Human Traces (26 page)

from you," he said, 'is a list of salaries and wages for the first two years. I also need a good estimate of how much you will spend on the further equipment you mentioned and an accurate projection of the costs of medicines and of the domestic and catering expenses. When we have those figures, then you must organise a structure of fees that shows a healthy profit. If you can show me that by running on an average of two-thirds capacity your business makes a profit, then I shall be prepared to make you a loan over a period of three years at the bank's current rate of interest. That will doubtless be less favourable than the terms of your Parisian gentleman, but I am obliged to make a small profit for my employers as well." "Of course," said Jacques. "We understand." Sonia can do the figures, he was thinking. "I suggest we meet again a week from today at the same time. Might I ask one last question? I know that these places are fashionable at the moment, especially in the mountains. Is there something particular about yours?" "Oh yes," said Jacques. "We aim to cure the patients who put their trust in us and to run a profitable clinic. But we hope to do much more than that. We intend to establish beyond doubt how the mind works. We are going to show what makes us human. That is why your bank must not miss this chance to help." Herr Leopold, more puzzled than ever, showed them to the door. "Cows!" he called after them as they retreated down the cobbled street. "Keep some cows!" In the course of the next week, over many cream-topped cups of coffee and slices of apple and cherry cake, Jacques and Thomas debated the name they should give to the clinic. Jacques wanted to call it Schloss Seeblick, but Thomas objected that no one ever called a castle after its view. "Lake View Castle is absurd," he said, 'and anyway you can only see the lake from our bedroom and half a dozen others." Jacques countered that schloss did not really mean castle anyway, but country house. The alternative name, 'mountain view', would have applied to more rooms, but made it sound as though they were in a stagnant valley looking up, while Seeblick or Lake View, they agreed, suggested elevation, pure air and optimism. Haus Seeblick, Thomas said, sounded like a boarding house at Bridlington, and after trying out Seeschlossl and Seeburg, they settled on the original Schloss Seeblick. If there was an element of nonsense in it, they agreed, it was not inappropriate. "In due course," said Jacques. "We will need to move to a mountain home. All the best sanatoriums are up in the hills." "Do you mind if we make this one work first?" said Thomas. "We are above sea level anyway' "We are in the foothills." "In more ways than one." Thomas wiped some cream from his lips. "So, Schloss Seeblick, sanatorium for nervous diseases... Hospital, hydro, spa?" "We do not have baths." "We shall have water treatments." "That does not make us a spa," said Jacques. "And I am not sure about "nervous diseases". The word "disease" makes it sound as though all our patients will have organic illnesses." "All right," said Thomas. "Disorders." "That is a fine word. Congratulations." "You don't think we should use the word "psychiatric"?" "No," said Jacques. "The word "nerves" is the accepted euphemism. Everyone knows what it means. And in fact not all our patients will be psychiatric cases." "We could call it the Mountain View Private Madhouse." "We could, Thomas, but we will not. We will call it the Schloss Seeblick, then in smaller print on the next line, "sanatorium and clinic for nervous disorders". "Sanatorium" suggests that people can stay for a year, and "clinic" will encourage those who just want to look in for a consultation. Then in the text we shall make it clear that we cater for everything from the most intractable dementia to the mildest exhaustion. And we should say that we have a speciality in neurological illness." "Is that not covered by "nervous disorders"?" "No. To them that means madness. Neurology means trembling and paralysis." "All right. Pass me the pen and start dictating." When at last they had something that was both definite and vague, specific but inclusive, they wrote it out again neatly (Thomas's handwriting, admired by his namesake at the asylum, was preferred) and took it to a printer recommended by the newspaper editor. They ordered a thousand copies and employed two clerks to send them to registered physicians far and wide, whose names they found in a directory in the town library. They took out advertisements in the local newspaper, in periodicals in Munich and Vienna and, ruing the expense, in the Frankfurter Zeitung. On their return to the bank, they found that Herr Leopold had scrutinised the figures and calculations done by Sonia and had authorised a loan. The following week, at the end of May, their first patients arrived. Sonia found that her presence was needed most in the kitchens. Thomas had written into the prospectus an undertaking that the schloss could administer the 'rest cure' made popular in America, and to fulfil this undertaking they were required to offer not only intensive nursing, baths, massage and electrical treatments but a diet on which the patients, most of them slender neurasthenic young women, were expected to eat prodigiously. They were deemed cured and ready to leave when all their bodily functions, particularly the reproductive, were working regularly, and when they had grown by up to half their initial body weight. Neither Thomas nor Jacques was much interested in the physiology of the patients or of the cure, but in the early days it brought them half their custom, and if the process told them little of medical interest, all the women did leave looking healthier and more content, so they felt nothing with which to reproach themselves. Although Frau Egger's father was Carinthian, her mother was Viennese and her repertoire in the kitchen included dishes from far beyond the mountains, rich and un stinting sometimes Sonia felt she and Frau Egger were like foie gras farmers fattening geese. The young women arrived at Schloss Seeblick looking pale and undernourished; many of them had nursed parents or other members of their family on their deathbeds, then, when the strain was over, had fallen ill themselves. They had been too long in stuffy invalid rooms; their eyes were tired from reading in the twilight. Sonia wondered whether some of them had not become infected by the medical procedures they had attended; none had heard of the new germ theory of disease, the work of Koch and Pasteur, which, Jacques had explained to her, was changing the hygiene of hospitals in Europe (he grimaced already to remember the un swabbed wards of the Salpetriere). One young woman called Bertha had sat for days by her father's bedside while a drain was inserted into a pleuritic abscess in his lung; sometimes her dress was soaked in his pus, but neither she nor the physician had thought of this as dangerous. For the first few days at the schloss the rest-cure patients lay immobile in their rooms while one of the nurses attended to every need: they cut up their food and spooned it into their mouths while the women lay prone; they brought them bedpans and gave them daily sponge baths; they fetched cups of hot milk and read books out loud to give their patients' weary eyes the chance to rest. Daisy had been rapidly trained in nursing by Thomas and was efficient at what she did, though she was restricted to those who spoke English, and even there Thomas made sure the literary expectations were not high. As he walked down the courtyard he would occasionally hear her voice, loud and insistent, hammering out the words of a sentence to her prone charge and it made him smile with a deep, subversive pleasure as he hurried on. After the patient had been immobile for a week, Mary would be sent in to start the massage. At first, Thomas or Daisy had to take her everywhere in the schloss, but she slowly began to find her way, feeling along the wall of the cloister, then stabbing at the cobbles with her stick and counting off the doorways as she went by. She had learned her craft on Daisy's body, its modesty preserved in cotton camiknickers, as Thomas explained the rudiments of anatomy. They began with the small bones of the feet and toes and worked their way up, with special attention to the joints, which were rotated through every position. A slight young woman, Mary developed strong muscles in the forearms as she grasped the areolar tissue, sometimes making Daisy squeal, rolled the large muscles of the calf and thigh firmly both ways and kneaded the belly with the heel of her hand. By the end of the treatment, Daisy was so relaxed that her initial self-consciousness had left her and she begged to be left to sleep. Once it had been explained to them that Mary was blind, most of the patients allowed themselves to be massaged naked, and this allowed her to develop a sensitivity to match her strength; she could feel where their bodies needed help to heal, relax or break down the deposits of fat and salt from the large amount of food they were consuming. The young women sat up with a smile when they heard the tapping of her stick approach their door: they were allowed no visitors apart from the doctor and the electrician, and many of them were lonely; they talked to Mary as she worked, telling her the stories of their lives, though not sure that she could understand. She sensed their pleasure in the way they let fall their heavy limbs at the wordless instruction of her hands and in their dreamy gratitude when she had finished. Each day her consciousness of what it meant to be alive was growing. There was the realm of speech, to which, after years of silence in the workhouse and the asylum, she was a newcomer. Neglect had made her own voice low and quiet, and it took many weeks before she could converse confidently even with Daisy, in English; no sooner was she there, than another language began to form in her brain and by simple repetition come to mean something. With no distraction from the seen world, she could concentrate on the sounds, remember and repeat them, wishing sometimes she had the courage to ask Thomas what some of the phrases really meant; she grew fluent in the idiom of tired young women, picking up their tics and idiosyncrasies as her own. A physical world, not bound by chains or locks, was opened up to her in the extensive grounds of the schloss, somewhere she could move at will, encountering different sounds and surfaces and densities of air. Josef held her hand and made her stroke the gelding's nose, then compare it to the mare's. On the other side of the stables was a small pasture where, following Herr Leopold's suggestion, they had put two cows, which Mary's educated hands learned how to milk. Beyond all these new perspectives greater than all the new worlds of language and sensation was her discovery of what it meant to feature in the thoughts of other living beings. They knew her name; they asked her questions; she became a part of their routines; she believed that to a small extent they even needed her. Sometimes she wondered if there was any level at which this ascent into awareness might end. It was like climbing from the centre of a set of Chinese boxes: how many new worlds can I discover, she asked herself, and still be looking at the same old life? Sonia had been at the schloss six weeks and was dreaming one night of a meadow near Torrington where she had often played as a child; she was running up the hill, scattering a flock of sheep, when she developed a stitch that made her gasp for breath. She awoke, sweating, in the warm May night to find that the pain was real not in her ribs but in her lower abdomen. She lit a candle, checked that Jacques was sleeping undisturbed, and made her way to the bathroom. As she walked, she found that she was bleeding. She locked the door and drew a warm bath, holding a towel between her legs. She placed the candle on the shelf beside the tub and climbed into the water, which she could see, by the light of the flickering flame, was blooming with the blood that poured from her. For a few minutes she lay still, rigid with the spasms and her fear of what they meant. Then the contractions and the cramps grew less frequent; the pain receded, but was replaced by an overpowering fatigue. Somewhere swirling in the candlelight, somewhere in the blood and water, the life of her son had been lost a mess of red cells she washed away, down through the drains and out beneath the dark fields of Carinthia -no spirit, no laughter, no breath, just red human matter. I have failed, she thought: I have failed a second husband. When she had cleaned the bath and the tile floor, she clamped a fresh towel between her legs and pulled her nightdress on again. She did not want to disturb Jacques, who slept far too little, and whom, for superstitious reasons, she had not yet told of her pregnancy. The night was warm and the ceramic surface of the floor was cool against her cheek as she lay down, wrapping her arms round her belly, covering over the pain, squeezing away the absence. The little boy was so real to her that she could almost hear his voice. "My little one," she whispered. "Oh my darling boy' She felt the up rushing love towards him fill her soul, then hang, until she crushed it back inside herself with the strength of her arms. In the morning, she told Jacques she had bled more heavily than usual. She noticed the flicker of disappointment in his eyes before he offered sympathy; he examined her, palpating gently. She had no fever and he was sure that she was well, but told her she must go to see the gynaecologist in the city hospital, to be certain. "I shall ask the Executioner to take you in this afternoon," he said. "I can come with you if you like. It is probably nothing, but to me it suggests something positive. Activity of any kind is a good omen for..." He trailed off with a gesture; the subject was delicate, and they had never voiced their hopes. The gynaecologist confirmed that she had lost a foetus. After examination, he 'tidied up', as he put it, and assured Sonia that he saw no reason why she should not conceive again; it was only if she miscarried three times consecutively at less than twenty weeks that there was deemed to be a functional problem. "Nature generally aborts for a reason," he said, drying his hands on a towel by the basin. "You have lost a good deal of blood. Rest for two days, then be of good cheer. You are a healthy woman." "I shall try," said Sonia. "In return, please do not tell my husband that I was pregnant." "Entirely as you wish." Back at the schloss, Sonia ignored the doctor's order and returned at once to work. By the end of the summer, she produced accounts for Herr Leopold at the bank that showed they were already making a small profit; there were several bookings for the