She was a cute one. Like a Baltic fishwife but without the quaint country conversation. By the time she had turned down my bed and told me to get undressed I was almost breathless with excitement. First Frau Lange’s maid, and then this one, as much a stranger to lipstick as a pterodactyl. It wasn’t as if there weren’t prettier nurses about. I’d seen plenty downstairs. They must have figured that with a very small room the least they could do would be to give me a very large nurse in compensation.
‘What time does the bar open?’ I said. Her sense of humour was no less pleasing than her beauty.
‘There’s no alcohol allowed in here,’ she said, snatching the unlit cigarette from my lips. ‘And strictly no smoking. Dr Meyer will be along to see you presently.’
‘So what’s he, the second-class deck? Where’s Dr Kindermann?’
‘The doctor is at a conference in Bad Neuheim.’
‘What’s he doing there, staying at a sanitarium? When does he come back here?’
‘The end of the week. Are you a patient of Dr Kindermann, Herr Strauss?’
‘No, no I’m not. But for eighty marks a day I had hoped I would be.’
‘Dr Meyer is a very capable physician, I can assure you.’ She frowned at me impatiently, as she realized that I hadn’t yet made a move to get undressed, and started to make a tutting noise that sounded like she was trying to be nice to a cockatoo. Clapping her hands sharply, she told me to hurry up and get into bed as Dr Meyer would wish to examine me. Judging that she was quite capable of doing it for me, I decided not to resist. Not only was my nurse ugly, but she was also possessed of a bedside manner that must have been acquired in a market garden.
When she’d gone I settled down to read in bed. Not the kind of read you would describe as gripping, so much as incredible. Yes, that was the word: incredible. There had always been weird, occult magazines in Berlin, like Zenit and Hagal, but from the shores of the Maas to the banks of the Memel there was nothing to compare with the grabbers that were writing for Reinhard Lange’s magazine, Urania. Leafing through it for just fifteen minutes was enough to convince me that Lange was probably a complete spinner. There were articles entitled ‘Wotanism and the Real Origins of Christianity’, ‘The Superhuman Powers of the Lost Citizens of Atlantis’, ‘The World Ice Theory Explained’, ‘Esoteric Breathing Exercises for Beginners’, ‘Spiritualism and Race Memory’, ‘The Hollow-Earth Doctrine’, ‘Anti-Semitism as Theocratic Legacy’, etc. For a man who could publish this sort of nonsense, the blackmail of a parent, I thought, was probably the sort of mundane activity that occupied him between ario-sophical revelations.
Even Dr Meyer, himself no obvious testament to the ordinary, was moved to remark upon my choice of reading matter.
‘Do you often read this kind of thing?’ he asked, turning the magazine over in his hands as if it had been a variety of curious artefact dug from some Trojan ruin by Heinrich Schliemann.
‘No, not really. It was curiosity that made me buy it.’
‘Good. An abnormal interest in the occult is often an indication of an unstable personality.’
‘You know, I was just thinking the same thing myself.’
‘Not everyone would agree with me in that, of course. But the visions of many modern religious figures — St Augustine, Luther — are most probably neurotic in their origins.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘What does Dr Kindermann think?’
‘Oh, Kindermann holds some very unusual theories. I’m not sure I understand his work, but he’s a very brilliant man.’ He picked up my wrist. ‘Yes indeed, a very brilliant man.’
The doctor, who was Swiss, wore a three-piece suit of green tweed, a great moth of a bow-tie, glasses and the long white chin-beard of an Indian holy man. He pushed up my pyjama sleeve and hung a little pendulum above the underside of my wrist. He watched it swing and revolve for a while before pronouncing that the amount of electricity I was giving off indicated that I was feeling abnormally depressed and anxious about something. It was an impressive little performance, but none the less bullet-proof, given that most of the folk who checked into the clinic were probably depressed or anxious about something, even if it was only their bill.
‘How are you sleeping?’ he said.
‘Badly. Couple of hours a night.’
‘Do you ever have nightmares?’
‘Yes, and I don’t even like cheese.’
‘Any recurring dreams?’
‘Nothing specific.’
‘And what about your appetite?’
‘I don’t have one to speak of.’
‘Your sex life?’
‘Same as my appetite. Not worth mentioning.’
‘Do you think much about women?’
‘All the time.’
He scribbled a few notes, stroked his beard, and said: ‘I’m prescribing extra vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium. I’m also going to put you on a sugar-free diet, lots of raw vegetables and kelp. We’ll help get rid of some of the toxins in you with a course of blood-purification tablets. I also recommend that you exercise. There’s an excellent swimming-pool here, and you may even care to try a rainwater bath, which you’ll find to be most invigorating. Do you smoke?’ I nodded. ‘Try giving up for a while.’ He snapped his notebook shut.
‘Well, that should all help with your physical well-being. Along the way we’ll see if we can’t effect some improvement in your mental state with psychotherapeutic treatment.’
‘Exactly what is psychotherapy, Doctor? Forgive me, but I thought that the Nazis had branded it as decadent.’
‘Oh no, no. Psychotherapy is not psychoanalysis. It places no reliance on the unconscious mind. That sort of thing is all right for Jews, but it has no relevance to Germans. As you yourself will now appreciate, no psychotherapeutic treatment is ever pursued in isolation from the body. Here we aim to relieve the symptoms of mental disorder by adjusting the attitudes that have led to their occurrence. Attitudes are conditioned by personality, and the relation of a personality to its environment. Your dreams are only of interest to me to the extent that you are having them at all. To treat you by attempting to interpret your dreams, and to discover their sexual significance is, quite frankly, nonsensical. Now that is decadent.’ He chuckled warmly. ‘But that’s a problem for Jews, and not you, Herr Strauss. Right now, the most important thing is that you enjoy a good night’s sleep.’ So saying he picked up his medical bag and took out a syringe and a small bottle which he placed on the bedside table.
‘What’s that?’ I said uncertainly.
‘Hyoscine,’ he said, rubbing my arm with a pad of surgical spirit.
The injection felt cold as it crept up my arm, like embalming fluid. Seconds after recognizing that I would have to find another night on which to snoop around Kindermann’s clinic, I felt the ropes mooring me to consciousness slacken, and I was adrift, moving slowly away from the shore, Meyer’s voice already too far away for me to hear what he was saying.
After four days in the clinic I was feeling better than I had felt in four months. As well as my vitamins, and my diet of kelp and raw vegetables, I’d tried hydrotherapy, naturotherapy and a solarium treatment. My state of health had been further diagnosed through examination of my irises, my palms and my fingernails, which revealed me as calcium-deficient; and a technique of autogenic relaxation had been taught to me. Dr Meyer was making progress with his Jungian ‘totality approach’, as he called it, and was proposing to attack my depression with electrotherapy. And although I hadn’t yet managed to search Kindermann’s office, I did have a new nurse, a real beauty called Marianne, who remembered Reinhard Lange staying at the clinic for several months, and had already demonstrated a willingness to discuss her employer and the affairs of the clinic.