The Pretender Read online

  ‘Who has done this to you?’ one of the nurses asked urgently.

  She was brisk and heavy-set with a cracked red face, a motherly woman. But the young woman, who had not uttered a single word, simply shut her eyes and shook her head. The nurse stood guard while she bathed.

  ‘Can’t trust you near water,’ she said heartily, her laughter echoing in the white-tiled bathhouse.

  Her merry voice was the only human sound, though the pipes gurgled and the bath tap dripped. The young woman made no move to stop it. She lay in the water like a corpse until the steaming water grew tepid. On the nurse’s urging she stepped out onto the wooden pallet by the bath. The nurse noticed another wound on her instep. And another thing which made her smart with fellow feeling. Hallux valgus. The mysterious patient, like herself, had bunions. She allowed herself to be wrapped in a towel and dried gently, the nurse mindful of her wounds, though by the look of them they were several years old. She did not struggle when the nurse slipped a white chemise of bleached hessian over her head. She was as biddable as an overtired child at bedtime.

  The nurse led her by the hand to a desk on the night ward. She made a list of her sodden clothes. Black skirt, black stockings, white linen blouse, underwear, laced boots, a brown shawl.

  ‘No coat,’ the nurse murmured in rebuke as she entered these details in a large ledger, ‘in this weather!’

  She sifted through the clothing, examining each item and shaking her head mournfully at the end of the process. There were no labels or laundry marks. They provided no clues to the wearer’s identity. She bundled the clothes into a large linen basket and led the young woman to a bed near the desk so that she could keep an eye on her. In the morning, she was sure, when the shock had worn off, whatever had happened to the poor creature would become clear. A predicament of love, the nurse suspected, why else would a pretty young woman try to kill herself?

  The nurse checked on her through the night. Scrubbed and clean and released from scrutiny, the young woman’s sleeping features had eased into a pallid innocence. Some mother had crushed this face to her breast, a man might have gazed here with desire.

  ‘But now, my dear,’ the nurse ruminated aloud, ‘you are as much yourself as you will ever be.’ The graveyard hours had made her pensive.

  In the morning, before going off duty, she brought the young woman breakfast, a bowl of coffee, a slice of white bread. She ate wordlessly but with relish. Her face had lost its night’s ease. In its place was a blank and haughty defiance.

  It is this look that greets the doctor who approaches the bed during the morning rounds. He is alone. From the admission notes he has gleaned that groups of people agitate the patient. When she came to on the canal bank the night before stretched at the feet of a crowd of onlookers, all babble and alarm, she cowered and clapped her hands over her ears as if to shut out the noise. He has told the police officer who has arrived to question her to wait outside.

  ‘Fräulein,’ he says gingerly.

  She does not raise her eyes from what seems intense contemplation of her hands. He draws up a chair, a rickety bentwood. The legs scrape along the speckled floor of the ward. She winces at the tiny scream.

  ‘Fräulein,’ he starts again, ‘you must tell us who you are. Your family will be concerned. Surely?’

  She looks up, but not at him. Her eyes follow the progress of a nurse bearing a jug and basin for a bed bath further down the ward.

  ‘They will wonder where you are, if some harm has befallen you. Your mother … Papa?’

  The word seems to jar. She looks at him swiftly, an afflicted glance no more, then looks away again.

  ‘Come, come, Fräulein.’ He tries a hearty tone. ‘You must let us help you. We need to know what brought you to such drastic action.’

  She sits stony-faced, eyes down.

  ‘It’s a crime, you know,’ he says sternly.

  Certain words seem to unnerve her. Crime makes her draw the coverlet up in a grim bunch to her face.

  ‘You can’t expect to get away with it, Fräulein.’

  She bunches the counterpane into a rosette at her mouth.

  ‘Trying to kill yourself … well, the authorities may want to pursue it. You would do better to co-operate with us rather than trust to the tender mercies of the Berlin police department.’

  Police. Another jagged word.

  ‘Tell us, we can help you. Who are you?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Do you work, Fräulein?’ he persists. He makes to take one of her hands. She withdraws it sharply as if his touch might burn.

  ‘In a factory, perhaps?’

  A tiny frown wrinkles her high brow. He is not sure if it is a furrow of concentration or distress.

  ‘Would it be fair to describe you as a working woman?’

  He is beginning to sound desperate, sitting there with his pen poised and a sheaf of papers on his knee, like a disconsolate fisherman hauling in empty nets. And then, slowly, she nods.

  ‘Yes?’

  Too keen. She turns away and buries her face in the pillow. The interview is over. He has been dismissed.

  He came back every day for weeks. He was like a dog, eager and hopeless by turns. He would get exasperated by her silence, exploding into a kind of helpless anger, immediately followed by a respectful apology, afraid of exciting her ire. She seemed to watch his antics with an indulgent fondness. Sometimes he thought she was laughing at him, enjoying this cat and mouse game, toying with him. At other times he believed her baffled muteness was genuine. And it seemed that she grew used to, if not to like, his daily visits, his tenderly persistent interest in her. He could not understand why it disturbed him that he didn’t know who she was. It didn’t disturb her. Other things did – the sight of the policeman who, in the early days, had sat in on a few sessions, a clumsy, incompetent oaf by the name of Krug. She clammed up completely then. He laughed at himself. Only he would recognise the difference between her general silence and the recalcitrance she reserved for Inspector Krug. In the end, though, she exhausted Dr Finsterl. (That was his name; in the absence of information about her he had talked about himself.) Willi Finsterl, aged twenty-nine, newly qualified intern at the Elisabeth Hospital. He had served at the Front. Wounded at Verdun, he said. Verdun. She did not want to hear about that, her hands went over her ears.

  After six weeks of fruitless questioning, Dr Finsterl surrendered. One Monday morning he arrived at her bedside as usual, but instead of sitting down companionably he stood rather formally at the end of the bed.

  ‘Fräulein,’ he said, with an upward inflection so that it sounded like a query.

  She plumped up the pillows behind her, a prelude to their halting routine of unanswered questions.

  ‘Today you are going to be taken to another place. To Dalldorf.’

  She cocked her head quizzically.

  ‘It’s an asylum.’

  She cleared her throat. Dr Finsterl realised that this was the first sound he had heard her make. He felt ridiculously proud as if she were an infant uttering her first word. And then she rewarded him with a full sentence.

  ‘I have done nothing.’

  So used was he to her silence that he looked around, sure that somebody else had spoken. When he looked back at her, her features were set in determined repose.

  ‘Who are you? Please, tell me,’ he pleaded.

  But after the brief sunburst he had lost her to the enveloping fog.

  ‘We cannot keep you here any longer,’ he said irritably. ‘We have many sick people to care for. And you refuse to help yourself.’

  He backed away and then he remembered.

  ‘I have given you a name, by the way. I had to put something on the papers. I’ve called you Fräulein Unbekannt,’ he declared, ‘the unknown one.’

  Fräulein Unbekannt. She liked the sound of it. She was grateful to Willi Finsterl; he had given her a little gift. Maybe now the questions would stop.

  She is ordered to dre
ss. She is given back the freshly laundered clothes they said she had come in with. Two orderlies take her by the arms and steer her along a polished avenue, vast and shimmering as if in a heat haze, then down two flights of stairs mottled with spots of peacock blue and fiery red from a vast stained-glass window several storeys high. They turn at the end of the steps and burrow through a maze of dim passageways. A burst of copper clamour from the kitchens. The hissing clouds of the laundry with its swaddled bins of soiled linen. And then out into a paved courtyard and into the yawning gape of an ambulance. She sniffs the air before they shut the doors. Rain on the way, an injured sky.

  The ambulance rattles along noisily as she sits clutching the edge of the hard bench. It is a long journey. She begins to get panicky locked up in this metal box, this prison on wheels. Where are these men taking her? To a lonely field. They would blindfold her and then … At least she would know what she had done. Before they shot her they would have to read out the charges. There might even be a priest there who would hear her last confession. But what would she confess to? Not even to a name at the moment, except the one Dr Finsterl had given her. Guilt is her only constant. She has done wrong, hasn’t she? All her thoughts end up like this. One question begging another.

  The motor slows and comes to a halt. The driver and his companion get out with a thunderclap of doors. The metal box sways like a horse, glad to have shrugged off its mount. She hears their footsteps scrunching on gravel as they make their way to the back. The bolt slides open. She crouches in the furthest corner. It is too bright out there – leaf-shimmer, drenched sun-dazzle. The two orderlies, reduced to burly silhouette, clamber into the archway of light. She curls up on the floor. Their boots make a rackety advance. One of them reaches down and grips her arm. She beats at him with her fists.

  ‘Steady on, darling, don’t make this hard on yourself.’

  She kicks out, catching him on the shins.

  He howls and staggers back, but the other one takes hold of her hair. She bites at his wrist. It is hairy and smells of sea-salt.

  ‘Agh,’ he roars, ‘the bitch has bitten me.’

  He grabs her again by her hair, while his companion hoists her up.

  ‘Finsterl was right,’ one of them mutters as they tumble out into the daylight, ‘this one really is crazy.’

  ‘TRANSFER FROM ELISABETH Hospital!’ one of the orderlies roars as they approach a long wooden counter in the entrance hall. There is nobody about. He raps a small bell on the counter top. A nurse, whom she will later find out is Nurse Walz, appears from a doorway behind the desk.

  ‘Sign here and we’ll be off,’ the orderly says and pushes a set of papers at her.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Nurse Walz says, smiling, ‘we’ve been expecting you, Fräulein.’

  ‘Well, just you watch her, she’s no lady and that’s for sure,’ the second orderly growls.

  ‘It says here that she’s depressed, melancholic,’ Nurse Walz says, puzzled.

  ‘Melancholy she may be, but she brawls like a fishwife. She’s just taken a lump out of my arm.’ He rolls up his sleeve and points to the teeth marks. ‘That’s all the gratitude they have, biting the hand that feeds.’ He gives the patient a spiteful look.

  ‘A few weeks in the cells might put manners on her,’ his companion adds.

  Is this a prison? Have they tried her in her absence?

  ‘We are not jailers here, gentlemen,’ Nurse Walz says sweetly.

  She circles out from behind the desk and lays a hand tentatively on the patient’s arm. The nurse is a young, slender woman, her dark hair pinned severely under her cap, her eyes a mossy brown.

  ‘Come this way.’

  She follows Nurse Walz through a pair of swing doors into a long yellow corridor. French doors give on to a veranda. The light is the colour of mown hay, though the gardens outside are coming into green leaf.

  ‘In here, please.’

  Nurse Walz opens a door with frosted-glass panes into a small, airless study. If the season outside is a mixture of spring and summer, this room is autumn. Dark panels of waist-high wood clad walls the colour of bonfire smoke. A huge desk straddles the far corner and behind it, bathed in the green glow of a lamp necessary in this dimness, an elderly man sits.

  ‘This is the patient from the Elisabeth Hospital, Herr Direktor,’ the nurse says, placing the papers on the desk and returning to her sentry position behind the patient.

  ‘Thank you,’ the director says without looking up.

  He leafs through the documents. He is white-haired but balding. His moustache is matched by twin tufts of hair at his ears. His spectacles are like thin slivers of silver.

  ‘Not much to go on here, Fräulein,’ he says reproachfully. He sighs. ‘I shall have to conduct an examination.’

  He rises and steps out from behind the desk.

  ‘Yes?’ he says loudly, peering into the woman’s face.

  The patient is mute, not deaf, the nurse thinks, but she too stays silent.

  ‘Please remove your clothes.’

  The patient does not react. Perhaps she is deaf after all, Nurse Walz thinks.

  ‘Fräulein,’ the director commands. ‘Your clothes, I must insist. We must carry out a physical examination.’

  He points to a latticed muslin screen near the desk. The patient backs away slowly. She turns and tries to lunge at the door and as she does it opens and a young man in a white coat marches in, beaming broadly.

  ‘Oh, apologies, bad time,’ he says and makes to retreat.

  ‘Ah, Hanisch, just the man!’ the director says with loud relief. He snaps his fingers. ‘Walz!’

  For a minute the patient thinks a band is going to strike up and the doctor is going to dance. Then the nurse rushes at her and pinions her arms behind her back. She is bustled behind the screen.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Nurse Walz hisses at her, ‘or do you want one of them to do it?’

  Nurse Walz methodically unbuttons her blouse, unhooks her skirt, unties her boots, unrolls her stockings. They lie where they have fallen, washed up around her ankles. Nurse Walz pulls down her bloomers.

  ‘Step out, Fräulein, would you?’ the director’s voice booms.

  Nurse Walz pushes back the screen.

  ‘My God,’ Hanisch gasps, ‘what has happened here?’

  The scars again.

  She stands naked and shaking as he runs his fingers along the rugged seams.

  ‘How did you come by such wounds?’ the director asks.

  ‘Bayonets?’ Dr Hanisch ventures, as if it were an endearing query of love.

  The director shrugs.

  The men move around her, picking up her hand, then letting it fall, examining her temples. They stare into the whites of her eyes; they peer down her throat. They beckon to her to stand on the weighing scales. They measure her height against a metal gauge on the wall. The examination ends with the dirctor giving her a sharp slap on the rump. She barely reacts; all the fight has gone out of her.

  ‘Walz,’ the director barks, ‘cover her up.’

  The nurse guides her behind the screen. She fishes for her discarded clothes and hurriedly puts them on, refusing the nurse’s help. She gets the buttons wrong, her skirt is crooked, she does not bother to lace her boots. When she emerges she has acquired the dishevelled look of the vaguely mad.

  ‘Does she not speak?’ Dr Hanisch asks.

  ‘She may not speak,’ Nurse Walz says, ‘but she bites. She attacked one of the orderlies who brought her in.’

  ‘Brutes,’ Dr Hanisch says. ‘I would bite them myself.’

  A strange thing happens then. The patient smiles. Dr Hanisch looks gratified; he likes his humour to be appreciated, even by the insane.

  ‘Put her in Ward B,’ the director says, ‘we’ll try her out with the quiet ones.’

  Ward B was a pit of noise. Fourteen patients crammed into a tall, narrow room. A row of internal windows looked out onto the yellow corridor, but they were placed so high even the sills we
re out of reach. The light, which had seemed fresh and golden outside, was wan and bleached by the time it had filtered through the unwashed glass. When Nurse Walz led her in, the din of argument within fell away. A motley collection of women turned and stared at her absently. For a few moments she held their dulled attention. Then they resumed their clamorous complaint. A nurse detached herself from the gaggle of patients gathered idly in the centre of the ward and came over.

  ‘New one for you,’ Nurse Walz said. ‘Careful, she bites.’

  Nurse Bucholz was tiny and round. She had to look up at the patient, but she compensated for her girth and lack of stature with the fierceness of her regard.

  ‘Bed fifteen,’ she commanded, ‘by the door.’

  There is a white bedstead and a tin locker. On the made-up bed is a grey shift, which Nurse Bucholz orders her to put on. Obligingly she pulls a screen around the bed and for the second time that day the patient undresses. Nurse Bucholz returns, whips away her day clothes and hands her a ragged robe to put on over her regulation grey, and a defeated pair of slippers. The patient watches sadly as the nurse removes the clothes. Her clothes, it seems. They were not fine clothes. Indeed most of them seemed home-made, but they fitted her and they bore a homely smell of woodsmoke not quite eclipsed by the Elisabeth Hospital’s aggressive starching. They were the only things she owned and Nurse Bucholz was taking them away.

  It was almost lunchtime. One woman with long ginger hair and a slack mouth approached her bed and stood staring at her, then pointed her finger and cackled noisily. The rest of them took up her laughter, though from their mouths it sounded more like ululation, a lament. A dry-skinned dwarf ran up and poked her about the ribs. She winced, her scars ajangle. A large, lumpen woman with thick spectacles dragged the dwarf away, smiling as she did and showing shyly the rotten stumps of her teeth. The patient put a hand to her own mouth, some reflex of old. She turned her back to the ward and climbed into bed, hoping that would shut out their crazed observation. She need not have worried. At that moment the kitchen trolley was rolled in. The kitchen maid lifted the lids off the basins sunk in the trolley and banged them together like cymbals. The slovenly occupants of Ward B all but stood to attention, filing to their places at the long refectory table set in the centre of the ward. At the second crash of the cymbals they sat down with military precision, clutching their wooden ladles. (They were not trusted with cutlery in case they did damage to themselves or others.) The kitchen maid dolloped a portion of mash and a piece of wurst onto each enamel plate. They ate noisily – slurps and belches – but with exquisite concentration. It was the only time that silence reigned in Ward B. They eyed each portion greedily while guarding their own with a shielding arm. That first day Nurse Bucholz brought a plate to her, leaving it on her locker. Turnip had been threaded through the mash; she could smell it. It made her heave. She turned her face to the wall. She would not eat their slop and she would never join them at their table, where they fed like pigs, snouts in the trough.