‘That advert. . . the one in the Spiegel. . . it was yours?’
Bleibtreu inclined his head. He opened the armrest beside him and took out a magazine. ‘We advertise in Focus, Stern and Spiegel. I think you replied to this one.’
Marc nodded as the old man handed him the open magazine. It was pure chance that the advertisement had caught his eye while he was leafing through it. He never read news magazines as a rule, let alone adverts. Ever since he’d had to have his dressing changed twice a week, however, he’d been obliged to kill a lot of time with the old illustrateds in the waiting area of his father-in-law’s hospital.
‘Learn to forget. . .’ he read out. The headline had exerted a magnetic attraction on him.
Have you experienced a severe trauma, and would you like to erase it from your memory? If so, email us. The Bleibtreu Psychiatric Clinic is seeking applicants to take part in a clinical trial under medical supervision.
‘Why didn’t you respond to our calls?’ the professor asked.
Marc briefly rubbed his ears, which were burning in that familiar, agonizing way as they gradually thawed out. So that accounted for all the calls from unknown numbers he’d left unanswered over the last few days.
‘I never respond to unsolicited calls,’ he said. ‘And, to be frank, I never get into strangers’ cars either.’
‘Why make an exception this time?’
‘It’s drier in here.’
Marc sat back and pointed to the side window. The airstream was dragging plump raindrops across the water-repellent surface of the glass.
‘Does the boss always attend to new patients in person?’
‘Only when they’re candidates as promising as yourself.’
‘Promising in what respect?’
‘Conducive to the success of our experiment.’
The professor retrieved the magazine and put it back in the central console.
‘I’ll be absolutely honest with you, Marc. May I call you that?’ His gaze fastened on Marc’s trainers and travelled upwards to the knee that was showing through his threadbare jeans. ‘You don’t look like someone who stands on ceremony.’
Marc shrugged. ‘What does this experiment entail?’
‘The Bleibtreu Clinic is a world leader in the field of personal memory research.’
The professor crossed his legs. His pinstriped trouser leg rode up over one sock to reveal the beginnings of a hairy shin.
‘In recent decades, hundreds of millions in research funds have been invested in discovering how the human brain works. In simple terms, the main focus has been on questions relating to the subject of “learning”. Hordes of researchers were and still are obsessed with the idea of using the brain’s capacity more efficiently.’
Bleibtreu tapped his forehead.
‘There has never been a finer high-powered computer than the one in here. Theoretically, anyone is capable of reeling off all the numbers in a telephone directory after a single reading. The ability to form synapses, thereby increasing our cerebral storage capacity to an almost infinite extent, is not a utopian dream. In my opinion, however, all these lines of research have been heading in the wrong direction.’
‘And I suspect you’re going to tell me why.’
The invisible chauffeur behind the opaque glass partition was negotiating a roundabout.
‘Our problem is not that we learn too little. On the contrary, our problem is forgetting.’
Marc’s hand strayed to the plaster on the neck. Becoming aware of this involuntary movement, he quickly withdrew it.
‘According to the latest statistics,’ said Bleibtreu, ‘one child in four is abused and one woman in three sexually harassed or raped in the course of their lives. There are few people on earth who have not been victims of crime at least once, and half of them have needed some form of psychological therapy thereafter, at least in the short term. But irreparable scars are often inflicted on our mental “tissue”, not only by crime but by numerous everyday experiences. From the psychological aspect, for instance, lovesickness possesses an almost greater negative intensity than the loss of a person close to us.’
‘Sounds as if this isn’t the first time you’ve delivered this lecture,’ Marc interjected.
Bleibtreu removed a dark-blue signet ring from his finger and transferred it to the other hand. He smiled.
‘Up to now,’ he said, ‘psychoanalysis has tended to unearth suppressed memories. Our research proceeds in the diametrically opposite direction.’
‘You help people to forget.’
‘Precisely. We erase negative thoughts from our patients’ consciousness. Permanently.’
That sounds alarming, thought Marc. Having guessed that the experiment would amount to something of the kind, he’d felt annoyed by his tipsy response soon after sending off the email. He would never have replied to the Bleibtreu Clinic’s dubious advertisement had he been sober, but that night he’d made a disastrous mistake and inadvertently told a cabby to take him to his old address. He had suddenly found himself back outside the little house that still looked as if the door would burst open at any moment and a barefoot, laughing Sandra come running out to meet him.
It was the ‘For Sale’ sign outside that had brought him face to face with his loss. He had turned away at once and run back down the street where local children played in the road in summer and pets dozed on dustbins because no one there, neither man nor beast, feared the advent of evil. He had run faster and faster, back into his new, worthless existence – back to the bachelor flat in Schöneberg into which he’d moved after being discharged from hospital. But he hadn’t run fast enough to escape from all the memories pursuing him. Their first kiss at the age of seventeen; Sandra’s laughter when she gave away the plot of a film before he guessed it himself; her look of disbelief when he told her how lovely she was; their tears when the pregnancy test turned out positive; and, finally, the advertisement he’d just reread.
Learn to forget. . .
He expelled a deep breath and strove to concentrate on the present.
‘The advantages of deliberately induced amnesia are immense. A man who has accidentally run over a child will never again be haunted by terrible visions of the paramedics failing to resuscitate it. A mother won’t spend the rest of her life waiting in vain for her eleven-year-old son to come home from swimming in the lake.’
Smoothly though the chauffeur braked, there was a faint clink from the cut-glass tumblers in the limo’s walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet.
‘The world’s intelligence services are interested in our findings, I fully admit. From now on, there’ll be no need to eliminate agents who threaten to defect to the enemy, taking all their knowledge with them. We’ll simply erase the vital information from their minds.’
‘Is that why you’re rolling in money, because you’re funded by the military?’
‘It’s a billion-dollar business, I grant you, and of unparalleled importance to the immediate future. But the pharmaceutical industry has always been like that. It may make a few people wealthy, but it also makes a lot of people healthy or even happy.’
Bleibtreu stared at Marc with the piercing intensity of an interrogator. ‘We’re still at the very beginning, Marc. We’re pioneers – that’s why we’re looking for people like you. Guinea pigs who have had to cope with traumata as severe as yours.’
Marc swallowed hard. He was feeling just as he had six weeks ago, when his father-in-law brought the terrible news to his bedside.
‘She didn’t make it, Luke. . .’
‘Just think,’ Bleibtreu told him. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if you could wake up in the mornings without your first thought being of your dead wife? Of the baby that never saw the light? You wouldn’t feel guilty any more because you wouldn’t know you’d driven the car into a tree. You’d be able to go back to work, socialize with friends and laugh your head off at some comedy film because the splinter in your neck wouldn’t be a perpetual reminder that you escape
d with a scratch whereas Sandra was hurled though the windscreen and bled to death at the crash scene.’
Marc ostentatiously unbuckled his seatbelt and reached for the door handle.
‘Kindly let me out.’
‘But Marc. . .’
‘At once!’
Very gently, Bleibtreu put a hand on his knee. ‘I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I was merely repeating what you yourself wrote in your email to us.’
‘I was at the end of my tether.’
‘You still are. I heard you at the swimming pool. You said you were contemplating suicide.’
Bleibtreu removed his hand, but Marc could still feel its weight on his knee.
‘I can offer you something better.’
The glasses clinked again, like a couple of ghosts derisively toasting each other. Marc noticed only now that his back was wet with sweat despite the pleasant temperature in the car’s air-conditioned interior. Nervously, he fingered the dressing on his neck. This time he left his hand on the plaster over the itching wound.
‘Speaking purely hypothetically,’ he said in a hoarse voice, ‘this experiment of yours – what form would it take?’
6
Eddy Valka’s shop smelt of cat’s piss and roses. Not an unusual combination to anyone reasonably well-acquainted with him. All that surprised Benny was that Valka had wanted to see him so soon. He’d only been out two days, and the ultimatum didn’t expire until next week.
‘What is this, a proposal of marriage?’ He laughed and rubbed his left shoulder, which those two knuckleheads had almost dislocated when throwing him into the boot. He’d have got in of his own free will. You didn’t object when Valka wanted a word with you. Not for long, anyway.
Valka threw him a quick glance, then redevoted himself to the long-stemmed roses lying on the counter in front of him. Picking them up one by one, he assessed their length, trimmed them with secateurs and inserted them in a galvanized bucket.
‘You’ll have to ask my parents’ permission first.’
‘Your parents are dead,’ Valka said in an expressionless voice, decapitating another rose. He evidently disliked its colour. ‘Did you know that cut flowers should be dunked in boiling water when they droop?’ He clicked the secateurs warningly at a Blue Chartreuse that was preparing to jump up on the counter.
‘Head first or stem first?’ Benny quipped.
He watched the cat scamper off to join its siblings under a radiator. Nobody knew why Valka put up with them. He didn’t like animals. He didn’t like any living creatures, if the truth be told. He had opened the florist’s only because he could hardly declare his true sources of income to the tax inspector. And also because he didn’t want his tame rose-sellers – the poor devils who hawked their wares around the city’s bars and pubs at night – to buy their stuff elsewhere. If Valka controlled a business, he controlled it a hundred per cent.
Benny looked around for somewhere to park himself, but the stuffy little shop wasn’t equipped to accommodate waiting customers. In fact, it didn’t seem interested in attracting customers at all, being far too remote from Köpenick’s main shopping streets and bang next door to a boxing gym whose burly habitués weren’t exactly a florist’s preferred clientele.
‘Great name, by the way,’ said Benny, glancing at the grimy shop window, on which a semi-circle of self-adhesive letters spelt out the word ROSENKRIEG – ‘Rose War’ – in mirror writing. ‘Very apt.’
Valka gave a gratified nod. ‘You’re the first person to notice.’
His was a Czech surname meaning ‘war’. As the uncrowned king of East Berlin’s nightclub-bouncer fraternity, Eddy Valka was inordinately proud of it. He wiped his hands on a green rubber apron and looked Benny in the eye for the first time.
‘You’re looking better than you used to. Not as flabby. Been working out?’
Benny nodded.
‘Well, I’m damned, that funny farm seems to have done you good. How come they let you out so soon?’
‘They reassess you every couple of months. It’s regulations.’
‘I see.’
Valka extracted an exceptionally long-stemmed rose from the bucket and sniffed it appreciatively.
‘So the shrinks thought you’d ceased to be a danger to the public?’
‘Yes, once my beloved brother had finally withdrawn his statement.’ Benny fingered the frond of a yucca palm beside him. ‘They released me after that.’
‘They could always have consulted me,’ said Valka.
Benny couldn’t help grinning. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure you’d make a trustworthy sponsor in the eyes of the law.’
The corners of Valka’s mouth turned down. He looked affronted. ‘Nobody’s better qualified than me to testify that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. How long have we known each other?’
‘Getting on for twenty years,’ Benny replied, wondering when Valka would get to the point. This meeting had to be more than just a chat about old times.
‘Christ, my current girlfriend wasn’t even born then.’ Valka’s smile went out like a light. ‘We didn’t want you in with us to start with, Benny. You were just too soft.’
Another rose lost its head.
‘And that’s precisely what I’d have told the shrinks who locked you up. I’d have told them that my former associate is an HSP.’
Benny smiled. It was very rare for someone to know the technical term for his disorder. But Eddy Valka was one of those people who you couldn’t judge by appearances. His bulldog features, bullet head and crooked teeth made him look like the archetypal roughneck. In reality, he had graduated from school and had even studied psychology for four terms before discovering that he wanted to be the cause of his fellow men’s nightmares, not the solution to them.
‘Who told you that?’ Benny asked.
‘Well, I often wondered what was wrong with you. Why you were so different from your brother, who never ducked a fight.’
Valka tugged at a jammed drawer beneath the counter and opened it with difficulty.
‘I mean, I never saw you with a girl, so I thought you were gay or something. But then I came across this.’
He produced a newspaper article. ‘HSP,’ he read aloud. ‘Highly Sensitive Person. Generally described as someone suffering from a pathological hypersensitive disorder. Such individuals are considerably more sensitive to their environment than normal test subjects. They sense, feel, see, taste and smell everything far more intensely.’
Benny made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s all humbug.’
‘Oh yeah? It says here that HSPs used to be sages and advisers at the royal courts of old. Or, thanks to their ability to empathize with the thoughts and emotional state of others, they became diplomats, artists, financial experts. . .’ Valka glanced at Benny over the top of the paper. ‘That would explain why you were always on at me to put mercy before justice, go easy on my enemies, and all that shit.’ He snorted noisily. ‘It also explains why I made you my bookkeeper.’
Benny’s expression didn’t change even now that Valka had finally came to the real reason for this meeting: money.
‘But it also says’ – Valka looked down at the article and clicked his tongue – ‘that HSPs have a regrettable tendency to become depressive. Lots of them go insane and commit suicide.’
‘I’m still alive.’
‘Yes, thanks more to your brother than yourself.’
‘Must we talk about Marc?’
Valka guffawed. ‘Glad you reminded me of what I really wanted to show you. Come with me.’
Tossing his apron on to the counter, he picked up the secateurs and gave Benny an unmistakable signal to follow him into the back room.
Valka used the windowless room next door as a storeroom. Not for flowers, fertilizer or vases, but – as Benny was appalled to see – for garbage. Human garbage, and this specimen was still alive.
‘It’s time we cured you of this HSP disorder of yours,’ said Valka, pointing to a naked man
lashed to a St Andrew’s cross. Jammed into his mouth was an orange bit ball with a central aperture the diameter of a drinking straw – his only means of breathing. He was on the verge of asphyxia, given that he couldn’t inhale any air through his nose, which was broken.
‘I want you to pay close attention,’ said Valka. He turned on an inspection lamp dangling from the ceiling, rhythmically clicking the secateurs in his other hand as he did so. The gagged man’s eyes widened at the sound. He couldn’t see the blades because his head was imprisoned in a sort of clamp that prevented him from turning it. The retaining screws were inserted in his ears, and blood was already seeping from the left one.
Benny started to turn away.
‘No, no, no.’ Eddy clicked his tongue several times as though quietening a horse. ‘Watch carefully.’
He went right up to the naked man and held the secateurs immediately in front of his face. The blades struck sparks from his victims’ pupils, he was breathing more and more frantically.
‘That article really opened my eyes, Benny. It said that HSPs are exceptionally sensitive to pain. Is that correct?’
Benny was speechless with horror.
‘Many of them don’t even respond to anaesthetics. Imagine the torture of going to the dentist!’
Valka thrust his victim’s upper lip aside with the secateurs. The man had bad, nicotine-stained teeth.
‘But what I found most interesting, Benny, was that people like you are said to be particularly sensitive to the sufferings of others. It seems they often feel other people’s pain more intensely than their own.’
Valka raised the man’s right eyelid with his thumb.
‘Stop it,’ Benny whimpered, although he knew it was futile. Valka wanted to demonstrate what would happen to him if he failed to repay the 90,000 euros he’d borrowed.
Valka turned to him one more time. ‘That makes things simpler for me, my sensitive young friend. It means I can inflict pain on you without harming a hair of your head.’