Pilgrim (29 page)
“Yes. Good morning,” Jung replied, still half-blind. He looked sideways, guardedly, at Pilgrim. Had he indeed spoken—or was Kessler a ventriloquist? Or was it just a trick of Jung’s embattled imagination?
Pilgrim was fully dressed, including a pair of elegant boots, the boots—like his trousers, jacket and waistcoat—white. And a bright bow tie which sat like a butterfly below a high collar. The tie was blue, with a touch of violet—a colour in between the two, neither completely one nor the other. It seemed almost to have settled there of its own volition. From Pilgrim’s breast pocket, a handkerchief of similar hue made a graceful puff, as of smoke.
The expression on Pilgrim’s face was that of a child who, expecting good news, has just divined that the news is bad.
Jung looked away, seeking refuge.
A chair had been placed near the foot of the bed. Plus a table—and on the table, an ashtray.
There
.
Jung sat down and slid the music bag onto the coverlet beside him.
Pilgrim followed this motion with his eyes. He made fists of both hands and pressed his knees together. His great height remained evident, even when he was seated. The curious cut of his hair was almost boylike, causing it to sit up over his brow as if the wind or a careless sweep of his hand had put it there. His cheeks, for all his general pallor, were pink. He might have just returned from a vigorous turn around the garden.
“Have you nothing to say?” he said to Jung. “I was expecting congratulations. My white suit…the abandoned chair…the undoubted pleasure of hearing my voice…” Pilgrim gave a nervous smile. “Of course, I believe you’ve heard it before…on a certain occasion. Though I cannot quite recall when that was, time is so…what? So out of kilter? I think that is what I mean.
Out of joint
. Someone said that. Hamlet, more than likely. Hamlet says everything, doesn’t he. Almost anything you can think of—so long as it’s in blank verse…”
He fell quiet.
Kessler shifted in his place and moved his fingers over Pilgrim’s shoulder. He eased himself from one foot to the other. His shoes squeaked. He coughed into one cupped hand.
Pilgrim looked down.
Jung looked up.
“Mister Pilgrim…There has been…”
“An accident.”
Pilgrim’s voice was hoarse, as though he had spent the last week shouting. He glanced away sideways towards the window and lifted his head.
“
The water is wide
,” he whispered. “
I can not cross o’er
.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a song. Just a song. Is she dead? My friend?”
“I’m afraid so. Yes.”
Pilgrim stood up. Kessler’s hand fell aside.
Pilgrim adjusted his tie. “I wore this for her,” he said. “I suppose I knew. In fact…I did know. I was hoping only that you…” He went to the window. “I thought perhaps you might have come to tell me I was wrong.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“An accident, you say.”
“Yes. In her motor car. She was killed in an instant, I can assure you.”
Pilgrim shrugged.
“Why do people always feel they have to say that?” he said. “It’s never true. And you know it isn’t. If I’m supposed to trust you, you’ll have to do better than that, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You can tell me in a word. Just say it.”
“Avalanche.”
“Avalanche.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Pilgrim sighed. In his mind, the image of the silver Daimler was turned and tumbled by a child creating a giant snowball. Inside, the occupants were rolled and tossed like laboratory mice in a revolving wheel. He reached out and ran his fingers along the edge of the gauze curtain to his right. “Was Miss Peebles with her?”
“No.”
“I thought not.”
“Only her chauffeur.”
“He must have had a name, Doctor Jung. They usually do.”
“Yes. His name was Otto Mohr.”
“Another instant death, no doubt.”
“One can only hope so.”
Pilgrim turned back into the room.
“I see that you have brought a child’s music bag with you.”
Surprised by the fact that Pilgrim had noticed the bag at all, let alone that he had guessed its true owner, Jung could only mutter: “I borrowed it from my daughter.”
Pilgrim indicated the bed, where the bag lay. “Is there anything in it for me?” he asked. He said this not so much coyly as meanly. It seemed almost that he was taunting Jung and Jung was not sure how to respond.
Pilgrim was now standing in the middle of the room, to Jung’s left. “A toy, perhaps?” he said. “I’m like a child, myself, you know,” he went on. “And a
child’s bag ought to contain at least one toy. If you give me a toy, I’m yours forever. Isn’t that the way of children?”
Jung stood up.
“No toys, I’m afraid,” he said. “But there is a letter.”
He went to the bag, unbuckled it and drew out an envelope.
“Here,” he said—and handed it to Pilgrim.
Pilgrim went away to the farthest window in the sitting-room before he withdrew the letter from its white pocket.
White, white—everything white
, Jung thought.
What is that? Japanese? White for mourning—black for rejoicing? Something…
All at once, Pilgrim dropped the letter to the floor. He could not have read more than one or two sentences.
Jung waited nervously for Pilgrim to retrieve the fallen pages. Surely the man must want to know what his friend had to say to him, but Pilgrim remained motionless, the envelope dangling from his fingers. Slowly, Jung turned with mute panic to the music bag. Looking inside, he saw at once what he had done. There sat Lady Quartermaine’s letter.
He went to the sitting-room, leaned down and scooped up the scattered pages, afterward taking their envelope from Pilgrim’s hand.
Turning back to the bedroom and the music bag, he glanced with a sinking heart at the writing before him.
There was music—this is true. Dwarfs, there were none—though you promised them…
He had given Pilgrim Elisabetta’s letter to Leonardo, which he had not, of course, intended him to see at all. If Pilgrim ever knew of Jung’s access to the journals, he would have every right to retrieve them, and Jung would then lose a precious commodity in his pursuit of Pilgrim’s sanity. All at once, he found himself praying that Pilgrim had not, in fact, created the letter himself as an act of imagination, but had found it mouldering in some barely known archive from which Jung could then claim to have obtained a copy.
Priejesu.
Ah, yes—the-chance-encounter-with-a-buried-treasure syndrome, to which so many dreamers succumb.
I thought you had agreed not to interfere.
I’m only here as an observer, Carl Gustav.
Un témoin,
as the French say. A witness. I could leave, of course. But if I depart, then any kind of accurate record of this encounter goes with me. After all, I am your memory as well as your conscience.
I don’t want a conscience.
Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but you have one. And why, I might ask, don’t you want one?
Because you stand in the way of spontaneity.
Don’t make me laugh, Carl Gustav! Don’t make me laugh. In your life, conscience
never
comes before the fact—only after. That’s what makes you a scientist instead of a philosopher—a psychiatrist and not a surgeon. Everything you do depends on leaping before you have a chance to think. If you had consulted me earlier, you would never
have accepted the gift of Mister Pilgrim’s journals. You would have returned them instantly to Lady Quartermaine. Your judgement—to date, at any rate—has always been empirical. I never get my way until it’s too late. But…
The Inquisitor sighed and took a deep, internal breath.
…
I am yours and you are mine. In the American parlance of Archie Menken—sometimes so infuriatingly apt—you and I are
stuck with one another.
And I think you ought to know that your patient is looking at you expectantly. Amongst his last words, before you handed him the fatal letter, were: “if you give me a toy, I’m yours forever
.”
Jung folded the treacherous pages back into their envelope and returned them to the music bag. There, at hand, were the other two envelopes—one containing photographs—the other, Sybil Quartermaine’s letter. Also, the monograph concerning
Psyche
butterflies.
Jung drew the latter out—and the photographs.
Toys?
Well—the next best thing.
Divertissements.
This was what Pilgrim needed, now. Not a letter from a dead friend, but something entirely other. The shock of being confronted with La Gioconda’s words might, after all, have driven him back to silence and that, at all costs, must be prevented.
Jung returned to Pilgrim.
“I thought you might want to see these,” he said, and pulled the photographs into the light. Some, of course, would be meaningless to Pilgrim. The
daffodil, the bust of Doctor Forel, the façade of the Jung house at Küsnacht. Emma looking pregnant, the children—Agathe, the eldest, holding Marianne, the youngest—Anna and little Franz. And the dogs, Philemon and Salome.
No. Don’t show him those. Too many happy faces. Some other time, perhaps. Not now.
But the pictures of Lady Quartermaine and Pilgrim in the garden—yes. Not the one showing Otto Mohr and the silver Daimler. Had it been nothing more than coincidence that all these latter photographs could be so neatly juxtaposed on the events that followed?
And, of course, the butterfly.
“I have brought these along,” Jung said as he crossed the room. “I took them last week, as you may well remember. They show you both together. In the garden. The garden just out there to the left of the…”
Don’t say
Clinic.
“…building.”
Jung shuffled the photographs. Cards.
Pick a card. Any card. Do not tell me what it is. Put it back in the deck…
He fanned and offered them, palming the one that showed the butterfly. That must come last.
Pilgrim seized the fan and closed it.
Looking down, he discerned that Sybil indeed was sitting there.
How beautiful she is
, he thought.
Is, was and always will be.
“May I have this?” he asked. “Just the one. I should like to have it by me.”
“Certainly. Absolutely.”
Jung took back the other photographs.
“There’s a silver frame on the bureau,” Pilgrim said rather dreamily. “A photograph of the woman who claimed to be my mother, though I know better. I no longer need or want her. I shall destroy her—burn her at last and flush her down the toilet.”
He looked up and smiled at Jung like an evil child whose parents will one day be murdered. A shiver passed over Jung’s shoulders. Though he tried not to show his shock, he was barely able to nod in response.
“Then I shall set this photograph of Sybil in its place and look at it every day. I thank you for it. You are kind. Very kind. More than kind. You are thoughtful and considerate. You have an understanding heart. You are filled with compassion. What a burden it must be, to love the human race to such a degree. Overwhelming, I should imagine. Overwhelming, overpowering. Soul-consuming—ruinous, almost. Annihilating. To think that you do such thoughtful, kindly, generous things as hand out photographs of the deceased. It is unimaginable. Some kind of miracle—indeed, the very essence of the milk of human kindness. What must your filing system cost you in upkeep! Cellars filled with photographs! The whole human race! And all with one little camera! May I see it? One day, I should like to see it. Truly. Really. Absolutely. Doctor Jung and his
camera compassionata!
Think of it! The whole human race in black and white…”
All of this had been spoken with a sleepy, offhand
drawl delivered from a languid stance—the photograph drooping from Pilgrim’s hand the way a handkerchief might dangle from the fingers of a dandified raconteur while he entertains his host with amusing gossip. But Pilgrim’s eyes belied any thought of humour or of entertainment. They grew increasingly narrowed until, at the end of his diatribe—for it had been precisely that—they were closed.
Then, all at once, he shouted: “
WHY HAVE YOU MADE ME LOOK AT HER
? S
HE’S DEAD
. S
HE HAS ACHIEVED WHAT I CANNOT ACHIEVE
. W
HY HAVE YOU SHOWN ME THIS
? W
HY
?”
Jung put out his hand and guided Pilgrim to a chair, where he seated his patient and asked Kessler to bring a glass of water.
Pilgrim sat, desolate—the photograph upside down in his lap.
Jung stood back and put the other photographs, including the butterfly, in his pocket.
He realized that a window, if not a door, had been opened—prompting Pilgrim’s flood of words. But he did not quite know what to do next. Why, for instance, had Pilgrim not mentioned Elisabetta’s letter? Had he truly not known what it was—or was something about it so deeply buried in Pilgrim’s psyche that he could not speak of it?
When Kessler returned, he offered a tall glass of water to Pilgrim and a second glass to Jung. In a war, Kessler had reasoned, both sides are thirsty.
A walk in the garden would do her a world of good. Carl Gustav would not return for the midday meal, having expected that his encounter with Patient Pilgrim would, in some way, be
traumatic
. That had been his word, although of course he had not intended a clinical reading of it. He had meant only to convey the range of what might take place between himself and his
recalcitrant adversary
.
“Really, Carl Gustav,” Emma had said, “you must not refer to your patients as adversaries. They are not your enemies.”
“Yes, they are,” Jung had replied. “In their way, they are. Each and every patient is like a territory lost in a war—or a tract of the homeland that must be reclaimed. Some aspect of some disease or condition has won them away and convinced them they are now the citizens of another country. That’s why they show so much hostility. They’ve been propagandized by their demons and made to recite some alien catechism. And in the long run, they believe it—this alien catechism. That’s what mental disease is about, Emmy. Or any disease. As Pilgrim himself has cited in his journal, though he puts the words in Leonardo da Vinci’s mouth:
everything wants to live, including contagion
. The whole struggle is to win the war not only against the disease or the condition, but against the victim who carries it. That’s why one must listen and believe. That’s why I encourage the Countess to go on
living on the Moon. Until I can recognize the Moon’s voice—or Blavinskeya’s version of it—there’s no way I can help her. It’s not enough—it’s not enough—it’s never enough to do what Furtwängler does and simply tell her there can be no life on the Moon. If she believes it—we must find out
why
.
