Human Traces

  He took the train to Vienna one freezing Thursday in December to attend the meeting of a learned society. The gathering was in a lecture hall attached to the university medical school, and because it was open only to members of the society and their guests it was not fully attended. There were few women and no students; it was quite unlike the circus atmosphere of Charcot’s lectures at the Salpêtrière, Thomas thought, but presumably that was the idea. These distinguished medical men did not want members of the public or students reeking of last night’s debauch; they wanted like-minded colleagues who would listen in respectful silence.

  An air of self-congratulation hung over the audience as the speaker, a man of about Thomas’s age, with a black curly beard that reached up almost to his eyes, climbed onto the stage. Dr Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose and throat specialist with psychological ambitions, outlined some theories concerning the relations between the nose and the female sexual organs. He had published a monograph three years earlier on the ‘nasal reflex neurosis’, in which he cited the case of 130 patients whose various physical pains had been cured by application of cocaine to the inside of the nose. Since the treatment had been especially effective in the treatment of menstrual pains, Fliess maintained that there were ‘genital spots’ inside the nose that were associated with some neuroses and which influenced the menstrual cycle. He was almost ready, he said, to publish a new book: The Relations between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect. The periodicity of the menstrual cycle suggested that two numbers, 23 and 28, might unlock all mysteries of human biology, including unknown dates of birth, onset of illness and death. Furthermore, Fliess maintained, his numerical pattern underlay the workings of the entire cosmos: all natural laws were obedient to these two numbers, their sum, their difference and, probably, their square and their cube.

  Thomas listened in some disbelief, and was surprised that the audience was not hostile. The Viennese world clearly believed itself to be so close to discovering a universal key that it must listen carefully to every offering: no one wished to risk having laughed at the new Galileo.

  Afterwards, the audience repaired to a sitting room where coffee and wine were served in a dense atmosphere of cigar and pipe smoke. Thomas, who knew none of the others, introduced himself to a friendly-seeming man who stood nearby.

  ‘Did you enjoy the talk?’

  ‘Not at all. I know nothing of medicine.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I am the guest of one of the committee.’

  ‘And what is your area of interest?’

  ‘I am a cartographer. My name is Hannes Regensburger.’ He held out his hand and Thomas introduced himself.

  ‘Where do you make your maps?’

  ‘My next venture is to Africa. Although maps are my profession, I am an amateur of palaeontology and in Africa I hope to be able to combine the two interests.’

  They talked for half an hour about the descent of man and the few fossil clues he had left behind; it was a relief to Thomas to speak of things other than the sufferings of contemporary lunatics, and he warmed to Regensburger’s dry style of conversation, which did little to conceal his enthusiasm for the subject. He asked if, since it was still early, he would care to join him for dinner afterwards, and Regensburger agreed; they fetched their coats and thanked the secretary of the society.

  ‘Did you enjoy the paper?’ said the secretary.

  ‘Yes,’ said Thomas. ‘Though Dr Fliess might benefit from knowing something of the nervous system. The cocaine clearly enters the patients’ bloodstream, thence the brain, where it has an anaesthetic effect. It makes no difference where it gets in. If I make a patient calm by giving him morphia by mouth, I do not look for areas of neurosis on his gums.’

  But the secretary had turned to speak to another member, and Thomas was obliged to finish the explanation to Regensburger, who said, ‘I have no idea about such things, but I do remember elementary mathematics from the gymnasium. If you take two positive integers with no common factors you can combine them to make any other number that you wish. Particularly if you also throw in the difference, the sum and the square!’

  He laughed as they walked down the frosty street together. In the distance, Thomas could see the two braziers burning outside the front door of the hotel where he had spent his honeymoon night. He shivered – in recollection, in cold, in anticipation of fatherhood: he felt irrationally happy as Regensburger pushed open the door of a restaurant and stood aside for him to go in.

  Regensburger told Thomas of his planned visit to German East Africa. ‘I expect you have heard of Oscar Baumann,’ he said. ‘He has made two expeditions to the area for the German Anti-Slavery Committee, and a map of his journey was published in Berlin three years ago. It is a beautiful piece of work in its way, but it lacks detail. He was unable to survey the land that was not on his route, and in any event cartography was not his principal purpose.’

  The waiter brought their food and drew the cork on a bottle of red wine. ‘Do you have a particular interest in the area?’ said Thomas.

  ‘There is commercial interest from numerous European concerns who hope to exploit the natural resources, to build further railways and so on. We shall solicit contributions to the expense of the expedition from such people. For myself, it is a journey I very much hope to make on account of something Baumann himself told me.’

  Regensburger helped himself from the dishes on the table with the heedless appetite of the thin man. He had glasses rimmed in gold and hollow cheeks; the skin was tight over his forehead and scalp, where the hair was sparse. There was a slight swelling in the finger joints that made Thomas suspect arthritis; he wondered whether Regensburger’s dry manner had developed partly as a result of dealing with pain.

  ‘The area close to the great Ngorongoro Crater,’ he said, ‘is rich in fossil remains – animals, plants, all sorts of things. Baumann told me of a particular place known to the Masai, though I believe they have little interest in it themselves. They do not understand the significance of such things.’

  ‘What is particular about this place?’

  Regensburger carved himself a slice of calf’s brain roulade, a speciality of the restaurant, in which the offal was baked in a Swiss roll of sieved potato and flour. ‘There are footprints preserved in ash,’ said Regensburger. ‘They appear to be human, I am told by Baumann, yet the layer in which they are fossilised seems to belong to a period before any human record we have.’

  Thomas found his interest quickening. ‘Did he take photographs?’

  ‘No,’ said Regensburger. ‘Sumptuous roulade, is it not? Such a mild taste, and the parsley adds just a little freshness. Baumann has Christian beliefs of an old-fashioned variety. He is a very good man, but he is not happy with new theories about the descent of mankind.’

  ‘Why might these prints alarm him?’said Thomas. ‘Unless someone was proposing that they belonged to Adam and Eve themselves and that the Garden of Eden was in German East Africa.’

  ‘I am not sure,’ said Regensburger. ‘To a believer in the literal truth of the Bible, many natural phenomena pose awkward questions. To live in an age of such scientific progress makes them unhappy. It is not every generation which is alive at a time when we are on the brink of explaining creation. Do you have difficulties, Doctor? Or are you one of us?’

  Thomas felt as though he was being tested for entrance to a Masonic lodge. ‘I believe that all species originated in a process of descent with modification, as Mr Darwin calls it, and that natural selection was the agency of change. I believe that man is no exception.’ It sounded as though he was reciting a creed. He coughed. ‘But there is still mystery of course. Maybe Alfred Russel Wallace is right and human evolution needed the presence of God at certain moments. It would be vain, in all senses, to suppose that I know the exact truth of our history.’

  ‘I see,’ said Regensburger. ‘But to suppose that we shared a common ancestor with the apes – that does no
t disturb you.’

  ‘I accept that it has been scientifically established.’

  ‘Good.’ Regensburger seemed satisfied, though Thomas was not sure whether it was the roulade or his own answers that had so pleased him. ‘We hope to leave in the spring of ’99. I shall be gone for two years. I shall see the new century dawn somewhere to the west of Mount Kilimanjaro.’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin and pushed away his plate. ‘Perhaps you would care to join me. We shall need a medical officer.’

  Thomas laughed. ‘It is an intriguing idea, but I could not possibly be away for that length of time. We have discovered that my wife is expecting twins next year and I have a very busy sanatorium to run in Carinthia.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Regensburger. ‘When we part company, I shall leave you my card. Then you may write to me if you change your mind. I suppose it would be possible for you to come only for a part of the expedition. There is a railway proposed from the interior which could take you back to the coast. Otherwise, with sufficient guides, you could retrace your steps on horseback, the way we came. In a man’s life, such opportunities are few.’

  Jacques could not settle to his work when he returned to Carinthia. He felt as though he had joined the roll of ordinary doctors, the pessimists content to manage rather than cure – the carpenters and plumbers of the human who did repairs only; he felt he had been forced to sign his name to the doctors’ universal declaration of impotence, which said: We Do Not Know. We can cure neither your cancer nor your cold. We do not know what causes dementia praecox or how to alleviate its horror. We wait for better instruments. We hope for a change in the weather. Meanwhile, here is a box of small red pills.

  He developed a kind of therapy by which he listened intently to the stories of unhappy people and made modest suggestions about how they might improve their outlook. He continued to examine how trauma and high emotion, when denied expression, might subsequently affect the wellbeing of the person, but gave up seeking to apply a universal formula, or trying to derive from it a psychology that might apply to all.

  In Vienna, a form of therapy that bore a close kinship to his own theory of psychophysical resolution had made an impact in scientific circles. Although many people scoffed at psychoanalysis and called it an expensively protracted cure for Jewish girls nervous about sex, Jacques had no doubt that therapies based on the interpretation of dreams and the function of the unconscious were more than the fashion of the day; they seemed to offer the best hope of therapeutic advance in all manner of conditions, ranging from psychosis to everyday symptoms of a mildly psychosomatic nature. Such treatments, in addition, represented the first real advance in the treatment of the mentally afflicted in his lifetime.

  Yet Jacques felt what the lawyers would have called ‘estopped’; because of a clinical error that in the end had turned out to have no serious ill effects, he was barred from publicly pursuing the line of inquiry that he felt was most congenial to him and most likely to be medically fruitful. He was limited to reading about psychoanalytic activity at a distance, the country cousin in Carinthia to the metropolis of Viennese discovery.

  The irony of the case of Katharina von A was acute for him. While his own hope of glory had been dashed, the fame of the Schloss Seeblick began to spread, and Katharina was herself a dynamic proselytiser, spreading word of the sanatorium among her old friends in Vienna. To deal with the increase in outpatients and short-term residents they were forced to open rooms in the small Lamp Court and, in the new year, to find a permanent place on the staff for Peter Andritsch, the doctor who had covered Jacques’s absence. There was hardly ever a spare room, and in January Sonia was able to present accounts to Herr Leopold at the bank that showed a steady profit.

  What worried Jacques was that it was earned by conventional means; they were becoming like numerous other well-run hydros and sanatoriums in the Alps. It was true that they still took and cared for public cases from the asylums, but few of these improved or were willing to leave, so the number of new patients from such places was small. The arrival of Peter Andritsch did allow him some freedom, however. Together with Franz Bernthaler, Andritsch could take the majority of the nervous cases, and Jacques was able to spend more time with the psychotics. Here, like Thomas, he found that his work was largely one of observation and note-taking – of scrutiny over a long period. There remained the hope, a little forlorn at times, that some insight might be gained by merely looking.

  To prevent himself from becoming downcast, Jacques also took charge of the question of where the sanatorium should be re-housed when its lease on the schloss expired on the first day of the twentieth century. He had convinced Thomas by his enthusiasm for the Mount Lowe solution and together they set off once more to see Herr Leopold at the bank.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Leopold, ‘you have reserves and a facility to borrow. You do not need my permission to spend your own money. Clearly the first thing that you need to know is whether the land on top of Wilhelmskogel is for sale and how much rebuilding you would need to do.’

  ‘We have already established that,’ said Jacques. ‘It belongs to a widow in Salzburg. She has no interest in the land, but she is short of funds and is ready to accept a reasonable offer. I have obtained an estimate from a builder in town for the cost of repairing the main house and for building further accommodation for the patients. Although it is considerable, you can see that it is still cheaper than buying an existing sanatorium or hotel of that size.’

  Herr Leopold agreed to look at Jacques’s preliminary figures, while Jacques and Thomas examined the possibility of taking a spur from the existing valley branch line into the foothills of the mountains – a ride of a few minutes only – before a cable-car would take traffic to the summit. After some enquiries, they were recommended an engineer in Salzburg called Tobias Geissler, who had wide experience of Austrian railways, both passenger lines and narrow gauge in mining, but had long wanted a project of his own. He was currently engaged in advising on the works at the lead mines near Villach, but it was said that his heart was not in it, and the alacrity with which he agreed to meet them was encouraging.

  Thomas and Jacques went to Villach on the last Sunday in January, with Sonia and Daniel, leaving Franz Bernthaler in charge of the sanatorium for the first time. Kitty had been advised by the obstetrician at the hospital to spend the last month of her pregnancy resting in bed. Twins, he told her, should not be taken lightly, particularly when the mother had not always enjoyed good health.

  Herr Geissler was waiting for them at the hotel, a newspaper spread across his knees and a clay pipe in his mouth.

  He sprang up when he saw them. ‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance.’

  The skin on his bald head was tanned a smooth, woody brown; he reminded Thomas a little of McLeish, though his attitude could hardly have been more different: for every problem they raised, he had a number of urgent solutions.

  ‘First of all, we will need an excellent surveyor. I have just the man. We worked together on several projects and he owes me a favour. A completed survey will give us an idea of cost. But I am more or less certain that – unless there is much more money in mad-doctoring than I have been led to believe – you will need to form a company in which you sell stocks. That is how these projects are normally financed. It is quite straightforward.’

  Jacques told him about the design of the Echo Mountain cable-car.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Geissler. He had a ringing bass voice and thick, powerful hands that continually opened and closed, as though itching for a jack or spanner to hold. ‘But do not contemplate, even for a moment, importing the wheel or the wire from San Francisco. I know of several railway engineering works where such things can be made to my design for a fraction of the cost. We also need to see how the descent of one car might power the ascent of the other. We could make it almost self-sufficient. On second thoughts, why do we need two cars? The traffic will be much lighter than on your Mount Lowe. We can have one line with
just two rails – no double track, no run-out. And we can store the energy of the descent in a battery to power the next lift!’

  As the waiter brought the food, Sonia said, ‘But will it not all be terribly expensive?’

  ‘It should not be beyond the reach of a modestly sized company. The rail itself is not expensive, nor is the timber. As for the labour, I have found the best men are Slovenes, and they, poor fellows, will work all day for a bed and a hot meal at night. Which of you is to be my point of reference?’

  There was a brief consultation between the three of them. They had not expected Geissler to move so quickly.

  ‘We can discuss my fee later,’ he said, laughing deeply. ‘In case that is why you are hesitating.’

  It was finally agreed that Jacques would be in charge. Sonia would have control over the finances while Thomas for the time being would continue to devote his energies only to medicine. Kitty might help Jacques with the paperwork at a later stage, if she had time to spare after the birth of the twins, though there would be nothing for anyone to do until a thorough survey was completed, which could take until April.

  Thomas could see the light coming back into Jacques’s eyes as they discussed the schedule; he thought it was a good way for his partner to rekindle his passion. It amused him to think that Jacques might eventually spend time with Kitty once again, and wondered how he would square the real woman he came to know with the Katharina von A of his imagination. He hoped, or so he muttered disloyally to himself, that the clerical work would not make her arms hurt.