Читать книгу The Camp Whore - Francois Smith - Страница 8

Afterwards, long afterwards, the thought occurred to her that her whole life and everything that had happened to her had culminated in that exact moment, in that instant when she reached for the handle, lifting her hand to that doorknob from under the dead weight of time – everything had spiralled towards that door and what lay behind it.

But she needed to calm down before she could see clearly: her presence before that door and how she’d come to be there. Strangely, it had happened long after she’d lost her faith in a natural order of things. By then she was already a full partner at Reymaker Psychiatrie, and the gap between what she theoretically believed in and her instincts had eventually narrowed to the point where she could practise her profession freely with an open mind. Though with a certain Dutch insouciance – no, instead she did so in an almost constant state of anger, impatient with frivolities. She had been completely assimilated. How else, she looks so Dutch: her face open and glowing, flaxen hair that she often rolls into a bun so that the old scars on her forehead are visible, the days when she’d so diligently hidden them long gone. Furthermore, she is tall and not at all fragile, her mouth is wide and full – rather greedy, this mouth of mine, she sometimes thinks when she allows herself to be self-critical. But she guards against that; too much self-criticism does no one any good, neither you nor those around you. And when she looks at her eyes, today still, she knows to be careful: you are not as strong as you think you are. She can be wilful. Probably the reason why she allowed her Dutch to retain an Afrikaans hue. Pure wilfulness. But then obstinacy is a known quality of the Dutch. So, where does that leave one?

One thing’s for sure, she’s far more at home with business-like communication. That’s if she compares it to the idle chatter she’d grown up with, the conversations and things. Her interaction with patients is direct and to the point. She would, for example, firmly silence a whining patient and say: Come, let’s separate the wheat from the chaff. The woman she’s thinking of was so consumed by neurosis that her melancholy, pessimism and obsession with death had led to the murder of her husband, almost as if she’d challenged death. To this woman she had said: You don’t dare think like that. The world is utterly indifferent to you, pays no attention whatsoever to what you think or do, or to what happens to you, or for that matter to what happened to your husband.

Strange that she should be thinking about this now. It’s early evening and the office has been quiet for a while already. In fact, her whole life is quieter now. The frenetic bustle is over. It’s not so much a case of waning strength, but simply the desire for silence. To be honest, she can now face silence. Only now. And so she spends more and more time in her office after work.

Quietly at her desk, before its smooth empty surface. She tolerates nothing on her desk, not even a book or a reading lamp, and when necessary takes a notebook out of a drawer. The walls, however, are an untidy tapestry of books, ornaments, artworks: a ceremonial mask from the Congo, a framed print of a clay pot and a woven mat brought to her from South Africa. This is her world; she finds the contradictions comforting. That is how she wants it. And it was here that she’d first seen herself in front of that door, realising that the world, her world, against all logic and without her realising it, had assumed the shape, the contours of that scene. As if the world in some macabre way was meddling in her affairs.

For a long time it was impossible, but now she can follow her train of thought, these days she can face it. The ride with Jacobs in his sidecar. That room in that hospital. And one of these days, she knows she will be able to face going back to where it all began.

The hospital is a fortress-like building, with red brick and ornamental plasterwork; the entrance is an archway below a watchtower with parapets. She emerges from the shadowy doorway into the blinding light of the morning sun reflecting off the ash-white gravel and the windows encircling the courtyard. She walks with her chin pulled in, giving the impression that she literally has to rein herself in.

It is not a graceful gait, but the rhythmic movement of the shoulders, from side to side, makes it seem as if she has dancing in mind, or even a soldier’s march. She walks lost in thought, her serene expression contradicting the pent-up energy of her stride.

Yesterday Jacobs showed her where to report. Hurst, the hospital chief, was not available then, and Jacobs’s careful knocking was met with silence. The hallways were nevertheless full of hospital activities, women scurrying around in nurses’ uniforms, a few deigning to throw her a sideways glance. From a corridor window she’d looked down on an overgrown garden. She’d seen two men in uniform walking in the shrubbery.

This time there is an answer when she knocks. He is sitting at a writing table watching her enter, and appears to be made of wax. For a moment she is convinced it is a wax statue, even though she should be used to the fact that European men look so different to the ones she’d grown up with. How freshly scrubbed they looked. Dr Arthur Hurst, however, looks almost transparent, his hair greased back and shiny, his top lip a taut line above the fleshy, mobile lower lip. The bottom lip and the eyes, she thinks, are the only parts of his face that have not been painted onto the blank visage with light brushstrokes. The eye sockets and the bottom lip have been roughly fashioned from potter’s clay, with a finger and thumb, and you’d need to be much, much closer to see what’s been put into those hollows.

As he rises from his desk, his voice comes from deep inside the curve of his body. “Seeing is believing,” he says in a tone that reminds her of the guilelessness of some of Jacobs’s hand gestures, and she feels an apprehension stirring within. “You are indeed a woman.” He walks around to her, his hand half-raised for a greeting. “I almost fell on my back when Rivers said he was sending …” His mouth falls silent, narrowing to little more than a skew sheepish pleat on his face.

“Would you have preferred a man?” she says coolly, after shaking his hand. She realises that it was his undisguised embarrassment that gave her the courage. Therein lies his charm.

“Lord, no, please don’t get me wrong …” He gestures towards a high-backed office chair. “Please sit down.”

He is in uniform. Not the khaki she’d become familiar with in South Africa, but an olive-green duffel fabric. The Sam Browne belt with its lanyard across the chest she knows well, and the puttees too. As he walks back to his chair, she also recognises the measured, deliberate steps that the puttees give to the wearer.

She is in her Dutch nurse’s uniform, and when she drops her chin she feels the cool bakelite of the yellow cross on her high collar.

She smoothes the white pinafore over her thighs, and at this moment, in this office and under the gaze of this man, she recalls of the only photograph of herself that she likes: her face angular rather than flat, her wide mouth with its pinched corners curling in barely perceptible scorn. Her face is turned away from the camera so that a shadow falls across the left side, but why she likes that photo most … no, “scorn” is not the right word, she’s not that way inclined, but there is nevertheless a certain defiance that she radiates. Or is it simply that she’d managed to completely ignore the attention of the camera?

When Hurst speaks again, she’s half-startled; for a moment she had been entirely lost in her thoughts. “After all, you are not the only woman here,” he says, though without any sharpness. “The place was also, and not so long ago, the headquarters of the Women’s Land Army – we’ve been here for, oh, barely a year.”

He stops speaking and watches her expectantly. She feels herself blushing involuntarily, and looks down at her hands in exasperation, hoping he has not noticed. But when she looks up at him again, he has leant forward in his chair, his elbows resting on the table.

Her reaction was evidently acceptable, or at least not suspect, because he now speaks with a noticeable uplift in his tone of voice: “Our warriors of the ploughshare. You must have heard of them, even perhaps come across them? How long have you been here? Oh, it doesn’t matter, the fact is the place is actually an agricultural college … or rather was, before headquarters decided it was more important to get shellshocked soldiers back to the front than to train women to take their place in the farmlands of the kingdom.”

Ah, she knows what he is talking about! She wonders for a moment whether he was being sarcastic, but his face betrays nothing. Now she knows why she blushed. Yes, she knows: when she was on her way to the hospital in the sidecar this morning they suddenly filled the road, these women. She’d grabbed hold of the sidecar, and felt Jacobs brake sharply. It took her a while to understand what she was seeing: the short overcoats, the pushed-up breeches, long grey socks, blue jerseys tucked into trousers, a couple of rubber boots, and here and there a hoe casually resting on the shoulder. But the hips and thighs and hair and breasts – they were indisputably women!

The group of labouring women, farming women, had given way to the motorbike in playful haste, with exuberance, even. Jacobs had accelerated and sped past and she tried to look back at the jubilant group, but Jacobs was trying to shout something at her above the roar of the engine, and she’d pulled her head back and leant across to him. He almost had to bring the bike to a halt before she could hear what he was saying and understand what his cackling laugh meant, his mouth agape and his tongue … yes, now that she thinks of it, it was quite obscene, the way he’d flapped his tongue between his teeth. She’d quickly looked away from him, stared intently at the road ahead, clinging to the flanks of the sidecar as they careened and bumped their way towards the hospital. Confused, she tried to make sense of Jacobs’s reaction to what they’d just seen. And above everything there was this strange anxiety inside her. There was something inappropriate about those silly women in men’s clothes, but – and this is what made her blush again – something deliciously exciting too.

She realises that Hurst is staring at her with a furrowed brow, and she looks down at her hands again. She is truly embarrassed by her reaction now. And why exactly, she does not know, because it has nothing to do with her.

It must be the strangeness of it all. The country is strange; she is a stranger. Yes, suddenly she even finds herself a bit odd. But then she hears Hurst speak and looks up halfway through his sentence and, noticing his questioning gaze, she tries to smile.

“I realise it is quite controversial, and to you, being Dutch, it must seem all the more strange.”

Dutch? Did Reymaker not let them know that she was a South African? Or had been. But now she is not at all sure what Reymaker might think others need to know about her. What would he have let them know? He must surely have spoken to his friend Rivers about her, because that’s how she ended up here – he’d facilitated the introduction. And what had Reymaker told Rivers? Do you have room here for a woman, and – don’t laugh – one with an interest in shellshock?

Oh well, it was not shellshock per se that had lured her here, even though Reymaker thought so. Or, rather, he thought she had some kind of morbid interest in the war. That’s what he threw at her the first time she told him about her “war plan”. When she asked him whether there might not perhaps be a position for her in one of the British military hospitals, his answer was: But it is not our war.

Indeed. It is not “our” war. Not even the fact that South Africans were being trampled into French mud made it her or Reymaker’s war. Their war, hers and Reymaker’s, was there in their clinic in Dordrecht. Their daily battle was to give a few people a grip on reality, perhaps even a grip on meaning.

On happiness? But that is not what Reymaker meant. He was simply alluding to the fact that the Netherlands was neutral, and not part of the war.

Or is that really what he meant? Reymaker had collapsed into the chair behind his desk, behind that bronze statue of a seated cat. His beloved cat. He’d peered past the cat at her; his eyes steady and coal-black above his sparse beard. She had remained standing with her hands on the back of a chair. Through the window she could see a rippled canal, on the skyline the squat spire of the Grote Kerk and fleecy clouds that seemed strange to her, even after fifteen years in the country. But to Reymaker and his peculiar habits, she had long grown accustomed.

She tried again to explain why she was so interested in the work of Rivers. It was not as if Dr W.H.R. Rivers’s approach had any specific connection to Africa, even less so to South Africa, but something that appealed to her from the outset was that his work was based on his research on traditional medicines of primitive tribes. She couldn’t believe it. Superstition! Magic! Witches! Those were all swearwords in the world where she lived and worked – and yes, she did still occasionally darken the door of a church. But he had seen that there was art in those accursed practices, the art of healing. Not the science, the art! And that insight is what had brought Rivers to the forefront of modern Western psychiatry. She had understood that almost instinctively. The first time she heard about it, she felt quite moved. A dry, factual account in a professional journal had touched her deeply.

Reymaker had not taken to it as easily, even though he and Rivers knew each other. Had met at some or other conference. They were perhaps even friends; she had bargained on them being more than just passing acquaintances. Reymaker had, after all, attended Rivers’s Fitzpatrick lecture in London, even though he was fairly sceptical of his colleague’s “new approach” to the treatment of soldiers’ hysterical episodes. But the two of them, she and her boss, had debated the subject often enough so that when she had her plans in order, there was little need for a preamble. She’d cut to the chase: “You have contact with Dr Rivers?” And then, “I was wondering whether you could perhaps arrange a position for me.” When his eyebrow arched, she quickly added: “The experience could mean something for the practice in the long run.”

His mouth fell open, and then he looked down sullenly at the papers on his desk. “I see,” he grumbled, “your burning ambition.”

Oh, old Reymaker! His irritability did not surprise her, and hadn’t for years. Their skirmishes had become a form of familiarity. “No, this is about Rivers,” she’d said emphatically, “I mean, his method.” Ensuring that her voice remained at an even pitch, she went on, “It’s new, not so? You said so yourself. And more than that, the whole phenomenon … indeed …” She did not spell it out; it was not necessary to say the word, the word that the war had given to the world. Even in the Netherlands, where people continued to tend their little city gardens, and also in their clinic in Dordrecht where words like neurasthenia, dementia and idiotism were put to bed under pure white sheets daily, even there the mere mention of the word brought a shiver down the spine: shellshock.

Shellshock. Shellshock hospital. Soldiers who have been shot of all sense, rendered mute, robbed of memory, of muscular control; bodies beset by spasms of an otherworldly horror, soldiers who desired nothing more than death.

It is however where she wanted to go. No, “wanted” is not the word. She had thought about this determination of hers on the boat coming over, and if she were to be honest, she was probably driven here by an inner strength of which she was totally unaware. Or rather, unaware then, because that strength had manifested earlier in her life. It was more than likely the same vigour that had spurred her on when she was only eighteen to go off and study in a foreign country, a foreign culture, virtually woman alone, eventually to get a post at Reymaker Psychiatrie.

It was he, Reymaker, who’d come specially to recruit her during her final practical year at Wilhelmina House in Amsterdam, by which time she already had years of training behind her. He wanted none other than the best psychiatry student to assist him in his clinic in Dordrecht. The most reliable, is what he was actually after, she thought bitterly at times in later years, although bitterness is an emotion she has guarded against her whole life.

The one who would complain least, that is what he wanted.

But what he did not know then, and what her lecturers didn’t suspect either, was that her diligence was the result of her passion. Or volatility. but call it what you wish, she still believes, sitting here under Hurst’s cool appraising gaze, that she conveys her opinion in a civil manner. She is direct, she can take strong positions, but she is decent. Decent in an Afrikaans way? Oh well, it’s not important, she then decides. For all practical purposes, she is Dutch.

She therefore does not bother to correct Hurst. “In the Netherlands,” she says, “psychiatric nursing care is primarily the domain of women.” That’s the simple truth, although not just any woman gets awarded the yellow cross. They must be middle class, seeing that this class of woman is considered the standard-bearer of the founding values of a healthy society. Psychiatric patients are seen as people who have strayed from these values and should thus be brought back to the path of righteousness. She thinks again of the farming women she’d seen at the roadside and says: “Here, things are possibly different, but we must … I must accept that the war has turned everything upside down.”

“No, we also have many women here, as you will soon realise. But not many foreigners. I assume people help in their own countries, but yes, in neutral countries it is another matter altogether. You could just as well have gone to work in Germany.”

Strange that the issue of where she was going to work had come up for discussion when she’d sounded out Reymaker.

He’d sat staring at his beloved cat, and gave the question a wide berth. “Against England I have no objection. On the contrary. I am talking about the idea of England.” He had tilted his head sideways so that one of those charcoal pupils could pin her down.

The idea of England? She wanted to let that phrase simply drift along the stream of words, a description that was little more than a formality, but it had stuck. She immediately wanted to dismiss this vague irritation, but failed. The idea of England? What had it meant to her? As she quickly reflected, some impressions fluttered through her mind like startled nocturnal birds: keening bagpipes playing “God Save the King”, a bell tent glowing like a lantern in a black, black night, a lantern jerking and swinging as if dangling from a wagon. The onset of anxiety was immediate, and she could recall nothing other than this tumult of images. Only later, when she’d probably already returned to her room, did the realisation dawn on her that England would always be only that to her, that was the problem. Always back to that same scene. A scene with its own background music, its own lighting, its own words; the choreography of that macabre dance for ever etched into her mind.

But that realisation only came to her later. Right then, there, in that office, Reymaker spoke again: “And Rivers? What you know and admire about him is what I have told you. I tend to think he takes his admiration for the primitive a bit too far, that I have told you ad nauseam. That wild, untamed man!” Reymaker pushed a belly laugh into the cat’s face, but abruptly grew more sombre, as if he suddenly realised that he was offending the little statue. “He takes things too far,” he continued thoughtfully. “But yes, he gets results, not so?” He reached a pale hand towards the cat and carefully stroked the tail that was curled neatly – so characteristically feline – around the feet. He glanced at her again from behind the statue. “It’s the war, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re drawn to the war.”

She looked at him quietly. Weighed his words, her fingertips resting lightly on the back of the chair. Was it the war? She looked at her boss on his throne, flanked by his statue of the goddess of wisdom. Anyone else would have burst out laughing at the eccentric old man, but she has learnt to take such caricatures in her stride. To tell the truth, she found it quite reassuring. It would have been harder if he’d been someone you had to take seriously. But is it the war that entices her? And if so, why?

No, she then decided. She chose this profession to be a healer; her life’s journey had led to those wounds that lie deepest and are slowest to heal, the wounds to the soul. And she is going to England because there are wards crowded with people whose souls have become caverns filled with flying shrapnel. “It is the people in the war that draw me,” she said.

Reymaker gazed at her and then riffled through some papers on his desk. “Oh, well, then,” he mumbled. She just needed to arrange a temporary replacement; he helped her to get a concession to travel and a post at one of Rivers’s hospitals.

Not at Rivers’s actual hospital, the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, but at the Seale-Hayne Hospital in Devon. “There’s a chap doing equally good work down there. Rivers seems to think he is on the right track, so that can mean only one thing. His name is Hurst.”

And here she sits, across from DoctorArthur Hurst. Major Hurst. A British soldier, in uniform. It is not a run-of-the mill situation. Certainly not for her. But this is exactly where her life choice, her career choice, was destined to lead her.

She could have spent her life running away from what she is, from what she had become in South Africa. But long ago she had already decided that there is only one way to survive, and that is in direct confrontation with the very thing that would continue to knock at her front door. But one’s not compelled to take such a sombre view, because, after all, her life was also saved there, in South Africa, and she’d simply decided to continue that sort of rescue work; the healing that she’d received at the hands of Tiisetso and Mamello in that cave is what she would promote. That’s how Rivers came into the picture. She would not give in to the wish to see someone suffer as she had suffered. The desire is still there at times. But that is not a foundation on which to build a life.

Hurst speaks again, and she listens with intense concentration. “But your interest in psychiatry, that is not necessarily an obvious choice?” he says.

That is not a surprise. She’s already had to answer that question a few times. In nursing college. Often. After that, Reymaker had asked … But long before that, she’d had to clarify it for herself. These are the facts she sits with: she was the daughter of a sharecropper, a child of the concentration camps. Well, perhaps not a child, but the fact remains that by any standards her education was defective. How did it come to be that someone with her background landed up in psychiatric nursing?

She has a few stock responses, but this time, before Hurst, she’s decided to evade the question entirely. “Yes, probably not,” she says, “but I came for professional reasons.” He looks down at his hand stretched out on the desk, and then again at her. She continues: “For a while, it must have been about ten years ago, women were actively recruited for psychiatric nursing in the Netherlands. Specifically, virtuous middle-class women.” She gives an ironic chuckle, a studied gesture. “This sort of nursing is premised on the reintegration of patients into the community. The first priority was to inculcate good civic values, and the Dutch authorities thought middle-class women were ideally suited to the task of bringing lost sheep back into the fold.”

“So that’s how you landed in your profession – by chance?”

He has not accepted her explanation at face value after all. “No,” she says, “not by chance.” He was not going to let her get away with it. “Luck was also on my side.” Briefly pausing, she continues: “There were people, though, who inflenced me, people who helped me make the decision. They also made it possible for me, in a practical way.”

“And now you are here. I suppose that was also not by chance?”

She senses that he is not satisfied with her vagueness. Careful, now.

“No, also not.” Again that smile. “Seems to me I am rather impressionable … It was your colleague, Dr Rivers. I’d heard of his work; he and my employer in the Netherlands are …” – are they friends? – “are in close contact and I wanted to, on behalf of our practice, gain some experience in his type of healing.”

He lightly nods his head: “And I assume in the Netherlands shellshock does not exist? I see. Yes, that makes sense. Or do you know what shellshock is? Have you seen it?”

Not in the Dutch practice, no. She remembers the woman in the Winburg camp who took to eating grass in the corrugated-iron pound where they sent those driven mad by grief to die; she thinks back to the time when she was bereft of all language and reason, proceeding in a cortège of women dressed in black on the road to her own damnation. Her answer is muted: “When I saw it,” she says, “the world did not yet have a name for it.”

He looks at her attentively before continuing: “Do you know what we are expected to do here? Officially. Do you?”

She does not answer; looks at him blankly, her thoughts still with the swishing of the black silk dresses, like wind rustling through the veld. Shellshock. Is that the name of the thing she has in mind?

“We are the guardians of the nation’s morale,” he says, and the way his lower lip drops the words makes her suspect a degree of bitterness. “The nation’s morale in a time of war. It largely comes down to ensuring that our soldiers are healthy enough to fight. Mentally sound. We need to confirm that these soldiers, our patients, are in the first instance genuinely ill and are not just malingering because they are too scared to continue fighting. Too scared to die. Our task therefore is to get them back into the trenches as quickly as possible.”

He looks at her blankly. She is now convinced of his irony. He had ridiculed his official task with great delicacy, or rather with expertly masked cynicism. She is dead certain of having drawn the right conclusion. She therefore risks saying: “I assume, Dr Hurst,” – mindful to strike a cautious note – “I assume that in this hospital the welfare of the patient is your first consideration.”

Again his mouth twists wryly, and she notices a faint flush on his cheeks. “We are going to try our best to heal them. And when they are well they can return to society.” He lifts his head, and she sees the eyes shining in their sockets as he then says: “And unfortunately our society presently finds itself in a state of war.”

She gets the gist of what he is saying. She does not have to answer him. For these men, war is currently the only mode of existence. Normal life is war. It is the only sanctuary. She wants to say what she had intended to say, something about aspects of Rivers’s work that she often thought about and more or less understood.

She hears herself saying something else, though: “I think part of the problem is that people think of themselves as being the war and nothing else. The irony is that you have to untangle them from the war in order for them to be ensnared again.”

“Or bolster them psychologically to the point where they maintain a distinction between themselves and the war.”

It’s as if his words are slowly moving towards her through thick mud; one by one, they reach her. “And so you are not your war?” She almost takes fright as the words line up before her. Inside her, etching into her. She has never expressed it that clearly to herself, even though it has been her life’s work. Dealing with catharsis, with closure, the winding-up of her war.

You are not your war.

“Exactly,” he says and gets up. “But to make that distinction … I’m telling you, it’s often dreadfully difficult. Let me show you what we are dealing with here.”