option doctor and patient may in consultation choose to take up or not. In any case, you’d hardly have had time to write something yet. You’ve only just arrived!’ Before I can say anything the wine arrives. She gives me an almost conspiratorial smirk. Despite the earlier tension I must admit I’m beginning to enjoy Ms Stearn’s company, even if she’s clearly determined to remain in control.
She raises her glass with obvious relish. ‘Your health!’ In reply I lift mine. Her joyfulness is contagious.
‘What a strange book you wrote all those years ago, Professor!’ she says. ‘ The Fictional I! I enjoyed reading it, even if I didn’t agree with a lot of what you were saying. I mean, if we think of ourselves as fiction, what then becomes of reality?’ To my relief this time she doesn’t laugh. ‘You haven’t changed your mind about that, by any chance? As I say, you wrote all that a long time ago.’ ‘No, I haven’t,’ I assure her. ‘To me, what people call reality is the ultimate fiction.’
So she’s done her homework. Not that it’s difficult to gather that kind of information from the Internet. It’s time for my knights. ‘But isn’t that the kind of thing Humanitas believes in?’ I ask innocently. ‘You’re right, I haven’t written much yet. But why have I been asked write about my life, even if it’s only an option? Or is that merely what you’d call occupational therapy, to give patients something to do while they’re here?’
She looks at me thoughtfully. But instead of responding to my purely tactical move she says: ‘Professor of literature! Isn’t that a strange title — a bit like professor of love?’
What brought that on? Before I can ask her, the food arrives. The waiters’ timing seems amazingly coordinated to my hostess’s control of our dialogue.
We continue to ask questions and not receive replies, or at least not the kind of answers we’re hoping for. It’s a staccato kind of conversation, abrupt but not without a certain compulsive rhythm. Or, if I can stick to the chess analogy, a game of more than one front — but isn’t that the true nature of chess? It may be all about the King, but only because he’s a captive, unable to move more than one step forward or back. It’s the Queen’s game really. Ms Stearn is in charge of all possible moves. I’m tempted to add, seeing she brought it up, that literature and love also operate on more than one front. But I have no desire to get into a discussion about that.
‘Why Australia?’ she asks.
‘It was as far away as I could get,’ I say. She’s clearly convinced it’s another attempt to be evasive. In fact, it’s the most precise answer I can give. If there’s any dodging, it’s my refusal to go into details.
‘How did your parents react to your leaving?’ She allows me to finish chewing my veal.
‘It was because of them I left.’ At this point she just raises an eyebrow, rather self-consciously, I believe, a gesture I daresay she’s practised in front of the mirror. All women seem to possess certain body expressions consciously or unconsciously designed to turn into signals, a kind of sign language conveying surprise, amusement, admiration or contempt. With Ms Stearn I have no doubt they’re well rehearsed. I think it’s time to counter her inquisitiveness with a few questions of my own.
Over coffee I ask her about the nature of the position she’s holding at Humanitas. This time it’s she who isn’t answering, at least not openly and directly. When she refers to herself as a hostess I’m tempted to upset her with subtle references to high-class brothels. Strangely, despite all this sparring and parrying I find the dinner with her quite pleasant. It’s possible we actually like each other. Our playful encounter may in fact be no more than a diversion – from what?
Later, alone in room forty, I realise I would have liked to tell Ms Stearn at least some of the things that brought me here. Did she sense that? I don’t know why we consider birth the beginning of our lives and start talking about that first up. It is of course biologically. But the really important turning points in one’s life are, I think, certain events that helped us become what we are and therefore determined the future. Like most people I have lots of childhood memories, but many of them tend to become mythologised. It’s what family life does to us. Stories are told over and over again, and each time they become more and more eccentric, grotesque or amazing. They take on a life of their own, so much so that the person talked about can no longer recognise himself in what they say about him. Or her.
Truth is, this isn’t the first time I’ve suffered a so-called nervous breakdown and the doctors don’t know what to do about it. That’s because they didn’t and still don’t know what really happened. Now, lying safely in this luxurious and comfortable bed, I can ‘talk’ about things without using words. There’s darkness and silence around me, but in images as clear as daylight I see again what happened when I was a boy of thirteen. It’s a language I never speak in when I’m with others. Maybe the childhood years I spent sharing my deaf brother’s sign language have conditioned me to retain those sights, the scenes of fear and loathing that have remained with me all my life. As on so many other nights the images come like an old black-and-white film from the 1950s, invade my head, keep me awake, return to curse and haunt me with one aim: to deny who I have become and why as a result of these images I have to suffer periodic breakdowns. There are pictures and reflections that won’t go away. I know they contain the answer doctors, friends and lovers, but also those who tried to destroy me, wanted to hear. In desperate self-defence I have for years managed to create anti-images to rescue myself from deadly evil, the way antibodies attack and destroy lethal substances in the blood. But my images don’t last as long as the resilient, murderous vision that has stayed with me for as long as I’ve lived.
Once, in a lecture on literary imagination, I made use of Joseph Conrad’s statement in A Personal Record: ‘Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life’. I don’t think I could still talk about that with the same confidence as I did then.
Running away is not what most people think. It may be desperate but it’s not cowardly. What’s horrible and painful is that when the pictures conjure up their nightmare I don’t know that I ever managed to escape, in the end. Whenever I relive the images in the cellar and cheap, dirty hotels there’s no flight, no getaway. And the men encouraged by my mother still look exactly the same as they did in 1953.
Next morning I wake up as always with a need for redemption. Is my hostility to being sent here for a cure the painful knowledge that once some humans have fallen apart they can’t be put back together again? I’m like a broken piece of china superficially repaired with glue, but if the vase has once been of any value it has now lost its worth forever.
Yet I have experienced reparation if not salvation in my life, for which I am deeply grateful. Australia saved me from a life of squalor and misery. Escaping to Melbourne after completing the school-leaving exam was my path to freedom. It was a complicated escape, difficult to arrange. I had in fact planned to return to America where I’d spent a year as an exchange student when I was sixteen. Having passed the US College Board Aptitude Test, I assumed all I had to do was enrol at a university. But when the enrolment form required my parents’ signature acknowledging they would cover medical expenses in case of their son’s illness or other emergencies, they refused to do so.
The year before I completed grammar school had been a particularly difficult time. For five years my mother had forced me to become her housekeeper after my older brother had left home, while Claus was attending his boarding school for the deaf in Schleswig and my afterthought sister played in the backyard and on the
