Nightmare in Berlin (19 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Voluntary discharge

While Doll was leading a life of idleness up on ‘Men's Ward III', albeit forced to be a little more wide-awake each day as the dosage of sleeping drugs was progressively reduced, it could not escape his attention as the ward's resident patient that the other patients on the ward were now a very different bunch from before. The paralytics and schizophrenics had given way completely to a relatively transitory clientele, which appeared to be neither mentally ill nor emotionally disturbed.

These patients generally arrived in the evening, and were rarely accompanied by relatives. There was often a kind of strange, unreal hilarity about them, and they were very ready to engage in conversation and to dispense the most expensive English and American cigarettes with a generous hand. Later on, they would be taken off to the bathroom, with some gentle persuasion, by two male nurses, and while they were sitting in the bathtub the ward sister and the female nurse would go through their belongings very thoroughly. Doll sometimes watched them, and saw how they checked every corner of the pockets and every envelope with meticulous care, whereas earlier they had been content just to remove anything with a blade or point, and perhaps the dressing-gown cord as well, which some depressives used to commit suicide.

When the new arrivals emerged from the bath they were put to bed immediately, despite all their protests. There was no more chatting with the other patients. A nurse stood guard by their bed, the young doctor appeared, usually an intravenous injection was given, and the patient fell asleep. He was usually kept in this comatose state for a week. But sometimes there would be a lot of noise coming from the room — shouting and screaming, and the sound of feet dragging across the floor — and through the window in the door, Doll would catch a glimpse of a figure in pyjamas, wrestling with the sister and a male nurse, and hear him saying: ‘You're driving me crazy! I want to …' And the soothing voice of reason: ‘If you could just hold on for a moment, Doctor!' (Nearly all these patients were addressed as ‘Doctor'.) ‘The doctor is on his way …'

And sure enough, the doctor summoned by telephone quickly arrived on the scene — quite often it was the privy councillor himself — fresh injections were given, different sleeping drugs administered, and everything quietened down again.

Once this first week was past, the patient appeared from time to time, leaning on the arm of the nurse. Puffy-faced and drugged up to the eyeballs, he would make his way to or from the toilet, and it was not uncommon for him to stop part-way, lean his head against the wall, and groan: ‘I can't go on, I just can't go on! What an idiot I was to come here!'

Idiots or not, it was obvious even to a layman that these patients made rapid progress. By the third week, most of them were wandering up and down the corridor fully dressed, leaning against the window, gazing outside and declaring impatiently: ‘It's high time I got out of this place!' And for the most part they did disappear again quite quickly, especially the ones who were actually entitled to be addressed as ‘Doctor', and new patients of a similar sort moved into their rooms.

Even someone less familiar with such places than Doll would have worked out after three days what was going on with these patients. So when one of these ‘Doctors' spoke quite openly to Doll one day, he wasn't telling him anything he did not already know: ‘It's all right for you, my dear fellow, you can stay here as long as you like. But I've got to get out again as soon as possible. I don't want anyone outside to know that I'm here, or why I'm here.'

Of course they didn't want anyone to know. They were medical doctors, after all, doctors who'd become addicted to morphine, who came here to be cured of their addiction in complete secrecy, and in particular without the knowledge of the feared public health authority. The fact that most of them were doctors was due to the circumstance that they had ready access to morphine at a time when it was in very short supply. If the drug had been more widely available and easy to buy, then doubtless three-quarters of the German population would have used it to anaesthetise themselves against the malady of the age — a mixture of bottomless despair and apathy.

So it was mainly doctors or other people with plenty of money who could afford the black-market prices for morphine. They began with one or two injections. These were enough to take away their cares, so that cold, hunger, the pain of loss — whether of people or of things — no longer troubled them. But gradually they had to increase the dose. What had worked a week earlier no longer worked now. So it was a case of step up the dose, and then step it up some more. In the beginning, they had only injected themselves at night, before going to bed, and then the afternoons began to drag, and another shot was just the thing to help them get through that, and eventually they could no longer get up in the mornings to face an endless grey day. In the end, they had used so much morphine that either the chemists had become suspicious or they had completely lost their zest for work. Or else their wives, relatives, or friends began to distrust them, and their marriage, their whole social standing, and their livelihood were put at risk: a man addicted to morphine was no longer a doctor who brought healing, but a sick man who was a danger to others. So they quickly disappeared inside a sanatorium. To the outside world, they were suffering from angina, and a friendly colleague stepped in as a locum — just as long as the public health authority, the body to which they were answerable, didn't find out about it.

Doll looked upon this endless succession of addicts as companions in suffering, people just like himself, who despaired of themselves and of Germany, who had broken down under the weight of all the humiliations and obscenities, and sought refuge in some artificial paradise. Just like himself, they were all seeking their own ‘Little Death'. Maybe they all still cherished a tiny hope that kept them from taking the ultimate step; maybe they all still needed — just like Doll — that last, final push. Everywhere people were escaping from the present, refusing to shoulder the burden that a shameful war had laid upon all Germans.

But behind his own person, behind all these transient visitors up on Men's Ward III, loomed a dark and menacing multitude: the entire German nation. There had been a time, a time of illusion it had been, but during this time Doll had known that he was not lying all alone in that huge bomb crater: the entire German nation was in there with him. As the morphine-addicted doctors had cut themselves off from this nation, so too had Doll. Walking up and down the rust-red linoleum of the corridor at night for hours on end, lying in bed in his cell for hours on end, staring up at the ceiling light, he reflected and pondered, looked back over the road he had travelled to get here, deeper and deeper into selfish isolation — running away like a coward from the job they were all called upon to do …

But the German nation was out there. It could not be denied or argued away; it was there, and he belonged to it. While he was sitting idly in here, featherbedding himself, living off the charity extended to him by this place, in consideration of the times he had stayed here before, the German people were hard at work. They had cleared away the tank traps and the rubble from the streets, and were now repairing roofs and winter-proofing people's homes. They retrieved burnt-out machinery and got it working again. They were hungry, they were cold, but they repaired the railway tracks, dug for potatoes in the icy October rain, and hiked along the highways in endless columns, making do with next to nothing.

While Doll was gazing enviously at the extra rations of the other patients, the milk was drying up in the breasts of mothers and children who were starving to death. While Doll was arguing with the night-duty nurse over an extra sleeping draught, old women and men, exhausted beyond endurance, were lying down in roadside ditches or in the rain-soaked forest to fall asleep for the last time. While soldiers returning home were looking for everything — their old home, their wives and children, food and work, week after week, never giving up hope — it was too much effort for Dr. Doll to go and speak to some official about their apartment and their ration cards. While Doll lived the life of a freeloader, supported by the proceeds from the sale of his wife's jewellery, and complained bitterly that the money wasn't falling into his lap fast enough, money that he promptly squandered anyway, frail girls were doing hard, physical labour, so poorly paid that they couldn't afford to buy a cigarette — at prices that Doll had long since come to regard as normal.

The fact of the matter was that he had lost his way completely, and had lapsed into a shamefully useless and idle, parasitic existence. He saw clearly the path that had led him to the padded cell in this place, sinking deeper and deeper into the swamp and quagmire since that day, 26 April. And yet he had no idea how he could have gone down this path. How had he got himself into such a state over a harmless schmuck like Piglet Willem? And how come he had let himself get so worked up about the beer wholesaler Zaches? He'd always known what these Nazis were like, after all. All this pointless running around after doctors and sleeping drugs and injections, which didn't change anything, and just made every decision that had to be taken even harder!

And then there was something else as well. This Dr. Doll who had just come to his senses a bit, this writer of books who had thought he had nothing more to write, this brooding self-doubter, who had thought himself completely empty and drained, this ex-mayor who had not been up to the job, this father and husband who had forgotten all about his wife and children — suddenly he thought about his children, and, full of concern, he thought about his wife, too. Now that Doll felt he was getting better, and that there might still be some sort of work for him to do in this life, in the midst of a population that was labouring with grim determination once more, he suddenly remembered his wife, and felt fearful on her account.

By this time, Doll was getting some news of his wife. She hadn't written, of course, but one day Dorle turned up to see him, his wife's loyal friend, and she had brought him a brand-new nightshirt, and cigarettes, and half a loaf of bread. Yes indeed, his wife was thinking of him, she never forgot him, she was worried about him, and she took care of him. She loved him, and he loved her — once more. He'd just forgotten the fact while he was ill, that was all.

Doll smoked, and wolfed down half the white loaf at a single sitting. Dorle sat on the edge of the bed and talked. She told him that Alma was the darling of everyone at the hospital, even the strict, devout nuns, and that everyone there spoiled her, including the doctors. Her wound had been really bad; the infection had gone quite deep because of the delay in treatment. But now it was looking better; they had sprinkled sugar in the wound, an old home remedy, and since then it was a lot better …

And Alma had a bit of money again. Ben had eventually — after many phone calls — turned up at the hospital and had brought money with him, though only two-and-a-half thousand. Apparently he had said that with the continuing fall in the market for diamonds he had only been able to get eleven thousand in total, and he just hadn't been able to make any more. Alma had been furious with Ben, and she had forbidden her, Dorle, to mention the matter to Doll; Dorle implored him not to let on to Alma that he knew. A woman who shared the room with Alma, and who was very knowledgeable about the black market, had apparently told Alma that a ring like the one she had described would easily fetch twenty-five thousand marks, maybe even thirty thousand. ‘So you can just imagine how angry Alma was', said Dorle, and added that she was done with her good friend Ben once and for all.

Doll shared her anger, but his anger was mixed with mild gratification, since no husband can avoid feeling a little jealous of his wife's former men friends, and is always glad to see the back of them. He listened patiently, therefore, when Dorle diffidently, but understandably, sang her own praises — how she was such a good friend to Alma, willing to do anything for her, through thick and thin. And as he listened to her prattling on, he thought to himself:
My dear, good, stupid Dorle! You, too, will only be such a good friend to Alma for as long as you can still get something out of her. And Alma must know this herself. Do you think I haven't noticed that there you are, all innocent and unassuming, already lighting up the third of the ten cigarettes you brought me? I bet you do the same with Alma, even though she's very willing to share — much too willing, in fact, and quite extravagant; she wants to share rather than have her things pilfered from her. And one day it will be all over with her as far as the friendly feelings are concerned — and that includes you!

Such were Doll's thoughts, but he kept them to himself, asking instead how it was going with his wife's painkilling injections. Here again, Dorle had all the answers. To begin with, Alma had had quite a few injections, but then the senior consultant had laid down the law, and now the patient was allowed just one small shot at night, and not every night at that. So she had to stage an elaborate little routine first with the young night-duty doctor, which usually achieved the desired result, the young doctor readily succumbing to her charms when she begged, pouted, cried, wailed, laughed, turned her face to the wall, and sulked — then immediately leapt out of bed when the doctor turned to leave and clung on to him, only to go through the whole rigmarole all over again. And if that failed to do the trick, the doctor was very amenable to foreign cigarettes, which he could not afford on his small salary. So Alma usually ended up getting her evening shot — according to Dorle.