‘Thank you, Herr Renn. Do we have an agenda?’
Renn looked at her with an expression she didn’t recognize. ‘No agenda, Frau Direktor. Familiarization visit. You are meeting with Doktor Wieczorek.’
‘Can’t the doctor come here?’
Renn busied himself with some papers that were on the filing cabinet. ‘It is usual to go there,’ he said stiffly and without turning to look at her.
She was about to say that it all sounded very mysterious and make a joke of it, but she had learned that jokes of that sort did not go down well in the East. So she said, ‘Do I need to take papers or files with me?’
‘Only a notebook, Frau Direktor.’
‘Will you not be there to take notes?’ She was surprised by this development.
‘I am not permitted to attend the meetings with Doktor Wieczorek.’
She looked at him but he didn’t turn round to meet her eyes. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘perhaps I’ll take an early lunch. By the way, Herr Renn…’
‘Yes, Frau Direktor?’
‘There is a doctor, Henry Kennedy…Here, I’ll write that down for you.’ She passed him the slip of paper and he read it carefully as if he might discover some hidden meaning in the name. ‘He is from London; working at the Charité on a year’s contract…’
‘Yes, Frau Direktor?’
‘For a year’s residence he would have been screened, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes, Frau Direktor.’
She wanted the next bit to sound as casual as possible. ‘Could you let me see the file?’
‘It wouldn’t be kept in this building, Frau Direktor.’ She looked at him. ‘But I could look it up.’
‘I don’t really need the file or even a copy.’
‘You just need to know that there are no complications,’ offered Renn.
‘Exactly, Herr Renn. He is someone I know socially; I will have to see him from time to time.’
‘All is clear, Frau Direktor.’
Pankow has long been one of the most desirable residential districts of the central part of Berlin. This was where smartly dressed East Germans arrived to dinner parties in imported cars! And here, Fiona had discovered to her great surprise, there were households that boasted live-in domestic help.
But the clinic was not in the most salubrious part of Berlin-Pankow. It was a three-storey building in imitation marble. Its bleak neo-Renaissance style, monumental proportion and the pockmarks of wartime artillery damage suggested that it was a surviving example of Berlin’s Third Reich architecture.
She was glad of her beautiful fur-lined coat. It was snowing: large flakes that came spinning down like discs and made loud crunching noises underfoot. The temperature had dropped with a suddenness that caught even the residents off guard, and the streets were quiet.
The driver found the clinic without any trouble. There was a wall around the building and a tall gate that opened for her car. The ornamental entrance doors surmounted a wide flight of stone steps with a relief, suggesting columns, on each side of it.
The lobby was lit by soft grey light that came from clerestory windows, set deep into the wall above the entrance. Its floor was an intricate mosaic, depicting Roman maidens broadcasting flowers, and the doors on every side were closed. Doktor Wieczorek’s name was painted on a wooden plaque and inserted, together with those of other senior medical staff on duty that day, into a large board on the wall behind the reception desk.
‘Yes?’ The receptionist was a young man with black hair upon which he’d used a generous amount of hair cream. He wore a washable grey linen jacket, a white shirt and black tie. It was a kind of uniform. He was writing something in a ledger and didn’t look up.
‘Doktor Samson,’ said Fiona. The profound trust that Germans showed for doctorates of any sort had persuaded her to start using her academic qualification.
‘Your business?’ The young man still didn’t look up.
‘Stand up when you talk to me!’ said Fiona. She didn’t raise her voice but the tone was enough to remind the young man that a visitor from the Stasi was expected this afternoon.
He leapt to his feet as if scalded and clicked his heels. ‘Ja, Frau Doktor.’
‘Take me to Doktor Wieczorek.’
‘Doktor Wieczorek…Herr Dok Dok Dok…’ said the young man, stuttering and red-faced.
‘Immediately. I am on State business,’ said Fiona.
‘Immediately, Frau Doktor. Yes, immediately.’
Doktor Wieczorek was an elegant forty-year-old specialist who had spent time in the Serbsky institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow and at the well-known mental hospital which was a part of the Chernyakhovsk prison. He had wavy hair that was beginning to grey at the temples, and a manner that suggested consummate medical expertise. Under his white jacket he wore a smart shirt and silk tie. His firm voice and avuncular manner relaxed her immediately, and so did his readiness to make little jokes about the bureaucracy that he constantly faced and so seldom defeated. ‘Coffee?’
‘No thank you,’ said Fiona. There had been an attempt to make the austere little office look homely with the addition of an oriental carpet and an antique clock that chimed the hours.
‘Tea? Tea with milk?’ He smiled. ‘That was the only thing I could remember about the British when I was a child: the way they poured cold milk into their tea and ruined it. No? Well we’ll get on with this “familiarization visit”. There is not a great deal to see in the building. At present we have twenty-three patients, one of whom I expect to be able to send home in a month or two. Some, I’m afraid, will never go home, but in the matter of clinical psychiatry I am always reluctant to say there is no hope.’ He smiled at her. ‘Do you know what we do here?’
‘No,’ she said.
He turned far enough to get from the shelf a large glass jar inside which a brain was to be seen in murky formalin. ‘Look at that,’ he said, putting it on the desk. ‘That’s the brain of “Der Grosse Gustaf”, who was a music hall performer of the nineteen thirties. Anyone in the audience could ask him such questions as who fought Max Schmeling in 1933. He’d immediately tell them it was Max Baer who won on a technical knockout in the tenth round in New York City.’
‘That’s impressive,’ said Fiona.
‘I’m interested in boxing,’ explained Wieczorek. He tapped the jar. ‘But “The Great Gustaf” could answer any sort of question: he had a brain like an encyclopedia.’
‘Why is it here?’
‘There remains in the Soviet Union a small but influential group of medical men who think that slicing up the human brain will reveal some of nature’s secrets. Lenin’s brain was sliced up and studied under the microscope. So was Stalin’s. So were a lot of lesser brains before and since.’
‘What did they find?’
‘That seems to be a State secret.’
‘They discovered nothing, you mean?’
‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ He tapped the jar again. ‘But I saved Gustaf from such indignity. Gustaf has his brain intact.’
‘Where did you get such a thing?’
‘It came from the Charité Hospital at the end of the war. All hospitals have a roomful of such stuff. When the Red Army infantry got into the Charité during the fighting in 1945 they found the generals, and other high-ups who’d been hanged for trying to assassinate Hitler. Their bodies were still preserved in the post-mortem room refrigerators there. The cadavers had been sent from the Plötzensee prison and no one had been told what to do with them. And there was the medical museum, with all sorts of other stuff, over there too but the Red Army high command disapproved and the exhibits were sent to other institutions. We got Gustaf’s brain.’ He shook the jar so that the brain moved. ‘The distribution of the exhibits started a lot of silly rumours. They said that Ernst Röhm’s heart had been sent to the University Hospital in Leipzig and it had been contained in a test tube.’ He put the jar back on the shelf. ‘You must forgive me: physicians are inclined to develop
a macabre sense of humour.’
‘What sort of success rate do you have, Doctor?’
‘They are all failures when they come here,’ said Wieczorek. ‘We only get patients for whom some other institution can do no more. For most of them we can merely keep the fires under control. It is like the job of your security service, isn’t it? Are we drawn to such work, do you think?’
‘Surely you are better equipped to answer that question,’ said Fiona.
‘I cannot answer on your behalf, but for me and many of my colleagues I suspect that dealing in failure provides an excuse for a lack of success. And like you perhaps, I enjoy the challenge of such fragile, complicated and deceptive disciplines. Can you ever be sure that you are right?’ He paused. ‘Right about anything at all?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Fiona. ‘You still haven’t told me about your methods.’
‘Carl Jung once said, “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” I think about that a lot. Methods? What can I tell you?’ He looked at her with polite interest. ‘The treatment of seriously disturbed patients has changed radically over the years. First and foremost there remains the old-fashioned analytical session in which patients are encouraged to delve into their own minds. As Freud discovered, it is a lengthy process. So along came the neuro-surgeons who drilled holes into the skull and destroyed brain cells and nerve fibres with surgical instruments.’ He waited while the horror of that became clear to her. ‘Then came a time when it seemed as if electric shocks through the brain could provide lasting improvement, and that seemed to be the panacea everyone had awaited. It wasn’t the answer we had hoped for. But the chemists were waiting their turn, and patients were given massive doses of Dexedrine followed by Seconal and whatever new drug the West German chemical companies were anxious to sell. Now I suppose many specialists are beginning to think that amid his claptrap, Freud may have had a few worthwhile ideas after all. But analysis on the couch is a very long process: we’ll never have enough analysts to fight mental illness in that laborious way.’
‘And where do you stand?’
‘In the matter of treatment? I am a senior consultant here but my staff are permitted considerable freedom to choose what is best for their patients. We have mostly depressives and schizophrenics, some of them catatonics demanding a lot of skill and close attention. However it is in the nature of our function, as a garbage can into which patients are discarded, that we treat a wide variety of illness. After many years of practice I have become reluctant to forbid any kind of treatment that a doctor, after a proper study of a patient, thinks will be beneficial.’
‘You forbid nothing?’
‘That is my stated position.’
‘Including lobotomy?’
‘A seriously disturbed patient who becomes violent can sometimes be returned to something approaching normal life.’ He got up. ‘Let me show you the wards.’
The clinic was hushed but not entirely silent. Most of the patients were in bed, sleeping with that impassive calm that medicine provides. One small ward was in semi-darkness. It held six sleepers who had been sedated for a week. It was, explained Doktor Wieczorek, the preliminary part of the treatment for most new arrivals. Underlying the smell of disinfectant there were all the disagreeable odours that warm bodies provide when crowded together in a closed room. He went to the window and raised the blind a fraction so that they could see the sleeping patients. Outside, she saw that the snow was falling much more heavily, the trees were rimed with it and passing cars left black lines in the road. Doktor Wieczorek adjusted the disarranged bedclothes. Sometimes, he joked, it took a week or two for their documentation to catch up with them.
The rooms were all lined with white tiles from floor to ceiling. There was something pitiless about the shiny hardness as it reflected the grey blankets. An ashen-faced patient stared at her but didn’t register any emotion. Fiona had that guilty feeling of intrusion that afflicts all fit people in the presence of the sick. Wieczorek pulled down the blind and it was dark. As if in response to the darkness, one of the patients gave a muffled cry but then went quiet again.
Downstairs there was a large ‘association room’ where half a dozen patients were sitting in metal chairs with blankets over their knees. Two of them, both middle-aged men, were wearing woolly hats. There was no sign of books or newspapers and the patients were either asleep or staring into space. A TV set in the corner was showing a cartoon film, in which a hatchet-wielding mouse was chasing a cat, but the sound was switched off and no one was watching it.
‘There is one patient you must meet,’ said Doktor Wieczorek. ‘Franz: he is our oldest inhabitant. When we got him, in 1978, his memory had completely gone but we are proud to have made a little progress.’ He showed her into a bare room with a big square-shaped sink equipped for washing bed-pans. There was a man sitting there in a wheelchair. His body had run to fat as a consequence of his confinement. His complexion was yellowish and his lips were pressed tightly together as if he was trying not to yell. ‘Come along, Franz. What about a cup of coffee?’
The man in the wheelchair said nothing, and made no move, except that he rolled his eyes as if trying to see the doctor’s face without moving his head. ‘I’ve brought a lady to see you, Franz. It’s a long time since you had a visitor, isn’t it?’ To Fiona Doktor Wieczorek said, ‘With patients of this sort the condition varies greatly from day to day.’
‘Hello, Franz,’ said Fiona, uncertain of what was expected of her.
‘Say, hello, Franz,’ said Doktor Wieczorek, and added, ‘He hears everything but perhaps today he doesn’t want to talk to us.’ He took the wheelchair and tipped it back to lift the front wheels clear over the step.
Wieczorek took Franz in his wheelchair along the corridor, continuing his small talk and seeming not to notice that Franz didn’t answer. Fiona followed. When the chair was positioned in a small room with ‘Treatment Room No. 2’ on its door it was placed so that Fiona and the doctor could sit down and face the patient. Although he still hadn’t moved his head Franz had become agitated at coming into the room. He was looking at a small grey enamel cabinet in the corner. Its dial was calibrated in volts and there was a mechanical timer and wires ending in what looked like headphones. Franz stared at the machine and then at Doktor Wieczorek and then back at the machine again.
‘He doesn’t like the electric shock treatment,’ said the doctor. ‘No one does.’ He put out a hand and touched Franz in a reassuring gesture. ‘It’s all right, Franz. No treatment today, old friend. Coffee, just coffee.’
As if by prearrangement a woman in a blue overall came in carrying a tray with cups, saucers and a jug of coffee. The chinaware was thick and clumsy: the sort which didn’t readily break if dropped. ‘I’ll change my mind, if I may?’ said Fiona as the doctor began pouring the coffee.
‘Good. Changing people’s minds is our speciality here. Isn’t that right, Franz?’ Doktor Wieczorek chuckled.
Franz moved his eyes and stared at Fiona. It seemed as if he could hear and understand everything that was said. Looking into his face, she wondered if there was something faintly familiar about him, but then she dismissed the thought.
‘Poor Franz Blum was a hard-working young third secretary working in the attaché’s office in London. Then one day he had a complete breakdown. I suppose it was the strain of being without his family in a strange country for the first time. Some people find it very difficult to adapt. The Embassy shipped him back to Moscow as soon as it was realized that he was sick. Everything was tried and although there were times when he seemed to get better, in the long term he just got worse and worse. It’s a sad case.
In a way he provides us with a constant reminder of the limitations of our science.’
Fiona watched Blum as he reached for his coffee, extending two hands and picking it up with very great care.
‘One confidential KGB report from London said that Franz was a spy for the British,’ said Doktor Wieczorek. ‘But apparently
there is no hard evidence to support the allegation. There was never any question of him going on trial but we were told the background, in case it could help in diagnosis. There was an inquiry, but even your Stasi interrogators got nothing out of him.’
She kept calm, very calm, but she turned her eyes away from Franz. ‘But you did?’ Then this was the man she had reported to Martin Pryce-Hughes, the one she had betrayed and consigned to a living death. Was Doktor Wieczorek in on that whole story, or was it all just need-to-know?
‘We have that sort of patient sometimes. Franz wasn’t easy to deal with. It’s a long time ago now but I remember it all so clearly. When he didn’t respond to the pills and injections it became clear that electric shock would be the only way to help him. Not just the little sessions that are given to help depressed patients; we tried a new idea, really massive shocks.’
Franz spilled a dribble of coffee down his chin. Wieczorek took a handkerchief and wiped it. Then he gently removed Franz’s woollen hat and indicated for Fiona the shaved patches where the electrodes were applied.
‘Shock,’ said Franz suddenly and loudly as the doctor fingered the bare skin.
‘Good,’ said Doktor Wieczorek proudly. ‘Did you hear that? As clear as anything. Keep up the good work, Franz, and we’ll soon be sending you home.’ He replaced the knitted hat on the man’s head but it remained askew, giving Franz Blum an inappropriately jaunty air. As if the demonstration was over, Doktor Wieczorek stood up and grabbed the wheelchair. He pushed it back into the corridor, where a nurse was waiting to take it from him. ‘You didn’t have your coffee,’ Wieczorek said to Fiona as if suddenly remembering it.
‘Is there much more of the clinic to see?’ she asked.
‘Nothing of consequence. Sit down and drink the coffee. I hope Franz didn’t upset you.’
‘Of course not,’ said Fiona.
‘He’ll never go home, he’ll never go anywhere,’ said Doktor Wieczorek. ‘He’s institutionalized for life, I’m afraid. Poor Franz.’