The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

“But isn’t every doctor?”

  “What does that have to do with it?” he said crossly.

  “Your sign says diseases of the lungs, and diseases of women.”

  Dr. Bono smiled, a fine curve of his beak-like lips. “Since you’re a woman, this is a disease of a woman, isn’t it? And the gall bladder is very near the lungs.”

  Eliza got up from the table and buttoned her clothing, while he watched her with his aquiline eye. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t think about it too long, or …”

  She didn’t wait to hear what the or was. She hurried back to her Bayswater room, feeling a little sick all over, and a dull pain in her stomach at the place he had pushed. She spent most of the next week sleeping, getting up now and then to make herself some tea. She didn’t feel like anything else to eat. When a week had passed she didn’t go back to Dr. Bono; it was the first time she had missed. She slept all morning as usual, and about noon there was a knock on the door. When she didn’t answer, there was a pause and then Dr. Bono came in. He wasn’t wearing his office gown, instead a pale blue suit with a white shirt and a blue necktie. She tried to decide whether the food stains on his suit were the same as the spots on his medical gown. She had the impression that perhaps he took them off the gown and put them on the suit when he changed to go out, as though they were badges or decorations of some kind.

  “I’ve made an appointment for Tuesday at a clinic in Wimbledon,” he told her. “You should be there at eight o’clock.” He gave her the address.

  After he left Eliza got out of bed and looked into the mirror, trying to plumb the mystery of her soul by examining her face intently. But it showed nothing, because the face knew somebody was watching it, and so was on its guard. Of course, that somebody was herself, but it put the soul on its guard all the same. She looked away, then glanced back quickly and as though accidentally. Then she slowly closed her eyes, an eighth of an inch at a time. What she wished was to see herself with her eyes closed, a thing nobody has ever seen. Her vision grew dark at the top and the bottom, then the rest of it filled with spots and was intersected by little filaments and twigs. Then darkness. She could see nothing. This terrified her.

  She packed a few things in a small bag and took a train to Harwich and then a boat to Amsterdam. She found a room even smaller than the one she had in Bayswater, with a narrow iron bed, a table with a pitcher of water on it, a nicked white basin, and a chamber pot. The room had a view of a canal and a horse-knackery on the other bank. She hadn’t brought along her Mrs. Humphrey Ward novel, but in the room she found a second-hand Everyman edition of Dante and she began reading that instead. She still held a stomachache in the place where Dr. Bono had palpated her. She tried to imitate as well as she could her life in Bayswater, and she bought a small electric cooker, found a place to get sausages and tea, and began taking long walks in this strange city with its concentric canals like the circles in Dante’s hell. It was on one of these walks that she saw the sign of a Dr. Fischbein who specialized in internal medicine. Eliza imagined that all diseases were inside people, but perhaps Dr. Fischbein knew something about her insides that Dr. Bono didn’t. She went up the stairs and told Dr. Fischbein the list of her complaints.

  Dr. Fischbein was nothing at all like Dr. Bono. He was older, and he was very calm, methodical, and gentle. He had her lie face down on a table, and then he got a kind of periscope which he stuck up inside her through the hole in her rear. It was cold and slippery, and he moved it in and out, back and forth, for a long time. Eliza imagined what the periscope was seeing, a long pink avenue littered with dung, a thing that exists but you are forbidden to look at, like your face when your eyes are closed. At last he pulled it out, went to the washstand, and washed it carefully with a bar of green soap. Then he dried it on a hand-towel and put it away in a drawer.

  Dr. Fischbein himself looked like his periscope, except that he had two protuberant shiny silver eyes instead of one. He was very hairy, and his small red mouth surrounded by hair reminded Eliza of something she didn’t even want to think about. He sat her in a chair, he took another chair, and he gazed at her inquisitively.

  “Your tract is over-excited,” he told her. “You should try to think more calm thoughts.”

  “What have thoughts to do with it?”

  “The connections between mind and body are just now beginning to be understood. In your case, your over-excited thinking has generated polyps which are now to be seen in your tract.”

  “Polyps?”

  Eliza imagined little animals like octopi, the size of your thumb, which squirted out black ink in their efforts to escape Dr. Fischbein’s periscope.

  “Surgery may be necessary,” he told her. “You will keep coming to see me and I will tell you when.”

  His English was not perfect. It is difficult to be clear when speaking in the future tense. Eliza went back to her room by the canal and lay down on the bed. Now she had the pain where Dr. Bono had pressed her, and a long twisting pain, like a snake, winding inside her in the places where the periscope had gone. It was better the next day and she went for her walk as usual. She decided that some of her troubles, like the polyps in her tract, might be due to the things she ate, and she went to a strange kind of store where herbs and seeds were sold and bought a preparation invented by a Swiss doctor, consisting of raw cereals, nuts, raisins, and bits of dried fruit. This was to be taken with milk and brown sugar. It had the advantage that she no longer needed to use her electric cooker, and the smell of sausage no longer filled the room. In only a few days she felt better.

  One day on her walk she was crossing a bridge over a canal and she saw Dr. Fischbein coming toward her. It was impossible to avoid him because she was already halfway across the bridge. As he passed her his two round optical devices gleamed under the shadow of his hat. He was wearing a long black cloak that came to his ankles and a soft black hat like an Italian magician, and he carried a cane with an ivory handle. He said not one word, but disappeared rapidly into the Amsterdam mist. Eliza went back to her room, packed her bag once more, and went to the railway station. This time she bought a ticket to Paris, but decided that she would get off at some city chosen at random along the way so that no one would know where she was.

  When night fell she went to the restaurant car, but found that all the tables were filled. There was one table, intended for two, that had only a single person sitting at it, a man of forty with long hair combed down his neck and a beautiful mustache in the shape of an archer’s bow. He smiled and invited her to sit at his table. Eliza recklessly accepted his offer. He could hardly harm her in any way in a restaurant car full of diners, and she would worry about getting rid of him after the dinner was over.

  As a matter of fact he was a perfect gentleman. He told her that he was a Luxemburger by nationality and that he traveled around Europe as a representative of a champagne company. He disliked dining alone and often invited people to share his table. “Just last week I dined with a circus acrobat, and before that with a Japanese prince,” he told her. He didn’t inquire about her profession; perhaps he discerned with his fine intelligence that she had once been a chemist’s assistant and was now an invalid. He treated Eliza to champagne of his company’s brand and then to oysters on the half shell, on a bed of ice surrounded by lemons and parsley. He discoursed wisely on the various types of oysters to be found in Europe and on vintages of champagne. Along with some toast points, this was all they had for dinner. When they rose from the table he remarked, “Coffee sours the palate.” When she left him he actually bowed, attracting the curiosity of the other diners in the car.

  Tingling from the champagne, she went back to her compartment and slept soundly for the rest of the night. When she woke up it was daylight and the train was slowing to a stop at the station in Lille. She took her bag, got out of the train, and sat down on a bench in the station, realizing for the first time that she had an excruciating toothache. The pain seemed to come from a place u
nder one of her back teeth, but it penetrated her whole body and made her head pulse like a heart. She sat on the bench enduring it while tears filled her eyes. She felt that she could scarcely get up and walk, let alone search around in this strange town for a room to rent. But luck was with her, because in a side street near the station she almost immediately found a sign saying “Dentiste.”

  She didn’t even have to walk up the stairs, because the dentist’s office was on the street floor, down a narrow dark corridor with stained walls. The door of the office was locked and there was a cardboard clock with movable hands to indicate that it would be open at nine o’clock, over an hour from now. Eliza waited, standing in the corridor since there was no place to sit. A little before nine the door was unlocked by a young woman assistant who seemed to be an Indian or an Asian. The dentist arrived immediately afterward. He didn’t bother to introduce himself. Seeing that she was in pain, he seated her in the chair and began preparations for the extraction. He was garrulous and cheerful. He told her not to worry and her pain would soon be gone; she would be well again. He put her under with nitrous oxide. When she felt the small office with its strange equipment and furnishings taking shape around her again, she at first didn’t know where she was. Then she sat up and found that the dentist was gone. So was her purse. The tooth was not pulled.

  The assistant told her that this often happened. “I’ve been through it all. He drinks, he takes laughing gas, and he swallows pain pills. He will come back in a few days, or a week at the most.”

  She offered to pull the tooth herself. She said she could do it easily; she had done it dozens of times. After the patient was unconscious, she often did it for the dentist because he was too drunk to do it. Eliza leaned back in the chair again, and the brown girl examined her mouth with the forceps ready. The pain increased two-or three-fold in intensity, if that was possible, and seemed to concentrate to a fine point like a needle.

  Then it abruptly sank away, leaving only an ache that thudded in the rhythm of her pulse.

  “Have you eaten raw oysters lately?”

  The brown girl held up the forceps to show her a piece of shell, a tiny fragment of mother-of-pearl covered with blood. “It was lodged under the gum. I imagine it hurt a great deal.” She washed her mouth out with permanganate and helped her out of the chair. No charge of course.

  “How much did you have in your purse?”

  She lent her a little money to rent a room. “I can get it back from him when he returns. Otherwise I can go to the law. He’s been in trouble with them before.”

  In Lille Eliza rented another of the rooms that seemed to litter her life behind her like unsuccessful love affairs. Her encounter with the champagne salesman on the train now seemed to her in the guise of a seduction, a pregnancy, and a miscarriage. He had hurt her, something came out of her covered with blood, and then she felt better again. In fact, her various aches, the one the shape of Dr. Bono’s hand just below her ribs and the other one the imprint of Dr. Fischbein’s periscope in her insides, had both disappeared. Now she only had asthma and a missed period; she felt better than she had for months. Deciding that neither fried sausages nor the mixture of the Swiss doctor were really good for her, she had a buri and coffee at a nearby café for breakfast and then later in the day bought fruit which she ate in her room. She had lost her Dante, and in place of it she bought a tattered French novel called À rebours, of which she could only make out little bits and pieces, but it was very strange. Her French was not very good. At one place, the hero seemed to have invented a kind of organ which pumped various kinds of wine into his mouth when he pushed the keys. Eliza went to sleep and dreamt of a silver snake which invaded her mouth and wrenched out a pearl covered with blood, showing it to her with gleaming eyes.

  In Lille someone knocked on the door of Eliza’s room but she paid no attention, since she didn’t know anybody in this town. It was probably somebody who had mistaken the room for another one, or an intoxicated roomer who wanted to make her acquaintance for amorous purposes. Later that afternoon she went out for a walk in this town whose map was not yet engraved on her memory, so that she had to guide herself by a few landmarks: a fountain here, a church there, the war memorial, the train station where she had arrived a week before. As she went around the fountain, which was in a round pool and consisted of a boy standing on one foot holding a dolphin, she became aware that a man was following her, perhaps the same one who had knocked at her door. At the edge of her vision she could make out only a lean figure in a trench-coat, bent slightly as though walking into a wind. He caught up with her and fixed her in his eagle eye, not smiling but regarding her with seriousness, candor, and intimacy.

  “I’ve made an appointment for you at Saint-Sauveur,” he said. “It’s the best hospital in town. It’s not London but it’s perfectly adequate. You’re to be there at ten tomorrow morning.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I got your address from your bank in Reading. I told them it was a medical emergency.”

  Dr. Bono looked different each time he changed clothes. There was Dr. Bono in his stained clinical gown, there was Dr. Bono in his blue suit and necktie, and now there was Dr. Bono in his traveling garb, which consisted of gaberdine pants, a heavy wool sweater, and the trench coat which served to carry around his stains, although they now seemed to be grease from some kind of machinery rather than stains from food. Attempting to puzzle out this mystery, which was totally unimportant, she reflected that no one ate wearing a trench coat and that perhaps Dr. Bono owned a motor car which he tinkered with in his spare time.

  “But I don’t want to have my gall bladder removed. I told you that before.”

  “No, you just told me you didn’t see any reason for it. We can’t always do what we want in this world, my dear young lady. Saint-Sauveur is at the Porte de Paris. You’d better take a cab. It’s too far to walk when you’re not feeling well.”

  At the hospital the next day she took off her clothes and put on a gown with an opening in the back, then took that off too and was made to lie down on a table where she was swaddled in sheets and bandages except for her midriff which someone painted rapidly with iodine. Dr. Bono’s eyes peered at her from the space between his mask and his cap. A white-clad ghost gave her an injection and another fitted a mask over her face. Her sense that she was still in possession of her body gradually darkened, along with her vision. Eliza set out on a voyage to a place unknown to her and forbidden to the human mind. She knew that a part of her went there, but it was not a part of her that she in her mind could follow. It was her soul, and it remained attached to her by something that she didn’t know, although she found out later when she met Moira. She didn’t dream, although she did pass through some spaces which she recognized as the organs of her own body, as though she were rehearsing her autopsy. She sank through black and invisible air, which was filled with the fine particles of a substance she identified as pain. Then she opened her eyes and found that she was lying perfectly conscious in a hospital bed, transfixed in position by a dagger which went through her abdomen and penetrated the mattress underneath.

  “Don’t move,” said Dr. Bono. “You’re fine. It’s because you’re trying to move that you’re yelling and complaining so much.”

  Eliza was not aware that she was yelling and complaining. She lay perfectly still so that the dagger wouldn’t hurt her any more than it already had.

  As soon as she left the hospital and was well enough to walk, with a stitch in her side, Eliza went back to London. Her old room was still waiting for her, since she had been paying the rent on it all this time. But when she looked around at the electric cooker, the unmade bed, and the cockroach scuttling across the floor, she left the room without even sitting down. She went to the bank and took out as much money as they would give her, then she walked through the wet streets to Paddington and bought a ticket to Cornwall. It was still winter, and as the train sped west the world outside the glass grew more and mo
re grim and blustery. She stayed the first night in a small hotel in Penzance, and the next day she got on a bus and went to St. Ives, a gray town on a gray bay with whitecaps scudding in from the Atlantic. There she took a room in the house of a Mrs. Mitthrush, who seemed to disapprove of something about her, perhaps her shabby clothes and lank carroty hair. The room was comfortable, with crocheted rugs, an engraving of a battle, and a collection of china cats.

  She slept the rest of the day and all through the night, awakening only at ten o’clock the next morning, and then lay in bed thinking, although not thinking about anything in particular, until noon. Then she got up, sprayed some wintergreen into her throat, combed her hair, and thought of a new way of fastening it with pins; it fell over her forehead, a little lower on one side than the other, and gave her a grave coquettish look that was new and strange to her as she looked at it in the mirror. She still had her freckles, of course, but in the winter they faded away until they were almost invisible. She had almost forgotten how to smile, then she remembered and made one in the mirror.

  Eliza made tea in her room, with hot water supplied by Mrs. Mitthrush, and sometimes had a scone or a bun with it, even though food was prohibited by Mrs. Mitthrush on account of mice. For the other meal of the day she had fish and chips at a shop down the road. Other solitary diners, she saw, provided themselves with a newspaper or a book to make their loneliness less apparent, but she saw no more reason to conceal her loneliness than to conceal her freckles or her scuffed walking shoes, the only shoes she owned. She ate gazing straight ahead of her through the window of the shop at the gray cobbled road and the houses opposite. One day she found herself looking directly into the eyes of a young man who was standing on the pavement looking in through the window. Something about him caught her attention; his placid manner, the ghost of a smile on his lips. He was wearing a gray overcoat and he was bare-headed. Without knowing quite how it happened she found herself smiling at him. He opened the door, entered, and came directly to her table and sat down.