Secret Dreams (15 page)

Lastly, they had a limited kind of surgery. Excess cranial fluid might be released from within the skull to relieve pressure, or fluid drained from the spinal column with a tap. And on rare occasions a violent case was brought under control by removal of several grams of brain tissue.

But what photo could show any of that? An iron table was just a table, a shower room just a place to wash your hair. No photo could show the forlorn cries falling on the stony ears of nurses and orderlies who had been around too many crazy people for much too long. Nor show the shallow look of bored cruelty on doctors' faces as their patients' imploring cries went unanswered; or the dull hum of staff conversations while a filthy young woman banged her head against her room door, laughing to herself minute after minute….

This was a mental hospital, a
madhouse
. And no photo could ever truly capture the dayroom. A glass-enclosed solarium that gave onto the garden. Where they put the Incurables. For so they were. Forty or more … all curious cases, the odd and the notable. Some were war veterans with shrapnel in their brains, whose tiny government pensions had been turned over to the Burghölzli for their indefinite care. A rich widow who had willed her entire estate to the Pan-Germanic Society of Maidens for Moral Decency now spent her days under the delusion that she ran a bordello, with the dayroomers her stable. Most of the Incurables were not paying patients of the hospital but rather kept as specimens — living diagnostic examples. And when one ceased to function, that is, died, the Burghölzli hurriedly replaced it with another suitable specimen.

The dayroom obsessed him, drawing him to it day after day. He used to find a spot to sit, and there he gazed through the glass inner doors as though into a pit of roiling chaos. Beyond the glass the noise was deafening: twenty voices babbled at once,- one voice stronger than the rest rose in tone-deaf verses, singing the same lines over and over:

We stuck it in!

We twirled it round'

Yes, she took it all,

Right on the ground!

This ditty from an Incurable who fashioned snatches of black cloth and white paper to make himself a minister's collar. A narrow, horse-faced man of about fifty-five, with protruding purplish lips and gray-ing hair that he sometimes pulled out in tufts. He had been a school superintendent — who suddenly one day failed to appear for work. But soon he warmed a bench in the public park and there, nine parts drunk, sang his lewd verses. From that day forward no one had gotten any more from Herr Superintendent than that ditty he chose to repeat. Because of his previous position, the local magistrate had to get involved in the man's commitment to the Burghölzli. To the delight of the whole court — spectators, clerks, and sergeant at arms — the magistrate maintained a straight face when each question asked was answered by:

“We stuck it in!” or “She took it all!”

In the end an exasperated magistrate finally inquired, “Pardon me, Herr Superintendent, but do you realize where you are going?” To the howls of the court, Herr Superintendent urinated nervously down his leg, replying meekly, “Yes. Right on the ground….”

Delusions ran rampant in the dayroom: a young peasant lass had convinced herself she was a little boy from China, She tied a headband around her head so tightly her eyes went slanty, and she always spoke accordingly in “Chinese.” There was a dignified dowager who had become Queen Victoria and went regally around the dayroom, inspecting her territories and protectorates. Occasionally she would mount punitive actions against the Pathans in the Kandahar — “Those devil blackies!”
—
and would have to be restrained.

The Barber of Seville, a small, sallow Spaniard, offered to shave anyone who would sit still for him, yet he wanted to shave nothing but their genitals.

Only by great vigilance did the staff manage to keep a razor from falling into his hands. Despite this, he cleverly fashioned a piece of cardboard into a “razor,” which he stropped on his belt, and he often shaved one particular man,- a fellow so withdrawn he never noticed anyway….

The hospital also cared for the Sisters of Mercy, a pair of pinheads who stared happily out into the garden all day long. Both, pale, hairless creatures with narrow pixie skulls and fairly sunny dispositions. Obviously content with each other, they never tormented any of the others. And though called sisters, they weren't biologically related. The male (he had a penis but no testicles) came from a convent hospital and was perfectly harmless. The female had been sold by a circus when her huckster died of drink. This sister was sexually active, and in everyone's mind her strange appetites were linked to her master's excess. She required an eye on her at all times when she went into “heat.” Still, the two sisters were drawn to each other out of some mutual sympathy…. While watching them chatter back and forth with no apparent content to their speech, Herr Doktor slowly came to see them as the menagerie's two most human attractions. Unhappily they proved him prophetically correct: when one of the sisters died of a bad cold, the other wasted away shortly thereafter. Died of grief, people said.

And finally the repugnant cases … A man called the Bricklayer, as he had really been one once. He defecated on himself with such regularity the staff had long ago ceased trying to tidy him up more than twice a day. Periodically, orderlies assigned to the dayroom could be heard calling out sadly, “Ach, another brick!”

There was an aging hormone case, a giantess, whose pituitary gland had gone rampant, making her grow seven feet tall. She licked her fingers and toes as if she were a house cat, and so she had always been known as Le Chat. During years of attempting to clean her “paws” she had twisted her limbs like a yogi contortionist. A select few of the staff knew her identity: the illicit offspring of a renowned Hungarian count and his twelve-year-old sister. The institution was amply compensated for the care of the counts “niece.” Rumor had it the pitiful child's “aunt” committed suicide at the time of her birth, abandoning into a cruel world yet another poor orphan.

But perhaps the most engagingly disagreeable case was Herr Tom Thumb, an unctuous, talkative dwarf about twenty years old — delivered to the institution by the same local magistrate after a brief court appearance. Herr Tom Thumb was lucid and congenial, always ready to regale a willing listener with the true stories of his early youth. “People spit on you when you're made like me. You can't even walk down the street in peace. Once I went to Zermatt to take the mountain air, and right there on the street a workman stepped out of a
Brauhaus
with his stein in his fat fist and spat on me. Spat on me! Pah! Just like that!”

Yet while Herr Tom Thumb talked, he masturbated almost continually: on his clothes, on his listener, against the windowpanes of the solarium…. The staff had quite given up trying to stop his chronic ten-minute bouts. And like most things repeated ad nauseam, the sight of Tom Thumb, little pecker in his pudgy fist, aroused no more reaction from the orderlies than a dropped cigar butt in the gutter. More amusing by far was Herr Doktor Jung engaging the dwarf in conversation. Herr Doktor sitting calmly on a bench by the glass windows while Herr Tom Thumb held forth from the top of a packing crate marked THIS END UP.

“I can't imagine why I do this,” complained the dwarf. “Do you know why, Herr Doktor? Well, I don't either. But I have to. I do it when I get up, I do it when I wash, before I dress, after I dress, I do it when I eat — I think I even do it in my sleep. You wouldn't believe how sore I get.”

“Then why don't you leave off for an hour or two, Herr Thumb?”

“Leave off” cried the dwarf in scandalized terror. “I
can't
leave off. That's what I'm
telling
you.”

“Well, my friend, it's no use wearing the thing out, is it? You must see that you run the risk of infection — when who knows what might happen? A surgical operation could leave you with less than you have already — how would you like that?”

The young dwarf paled, swallowing his fear. “Never! I'd kill myself first.” Then, paling even a shade whiter, he demanded with quiet resolve, “Don't you believe me?”

The little man was so earnest, only a cruel person would have laughed. “Yes, I believe you,” Herr Doktor assured him. “But let me see if I can get you some salve.”

The dwarf looked to heaven, clasping his hands to his breast. “Sweet succor in my hour of need!” Suddenly he leaned over the edge of the crate, whispering secretly, “See if you can make it petroleum jelly.”

“All right, then. But I'll have to prescribe it officially, you know.”

“Is that a problem?” the dwarf asked, looking really worried.

“In the case of a baby with diaper rash, no … But in your case, Herr Thumb, I have to avoid making it look as though I approve of your conduct. This means submitting a procedural note defending the request for your prescription. First, there's the incurable degenerative nature of your affliction.”

“Yes, there's that,” the dwarf agreed readily

“Then there's the hope of postponing the inevitable and drastic consequences from your … from your …”

“From the willful misuse of my bodily parts,” the dwarf tried hopefully. “The magistrate said that, not me.”

“And quite to the point, my friend. Admittedly this prescription only hastens the overall worsening of your condition, so I shall stress the alternative: that the situation ignored can only lead to more radical deterioration, irritation, inflammation, infection …”

“And
surgery,”
the dwarf murmured, appalled. “Help me,” he pleaded.

“I will do what I can, Herr Thumb. There's no point in letting you whittle yourself away.”

The dwarf ceased handling himself for a moment and hurriedly crossed his breast in the Christian manner. “Bless you,” he said piously. Then peered suspiciously around the room. The nearest orderly was lounging against the wall not paying the slightest attention. Herr Tom Thumb leaned dangerously over the edge of the crate and asked conspiratorially:

“Why the devil do you come here?”

‘‘Why, to be with you,” Herr Doktor said immediately. “And to help, of course … Would you rather I sat in the cafeteria with my colleagues over limp Strudel, doing those droll impersonations of Le Chat, for instance?”

Herr Tom Thumb knocked his heels against the crate and began handling himself again. “Filthy practice,” he agreed. “I've never seen the humor in callous jests at other people's expense.”

A newly admitted patient was always called the New Victim.

“Your New Victim needed restraint this afternoon.”

Or: “Victim in 504 needed a bath and purging.”

This time it was Nurse Bosch who passed by him as he sat in his regular chair, watching the Incurables in the dayroom. The Bricklayer had just laid himself another lodestone and was proudly showing it off to anyone who would admire it. Herr Doktor heard Nurse Bosch's skirts swish as she approached.

The head nurse was an irrepressibly sunny woman with a broad Slavic face and one of those eternally optimistic dispositions. About forty-five, a large woman whose stoutness had no flab, she kept her hair in a starched cap. The first time young Herr Doktor saw her, he thought,
Ah, at last I have met the Happy Pig
. But all he said out loud was: “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Nurse Bosch.”

Now she passed him without breaking stride and said offhandedly, “Your New Victim has arrived, young man.”

When he turned to have a word with her, Nurse Bosch was nowhere in sight and he had to go about finding his New Victim him-self.

On his way to the registrar's office, he glanced out the window into the garden. September was in its dusty middle days, the air still hot, and the branches on the trees hung parched, ready to shed their green. That morning he had noticed a few fallen leaves on the sidewalks and in the dry rain gutters, omens that the heart-quickening days of autumn were not far off. He passed an electric fan whirring noisily in the hall, stirring the dead air to no purpose.

The registrar knew the whereabouts of the New Victim's parents. They had been waiting in Herr Doktors office for a quarter of an hour. He bounded up the stairs two by two. His mouth felt dry and awkward,- he hated meeting people for the first time. The soft sucking sounds of a man drawing on his pipe came out of his silent office, then the stiff rustle of a woman adjusting her dress as she sat. The parents were not talking to each other, Herr Doktor went in and apologized for keeping them waiting. The registrar's admission form told only that the family owned a printing house for the preparation of legal briefs in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. They lived somewhere in the German quarter. The husband's age was fifty-two. A cursory glance yielded the impression that the parents were nice, respectable, and bourgeois.

“Rostov is a long way off,” Herr Doktor remarked, waving his hand in the general direction of the east.

“That's very true,” the husband agreed. And then the three of them lapsed into the consuming silence once more. The man went on smoking his pipe in an amiable, inoffensive manner, as though he had plainly said all that needed saying. Yet mixed in with the unmistakable smell of expensive tobacco was the calm, assured way he left his matches in the ashtray on Herr Doktors desk — as though it were his ashtray, his office, his desk.

The registrar's form told even less about the wife. She had omitted filling in her age. She had the rich, satisfied air of an aristocrat, perhaps because of her fine clothes and the ease with which she wore them: the fur stole about her shoulders, the long black feather in her hat, the diamond sparkles in the veil she never raised, the touch of perfume…. Yet beneath the veil Herr Doktor saw the face of a hawk. She was at least her husband's age, maybe older. And the first to break the silence, asking Herr Doktor questions in the matter-of-fact tone of a woman accustomed to getting down to business. “Forgive me, young man, but aren't you a little youthful to be a physician?”