Pilgrim (3 page)

“To some degree, I suppose. He goes through periods when he…” She considered the next word carefully and then said: “when he drifts.”

“Drifts?”

“Yes. Goes off. Away.”

“Have such periods in the past preceded his other suicide attempts?”

Sybil said: “really, Doctor, you surprise me. I am shocked. What other suicide attempts?”

“You mean that you are unaware he has done this before?”

“Absolutely.”

“You know nothing?”

There was the briefest hesitation before she spoke again. “No,” she said. “Nothing.”

Doctor Furtwängler made an unobtrusive note beside her name.
Sie lügt
is what he had written.
She is lying.
Then:
warum?

Why?

4

Pilgrim’s quarters, it turned out, were on the third floor. He rode up with Kessler in an ornate glass elevator with openwork brass fittings. Beyond the glass, he could see the curving marble staircase that surrounded them not unlike a corkscrew. Its banisters were made of some dark wood he could not identify.

In the elevator there was an operator of indeterminate age. He wore a green uniform without a cap and he sat on a fold-down wooden seat, running the lift with a handle projecting from a wheel. His shoes were so highly polished they gave off light, and his hands were encased in white cotton gloves. There was absolutely no expression on his face the whole way up. He did not speak to Kessler. Nor did Kessler speak to him.

On arrival at the third floor, Pilgrim hung back.

The brass accordion gate stood open. Kessler
moved forward and, turning, said from the marble landing: “you may come. All is well.”

He held out his hand.

The operator still had not risen from his seat. He sat there, leaning slightly forward in order to hold the gate in place, his other hand folded in his lap.

“Mister Pilgrim?” Kessler smiled.

Pilgrim glanced at the orderly’s extended hand and seemed to regard it not as a signal to proceed, but a warning—or perhaps a barrier.

“You have nothing to fear,” Kessler said. “You are home.”

No sooner was Pilgrim standing on the landing than the metal gate snapped shut behind him. When he turned to look, the operator’s still-expressionless face was disappearing below the marbled edge at Pilgrim’s feet.

Kessler guided him towards the corridor, where a seamless carpet rolled away into the distance between an avenue of doors.

The carpet, with gold-threaded edges, was a deep maroon in colour. No pattern. All the doors along the way were shut, though light was filtered into the hallway through open transoms.

A long way off—or so it seemed—an old woman wrapped in a sheet stood watching them. Beyond her, a pale white light made an aureole about her figure.

“You are fortunate, Mister Pilgrim,” Kessler said. “You will be in Suite number 306. It has a superior view.”

He started off—came back—collected Pilgrim and,
guiding him once again by the elbow, led him along the silencing carpet.

The woman did not move. Whether she was watching them was not quite clear. Her eyes could not be seen.

Suite number 306 had a tall white door, transom closed.

Kessler led the way—through the vestibule to a second door and thus into a sitting-room that was more in the nature of what a hotel might offer. Nothing visible of a clinic. Between the windows there was an alcove fitted with an ornate desk and there were tables, chairs and carpets—the chairs wicker, with cushions. The carpets were ersatz Turkish—not expensive, but effective. Blue and red and yellow—the final threads undone, unfinished—ersatz dreams included free of charge.

Kessler ushered his patient through to the bedroom.

Pilgrim’s steamer trunk stood in the middle of the floor. His suitcases—two of them—sat unopened on the bed. They had all been delivered from the station during the time that coffee was being served.

Both the windows were shuttered on the inside. “Against the wind,” Kessler explained. “There is a storm just now, but you will be safe in here and warm.” He was moving about the room, turning on lamps. “Here, as you see, is your bathroom. Everything just the same as if you were at home…”

Pilgrim was paying no attention. He was standing beside the steamer trunk, using it—so it seemed—as a
means of remaining upright. He gripped its edge with his left hand and stared about him.

“Why not sit down, Mister Pilgrim?” said Kessler. “Here, I will bring you this chair.”

He carried it to where his patient wavered beside the trunk. “There you are then.”

Kessler lowered Pilgrim into the chair, but even so, Pilgrim would not let go of the trunk.

“You cannot want to hold it so, Mister Pilgrim. Please, you must let it go.”

Pilgrim held fast.

Kessler reached out and gently, finger by finger, pried the hand free and laid it with the other in Pilgrim’s lap.

At the door to the bedroom, a voice said: “have you come for me?”

It was the woman wrapped in the sheet. She walked straight in and up to Pilgrim, staring at him. “You must have come for me,” she said, “or you would not be in my room.”

Her voice was barely audible. Her tone was not accusatory. In fact, there was little inflection at all.

For the briefest moment, the woman and Pilgrim remained face to face, but it seemed he did not see her. She was not so old as she had appeared in the distance down the corridor. Thirty or thirty-five at the most. Her face was quite unlined, though its colouring was sallow. Under her eyes she might have fingered some kohl, the shadows were so profound. Her hair was completely undone and wet as if it had just been washed.

Kessler said to her: “please, Countess, you do not belong in here.”

“But this is my suite,” the woman said. Her English was perfect—her accent, Russian. “I have been waiting all these years for him, and now—you see? He knew exactly where to find me.”

“No, Madame. No. I will take you home. Come with me.”

“But…”

“Come with me.”

Kessler led the woman to the door and beyond it through the sitting-room and vestibule into the corridor. All the while she protested that number 306 was where she belonged and that Pilgrim had arrived expressly and only in her behalf. “We have met before,” she said, “in a blizzard on the Moon.”

Kessler did not protest. He knew the Countess Blavinskeya. She had been a famous ballerina and was sometimes his responsibility—a source of consternation to others, though not to him. She believed that she lived on the Moon and was the subject of many arguments amongst the doctors. Some, including Doctor Furtwängler, wanted her “returned to earth,” claiming Blavinskeya would never recover her mental stability unless she was forced to confront reality. Countering this was the argument that Blavinskeya suffered from “an excess of reality” and could barely function in what most people understood to be the real world. “If her survival depends on her belief that she belongs on the Moon, then we must reconcile ourselves to
her
reality, not she to
ours.
” This latter
argument was so astonishing that those who propounded it—and there were few enough of them—were considered to be renegade and contra-science. Privately, Furtwängler called them
mad
and complained that if they had their way in her behalf, it would be tantamount to handing the Countess over to the madness that drove her.

Kessler did not care, either way. The “Moon” and Suite 319, where Blavinskeya was housed, were synonymous. He himself would say:
I am going to the Moon
when it was his responsibility to get her through the day. She was exquisite—childlike—eternally innocent. To be with her even briefly was to be returned to those moments in childhood when every blade of grass is a revelation. The Moon need only be reached for to be achieved.

Pilgrim sat transfixed.

He could see his hands. They lay where Kessler had left them, twisted, staring up at him, palms as pale as plates.

He might as well have closed his eyes. He could not see outwards, only inwards. The room he sat in was nothing more nor less than a box—a floor, a ceiling, walls. The windows, shuttered, had no function. They were merely oblong shapes. The lamps and the light they shed were like portholes. Perhaps the sea lay beyond them, moonlit and wavering. Portholes. Moonlight. Water.

In his mind the troubling news was given that the ship he was on was sinking. At any moment, the walls
might tilt and spill the contents of the room towards him. The bed was a lifeboat—the table an upturned raft—the carpet, matted seaweed. The chairs were his fellow passengers—bulging with life preservers—floating upside down.

All of this had happened on the night of April 15th, two days before he had hanged himself. He knew that. He had read it and he remembered. The ocean liner
Titanic
had struck an iceberg and sunk. Fifteen hundred persons had died. And he had lived. It wasn’t just—that so many had been granted his most fervent wish. It wasn’t just—that death was so generous to others.

He sat and waited—listening.

I am a voyager
, he thought.
I was going somewhere, but I have been denied my destination.

The wind rose beyond the windows.

Pilgrim’s eyes shifted.

Someone stood beside him.

“Mister Pilgrim?”

It was Kessler.

Pilgrim did not move.

“Are you hungry?”

Hungry?

Kessler waved his hand before the staring eyes.

Nothing. Not a flicker.

Kessler retreated to the bed. He would unpack the suitcases. Then he would attempt the trunk. At any moment Doctor Furtwängler must arrive. And Lady Quartermaine would come to say goodbye. Instructions would be given. Perhaps some medication.

Shirts. Underclothing. Socks…

Handkerchiefs. Monograms.
P
for
Pilgrim.

Kessler eyed the seated figure, its uncombed hair a windblown halo. The wings were folded now—the shoulders drooping forward, the neck engulfed in tartan scarves.

It was a bony face. Wide-browed. Heavy-lidded eyes. The nose, a beak—nothing less. It hooked out over the upper lip and the upper lip was parted from the lower. Kessler thought he saw it move.

“Would you speak? Do you want to speak?”

Speak? No.

Nothing.

Kessler snapped the first suitcase shut and moved to the second. Before depositing the clothing in drawers, he would lay it out on the bed in order to assess what sort of space would be required for each category.

Pyjamas. Slippers. A dressing-gown; no cord. Expensive. Silk. And blue.

All else was blue. Or white. The handkerchiefs were white. Some shirts. Some underclothes. In the steamer trunk he would find one white suit. But most was blue.

Kessler moved to the bureau, where he set out brushes and combs.

Doctor Furtwängler came to the bedroom door. Lady Quartermaine stood in the sitting-room. Her veils were lowered. She wore her overcoat. She said nothing.

Furtwängler spoke a few words in German and Kessler retreated into the bathroom, where he closed
the door and laid out Pilgrim’s toiletries.
An angel toothbrush, an angel nailbrush, an angel bar of soap…
He smiled.

Furtwängler beckoned and Lady Quartermaine joined him.

Pilgrim still sat frozen in his place.

Sybil looked at Doctor Furtwängler.

“Go to him,” he said.

As she crossed the carpet, the skirts of her travelling coat made a swishing noise against its surface.
The sea—the sea,
it whispered.
The sea…

It was difficult for her to look into Pilgrim’s face. His seemingly blinded eyes were more than troubling. They made her want to weep. But no—she must not.

Should she kneel? A supplicant?
Be well. The Lord be with thee.

No. It would make her departure seem too final.

“Pilgrim,” she whispered, and took his hands. “I’ve come to say good night. And in the morning…”

She looked at Doctor Furtwängler, who nodded.

“…in the morning, I will come again and we…”

His hands were cold and unresponsive. A dead man’s hands.

She lifted her veils. “In the morning we can walk along the terrace,” she told him. “In the morning we can look at all the snow. In the morning…Do you remember, Pilgrim, how you always loved the snow when we were young? The sun will shine again—I’m sure of it. In the morning…” She closed her eyes. “Good night, dear friend. Good night.”

She released his hands and leaned above his face to kiss him on the forehead.

“All is well,” she told him. “All is well.”

Still he did not move.

“Good night, Doctor Furtwängler. Thank you.”

She moved towards the door.

Doctor Furtwängler called to Kessler in German, asking him to accompany Lady Quartermaine to her motor car, which had arrived despite the blizzard and was parked beneath the portico.

Kessler emerged from the bathroom. Holding up a razor, he slipped it into his pocket.

Doctor Furtwängler nodded.
Good.
Lady Quartermaine had told him that, in the intervening days between Pilgrim’s bid for suicide and their arrival at the Burghölzli, there had been no further attempts. Still, for the first few days—a week, perhaps—Kessler could act as barber, shaving the patient or—who knows—it could be Mister Pilgrim would decide, as some men did in his circumstances, to grow a beard.

When the others had departed, Furtwängler closed the door and went to stand where he could get a better view of his patient. Pushing aside the emptied suitcases, he sat on the bed. Something must be said.

He waited.

Pilgrim had shifted the focus of his blind gaze to some interior field of vision Furtwängler could only guess at.

In time,
he thought.
In time there will be words. I can wait. But not too long. He must not be allowed to sink any
deeper. People have died down there and—even though it is what he wants, it must not be allowed to happen. I cannot—I will not allow it.