Entanglement (20 page)

He parked outside the house.

“What fucking bullshit,” he said aloud, putting the radio-control panel in his briefcase. “You’re getting worse, Szacki, worse and worse.”

 

UEFA has decided that Liverpool can after all defend its title in the next season of the Champions League, though it shouldn’t, because it only took fifth place in the Premiership. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office has ruled that there is nothing wrong with the expression “Jewish aggression as a form of Satanism”. The centrist Polish People’s Party authorities have decided that Jarosław Kalinowski will be their party’s candidate for President. The candidate wants to hold a debate during the campaign on what Poland should be like. But in the polls Lech Kaczyński gains two points again, leaving independent Zbigniew Religa eight points behind. From other polls it appears that most Poles support Mayor Kaczyński’s crusade against gays, but most Varsovians do not. A bomb scare in the capital. Fearing a sarin attack, for three hours in the afternoon the police block off the main junction in the city and suspend the metro. The resulting mega-jam probably exceeds the hoaxer’s boldest expectations. Meanwhile at Warsaw Zoo lumps have appeared on Buba the elephant’s trunk, probably caused by a virus. She is bearing her treatment bravely and doesn’t have to be anaesthetized for it. Maximum temperature - 18 degrees; fairly sunny, no rain.

Dr Jeremiasz Wróbel resembled a cat. His face looked as if it had been drawn with a compass, pale and freckled, with short, sparse red stubble and sparse, curly red hair cut very short. On top of that, he had no profile. Although looking at him face on, you did get an impression of some depth, from the side his face was almost flat. It crossed Szacki’s mind that as a child he must always have slept on his stomach, and always on the floor. His ears stuck so closely to his head that he didn’t seem to have any at all. He looked peculiar, but was, as Szacki had to admit, extremely amiable. His voice was nice and warm, similar to Rudzki’s therapist voice, but more velvety. If Szacki had had to choose which one to tell his problems to, he’d undoubtedly have chosen Wróbel. Maybe because he wasn’t implicated in a murder.

They soon left the doctor’s tiny study at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology on Sobieski Street and went down a corridor into a conference room, where the doctor could watch the recording of the constellation held at Łazienkowska Street. They only exchanged a few words. Szacki did most of the talking, describing the inquiry to Wróbel. He also explained why, instead of making a request for a written opinion in the usual manner, he had insisted on a meeting.

“This recording might be the key to the mystery of Telak’s murder,” he said. “Therefore, I’ll also be ordering a written opinion from you for the files, but for now I need to know what you think of it as soon as possible.”

“Prosecutor, you stand out among your kind like an erection at an OAPs’ club,” said the therapist as he switched on the light in the small conference room. There was a hospital odour mixed with the smell of coffee and new carpeting. Szacki was starting to understand why the idea of transcribing a conversation with Wróbel prompted mirth.

“We psychotherapists rarely host representatives of your office. I think each of you should talk to us in person before and after we give an expert opinion. But that is just my view, and I am merely a humble assistant in the Lord’s garden, entrusted with caring for the vegetable bed.”

Szacki had it on the tip of his tongue to say the “vegetables” should be treated individually, not as a group, but all he said was that, unless something had changed since yesterday, the Prosecution Service was simply too understaffed to meet with every expert witness.

The therapist watched the recording in silent concentration. Several times he made notes. Then he reached the bit where Kwiatkowska and Kaim went closer to the chairs representing Telak’s parents, Jarczyk was in hysterics and Telak himself was staring into space, his face twisted with pain. He stopped the image.

“Ask your question,” he urged, turning to face Szacki.

“Why did you stop it at that moment?”

“First the foreplay, then the climax,” said the therapist, shaking his head.

Szacki almost said automatically: “You talk just like my wife”, but he stopped himself at the last moment. He was at work.

“First of all, I’d like to know if this therapy was conducted according to the rules of the art.”

Wróbel leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head.

“You see, the
ars therapeutica
is a bit like the
ars amandi
. There’s no single perfect way to bring any woman to orgasm in three minutes, nor is there any one position that would suit everyone.”

“Without wishing to adopt your poetic form of expression,” said Szacki, starting to feel annoyed, “nevertheless I will ask: was it sex or was it rape?”

“Definitely not rape,” replied Wróbel. “Bold sex, but the kind without any leather costumes or police caps. You see, theoretically in Family Constellation Therapy there should be more people taking part. I can lend you a DVD with a recording of constellations conducted by Hellinger himself. There’s a full room, a large audience as well as the patients. There’s never a shortage of people to arrange as some distant relative or wife’s lover. But what Mr Rudzki did - substituting chairs for the patient’s parents at a moment when they no longer had a role to play - is acceptable. Sometimes you do in fact do that when there’s a lack of representatives.”

“Here there were only four people from the start,” noted Szacki. “Isn’t that too few? Obviously everyone has parents, their own family, grandparents. Isn’t it hard to work in such a small group?”

“It could be, but I can see where Rudzki’s coming from. I’m not keen on those orgies either - sometimes all that’s missing is animals. I like to have my fun in groups of ten best of all. Rudzki has gone even further. OK, you could even call it an interesting experiment. And from what I can see the field is working, and that’s not bad at all. You can’t deny it.”

Szacki didn’t.

“Apart from that you must realize that Dr Cezary Rudzki is no novice. He may not be as widely known as Eichelberger or He-Whose-Name-Is-No-Longer-To-Be-Uttered” - Szacki knew he must mean the therapist Andrzej Samson, exposed as a paedophile amid a great public scandal - “but in our field Rudzki’s a major figure. More than once he has experimented with therapies that seemed as stable as a sixteen-year-old’s sex drive, and often brought off amazing results.”

“So in your view he didn’t make any mistakes?”

Jeremiasz Wróbel smacked his lips, frowned and scratched behind his ear. Szacki thought that if he were to take his photo
now and send it to the organizers of a cat show, he’d be sure to qualify.

“In my view he made one important error,” he said at last. “That is, you see, I’d have done it differently. But it may be that friend Rudzki had some other plans. He knew he’d do it all at the end.”

“More specifically?”

“Yes, sorry. When the issue with the patient’s parents was explained, before bringing his current family into the constellation, in my view he should have introduced some resolving sentences. As that was left in a state of suspension, the continuation must have been incredibly hard for the patient. If order had been brought in the family of origin, if the patient had felt immediate relief thanks to reconciliation with his parents, if from then on he had ceased to feel guilty towards them, he’d have entered the next stage of the therapy feeling stronger. What’s more, I’m sure the rest of the participants would have felt better, and those terrible scenes would not have taken place.”

Szacki suddenly felt a complete mental blank. He sat and stared at Wróbel, and could only think about one thing: there was nothing, once again nothing, no progress. It all works, it’s all in order, it all makes sense. Just the corpse with a skewer in his eye doesn’t quite fit in somehow.

“Do the emotions go on working after the constellation is over?” he asked at last.

“Meaning?” Wróbel didn’t understand the question.

“If during the constellation Mrs X represents Mr Y’s passionate lover, and then runs into him after the session in the hotel lobby, does she go to bed with him?”

The doctor thought for a long while.

“Interesting question. I think that even if those weren’t her emotions, she would experience them as if they were. The memory of being fascinated, attracted to Mr Y. Yes, of course
she wouldn’t start writhing at his feet moaning ‘fuck me’, but if they’d started flirting, it wouldn’t be so hard for them to decide on sex. That’s what I think.”

Szacki told him about the voice of the “daughter” recorded on Telak’s Dictaphone.

“And are you sure it was the woman representing his daughter?”

“Ninety per cent. We’re doing sound tests to be sure.”

“Interesting. Does Rudzki know about this?”

“No, he doesn’t. And I wouldn’t like him to find out from you.”

“Yes, of course. You see, it could be significant that the constellation was so brutally interrupted. We usually try to bring it to an end ourselves; interruptions are very rare, sometimes there are breaks lasting several days for the patient to be able to gather information about his family. But it always happens gently, whereas here, at the moment when the field was working strongest, the participants suddenly parted ways. Could it be that they went back to their rooms ‘possessed’ by the people they were representing? I don’t know. I’ve never come across such a case before, but, well…”

“It sounds logical?” suggested Szacki.

“Yes. I’d compare it with the situation of a patient under hypnosis. I can bring him out of it, but I can also leave him in it. Eventually the state of hypnosis passes into sleep, and after that the patient wakes up as if nothing has happened. Perhaps it was similar here. The constellation was brutally interrupted, and before they’d recovered, for some time yet, the patients were not just themselves, but also the people they represented. Perhaps.”

Wróbel stared into space, exactly like Telak, frozen in the frame on the television screen.

“Are you able to say how long someone could remain in such a state of ‘hypnosis’?” asked the prosecutor.

“No, I have no idea. But I can sense where you’re heading, and I think it’s a blind alley. Like a transvestite’s sexual organs. On the surface the prospect might look promising, but take off a few layers and it’s disappointing.”

“Why?”

“Medical limitations, which are sure to be overcome sooner or later. It’s not easy to shape a vagina and implant it inside the body. That’s why transvestites limit themselves to clothing that…”

Szacki wasn’t listening. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths in an effort to calm down.

“Why is my reasoning a blind alley?”

“Oh, sorry.” Wróbel didn’t look at all embarrassed. He moved his chair closer to the television. “Take a look at the way they’re standing,” he said, pointing at “the Telak family”. “Opposite each other. And that always means disorder. Conflict, longing, unsettled issues. The outcome of a constellation is always a semicircle: the people stand next to each other, they can observe each other, but they have a space in front of them, they don’t have to fight anyone for their place. Please note that here the patient’s children are standing next to each other, which means they are in harmony. So too are the patient’s parents, represented by the chairs. But apart from that they’re all scattered about, and chaos is the dominant feature of the constellation. If the session had lasted longer, we’d have seen on the recording how more people would have been reconciled, and then they’d have taken their places next to each other in a semicircle. This whole therapy works because each of them wants to feel better, not worse. And committing a crime overloads the system in a dreadful way - the most dreadful, the worst of all possible ways. And so I doubt if representing a member of the patient’s family was the motive for the murder.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’re talking about the human psyche, Prosecutor. I’m not sure of anything.”

“What about this story that Telak’s daughter committed suicide and his son fell ill in order to give him relief? To me that sounds improbable.”

Wróbel stood up and started pacing the room. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his doctor’s coat. His movements were catlike too. He gave the impression of being about to do something completely unexpected - to start miaowing, for example - which made Szacki feel tense. He turned his head to relax the muscles in his neck. As usual it didn’t help at all - he should finally treat himself to a massage. It probably wasn’t all that expensive.

“In constellations we set ourselves two basic questions. Firstly: who is missing, and who should join the constellation? It’s often like an inquiry, digging about in the dirty laundry of family history. Secondly: who should depart? Who should be allowed to do that? The mechanism is always the same. If we don’t allow someone to depart - in the sense of ‘die’ as well as ‘go away’ - instead of that person, the children leave. It’s usually the adults who are guilty, and the children want to help them, so they take the guilt on themselves, and leave instead of the person who ought to leave. That is the order of love. That’s why the therapist allies himself with the children rather than the adults.”

“But suicide straight away?” Szacki was getting the same feeling he’d had during his conversation with Rudzki. He understood, but he didn’t want to believe it.

“Often the cause of suicide is a wish to relieve the pain of a parent who has lost his former partner in tragic circumstances. I think Rudzki’s theory concerning the unexpiated guilt about leaving home that was felt by… What was his name?”

“Telak.”

“…felt by Telak holds water. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his lover or former partner had been killed in a car crash, and he never came to terms with it, maybe in some way felt guilty. To such an extent that his daughter decided to atone for that guilt for him. You should know that if they’re allowed to depart, former partners are usually represented by the children.”