The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  Come with us, my friend. Join our sacred brotherhood. Heed the call to arms. You need this battle. You desire it more than life itself.

  “When I saw Caligari cooking his pigments, he spoke of Kriegslust,” I said.

  “The love of war,” said Ilona, nodding. “The craving for battle. I saw it in my younger brother and all my former husbands.”

  I broke with the soldier’s gaze and fixed on the background. Beneath a blue and cloudless sky, fearless battalions marched, noble horses pulled artillery, and flags of uncertain provenance—all stars and swords and shocks of wheat—fluttered in an orgiastic wind. Now the gallery resounded with the same stirring fife, drum, and brass through which Caligari had brought the panorama to completion, and soon desires such as only soldiering could satisfy were churning through my veins.

  “I need this battle,” I wheezed.

  “Young Francis, I must say that I, too, find the picture very—what is the word?—very excitable,” said Ilona between parched gasps.

  “Exciting.”

  “Exciting and stimulatory.”

  “Do you mean you wish to join these soldiers?”

  “No, I wish to go to the dark gods!”

  Now the platoon broke into song. Although the soldiers’ uniforms were generic, the lyrics were unmistakably German.

  Solang ein Tropfen Blut noch glüht,

  Noch eine Faust den Degen zieht,

  Und noch ein Arm die Büchse spannt,

  Betritt kein Feind hier deinen Strand!

  “‘As long as a drop of blood still glows,’” sang Ilona, alternately translating and hyperventilating, “‘a fist still draws the sword, and one arm still holds the rifle, no enemy will here enter your shore!’”

  In a gesture of supreme sensuality she undid the topmost button—an elegant little mother-of-pearl disc—of her yellow blouse. An instant later the platoon began singing “La Marseillaise.”

  Allons enfants de la Patrie,

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

  Contre nous de la tyrannie,

  L’étendard sanglant est levé!

  “ ‘Arise, children of the Fatherland—the day of glory has arrived!’ ” I shouted as a lump formed in my throat.

  Ilona undid a second mother-of-pearl button. “Please, young Francis, you do not need a battle today!” She grasped my hand and pressed it squarely against her left breast. I could feel her nipple through the fabric. “You will never need a battle! We must fuck ourselves free of Caligari!”

  “ ‘Against us tyranny’s bloody banner is raised!’ ” I sang, my bones and tissues quavering with Kriegslust.

  She lunged at me, and together we tumbled to the floor. The next thing I knew I was kissing her on the lips and undoing the third button.

  “Fuck flags!” she cried. “Fuck fatherlands! Fuck me!”

  Despite the lovely buttons beneath my fingers, despite my wild oscillations between carnal arousal and martial rapture, I managed to entertain a rational thought. We must remove the evidence of our intrusion or risk Caligari’s wrath. I rolled away from Ilona and, rising, grabbed one hem of the crimson curtain. She gained her feet and seized the other side. After three failed attempts we hurled the veil over the top of the stretcher frame. The velvet unfurled, momentarily quelling the painting’s performance (no more music, no more singing) but doubtless leaving its powers undiminished.

  Ilona took my hand and attempted to lead me away. For a brief instant I resisted, mired in Kriegslust, but then the better passion won, and we dashed out the door.

  Standing in my study before Cézanne’s magnificent apples, we sculpted one another with feverish fingers. Avidly I removed the layers of fabric—yellow blouse, silk camisole, Punjabi pants—covering the emerging pentimento of her flesh. With equal zeal she peeled away my blue flannel shirt and brown corduroy trousers. Apprehending Ilona in all her splendor, this Spider Queen with her lavish breasts, alert nipples, and impossibly desirable thighs, I felt confident that Caligari’s painting would never possess me again.

  “Someday I would like to own a satin gown,” she said.

  “Someday I would like to buy you one,” I said, leading her into the bedroom.

  “It will be the color of my hair.”

  “I’m having qualms,” I confessed.

  “Though I see the news has not yet reached your loins,” said Ilona.

  “Perhaps we should postpone all this?”

  “I believe it was Martin Luther who said, ‘It is better to sin boldly than not to sin at all.’ ”

  Like athletes hurling their overheated flesh into a mountain lake, we toppled onto the mattress. Ilona reached between her thighs and lifted away the napkin through which she’d stanched her menstrual flow. She grasped my awestruck cock and drew it toward her, stirring her labia like an alchemist applying pestle to mortar. I decided this must be how the artists and poets of Paris disported themselves in their bohemian garrets. We fucked strenuously, nullifying Caligari’s brushstrokes one by one, eventually achieving le petit mort, and then we did it again. Vive la France.

  “‘Betritt kein Feind hier deinen Strand,’” sang Ilona, then took my prick, stippled with her blood, and clothed it with her mouth. She bobbed her head up and down, her lips sealed around my glans penis (today even Latin was a sensual language), all the while moving her curled palm along the length of my ardor as if she were polishing a candlestick.

  “Formidable!” I reported in French, spasming.

  As the lubricious afternoon progressed, we became our own private museum, a gallery of forbidden sculpture, pose after pose, entrance by invitation only. Periodically we visited the icebox in the sitting room, gorging on cheese and dried figs, bathing our brains in Riesling, serving ourselves untoward portions of strudel. Seated beside Ilona on the divan, intoxicated by the raw fact of her presence, her Existenz, I alternated my gaze between her physical facticity and the invisible purple oil she’d wrought and titled Violet Silence.

  “I believe I’m beginning to understand our theory,” I said, pointing toward the canvas. Technically it was no longer blank; streaming through the casement window, the sun cast the shadow of a tree limb on the surface.

  “Next time I shall dare to use paint,” she said.

  Not only did the icebox satiate our hunger, it abetted our bacchanal. Returning to the canopy bed with our spoils, we adorned each other with strawberry preserves and clotted cream. “I have memorized you,” said Ilona, fixing me with the emphatic stare of Cesare the cat. “I have etched you on my retinas, every line and hair and pore.” She climbed out of bed and, retrieving a hand mirror from her madras bag, held it before my face. “One day I shall be compelled to paint your portrait.”

  We proceeded to the bathroom. The tub was as large as Conrad had promised, and the water indeed proved delectably hot. Slowly, languidly, we washed away the residue of our pleasure.

  “It is very awkward having eight legs, but I manage,” said Ilona. “I can’t recommend four eyes, either. I see too much.”

  “Ilona, you don’t actually believe—”

  “And now I must go to my tongue fun—”

  “Your dungeon.”

  “Before Nurse Roussel comes pounding on your door, looking for her lost lunatic.”

  She hauled herself free of the tub, her limbs tinted rose by the hot water, her back and shoulders glossy with her ablutions. Upon collecting her clothes, she availed herself of a freshly laundered Turkish towel from the linen closet and a new menstrual pad from her madras bag. She dressed hurriedly. I followed her into the foyer.

  “How marvelous that we have both of them in our lives,” she said.

  “Both of what?”

  “Theory and fucking. Reason and Eros. I am so glad we are friends, and yet my heart is filled with sorrow.”

  “Don’t be sad, Ilona.”

  “There is something so gloriously ordinary about friend-ship”—she opened the door—“and gloriously ordinary things are forbidden to the Spider
Queen of Ogygia.”

  “I shall always be your friend.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “How could I forsake the person who rescued me from Caligari’s art?”

  “Last week Commander Ludwig told me an interesting fact.” She stepped into the corridor. “The asteroid Eros comes closer to Earth than any celestial body except the moon.” Given Herr Mittendorff’s enthusiasm for Ludwig’s mellorope, Gaston’s dreadnacht, Pietro’s pikeworm, and Ilona’s arachnid grandmother, I did not hesitate to approach him after dinner and request his assistance in bringing the sculptures to the next stage in their evolution. He replied that he would indeed be happy to remove the metal pan of impossible creatures from my classroom tomorrow, deliver it to the kitchen, and have the cooks bake the pieces for two hours in a slow oven. I considered asking him to take particular care with Fräulein Wessels’s spider egg, but I did not wish to betray the probability that I was falling in love with her.

  Although Ilona’s passion had surely put my Kriegslust in remission, and perhaps cured it completely, my dream that night betrayed a mind marooned in angst. With no aim beyond the rewards of perversity, my subconscious self opened the wax repository in my classroom and smashed the lunatics’ unfired sculptures to bits. An instant later the dream took me to my study, where I scissored an apple out of the Cézanne still life and ate it. As the dream dissipated, I transferred all the unframed oils from my portfolio to the asylum courtyard, soaked them in kerosene, and made a burnt offering to the gods of modern art.

  Shortly after dawn my apartments began reverberating with the steady tramp-tramp-tramp of numerous feet. I put on my shirt and trousers, then rushed out the door, sprinted along the corridor, and pursued the passageway to the gallery door. Caligari had posted a guard, the same obese and freckled sentry who’d threatened me with his Luger on Sunday afternoon.

  “I need to analyze the work of my student Ludwig Ruttluff,” I said, speaking above the thunderous cadence.

  “Not at six o’clock in the morning you don’t,” said the sentry.

  “His sculptures hold clues that may lead to his cure.”

  “Today’s exhibition is for soldiers only. Geh weg, mein Herr.”

  Accepting this momentary defeat, I strode away, intending to reconnoiter the château grounds and perhaps solve the mystery of the marching troops. Reaching the grand lobby, which was crowded even at this early hour, I observed that the tramping had inspired a half-dozen inmates to strut back and forth holding phantom rifles and exchanging flamboyant salutes. An agitated Conrad Röhrig stood beside a potted aspidistra, the remnant of a cigarette balanced on his lower lip.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

  “No, but I can tell you that early on Sunday morning Herr Mittendorff saw you leaving the gallery.” Conrad stepped away from the aspidistra and, aiming his dormant cigarette like a dart, hurled it into the flowerpot. “Perhaps you were inspecting Caligari’s secret picture?”

  “I was disoriented.”

  “It’s a confusing passageway,” he said in an amicably conspiratorial tone. “Perhaps you would like to join me as I attempt to fathom why Herr Direktor has brought hundreds of soldiers to Kleinbrück?”

  “Indeed.”

  He led me to the north wing of the château, its walls lined with tapestries depicting troubadours in walled gardens. Upon reaching his apartments, he dashed inside, then returned gripping a pair of field glasses.

  A half-hour later, having ascended thirty flights of stairs, we stepped breathless and perspiring from the topmost landing to the roof of the asylum. Gingerly we made our way along the parapet surrounding the clock tower. I glanced at the mammoth timepiece, which suggested some fabulous disc-shaped flying apparatus out of Ludwig’s fantasies (its harpoon hands poised to spin madly and launch the machine into outer space), then joined Conrad in studying the peculiar maneuvers unfolding just beyond the château walls.

  Two parallel columns of soldiers were on the march, the near one entering the museum, there presumably to behold Ecstatic Wisdom, the far line exiting and then returning to Kleinbrück Station. Conrad passed me the field glasses. I worked the focus knob, resolving the blur into a network of railroad tracks bisected by gravel paths (an image that for me evoked the Wessels-Wyndham theory of nonpictorial art). I panned the glasses past a water tower, a semaphore signal, and a row of tank cars apparently waiting to carry petrol to the emergent Western Front. The troop train stood idly on a siding, its locomotive swathed in steam, its twenty coaches dispatching and receiving young men in dull green German Imperial Army uniforms.

  I surveyed a half-dozen soldiers as they tramped toward the river, crossed the footbridge, and disappeared through the open doors to the gallery. No man carried a rifle or pack; they were going to an art exhibition, after all, not a battlefield. Their patches and chevrons identified them as privates, corporals, and sergeants—from the IV Corps, Second Division, 3rd and 6th Regiments—but a few commissioned officers were also on the scene: captains, majors, and colonels, setting the pace by banging their riding crops and swagger sticks against rocks and tree trunks.

  I handed Conrad the field glasses, and for a full minute he observed the troops as they emerged from their encounter with Caligari’s magnum opus.

  “What sort of picture does Herr Direktor have on display?” he asked.

  “A panorama pulsing with Kriegslust. The pigments are evidently bewitched. He calls it Ecstatic Wisdom.”

  “It has changed these poor schoolboys.” Conrad pressed the field glasses into my grasp. “And not for the better.”

  “I believe that’s the whole point.”

  “So the great medical genius, healer of madmen, sorcerer extraordinaire, has elected to soil himself with history.”

  “History is paying him well,” I said. “On Saturday he told me his painting will bring permanent financial security to Träumenchen—but he also speaks of aesthetic intensity: I’m afraid he sees this war as a grand-scale Nietzschean work of art.”

  “Yes, that would be Caligari.”

  I scrutinized the transmogrified soldiers. One instant they looked stupefied, automata in thrall to the painting, and the next they radiated a boundless desire to find a battle, any battle, and hurl themselves into its maw. How pitiable they were, these golden lads going off to die with no Spider Queens on hand to deliver them through Eros.

  The clock hands locked onto the new hour, seven a.m. As the bell began to toll, I steeled myself, lest the vibrations waft me over the parapet. With each ponderous gong I could sense La Belle Époque slipping further away, torpedoed by U-boats, bombed by dirigibles. For all I knew, Cézanne really believed a freshly observed carrot would one day set off a revolution, but just then the world faced a more carnivorous sort of crisis.

  “It’s all about Soldatentum,” said Conrad. “A difficult word to translate. ‘Soldierliness’ perhaps. Military service as a spiritual calling. Soldatentum is the state religion of Germany.”

  “And many other nations as well.”

  “True, but they’re more subtle about it.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised when the mesmerized troops started singing, but their recital caught me off guard, and Conrad was even more astonished than I.

  “Solang ein Tropfen Blut noch glüht, noch eine Faust den Degen zieht. . . !”

  At this juncture I spotted Caligari himself, stovepipe hat squeezed onto his dome, feet planted on a grassy hill between the footbridge and the museum. Waving his boar’s-head cane about like a maestro’s baton, clanging his ridiculous bell, he urged the troops toward their lesson in war appreciation.

  “Und noch ein Arm die Büchse spannt,” chorused the Kaiser’s infantrymen, “betritt kein Feind hier deinen Strand!”

  After ninety minutes the parade finally ended as the last of the German soldiers, still singing, filed back into the passenger coaches. The doors slammed closed, the pistons hissed, the wheels squealed against the rails.


  No sooner had the steam-driven behemoth rolled away, bound for some staging area or other, than another train arrived, its locomotive snorting and chuffing. Scores of unarmed soldiers spilled from the coaches, each young man wearing a deep blue French Army uniform—III Corps, First Division, 4th and 10th Regiments—and then the ritual occurred again: the parade to the museum, the enforced adoration of Ecstatic Wisdom, the return of the transformed schoolboys with their exultant faces and voices raised in song.

  “Ah, so he isn’t selling his services to the Kaiser exclusively,” I said. “He means to infect all of Western Europe’s armies with Kriegslust.”

  “And perhaps also the colonial armies of India and Africa,” said Conrad.

  “I imagine the Russians and Turks would be willing to meet his price.”

  “If I thought I could find another job, I would leave this place.”

  “How long have you been with Caligari?”

  Splaying his fingers, Conrad racked his unruly locks. “It seems like forever. Before he discovered his mystic gifts, before he built Träumenchen, we used to travel around southern Germany and northern Italy together staging a grand spectacle at village fairs: Lorenzo the Hypnotist presents Giacomo the Somnambulist.”

  “Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!” sang the French infantrymen.

  “The show began with Lorenzo ringing his brass bell to summon a crowd, then directing their attention to an upright cabinet resembling a warped coffin,” said Conrad. “Lorenzo would claim that for the past fifteen years he’d kept Giacomo in a state of suspended animation, lest the fiend go rampaging through the countryside committing murders. But in recent weeks, Lorenzo boasted, he had gained control of the sleepwalker’s will.”