“We all forget everything here,” Streptomycin Lilly offered mildly from her corner. “Anyone who stays here for a few years is no longer good for anything down below.”
Lilly was the Dalai Lama’s guinea pig for new cures. At this time, he was trying streptomycin on her. She could not tolerate the drug very well; but even if the Dalai Lama were to discharge her, she would not have Eva Moser’s problem. She was the only patient in the sanatorium who had been born in the village, and could easily find a job anywhere. She was an excellent cook.
“What kind of job can I get?” Eva Moser was whipping herself up into a frenzy. “Stenographer? Who would take me? I’m a rotten typist. Besides, people are leery of stenographers who come from a sanatorium.”
“Be secretary to a man with t.b.,” the graybeard croaked.
Lillian looked at Eva as if she were a prehistoric animal which had crawled out of a crack in the floor. There had been other discharged patients who had said that they would like to stay—but they had only done so out of consideration for the others, to play down the curious feeling of desertion that often accompanied discharge. But Eva Moser was a different case; she meant what she was saying. She was genuinely in despair. She had become used to the sanatorium, and was afraid of life down below.
Dolores Palmer brought Lillian a glass of vodka. “That woman!” she said, throwing a look of disgust at Eva Moser. “No self-control! How she’s carrying on! It’s absolutely obscene, isn’t it?”
“I’m going,” Lillian declared. “I can’t stand it.”
“Don’t go,” Charles Ney said, leaning toward her. “Beautiful, flickering light in the uncertain darkness, stay a while. The night is full of shadows and platitudes, and we need you and Dolores as figureheads to bear before our tattered sails, lest we be trampled mercilessly under Eva Moser’s dreadful brogans. Sing something, Lillian!”
“What shall I sing! A lullaby for children who will never be born?”
“Eva will have children. Heaps of them. You can be sure of that. No, sing the song of the clouds that do not return and of the snow that buries the heart. The song of the exiles of the mountains. Sing it for us. Not for that strapping wench Eva. We need the dark wine of self-glorification tonight. It’s better to wallow in sentimentality than to weep.”
“Charles got hold of half a bottle of cognac somewhere,” Dolores commented matter-of-factly. She strolled long-leggedly over to the phonograph. “Play the new American records, Schirmer.”
“That monster,” Charles Ney sighed to her retreating back. “She looks like the most poetical being on earth and has a brain like an almanac. I love her as one loves the jungle, and she answers like a vegetable garden. What’s to be done about it?”
“Suffer and be happy.”
Lillian stood up. As she did so, the door opened, framing the Crocodile. “Just as I thought! Cigarettes! Alcohol in the room! An orgy! And you here, too, Miss Ruesch!” she snapped at Streptomycin Lilly. “Creeping in here on crutches! And Mr. Schirmer, you, too! You ought to be in bed.”
“I ought to have been dead long ago,” the graybeard replied cheerfully. “Theoretically, I am.” He switched off the phonograph, pulled the nylon underclothes out of the loudspeaker and waved them in the air. “I’m living on borrowed time. When you do that, you live by special rules.”
“Is that so? And what are these rules, if I may ask?”
“To get as much as possible out of what life you have left. How you do that is up to you.”
“I must request you to go to bed at once. Who brought you here, may I ask?”
“My good sense.”
The graybeard got back into his wheelchair. André was chary of taking over the pushing of it. Lillian stepped forward. “Come on, Schirmer. I’ll wheel you back.” She pushed the chair to the door.
“So it was you who brought him!” the Crocodile said. “I might have guessed it.”
Lillian pushed the chair out into the corridor. Charles Ney and the others followed, giggling like children caught in mischief. “One moment,” Schirmer said, swiveling his chair so that he was facing the door. The Crocodile stood squarely in the doorway. “Three sick people could lead happy existences on the amount of life you’ve missed,” Schirmer pronounced. “I wish you a blissful night with your wrought-iron conscience.”
He swiveled the chair again. Charles Ney took over the pushing. He laughed. “What’s the point, Schirmer? She’s only doing her job.”
“I know. Only she does it with such a damned superior air. But I’ll outlive her! I’ve already outlived her predecessor; she was only forty-four and died in four weeks of cancer. I’ll outlive this bitch—how old is she, anyway? Must be over sixty. Or almost seventy.”
“What wonderful people we are.” Charles grinned.
“No,” the graybeard replied with fierce satisfaction. “We’re just people condemned to death. But we’re not the only ones. So are the others. Only we know it. They don’t.”
Half an hour later, Eva Moser came to Lillian’s room. “Have they brought my bed in here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Where can it be? My room has been emptied out. All my clothes are gone, too. I have to sleep somewhere. Where can my things be?”
It was one of the usual jokes, when someone was discharged from the sanatorium, to hide his things on the last night. Eva Moser was in a state. “I had everything dry-cleaned. Suppose they get my clothes all messed up. I’ll have to be careful about money, now that I’m going down.”
“Doesn’t your father look after you?”
“Oh him! He wants me off his hands. I think he wants to marry again.”
Lillian felt that she could not stand the girl around a minute longer. “Go into the hall,” she said. “Hide near the elevator until Charles Ney comes out. He’ll be coming to me. Go straight to his room—he won’t have locked it. Telephone me from there. Say you’ll throw his dinner jacket into the bathtub and pour ink on his shirts if your things aren’t brought back at once. Clear?”
“Yes, but—”
“They’ve hidden them somewhere. I bet Charles Ney knows all about it.”
Lillian lifted the telephone. “Charles?”
She signaled to Eva Moser to leave. “Charles,” she said, “could you drop in at my room? Yes? Fine.”
He came a few minutes later. “What happened with the Crocodile?” Lillian asked.
“Everything’s fixed up. Dolores handles her beautifully. She’s wonderful with people like that. She simply told the truth—that we wanted to drown our sorrow at having to stay here. An inspired idea. The Crocodile almost dropped a tear before she left.”
The telephone rang. Eva Moser’s voice was so loud that Charles could hear what she was saying. “She’s in your bathroom,” Lillian reported. “She’s filled the tub with hot water. In her left hand she’s holding your new dinner jacket and in her right a bottle of turquoise-colored ink. Don’t try to catch her by surprise. The moment you open the door, she’ll take action. Here, talk to her.”
She handed the telephone to Charles and went to the window. The Palace Hotel in the village still showed many lighted windows. In two or three weeks, that would be over. The tourists would fly away like birds of passage, and the long, monotonous year would wear on through spring, summer, and fall to next winter.
The telephone clicked behind her. “That slut!” Charles Ney said suspiciously. “That idea didn’t pop into her head just like that. Why did you ask me to come here?”
“I wanted to know about the Crocodile.”
“You’re not usually that curious about her.” Charles grinned. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Now I have to go to the rescue of my dinner jacket. It would be just like that idiot to boil it. Good night. It was a wonderful evening!”
He closed the door behind him. Lillian heard his slippers padding rapidly down the corridor. His dinner jacket, she thought—that was his dream of freedom, his symbol of hope, of nights in cities—his mascot,
just as her two evening dresses were hers, useless up here, but she would not give them up; she clung to them as if her life depended on them. If she were to give them up, she would be giving up hope as well. She went to the window again and looked at the lights down below. A wonderful evening! How many such hopeless wonderful evenings she had known!
She drew the curtains. There was the panic again. She looked for her cache of sleeping pills. For a moment, she thought she heard Clerfayt’s motor. She looked at the clock. He could save her from the long night; but she could not telephone him. Hollmann had said that he had someone with him. Who? Some healthy woman from Paris or Milan or Monte Carlo! To hell with Clerfayt; he would be driving away in a few days anyhow. She swallowed the pills. I ought to submit, she thought; I ought to do as Boris says; I ought to live with it; I ought to stop fighting against it; I ought to submit, but if I do submit, I’m lost.
She sat down at her table and took a sheet of letter paper. “Beloved,” she wrote, “you with the indistinct face, unknown, who have never come and are always expected, don’t you feel that the time is running out …” And then she stopped writing, pushed off the table the box in which lay many letters she had never sent because she had no address to send them to, and looked down at the white sheet in front of her. Why am I crying? she thought. That doesn’t change anything—
Chapter Five
THE OLD MAN LAY as flat under his blanket as though there were no longer a body there. His face was gaunt, his eyes deep-sunken, but of a strong blue; the veins bulged under the skin, which looked like crumpled tissue paper. He lay in a narrow bed in a narrow room. On the night table beside the bed stood a chessboard.
His name was Richter. He was eighty years old and had been living in the sanatorium for twenty years. At first he had occupied a double room on the first floor, then a single room with balcony on the second—and now that he no longer had any money, he had this narrow room. He was the prize exhibit of the sanatorium. The Dalai Lama always cited his case when patients became downhearted, and Richter showed his gratitude. He did not and did not die.
Lillian sat beside the bed. “Look at that, will you!” Richter said, pointing to the chessboard. “The man plays like a night watchman. He ought to know that this knight move will give me a mate inside the next ten moves. What’s the matter with Régnier nowadays? He used to play good chess. Were you here during the war?”
“No,” Lillian said.
“He came during the war, in 1944, I think. What a relief that was! Before that, my dear young lady, before Régnier came, I had to play against a chess club in Zurich for a whole year. We had nobody up here. It was terribly dull.”
Chess was Richter’s sole passion. During the war, the various chess players in the sanatorium had left or died, and no new ones arrived. Two German friends with whom he had played by correspondence had been killed in Russia; another was taken prisoner at Stalingrad. For a few months, Richter was entirely without partners; he grew tired of life and lost weight. Then the head doctor made arrangements for him to play against members of a Zurich chess club. Most of the people were not strong enough for him; with the others, the games took too long. In the beginning, Richter impatiently made his moves by telephone; but that became too expensive, and he was compelled to resort to post cards back and forth. That meant that he could make a move only every other day. After a while, his partners had abandoned these correspondence games, and Richter was once again forced to play over old games out of books.
Then Régnier had come. He played one game with Richter, and Richter was ecstatic: at last he had found an opponent worthy of him. But Régnier was a Frenchman who had been liberated from a German concentration camp. When he heard that Richter was German, he refused to play with him. National enmities did not stop at the sanatorium.
Richter began pining away again, and Régnier, too, was confined to his bed. Both men were bored; but neither wanted to give in. A Negro from Jamaica, a believer in brotherly love, finally found a solution. He, too, was a bed-patient. He wrote a letter to Richter and one to Régnier, inviting them to a game of chess from bed to bed, via telephone. Both men were overjoyed. The only difficulty was that the Negro had only the faintest notion of the game; but he solved that problem simply. He played white against Richter, black against Régnier. Since white had the first move, Régnier made it on the board that stood beside his bed, and telephoned it to the Negro. The latter telephoned the move to Richter. Then he waited for Richter’s move, and telephoned that to Régnier. He telephoned Régnier’s second move back to Richter, and Richter’s response to Régnier. He himself did not even have a board, since he was only having Régnier and Richter play against one another without their knowledge. The trick was to play white against one man, black against the other; had he played white or black in both games, he would not have been able to pass on the moves.
Shortly after the end of the war, the Negro died. Régnier and Richter had by then been compelled to take rooms without telephones, for reasons of economy. Régnier was on the third, Richter on the second floor. The Crocodile now assumed the Negro’s part, and the nurses transmitted the moves to the two opponents, who still thought they were playing against the Negro. They were given to believe that he could no longer talk because of advanced tuberculosis of the larynx. All went well until Régnier was able to get up again. His first thought was to visit his Negro friend, and so the whole story came out.
By this time, his nationalistic feelings had somewhat subsided. When he heard that Richter’s family in Germany had been killed in air raids, he made peace, and henceforth the men played harmoniously with one another. After a while, Régnier was confined to his bed again, and various patients did messenger service for the two. Lillian was among them. Then, three weeks ago, Régnier had died. Richter had been so weak at this time that he was not expected to live, and no one wanted to tell him that Régnier was dead. To deceive him, the Crocodile had leaped into the breach as partner; she had recently learned the game, but was, of course, no opponent for Richter. The result was that Richter, who still believed he was playing against Régnier, was stunned to see how his friend’s game had degenerated.
“Don’t you want to learn chess?” he asked Lillian, who had just brought him the Crocodile’s latest move. “I can teach you quickly.”
Lillian shook her head. She saw the fear in the blue eyes. The old man took it as a bad sign that Régnier was playing so miserably; he was afraid he would soon be again without a partner. He put the same question to everyone who visited him.
“It doesn’t take long to learn. I’ll show you all the tricks. I played against Lasker.”
“I have no talent for it. And no patience.”
“Everyone has talent. And you have to have patience when you can’t sleep at night. What else is there to do? Pray? A lot of good praying does. I’m an atheist. Philosophy isn’t any help either. And detective stories only for a short time. I’ve tried everything, my girl. Only two things are any use. One is to have someone else with you; that’s why I married. But my wife died years ago—”
“And the other?”
“Solving chess problems. Chess is so far removed from everything human—from doubts and anxiety—so abstract—that it gives peace of mind. At least for one night—and that’s all we ask for, isn’t it? Just to hold out until next morning—”
“Yes. That’s all we ask for here.”
Through the room’s window, nothing could be seen but clouds and a snow-covered slope. The clouds were yellow and gold and turbulent now, in late afternoon. “Wouldn’t you like me to teach you?” the old man asked. “We could start right now.”
The strong eyes flickered in the cadaverous head. Hungering for company, Lillian thought, not for chess games. Hungering for someone to be there when the door suddenly opened and in came the hot and icy wind that made the blood rush from the throat and fill the lungs, until there was an end to breathing.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
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“Twenty years. A lifetime, eh?”
“Yes, a lifetime.”
A lifetime, she thought, and every day was like every other, the endless routine, day after day, and at the end of the year the days coalesced as if they had been only a single day, so much were they alike, and, similarly, the years coalesced as if they had only been a single year, so everlastingly the same were they.
“Shall we start today?” Richter asked.
“No,” Lillian replied absently. “There wouldn’t be any point. I won’t be staying here long.”
“You are leaving?” Richter croaked.
“Yes, I’m leaving. In a few days.”
What am I saying? she thought in profound astonishment. It isn’t true. Yet the words lingered in her ears as though they could not be retracted. Confused, she stood up.
“Are you cured?”
The hoarse voice sounded vexed, as if Lillian had committed a breach of trust. “I’m not going for long,” she said hastily. “Just for a short time. I’ll be coming back.”
“Everyone comes back,” Richter croaked, reassured. “Everyone.”
“Do you want me to take your move to Régnier?”
“There’s no point.” Richter knocked over the chess pieces on his board. “He’s as good as mate. Tell him to start a new game.”
“A new game. All right.”
Lillian’s restlessness stayed with her. In the afternoon, she cajoled a young nurse, assistant in the operating room, into showing her the last X rays that had been taken of her. The nurse thought Lillian would not understand them, and brought her the prints.
“Can I keep them here for a few minutes?” Lillian asked.
The nurse hesitated. “It’s against the regulations. I’m really not supposed even to show them to you.”
“But the doctor usually shows them to me himself, and explains them to me. This time he forgot to.” Lillian went to her wardrobe and took out a yellow dress. “Here is the dress I promised you last week. You can take it with you.”