Joanna Kavenna - The Birth of Love

I said that I was not a doctor, merely a man of independent means who liked to conduct researches. But he was not listening at this point.

‘Do you work at the hospital?’ he said.

‘Which hospital are you thinking of?’

‘I do not know. Where is it? Nearby I think.’

‘The General Hospital, here in Vienna?’

‘Yes, I think so. I think that is what I mean.’

‘I do not work there. I am not a doctor, as I explained before. I work mostly from home. I read and write in my study, and then I visit asylums and avail myself of any opportunity to speak with the patients. I visit this asylum roughly every two weeks. I must have made my last visit shortly before your arrival.’

‘My arrival?’

‘Yes, you came here two weeks ago.’

‘I have been in this cell for two weeks?’

I reaffirmed that he had.

‘Did you bring me here?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Why am I here?’ Now he was inflamed, seeking to rise from his chair, though it seemed he was too weak to move, and, though he was perhaps unaware of them at that moment, his hands and feet were anyway in chains.

‘I am not certain,’ I said, when he had calmed himself a little. ‘We were recently discussing it and you could not remember. You said you came on a train. There was a friend of yours there.’

‘A friend? I did not think I had any friends left.’

‘You said he was an old friend. You were pleased to see him.’

‘Why are you telling me these things?’

I explained again who I was.

‘Why do you keep talking about the insane? I am in prison, am I not? Surely I have been convicted, finally, of murder?’ he said.

‘You are not in prison,’ I said. ‘You have been brought to a place where you will be treated for what is perceived as your condition. I fear this treatment will do you no good at all.’

‘I do not need treatment,’ he said, angrily. ‘I need to be punished.’

‘Sadly this is indeed a punishment, nonetheless.’

‘What do they propose to do to me?’

‘I do not know the precise nature of your treatment. I am not an insider here. I am permitted access simply because of various friendships I have developed. I have no medical status at all.’

‘But where, where did I come from? I cannot remember. My mind is full of darkness,’ he said.

*

As we fell silent I heard — I imagine he did too — the cries of a man in a neighbouring cell. ‘God God God,’ the man was crying, over and over again, so it pained me to hear his incessant delivery of this word. ‘ GOD GOD GOD .’ This poor man, entreating a deity who had either forsaken him or had allocated him a life of suffering. For it was certain this neighbour was suffering, mired in despair and begging his God to help him to comprehend it, to endure it. In the silence of the cell, this word echoed around us, and I thought that even had Herr S been entirely lucid when he arrived in this place then merely a day of this would have delivered him into another state of being. When I looked again, he was staring into space, having assumed once more an expression of dull defeat.

*

‘You were interested in the General Hospital. Why is that, I wonder?’ I said.

‘I am not sure. The thought of it frightens me. I see it as a place of suffering and death.’

‘It is common to feel like this about hospitals.’

‘Perhaps I was there once. Perhaps I was ill.’

‘Herr S, you are an educated man. Earlier you discussed internal bleeding with confidence. Perhaps you have worked at the hospital?’

‘I am not sure.’ Now he began rubbing his forehead again. I could not tell what the man might have looked like in a happier era. Perhaps in his youth he was stout and fair, though he would even then, I imagine, have been balding and with a tendency to corpulence. I could see he might once have responded passionately to elements around him — his work, or a beloved girl, or his friends. His moods shifted constantly, and this might in youth have made him restless, precocious perhaps. I was uncertain how old he might be now. He was bent and wrinkled, and his remaining hair was white. But his voice was firm; his movements unencumbered by decrepitude. I suspected he was a prematurely grizzled man of fifty or so; that he had perhaps suffered from a traumatic experience which had etched lines upon his face.

*

‘I think perhaps I have been ill for some time,’ he was saying, as he rubbed his forehead in his desperate way. ‘I am not sure. I have such scenes in my brain … I cannot …’

‘What sort of scenes?’

‘It is as if everything happened a very long time ago. Something dreadful occurred. I have a sense of a terrible crime. I think I committed it, but there were many accomplices. I wonder if I have committed it and hidden the evidence, and this is why I am here. They will interrogate me, will they not? They seek to unearth my secret, I trust?’

At that, his dull eyes turned towards me.

‘You are in an asylum,’ I said, again. ‘There are many inmates here who do not deserve the epithet “mad”. Indeed perhaps all of you. Yet your keepers are woefully uninterested in your inner thoughts. They seek merely to suppress you.’

‘You are not being honest,’ he said. ‘I know I am to be tortured, and you are lying to me.’ He was preparing to rage but then I said very quietly and calmly, ‘I assure you, I will not lie to you. Essentially I do not know anything about you. I am merely telling you what I think is the case. If you disagree with me that is perfectly understandable, but I am not lying. Because I am not an insider, they will not tell me anything about you. Herr Meyer is a corrupt man, but he does not like me. So he has not told me your name, and he will not inform me of any of the particulars of your case.’

At this, he stopped rubbing his forehead and placed his hands on his lap. Then he looked down at his hands.

‘All you are saying in your … pretty words … is that you have no power and they will torture me anyway.’

‘With respect, I am not saying that at all. I am saying that I should like to talk to you, that I seek to understand you, if you will permit me to stay here a little while.’

‘You will understand me!’ he said, scornfully. ‘I do not think you would like that very much. There is something within me — I have a dim recollection of it, and it makes me shudder with fear … I am not sure I want to remember the rest … I long to sleep, but it is so uncomfortable. I long to sleep and be oblivious … But it seems I am always awake, and always there is this sense … of something …’

‘Do you think you have fallen into your present condition as a response to a particular event, to something dreadful that has occurred?’

That seemed to irritate him once more. He snapped back at me, ‘I do not know, how should I know? I am in darkness, and you ask me what I think?’

‘I am sorry if my questions seem inappropriate to you. I do not want to upset you.’

‘You have no power to upset me at all. Your voice is very faint, very distant. There is a roaring in my head, I can barely hear you beneath the roaring. I am adrift on a … poisonous … boiling ocean. I cannot see the shore. I have been cast off, sent to drift until I drown …’

*

Professor Wilson, do you not think this conversation was relatively cogent, if you will permit a qualified use of the word? I have had many a discussion with the inmates of asylums, and it is rare that they speak in this manner. By this I mean that they are usually far less self-aware, far more deeply ensconced in the private or other world to which they have gained access. They have nearly forgotten the language of their former lives, the cadences of conventional speech. But Herr S was still quite fluent in such everyday modes. He was aware of his condition, to a notable degree. Naturally, he railed and lapsed into symbolical utterance at times, when the moon was working its mischief within him; he was moving constantly between worlds, the lunar and the solar: he was neither of one nor the other. I wrote down some notes, trying to express some of this and also to record my immediate impressions of the man, and all the while Herr S was sitting thoughtfully in his chains. The only consistent sign of distress was the repetitive movement he made with his hands. This was a horrible motion, as if all his suppressed energies were finding an outlet through his hands. Yet in many ways he was surpris- ingly measured. When I asked him a question, he often thought about his answer before he spoke. He was struggling to use his addled brain, though it was clear that organ had indeed suffered a form of injury — whether before or after his arrival in the asylum I could not ascertain — that it was not functioning correctly. I suspect that he knew his so-called reason had deserted him, or been terribly compromised. Most inmates of these institutions have no more notion of reason, and what it is to be in a ‘reasonable’ state, than you or I have of what it means to have fallen into unreason. If one accepts that it is in dreams that we encounter our inner madness, these ordinarily fettered forces of misrule, then the inmates I meet are living in the world of dreams, and cannot return to the daytime realm. Nonetheless Herr S was in a lucid dream, aware that he was dreaming, and sometimes, briefly, he woke altogether. He woke and stared around, recognised familiar objects, then he slipped into his dream state again. This must have been most distressing for him, and I think this was the cause of his sudden rages. Yet I am not sure.