The House of Breathing Page 8

  I actually saw Bertha quite often after that. Believe it or not we became good friends. Sometimes on Sundays we would walk down to the park together, arm in arm. On the Sundays, that is, that Jacob was in hospital. I can’t for the life of me imagine what we talked about—Bertha being as she was, though not as dim as you might expect—but I recall that our short times together were pleasant. Apart from Claus, who, as a working man, worked very long hours, I didn’t really know many people in the city. (My family, you see, were all back in Eisenerz.) So I enjoyed her company. When Jacob came home from the hospital we sometimes, all three, went out walking together—but not very often. I didn’t mind being seen in the company of Bertha, but with the two of them together we were really very conspicuous, and attracted attention. Once in the park a little girl screamed and burst into tears when she saw us coming, all three, along the path towards her. A terrible thing. A real sweetie, too.

  I forgot to mention, by the way, that Bertha was employed. Well, part-time, in fact. She was employed doing menial chores two days a week at the home of Karl Kraus—you may have heard of him—the notorious writer of nasty pamphlets. The story goes that Karl Kraus had been out walking one day—no doubt on the lookout for scandals to print and embarrass—and spied our dear Bertha. Interested, for some reason, he followed her home where he proposed to the mother a contract of employment. I have no idea—it seems so rash and irresponsible—why she accepted. They did not appear hard up, but then you never can be sure with other people, can you? And to such a man!

  One day the mother came to me—it was already evening (the lamps were on) and I was just home from work—and asked me if I would go and fetch Bertha from Herr Kraus’s house. It seems she was late, much, much later than usual. Why the mother didn’t go herself I really don’t know, though now that I think about it she hardly ever went out. Anyway, it was the very first time she had come to my rooms, and as she was a commanding and mysterious woman, I felt it must be important and so agreed to the errand. The mother handed me a piece of paper with the address printed on it in a perfectly neat hand, and I set out through the dark.

  Can you imagine? I was asked to wait in the parlour while a woman went to fetch her. Very fancy it was; very bourgeois. Long mirrors, Turkish rugs, silk coverings on the furniture, two columns in the doorway with identical candlesticks, stiff chairs, Venetian glass. Before the woman returned, there was Karl Kraus himself—much kinder looking than I had imagined, and rather vulnerable, I think, behind those rimless glasses—leading Bertha by the hand and bringing her forward. He said something like: ‘So you have come to fetch Bertha, Bertha the very symbol of Vienna herself: beguiling grin on the outside, crescent, conventional, covering like a mask the imbecile vacancy within’. Just like that! Those very words! And he said this, mind you, in such a friendly tone that for a moment I was not sure at all how to respond. But then I realised what he had said, how unpleasant, how uncalled for, and seized Bertha from him, turned swiftly and left, without uttering in reply a single word. Such an awful man! I shall never forget it.

  But I have digressed, haven’t I? It is the Freud story, isn’t it, you wish to know.

  Dr Freud was placed, as I said, in the utility room with Franz Josef and the idiot dwarf Jacob. He seemed settled when I left him, and I assumed he would sleep. I went on with other duties nearby, just up the corridor, and to be honest quite forgot that he was with us. But then, to my astonishment, there was Jacob running towards me in his clumsy fat-man way and shouting at the top of his head: ‘The blood of doctor! The blood of doctor!’ I shall never forget it. I rushed back to the room—with Jacob stumbling at my heels—to see Dr Freud lying prostrate in a mess of new blood. The bandages on his face were completely soaked, and his hands were bloody also, as though he had tried to stop the flow by clasping them to his wound. And the whole of his pillow was red and damp, a profuse haemorrhage, in short, and still streaming out. I felt suddenly guilty—knowing this man’s importance, knowing he was stuck here in the utility room with the dwarf, knowing that a doctor would have to be immediately found. I settled Jacob by the bed to watch over Dr Freud, and hurried off for a physician. What a wasted effort! Dr Hajek was nowhere at all to be found; he had left after surgery. So I rushed back to the utility room without a doctor. The dwarf Jacob, thank God, was still in attendance. With one hand he held the dangling hand of poor Sigmund Freud, the other he had firmly fastened at Dr Freud’s jaw, perhaps in imitation of something he had seen earlier. It was a curious sight, and might have looked, at a glance, as though Jacob had just committed some shocking crime, and was busy hushing up the screams of his victim. But in fact he was tender and firm and gentle as a child. More sensible, too, than I’d had reason to believe.

  I pushed him aside and set about repair work. Pressure. New bandages. Binding. More pressure. (Until the doctor came and took over—as doctors do.) I learned later that our patient had been very close to death, and that the dwarf had certainly saved him by raising the alarm and helping to stop the blood. (No thanks to Dr Hajek who should have stuck to noses.)

  When the crisis was over the patient communicated on paper—since he could now not speak at all without extreme discomfort—that he would like to remain in the utility room rather than move to a ward. This surprised us all, especially in the light of his later accusations. (You will know, of course, that Dr Freud later charged that the hospital had been deliberately negligent since its staff was jealous and resentful of the success of psychoanalysis!) Anyway, he stayed, recuperating for a few days where he had first been put. His daughter Anna slept on a chair in the same awful room.

  There is something—let me tell you—I have always remembered. Bertha came to visit while Dr Freud was still there. She didn’t often visit Jacob when he was stuck there in hospital; for some reason I think—though I’m not sure why—that the mother prohibited it. Still she came in one day, and this is how I see them. Dr Freud is propped up in bed with a heavily bandaged jaw, with the face of Emperor Franz Josef hovering alive above his head. In comes our dear Bertha—I led her in myself—who goes straight over to Jacob and gives him one of those cumbersome and slobbering embraces that such people seem invariably to have. Quite touching, really. Kisses, holding hands. Dr Freud had been observing her and beckoned with his finger for Bertha to come over to him. Which she did, smiling. Then he held her face in both hands and ran his fingers carefully over her features as though he were somehow medically appraising her odd condition. (The smile, I mean, not the idiocy.) A sort of medical appraisal. I watched him very closely and thought for just one moment, just one moment, mind you, that he was going to cry. He didn’t, of course; men didn’t in those days. But just for one moment I thought that he would. The famous Sigmund Freud crying; can you imagine?

  No, I know nothing more of the idiot dwarf Jacob; I’m sorry to say. Except that he died of complications of pneumonia not very long after, early, I think it was, in 1924. Bertha and the mother stayed on in the apartment, though I moved out to live with my husband Claus. I heard later that they were taken away by the Nazis—two of the first to go, and her no longer by that time looking like a silent movie star with heart shaped lips, but much, much older, and her hair gone grey as her eyes. No one seems to know of their final fate, but one can guess, of course, where Nazis are concerned.

  Really, there is nothing more I can tell you about Jacob. I know you want to write up the dwarf part of the story but I remember other things. When I think back on Jacob and the time of the biopsy, I think mostly of the women. I think of the mother at her window, so beautiful and quiet, and most of all of dear Bertha, who was always smiling and affectionate, and a friend despite all. And whom that terrible man—Karl Kraus was his name—said one night was somehow the very symbol of Vienna.

  Veronica

  My colleague said of this story: it is a Veronica myth; there is nothing more to it. A dismissive sneer arose on his face, scholastic, stringent and unimpeachably sure.


  This story begins where it should, at a point of arrival. The place of its initial action is a North Indian railway station, a largish rural town, a hot mid-summer. There is the predictable Asian plenitude, a cram of human bodies impossibly compressed, too many people inhabiting too tiny a space. In the rush for exits some will fall under, a child will be lost, a parcel mislaid, a sari ripped, a precious fragment of food dropped to the ground and crushed underfoot. There are all the complex versions of random and purposive movements that constitute the rude democracy of crowds. The noise of the place adds another plenitude, since every area is loud. Greetings and anxious exclamations over luggage mingle with the reprimand of children, shouts of hawkers and the squeaks and clangs of exhausted machinery. And superintending all, like a deific manifestation in this land of many deities, are booming messages issuing incessantly from a public address system corrupted by static.

  Our heroine Elizabeth makes her way tourist-eager through the interstices of the crowd. She has a certain bravura, a certain intentness of purpose. Against the mass of milling people she defines herself singular and somewhat elect. Let us say she has also the smugness of a conqueror: having governed her unease at bodies and smells, at the different skins of others, she wishes now to repose in first world sovereignty, to enjoy what she sees for its souvenirs and its spectacles. She moves with confidence, clutching at her travel pack in tenacious regard for the hands of thieves. She easily defies the jostling abrasions of the crowd, at first elbowing through groups decomposing before her, then sidling apologetically or stretching in a leap to straddle a gutter. At her back lies a stench she has not yet accommodated: the particular pungency of hot metal machinery. It is something of her own world, something, perhaps, reminiscent of accidents. She discounts this distraction and moves quickly away.

  Our heroine Elizabeth moves away towards odours which will later summon India more suddenly and immitigably than any of the photographs she pauses daily to capture. The scent of samosas turning in oil. The alliterative ingredients of cardamom, chilli, cumin, coriander. The perfume of saffron. The sourdough of chapatis. Some unpronounceable coconut condiment which dampens down curry. Curd. Vindaloo. She inhales deeply and indulgently and then proceeds to order, with all the opulent indifference of a millionaire, whatever takes her fancy. The seller squats on the floor in dirty robes. He is dextrous in servitude. He presents a plate of torn cardboard and piles it neatly and efficiently with a serve of food which is spare but impressively redolent; and Elizabeth stuffs down her meal with unseemly haste, aware of no censure.

  Enough money brought our heroine to what the urchin guide falsely claimed was the best hotel in town. It was tolerably shabby and called, in its much smaller English translation, the Lux. Framing the name were a pair of reversed swastikas, a symbol Elizabeth had at first, and ingenuously, misunderstood as fascistic. Now knowing better (from the Sanskrit svastika, from svasti: well being, fortune, luck), she smiles to herself wisely (with the wisdom of guidebooks), and decides that the Lux is sufficient for one night.

  The hotel room, however, has a quality of chastening decrepitude. The bed is of wooden slats, has but the slightest shred of mattress, and bears a coverlet marked all over with stains of semen and urine. There is no other furniture, not even a chair. In one corner of the room stands an earthenware jug of water, a modest touch remarkable only for its presence.

  Elizabeth considers the embarrassment of asking for her money back, of seeking out a new urchin and traipsing back through the streets, but resolves to stay—for one night only—where circumstance has placed her.

  The room has one feature not yet described: there is a large double window that commands an excellent view of the busy street below. So while inside is all vacancy and a smear of past lives, outside, just through the window, is a present tense full of people and noisy activity only marginally less crowded than the clamorous railway station.

  Elizabeth positions herself on the narrow sill of this window and considers the scene. Containing little to photograph, it is judged uninteresting. Workers work, sellers sell, shoppers buy. There are bicycles and bullock carts. Motorised minicabs. An occasional car. A woman in an emerald sari is flirting with a young man who has papers under his arm. To the left an older woman weeps alone in a shadow. There is a scatter of escaped chickens and a man with a stick. Another woman, also old, roasts peanuts over a burner and sells them in little cones made from discarded newspapers. Children who ought to be in school chase about, dashing bright colours. And overall hangs suspended a fine white dust, one set moving in the air with each active intervention as though registering ethereally lives otherwise terrestrial, caught and solid. It is this dust Elizabeth pauses momentarily to ponder. She suspects it pestilential, and will stay just one night.

  The afternoon seems interminable. An excursion outside to spend money and take photographs is futile and demoralising. The town, as it happens, is ill appointed for tourists seeking solace and diversion. Elizabeth retreats to her room and rejecting the bed—which offends the hotel obligation to obliterate precession and present each room anew—lays her sleeping bag on the floor and reclines into hardness.

  She takes from her worn travel pack a paperback book, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It had been discarded much earlier as too Germanic for her taste, too cumbersome and earnest, but in the circumstances she is prepared to tackle it once more. Elizabeth opens the pages of her portable Europe, and displaces, word by word, the shabby room, the inhospitable town, the suspect, grey, circumambient dust, with the grandiloquence and august gravity of the Alps. She enters mountains and cold air. Cultivated voices debate the verities. Sensibilities quiver. Clouds are uplifting. Ice, snow. The text possesses some aspect of lyrical refinement that, existing only in fictive places for which no passport is required, is both immediately soothing and automatically accommodating: From the rugged slopes came the sound of cowbells; the peaceful, simple, melodious tintinnabulation came floating unbroken through the quiet, thin, empty air, enhancing the mood of solemnity that broods over the valley heights.

  At twilight something noisy is happening outside. Through the window and the darkening air comes the sound of voices growing louder and music swelling at a distance. Elizabeth rises from her sleeping bag, flings the Alps dismissively, and moves to the window. Something is happening a little further up the street: a procession is approaching. She seizes her camera and scampers downstairs to witness whatever it is.

  Crowds of people stand back against the rows of buildings. Ahead through the dust, now agitated, dense and sinuously spiralled, is an advancing wedding party. The honoured couple sit high on a bullock cart bedecked with dozens of garlands of orange and yellow marigolds. Above them is a canopy of some unusual silver fabric: it shines in the half light—doubly for a row of bright coins that sway and tinkle at its luxurious fringe. The couple, who stare stiffly ahead giving no sign of affection, also wear money. The man has a jacket festooned with rupee notes; the bride has more notes fluttering loosely in her lap. She is additionally weighted with jewellery of gold, a ring through her nose, heavy chains at the throat and the temple, a large pair of expensive ear-rings finely wrought. They are, in short, a dazzling pair, felicitously translated into the idol-like pose of the nation’s archetypes. Statue still they fix, albeit gaudy with wealth, fertility itself: blooms, riches, beneficence, light. (Our heroine adjusts her camera lens to fix the couple further.)

  At each side of the bullock cart, walking in single file, a train of people carry bamboo poles mounted with electric lights. This seems to Elizabeth odd and incongruous. Her tourist soul would have preferred the enveloping soft focus of lanterns or candles. Moreover it sets a trail of ugly black cords streaming backwards from the procession, giving the appearance that the whole event is somehow run by electricity, that it is an artificial energy that moves and articulates the splendour of the party. Musicians in attendance contribute to this sense: they weave throug
h the light bearers with a mechanical jerkiness. Only children seem exempt and with characteristic anarchy act in dissident form, running about in their best clothes, flinging rose petals indecorously from baskets and bowls. The petals fall slowly, buoyed on warm air; the dust, in contradistinction, swirls upwards to the heavens in speedy dispersal.

  For some moments Elizabeth is almost unaware that a new sound is approaching. Her face is in the camera; she is concentrated on the visual. But then, noting discordancy, she recovers her eyes and looks to see what it is. At some distance from the cart, coming up from behind, are two men carrying an electric generator between them on a platform. The long black cords converge to where they are; they are the source of the light.