Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Read online

  “And your case, couldn’t that be pure luck too, an accident?”

  “There have been too many accidents,” I said.

  He didn’t believe me. The mere facts I could give him; but the diabolical aura that surrounded them, that I was unable to convey. The doctor beamed.

  “What you’ve told me,” he said, “is no illusion or hallucination, I’m sure. But you do jump to conclusions. You are in such a terrible hurry to understand everything at once, to anticipate. I imagine they wish to develop certain qualities in you: an alert mind, the capacity for objective observation, attention to detail, the ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant, and many, many other things that will be indispensable in your work. I would say then that this was not, as you called it, a test, but rather a period of training; and training, when intensive, may sometimes bring one to the point of exhaustion, which is exactly what happened in your case.”

  I gazed into the empty eyes of the skull, no longer caring. “But do forgive us about your clothes,” said the doctor, beaming too much. “The nurse should be bringing them in any minute now…”

  He kept talking. A thought occurred to me, vague, difficult to put into words…

  “Do you have a section around here for—the mentally ill?” I asked. He blinked.

  “Certainly we do,” he replied kindly. “It’s a regular ward, but with just a few beds. Does that interest you? Who was it that said the spirit of an age speaks through its madness? An exaggeration, I’m sure. But if you’d like to see our ward, conduct your own observations firsthand, I have no objections. You’ll be here for a while anyway.”

  “What?!”

  “It would be advisable. But please understand, we are by no means holding you here.”

  “So you think that I…” I began calmly. He shuddered. The dimples vanished.

  “Heavens, no! Nothing of the kind! You’re simply overworked, that’s all. To prove it, I’m prepared to conduct you ad altarem mente captorum. Though actually we have only a few patients at the moment, all rather ordinary cases —catatonia provocativa, some residual obsessions, nervous ticks, compulsive winking and the like, collaboration dissociation, top priority hysteria, all according to textbook, quite boring really.” Now he was warming up. “Recently, however, we acquired a fairly interesting case—a three-personality syndrome, tripsychoma, folie en trois, Dreieiniger Wahnsinn, as it’s variously called. Two personalities continually unmask one another, and the third gnaws at his arms and legs to keep from taking sides. Actually, it’s nothing but reservatio mentalis with a few complications. You might also be interested in a condition called mania autopersecutoria, that is, a self-interrogation fit: the patient cross-examines himself—mutually, mind you—for up to forty hours without stopping, until he drops. Finally, we have a curious little item, autocryptic withdrawal.”

  “Oh?” I said, indifferent.

  “The patient hides himself in his own body,” the doctor explained, his face flushed with excitement. “He compresses his identity to such a degree that he thinks, for example he’s the malleus—you know, that little hammer-shaped bone in the middle ear—and that all the other parts of the body are enemy agents out to get him. At the moment, unfortunately, I can’t take you on a tour of our ward; I have rounds to make elsewhere. Wait here, the nurse will bring your clothes. In the meantime you’re welcome to look at my library. All I ask is that you try to relax—please!”

  I was standing near the chair, feeling awkward in a bathrobe several sizes too large. The doctor shook my hand with his warm, plump hand and said:

  “Chin up. Fewer suspicions, more simple courage, and everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  At the door he smiled again, waved, and left. I stood around for a while, waiting for the nurse and my clothes, then went back to the table and took a good look at the skull. It grinned at me with a full set of big white teeth. Curious, I picked it up and snapped the jaw a few times—it was on a spring. There were hinges on the sides, the temples; the whole top came off like a lid. That is, could come off—I didn’t care to open it, I liked the skull as it was, spherical. I admired the shine.

  How elegantly the parietal bones fitted into the frontal, how smoothly the jagged edges interlocked! The occipital, on the other hand, was an enchanting moonscape with its many articulations and indentations, mounds, peaks, ravines, and that mighty crater, the foramen magnum, the gate for the spinal column. Ah, and where was the spine now? I sat, my elbows on the table, and meditated on skulls. Still no nurse.

  I thought about various things. For instance, I knew a man once who suffered from a skeleton complex (his own), or rather a skeleton phobia, since it terrified him so much that he never spoke of it and even avoided touching himself in order not to feel beneath that soft envelope of flesh the hardness which waited to be free… I thought about how the skull was a symbol of death for us, a warning on a bottle of poison. Centuries ago the skeletons in anatomical atlases were not depicted in such stiff poses of warning, but were shown in attitudes of life: some danced, some leaned, their tibiae casually crossed, on sarcophagi while they directed their keen albeit funereal eye sockets straight at the reader. I even recalled a woodcut of two skeletons a-courting—and one of them was plainly bashful!

  But here was a contemporary skull: clean, hygienic, scrubbed, the balustrades of the cheekbones nice and sleek, making little balconies beneath each orbital cavity—the nasal hole was a bit unpleasant, but then, who is without some minor blemish? And the smile! The smile made one stop and think. I lifted the skull, weighed it in my hand, rapped it with a knuckle, then—quickly—bent over and sniffed. Only dust, harmless, everyday dust tickling the nostrils, but then a whiff, a trace of something, something … until my nose touched the cold surface and I inhaled—yes—a faint, the faintest stink—another sniff—oh, foul play! Corruption!!

  The reek betrayed the crime within. Like a drunkard, I breathed in the bloodiest, the most hideous murders behind that ivory elegance. I sniffed again: the gleam, the polish, the whiteness—all a vile hoax. Sickening! Horrible! I sniffed again, greedily, in terror, then hurled it on the table and frantically wiped my face, my hands, with the comer of my robe. But something drew me to it still … how it drew me…

  The nurse entered with my suit carefully brushed and pressed. It looked like new. She placed it on the table by the skull, nodded stiffly, and left.

  11

  I dressed in an adjoining bathroom, leaving the door ajar so I could keep an eye on the skull. “My baleful beauty!” I thought. “What sweet revulsion to stare at you like this! How you thrill and chill me!” But it wasn’t the skull I feared, I feared myself. What was drawing me to it, that well-boiled chunk of bone? What made it so attractive, what enticed me to sniff, sniff in a frenzy of disgust? The death that necessarily produced the skull? No, that death had no connection with this posthumous paperweight—nor with me, for that matter. I could understand, at least, why in the old days, long ago, they drank their wine from skull-caps. It added spice. I was thinking in this vein when suddenly a door squeaked open and someone entered the doctor’s office. I closed my door to a crack and cautiously peeked out.

  There were two of them, in bright pajamas. One had red hair, unevenly red, as if dyed and fading in spots. He was bending over and trying to read the titles of the doctor’s books. The other was on the heavy side and had eyelids the color of strong tea; he sat at the table with the skull and said:

  “Come on, you should have it down by now.”

  I adjusted my tie and walked in. The one who was sitting hardly looked at me. His neck was oddly white and flabby under that sunburnt, weather-beaten face.

  “Want to play?” he asked, taking out a small tumbler from the pocket of his fuchsia pajamas, unscrewing it, rolling the dice out on the table.

  “What do we play for?” I asked, hesitant.

  “The stars, of course. Highest number wins, winner names the sta
kes.”

  He was already shaking the dice, rattling the bones.

  I said nothing. He threw them and counted: eleven.

  “Your turn.”

  He handed me the tumbler. I shook it and rolled two deuces and a four.

  “I win!” he shouted. “Okay … this time, Mallinflor. He’s a good one.”

  This time he threw thirteen.

  “Five short,” he said with a grin. I threw two fives and a six.

  “Hell,” he said. “All right, you name it.”

  “I don’t know…” I muttered.

  “Go on, don’t be bashful!”

  “The Admiral.”

  “You aim high!”

  He threw seven. It was my turn again—two fives, but the third die rolled off the table and fell at the feet of the one who was looking at the books, his back to us.

  “What is it, Cremator?” asked my partner, not getting up.

  “A six,” the other answered.

  “What luck!” smiled my partner, displaying a set of rotten teeth. “Well?”

  “A star,” I began.

  “Hell, for sixteen you can name a constellation!”

  “A constellation? The Gold Spectacles,” I said on impulse.

  He blinked, he squinted at me—and the other came up and said:

  “No sense playing any more, the doctor’s here.”

  He had a slight stutter, and the face of an old squirrel: buckteeth, pointed whiskers and tiny, dull eyes surrounded by wrinkles.

  “We haven’t been introduced,” he said. “I’m Sempriaq, the Senior Cremator. Sempriaq with a q.” I mumbled my name and we shook hands.

  The other asked:

  “So where’s the doctor?”

  And he gave the dice a rattle.

  “He’ll be along. And you, you’re an ambulatory?”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “We too. Came straight from work, saves time that way, quite a convenience. You don’t happen to have a mirror, do you?”

  “Stop it,” said the doctor. Sempriaq ignored him.

  “I should have one somewhere.” I searched my pockets, then handed him a small, square mirror, scratched up quite a bit from long use. He looked himself over carefully and made a series of faces, as if trying to decide which was ugliest.

  “Excellent!” he said. “It’s been years since I looked so old!”

  “And you’re glad of it?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Even if I never see him again, this way at least—”

  “See whom?”

  “But you don’t know, of course. It’s my brother, my twin brother. He’s on a Mission, so I may never see him again. This way at least—he did me dirt, you see—I can follow his misfortune.”

  “Stop it,” said the other, clearly annoyed.

  I studied them both. Sempriaq, though fairly thin and with a sunken chest, bore a striking resemblance to his heavy companion—in fact, they were as alike as two suits of slightly different cut but in exactly the same stage of wear, or as two clerks grown old together at adjacent desks. What had dried up and wrinkled over in one, sagged and folded in the other. Sempriaq, however, tried to preserve a certain style: every now and then he would smooth his mustache with a finger, or reach to adjust his collar—which wasn’t there, since now he had on pajamas, chartreuse and silver.

  “So you’re going for treatments too?” he said, trying to resume our conversation.

  “Another game?” the other asked with a nasal twang.

  “Not the bones again?” Sempriaq sneered. “Can’t you think up something else?”

  An eye peered into the room through the keyhole, then vanished.

  “There’s Dolt,” grumbled the other. “Up to his old tricks.”

  The door opened and a man in puce pajamas sauntered in, his clothes folded over one arm and the other holding a briefcase and a thermos. He was tall, painfully thin, his nose and Adam’s apple jutted out like bent knives, and his eyes were pale and vacant, a peculiar contrast to his lively manner—particularly when he threw his head back and cried:

  “Greetings, greetings, comrades and accomplices! When the doctor’s called away, the patients will play!”

  “What, another attack?” the heavy one asked calmly.

  “Who can say? Brain failure, I suspect. Ha! But why wait, gentlemen? There is much merry to make!”

  “Same old Dolt,” sighed the heavy one, getting up. “One drunken orgy after another.” Sempriaq touched his mustache pensively.

  “Just us?”

  “Just us! And a recruit to fill the cup. An able lad! Come, brave hearts, let us be off!”

  I tried to slip away unnoticed. But just then he turned his watery eyes to me.

  “What’s this? A new man?” he said with exaggerated warmth. “We’d love to have you! A shot, a little harmless cheer, good for what ails you—ha! You must join us!”

  I started to excuse myself, but was already arm in arm with the fuchsia pajamas and the puce pajamas, marching out the door, still protesting, and down the narrow corridor—the chartreuse pajamas went ahead and slammed the doors left and right along the way, and the slamming echoed up and down the entire level, announcing our mad progress. One door bounced back open, revealing a large room full of old women in shawls and high-buttoned shoes. Their voices blended into one complaining and quarrelsome sound as we passed.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Busybodies,” said the cremator. “We keep them in reserve. This way, please.” And he pushed me forward. I got a good whiff of his cheap hair tonic, and the smells of ink and soap.

  The heavy one became strangely animated, began to bounce along, waving his arms and whistling—until, at the last door, he stopped and adjusted his pajamas with great ceremony, cleared his throat with even greater ceremony, and threw the door open.

  “Welcome, welcome to our humble abode!”

  The walls were bare; there was a huge, old-fashioned cupboard in the corner; and a banquet table stood in the middle of the room, its snow-white cloth covered with gleaming bottles and endless platters of food. In the far comer a young man with flowing hair—also in pajamas—was struggling with a stack of folding chairs, the kind one sees in outdoor cafés. He was opening and testing them, and raising a terrible racket in the process. The heavy one went to give him a hand, and the tall, emaciated organizer of this odd celebration, the one they called Dolt, folded his arms across his chest like a general on a hilltop, and surveyed the richly laden table as if it were tomorrow’s battlefield.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice behind me, and I made way for the smiling young man, who was carrying several bottles of wine. He put them down and introduced himself.

  “Klappershlang,” he said, shaking my hand and blushing. “A trainee, as of yesterday…”

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty. His thick black hair curled around the pale forehead and fell to the ears in pretty ringlets.

  “Comrades and accomplices, take your seats!” Dolt announced, rubbing his hands together.

  We hardly had time to settle ourselves in those terribly rickety chairs when he filled our glasses and raised his own with a greedy, lopsided smile, and yelled:

  “Gentlemen! The Building!”

  “The Building!” we roared in one voice, clicked our glasses and drank. Whatever it was, it started a slow fire inside. Dolt refilled our glasses, licked his lips, made another toast, louder than the first, and emptied his glass in one swallow. The cremator sprawled in his chair, stuffed himself with hors d’oeuvres and with considerable finesse spit olive pits in the young man’s direction. Dolt refilled and refilled. It was growing hot, and though the alcohol didn’t seem to affect me, everything began to merge into a thick, shimmering liquid. The second the glasses were filled, they had to be emptied—as if there was some great urgency about it, as if they expected someone to rush in and call a halt to the proceedings. And their gaiety was unnaturally wild, for so few drinks.

  “What ki
nd of cake is this? Triple-layer?” asked the heavy one, his mouth full.

  “No, triple-agent!” quipped Dolt, and the cremator laughed and broke into a volley of drunken jokes and off-color nursery rhymes.

  “Your health, Dolt! And yours, you old necrophiliac!” roared the heavy one.

  “Please, a thanatophile,” said the cremator, reproachful.

  Conversation became impossible; even shouts got lost in the confusion. There was toast after toast, down the hatch and bottoms up, and the jokes grew so awful that I had to drink to hide my disgust. Dolt sang in a piercing falsetto and performed an obscene dance with his fingers across the tablecloth while the cremator guzzled vodka and threw whole olives at the young man, who sat there in a stupor, and the heavy one bellowed like a bull:

  “We’re here because we’re here!”

  “Because we’re here!”

  “Because we’re here!!” they howled in unison.

  Then he jumped to his feet, tore off his wig and screamed, his bald head dripping sweat:

  “Gentlemen! Hide and seek!”

  “No, blindman’s bluff!”

  “No, charades!”

  “Ho-ho! Ha-ha! Hee-hee!” they whinnied and brayed.

  “Come fill the cup, and in the lire of Spring, your Winter-garment of Repentance fling!” cried the cremator, kissing the air.

  “Gentlemen, I give you—I give you—I give you—gentlemen—the doctor!!” shrieked Dolt.

  “And the ladies! Don’t forget the ladies!”

  “Oo-la-la!!”

  “Hail, hail, the spies are hee-eere!” wailed the heavy one, then burped and looked around with a bleary eye, and yawned, revealing a pointed, delicate tongue, an almost feminine tongue.

  What in heaven’s name was I doing here among these loathsome lowlifes, participating in this revolting, pitiful binge of petty bureaucrats, this crude carousal of clerks? I was filled with horror.

  “Gentlemen! I give you—our gatekeepers! Gentlemen—our cremators! I give you—” a voice piped from under the table.

  “God save the King!”

  “I’ll drink to that!”