence. “You weren’t with them. You were against them.”
Without a word, with the utmost economy, he evinced a denial.“But I saw you! I saw exactly what you did. You locked the library. Why do you think I came there looking for you? You don’t think I’d have crossed the street to help one of them!” A one-note laugh of scorn, and she awarded the well-delivered line the moment of silence that was its due. The radio hissed thinly, drifting back to static. She sat down on the foot of the bed, directly in the librarian’s line of sight, front and center.
“I’ve known you by sight for I don’t know how long—a couple of years, it must be. My other room, there, looks out on the square. Right across to the library. I’ve seen you opening it up in the morning a hundred times. This time I saw you closing it, at two in the afternoon. Running those wrought-iron gates across the doors in a rush. So what’s he up to? Then I heard the cars and those damned motorcycles. I drew the curtain right away. But then I stood behind the curtain and watched. That was strange, you know? I’d have sworn I’d be hiding under the bed in here as soon as I knew they were that close. But I stood there and watched. It was like watching a play!” she said with the expansiveness of inaccuracy. In fact, peering out between the curtain and the window frame with a running thrill of not disagreeable terror, she had inevitably felt that she was sizing up the house. Was it that revival of emotion that had moved her, so soon afterwards, to act?
“They pulled the flag down first. I suppose even terrorists have to do things in the proper order. Probably in fact no one is more conventional. They have to do everything that’s expected of them... Well, I’d seen you go round to that side door, the basement entrance, after you’d locked the gates. I think I’d noticed your coat, without noticing that I noticed, you know; that yellowish-brown color. So, after they’d been all over the front steps, and broken in at the side door—like ants on meat, I kept thinking—and finally all come out again and got onto their damned motorcycles and roared off to go wreck something else, and I was wondering if it was smoke or just dust that was hanging around that side door—then I thought of your coat, because of the color of the smoke,that yellowish brown. I thought, I never saw that coat again. They didn’t bring the librarian out with them. Well, so I thought probably they’d shot you, inside there with the books. But I kept thinking how you’d locked the doors and locked the gates and then gone back inside. I didn’t know why you’d done that. You could have locked up and left, got away, after all. I kept thinking about that. And there wasn’t a soul down in the square. All us rats hiding in our rat-holes. So finally I thought, Well, I can’t live with this, and went over to look for you. I walked right across the square. Empty as four a.m. It was peaceful. I wasn’t afraid. I was only frightened of finding you dead. A wound, blood. Blood turns me faint, I detest it. So I go in, and my mouth’s dry and my ears are singing, and then I see you coming with an armload of books!” She laughed, but this time her voice cracked. She turned left profile to him, glancing at him once sidelong.
The Compass Rose Page 12