*
The Victory of a Healthy Mind over an Unhealthy Body Isn’t this by him, you know, your doctor? Hilde Mayer asks one morning after unfolding a crisp copy of Neues Wiener Tagblatt on the desk. She has been looking at the patchwork of advertisements and points helpfully at the top right-hand corner of the page:
It’s him, Doctor Jekelius, isn’t it?
Under the heading Lectures, she reads:
In Urania, at 7 o’clock
A lecture by Erwin Jekelius, Doctor of Medicine:
‘The Victory of a Healthy Mind over an Unhealthy Body!’
For some reason it upsets Anna Katschenka even more that Jekelius turns out to be back in Wien than it did when she learnt that he was called up. It feels as if a secret agreement between them has been broken. At first, she can’t think why he is here even though there are, logically, several possible answers to that question. He might be on leave or recalled for some consultation. It might be a family matter. Whatever made him not tell her in advance, she must now respect his silence. Unless, of course, the advertisement in Neues Wiener Tagblatt is his very special way of informing her. It is an idiotic notion, she knows that, but can’t quite make herself reject it. She decides not to attend the lecture but ends up going after all. The title of the lecture had made her expect a sophisticated, well-behaved audience of perhaps older colleagues and educated non-medical men and women, but instead a noisy, unruly crowd of quite a different kind are pushing through the doors. Many are youngish middle-aged women, hanging on the arms of spouses who appear to be flushed and stiff-faced with embarrassment and try to hide it behind coarse gestures and over-jolly bursts of laughter. Among the back-slapping men, she catches glimpses of a few faces she knows from Steinhof, among them Doctor Hans Bertha and a younger colleague. Both look very uncomfortable. They must have decided to go for places further back in the hall than she has, because this is her only glimpse of them before the door to the lecture hall closes. The loud-mouthed audience gradually goes quiet and everyone turns towards the stage. Next, something very strange happens. The lecturer steps onto the podium, but it isn’t Doctor Jekelius. Her first, confused thought is that he has employed the same device as he did in the Lemberg hospital when he ‘borrowed’ someone else’s hand to write for him. Has he borrowed an entire person this time and is this person going to lecture on his behalf? This one looks very much like Jekelius, has the same facial features and the same body. But he moves quite differently, seems awkward and jerky, and also laughs almost all the time, or at least when he begins by telling some kind of humorous anecdote. She can’t catch what he says and misses the point. Still, the rest of the audience must feel as lost, because there are only a few laughs and most people are shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. Then he asks in a tone that sounds slightly less actorly: what are the requirements for being a truly good healer of souls?
He launches into the answer to his rhetorical question:
In order to be good at knowing the souls of one’s fellow men and women, one must above all have the ability to engage deeply with the lives of others. Thus, for instance, Goethe has said that he, too, must be capable of carrying out the horrendous acts that he makes his fictional characters commit. In that sense then, Goethe might have been a compulsive offender, had he not taken the opportunity to act out his inclinations in writing. Just as I might myself have murdered in the most terrible ways and acted like a madman, had I not become a doctor. Experience of life is essential if one is to comprehend the lives of others and I now believe that one must, in particular, have lived through three overwhelming states of mind – great love, profound suffering and debilitating illness. A great love and the misery that follows in its wake are both recent emotions that I have endured. And now, in the ongoing war, I have experienced severe illness. Therefore, I think that I can with conviction state that the man who now stands before you is exceptionally well-equipped to conduct a discourse around the subject set for us all this evening.
At last, the audience has fallen completely silent. All eyes are fixed on the lecturer who goes on to speak in his unexpected, almost unsettlingly personal way about how, on his way to Russia, he fell so ill his entire body became paralysed. He not only lost both the motoric and sensory functions of his body but the sight in both his eyes:
I lived as if immersed in an alien darkness; I was in enemy territory and unable to know for certain if those who cared for my helpless body were truly my helpers or intended to push me further towards annihilation. While in that condition, three letters were read out to me, all from women who in different ways had learnt that I had been wounded on the field of war. The first letter was from a deeply religious woman who wrote that she remembered me in her sincere prayers. The second was from someone with no religious beliefs. She sent me a few colourful pictures in the hope that they might stimulate me to regain my sight. But the letter that moved me most was from a third person. She sent me her good wishes and added just a few words: You are a doctor of souls, she wrote, and so need no eyes.
She looks up. These are her own words, written to him. Now she suddenly recognises the true Jekelius behind the mask of a stranger. He is standing by the lectern, looking straight at her with his clear, open eyes. Of all the hundreds of people in the audience, he has picked her out almost at once. She can’t cope with meeting his gaze and looks down at her hands, clenched into fists. These words gave me strength, he continues after a pause which, to her, seems to last for ever. He goes on to tell them about how one of the doctors at the hospital in Lemberg had let him know that there was another soldier in the same ward, much younger then himself, who was also paralysed from the shoulders down. Jekelius requested to be lifted onto a stretcher trolley and wheeled along to this soldier’s bed:
When my stretcher stood edge to edge with the other patient’s bed, I turned my face towards this stranger, concentrated all my strength and hypnotised him. Once he was in hypnotic sleep, I asked the doctor and the nurse, who had come along to be near us, to lift the patient upright. As he hung there between them, looking lifeless, I told him to start walking. And the sleeping patient began to walk with small, uncertain steps. Supported by the doctor’s hand, of course – but he walked.
Now uproar begins to spread among the members of the audience. Charlatan! somebody cries. Cheat! Katschenka turns and spots an elderly man in one of the rows at the back of the hall. He is waving his arms and trying to get to his feet but is prevented by somebody next to him. A few rows still further back, she sees Professor Bertha bending forward with his head in his hands. Up there on the podium, Doctor Jekelius holds both hands in front of his face in mock distress, then scans the audience as if to imprint it on his mind. A soul, he says. Now, what is that?
The soul can be defined as the sum total of our emotion, thought and will. The soul can also be defined as that which exists in the interval between desire and action. But then, ask yourselves the following question: does the soul cease to exist just because the body, for some reason, is paralysed and so temporarily out for the count and incapable?
Once again, silence falls in the hall. She sees Doctor Jekelius smile. His smile shows his entire row of teeth, like the grin of a salesman or a thief. There is also something self-satisfied about it. As if he knows that he has the audience under his spell from now on.
You will by now wonder, full of utterly justified doubts, or indeed anger, how someone whose body was paralysed from top to toe, who could not use his eyes to see with or his tongue to formulate the words he thought – how can he act at all? How, you ask yourself, could such a person, relying only on the strength of his will, make another man rise from his sleep and walk as if he had never been injured?
You ask: can medicine create miracles?
You, who doubt what I have just told you, consider this:
Not even the most skilful medical man can heal himself but, then, the art and science of medicine has never been directed towards the self. The most important word in a
doctor’s vocabulary is neither diagnosis nor treatment, but … you. This single word means that the ill individual is seen and that a stronger soul can lift a source of suffering that has been too inaccessible or too daunting for the patient to touch. And, in that sense, a healthy soul will always be stronger than the most disease-ridden body. Perhaps the soldier whom I cured in that military hospital ward was suffering from one of the traumatic mental conditions that are such common consequences of war. One word was sufficient to loosen his self-applied fetters. In other cases, such as mine, perhaps the diagnosis will be different and other treatments used.
Nonetheless: you see me standing here before you and, once more, I can see; once more, I can move and I can speak. Ignorance and fear have made us think about illness in a way that is similar to how people during the Middle Ages thought about natural phenomena: as if illness was unchanging, and fundamentally incurable. But, for as long as the soul remains the stronger force, there will always be a way of healing bodily distress. The only questions concern the methods we use and how we regard individual human beings.
He turns to the part of the hall where she is sitting and, with a slight bow, indicates to the audience that the lecture is at an end. At the back, people close to the main door are on the move as if they couldn’t exit quickly enough. Around the stage, a crowd that is almost as large has gathered to press the lecturer’s hand and put to him the many enthusiastic questions they are bursting to ask. She finds herself standing alone in a sea of empty chairs. What should she do next? Leave the hall and seem to join his critics at the back? Or stay where she is until his ardent admirers finally let him go, in the hope that he will look at her and mean it, with a genuine smile that she knows is his own. As she waits just outside, she realises that her choice is already made. He knows it, too, and once he has allowed himself to be praised and questioned for half an hour, he comes to her in the foyer. By then, his face looks withdrawn and sombre again. Sister Anna? he says in a surprised tone that might be put on for her benefit or simply an affectation. Have you, too, come here to denigrate me?
*
The Blind During the years that followed, there were times when she could not, awake or asleep, visualise him in her mind. He might as well have made himself invisible to her or vanished into some sphere of reality beyond her reach. Sometimes, as she lay awake at night, her thoughts fumbled with the memory of him, as a blind woman would fumble with her fingertips on a familiar face, but without finding a single feature she recognised. His words, even the most significant and distinctive, were also gone. At least let me keep your voice, she said into the dark around her, but the voice that spoke in her mind had become indistinguishable from the crowd-pleasing tones of the speaker in Urania’s large lecture hall. That evening, he had asked where she lived and, when she gives him the street address he must have known after a year of addressing letters to her, he suggests that they should keep company, at least for part of the way. Then he sets out on a route in almost exactly the opposite direction to her home: after descending the stairs in Urania, they stroll along the canal, first under the Schwedenbrücke and then Marienbrücke. She follows him obediently and, because he seems unwilling to speak, she starts unprompted to tell him about how things are going at Spiegelgrund. She mentions Illing’s ‘firm grip’ that increasingly controls the work, how the children are subjected to lumbar puncture as a matter of routine, even in cases without the slightest indication of any relevant illness. Jekelius snorts and says: so, it would seem that the institution has been transformed into some kind of experimental laboratory? She doesn’t comment and he anyway continues to speak, almost as if to himself:
Our people have never been faced with a more colossal task than at present but these career-mad medical men show themselves, as usual, to be more preoccupied with material status and greed for academic acclaim. Of course, all that is of minor importance. I had never thought that you would place such emphasis on trivial matters.
She puts her hand to her chest. She can’t understand what he means with her ‘placing such emphasis’ – she had only told him what was happening. It doesn’t matter because his thoughts are now elsewhere:
They had promised me a post as senior consultant on the condition that I left the clinical work at Spiegelgrund. Instead, they continue to persecute me. Many times, when I give my lectures, it has pleased them to turn up. Incognito, naturally. They always sit at the back and refuse to stand and be counted. For as long as I am in army service, they feel safe –hoping, no doubt, that they’ll be rid of me soon – but at the same time, they watch my every step. It’s fear that drives them. Fear that I will give their little secrets away.
He casts a sideways glance at her and realises that she is still at a loss:
By now, Sister Anna must surely know the full story?
What story? she asks.
The story of the great love of my life, he says. We would have become engaged. But he stopped it.
He? she wonders.
Our Führer, of course.
And she thinks: he’s out of his mind. She thinks it quite lucidly and soberly. His war injury (he still hasn’t said anything about what kind of injury) must also have affected his sanity. He doesn’t notice her silence and continues unconcernedly:
One single word from him could have rescued me. I wrote to his office and asked to be allowed to present myself in order to sort it all out but didn’t even receive a reply. That, despite all I have done for him. Or precisely because of it. Do you know, Mrs Katschenka, I think that he is frightened of me, too. We doctors are of course the masters of life and death. And I have learnt from a close relative of his that he – yes, even he, the otherwise infallible – has a relation who was kept in an asylum. Perhaps he was afraid of what he had ordered us to do, of the consequences?
When she had been referred to him and they met for the first time in his Martinstrasse surgery, she had told him about her foolish marriage to the fake doctor, the repulsive Jew Hauslich. Jekelius had looked deep into her eyes and told her that she had behaved in a way typical of her. Again and again, you search out that which harms you, he had said. You do so, because you believe that the only cure for the pain you feel is a still more severe pain. Your have a large wound inside you but can’t see it. He had said all that, precisely. Many times during the nights that followed their evening walk together, she would recall this and reflect that his diagnosis was right. Only, this time, he was her wound. What she had thought she had found in him was just what had driven her to fling herself to the ground, time and time again, expecting that the ground, at least, would support her. And this was why, since that evening in Urania, she could never again get a grip on him, however intently she probed his entire being with her gaze and her memory. For her, he was no longer firm ground.
She tells him that she must go, that she regrets having to leave him but she really must go now. He doesn’t protest, just says a curt goodbye without holding out his hand. He walks away and turns right at the Gestapo headquarters on Morzinplatz. She notices that he limps a little on his right leg and asks herself if this is due to his war injury or if he puts on the limp because he knows that she stands there, looking at him.
IX
Gulliver
The Chosen Ones Page 28