The Opal (and other stories) E-Book

Gustav Meyrink

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 326

Beschreibung

A collection of bizarre, macabre and unusual short stories

Das E-Book The Opal (and other stories) wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

TITLE

INTRODUCTION

THE ARDENT SOLDIER

THE BRAIN

IZZI PIZZI

THE VIOLET DEATH

TERROR

PETROLEUM, PETROLEUM

THE CURSE OF THE TOAD – CURSE OF THE TOAD

THE BLACK BALL

THE PREPARATION

DR. LEDERER

THE OPAL

THE MAN ON THE BOTTLE

BLAMOL

THE TRUTH-DROP

DR. CINDERELLA’S PLANTS

ST GINGOLPH’S URN

THE RING OF SATURN

THE AUTOMOBILE

THE WAXWORKS

FEVER

WHAT’S THE USE OF WHITE DOG SHIT?

HUMMING IN THE EARS

BAL MACABRE

RUPERT’S DROPS

COAGULUM

THE SECRET OF HATHAWAY CASTLE

CHIMERA

A SUGGESTION

THE INVALID

G.M.

WETHERGLOBIN

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

All the stories translated here are taken from a collection first published under the title Des deutschen Spießers Wunder-horn in 1913. It is an odd and characteristically barbed title. In the first place it is intended to remind us of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’), a collection of verses put together by the German Romantic poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in 1806/8, and so embedded in the popular consciousness as to have become an indispensable part of any sentimental German-speaker’s literary ‘heritage’. In Meyrink’s terms however it also calls to mind by implication the heritage of the ‘Spießer’, that is, the ‘Philistine’, the conventional, correct bourgeois of few literary pretensions, who possesses the book only because it is the proper thing to have in one’s domestic library.

And yet of course the stories he is about to unfold are anything but the proper thing to have in such circumstances, with their withering attacks upon the pillars of order, of upright respectability and authority: the pompous, empty-headed Wilhelminian military officer, the self-important medical man or the bureaucratic government official, in short, all ‘normal’ assumptions about comfortable and civilised living. Instead, he presents an alternative, subversive underworld of mysterious uncertainties, inexplicable by the rational means of Western thought. It is a world of absurdities, of dreams and nightmares of occult oriental magic, of the horrors that lie beneath the surface, which may be raised through the extension of reality by means of a little imagination.

Meyrink’s style and use of language is similarly suitably allusive, extremely spare, but consequently all the more vivid in the occasional multiplicity of underlying significances and implications. Occasionally (as in Blamol, for instance), he indulges in an extended joke, turning the whole world upside-down into an undersea parody of reality.

Prior to the publication of Des deutschen Spieβers Wunder-horn many of these tales had appeared in one or other of three smaller collections: Der heiβe Soldat und andere Geschichten (1903); Orchideen, Sonderbare Geschichten (1904), and Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, Sonderbare Geschichten (1907). Even before this however most of these ‘strange stories’ were issued as contributions to the famous satirical weekly Simplicissimus between October 1901 and July 1908. Der heihe Soldat indeed, the title story of the first collection (translated here, with suitable ambiguity, as The Ardent Soldier), was Meyrink’s very first published work. In keeping with the bizarre nature of some of the stories, it too gave his literary career a curious start, for when it was first received at the offices of Simplicissimus it was consigned to the wastepaper basket by a sub- editor of the paper, who considered it to be the work of a ‘madman’, and it was only by chance that it was picked out again on the point of his walking stick by the writer Ludwig Thoma, idly rummaging about. He however on reading it recognised it as a work of ‘genius’, had it printed, and commissioned more.

The Ardent Soldier, though it is the earliest story to come from Meyrink’s pen, is already written in characteristic style, and contains most of the themes of his subsequent work. All these tales however predate the period of Meyrink’s greatest (but relatively short-lived) fame, generated by the publication of his best-known novel The Golem in 1915.

Meyrink did not set out to be a writer. Born in 1868, he was the illegitimate son of a Viennese actress, Maria Meyer (he changed his name to Meyrink partly on the grounds of a supposed family link to an ancient Bavarian noble line called Meyerinck, but also because he felt he ‘shared the name of Meyer with too many people’) and a Württemberg government minister, the impressively named Gottlob Karl Freiherr Varnbühler von und zu Hemmingen, who generously provided for his son a sum of money in trust that was to enable him in 1889 on attaining his majority to set up as a banker in Prague, in association with the nephew of the poet Christian Morgenstern.

The House of Meyer & Morgenstern was anything but conventional: Meyer, the dandy, with new access to money, determinedly cut a dash with his clothes and his accessories, always in the most modern fashion. He kept white mice and other more exotic pets, by all reports quite deliberately in order to shock and provoke the worthy citizens of Prague. His unorthodox background made him already conscious of his position as an ‘outsider’, beyond the limits of conventional bourgeois society, and he seemed determined to live up to it. By nature essentially an introvert, he countered the tendency by displaying a provocative exterior.

The tension remained, however, and at some point in the ensuing months it culminated in a suicide attempt. Whether it was genuinely intended or not, Meyer was diverted from blowing his brains out – another way to épater le bourgeois perhaps? – by the fortuitous appearance of a publisher’s flyer under his door at the very moment he was raising the pistol. He picked it up, and found an advertisement for a new book ‘On life after death’. This dramatically serendipitous event was sufficient to stir an interest in the occult, and for several years after this he was seriously involved, becoming for instance a founder-member of the Theosophical Society branch in Prague (1891). Such activity is perhaps reflected in a passage from What’s the use of White Dog Shit? where the narrator remarks in passing that ‘the next thing I did was to immerse myself in the study of the history of secret societies. There can’t be a single fraternity left that I haven’t joined …’

Meyrink is clearly not incapable of self-irony, for he did indeed join a number of similar organizations, becoming for instance (in 1893) an ‘Arch Censor in the Mandala of the Lord of the Perfect Circle’. Again perhaps this provides an oblique clue to the all-seeing qualities ascribed to the perfect sphere in The Truth-drop. He read deeply in the literature of the occult, taking an interest especially in its Indian and Tibetan connections. The Violet Death, The Opal and The Black Ball each illustrate the mysterious power that he felt underlay such esoteric knowledge. He did however rapidly become disillusioned with the institutions of the occult, even while retaining a belief that enlightenment comes to the individual only through the individual effort of the brain, and he persisted in a belief in the curative powers of yoga, which he practised for many years. Its residual impact on the stories is however ambivalent, and overlaps with the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, with which he also experimented at this time.

Meyrink is for instance fond of representing figures in yoga-like poses and trances: ‘I took up the pose, raised both arms above my head in imitation of the statue, and lowered my fingers until the nails just brushed my scalp … … I cannot believe that I could have fallen asleep. Suddenly there seemed to come echoing out from somewhere inside me a sound …’ (Dr. Cinderella’s Plants). In this passage it becomes uncertain whether what then follows is an account of a real experience or just a mad vision. Similar behaviour, directed towards some kind of control of the events surrounding the protagonist, can be found for instance in The Ring of Saturn, or in The Man on the Bottle, where there is also a parallel set of contortions/distortions, this time affecting the victim of a cruel punishment.

Alternatively, other stories should rather be read as visions of a drug-fevered mind: Bal Macabre for instance offers the consequences of a bout of mushroom poisoning, while Fever or Rupert’s Drops suggest the more familiar atmosphere of an opium-induced dream. A Suggestion goes further, towards Gogol’s Diary of a Madman perhaps, or even Maupassant’s story of spectral obsession Le Horla, in recounting the stages by which a mind gradually collapses into insanity.

Slightly more conventional science also plays a role in these tales, though it too can be treated with a satirical eye. Meyrink makes fun of popular naiveté in describing the panic induced by an image of a chameleon appearing in the night sky (Dr. Lederer), but on a less surreal level he touches, sometimes quite uncannily, on ideas well ahead of his time. The villain of Petroleum, Petroleum who threatens to suffocate the world by covering the entire surface of the oceans in oil is undoubtedly more believable (and consequently terrifying) now than he was in 1902. The Truth-drop offers an insight into the universe mirrored in a single droplet of liquid: it does not take too much imagination to see a parallel in the invention of television. And The Black Ball presents to the reader familiar with modern cosmological theory a genuinely frightening scenario more real than anything Meyrink could have supposed, in portraying the mystic powers of oriental thought which, allied to the emptiness of certain Western minds, can produce a black hole that can swallow up an entire universe.

He is however not averse occasionally to turning the tables, by demonstrating the superiority of scientific theory to experience, as for instance in The Automobile, where we are treated to a demonstration of why the internal combustion engine cannot possibly work: a theory spectacularly and explosively proved in the denouement of the tale, though there is also something uncanny about the accuracy of the professor’s prediction – or is it just his supreme mathematical ability?

In yet other tales Meyrink offers a more light-hearted and whimsical touch. The Curse of the Toad – curse of the toad with its curious motif of repetition resurrects a very simple, and very old, joke dressed up in mysterious eastern splendour; The Secret of Hathaway Castle has all the trappings of gothic horror to disguise the problem faced by anyone charged with the expense of maintaining a large and decaying property. Similarly, G.M. also presents an elaborate joke, though this one does have the hard edge of satire directed at planning authorities and human greed. The motif of the lure of buried wealth here is a topic which recurs in such stories as Chimera or Coagulum, though the latter also hints at something much more unpleasant than gold that is hidden, as does, a fortiori, the tale of The Urn of St. Gingolph. Buried in another sense, within one’s own head, the secret of Humming in the Ears reveals a common acoustic phenomenon in psychologically disturbing terms.

The interest in oriental occultism when allied to a particular aspect of medical science gives rise to some of the most vividly disturbing of all Meyrink’s stories, in which the malign and mysterious figure of Dr Mohammed Daryashkoh repeatedly reappears. The Brain, Dr Cinderella’s Plants, The Waxworks and The Preparation are all morbidly obsessed with the scientific possibilities inherent in anatomical deconstruction, and the horrific preservation of the vital functions of mere parts of humans. Meyrink is fascinated by the opportunities presented by a post-Frankenstein world, and the darker aspects of medical practice are thus revealed.

On a more down-to-earth level, he can flirt with eroticism (Bal Macabre, Izzi Pizzi, Blamol) to uncover a seamier side of the world that ‘respectable’ society prefers not to acknowledge, and he does not miss any opportunity to attack the smug, browbeating and blinkered complacency of established doctrines, especially within the medical profession, as for instance The Brain reveals, where the eminent medical Professor ignores the most dramatic event of the tale which leads to the death of Martin Schleiden, because he is so anxious to stress the failure of the victim to follow his instructions. Schleiden has just died of shock at seeing a brain spill out from a plaster head dropped by a man carrying it in the street. Meyrink’s implied suggestion is that the brain is somehow mysteriously connected with Schleiden’s own displaced consciousness, in consequence of a disagreeable experience he had at the hands of some witch-doctors in the Sudan. But all the professor can say, brushing such ideas aside – or rather, not contemplating them at all – is that ‘you are asking me about irrelevancies which I have neither the time nor the leisure to pursue … I have in the most explicit terms prescribed to your brother a total abstention from any kind of excitement. This was a Medical Prescription! Your brother was the one who chose not to follow that advice.’ A similar attitude is taken in The ardent Soldier where in the face of an 80 degree fever the possible involvement of an Indian medicament as the cause is dismissed as ‘irrelevant’, and a nonsensical explanation in pseudo-medical jargon is offered, which is supposed to pacify the curiosity of the ignorant public.

The particular quality of bile reserved for doctors in these stories, matched only by Meyrink’s hatred of the military, and especially of its officer corps, can in part be accounted for by reference to further episodes in the life of this, in the view of the upright citizenry of Prague, highly unorthodox banker.

In 1900 he suffered a kind of paralytic trauma, identified by his doctors as tuberculosis of the spine. Conventional treatment having little effect (The Invalid perhaps reminds us of this experience), Meyrink was convinced that his yogic exercises were more beneficial than any medication, and came to believe in due course that they had indeed cured the condition. It is not surprising then to find that the sea-lily in Blamol similarly suffers paralysis on eating a ‘Blamol’ pill, and that the pompous cuttlefish doctor should assert, without a trace of irony, that ‘Blamol works, like all such agents, not when you take it, but only when you spit it out.’ The title of the story is, incidentally, almost certainly a pun on ‘Darmol’, a popular patent digestive remedy of the time.

Meyrink’s high-profile and eccentric behaviour, his illegitimate origin and an irregular liaison with the woman who was to become his second wife (in 1905) while his first wife (whom he married in 1893) refused to divorce him, all contributed towards a latent conflict with a bourgeois society expecting a different set of principles from a banker, and this culminated in 1901 in Meyrink learning that while he had been ill, he had been gravely insulted by an Army Reserve officer (and a medical man to boot) Dr Hermann Bauer. Meyrink demanded satisfaction in a duel. This was refused, on the grounds of his known illegitimacy. To have accepted his challenge, and thus to treat him as an equal, honourable and worthy opponent would apparently have damaged Dr Bauer’s military honour. The ending of Coagulum amply illustrates Meyrink’s feelings on that score.

Others took advantage of his weak position at this time too, accusing him of irregular banking practices. The outcome of it all was a period of imprisonment from January to April 1902 (an experience of which the story Terror is perhaps a reflection) while the case was investigated, only to be dropped when the principal witness vanished on realising that his accusation was about to be shown to be worthless. The damage was however by then done: as a banker Meyrink was ruined, and he was obliged to turn elsewhere. The Simplicissimus satires over the next seven years were the result.

The impact of these stories was immense. They certainly contributed to an increase of some 500% in the circulation of Simplicissimus over the period in which they appeared. But they were strong meat for some, and with the advent of the First World War their open satire, especially of military ideas, attitudes and competence, and their depiction of the officer class in particular as empty-headed strutting peacocks (The Black Ball) driven by blind nationalism (Wetherglobin) became unacceptable to established representatives of authority.

In 1916 the collected volume of 52 stories in all was banned in Austria, and especially after (and perhaps because of) the huge increase in his popularity following the publication of The Golem in 1915, which put him among the most famous of living German authors, Meyrink became more and more the focus for nationalist attacks, which used him as a scapegoat for the lack of progress in the War, impugned his patriotism, accused him of ungentlemanliness and lacking in decent manners (The Ring of Saturn was pilloried as an insult to German womanhood), and drew attention to his supposed Jewishness – his actress mother Maria Meyer being wilfully or otherwise confused with a Jewish actress Clara Meyer. One critic (Bartels) remarked sarcastically that Meyrink might well deny being a Jew, but his literary character and style were still typical of one. The very success of The Golem, albeit short-lived, which was at least partly to be ascribed to nothing more than astute publicity and advertising, but whose content also chimed in with the mood of 1917, a prevalent desire to escape from the present horror into a perceived fictional occult horror, contributed to his vilification as unpatriotic and decadent. It is notable that Meyrink’s Collected Works of 1917 in fact omit five of the stories that had appeared in the edition of 1913.

The attacks on Meyrink were fundamentally directed at the satirist, but by now he had moved on, withdrawing from the public eye and concentrating more and more on the esoteric and the occult. He died in 1932, but by then he was a nearly forgotten figure. The Third Reich would of course have no time for him, and it is only in a more recent and sympathetic age that his work has begun to resurface.

THE ARDENT SOLDIER

It had been no small task for the army doctors to treat all the wounded Foreign Legionaries. The Annamites had poor weapons, and the gun pellets almost always stayed lodged in the soldiers’ bodies.

Medical science had recently made great strides – a fact known even to those who could neither read nor write, who willingly submitted to all sorts of operations, especially since they had no other choice.

Most of them died, to be sure, but only after their operation, and even then only because the Annamite ammunition had clearly not been sterilised before it was fired, or because it had picked up dangerous bacteria on its flight through the air.

Professor Mostschädel’s reports left us in no doubt about that. He had attached himself to the Legion (with official permission) for scientific reasons, and it was thanks to his vigorous measures that the soldiers as well as the natives in the village were now constrained to speak of the magical cures of the pious Indian holy man Mukhopadaya in nothing louder than a whisper.

A final casualty who was brought to the field hospital by two Annamite women long after the skirmish was over was Private Wenzel Zavadil, a Bohemian by birth. When asked where they came from, that they were so late arriving, they explained that they had found Zavadil lying unconscious outside Mukhopadaya’s hut, and had then tried to resuscitate him by administering some opalescent liquid which was the only thing they could find in the fakir’s abandoned residence.

The doctor could find no injury, and his questioning of the patient only produced a wild growl which he took to be the sound of some Slav dialect. As a cure-all he prescribed a clyster, and strode off to the Officers Mess.

Doctors and Officers got on well together. The short but bloody skirmish had brought a bit of life to the usual tedium.

Mostschädel had just said a few kind words about Professor Charcot (in order not to emphasis too painfully his superiority, as a German, over his French colleagues), when the Indian Red Cross nurse appeared in the entrance to the tent and reported in her broken French: ‘Sergeant Henry Serpollet dead, Trumpeter Wenzel Zavadil 41.2º fever.’ ‘Intriguing people, these Slavs,’ murmured the M.O. ‘The fellow has a fever, and yet no wounds!’

The nurse was given an order to stop the soldier’s mouth (the one who was still alive, of course) with three grammes of quinine.

Professor Mostschädel had caught the last few words, and used them as the starting-point for a lengthy disquisition in which he celebrated the triumphs of science, which had succeeded in discovering this fine substance quinine in the hands of the ignorant, who had, like a blind chicken, come across the remedy in nature.

He had moved on from this theme to talk about spastic spinal paralysis, and the eyes of his listeners were beginning to glaze over when the nurse reappeared to report:

‘Trumpeter Wenzel Zavadil 49 degrees of fever – permission to request a longer thermometer …’

‘By that reckoning long since dead,’ smiled the Professor.

The staff surgeon slowly stood up, and with a severe gesture strode over to the nurse, who took a step backwards. ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he said observing this, ‘the woman is hysterical, just like the soldier Zavadil; a double case!’

And they all relaxed again.

‘The Medical Officer requests your presence at once,’ rasped the adjutant, waking the academic (who was still very much asleep) as the first rays of the sun lit up the edge of the nearby hills.

Everyone turned to look expectantly at the Professor, who at once made his way to Zavadil’s bed.

‘54 degrees Réaumur blood-heat. Unbelievable,’ groaned the doctor.

Mostschädel smiled in disbelief, but pulled his hand away in astonishment when he actually felt himself burning as he touched the invalid’s forehead.

‘Give me the history;’ he eventually said to the Medical Officer with some hesitation, and after a long and embarrassing silence.

‘Give me the history, and don’t loiter about so aimlessly!’ roared the M.O. at the youngest doctor present.

‘Bhagavan Sri Mukhopadaya might know …’ the Indian nurse dared to begin.

‘Speak when you are spoken to!’ interrupted the Medical Officer.

‘Always the same old superstition,’ he went on, turning to Mostschädel.

‘The layman always thinks of the inessentials,’ agreed the Professor soothingly. ‘Send me the report, I have urgent matters to attend to now.’

‘Now, my young friend, what have you established?’ asked the great expert of the young subaltern, who was followed into the room by a crowd of curious officers and doctors.

‘The temperature has reached 80 degrees now …’

The Professor waved his hand impatiently. ‘And?’

‘Patient survived Typhus ten years ago, mild diphtheria twelve years ago. Father died of a fractured skull, mother of concussion; Grandfather skull fracture, grandmother concussion! – The patient and his family come from Bohemia,’ explained the subaltern. ‘Condition, apart from the temperature, normal. Abdominal functions all sluggish. Wounds, apart from slight contusions to back of head, not apparent. Patient is said to have been treated with an opalescent liquid in the hut of the fakir …’

‘Stick to the point, young friend. No irrelevancies,’ warned the professor good-naturedly, as with a gesture of invitation he indicated the various bamboo chairs and baskets standing in the room to his guests for them to seat themselves. He continued:

‘This, gentlemen, as I recognised at once early this morning, but only hinted at to you, so that you might yourselves have the opportunity to find your way to the correct diagnosis, is a not altogether common case of spontaneous thermo-incrementation in consequence of trauma to the calorific node (here his expression facing the officers and the civilians, took on a quality of slight disdain) – of that centre in the brain that controls variations in the temperature of the body – on the basis of inherited and acquired factors. If, further, we consider the subject’s cranial structure …’

At this point the speaker was interrupted by the repeated notes of a horn advertising the arrival of the local fire brigade (consisting of a few invalid soldiers and Chinese coolies) and presaging horror in the direction of the Mission Building.

Everyone rushed outside, the colonel leading the way.

Trumpeter Wenzel Zavadil was running down the hill from the hospital towards the Lake dedicated to the goddess Parvati. Followed by a shrieking and gesticulating crowd and clothed in blazing rags, he bore a strong resemblance to a human torch.

The poor fellow was met just in front of the Mission by the Chinese fire-brigade in command of a stout jet of water, which admittedly knocked him to the ground, but which almost immediately evaporated in a cloud of steam. – The trumpeter’s temperature had at last risen so far as to begin to carbonise all the objects around him in the hospital, and the nurses were eventually obliged to chase him out of the building with iron staves. The floors and stairs showed evidence of his burning tread, as if the very devil had passed by.

And now, the last rags having been torn away by the water-jet, Zavadil lay naked in the courtyard in front of the Mission, steaming like a smoothing-iron and ashamed of his nakedness. From the balcony above a Jesuit father of some resourcefulness threw down an old asbestos suit which had once been the property of a worker in the lava fields, and Zavadil gratefully put it on.

*

‘But how in Heaven do you explain how the fellow isn’t just a heap of ashes?’ the Colonel asked Professor Mostschädel.

‘I have always admired your strategic talents, Colonel,’ replied the scholar indignantly, ‘but as far as medical science is concerned, you must leave matters to us doctors. We must adhere to the facts as they are given to us, and there is for us here no contra-indication that we should ignore them.’

The doctors were highly pleased at this lucid diagnosis, and subsequent evenings were spent in the Captain’s tent, where there was always a jovial atmosphere.

Only the Annamites spoke of Wenzel Zavadil any more. From time to time he might be seen on the other side of the lake sitting near the stone temple of the goddesss Parvati, the buttons on his asbestos suit glowing red.

The priests of the temple were rumoured to roast their chickens at his fire; others were of the opinion that he was already cooling down, and was intending to go home to his own country, just as soon as his temperature had got down to 50 degrees.

THE BRAIN

The vicar had been looking forward so much to the return of his brother from southern climes, yet when at last he arrived an hour earlier than expected, and walked into the familiar old parlour at home, all his joy vanished.

What the reason for this might have been he had no idea; he just felt it, as you would feel a November day when the whole world seems to be about to collapse into ashes.

Even the old housekeeper Ursula was lost for words. Martin was as sunburned as an Egyptian, and smiled affably as he shook hands.

He would certainly stay for dinner, he said, and was not at all tired. He would have to go up to town for a few days, that was true, but then he would be able to spend the whole summer at home.

They talked of their younger days, when their father was still alive: and the vicar saw how the oddly melancholy cast of Martin’s features became more pronounced.

‘Don’t you think that certain kinds of startling or decisive events become just bound to happen precisely because the fear of their happening can’t be suppressed?’ These were Martin’s final words before going to bed: ‘And can you remember my awful terror as a child when I once saw a bleeding calf’s head in the kitchen …?’

The vicar couldn’t sleep: it was as if his room, where the atmosphere was usually so pleasant and comfortable, was filled with some kind of eerie, suffocating fog.

‘It’s only because there’s something new here, something unfamiliar,’ he thought.

But it wasn’t the new or the unfamiliar – it was something else his brother had brought with him.

The furniture had taken on a different aspect from usual, and the old pictures looked as if an invisible force was pinning them to the walls. A nervous foreboding permeated the air, as if merely thinking an outlandish or mysterious thought might precipitate a sudden and unpremeditated change. Just don’t think of anything new – stick with the old and comfortably familiar, comes the warning from inside. Thoughts are as dangerous as a bolt of lightning!

The vicar found it impossible to get Martin’s adventure after the battle of Omdurman out of his mind: how he had fallen into the hands of the obi-men, who had tied him to a tree … then he sees the witch-doctor who comes out of his hut, kneels in front of him, and places a human brain, still covered in blood, on a drum held in front of him by a female slave.

Then he takes a long needle and stabs it into the brain in various places, and each time Martin cries out in pain, because he can feel the pricking inside his own head.

What does it all mean?

The Lord have mercy on him!

On that occasion Martin had been rescued by English soldiers, who brought him back to the field hospital in a state of total paralysis.

One day the vicar found his brother lying unconscious at home.

The butcher had just arrived with his meat-grinder, reported old Ursula, and Mr Martin had inexplicably passed out.

‘This can’t go on: you will have to go to Professor Diocletian Crammer’s Nervous Clinic – he has a world reputation,’ the vicar had said when his brother regained consciousness. Martin agreed.

‘Mr Schleiden? Your brother, the vicar, has already told me something about you. Please take a seat and tell me briefly what the problem is,’ said Professor Crammer, welcoming him to the consulting room.

Martin sat down, and began: ‘Three months after the affair at Omdurman – as you know – the last signs of paralysis—’

‘Show me your tongue,’ interrupted the Professor – ‘Hm: no abnormality; slight tremor. Go on then?’

‘The last signs of paralysis —’ Martin repeated.

‘Cross your legs. Good. More. Good’ ordered the specialist, producing a little steel hammer, and tapping the patient smartly just below the kneecap. The leg jerked upwards.

‘Heightened reflexes,’ said the Professor. ‘Have you always had heightened reflexes?’

‘I don’t know,’ Martin apologised. ‘I’ve never hit myself on the knee.’

‘Shut this eye. Now the other one. Open the left … yes, now the right – good. Light reflexes normal. Has the light reflex always been normal, Mr Schleiden, especially recently?’

Martin gave up and stayed silent.

‘You really should have taken notice of these signs,’ remarked the Professor a little reproachfully, and then ordered his patient to get undressed.

A long and exhaustive examination now took place, during which the doctor displayed every sign of deep ratiocination, accompanied by the expression of Latin words sotto voce.

‘You said earlier something about symptoms of paralysis. I cannot find any,’ he said suddenly.

‘No, I meant to say that they had disappeared after three months,’ Martin Schleiden replied.

‘You have been ill for so long, Sir?’

Martin looked nonplussed.

‘It is a remarkable phenomenon that almost all German patients are incapable of expressing themselves clearly,’ opined the Professor, smiling kindly. ‘You should go to a French clinic one of these days. How succinctly even the simple man can express himself. There is not much to say about your malady, by the way. Neurasthenia, that is all. I am sure that even you will be interested to learn that we doctors have succeeded, especially recently, in getting to the bottom of these nervous problems. Yes, that is the blessing of our modern investigative methods, that we can know quite precisely when it is appropriate to use no physical means – such as medicines. Keep the whole syndrome emphatically in view! Day by day! You would be surprised at what we can achieve by these methods. You understand me? And then the important thing is, to avoid all excitement – that is poison to you. And make an appointment to see me every other day. Remember: No Excitement!’

The Professor shook the invalid by the hand. He seemed visibly exhausted by his intellectual effort.

The sanatorium was a massive building on the corner of a neat street bisecting the quietest part of town.

On the opposite side there extended the old palace of Countess Zahradka, curtains hanging permanently across the windows reinforcing the morbidly quiet impression conveyed by the empty street.

Almost nobody went past, for the entrance to the busy clinic was on the other side facing the park, by the two old chestnut trees.

Martin Schleiden liked the solitude, and the garden with its carpets of flowers, its bath-chairs and its capricious invalids. He did not like the boring fountains and the stupid ornamental glass balls.

He was drawn to the quiet street and the old palace with its barred and gloomy windows. What might the place look like inside?

Old, faded tapestries, worn furniture, muffled chandeliers; an ancient dame with bushy white eyebrows and hard, austere features, who had forgotten both life and death.

Day after day Martin Schleiden walked past the walls of the old building.

In such desolate streets you have to keep close in to the walls.

He had the characteristic easy stride of a man who has lived long in the tropics. He did not disturb the impression of the street at all: they fitted neatly together, these two unworldly existences.

Three hot days arrived, and on each one of them, in the course of his solitary walk, he encountered an old man carrying a plaster bust. A plaster bust with an ordinary, quite unremarkable physiognomy.

On the third occasion they walked straight into one another – the old man was so clumsy.

The plaster figure slipped out of his grasp and fell slowly to the ground – everything falls in slow motion: it is only those people who have no time to stand back and watch things who are unaware of that fact.

As it struck the ground the plaster split open, and a human brain, all bloody, spilled out.

Martin Schleiden stared at it with a glazed expression, stiffened and went pale. He spread his arms and then buried his face in his hands, before collapsing with a sigh on to the pavement.

Quite by chance the Professor and his two assistants had witnessed everything from a window, and now the victim lay unconscious in the examining room, totally immobile. Half an hour later death supervened.

A telegram had brought the man of the cloth hurrying to the sanatorium, and now here he stood in tears before the man of science.

‘How did it all happen so suddenly, Professor?’

‘It was to be predicted, my dear Vicar,’ replied the great man. ‘We adhered strictly to the methods of treatment we doctors have developed over many years of experience, but if the patient himself does not follow what is prescribed for him then all our medical skills are bound to be applied in vain.’

‘But who was the man carrying the plaster bust?’ broke in the vicar.

‘There you are asking me about irrelevancies which I have neither the time nor the leisure to pursue. Allow me to continue. Here in this very room I have in the most explicit terms prescribed to your brother a total abstention from any kind of excitement. This was a Medical Prescription! Your brother was the one who chose not to follow that advice. It pains me a great deal to say so, my dear friend, but you will agree that strict compliance with medical advice is and remains the principal necessity.

I myself was a witness to this unfortunate event: the man claps his hands to his head in a state of great excitement, falters, staggers and collapses to the ground. Of course assistance naturally came too late. I can already predict what the autopsy will establish: Cerebral Hyperanaemia in consequence of diffuse sclerosis of the cerebral cortex.

Now, calm yourself, my dear fellow, and take the proverb to heart: those who make their beds must perforce lie in them.

It sounds hard, but you know, the truth is a cruel task-master.’

IZZI PIZZI

My last port of call on a holiday tour of the sights was the ‘Goldenes Dachl’ in Innsbruck.

Since then I have sworn an oath by Vishnu never to do the same thing again.

I prefer to admit quite publicly that I am depraved. I take no interest in the sort of things that fill the rest of the nation with pride; I am bored by the most revered canons, my heart does not beat one whit the faster at the sight of Clothilde the Chaste’s lacy breast-binders.

A fellow like me knows of nothing better than to wander about the streets when he’s on holiday, watching people go by, standing for hours in the flea-market or gazing into shop windows.

I had spent another day in just this fashion, and when evening came I fetched out my compass and set out in a direction that would take me most quickly and assuredly away from the city theatre.

A policeman had assured me on his honour that there wasn’t another one, so I was quite easy in my mind.

Not long after, I was reading the boldly captioned poster advertising the ‘Vienna Orpheus Society’ by the light of a red lantern suspended above it.

‘Izzi Pizzi, the charming young songstress, the ‘Pride of Hernals’ makes her debut again today’ I read. I put a hand to my breast pocket to check that I still had my wallet secure, and with the bold stride of a seasoned rake I stepped through the portal of the ‘Black Horse’ as the place was called – evidently named after its bearded proprietor who directed me towards a glass door.

I entered a long, narrow room, packed with people, and sat down at the table marked ‘reserved’ – to those in the know a sure indication that rakes are permitted to sit there. Izzi Pizzi is just about to take the stage with her lovely ballad ‘Down at Larkey Meadow where we met the soldier boys’. And every time she comes to ‘Larkey’ she produces an inimitably graceful wave of the arm, and steps back with her left foot on its elegant point.

She, or no-one, whispers my thumping heart.

I call to the waiter, pull out a silver florin and invite the beauty to supper. It’s half-past eleven, and the performance will soon be at an end.