‘We couldn’t cure her. Still, at least she now knows she isn’t an interpreter, and that nobody means her any harm. Don’t you, Frau Ludwig?’ The doctor gave her knee a clumsy pat through the bedclothes.
The elderly patient seemed unaware of what was going on around her. She was asleep with her eyes open and breathing exclusively through her mouth.
She looks thin, Marc thought. Almost emaciated. Quite unlike his mental picture of her.
‘Look. . .’ The doctor cleared his throat. ‘No offence, Doctor, but I can’t imagine how you hope to get through to her. She’s very suspicious of strangers.’
‘I’m not a stranger, actually,’ said Marc, removing the lid of the cardboard tube. ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked, turning to look at the woman as he turned it upside down and carefully shook out its contents.
No response.
‘What on earth is that?’ the doctor asked a minute later, when Marc had completed his preparations. He went over to the wall with his hands extended in the direction of the canvas which his young visitor had temporarily secured to it.
‘An heirloom,’ Marc replied. From now on, he concentrated on the patient alone.
‘Look.’
He stepped aside to enable her blank gaze to dwell on the picture facing her bed. ‘I’ve brought you something.’
‘“Haberland’s House”?’ queried the doctor, reading the little inscription in the bottom-right corner of the painting. He turned round. ‘All I can see is a white expanse.’
Marc took no notice of him. He was now standing right beside the old woman, at the head of the bed. In spite of her severe mental illness, her face hadn’t entirely lost its gentle expression.
‘My uncle Benny told me you liked it a lot,’ Marc whispered, too softly for the doctor to hear. ‘You were the only one who grasped what it was meant to represent when you spotted it in his flat. Benny took it to the house in the forest later on. Do you remember?’
No change. Still no response.
‘You see, my young friend!’ The doctor sounded almost triumphant. ‘She won’t let anyone get through to her.’
Marc Lucas nodded absently.
‘I’ll leave it here for you,’ he whispered in the old woman’s ear. ‘And I’ll come again. Next weekend. Perhaps you’ll feel like talking to me about my father then.’
About the man to whom I owe my life in every respect.
‘I think you were a great help to him.’
Marc continued to whisper, although Emma’s face betrayed not the least sign of comprehension.
‘Anyway, you knew him better than I do.’
He brushed the hair off her forehead and stepped back. Emma Ludwig’s mind really didn’t seem to be in the same room as he was. Her face remained blank and expressionless as she gazed inertly at the coarse-grained white canvas.
She didn’t react when he gave her hand a farewell squeeze, nor did she stare after him when the doctor escorted him out.
She didn’t even blink when, a long time afterwards, her eye shed a single, impotent tear.
LEARN TO FORGET
We are a self-help group looking for former participants in a psychiatric amnesia experiment. You yourself may have been a patient and cannot now remember the experiments to which you were subjected. If you have the slightest doubt about your memories, please visit our self-help page on the Internet under:
www.mpu-berlin.org/anfrage/
There you can check whether you have ever participated in an amnesia experiment.
Many thanks.
About the idea underlying SPLINTER
Before I started work on SPLINTER there were many things in my life I would sooner have forgotten. For example how I once, when utterly exhausted and befuddled by jet lag, went astray in my own hotel room. I’d meant to go to the bathroom but found myself outside in the passage. The door had swung shut, needless to say, and my key was on the bedside table. The only other thing you need to know is that I’m not a pyjama fetishist. All I wear as a rule is a short T-shirt, with the emphasis on short.
My ride down in a fully occupied lift, the horrified expression of the woman behind the reception desk and the giggles of the bellhop who escorted this half-naked German back to his room – I would have swallowed an amnesia pill on the spot if it had blotted out my memory of this toe-curling episode.
I would have done so then. But that was before I started to write SPLINTER and made a closer study of the subject.
Hand on heart: Would you take a lovesickness pill if one existed?
Or an amnesia injection after a particularly embarrassing or – worse still – tragic experience?
You may think that this question – and with it the entire theme of SPLINTER – belongs in the realm of science fiction. But don’t be misled. Scientists (criminals too, alas) have long had access to substances that can eradicate recollections from our short-term memory – and I’m not just talking about mental blackouts occasioned by excessive alcohol intake: Flunitrazepam, for example, which has sadly gained notoriety as a so-called date-rape drug. In combination with other narcotics, it ensures that rape victims cannot remember the horrible crime perpetrated on them.
But research into drugs that erase long-term memory is ongoing. Biologists from New York and Rehovot, Israel, have discovered an active substance that blocks an important protein in nerve tissue if injected into the cerebral cortex. This, however, induces complete amnesia.
Mark Bear of the Massuchusetts Institute of Technology is conducting some rather more specific research in this field. He wants to get rid of bad memories without affecting good ones. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ he asked in the 14/2008 edition of DER SPIEGEL for 31 March 2008, under the title ‘Der Sprache des Gehirns’ (‘The Language of the Brain’, an extremely readable article by Jörg Blech on the present state of research, which I link with my website, www.sebastianfitzek.de.)
Bear, who assumes that traumatic experiences etch themselves more deeply into our nerve tissue than positive ones, is looking for a pharmacological substance that will focus solely on these deeper ‘engravings’.
I myself am in the fortunate position of not having so far undergone any experiences as traumatic as those inflicted on Marc Lucas in the novel you’re holding in your hands at this moment, so I won’t presume to pass judgement on people so desperate that they yearn for deliberately induced amnesia. While writing SPLINTER I came to realize more and more that I don’t want to relinquish a single one of my memories. Neither of the day I received the news that my first book was to be published, nor of the night my mother died. I believe that people are the sum of their memories, and if there is any reason for our presence here on earth, it may be to accumulate as many of them as possible during our journey through life.
Before I forget. . .
It has become almost a tradition for me to begin my acknowledgements by thanking the reader. So thank you.
To be quite frank, you aren’t in the forefront of my mind while I’m writing. I’ve so far received thousands of emails addressed to [email protected] (which I really do answer personally, by the way, even if it sometimes takes me a while), and many of them contradict each other. What one person likes another thinks is stupid, and vice versa, so I stick to what I did in my first thriller, THERAPY: I simply write a story I would like to read. That’s why I’m so grateful I’m not alone, and that there are other people, like you, who spend time with my books. That’s precisely why I thank you and hope you had an entertaining hour or two. If not, I know the address of a clinic in Berlin that can help you to forget this novel in short order. . .
This book is dedicated to my brother Clemens Fitzek. We are seven years and eight hours apart, the eight hours being what it seems to take to drive along the urban expressway between Charlottenburg and Köpenick. Although we see each other so seldom, I feel profoundly attached to you. Thanks so much, and not for your medical advice alone.
Sabine – the same goes for you, of course. I�
�d have been lost without all the invaluable professional tips you gave me.
I owe a very special debt of gratitude to Dr Marcus Schuchmann, who gave me some valuable medical advice in the cheap Berlin restaurant where we’d taken refuge from a shower of rain. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal your field of expertise without giving away the end of the thriller. Next time, you’ll get more than a measly hamburger, I promise!
Sandra, I thank the screenwriter who wrote you the leading role in the film of my life, even though I now have to get to grips with its side effects: for instance, the little remarks that upset the endings of my stories – and improve them as a result!
BB, how glad I am we didn’t dump your father’s car in the lake that time. We really came within an ace of doing so. I thank you today for the experience I was able to incorporate in Splinter and hope your unwitting father never reads this.
Gerlinde, you’re crazy but wonderful. A lot of things have changed, but your unstinting friendship and support endure. I can’t thank you enough for them (and for introducing me to the radio oracle).
Zsolt Bács, you got rather short measure in my last acknowledgements, even though you gave me one of the most helpful tips for my thriller THE SOUL-BREAKER when I was suffering from writer’s block. You’ll get something nice for it, but remember Santa Claus: one big present is enough.
I sometimes come across people who look more innocuous than me but are even crazier. For instance, Thomas Zorbach and his team from vm-people. Anyone who manages to induce his colleagues to stage my book readings by lying down in mortuary refrigeration drawers (thanks, Oliver Ludwigs) has more than earned his place in these acknowledgements.
People who work with me have to be prepared for the worst every day. My editor, Carolin Graehl, got a shock when she returned from holiday and overheard Andrea Ludorf (who looks after my reading trips) terminate a phone call with the words: ‘. . .Fine, so I’ll get hold of a wheelchair for Sebastian Fitzek.’
Carolin’s fears were groundless. I hadn’t had an accident; I simply needed the thing for my reading (better not ask why).
Christian Meyer, a very good friend who had really only wanted to accompany me to the reading, had to push me on to the stage in the said wheelchair. I had previously bullied him into wearing a surgical gown and mask.
Thank you all for joining in this tomfoolery. Take seriously what you do but never yourself. That’s my favourite motto, and it applies to Manuela best of all. You not only do a splendidly professional and meticulous job (you’re my quick-out brain!) but laugh at all my silly antics as well. What I thank you for most, though, is your friendship.
If I look like a fighting machine at my next reading it’ll be down to Karl Raschke, former personal trainer to Graziano ‘Rocky’ Rocchigiani, who thinks, for some obscure reason, that he has to develop me into an iron man. I’m so exhausted by the end of a work-out, I don’t have the energy to cancel our next appointment. Thanks, Kalle. But for you I’d still be a fat, lazy couch potato. In other words, I’d still be happy.
Sabrina Rabow, only a fantastic press agent like you could have kept my criminal record out of the papers all these years. (I’m joooooking!) Thanks so much for that and for always being there for me.
I hit on the basic idea for SPLINTER during a conversation with the neurosurgeon Professor Samii at his clinic in Hannover. He startled me the following remark: ‘Most people are looking for new techniques and ways of storing knowledge in their brains more easily and quickly. Very few concern themselves with how one learns to forget.’ Learn to forget. . . Thank you, Professor Samii, for that wonderful quotation.
The following have earned a place in my acknowledgements’ eternal Hall of Fame:
Dr Hans-Peter Übleis and Beate Kuckertz.
Thank you for letting a child like me run riot in your publishing house. What publisher could suit my thrillers better than Droemer? After all, it’s an anagram of ‘Moerder’!
Carolin Graehl and Regine Weisbrod. Damn it, I always think after the first draft: ‘That’s it, there’s nothing more to be done.’
And then you come along and improve the book so much with your editing I can scarcely believe it myself. You’re wonderful. It isn’t your fault if people don’t like my thrillers, and that’s a fact.
It seems a lot of people clear off if they’ve had to work with me for any length of time. It started with my first editor, Dr Andrea Müller, who discovered me, and to whom I’m eternally grateful. She was followed by marketing boss Klaus Kluge, who has also defected to the competition. Well, you’ll soon discover what a tough sell obscure authors like Dan Brown and Ken Follett are. :-)
Seriously, though, I’m delighted for you and grateful to you for all you did for me.
I now know so many Droemer staff whose daily work ensures that my books get read I could type out the entire in-house telephone directory. On behalf of them all, I express my thanks to Andrea Ludorf, Andrea Fischer, Dominik Huber, Susanne Klein, Monika Neudeck, Sibylle Dietzel, Iris Haas, Andrea Bauer, Georg Regis, Andreas Thiele, Katrin Englberger and Heide Bogner, but the list is far from complete.
My thanks go also to Claudia von Hornstein, Christine Ziehl, Uwe Neumahr and everyone else in the team from AVA International, my literary agency and, first and foremost, of course, to Roman Hocke. He’s the agent who first made an author of me, but I wouldn’t recommend him to anyone else. He’d have less time for me if I did!
The same applies to Tanja Howarth. If you’ve got a book and want it published in Britain and the USA, take an amnesia pill and forget her phone number. Tanja is mine.
And now for the cheap seats, which I’ll polish off in a single sentence. (No, it’s not just that I don’t have much room left. You’re important to me, honestly, but these acknowledgements are already so long and paper is getting more and more expensive. . .)
So thanks to Ivo Beck, David Groenewold, Oliver Kalkofe, Arno Müller, Jochen Trus, Thomas Koschwitz, Dirk Stiller, Iván Sáinz-Pardo, Peter Prange, Christian Becker, Stefan Bäumer, Dagmar Miska, Christoph Menardi (thanks for your surname), Kossi, Fruti, the Alzners, Simon Jäger, Michael Treutler, and, of course, my father Freimut Fitzek, who was second to none in encouraging my love of literature. My next book is for you – not that it’ll be much use to you.
So. . . Have I forgotten anyone? Ten to one I have, and I can’t, alas, blame that on any pill. If, after reading this book, you aren’t so sure you can remember everything in your life – if you feel you may have taken part in an amnesia experiment at some stage – there’s a website on the Internet where you can find out:
www.mpu-berlin.or/anfrage
Drop in there sometime. It’ll be worth it!
I shall end by addressing the question I’m always being asked: Are my stories based on fact? To be quite honest, I can’t really remember.
Sebastian Fitzek
Berlin, March 2009
Splinter Page 27