Pilgrim

  “Of course. I shall send some mixed grain along with them.”

  “In that case, you may have the use of my homing pigeons, if I may have the use of fifty francs.”

  “Done,” said Forster—and they shook hands.

  On Monday the 10th of June, Pilgrim had been discharged from the violent ward and returned to his rooms on the third floor.

  He wore white, having requested that Kessler bring the white suit, white shoes and even a white straw hat. His tie on this occasion was green—a colour that, for Pilgrim, denoted freedom. He also carried his walking stick.

  “We look,” Kessler told him, “as if we were about to depart for Venice.”

  “Perhaps we are,” said Pilgrim. “Destination: San Michele, Isle of the Dead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kessler, bearing the last of Pilgrim’s toiletries, his pyjamas, bathrobe and slippers plus shaving utensils in a canvas bag, followed his ward along the darkened corridors where all the doors were closed until, at last, they came to a corridor where all the doors stood open.

  Pilgrim reached up and pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes. He had waited so long for the sun that when he saw it he was dazzled.

  On arrival at number 306, he allowed Kessler to precede him, and to fling open the succession of doors until it seemed there could be no more room for sunlight but only the sun itself.

  Pilgrim went immediately to the windows and opened them one by one, stepping back to let the air and a soft breeze enter.

  There were the pigeons—there were the doves.

  “Bread,” said Pilgrim, laying aside his walking stick.

  Kessler went to the bureau and produced a brown paper bag full of crumbled toast and croissants, raisin loaf and rolls.

  Pilgrim said: “soo-soo-soo. There, there,” and began to scatter bounty.

  From his windows at the Baur au Lac, Forster had watched this scene through his binoculars. Pilgrim in white and the cretin Kessler standing in the background, folding clothes.

  Another twinge of nostalgic regret pulled at Forster’s memory—the thought of all the mornings he had laid out Pilgrim’s suits and jackets, shirts and ties and shoes and all the nights he had pulled down the covers of the bed and set out pyjamas, robe and slippers. And Agamemnon, the regrettable but charming little tyke, whose favourite trick was to crawl beneath the covers and lie in wait for his master. Such a long while ago, it seemed. Such a long, long while ago.

  Pilgrim removed his hat and slowly began to fan his face with it—back and forth, back and forth in the manner of a lady watching her flock of daughters from the sidelines at a ball.

  He turned away. Apparently there had been a knock at the door. Kessler was laying down the folded clothing. The figure of Doctor Jung made its entrance.

  Forster swung his gaze to the right until he had managed to bring the sitting-room into view. Jung appeared to be agitated.

  It was both fascinating and maddening not to be able to hear what was being said.

  Had Pilgrim done something wrong? Why was Jung so clearly angry?

  After a moment, the anger—so it seemed—began to melt and a kind of resigned fatalism took its place—a throwing up of hands—a sequence of shrugs—a wiping of the brow and then dejection, Jung’s head bowed, his body stilled.

  Pilgrim said something.

  Jung replied.

  Then Jung spoke to Kessler and Kessler bowed in that beastly, cringing Germanic way that Forster could not abide—the resigned subservience of the soldier to his commandant, the burgher to his mayor, the slave to his master. Stand up and square yourself! Forster wanted to shout. In fact, he actually spoke the words aloud. “All you have to do is say: yes! You don’t have to kiss his boots!”

  Jung departed.

  Forster waited for the sound of a closing door, but of course it never came.

  Then Pilgrim returned to the bedroom, threw his hat on the bed and pulled a chair up closer to the windows open to the balcony.

  He looked towards the mountains.

  His face was a mask of anguish.

  Forster lowered the binoculars. What can have happened?

  What could it be? Had someone else died? Or was it, as too often, that someone had not?

  5

  Jung had returned, though not contritely, to the fold. He was there to stabilize and solidify his relationship with Emma, not to forget or to forego his affair with Antonia Wolff. The latter was now an undebatable fact and Emma would have to live with it or leave.

  She had chosen to stay.

  I can make my own life, she had said. And she would, though it would not be the life she had craved and had once thought was in her grasp. She was to have been the undisputed centrepiece of Carl Gustav’s domestic life—his wife, his companion, his intellectual equal. And the mother of his children.

  She had delighted in their academic arguments, in providing him with research and in entertaining his friends and colleagues at what everyone had called the most stimulating and rewarding dinner parties in the psychiatric community. Freud had sat at their table—Adler, Jones and James. The poet Ezra Pound and the young Thomas Mann, who had only just published Death in Venice—and Gustav Mahler, in 1910, who had come to Zürich to conduct his stupendous Symphony of a Thousand, with its tribute to Goethe’s Faust. Carl Gustav, of course, had particularly gloried in this latter visit because of his claimed, if distant relationship to the great German poet, whose words had provided the choral finale of the work.

  Even thinking of it now, Emma was elated by the memory of sitting in the grand concert hall wearing her elegant rose-red gown and her seven long strands of pearls. And the tiny figure of Mahler, caught in her opera glasses, stirring up the souls of both the living and the dead—sweeping the whole of existence towards the heavens…

  Oh, what wonderful times Carl Gustav and I have seen and shared and treasured, she thought. And now…? Who could tell. She must share him with Antonia Wolff, which she would—though never without vigilance and sorrow. All to say nothing of the fact that, as always, she must share Carl Gustav with his work.

  On the night of Pilgrim’s release from the violent ward, Jung had returned to Küsnacht in a state of great agitation. Something had happened which at first he would not discuss. This failure to communicate was now the norm.

  Ever since the sinking of the Titanic in April, Jung had developed an irritating habit which Emma could hardly bear to watch. Wetting the index finger of his right hand, he would use it to pick up every last crumb of food from his plate, having stated at the outset that all survivors must be offered rescue. The cruel white surface of his dinner plate was now the cruel white surface of the North Atlantic—ice floes and all. Little mounds of mashed or riced potato would be all that remained of his meal by the time he was through playing Lifeboat. He never finished off these latter, perhaps because he feared they would freeze his tongue.

  Emma was resigned to sitting out this rescue operation. Once, back in April, she had rung the silver bell for Lotte before the de-crumbing had been completed. As Lotte had reached for Jung’s plate, he had locked it to the tabletop in an iron grip.

  “Leave it,” Emma had said. “I will ring again when the Doctor has finished.”

  Now, she was worried. Not only had Carl Gustav wandered in the dallying sense, he was wandering increasingly in other ways. Lifeboat was not his only game. There were building games with pencil fortresses erected on his library table—virtually hundreds of pencils piled in interlocked squares and towers—great green and yellow castle keeps and outposts in the wilderness. There was the pebble game—modelled, so Carl Gustav claimed, on the Japanese game of Go—played not with single stones, but miniature piles of them. There was the dungeon game by the garden shed and a graveyard game in the flowerbeds. The minuscule graves were all left open, as if the dead had risen; and the dungeon was a three-sided tent made of sticks in which he had placed a footstool, where he would sit for whole Sunday mornings or Saturd
ay afternoons. He called it his wigwam, but it was not. It was his dungeon in the dark, with its back to the shed and its sides overhung with the branches of a rowanberry tree.

  These games were never discussed, merely developed and practised. It was Emma who had named them.

  On the night of June the 10th, dinner consisted entirely of vegetables—cauliflower, mushrooms, stuffed tomatoes and creamed spinach. The tomatoes were an innovation which Emma herself had concocted: scoop out the centres, replacing them with raisins, wild rice and a sprinkling of crushed peanuts. Frau Emmenthal had broiled them on a bed of early basil leaves. They were delicious.

  Carl Gustav was not impressed. He pushed his food around his plate, feeding from its corners only, staring at it vacantly, looking away to consult some figure in space—or seemingly so—and locating his focus by means of closing his eyes, tilting his head, reopening his eyes and gazing into whatever distance was consequently offered

  Suddenly he said: “there will be no Moon tonight.”

  It was a complete non sequitur.

  Emma laid her knife and fork aside and raised her napkin.

  “What makes you say so, my darling? The calendar tells us…”

  “I don’t care what the calendar tells us. There will be no Moon.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “The Moon is dead. Furtwängler has killed it.”

  “I see.”

  Emma was becoming practised in this form of response—the non-committal reply that left all the doors standing open. She knew that Carl Gustav would explain whatever he was proposing and she knew that it would either be madness, pure and simple, or it would lead to some psychological dilemma he had encountered amongst his patients. There had recently been instances when his opening sentence had caused her heart to stop: no more dogs—they have all departed; and: if you could dance with the Devil, which rhythm would you choose? And: did you know that Robert Schumann mutilated his own hands in order to improve his extension?

  Two of these openers had proven to be simple introductions to problems either solved or unsolved in the lives of his patients. The line about dancing with the Devil had never been explained. It lay there between them, begging an answer Emma dared not give. The tango, she would have said, but Carl Gustav left the table to shut himself up in his study before she could reply.

  Tonight, the Moon had died.

  Emma waited.

  “I went in this morning expecting to spend the day with Mister Pilgrim,” Jung began.

  “Yes. You said so as you left.”

  “When I got there, he was not immediately available. And so I went to check on some of the others—Miss Schumann-hands, the Penless Writer, et cetera. And—oh, dear God…”

  All at once Carl Gustav pushed his chair away from the table and sobbed.

  Emma stood up.

  Wait.

  She waited.

  Carl Gustav removed his glasses, fumbled for his handkerchief, found it and pressed it to his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t—I just cannot bear it.”

  “Oh, my darling…” Emma went to the far end of the table, pulled out a side chair and sat down facing him on an angle. She took his left arm in her hand and gently held it. “What—what has happened?”

  “Blavinskeya…the Countess…”

  “No. Please don’t tell me. Not that lovely, wondrous woman…”

  “Yes.”

  Jung could not stop crying.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “But my darling—you did everything you could. Everything. It was that maniac Furtwängler. He simply refused to let her go. Oh, God—how very sad. How wrong. How sad.”

  They sat for a moment in silence.

  Lotte entered.

  Emma waved her away.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jung had begun to fold his handkerchief—squaring it—squaring it and squaring it again. Emma, at last, removed it from his hands and handed him her own.

  Jung then fell to his knees and laid his head in her lap, embracing her waist—the smell of her own cologne rising from his fingers.

  “She was my prize,” he said. “She was my undeniable proof that all of us cannot conform to all the rules of normalcy. We dragged her here and held her here against her wishes and—yes—I was a part of that—yes, I was part of it, until I understood she did not belong amongst us. Wasn’t it—isn’t it—wasn’t it wonderful! All these other lives that people live and need to live—and yet, we call them crazy.”

  “Some of them—most of them are, Carl Gustav.”

  “I know that. I know—but she was crazy all the way to sanity. She lived up there in the sky, alive—alive—until we anchored her. Dragged her down to this—this dreadful place where everyone is mad and nothing works and the world ends every day. I should never have let her go. I should have insisted. She was mine, but Furtwängler claimed her. And the moment I was distracted by Pilgrim—I lost her.”

  “You must not blame him. Not Mister Pilgrim.”

  “I don’t. I’m only saying—if I hadn’t been distracted, this would not have happened.”

  Yes, Carl Gustav. If only you had not been distracted.

  Emma placed one hand on the back of his head.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “In the night—last night,” he told her.

  “Yes?”

  “In the night, last night, she went onto the upper balcony—you remember—four storeys up—above the portico…”

  “Yes.”

  “Somehow, Schwester Dora had lost control of her. I don’t really know exactly how. It might have been that she went to get a cup of cocoa, something as simple as that. Whatever it was, however long she was gone, it was long enough for the Countess to escape. God knows how she knew her way to the balcony. God knows why or how there was access. The building has been designed to prevent such things, but somebody failed her—left a door open—a window unlocked. God knows.”

  Jung sat back, but remained on the floor at Emma’s feet.

  “Go on.”

  “In her report this morning, Schwester Dora—for whom I feel so sorry—oh, how she loved the Countess! In her report, she told us that Blavinskeya had been restrained by Doctor Furtwängler—drugged and restrained and abused.”

  “Abused. Good heavens!”

  “Not in any physical way, but she was yelled at, according to Schwester Dora—yelled at repeatedly and, in other sessions, submitted to Furtwängler’s whispering campaign. His god-damned whispering campaign. I’ve told you about it before—his insidious whispers in the patient’s ear while the patient is drugged and asleep: you do not live on the Moon—you have never lived on the Moon—the Moon does not exist—come down—come down and join the human race…! Come down, come down and join the human race. And so…”

  “She jumped.”

  “She jumped.”

  Emma reached out and emptied her husband’s wine glass.

  “How do we know she wasn’t reaching for the Moon?” she said. “I watched it myself, last night—and wished I could have reached it.” Then she stood up and said: “you must not blame yourself for this, Carl Gustav. It is right for us to grieve, but she herself would not have blamed you. It is the ignorance of incompetents—of men like Josef Furtwängler, who do not belong in psychiatry—who believe only in mediocrity—in commonality and normalcy and God help those who don’t or can’t conform to it.”

  She went to the middle of the table, retrieved the carafe and poured them each a full glass of wine.

  “Let us drink to the Countess Blavinskeya,” she said.

  Jung stood up with some effort. His legs had partially gone to sleep.

  Watching her husband, Emma thought: all survivors must be offered rescue.

  She raised her glass.

  “To the Moon,” she said, “and to its latest resident.”

  They drank.


  They sat.

  The Moon rose, resplendent, ivory white and smiling.

  In the morning, before he took the ferry to Zürich, Jung retired to the garden and stayed there for some time. Emma watched him from the window, and after his departure, she went to inspect the flower beds in which he had seemed so interested.

  One of his graves had been closed and covered with earth. Digging on her knees, Emma discovered the body of a single rose. She kissed it and laid it back in place, after which she scrabbled the soil so Carl Gustav would not be able to tell she had pulled it aside. The rose was pure white and had been named for Anna Pavlova.

  6

  Since his time in the violent ward, Pilgrim had been forced to take his exercise in the walled garden at the rear of the Clinic, where he walked in the company of other “dangerous” prisoners and their keepers. He always wore his white suit and carried his walking stick—unless it was raining, in which case he carried his umbrella. The great wet heat of the alpine summer had descended and the consequent discomfort caused everybody to move as though walking on sand through water.

  “My legs hurt,” he complained to Kessler. “Are you sure this is necessary?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a rule. Every patient—unless confined—must take an hour’s exercise every day. It keeps you regular and it helps the circulation.”

  “The circulation of what?” Pilgrim asked facetiously. “My spleen?”

  They walked in circles—some in circles of eight, others of six and four—most, like Pilgrim with Kessler, alone with their keepers. The walls were made of whitewashed stone and were twelve feet high. Along their tops, broken glass had been sunk in cement so that its jagged edges would dissuade the inmates from thoughts of escape.

  “Convicts,” Pilgrim told Kessler. “That’s what we are, out here in this yard. It might as well be a prison.”

  Pilgrim thought of Wilde at Reading Gaol and of the notorious circle of prisoners, some in ankle-irons, in whose company Wilde had been forced to walk every day. Embezzlers, rapists, murderers and a multitude of men whose crimes were as petty as theft of clothing from wash lines, loitering with intent to keep warm or to feed themselves from the refuse left at the rear of restaurants and hotels. Even, Oscar had mused, from my own unfinished plate at the Café Royale.