the Emigrants (13 page)

Once again Dr Abramsky fell silent for a lengthy spell, occasionally scrutinizing the lines on his left hand. I believe, he then went on, looking up at me, I believe it was Fahnstock's unmistakably Austrian intonation that predisposed me towards him at first. He reminded me of my father, who was from Kolomea and, like Fahnstock, came from Galicia to the west after the dissolution of the Habsburg empire. Fahnstock tried to re-establish himself in his home town, Linz, whilst my father tried to start up in the liquor trade in Vienna, but both fell foul of circumstances, the one in Linz and the other in Vienna's Leopoldstadt. In early 1921 my father emigrated to America, and Fahnstock must have arrived in New York during the summer months, where he soon resumed his career in psychiatry. In 1925, following two years at the state hospital in Albany, he took up a position at Samaria, a newly established private sanatorium. At about the same time, my father died when a boiler exploded in a soda factory on the Lower East Side. After the accident, his body was found in a partly poached state. When I was growing up in Brooklyn I missed him very much. Even in the face of the greatest adversity he was confident; my mother, by contrast, seemed only a shadow after his death. I now think that, when I myself began as an assistant at the Samaria, I was uncritically on Fahnstock's side because much about him recalled my father. But when Fahnstock began to believe, towards the end of his career, that he had discovered a psychiatric miracle cure in the block or annihilation method, and when he, who had never had the slightest scientific ambition, increasingly became caught up in a kind of experimental mania and even planned to publish a paper about Ambrose, then, and only then, did it dawn on me that his fanatical interest as well as my own vacillation were, in the end, merely proof of our appalling ignorance and corruptibility.

It was almost evening. Dr Abramsky led me back through the arboretum to the drive. He was holding the white goose wing, and from time to time pointed the way ahead with it. Towards the end, he said as we walked, your great-uncle suffered progressive paralysis of the joints and limbs, probably caused by the shock therapy. After a while he had the greatest difficulty with everyday tasks. He took almost the whole day to get dressed. Simply to fasten his cufflinks and his bow tie took him hours. And he was hardly finished dressing but it was time to undress again. What was more, he was having constant trouble with his eyesight, and suffered from bad headaches, and so he often wore a green eyeshade - like someone who works in a gambling saloon. When I went to see him in his room on the last day of his life, because he had failed to appear for treatment for the first time, he was standing at the window, wearing the eyeshade, gazing out at the marshlands beyond the park. Oddly, he had put on armlets made of some satin-like material, such as he might have worn when he used to polish the silver. When I asked why he had not appeared at the appointed time, he replied (I remember his words exactly): It must have slipped my mind whilst I was waiting for the butterfly man. After he had made this enigmatic remark, Ambrose accompanied me without delay, down to the treatment room where Fahnstock was waiting, and submitted to all the preparations without the least resistance, as he always did. I see him lying before me, said Dr Abramsky, the electrodes on his temples, the rubber bit between his teeth, buckled into the canvas wraps that were riveted to the treatment table like a man shrouded for burial at sea. The session proceeded without incident. Fahnstock's prognosis was distinctly optimistic. But I could see from Ambrose's face that he was now destroyed, all but a vestige of him. When he came round from the anaesthetic, his eyes, which were now strangely glassy and fixed, clouded over, and a sigh that I can hear to this day rose from his breast. An orderly took him back to his room, and when I went there early the following morning, troubled by my conscience, I found him lying on his bed, in patent-leather boots, wearing full uniform, so to speak. Dr Abramsky walked the rest of the way beside me in silence. Nor did he say a word in farewell, but described a gentle arc with the goose wing in the darkening air.

In mid September 1991, when I travelled from England to Deauville during a dreadful drought, the season was long over, and even the Festival du Cinéma Américain, with which they tried to extend the more lucrative summer months a little, had come to its end. I cannot say whether I was expecting Deauville to have something special to offer - some remnant of the past, green avenues, beach promenades, or even a stylish or scandalous clientèle; whatever my notions may have been, it was immediately apparent that the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction. The villas built in the latter half of the nineteenth century, neo-Gothic castles with turrets and battlements, Swiss chalets, and even mock-oriental residences, were almost without exception a picture of neglect and desolation. If one pauses for a while before one of these seemingly unoccupied houses, as I did a number of times on my first morning walk through the streets of Deauville, one of the closed window shutters on the
parterre
or
bel étage
or the top floor, strange to relate, will open slightly, and a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that soon one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move soundlessly about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by who has happened to stop outside their prison and stand gazing up. Almost everything, in fact, was shut, both in Deauville and across the river in Trouville - the Musée Montebello, the town archives in the town hall, the library (which I had planned to look around in), and even the children's day nursery
de l'enfant Jesus,
established through the generosity of

the long-deceased Madame la Baronne d'Erlanger, as I was informed by a commemorative plaque placed on the fa$ade of the building by the grateful citizens of Deauville. Nor was the Grand Hotel des Roches Noires open any more, a gigantic brick palace where American multimillionaires, English aristocrats, French high financiers and German industrialists basked in each other's company at the turn of the century. The Roches Noires, as far as I was able to

discover, had closed its doors in the Fifties or Sixties and was converted into apartments, though only those that had a sea view sold well. Now what was once the most luxurious hotel on the coast of Normandy is a monumental monstrosity half sunk in the sand. Most of the flats have long been empty, their owners having departed this life. But there are still some indestructible ladies who come every summer and haunt the immense edifice. They pull the white dustsheets off the furniture for a few weeks and at night, silent on their biers, they lie in the empty midst of it. They wander along the broad passageways, cross the huge reception rooms, climb and descend the echoing stairs, carefully placing one foot before the other, and in the early mornings they walk their ulcerous poodles and pekes on the promenade. In contrast to the Roches Noires, which is gradually falling down, the Hotel Normandy at the other end of Trouville-Deauville, completed in 1912, is still an establishment of the finest class. Built around a number of courtyards in half-timber that looks at

once outsize and miniature, it is frequented nowadays almost exclusively by the Japanese, who are steered through the minutely prescribed daily programme by the hotel staff with an exquisite but also, as I observed, ice-cold courtesy verging on the indignant. And indeed, at the Normandy one felt one was not so much in a celebrated hotel of international standing as in a gastronomic pavilion built by the French for a world fair somewhere near Osaka, and I for one should not have been surprised in the slightest if I had walked out of the Normandy to find next to it another incongruous fantasy in the Balinese or Tyrolean style. Every three days the Japanese at the Normandy were exchanged for a new contingent of their countrymen, who, as one hotel guest explained to me, were brought direct, in air-conditioned coaches, from Charles de Gaulle airport to Deauville, the third call (after Las Vegas and Atlantic City) in a global gambling tour that took them on, back to Tokyo, via Vienna, Budapest and Macao. In Deauville, every morning at ten, they would troop over to the new casino, which was built at the same time as the Normandy, where they would play the machines till lunchtime, in arcades dense with flashing, kaleidoscopic lights and tootling garlands of sound. The afternoons and evenings were also spent at the machines, to which, with stoical faces, they sacrificed whole handfuls of coins; and like children on a spree they were delighted when at last a payout tinkled forth from the box. I never saw any of them at the roulette table. As midnight approached, only a few dubious clients from the provinces would be playing there, shady lawyers, estate agents or car dealers with their mistresses, trying to out-manoeuvre Fortune, who stood before them in the person of a stocky croupier clad inappropriately in the livery of a circus attendant in the big top. The roulette table, screened off with jade-green glass
paravents,
was in a recently refurbished inner hall - not, in other words, where players had gambled at Deauville in former times. I knew that in those days the gaming hall was much larger. Then there had been two rows of roulette and baccarat tables as well as tables where one could bet on little horses that kept running round and round in circles. Chandeliers of Venetian glass hung from the stuccoed ceiling, and through a dozen eight-metre-high half-rounded windows one looked out onto a terrace where the most exotic of personages would be gathered, in couples or groups; and beyond the balustrade, in the light that fell from the casino, one could see the white sands and, far out, the ocean-going yachts and small steamers, lit up and riding at anchor, beaming their Aldis lamps into the night sky, and little boats moving to and fro like slow glow-worms between them and the coast. When I first set foot in the casino at Deauville, the old gaming hall was filled with the last glimmer of evening light. Tables had been laid for a good hundred people, for a wedding banquet or some anniversary celebration. The rays of the setting sun were caught by the glasses and glinted on the silver drums of the band that was just beginning to rehearse for their gig. The instrumentalists were curly-haired and no longer the youngest. The songs they played dated from the Sixties, songs I heard countless times in the Union bar in Manchester.
It is the evening of the day.
The vocalist, a blonde girl with a voice still distinctly child-like, breathed passionately into the microphone, which she held up close to her lips with both hands. She was singing in English, though with a pronounced French accent.
It is the evening of the day, I sit and watch the children play.
At times, when she could not remember the proper words, her singing would become an ethereal hum. I sat down in one of the white lacquer chairs. The music filled the whole room. Pink puffy clouds right up to the golden arabesques of the ceiling stucco. "A whiter shade of pale."