Pilgrim Read online

  What Johannes saw of his father was two black eyes, two dark nostrils and the gaping pit of a mouth in the oval of a flour-white face, beneath a fall of hair that was dark where his father’s cap had been and white where it had not. Shoulders drooping, elbows on the table, minimal, almost mechanical movements—a man-sized wind-up father-doll sitting amongst his brood—a doll whose springs were winding down even as its children watched—until, each evening, it stopped and simply sat there while the dishes, knives, forks and spoons were removed from around it. Then it rose and went away to its bed. No one spoke. Not ever. It was a house of endless fatigue and silence.

  In those days, Frau Eda did not come home until Johannes himself had long been in his own bed. He only ever saw his mother in the mornings—once again from the vantage point of his high-chair—while she drank her last cup of coffee, rolled down her sleeves, pulled on her coat and went beyond his view into the world of someone else’s house, where she spent the day in someone else’s kitchen.

  When Johannes was six, his father’s sleeve got caught in one of the mill-wheels and, there being no one by to save him, he was drawn in amongst the cogs and crushed to death. At the time, the boy was told none of this, only that his father had gone away and would not return.

  Later, at school, he was told the truth by an older boy whose father had also worked at the flour mill. For a very long while, young Kessler said nothing to his mother or to his sisters about what he knew. When he was eleven—or perhaps when he was twelve—he began to ask questions it had never occurred to him to ask before. Where, when he left, did Father go? And: why did he go away alone when he could have taken us with him? And: why has he never written? Why has he never come back?

  The answers to these questions were always the same. He went away to join his mother and father…to stay with his brothers in Argentina…he had no money to take us with him…there is no post from South America…

  One lie compounded the last and the one that followed. His mother had already grieved and put her grief behind her. A lie was easiest—and even telling it, she could partially believe it herself. She could daydream her husband’s life in Argentina. She could call the brothers back into her mind and in their company recreate the sunny days when she and her husband had been young and there was no foreboding. To call him dead at this late date was to take a step towards her own death she was not prepared to take, and even when young Johannes was as old as sixteen, she had still not declared herself a widow.

  As for Elvire, she had been glad of her father’s death. The burden of his life had overwhelmed and exhausted her. When he died, she had been only fourteen and had borne his needs since she was nine—all his meals, laundry, bathwater and errands and his lack of any acknowledgement of what she did. Not that she had hated him. That, she knew, would be unjust, given that she was aware of the circumstances of his poverty—how little work there was in the world they inhabited and how little return there was when the work was done. Still, she was glad of his absence. She need only thereafter see to her brother’s survival and her own, their mother then being an almost invisible presence, so little was ever seen of her.

  Frau Eda had a cage of finches which sang to her in the mornings before she left the house to take up her duties in Herr Munster’s kitchen. Every day began with the removal of their night-cloth and every day ended with its replacement.

  One day, when young Johannes was not quite sixteen, Frau Eda returned from the lawyer’s house to discover the bird cage was empty.

  Elvire and Johannes were questioned. Both denied having any knowledge of how the birds might have escaped.

  Two days later, Elvire opened a drawer in Johannes’s bureau in order to deposit some freshly laundered shirts. The drawer was filled with wings. Finch wings.

  Horror-stricken, she sat on her brother’s bed. It was noon. He would soon return from school and want his lunch.

  Rising, she closed the drawer and went downstairs.

  While Johannes was seated at table, his face leaning down towards his plate of soup, she watched him—thinking how like his father he had become: the same silent presence, the same hidden mind and nothing said and nothing indicated but the slow slaking of thirst and stilling of hunger.

  “Do you know what became of mother’s finches?” she asked him, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him as he ate.

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Oh? And what might that be?”

  “I think you killed them.”

  For a moment only, he sat still—the spoon just emptied poised above the dish. Then he narrowed his eyes and squinted at her before he spoke—and when he did, his voice was colourless and his words without inflection.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “I did that day before yesterday.”

  He then went back to eating.

  Soup sounds.

  And then: “do you mean to tell her?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Am I to tell her?”

  “No. No one is to tell her. All we need to say is: they went away. She’ll understand.”

  Elvire stood up and turned her back to him. She said nothing more. She wanted to leave the room, but could not. It was impossible to move, she was so afraid.

  “I kept the wings,” Johannes said.

  “I know you did.”

  “In all my life, I’ve never seen anything so pretty. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Elvire said nothing.

  “I’m starting a collection,” Johannes went on—barely pausing to swallow his soup between sentences, all but choking on his words—and the words still monotonic, clocklike in their precision. “I like the feel of the feathers—and the way they lie just so…you know? One lying down beneath the other…all in a row…and when you spread them out they make a perfect fan…just like those Spanish ladies hold in the magazines…just like a Spanish dancer holds…”

  “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “sTOP IT!”

  “Stop what?”

  “Speaking—talking—saying those horrible things. Stop it!”

  “But it isn’t horrible. Why call it horrible? Look. Look, Elvire. Look. Turn around and look. I’ve got another one right here.”

  Terrified, she turned.

  Johannes, dead-faced, sat there, his plate emptied, his spoon laid aside—and in his hand a freshly killed bird.

  Elvire stared at him.

  Clearly—all too clearly—he was mad.

  She reached out her hand and took the bird—it was a young pigeon—and spoke to Johannes quietly.

  “I will keep it for you. Yes? You can’t want to take it with you back to school. The other boys would harm it. They wouldn’t let you keep it.”

  He said nothing.

  When he had gone, Elvire put the pigeon in the stove and burned it.

  By the time Johannes returned at five o’clock, Frau Eda was there and, with her, a doctor from the Burghölzli Clinic. Standing at the curb was the famous yellow wagon which would take Johannes away.

  By the time three years had passed, Johannes Kessler was pronounced cured. What emerged from the Burghölzli wards was a young man whose obsessive violence had been completely turned around. Over time, his gentleness towards his fellow patients had earned him not only the respect of his minders but also the interest of the staff psychiatrists. It would not be the first time that an ex-patient was seen to have potential as a Clinic employee.

  When the offer was made to him—to take the training that would allow him to be hired as an orderly—Johannes accepted calmly and gratefully. He had come to be more at peace in the Clinic than anywhere, and although—on the advice of his doctors—he returned to live with his mother and sister, he continued to feel that his true home was the Burghölzli.

  For one thing, there were blanks in his memory of the pre-Clinic times. Whole years had taken flight and winged their way out of his mind—including the days of the killing of the birds. All
that remained of his obsession was an abiding sense of wonder at the beauty of flying creatures.

  Wings. Anything with wings. The very image of wings. Kessler’s world was made magical by the flight of birds, of butterflies…and—most marvellous of all—of angels.

  13

  Two days after Pilgrim had been taken to the Infirmary, Jung was seated opposite Lady Quartermaine in the dining-room of the Hôtel Baur au Lac.

  There was an orchestra. There were palm trees. There was a vaulted roof and windows twelve feet high, which gave a view of lake and mountains.

  Jung had often eaten here before. It was the purview, almost exclusively, of the wealthy and titled families who came to Zürich to be with their relatives or friends who were patients at the Clinic.

  In the early years of their friendship, before the current schism had begun to do its work, Freud had often sat with him here in one of the private corners, discussing his views on the subject of schizophrenia and praising Jung to the heavens for his exploration of this treacherous disease.

  This treacherous disease had become a verbal talisman to Jung—almost a mantra. He never heard the words in his mind without the sound of Freud’s voice in his ear. Nothing so apt or succinct could be imagined as defining schizophrenia—the mind betrayed by images beyond its control and forced to obey the instructions of strangers who refused to identify themselves.

  “It is your supposition, I assume, Doctor Jung, that my friend Mister Pilgrim suffers from this malady. Am I correct?”

  Sybil Quartermaine was seated opposite Jung at a table he would later describe in his notes as occupying centre stage, quite the opposite of where he used to sit with Freud. Lady Quartermaine was dressed entirely in violet and shades of blue. Her hat was modest in size and had no veil. She did, however, wear dark glasses, a mark of interest to the other diners.

  “Physically, my eyes have never been able to tolerate winter light,” she told him, “even though I am in love with it. Winter light is a special joy and I have no words to describe its effect on me, Doctor Jung. Perhaps the word revivifying comes close. Perhaps restorative—perhaps recuperative…But none of these quite tells the tale. I believe that something in a person dies, come winter—almost as though we were meant to hibernate in the fashion of certain animal species. But here, with all these windows and all that snow, the light—for all that I love it—is somewhat overpowering. By mid-afternoon, I shall be sick with its effect on my eyes and retire to a darkened room. Nonetheless, I worship it. The light.”

  “Indeed, I have a passion for it myself,” said Jung.

  “Mister Pilgrim, on the other hand, is a child of darkness.”

  Jung sat back. What Lady Quartermaine had said was mystifying. It could be construed too many ways. Satan himself—or Satan’s progeny? It seemed unlikely that either was intended. But Jung, being the child of a stark-minded pastor of the Church, could not shake the image. Yet, surely Pilgrim’s dilemma had nothing to do with Satan. With darkness, yes—but evil, never. He was too poignant for evil—too much in need.

  “Perhaps you had best explain what you mean, madam, by a child of darkness,” he said, attempting to smile.

  “I will, if I’m able,” Sybil replied. Then she said: “you have been told how we met? And when—Mister Pilgrim and I?”

  “Yes. Beneath a tree when you were twelve and he was eighteen.”

  “Exactly so. Well, the darkness I refer to is the time before that meeting. Eighteen years unaccounted for, in which he claims to have lived—if at all—in a fog; in a mist; in what he once described himself as a permanent twilight. In other words, a kind of darkness.”

  “What about his family?”

  “He has spoken of parents—a mother, a father—and of some kind of shadowy childhood. But no details. Somehow, to Pilgrim, that was all ‘the past.’”

  “The past?”

  “Yes. To my knowledge, since the day I found him lying there, he has never seen or heard from any of his family. And yet, he lives by means of an inheritance of some weight. He lacks for nothing—though he labours little. Writing, of course, is labour. But his writing, however notable, could hardly afford him the life he leads and the style in which he leads it.”

  “And no explanation of this unknown family?”

  “None whatsoever. Except for one thing. He did once mention that before he woke beneath that tree in my garden, there had been a significant dream. But he has never told me what it was he dreamt. Only that the dream preceded his arrival at consciousness. Those are his very words. One day, he arrived at consciousness.”

  “I see.”

  “And so…You believe my friend is—I want to be correct—is the word schizophrenic? Have I got the notion of it? Is that what you believe?”

  “When I know nothing, Lady Quartermaine, I believe nothing,” Jung said, and smiled.

  “A clever answer, Doctor—but you avoid me.”

  “It is not intentional. You must remember, madam, I have barely had time to acquaint myself with your friend’s condition.”

  “It is not a condition,” Sybil said, placing her knife on the left-hand side of her service plate. “It is not a disease that has captured him.” She moved her fork to the right and slapped it down as a kind of punctuation mark. She was not prepared as yet to explain her vehemence.

  An entrée of oysters arrived.

  They were displayed on a platter of ice, with cuts of lemon in their midst. There was also a vinaigrette and squares of Melba toast.

  “You care for oysters, Doctor Jung? I could live on them.” Sybil moved the platter into a more advantageous position. “If you don’t begin, I shall have them all.”

  “I hope not. I am quite partial.”

  Each of them took up a shell and, having filled its basin with lemon juice and vinaigrette, loosened its contents and drank.

  “Divine!”

  “Indeed.”

  For a moment they ate in silence, wielding protective napkins, digging with their forks at the roots of the oysters—drinking down each one as if it was the last.

  “A dozen is not enough,” Sybil said. “But it will have to do. I have ordered us riz de veau. My spies have told me they are excellent here.”

  “They are—and happen to be a particular favourite of mine.”

  “Yes, yes. I knew that.”

  For the first time since being seated, Jung felt distinctly uncomfortable. Is there nothing this woman has not exposed to research?

  “I’ve been reading your book, Doctor Jung. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. I have it with me, in fact, but will not embarrass you by displaying it. Someone anonymous had it left for me only yesterday morning—supposing, I suspect, that it would interest me—which it does. People can be so kind, can’t they—leaving little gifts of significance for one to peruse.”

  “I trust you understand, Lady Quartermaine, my book is not for amateurs,” Jung told her. “It was written by one psychologist for others—not for the layman.”

  “Nonetheless, I seem to be getting on with it quite well.”

  Here, Sybil reached into her bag and produced a notebook bound in soft Venetian leather. It was green, embossed with gold. Its binding contained a pencil with a thin gold chain.

  As the platter of emptied shells was being removed, Lady Quartermaine adjusted her dark glasses, sipped at her wine and consulted her notebook. Jung watched her every move, entranced by her precision and the grace with which she wielded it.

  “You write at some length on the subject of disintegration,” she said, “as observed in your patients here at the Clinic.”

  “Yes. It is my belief that people suffering from schizophrenia are in fact suffering a disintegration of personality.”

  “Fragmentation, you call it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fragments like pieces of glass is one of your phrases.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fragments…Fragmentary…fragmentation. A disintegration of personality, as you sa
y. This is what you believe has happened to Mister Pilgrim?”

  “I believe it is a possibility.”

  “A strong possibility?”

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “What in Mister Pilgrim’s behaviour makes you think so? I’m interested.”

  “His aloofness from reality. His refusal to make contact.”

  “His silence?”

  “Yes.”

  Jung had thought it best not to tell Lady Quarter-maine about the second suicide attempt. Nor the fact that Pilgrim had spoken. Once he did so, she would ask him what had been said and he was not prepared to divulge that yet. In time, yes—but not now. Nor, of course, had he told her of Furtwängler’s decree that Pilgrim was off limits. In fact, neither had he informed Furtwängler that he was taking his luncheon with Sybil Quartermaine. It had come about at her instigation, not his own. On hearing that Jung was in practice at the Clinic, and knowing of him by reputation, she had taken it upon herself to issue the invitation only that morning.

  The riz de veau arrived and were served by two young waiters under supervision of the Maître d’.

  As the vegetable dishes were uncovered and displayed, Sybil said: “did I order spinach?”

  “Yes, my Lady. Expressly. Spinach and parsnips.”

  “Good. I’d forgotten the spinach. And the wine? The white was excellent. And the red?”

  “It is here, my Lady. The claret, just as you requested.”

  “So.” Sybil turned to Jung. “I hope you don’t mind. I always prefer a dry wine with sweetbreads.”

  “It sounds just right.”

  Sybil nodded at the attendants.

  The waiters departed and, having decanted and poured the red wine, the Maître d’ followed them. When they had gone, Sybil said: “I’m always relieved when a restaurant has no wine steward. It saves having to argue about one’s choices.”

  She watched as Jung took the first forkful of riz de veau.