The Memorist

Chapter 26

As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life, the life of God.

– Count Leo Tolstoy

Outskirts of Vienna, Austria

Sunday, April 27^th-12:05 p.m.

Ashaft of sunlight filtered down through the blue-green trees and splashed on Meer’s hands and face. They’d been driving through deep woods for the last quarter of an hour talking about music. It was an easy drive and an easy conversation that had led to Sebastian putting on the Mahler symphony they were listening to now.

As the road twisted she caught a glimpse of redbrick and white stucco structures and beyond them, a shining gold dome, and then Sebastian took a right turn and the vista disappeared. She was finally tired, so tired she thought if she closed her eyes she might be able to sleep.

Last night, after her strange experience on the street in the old Jewish section, she’d gone back to her hotel almost in a trance. How could a fabricated story have affected her so deeply? She felt as if she’d absorbed the imaginary woman’s fears and anxieties…and all her awful responsibilities, as if someone she herself loved was in danger and it was urgent she help him. Meer wished there was a way to shut down her mind, to prevent her unconscious from spinning any more tales.

She was picking at a dinner of soup and salad she’d ordered from room service when Malachai called to tell her he was no longer under investigation and would be arriving on Monday. With the gaming box connected to a possible memory tool, he wanted to see it for himself and perhaps bid on it at the auction on Wednesday.

She told him how relieved she was for him. No matter how desperate the police were to find someone to blame, how could they have suspected Malachai had been involved in a kidnapping? He helped children. Had all his professional life.

Because of her jet lag, she hadn’t been able to fall asleep until well past two in the morning and then it seemed only moments later when she got another call that woke her up at seven. Her father’s voice was rutted with grief for his friend whose condition, he told Meer, had worsened overnight. Smettering’s son was scheduled to arrive by noon and Jeremy would be back by that evening. Unfortunately he had his car with him and had to drive. Was she all right spending another day alone?

She was far too used to being alone, she wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead she told him not to worry, she was fine. And she was, wasn’t she? To prove it she ordered coffee and juice and yogurt with fruit and ate it all while leafing through the city magazine the hotel provided, trying to decide what to do with a whole day to herself. At ten, Sebastian phoned, as promised, to see if she needed anything. She told him no, and thanked him. He was going to visit his son at the hospital, he said, and asked if she would consider coming with him to meet Nicolas. She knew she wouldn’t be able to help the boy but Sebastian had been kind to her since she’d arrived; it seemed like the least she could do.

Meer must have dozed off because when she awoke they were already in the hospital parking lot.

“If there’s a map in God’s house, this spot is marked in blood,” Sebastian said.

“What do you mean?” Meer asked, responding viscerally to the disturbing expression.

“This is an unholy place. That Rebecca worked here was bad enough. Then she convinced me to let Nicolas attend the day care and summer camp the hospital built for the doctors’ kids. And now he’s living here.”

“It looks beautiful,” Meer said. “What’s wrong with it?”

Sebastian slipped into guide mode but with a catch in his voice. “The Third Reich’s doctrine of racial hygiene was acted out right here at Steinhof hospital starting in 1938. A program named Action T4 identified medical institution patients deemed unfit to live who were then sent to Linz and gassed. More than thirty-eight hundred from this hospital alone died there.”

In the pauses between his words Meer heard birdsong through the open window, and for a moment was surprised that they hadn’t stopped singing after hearing what he was saying.

“In one pavilion doctors conducted horrifically painful experiments on children who were then sent to another pavilion to die of malnutrition or disease. More than seven hundred children died that way and their brains and their spinal cords were saved to be used in research-” He stopped, either unable or unwilling to go on for the moment and she was almost sorry when he chose to continue. “But it wasn’t just what happened here during the war. What’s just as horrible is that it didn’t stop when the war ended. Not the brutality, not the callousness. The remains of those children, their brains, the spines…other organs continued to be used in medical research at the hospital until 1978. They were even on display for visiting researchers. Sometimes, the staff still finds small horrors tucked away in corners of the various pavilions. While Nicolas was at day care here during a school break, a gardener unearthed a child’s skull. Who knows how many of the kids playing outside saw that? Six months ago the city finally buried the last of the remains from that terrible time…but who knows what another gardener will dig up one day?”

“Did your marriage break up over the problems with Nicolas?”

Sebastian shook his head. “Two years before. It’s rather sordid, I’m afraid.” His voice sounded bitter. “Rebecca had an affair with another doctor.” The bitterness gave way to wistful reflection. “We didn’t make it through that.”

“I’m sorry,” Meer said softly, and she was, both for him and for asking.

The nine-year-old boy who had Sebastian’s honey-colored hair and gray-green eyes was sitting at a table, working furiously, molding dull gray clay into a ball, murmuring words she couldn’t hear except as a constant hum.

Looking up from his work, he stared at Meer for a moment but didn’t make contact with her. What did he see? A stranger in a long black skirt and boots standing in the doorway? Another nurse come to give him more medicine? A ghost? Nothing at all?

“Six months ago he was a normal child going to school, good at sports, riding his bicycle, playing with his friends…now he’s lost.” Sebastian spoke openly in front of Nicolas, as if the boy either couldn’t hear him or wouldn’t understand him. “He lives in an impenetrable shell, spending his days chanting that song and drawing or sculpting the same thing over and over…” He pointed to a pile of drawings. “He only stops to eat or drink or sleep when someone gives him food or puts him to bed.”

Meer remembered how she used to sit at the piano for hours trying to find one certain musical sequence on the keyboard. Obsessively testing different combinations of notes, she would sometimes fall asleep there and wake up hours later with the keys pressing into her cheek.

In Nicolas’s eyes she recognized the empty look she used to see when she looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t need to play Cicero’s memory game to remember how it felt to be taken over by memories that didn’t belong to her-

“Was tun Sie hier?”

Meer turned at the voice. The words were in German but the tone indicated the speaker was annoyed.

“Meer, this is Dr. Rebecca Kutcher, Nicolas’s mother. Rebecca, this is Jeremy Long’s daughter,” Sebastian said in English to his ex-wife.

She was lovely, despite the anger that pursed her lips and glittered in her eyes. Her blond curls trembled as she shook her head. “Sebastian, I was clear, I thought, on the phone.” She spoke with a British accent. “I’m sorry,” she addressed Meer, “but strangers are too disruptive to my son’s treatment.” The pain on her face was difficult for Meer to look at, reminding her of her own mother’s discomfort.

“I don’t want to upset you or your son,” Meer offered. “Let me go wait in the hall.” She turned to Sebastian. “I don’t want to ruin your visit.”

“No, please, Meer. I want you to spend some time with Nicolas.” Then he addressed Rebecca. “Nothing else has helped. Why not let her spend a few minutes with him? She might have some insight. She’s been where he is.”

Nicolas’s murmuring increased in volume, becoming more of a droning than a hum. The doctor looked over at her son and watched him for a long moment, then she spoke to Sebastian. “It’s not fair to press me so hard on this. Please, don’t stay too long.”

As the door shut softly behind Rebecca, Sebastian knelt down in front of the boy and started whispering to him. Nicolas didn’t react but Sebastian kept at it, stroking his hair, smiling-the expression on his face a heartbreaking combination of love and desperation.

Nicolas’s eyes were large and troubled, as if he was watching battles being fought and wars being waged. As if he was witnessing horrors that were shaking him to the bone. He didn’t look directly at his father but he did lean toward him; on some subliminal level he craved what Sebastian offered.

“This is how my son lives now.”

Meer wasn’t sure if Sebastian was talking about the surroundings or the boy’s mental state. “For how long?”

“About two months. Rebecca had been dealing with him at home, as difficult as that was and then…” His mouth contorted with fury and turned into one straight angry line. “He slipped deeper into this state and it became obvious he needed constant care.” He broke off, took a breath then continued. “I was willing to bring him to my apartment and give him that care but Rebecca insisted this was the right solution and got his other doctors to agree, of course. Being on staff here, she was able to make special arrangements to let him stay as long as the bed isn’t needed and since the psychology wing is now eighty percent outpatients, it’s unlikely he’ll ever be asked to vacate the room.”

It was the mention of the room that forced Meer to take her eyes off the child and look around. She focused on the pile of drawings Sebastian had pointed out before and now she took in that horror, too. One after another, every one of the monochromatic childish sketches were done in shades of black, gray and brown. Not a single bright color had been used. And next to the stack were three putty-colored clay busts. Each drawing and sculpture depicted the same subject: a little boy’s face-not Nicolas-a very different looking child-eyes alive and wide in terror, mouth open in a silent scream.

“Nicolas, does it make you sad to be with this little boy all day?” Meer asked.

He didn’t answer.

“You said he speaks English?” she asked Sebastian.

“Yes, or at least before all this he did. Rebecca’s mother is British, her father is German. Nicolas spent summers with her family in Surrey.”

“I think you are a very good artist, Nicolas.” Meer tried again.

The boy was rocking himself back and forth in his chair now, still mouthing words that Meer couldn’t make out.

“Do you know what he’s saying?”

Sebastian nodded solemnly. “Yes. Rebecca brought in a woman who can read lips. It’s called dovening in Yiddish. Our son is saying the Jewish prayer of the dead.”

“Are you-”

He didn’t need to hear the rest of the question. “No, neither Rebecca nor I is Jewish. As far as we know he’s never been in a temple in his life. There’s not a very big Jewish community in Vienna.”

Meer didn’t know Sebastian that well, but she could tell from the way he was pressing his lips together that there was more he wasn’t saying.

“Nicolas?” Meer sat down very close to him. “I know how it feels to remember people you’ve never met and places you have never been. It all seems so real to you but no one else can see them or hear them. Is that what it’s like for you?”

She waited for a response but he ignored her and continued chanting. She was moved by how much grief she could hear in the sounds he made.

“If you want I could tell you about the little girl who lived inside of my head…the way this little boy is living inside of yours. I couldn’t draw her though. She played piano and I kept trying to play the song she played. I could almost hear it. Almost. But never quite.”

Meer was surprised how easy it was to talk about her past with the silent boy whose consciousness seemed to be trapped in another time and place. Einstein had written: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Meer always thought she’d been living the proof of the opposite. Illusion was her reality and always had been. The same way it seemed to be for Nicolas. She stayed for a few minutes more telling him about how scared she was when the dreads took over and how she could never find the outer limits of her terror.

“My parents didn’t know what to do with me either.” She tried to make her voice light as she whispered. “You’d think sometimes they’d realize how much pressure they’re putting on you, wouldn’t you?”

Still no response.

“I could sing along with you if you sang a little louder, if I could hear the tune.”

Finally, realizing that even if he could hear her, he wasn’t listening, she stood up, ran her hand over his head, smoothing down his hair, and in a soft voice, said goodbye. “If you’d like me to come back, I will. It would have made me feel better if I’d known someone understood what I was feeling and how really awful it was.”

As she stepped away, Sebastian came over, put his arms around his son and kissed his forehead. He stayed like that for a few seconds and Meer turned away, not wanting to intrude. She wished she could tell Sebastian that holding Nicolas like that helped, except she knew that for her, nothing helped. No one’s arms had been able to pull her out of the freezing cold hell when she slipped into it.

Before they left the room, Sebastian walked over to a shelf above the bed where there was a radio and turned it on. A Sibelius symphony filled the room. “Now, we can go,” he said to Meer.

Outside, Sebastian led her down a small path. “Do you mind walking?”

Mostly because he wanted to and she ached to assuage some of the pain in his eyes if she possibly could, she said it was fine.

“I saw you turn on the radio in your son’s room,” she said, returning to the only subject, she was sure, that he could focus on now.

“Nicolas always loved listening to music. Even when he was a tiny baby. I think that’s when I was the happiest…when my son sat, listening to music I made for him.”

“Do you still play for him?”

He nodded. “He doesn’t seem to hear me but his chanting seems to adjust to the rhythm of what I’m playing. I’ve arranged for the nurses to play the classical music radio station for him, and when I have a performance that’s being broadcast they’re very good about putting it on and telling him it’s me. I keep hoping that one day the music will reach him.”

“The power of music…”

“Is there anything you noticed about Nicolas that’s similar to what you experienced?”

“I wasn’t that lost.”

“Your father thinks he’s having what Malachai Samuels calls a past life break.”

She nodded. “He describes it as a dam collapsing. Too many memories flooding in, overpowering the mind.”

“Is that what you think happened to you?”

“No. I had a slow trickle of false memories that I created myself.”

“Your father introduced me to Malachai Samuels via e-mail and since then I’ve talked to him twice over the phone. I wanted to pay him to come here and work with Nicolas but he told me it’s hard for him to leave the country now.”

“Not anymore. In fact he’ll be here tomorrow, coming for Wednesday’s auction. Maybe you can convince your wife to let just one last stranger in.”

They’d reached a small pond encircled by tall pine trees that scented the air with menthol and cast cool blue shadows. Picking up a pinecone, Sebastian threw it into the pond with surprising ferocity, and it hit the silvery calm surface with an angry splash. The impact sent a series of concentric circles rippling outward, each ring growing larger and larger until it vanished.

“Did he help you?”

“Not to figure out what was happening, no. But he did teach me to keep the attacks at bay and stop them from paralyzing me.”

She tripped on a branch and Sebastian reached out to keep her from falling. She was aware of the momentary pressure of his fingers on her arm.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I thought since we’re here, I’d show you the church that Wagner built. It’s beautiful. Probably the only thing worthwhile in this whole detestable place.”

While they continued on, she tried to answer the rest of his questions about what it had been like for her when she was a child.

“You must have been very scared,” he finally said with so much empathy it made her throat hurt.

I still am, she almost said. But that would be saying something she wasn’t sure she wanted him to hear. Or wanted to admit. Even to herself.