A short time later Sir Albert De’Ath and Doctor Zachary Busner sit either side of the utilitarian desk in the nurses’ station of Ward 20. Busner smokes one of his own cigarettes — filterless Gauloises Caporal that none of the nurses can bear. Sir Albert has accepted a cup of tea, and now he adds demerara sugar from a rumpled cellophane packet with quick digging movements of a spoon that remind Busner of. . someone hurriedly filling in a grave. I have been researching further on encephalitis lethargica, Sir Albert says. Oh, really. . Busner isn’t exactly distracted, however he is quietly enjoying the way that Mind seems so much pettier when prised from its strange reef of impedimenta and set down in this workaday context, with a tatty staff roster framing its bald cranium. Ye-es, Sir Albert continues, as I said when we first met, I was aware of the epidemic at the time and had retained this data — the Lancet article, the HMSO report put out later in 1918, and a few other bits and pieces — but learning of my sister’s condition led me to investigate the matter more thoroughly and from a historical perspective. The old man, hunched up in his spiffy togs, sups his tea, and Busner mentally rubs at his outline, sees him smudged into senescence and so becoming eminently suitable for admission. — I wonder if you were aware that — insofar as these things can be established from fragmentary contemporary records and long after the fact — there seem to’ve been a number of other outbreaks. Really, Busner dreamily exhales. Sir Albert grows pettish: Yes, really, Doctor Busner: in London in the 1670s, in Manchester in the 1840s — in Vienna at the turn of the century, as we know, — and then quite possibly in the Nazi’s concentration camp at Theresienstadt during the Second War. . This does get through the tabac brun to the psychiatrist, who leans forward and stubs out his cigarette. Sir Albert continues in his usual robotic tone: Of course, on the face of it, there are perfectly obvious reasons — common to any of the epidemiological studies — why a brain fever should’ve affected people in these cities at these times: density of population, insufficiency of diet, etcetera, etcetera. . Yet something about the possible outbreak at Theresienstadt made me look at the question in a less analytical and more. . in a more. . It is strange indeed to see
Mind lost for words. . yes, a more symbolic way — perhaps that’s your influence, Busner, or at least the influence of your professional expertise. To wipe away the bad taste of his sarcasm, Sir Albert gets out a heavily wadded and stained handkerchief from his breast pocket and rubs it around his mouth, then he resumes: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Theresienstadt. . Where is this going? Does he want me put in there, long after the fact? but even by German standards it was a model of efficient administration and planning — albeit put to rather, ahem, inhumane ends. Perhaps as many twenty thousand Jews and other undesirables were crowded within the old town walls, which were not much more than half a mile square. Inside there were workshops of all sorts — upholstery, shoemaking, etcetera — a bakery, and a brewery, they even had a machine shop and an electricity-generating plant, and at one time, I believe, a small chamber orchestra and a theatre. Sir Albert takes a gulping tea break, then, with a sweet and tannic sigh, begins again: Ahhh, the aim, of course, was not to in any way improve the lot of the inmates, but rather to create a version of a Potemkin village that could be shown off to visiting Red Cross delegations — they made a rather grisly film of it, the Nazis, although unfortunately I’ve been unable to see a copy. . It would’ve been interesting. . he muses, long and disturbingly elegant fingers fondling his empty cup. . because it might’ve helped me to confirm the outline of my theory —. Which is? Busner breaks in, fully expecting some anti-Semitic nastiness. Surely, Sir Albert continues unruffled, you see the similarities here: all these cities had the high populations needed to support the disease vector at the time the epidemics occurred — indeed, they had all recently undergone considerable population explosions — but Theresienstadt is a case apart. If we look for the factor it has in common with the others — London on the brink of the first Industrial Revolution, Manchester in the throes of the second, Vienna caught up in a frenzy of wartime armaments production — we might hypothesise that it is not the numbers or density of humans that was the decider, but the density of mechanisation, of. . technology. Anyway. . abruptly for such an elderly man, Sir Albert rises to his full, looming height. . it is, as I say, merely the outline of a theory, I offer it to you by way of a valediction. And then Busner remembers: But, Sir Albert, I haven’t asked you. . I mean. . how did it go with your sister? Mind looks down on him with ill-concealed contempt, and says: Go? It didn’t go with my sister at all, Doctor Busner — she is, as I suspected, quite catatonic, altogether unreachable — didn’t register my presence at all so far as I could make out, and looked to be stricken by a terrible sadness, Melancholica attonica, I believe it’s called. . You see, I hope, that I’m not entirely the brute you take me for, I’ve explained it to your assistant —. — Assistant? Busner is on his feet as well, and the two of them edge round the desk in their respective crannies. Ye-es, Sir Albert says, African gentleman — Mboya, is it? Seemed very capable, I told him I’d make all the arrangements necessary for an annuity to be paid to Audrey for the rest of her life — paid even in the event of my predeceasing her. I was able to tell him this — and here Mind is unable to repress a smirk of conceit — in his own language, with which I have a little familiarity.