The Asylum of Dr. Caligari Read online

  “How would you assess the condition of Fräulein Wessels?” he asked, scrutinizing me from behind his desk. Cesare the cat pranced back and forth amid the African carvings and stacks of books.

  “She’s still the Spider Queen of Ogygia, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Do you know what Freud would say about Fräulein Wessels? During infancy she channeled her libidinous impulses—”

  “Freud posits a childhood sex drive?”

  “It’s a gaudy theory. Like all little girls, she channeled these impulses toward her father, even as she cultivated an unconscious desire to commit matricide and take her mother’s place in the marital bed.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “No, Freud is. His apostle Carl Jung applied the term ‘Electra complex’ to the syndrome. In the view of those two quacks, Ilona entered womanhood without resolving her incestuous fantasies, and so she became a delusional neurotic.”

  “We both know she had difficulties with her father, but not of the sort you’re describing.”

  “Here at Träumenchen, by contrast, we don’t talk about erotic fantasies—we enact them. And that is why you must instruct Fräulein Wessels to take up residence in your apartments.”

  “I must do what?”

  “There’s room enough for both of you.”

  “Signore, I don’t understand.”

  “I want you two to start fucking until your eyes fall out—is that clear enough?” said Caligari. “Nurse Roussel will supply you with prophylactics. I call it la cura amore. I’m convinced that in Fräulein Wessels’s case it’s the best way to prevent her arachnophilia from advancing to hebephrenia, a personality schism, or some equally unfortunate disorder. Would daily encounters be feasible?”

  “Signore, she is my student,” I protested.

  “Don’t pretend you’ve come down with a sudden case of scruples. Nurse Roussel reports that you and Fräulein Wessels are spending many extracurricular hours together. Tomorrow I shall instruct Herr Röhrig to issue your inamorata her own key. With every act of copulation you’ll be giving the lie to Freud’s talking cure—unless, of course, you agree with him that people can simply chatter their way to wellness?”

  “I’m sure la cura amore is superior.”

  The alienist smiled and scratched Cesare behind the ears. “Tell me, Mr. Wyndham, do you stay abreast of current events? Do you read your newspapers?”

  “Every morning.”

  “Then you know that the bloody fighting in Belgium is momentarily on hiatus. Soon we’ll have bloodier fighting in France along the Marne River. Dr. Verguin has heard rumors of a pathology that first manifested itself during the Frontiers engagements, ‘shell-shock’ in the parlance of the army physicians. Don’t be dismayed if you start seeing mentally wounded soldiers wandering our halls.”

  “ ‘Shell-shock,’ ” I echoed. “I imagine it’s more real than the Electra complex.”

  Caligari favored me with a smile of approbation. “As even Freud could tell you, the human psyche is ill-equipped for crawling around in the mud day after day beneath artillery bombardments.”

  “Do you believe shell-shock can be treated with art therapy?”

  “I would prefer to treat it with fucking, but we lack the resources, Träumenchen being an asylum and not a brothel.” Caligari ran the edge of his hand along Cesare’s back, inspiring the cat to stretch himself languidly. “This meeting has ended. Go to Fräulein Wessels and enlist her in our conspiracy against the Freudian menace. Herr Röhrig will send me reports on your progress.”

  Although my explanation of why Herr Direktor wanted us to cohabit made little sense to Ilona, and I didn’t really understand it either, she greeted the prospect with a smile as wide as Gwynplaine’s in The Man Who Laughs.

  “Naturally a person should hesitate to obey the wishes of the dubious Caligari, but la cura amore is so very beautiful I cannot resist,” she said. “And yet, young Francis, I must tell you my great and paradoxical fear. The closer we become as lovers, the nearer draws the day when you will abandon me.”

  “I cannot imagine abandoning you.”

  “My first husband left me for a cabaret singer, the second for a gin bottle. Then came Gerhard, who fell into the Rhine and drowned while returning from the house of his mistress. I think you will leave me for a woman too sane to believe that art can grow new capillaries in the brain.”

  “I am yours for eternity.”

  “Please, young Francis, no eternities. They are too much like infinities.”

  And so she become my paramour in residence. When not pursuing the measures Caligari had prescribed for constraining her madness, we spent long hours covering canvases with abstract forms and daubs that aspired to unalloyed Existenz. Some of our efforts were collaborations, Ilona grasping the brush in her dominant hand (the left) while I clutched the same implement in my right, the two of us contacting the canvas in tandem and allowing the paint-laden bristles to travel hither and yon like the planchette on a Ouija board.

  But whether painting, making love, or attending to quotidian details, we could not escape the shadow of the adjacent Kriegslust factory. Before long the New York Herald corroborated Caligari’s forecast that the next chapter in the Great War would be a series of engagements throughout the Marne floodplain. The journalists offered their usual clinical accounts of skirmishes and battles, attacks and counterattacks, complete with maps showing disputed ground and graphs referencing unfathomable grief.

  “‘Casualties’—what a ridiculous word,” I said to Ilona. “There is nothing casual about a young man being torn to pieces by flying metal.”

  As Caligari had also predicted, the Marne brought an influx of patients diagnosed with shell-shock. Träumenchen became a haunted place, its corridors clogged with inmates who seemed not so much soldiers as ambulatory corpses. In light of this epidemic, I was hardly surprised when, on the day the New York Herald informed its readers that a “stalemate” now obtained on the Western Front, Dr.

  Verguin told me about Viktor Zimmer, German VI Corps, a battle-weary Leutnant—meaning lieutenant—she’d just finished evaluating.

  “A difficult case,” she said, absently fingering the resonator on her stethoscope. “The poor fellow insists on wearing a bandana around his mouth and nose, so chlorine gas won’t get into his lungs—except the Entente doesn’t use gas, not yet. Before the war he worked as a painter and printmaker, and I believe he would benefit from your class.”

  “The shock of artillery versus the shock of the avantgarde,” I mused. “Perhaps the second trauma can ameliorate the first? Aesthetic heteropathy?”

  “Assuming you and Fräulein Wessels can spare a moment from your sex regimen,” said Dr. Verguin, “I’ll have Nurse Roussel deliver Zimmer to your apartments tomorrow morning for an interview.”

  Twelve hours later, while Ilona soaked in her regular morning bath and I savored poached eggs in my dining room, someone knocked impatiently on the door. I took a swallow of cold coffee, then admitted Nurse Roussel and her unfortunate charge. Dr. Verguin had prepared me for Viktor Zimmer’s gas-resistant bandana (it was bright red). The Leutnant also wore a muted green German Imperial Army uniform shorn of all insignia. His gaze was vacant. His lower legs jerked uncontrollably. When I guided him into my study and bid him take a chair, he replied, in a tremulous voice, “I’ve forgotten how to sit.”

  “At eleven o’clock, Herr Zimmer, you will report to the natatorium for hydrotherapy,” Nurse Roussel instructed him. “Can you manage that?”

  “I’ll make sure he gets there,” I told her.

  “During the Marne I saw a hideously wounded man wandering around the battlefield,” said Zimmer. “He’d lost his entire lower jaw to shrapnel.”

  “I know you’ve been through hell,” I said, “and I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

  The instant Nurse Roussel left my apartments, the Leutnant’s demeanor changed dramatically. He removed the bandana and crammed it in his trous
ers pocket. A light came to his eyes. Calmly he extended his arm, fingers steady and solicitous. We shook hands.

  “Yes, I’ve been through hell, but it did not destroy me,” said the Leutnant. “My shell-shock, to use that dubious term, is largely feigned.”

  “I don’t blame you for running away.”

  “I did not run away—I ran here, to Träumenchen. I’m more familiar with this place than you suppose. In fact, I once occupied these very apartments, and my real name is—”

  “Herr Slevoght!” Ilona stood in the doorway to the study, her plenteous red tresses dripping water, her body wrapped in a white Turkish towel.

  “Good morning, Fräulein,” said our visitor.

  “Is that really you, Herr Slevoght?”

  “You’re looking well, Ilona.”

  “I am becoming less sick,” she said. “Mr. Wyndham is treating me with la cura amore.”

  “So I see.”

  “How wonderful that you’ve returned,” Ilona told my predecessor. “You look terrible.”

  “Carnage does not agree with me. There is much we need to discuss.”

  “We have coffee and pastries.”

  So the three of us retired to the dining room, where we sat at the oaken parallelogram table pursuing a conversation fueled by sugar, caffeine, and immoderate anxiety.

  “I’m told I acquitted myself well as a soldier,” said Slevoght, sipping coffee, “but art will always be my primary passion—and yours, too, am I right, Mr. Wyndham?”

  “Indeed. Call me Francis.”

  “Werner,” he said, shaking my hand. “How I’ve missed the smell of linseed oil. I’m actually looking forward to attending your classes, assuming Ludwig, Pietro, and Gas-ton will pledge to keep mum about their former teacher’s return from the front. Many are the faces of Werner Slevoght. Not only have I led two lives as an art therapist and a mental patient, I continue to lead two lives as . . . can you guess what I’m getting at?”

  “Ilona told me.”

  “‘The love that dare not speak its name,’ as a friend of Oscar Wilde put it. In the opinion of Dr. Freud, people with my predilections are as sick as any Träumenchen inmate. Caligari’s dislike of the Viennese alienist is the only thing I admire about him. If Freud is a charlatan, Caligari is a megalomaniac—a more dangerous syndrome. Do you know about the ensorcelled painting?”

  “Last month I witnessed Caligari’s war machine in action,” I said, “long columns of soldiers visiting the Kunstmuseum and leaving it afflicted with what Conrad calls Soldatentum.”

  “Yes, that’s the right word. And how is our dear Conrad?”

  “Sound in body but not in spirit.”

  “Poor man,” said Werner. “He wastes eight years of his life touring Europe as a second-fiddle sleepwalker to Caligari’s charismatic hypnotist, and then he becomes his drudge at Träumenchen, and then he learns his employer is a war profiteer.”

  “You should know that three weeks ago I tried to burn the painting,” I said, biting into a pain au chocolat. “The damned thing turned my turpentine into a flaming demon. I was nearly incinerated.”

  “How did you manage to attack the beast with all those soldiers coming and going?”

  “Caligari remembers the Sabbath and keeps it holy,” I said, “though I wouldn’t count on his maintaining that observance indefinitely.”

  “Has he given his obscenity a name?”

  “Verzückte Weisheit,” said Ilona, buttering a poppy seed roll. “Its effect on male spectators is always the same boring Kriegslust. On women—or at least on this woman—it exerts a more benevolent influence, libidinous rather than jingoist.”

  “I must admit, I find Herr Direktor’s attitude toward the war difficult to fathom,” I said. “He calls it ‘transcendently meaningless,’ which for him is evidently a term of approbation.”

  Werner ate a piece of his Streuselkuchen. “I never cared for Caligari’s adolescent strutting. He got it from Nietzsche, I believe, when the philosopher was living here. Although my relationship with Caligari was strictly collegial, occasionally I glimpsed his project—Ecstatic Wisdom, you said?—when it was just a jumble of charcoal sketches and watercolor studies. Eventually I realized he intended to create a preternatural call to arms. And then one day he caught me leafing through the watercolors. He was furious, of course. He probably considered shooting me with his pistol, but in the end he decided to murder me indirectly by—”

  “By arranging for your conscription,” I said. “Janowitz the innkeeper told me.”

  “I was sent to a training camp in Düsseldorf, where they taught me how to use a bayonet—never above the waist, or the blade might get caught in your enemy’s ribs, but always a long thrust to the belly, then a short thrust. They put our battalion on a train to Kleinbrück. I was the only private on board who knew what our officers had in mind. By hiding in the lavatory of a passenger coach, I avoided being frog-marched past the painting.”

  “A narrow escape,” said Ilona.

  “According to my superiors, I fought bravely during the Frontiers campaign,” said Werner, “so they made me a sergeant, then a lieutenant. When I got to the Marne, I started hearing about a syndrome called shell-shock, and how the victims were normally sent to Träumenchen for treatment. So I began calling myself Viktor Zimmer and pretended the guns and the bombs had made me crazy. Anything to get back inside this place so I could try to foil Herr Direktor.”

  “An ingenious scheme,” said Ilona.

  Werner seized the carafe and poured himself a second cup of coffee. “Your turpentine attack was bound to fail, Francis, but I’m pleased to infer you’ve grasped the necessity of fighting Caligari.”

  “Is it possible the crimson curtain makes the painting blind?” asked Ilona. “Could we take an ax and murder it through the velvet?”

  “The beast would outmaneuver us,” said Werner.

  “Perhaps we should give the turpentine strategy another chance,” I said. “I’m imagining a coordinated strike by you, me, Ilona, and Conrad.”

  “Please try to understand: we’re up against black magic here, not the Three Musketeers,” said Werner. “Any merely physical assault is doomed from the outset. We can battle Caligari’s sorcery only with sorcery of our own.”

  “Very well, but I’m no sorcerer,” I said.

  “Neither am I.”

  “Nor am I,” said Ilona.

  Werner rose from the parallelogram table and approached the Spider Queen. He cupped her jaw in his palms, pressed his fingers against her cheeks, and looked her in the eye. “Ilona, my dear, that is not entirely true.” Gently he turned her face toward mine. “When I was Fräulein Wessels’s art therapist, I observed qualities in her that she herself did not perceive.”

  “I’m a lunatic, not a witch,” she said.

  “What you are, Ilona Wessels,” said Werner, sliding his hands from her cheeks, “is an artist of infinite potential.”

  “Please don’t use that word,” said Ilona.

  “ ‘Artist’?”

  “ ‘Infinite.’ I’ll explain later.”

  “Let me lay all my cards on the table,” said Werner. “I don’t simply want to sabotage Caligari’s Kriegsmaschine. I want to replace it with a Friedensmaschine.”

  “A peace machine?” I said.

  “After what I saw on the Frontiers and the Marne, all that absurd slaughter, I won’t rest until we’ve taken down Verzückte Weisheit and substituted another magical work of art—the antiwar painting to end all antiwar paintings.”

  “I think I should have stayed in America,” I said, heaving a sigh. “All this Continental esoterica is beyond me.”

  “Herr Slevoght, I could never make a picture such as you have in mind,” said Ilona.

  “Do you know why I made a secret copy of the museum key?” Werner asked. “So I could visit your spiderwebs whenever I wished, even in the middle of the night.” He took his coffee cup in hand and slowly orbited the table. “On Sunday morning at ten o�
��clock we three shall gather in the gallery, so that Francis might experience the full magnitude of your gifts. Where is the key now?”

  “Under a loose floorboard in the sitting room,” said Ilona. “I have no gifts. These days I am a theory person.”

  Werner explained that before our next meeting he and Conrad would scour the subterranean atelier for materials that might aid our project. I supplied him with the key, then cast my mind ahead to Sunday. The thought of once again entering the vicinity of Ecstatic Wisdom terrified me, and yet I felt duty-bound to help counteract the contagion Caligari had unleashed.

  “Knock four times, Morse Code for H.” Werner set down his cup, then pulled the red bandana from his pocket. “Heaven, hell, hope, horror—take your pick.”

  “Truth to tell, Herr Slevoght, I wish you’d never returned,” said Ilona as she and I escorted him into the foyer. “I wish you and Conrad had taken a cottage on the Rhine.”

  Werner restored the disguise to his mouth and nose. “Believe me, Fräulein, I hate being the bearer of bad news and worse obligations.” He opened the door and stepped into the corridor. “And yet I fear that the destiny of regiments lies in your enchanted hands.”

  Ilona fixed on her hands, and she was still staring at them long after Werner had gone.

  On Sunday morning Ilona and I arrived outside the museum at the appointed hour. I knocked in the prearranged rhythm. Still dressed in his threadbare uniform, Werner admitted us. Sucking on an unlit cigarette, Conrad slouched in the far corner, within arm’s reach of Ecstatic Wisdom, which was once again masked in velvet.

  “Guten Morgen, Herr Röhrig,” said Ilona.

  “I’m happy to see you have taken our side,” I said.

  “I shall never carry water for Caligari again,” said Conrad, lighting his cigarette.

  Werner sidled toward the spiderweb oils, then turned and solicited me with a hooked index finger. “Come, Francis. Observe what our arachnophiliac has wrought.”

  “I’ve already seen them,” I said.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  I approached Ilona’s oils and scrutinized the mandala web, the surrounding plaster still bearing the marks of her mallet attack.