by Ann Gosslin
* * *
In the free hour before his session with Ismail Mahmoud, Gessen played the video of Ursula’s session with Vidor, listening impassively for a few minutes before turning up the volume and zooming in on his face. Broken, bones. Father, gone. Dry, desert. Nothing particularly remarkable there. Except maybe that bit about the father.
Though he was not as convinced as Ursula about the utility of word association results, as an addition to Vidor’s other assessments, they might provide a key piece of the puzzle.
Close to the end of the session, Vidor’s expression abruptly changed, and his voice took on a different timbre. Slight, but it was there. He flicked his right ear twice, and opened his eyes wide, as he stretched his hand towards the painting and cried out. On the tape, Ursula’s voice was tinged with concern. Are you all right? Gessen reset the video and played it again. That ear flick looked familiar. He’d seen it before, but where? In a session, or was it…?
He opened Vidor’s file and clicked on the video from Copenhagen, creating a split screen so he could view both videos at the same time, frame by frame. There was Vidor, mounting the dais, accepting the plaque from the Crown Prince, turning to the lectern to face the audience. And there it was, the ear flick, followed by a flash of anger as Vidor flushed red and began to shout. Gessen closed his eyes. That odd little tic had unlocked something in his brain. Rewind, go back. He’d seen that gesture before.
17
With deliberate care, Vidor unfolded the linen napkin and placed it on his lap. He was alone in the dining room and looking forward to a solitary breakfast when he spotted the English girl stepping through the door and heading his way. He was in no mood to chat, having awoken with the odd sense that, during the night, he had travelled a long distance through rocky and treacherous terrain.
While dressing, and groggy with fatigue, he’d been startled by a sharp knock on the bedroom wall, followed by a series of staccato raps. What had that idiot boy been doing? Probably sending cryptic messages as another way to insult him. The rage he felt left him so dizzy and weak he’d been forced to drop his head between his knees.
The English girl waved as she walked past, though her eyes looked vague. Since their conversation by the fishpond, she’d cut her long hair short, and it fluffed about her ears like a blown dandelion. She perched on the empty seat next to him. The breakfast buffet offered a sumptuous spread, but the only thing on her plate was two pieces of wheat toast, thinly spread with butter. He eyed her new haircut with a twinge of alarm. Easier to manage, or had she chopped it off in a moment of distress? He hoped he hadn’t traumatised the poor girl.
She bit off a piece of toast. ‘I know who you are.’ She gave him a quick sidelong glance.
A muscle twitched in his jaw. She couldn’t possibly know such a thing. Or was the sad-girl demeanour an act, and she truly was mad? ‘I’m sorry, what?’ A chill passed through him, and he glanced at the gloomy skies through the window. How quickly the weather changed in the mountains.
‘My name’s Libby,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I mentioned it before.’ She pulled her cardigan tight around her thin chest and hugged her arms. ‘Anyway, I have a friend at St Catharine’s. She said one of her professors had a crack-up while getting some award.’ She nibbled her toast. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’
The back of Vidor’s neck tingled. Though well known in the rarefied world of neuroscience, it had never occurred to him that anyone here, especially this slip of a girl, would possibly know who he was. Perhaps his recent groundbreaking work, celebrated enough to capture the million-euro Søgaard Prize, had catapulted him into the public sphere.
‘Funny, you’d be here.’ She scratched her wrist hard, until pink welts rose on her skin. ‘There was an article in the newspaper.’ She looked at him sadly. ‘And some moron posted a video online, though you probably haven’t seen it.’ She tilted her chin at the empty room. ‘Can you believe this place? No phones. No internet or newspapers. Crazy, right? Do they really think that locking us away from the real world is a good idea?’ She’d taken off her cardigan and gooseflesh stippled her arms. ‘And what happens when we get out? We’ll be like baby mice, unprepared for the onslaught that awaits us.’ She flung out her hand, knocking over a full glass of water, staring blankly, as it flooded the tablecloth and dripped onto the floor.
Vidor was disturbed by the naked quality of her distress. They weren’t supposed to ask, but if he did, he wondered if she would tell him why she was here.
‘Don’t worry.’ She abruptly stood and leaned in close until her warm breath tickled his ear. ‘Your secret is safe with me.’
* * *
On the way back to his room, Vidor paused to examine the jagged line of the mountains rising above the valley, only to be seized by an attack of vertigo as the world revolved under his feet. On the other side of the gardens, screened by a wall of shrubbery, lay the vast bowl of open space. Strange that there wasn’t a sturdier fence to protect them from their baser impulses. As long as he could remember, Vidor had loathed standing on any kind of high place, be it cliff, bridge, or parapet. Terrified of the siren call of the infinite ether, l’appel du vide. Not that he harboured a wish to die, but the compulsion to launch his body into the tantalising emptiness might someday prove too much.
Sweat broke out on his brow as he stumbled up the steps of his chalet. The bearded attendant at the front desk glanced up as he hurried past and pushed open the door to his room. Alone at last.
Except he wasn’t.
A man was sitting on his bed. Dark hair, blue shirt, slip-on shoes. A flash of rage stabbed him in the chest. ‘What are you doing? Get out of my room.’ When Vidor raised his fist in the air, the man copied him in perfect synchrony. It was like looking in a mirror. The face, so familiar, jeered at him.
‘Get out.’ Vidor launched himself at the intruder and fell flat on the empty bed. No one was there, nothing at all but a figment of his imagination. Had he gone mad? He held his head and groaned. It was this wretched place, with its cabal of doctors and attendants, all conspiring to drive him to the brink of lunacy. They wouldn’t stop until he was reduced to a gibbering creature, shrivelled and pale, chained to the wall of a dank bunker deep in the mountains. He had to get out. But who would help him? His pulse slowed as the surge of adrenaline waned. Dr Lindstrom seemed sympathetic. It was Gessen who was keeping him here against his will. Today, he would devise a plan. Tomorrow, he would beg Dr Lindstrom to help him escape.
18
‘Did you have a mishap with the gardening shears?’ Vidor dropped into the chair opposite Gessen’s desk.
‘What?’ He frowned. ‘Oh that, it’s nothing.’ He’d forgotten about the plaster on his thumb. It should have healed by now, but the nasty cut he’d acquired while poking around Vidor’s study was taking an inordinate amount of time to heal.
He followed Vidor’s gaze as he took note of the recent additions to his office. Green and gold paisley cushions on the chair in the corner. A row of fossil ammonites on the bookshelf, flaunting their perfect spiralled symmetry. That morning, he’d brought in a few specimens from his collection at home, thinking they might make a good conversation piece.
‘I see you’re admiring my ammonites,’ Gessen said. ‘Fascinating, aren’t they?’ He paused. ‘Until I was lured away by the call of medicine, I began my studies in mathematics and wrote a thesis on Fibonacci spirals in nature. A lovely sequence. Do you know it?’
Vidor’s shocked expression turned quickly to suspicion. ‘Of course I know it. It is deeply embedded in my bones.’ He tapped his sternum. ‘I, too, wrote a thesis on the Fibonacci sequence as an undergraduate.’
‘Did you? How strange.’ Once again, Gessen had the unsettling feeling that he and Vidor, following their separate journeys from birth, had landed on the opposite sides of the same coin. ‘And where did you write your thesis, in Paris?’
‘Cambridge.’ His voice was flat. ‘As I told you several times already, I left for Engl
and soon after earning my baccalaureate.’
Gessen waited for him to fill the silence, but Vidor remained mute. ‘Do you mind if I put on some music?’ He rose from the chair. ‘I find it helps to settle the mind.’ He pressed a button on the remote and adjusted the volume as the opening notes of a Bach violin concerto filled the room. ‘Close your eyes,’ he said, lowering the lights. ‘Allow the music to fill your senses.’
Fibonacci spirals, Bach. What next, chanting and crystals? Gessen was rapidly running out of ideas. With a murder charge hanging over Vidor’s head, there was no time to waste. But getting at the root of the problem was impossible, as long as he failed to discover the crack in Vidor’s defences. How could he possibly prove amok syndrome, or any other form of temporary psychosis, with no evidence of festering trauma to work with? Vidor’s toxicology screen in Copenhagen was clear, so he couldn’t point to mind-altering drugs as a mitigating factor.
Even his blood glucose levels, which Vidor insisted was the real cause of the attack, had been perfectly normal. His EEG checked out as well, though a single recording wasn’t sufficient to rule out temporal lobe epilepsy. He could schedule a longer EEG and try to induce a seizure with flashing lights. But such assessments took time, and Vidor’s extended stay, with no ground gained, was costing Gessen money he could ill afford.
He closed his eyes and allowed the music to wash over him. The last time he’d heard this piece live was at a concert hall in Florence. After stumbling upon the file of documents that revealed the terrible history of his mother and father, both long dead, he’d tried to outrun the pain by travelling to Tibet, before circling back to Europe by way of Italy. He’d begun his journey in a tiny village in Sicily, before drifting northward, accompanied at times by a ghostly companion he could only assume was a delusion created by his exhausted mind. Or perhaps a spectral presence, as suggested by an old woman he’d met on a mountain trail. Mostly benevolent, and believed to accompany those on the brink of death.
After he’d reached Florence and was sitting in the darkened concert hall as the final notes of Bach’s violin concerto in E major faded away, the idea of becoming a psychiatrist floated into his head. If he could dedicate his life to helping others heal from trauma and the terrible weight of the past, it might provide him with a tiny measure of redemption.
Through half-closed lids, he studied Vidor’s bored expression, as if trying to parse the thoughts of an unfamiliar life-form.
‘Lovely, isn’t it,’ Gessen murmured. ‘Stirs the soul.’ When he switched off the music, the air in the room hummed with the last vibrations of the strings.
‘Are you going to ask me about my dreams now? Whatever programme you have in mind,’ Vidor said, ‘could you please step up the pace so I can get back home. Every day I’m not in my office, or the classroom, or the lab is a day wasted.’ He gave Gessen a thin-lipped smile.
An email from Ursula earlier in the day was evidence of Vidor’s growing desperation. Just after breakfast, he’d cornered her on the way to her office and begged her to have him released. She promised to speak to Gessen on his behalf, hoping to calm him down, but it was clear Vidor’s frustration had reached a tipping point. And a desperate man, feeling caged, might resort to rash behaviour. In the coming days, he would have to be carefully watched.
Gessen waited for Vidor to finish. ‘Rest assured,’ he said, ‘discussion of your dreams is not on the agenda. Not yet, anyway.’ He smiled. ‘Now, I’d like you to turn your attention to the past.’ Gessen met Vidor’s eyes. ‘You want to go home? Then no more dodging the ball. Today, you’re going to tell me about your father. I suggest you start with your very first memory, and then go from there.’
19
Another dead end. With Vidor continuing to stonewall, short of strapping his patient down and threatening him with shock therapy, what could Gessen do? But each time he suggested there might have been friction between father and son, Vidor countered with another saccharine tale of paternal heroism, and how the man had surely taken his rightful place in the pantheon, alongside the other gods.
Gessen paged through his notes. Could the trauma have originated from someone else? Another family member, a neighbour, a friend. Or was he simply grasping at straws, and there was truly nothing to uncover? A case of Gessen’s own traumatic history colouring his judgement.
When Mathilde came into the room with his coffee and the day’s mail, he leapt up to take the tray, welcoming the distraction.
‘Shall I light the fire in the sitting room?’ she asked. ‘It’s chilly today.’
The thermometer outside the window hovered just above zero. Chilly indeed. ‘Thank you, Mathilde. If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘Not in the least, and it will do you good to sit by the fire. If you don’t mind my saying, you look terribly worn out. When was the last time you took a proper holiday?’
He smiled. She knew the answer as well as he did. ‘Two years ago?’
‘More like seven.’ She lingered in the doorway, her usually brisk expression softening. ‘If you’re not careful, you’ll end up on the other side of that desk.’
She might be right. Yesterday, he’d been overwhelmed by desire to run away, to escape his fractious patients and gnawing worry about the fate of the clinic. It was true he hadn’t had a holiday in ages, and he sometimes dreamed of sprouting wings and flying over the Alps to the warmer climes of Italy.
Years ago, not long after finishing his studies at the Sorbonne, he’d read a newspaper article about the plight of the swallows in Switzerland, too exhausted and hungry to make their migratory flight to the other side of the Alps. The weather so harsh that the exhausted birds were being gathered up in cages and flown in aeroplanes to their winter feeding grounds in sunny Ticino. The favourite bird of his first and only love, and the clinic’s namesake. At the time he’d wondered, with a pang of sadness, if Sophie might have read the same article, and imagining her gratitude at the quirky generosity of the Swiss. Transporting the birds over the very mountains he could see outside his window, because they were unable to make the journey on their own.
He met Mathilde’s questioning glance and suppressed his habitual response. It was their old argument. Though a good ten years his junior, she’d been his faithful aide-de-camp for many years, and her maternal chiding was woven into their dynamic. ‘By the way,’ he hesitated, ‘has Ursula said anything to you?’
‘What about?’ Her look was inscrutable.
Their usual game of don’t ask, don’t tell.
‘You mean that ring on her finger?’ Her look was sympathetic. ‘I wouldn’t worry. She’ll tell you when she’s ready.’
He considered asking her to join him for coffee, but she had her own work to do and he couldn’t keep putting off the business of the day. Seated by the fire, he poured out the coffee and sifted through his stack of mail, pausing at a letter postmarked Toronto. In the search for Vidor’s family, he’d written to a number of women in Canada and the US, after Vidor let drop that one of his sisters had emigrated to North America. Though his letter campaign felt like trying to hit a target with a fistful of pebbles, perhaps he’d struck the bullseye on the first attempt. He slit open the envelope and smoothed the letter on his knee.
Toronto, Canada
20 November 2008
Dear Dr Gessen,
My apologies for the delay in replying to your letter of 12 November. I was out of the country for several weeks, and only returned the day before yesterday to a chilly house and a stack of mail teetering on the table in the front hall.
At first, I couldn’t make any sense of your letter and assumed there must be some mistake. Crossed wires, you might call it, or perhaps simply a question of one of those computer searches gone wrong. It happens quite often these days, I understand, what with old classmates and former lovers anxious to rekindle memories best left in the past where they belong. When I read your letter, my first thought was that I didn’t know anyone named Vidor Kiraly.
As to the matter of that gentleman being a relation of mine, I could by some stretch of the imagination accept that your Mr Kiraly was a distant cousin from the old country looking to reconnect. Vidor is certainly a common name in Hungary, as is the family name Kiraly (and my middle name, if that’s of interest), but my family name is Molnar (Miller in English, so you can imagine how many of us there are). I didn’t change it when I married my late husband. Quite a modern thing to do in those days, but I was a bit of a rebel in my youth and with my husband having a plain old Anglo-Saxon name, I didn’t care to lose the part of my heritage I held so dear. I have fond memories of my early life in Budapest – I was fourteen when we emigrated to France – and it was part of family lore that, no matter where fate took us, we would always be proud Magyars.
But after tucking your letter into a drawer in the writing desk where I pay my bills, I thought nothing more of it until yesterday, while walking on the old bridle path through a lovely wood. Out of nowhere, it struck me that the Vidor Kiraly you mentioned could indeed be someone my family knew, and the mix-up due to my brother’s name being Vida, a variant of Vidor. Your Vidor would be the right age to have been a friend of my brother. He was always known as Vida, though his full name was Vidor Péter Molnar. Péter was my mother’s name before she married. It was a common practice to use the mother’s family name as a child’s middle name.
Even so, the person you’re looking for couldn’t possibly be my brother. He died of virulent meningitis at the age of twelve. A terrible tragedy for my family. My mother took to her bed and stayed there for months. So long ago it was, but the memory of that terrible time has stayed with me, just as clear as if it happened last week. Strange to think that if Vida had lived, he’d be in his late fifties now.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any more help to you. I emigrated to Canada almost forty years ago and am as settled here as anywhere on this green earth. With each passing year, my former life seems to fade into the mists. He was a lovely boy, our Vida. It gives me comfort to think that his brief time on earth might be preserved, like a butterfly under glass, in someone else’s memory.