The Emigrants

The old porter's information enabled me to find the sanatorium without difficulty that afternoon. A long drive swept through a park that must have covered almost a hundred acres and led up to a villa built entirely of wood. With its covered verandahs and balconies it resembled a Russian dacha, or one of those immense pinewood lodges stuffed with trophies that Austrian archdukes and princes built all over their hunting grounds in Styria and the Tyrol in the late nineteenth century, to accommodate their aristocratic guests and the accredited barons of industry. So clear were the signs of decay, so singularly did the window panes flash in the sunlight, that I did not dare go any closer, and instead began by looking around the park, where conifers of almost every kind — Lebanese cedars, mountain hemlocks, Douglas firs, larches, Arolla and Monterey pines, and feathery swamp cypresses — had all grown to their full size. Some of the cedars and larches were forty metres tall, and one of the hemlocks must have been fifty. There were woodland meadows between the trees where bluebells, white cardamines and yellow goats-beard grew side by side. In other parts of the park there were many different ferns, and the new greenery of dwarf Japanese maples, lit up by rays of sunlight, swayed over the fallen leaves underfoot. I had been strolling around the arboretum for almost an hour when I came upon Dr Abramsky busy fitting out new beehives outside his apiary. He was a stocky man close to sixty, and wore threadbare trousers. From the right pocket of his patched-up jacket protruded a goose wing, such as might once have been used as a hand brush. What struck one immediately about Dr Abramsky was his shock of thick, flaming red hair that stood on end as if he were in a state of the greatest anxiety; it reminded me of the Pentecostal tongues of fire over the heads of the disciples, depicted in my first catechism. Quite unperturbed by my appearance out of nowhere, Dr Abramsky pulled up a wicker chair for me and, going on with his work on the beehives, listened to my story When I had finished he put his tools aside and began to talk himself. I never knew Cosmo Solomon, he said, but I did know your great-uncle, since I started here in 1949 at the age of thirty-one, as Fahnstock's assistant. I remember the Adelwarth case so clearly for a special reason. He came at the beginning of a complete change in my thinking, one that led me, in the decade following Fahnstock's death, to cut back my psychiatric practice more and more, and eventually to give it up altogether. Since mid May 1969 — I shall soon have been retired for fifteen years — I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective. You will have seen that the Samaria is now deserted. Giving it up was the step I had to take in order to free myself from any involvement in life. I do not expect anyone can really imagine the pain and wretchedness once stored up in this extravagant timber palace, and I hope all this misfortune will gradually melt away now as it falls apart. For a while Dr Abramsky said nothing, and merely gazed out into the distance. It is true, he said at length, that Ambrose Adelwarth was not committed into our care by any relative, but came to us of his own free will. Why he came here remained a mystery to me for a long time, and he never talked about it. Fahnstock diagnosed profound senile depression with a tendency to cataleptic seizures, though this was contradicted by the fact that Ambrose showed no sign at all of neglecting his person, as patients in that condition usually do. Quite the contrary, he attached the greatest importance to his appearance. I only ever saw him in a three-piece suit and wearing a flawlessly knotted bow tie. Nonetheless, even when he was simply standing at the window looking out he always gave the impression of being filled with some appalling grief. I do not think, said Dr Abramsky, that I have ever met a more melancholy person than your great-uncle; every casual utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment (he held himself erect until the end), was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence. At meals — to which he always came, since he remained absolute in matters of courtesy even in his darkest times — he still helped himself, but what he actually ate was no more than the symbolic offerings that were once placed on the graves of the dead. It was also remarkable how readily Ambrose submitted to shock treatment, which in the early Fifties, as I understood only later, really came close to torture or martyrdom. Other patients often had to be frogmarched to the treatment room, said Dr Abramsky, but Ambrose would always be sitting on the stool outside the door at the appointed hour, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for what was in store for him.