The Asylum of Dr. Caligari Read online

  “Concentrate on the axis,” said Werner. “What do you see?”

  “A web and a spider.”

  “Keep looking.”

  Suddenly, before my astonished eyes—as if the painting were a Victorian zoetrope frieze or a strip of nickelodeon celluloid—the spider came to life. It abandoned the lower corner of the canvas and crawled north to the center of the web. Now the mandala began to rotate. An instant later a rainbow suffused the threads, turning them carmine, then azure, violet, jade, emerald, turquoise, as if Ilona had modeled her painting on a bejeweled wheel from King Sargon’s ceremonial chariot.

  “How beautiful,” I said.

  “Danke schön,” said Ilona.

  “Why didn’t you tell me—?”

  “That my spiders will sometimes come to life? I thought that fact would frighten you. It frightens me.”

  The mandala stopped turning, and the painting reverted to its original static form. I shifted my gaze to the suspension bridge. At first the oblong image seemed inert, but then five travelers (homunculi by the scale of the world beyond the picture) came on stage and started crossing an unseen chasm. Abruptly the spider appeared at the end of the span, blocking the party’s progress.

  “Is she going to murder them?” I asked.

  “Never confuse predation with immorality, young Francis.”

  The drama on the bridge froze. I shifted my focus to the maelstrom. Although the subject was inherently kinetic, this painted Charybdis was actually spinning, the spider herself riding on the whirlpool’s foamy lip. I peered into the funnel. The remains of a sunken city rotated about the black core: towers, turrets, ramparts, bridges—flotsam from a lost civilization, stirred up by the vortex.

  “The ruins of Atlantis,” I said.

  “No, Lyonesse,” said Ilona as the maelstrom become a mere spiderweb again.

  “Outwardly your masterpiece will look exactly like Ecstatic Wisdom, an illusion you’ll create by replicating Caligari’s epic on a linen scrim. That way we can substitute one painting for the other without arousing suspicion. But beneath the surface of the facsimile, waiting to emerge and beguile the troops, will lie a panorama as potent as anything our wicked magician ever wrought.”

  “Herr Slevoght, you should not imagine I can command my talents. Most of the paintings I made for you have no magic in them. They’re dead as timestones.”

  “Tombstones,” said Werner.

  I turned away from Ilona’s webs and, approaching Werner, asked him how the hunt in the atelier had gone. He reported discovering the preliminary pieces Caligari had made for Ecstatic Wisdom, nine charcoal sketches and eleven watercolors that would “guide Ilona when she paints the facsimile on the scrim.” Conrad had secured these studies in his apartments along with the other fruits of the morning’s quest: Caligari’s original brushes, his pair of oversized easels, and four mahogany bars he’d evidently set aside “to remount the canvas if damp weather ever warped the original stretcher frame.” As for the beakers of ensorcelled paint, Werner had found these sealed with wax discs and locked away in a cabinet. The pigments themselves were caked and dried, “but careful applications of linseed oil may resuscitate them.” When I told Werner about the outré ingredients I’d seen Caligari dissolving in his potions—salamander, beetle, toad, slug, bird embryos—he hypothesized that “their powers are probably still bound to the pigments, but we’ll let our Spider Queen be the judge of that.”

  Ilona marched across the gallery and fixed on the maelstrom web. “I keep thinking about the regiments. Those poor doomed schoolboys and their timestones.”

  “You can save them,” said Werner.

  She shifted her attention to the mandala. A thick silence enshrouded the gallery.

  “I’m going to need an enormous canvas,” she said.

  “Of course,” said Werner.

  “Cut and stretched to the precise dimensions of Ecstatic Wisdom.”

  “I still have the sideshow tent Caligari and I carted around the countryside,” said Conrad. “I shall gladly sacrifice it.”

  “And an equally large scrim for the forgery,” said Ilona.

  “The infirmary has many yards of linen bandages,” said Conrad.

  Ilona closed her eyes. “An audacious idea is forming in my brain—a plan by which I might gain control of my abilities.”

  “Tell us,” said Werner.

  “On the staff of this place are a half-dozen hypnotists.” She opened her eyes. “If somebody were to put me in a trance—not a depleting trance, not what Svengali did to Trilby, but a nourishing trance—then maybe . . . do you grasp my reasoning?”

  “As it happens, there is one such hypnotist in this very room,” said Conrad. “Years ago, while portraying Caligari’s somnambulist, I absorbed the fundamentals of mesmerism.”

  “I have a title in mind for my picture,” said Ilona. “The Corpse Factory of Dr. Caligari.”

  “That sounds like an act rejected by Le Grand Guignol,” I said.

  “How about Totentanz?” said Ilona.

  “I like that,” said Werner.

  “Myself as well,” said Conrad.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “The dance of the dead,” said Ilona.

  In the days that followed, she became a force of nature and a wonder to behold, every atom of her being fixed on the needs of Totentanz. Were she not an atheist, I imagine she would have prayed. Were she given to mystical visions, she might have fasted. Instead she sat for hours at the dining room table, alternately drinking coffee and brandy, all the while filling a sketchbook with incomprehensible charcoal drawings that I took to be preliminary studies for her imminent epic.

  Throughout this interval I continued to teach presumably therapeutic art lessons. Ilona attended my classes intermittently, as did Werner—much to the delight and perplexity of his former students. When Gaston, Ludwig, and Pietro swore to keep Leutnant Zimmer’s true identity a secret, Werner and I elected to take them at their word (they were crazy, not dishonest), and all three lunatics offered equally sincere vows of silence after we recruited them into our plot against Caligari. True, they didn’t entirely grasp our larger political agenda, but they understood that we’d accorded them the honor of membership in a conspiracy.

  “Think of it as a kind of game,” I told them.

  “There is only one game,” said our Grandmaster, “but I shall be pleased to help Ilona make a magic picture.”

  “I shall likewise lend my courage and fortitude to this daring mission,” said Ludwig. “We officers in Die Erste Galaxisbrigade live by a code.”

  “I always knew Caligari was my enemy,” said Pietro. “Of course, everyone is my enemy, but some of you are more ready than others to pour honey down my throat and release the ants.”

  On the last day in September, much to my horror, Ilona seized a pair of scissors and cut her hair almost down to the scalp, so that, once the composition process began, her tresses wouldn’t trail across the palette, mushing blobs of pigment together. When I first beheld my shorn Spider Queen, I gasped in dismay, but by the end of the week I’d decided she was as comely as ever—more so, actually, in a Nefertiti sort of way.

  Twenty-four hours later I presented our Grandmaster, our space traveler, and our paranoid with a reel of measuring tape from my supply cabinet, then supervised them as, working in Conrad’s gas-lit back parlor, they sliced a huge segment, 9 meters long by 4.5 meters high, out of the sideshow tent. The following day I had the students sneak the block of canvas, the oversized easels, and the mahogany bars into my sitting room (I’d already removed the standard easel and a dozen nonpictorial paintings, stashing them in the bedroom closet). By the light washing through the casement, our lunatics screwed the bars together into a stretcher frame congruent with Ecstatic Wisdom, affixed the canvas to the wood with carpet tacks, and tightened it further by moistening the reverse side. They primed the obverse with gesso using a brush so broad it could have painted a barn.

  Mean
while Ilona set about analyzing Caligari’s cryptic pigments. After Conrad brought her the beakers, she removed the wax seals and irrigated each color—vermilion, cadmium yellow, viridian, ultramarine—using a pipette filled with linseed oil. On instructions from Ilona, Conrad transferred the restored paints to ceramic mustard pots. Taking up the vermilion, she inserted her index finger until it contacted the paint. She held the sample up to the light, inspecting it with a skeptical eye. She sniffed the smear. She tasted it. She brought the pot to her ear and listened. I thought she was about to reveal the results of her analysis, but instead she submitted the remaining pots to the same sensory tests.

  “We are fortunate,” she declared at last, exhibiting her guileless but knowing smile. “Caligari’s powers still inhabit these mixtures. The catalytic agents—salamander, beetle, toad, slug, unhatched birds—remain active and need not be reintroduced. Even the incantations have survived. Effundam spiritum meum in vobis, virtutibus. Perfectus es.”

  Throughout the first two weeks in October, inspired by the stolen sketches and watercolors, Ilona channeled her energies toward creating the counterfeit Ecstatic Wisdom beneath which Totentanz would lie camouflaged. Hour by hour, working on the floor of the sitting room, she applied the potions to the immense linen scrim Werner and I had sewn together from stolen bandages. Every time I glanced at the emerging forgery, the more confident I became that our scheme would succeed, for it was the very Doppelgänger of Caligari’s magnum opus.

  When not busy preparing the facsimile, Ilona joined Conrad in his apartments, and together they pursued their hypnotism experiments. During each session Conrad invited his subject to contemplate alternately a rotating wheel of multicolored glass and a phosphorescent spiral painted on a spinning disc. As these two entrancing moons bore Ilona to the shores of an uncommon sleep, Conrad offered exhortations of the sort declaimed by the anonymous narrator of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Nine trances later Ilona and Conrad had little to show for their collaboration, but she remained optimistic.

  “It’s simply a matter of time,” she said.

  On the Ides of October Ilona instructed me to comb through the asylum library seeking books containing military photographs and drawings. Pictures of technical innovations—flamethrowers, machine guns, howitzers, Minenwerfers, dirigibles—would be particularly useful, she said, likewise medical illustrations depicting the antagonistic and lopsided relationship between war and flesh. My mission proved successful, supplying her with a plentitude of abhorrent images.

  As an All Saints Day sun rose over Weizenstaat, an exhilarated Conrad summoned Werner and me to the dining room, where Ilona stood beside the table holding her sketchbook open to a drawing of an infantryman snarled in barbed wire.

  “The hypnotism has done what we’d hoped,” she said. “My talents are now fully my own.”

  “Look closely,” said Conrad. “This will amaze you.”

  The pen-and-ink infantryman moved, actually moved, convulsing and retching inside his fanged prison, as if his ordeal had been recorded on frames of motion-picture film now unspooling through a kinematograph. The barbed wire vibrated with his anguished spasms. I could hear his cries of despair.

  Ilona flipped to another drawing. A bugler writhed in a field of poppies, his left hand holding his tarnished instrument, both his legs amputated by an artillery shell. Although her medium was black ink, a bright red fluid leaked from the stumps, ran to the edge of the page, and stained the table.

  Now that she had recovered and bridled her gifts (for the immediate future at least), Ilona threw herself into the creation of Totentanz. Using the sitting room floor as a drawing board, she prepared a full-scale study for the entire painting, sketching the contours and textures on a huge grid she’d patched together from a hundred sheets of asylum stationery. The scene centered on a figure she’d named “Korporal Hans Jedermann”—Corporal John Everyman—a clean-shaven, baby-faced, all-purpose soldier dressed in a nondescript brown uniform and fearfully surveying a no-man’s-land sprawling between the trenches of opposing armies.

  Availing herself of calipers, graphite sticks, and gum erasers, Ilona stood before the stretcher frame and began copying the Totentanz study onto the dried gesso. She permitted Werner and me to assist her, confident we would replicate her drawing precisely. The project consumed an entire week. Our lines were ephemeral and delicate, so the pigments could cover them like jam on bread.

  On the first Sunday in November, while men fought and died in the Battle of Armentières (one of a dozen hideously indecisive sequels to the Marne), Ilona solemnly presented herself to the canvas, a palette in one hand, a pig-bristle brush in the other, and applied a supernatural dab of vermilion. The great work had begun. As the month elapsed, she labored around the clock, pausing only for brief naps and modest portions of bread, cheese, fruit, and wine. At her insistence Conrad stole a phial of cocaine from the asylum’s pharmaceutical supplies, but before taking up the syringe she decided that the project itself was the only euphoriant she needed.

  Twenty-four hours after the first snows of December had blanketed the asylum, Ilona invited our cabal into the sitting room.

  “It’s not quite dry,” she said. “No fingers.”

  Cautiously I approached the stretcher frame. A familiar image displayed itself: Caligari’s epic—that is, Ilona’s forgery of Caligari’s epic—with its happy schoolboys marching off to war. Now Totentanz took command of the linen scrim, and the nearest Ecstatic Wisdom soldier looked me in the eye and gave me to know his thoughts.

  I no longer work for the generals, friend, nor for the princes, but you must not tell them that. Please allow my brother-in-arms Korporal Jedermann to show you an edifying panorama painted by Ilona Wessels, Europe’s greatest living artist.

  In thrall to the magic canvas, the scrim became as transparent as cellophane, and Totentanz shone through. There was Hans Jedermann, rifle on his shoulder, casting his bewildered gaze across the battleground. The painting resolved into a succession of discrete tableaux. Soldiers hoisted themselves free of their trenches only to meet the sweeping scythe of massed rifle fire, a quick and mechanized harvest that soon littered no-man’s-land with corpses. Several youths were cut in two, actually cut in two, by the saber-sharp efficiency of the machine guns. Artillery rained shells on charging battalions, the explosions launching severed limbs in all directions like embers flying free of a bonfire. My skull reverberated with bugles bleating, drums thundering, grenades detonating, cannons convulsing, horses neighing in terror, wounded soldiers screaming for their mothers.

  “This will bring entire armies to their senses,” said Conrad.

  “It’s the Marne—it’s the Marne, and you weren’t even there,” said Werner. “Fräulein, you are a marvel.”

  “A marvel, a genius, and—I don’t doubt it—Europe’s greatest living artist,” I said, even as I gagged on the air around the stretcher frame, a miasma of cordite, vomitus, fear, feces, burned flesh, and the iron odor of blood.

  “This morning I woke up with a headache, and that means brain cancer,” said Pietro.

  “Vicious as they can be, when Ganymedians go to war, it is never this bad,” said Ludwig.

  “Check and mate,” said Gaston.

  “Well played, Dr. Caligari,” said Conrad, “but you lost.”

  “It occurs to me that a day may come when I shall need to restore a damaged section of Totentanz,” said Ilona. “We must hide the pigments where Herr Doktor will never find them.”

  Conrad said, “I’ll wrap each pot in cheesecloth, put all four in a waterproof case, and bury them—”

  “Beneath the sundial in the courtyard,” said Ilona.

  “Done and done,” said Conrad.

  Again I scanned her masterpiece. It was indeed the antiwar painting to end all antiwar paintings. It was perhaps even the antiwar painting to end war itself. Were someone to carve on my tombstone—or, as Ilona would have it, my timestone—a simple s
ix-word epitaph, Assisted in the Creation of Totentanz, that would be good enough for me.

  Shortly after dawn on Friday the 25th of December, 1914, feeling confident that even Alessandro Caligari would not consider Christmas morning an appropriate time for war profiteering, we peeled the linen Ecstatic Wisdom forgery from Ilona’s painting, detached Totentanz from the mahogany bars, disassembled the stretcher frame, and rolled up the dried canvas like a rug. We bore the components of our conspiracy down the passageway to the museum door, then cautiously admitted ourselves. The gallery was blessedly deserted. As always, Herr Direktor’s magnum opus—at the moment mantled in velvet—commanded the west wall. We laid our materials beneath Ilona’s spiderweb oils, then set about making the grand substitution.

  Gaston, Ludwig, Pietro, and I took Ecstatic Wisdom in hand, grasping the bottom edge and lifting the suspension cable clear of the three spikes. We staggered backward under the weight of the stretcher frame. I half expected the painting to harm us in some way, perhaps by transforming its pigments into chlorine gas or its cable into a poisonous snake, but we conveyed it to the elevator hatch without mishap, resting it vertically on the platform.

  Werner approached the winch and began turning the crank as if operating an immense coffee grinder. With a harsh screeching of pulleys and a strident clattering of chains, the platform descended, delivering the malign painting, the lunatics, and myself into the depths of the cellar. Taking care not to smash any of Caligari’s alchemical apparatus, we slid Ecstatic Wisdom across the length of the atelier, the mahogany bar functioning like the runner on a sled, and secluded it in a cavernous alcove.

  There remained the task of retrieving the crimson curtain. Apprehensive that the monster might awaken, I grasped the material with both hands and slowly lifted it free of the canvas. Although I heard faint whisperings of “La Marseillaise,” Ecstatic Wisdom remained otherwise inert, evidently oblivious to our presence. We exited the alcove, then folded the curtain into a rectangle the size of a coffin lid. Embracing the velvet pile, I led the students back to the elevator platform.