Memoirs Found In a Bathtub (17 page)

“It’s me,” came the doctor’s voice from behind the door. “Can I come in?”

I opened the door.

“My clothes,” I said, confronting him.

“Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. The nurse took them to sew on a button, or maybe they needed some ironing.”

“Searching without a warrant?” I asked, unconcerned. He flinched.

“Still some traces of shock,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll prescribe a tranquilizer for you, yes. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll examine you.”

I let him test my reflexes and listen to my heart. He nodded vigorously.

“Wonderful,” he exclaimed. “You’re in splendid shape. Now let’s go to my office. The nurse will bring your clothes presently. This way, please.”

We went down a narrow hall to a dim room with a green lamp on the desk and massive bookcases filled with volumes bound in leather, the titles all in gold. Near one bookcase stood a round table with a skull in the middle, and two armchairs.

I took a seat—the books behind the glass seemed to breathe gloom. The doctor hung up his white coat and I saw that he wasn’t in uniform after all, but was wearing an ordinary gray suit. He sat across the table from me and watched me carefully for a considerable time.

“And now,” he said at last, as if my face had passed inspection, “perhaps we can discuss what prompted that little—that little outburst of yours. In the privacy of my office, of course.” And he indicated the long, dark rows of books with a wave of the arm.

“Feel free to tell me everything.”

He waited for me to start. When I didn’t, he said:

“You don’t trust me. Perfectly natural. I would feel the same in your place, I’m sure. But believe me, you
must
try to overcome this compulsion to be silent. It’s important that you try. The first step is always the most difficult.”

“That’s not it,” I said. “The thing is, I don’t know if it’s really worth it… Anyway, you took me by surprise—just a while ago you were saying that you didn’t want to hear about it.”

“You must forgive me,” he said, showing his dimples. “Before anything else, I am a doctor. In the other room I wasn’t sure you had completely recovered, I didn’t want to excite you by stirring up painful memories. But now that I’ve examined you, I know that I not only can, but that I should—of course, I don’t insist, but if you’re willing to cooperate…”

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll talk. But it’s a long story.”

“I’m all ears.”

What was there to lose? I began at the beginning, summarized my interview with the Commander in Chief, told about the Mission, my instructions, all the complications, told him about the little old man, the officers, the priest, all my suspicions (except those touching Major Erms), also about the spy sleeping in the bathroom and our odd conversation—but I no longer followed what I was saying, having realized that without mention of the fact that I had caught Major Erms copying secret documents, my attack on him appeared insane. So I tried to find some aspects of my conversation with the spy in the bathroom which might justify, at least to some extent, my mad behavior. But my arguments were unconvincing even to myself, and the more I talked, the less I seemed to say, yet I plowed on grimly, getting in deeper and deeper, convinced that I was only providing additional evidence that I was not in full possession of my senses.

While I talked, the doctor picked up the skull (it served as a paperweight) and put it down in different positions: sometimes it was in profile to me, sometimes it stared at me with its gaping eyes. When I finished, he sat back in his chair, clasped his hands and said in a smooth voice:

“As far as I can see, your doubts concerning the importance and, for that matter, the very existence of your Mission are generated by an exceptionally high number of apparently accidental meetings with traitors—and in such a short time, too. Correct?”

“More or less.” I was recovering somewhat from the feeling that I had put myself in his hands. The empty eyes of the skull looked into mine; the smooth bone seemed to glow.

“Now you say the little old man was a traitor. Your own conclusion?”

“The captain who shot himself told me.”

“He told you—then shot himself? Did you see the actual shooting?”

“Yes, that is… I heard a shot in the next room, then the thud of his falling body, and through a crack in the door I saw his leg, that is, a shoe…”

“Ah. And before that, the officer who was serving as your guide was arrested. Could you describe that arrest?”

“Two officers approached us, they took him aside and talked with him. I don’t know what they said, I couldn’t hear. Then the first officer took him away and the second went with me.”

“Did anyone tell you that this was an arrest?”

“Well, no…”

“So you couldn’t really swear to it?”

“I guess not, but the circumstances … particularly when you consider what happened later…”

“One thing at a time. You say the captain told you about the little old man, then you heard a shot, saw a shoe, and concluded that the captain himself was a traitor. As far as your guide is concerned, all you really know is that he was called away. Not much to go on, is it? Who’s left? The spy in the bathroom—you found him asleep?”

“Yes.”

“What would he be doing in a bathroom after photographing such vital documents? And taking a nap, too. The door wasn’t locked, was it?”

“That’s true, it wasn’t.”

“Are you still convinced that these were all traitors?”

I was silent.

“There, you see! Jumping to conclusions!”

“One moment,” I interrupted. “Assuming they weren’t traitors, how do you explain all of this? What was it, a play put on just for my benefit? But why? To what end?”

He smiled, all dimples, and said:

“Who knows? Perhaps they were inoculating you against treason by applying it in small doses. For that matter, even a man like Major Erms might do something you’d think suspicious, something a bit unusual—but surely you wouldn’t take him for a traitor? Or would you?”

He watched me closely. How icily the eyes gleamed in that round and pleasant face…

He didn’t wait for an answer.

“There remains one more nut for us to crack, the hardest: your instructions. They were in code, naturally. Were you able to take a good look at them? Are you absolutely sure they were a written account of your every movement and thought in the Building?”

“Well, no…” I replied reluctantly. “There was only time to read a paragraph or two. It had something about my going from office to office and people ignoring me, then about how vast and impersonal the Building was—operating in a random way—I can’t recall the exact words, but I know they were practically taken out of my mouth…”

“That was all you managed to read?”

“Yes. Also, from time to time, people I meet make allusions to my experiences in the Building, even my very thoughts. Prandtl, for example. I told you about him.”

“All he did was give you a sample of code, a demonstration.”

“It seemed that way at first. But the sample happened to answer the question in my mind.”

“Are you aware that superstitious people, when they find themselves in a critical period of their lives, often open the Bible at random to get some indication, some sign on which to predicate their future actions?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of that.”

“You don’t think it could be of real help?”

“Certainly not, it’s a matter of pure luck which passage you open to.”

“And your case, couldn’t that be pure luck too, an accident?”

“There have been too many accidents,” I said.

He didn’t believe me. The mere facts I could give him; but the diabolical aura that surrounded them, that I was unable to convey. The doctor beamed.

“What you’ve told me,” he said, “is no illusion or hallucination, I’m sure. But you do jump to conclusions. You are in such a terrible hurry to understand everything at once, to anticipate. I imagine they wish to develop certain qualities in you: an alert mind, the capacity for objective observation, attention to detail, the ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant, and many, many other things that will be indispensable in your work. I would say then that this was not, as you called it, a test, but rather a period of training; and training, when intensive, may sometimes bring one to the point of exhaustion, which is exactly what happened in your case.”

I gazed into the empty eyes of the skull, no longer caring. “But do forgive us about your clothes,” said the doctor, beaming too much. “The nurse should be bringing them in any minute now…”

He kept talking. A thought occurred to me, vague, difficult to put into words…

“Do you have a section around here for—the mentally ill?” I asked. He blinked.

“Certainly we do,” he replied kindly. “It’s a regular ward, but with just a few beds. Does that interest you? Who was it that said the spirit of an age speaks through its madness? An exaggeration, I’m sure. But if you’d like to see our ward, conduct your own observations firsthand, I have no objections. You’ll be here for a while anyway.”

“What?!”

“It would be advisable. But please understand, we are by no means holding you here.”

“So you think that I…” I began calmly. He shuddered. The dimples vanished.

“Heavens, no! Nothing of the kind! You’re simply overworked, that’s all. To prove it, I’m prepared to conduct you
ad altarem mente captorum
. Though actually we have only a few patients at the moment, all rather ordinary cases
—catatonia provocativa
, some residual obsessions, nervous ticks, compulsive winking and the like, collaboration dissociation, top priority hysteria, all according to textbook, quite boring really.” Now he was warming up. “Recently, however, we acquired a fairly interesting case—a three-personality syndrome, tripsychoma,
folie en trois, Dreieiniger Wahnsinn
, as it’s variously called. Two personalities continually unmask one another, and the third gnaws at his arms and legs to keep from taking sides. Actually, it’s nothing but
reservatio mentalis
with a few complications. You might also be interested in a condition called
mania autopersecutoria,
that is, a self-interrogation fit: the patient cross-examines himself—mutually, mind you—for up to forty hours without stopping, until he drops. Finally, we have a curious little item, autocryptic withdrawal.”

“Oh?” I said, indifferent.

“The patient hides himself in his own body,” the doctor explained, his face flushed with excitement. “He compresses his identity to such a degree that he thinks, for example he’s the malleus—you know, that little hammer-shaped bone in the middle ear—and that all the other parts of the body are enemy agents out to get him. At the moment, unfortunately, I can’t take you on a tour of our ward; I have rounds to make elsewhere. Wait here, the nurse will bring your clothes. In the meantime you’re welcome to look at my library. All I ask is that you try to relax—please!”

I was standing near the chair, feeling awkward in a bathrobe several sizes too large. The doctor shook my hand with his warm, plump hand and said:

“Chin up. Fewer suspicions, more simple courage, and everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

At the door he smiled again, waved, and left. I stood around for a while, waiting for the nurse and my clothes, then went back to the table and took a good look at the skull. It grinned at me with a full set of big white teeth. Curious, I picked it up and snapped the jaw a few times—it was on a spring. There were hinges on the sides, the temples; the whole top came off like a lid. That is, could come off—I didn’t care to open it, I liked the skull as it was, spherical. I admired the shine.

How elegantly the parietal bones fitted into the frontal, how smoothly the jagged edges interlocked! The occipital, on the other hand, was an enchanting moonscape with its many articulations and indentations, mounds, peaks, ravines, and that mighty crater, the foramen magnum, the gate for the spinal column. Ah, and where was the spine now? I sat, my elbows on the table, and meditated on skulls. Still no nurse.

I thought about various things. For instance, I knew a man once who suffered from a skeleton complex (his own), or rather a skeleton phobia, since it terrified him so much that he never spoke of it and even avoided touching himself in order not to feel beneath that soft envelope of flesh the hardness which waited to be free… I thought about how the skull was a symbol of death for us, a warning on a bottle of poison. Centuries ago the skeletons in anatomical atlases were not depicted in such stiff poses of warning, but were shown in attitudes of life: some danced, some leaned, their tibiae casually crossed, on sarcophagi while they directed their keen albeit funereal eye sockets straight at the reader. I even recalled a woodcut of two skeletons a-courting—and one of them was plainly bashful!

But here was a contemporary skull: clean, hygienic, scrubbed, the balustrades of the cheekbones nice and sleek, making little balconies beneath each orbital cavity—the nasal hole was a bit unpleasant, but then, who is without some minor blemish? And the smile! The smile made one stop and think. I lifted the skull, weighed it in my hand, rapped it with a knuckle, then—quickly—bent over and sniffed. Only dust, harmless, everyday dust tickling the nostrils, but then a whiff, a trace of something, something … until my nose touched the cold surface and I inhaled—yes—a faint, the faintest stink—another sniff—oh, foul play! Corruption!!

The reek betrayed the crime within. Like a drunkard, I breathed in the bloodiest, the most hideous murders behind that ivory elegance. I sniffed again: the gleam, the polish, the whiteness—all a vile hoax. Sickening! Horrible! I sniffed again, greedily, in terror, then hurled it on the table and frantically wiped my face, my hands, with the comer of my robe. But something drew me to it still … how it drew me…

The nurse entered with my suit carefully brushed and pressed. It looked like new. She placed it on the table by the skull, nodded stiffly, and left.

I dressed in an adjoining bathroom, leaving the door ajar so I could keep an eye on the skull. “My baleful beauty!” I thought. “What sweet revulsion to stare at you like this! How you thrill and chill me!” But it wasn’t the skull I feared, I feared myself. What was drawing me to it, that well-boiled chunk of bone? What made it so attractive, what enticed me to sniff, sniff in a frenzy of disgust? The death that necessarily produced the skull? No, that death had no connection with this posthumous paperweight—nor with me, for that matter. I could understand, at least, why in the old days, long ago, they drank their wine from skull-caps. It added spice. I was thinking in this vein when suddenly a door squeaked open and someone entered the doctor’s office. I closed my door to a crack and cautiously peeked out.