She was in the dingy bathroom on the landing, I found her when I tried to open the door and something was stopping it. She lay in a huddle with her knees drawn up to her chest and one bare arm flung out. She was wearing her plastic raincoat over her slip. One of her bare feet was wedged against the door, I had to hold my breath and squeeze sideways through the opening. When I knelt beside her she stirred and gave a fluttering, vaguely protesting sigh, like a sleeping child unwilling to be wakened from a dream. Her hands were icy, she must have been lying here for hours. There was a blue bruise turning yellow in the hollow of her elbow.
— Adele, I said. Adele.
It sounded foolish.
I gathered her up in my arms. She had wet herself. She was unexpectedly heavy, a chill, clammy limpness that I could hardly hold. Her raincoat squeaked and crackled when I lifted her. I got my foot around the door to open it, but lost my balance and swayed off to one side, like a caracoling horseman, and for a moment I was trapped there, with one foot in the air and my shoulder pressed to the wall. A tap was dripping in the handbasin. The window behind the lavatory was open, down in the garden a blackbird piped a repeated, liquid note, that too was like water dripping. When I turned my head a magnified eye, my own, loomed at me in a shaving mirror. I looked at things around me, that tap, an old razor, a mug with a toothbrush standing in it, their textures blurred and thickened in the ivory light of morning, and I felt for a second I was being shown something, it flashed out at me slyly and then was gone, like a coin disappearing in a conjuror’s palm.
I got her to the front room and put her on the sofa, propped against the armrest. Her head kept slipping down. I must have stood there for a long time, transfixed, just looking at her. Then I strode into the kitchen and back again, to the bedrooms, wringing my hands, looking for I don’t know what. I brought her ragged fur coat and wrapped it around her. I think I was talking to her all the while, I recall dimly the dull blare of a voice in the background, cajoling and hectoring, it can only have been mine. I recall too the Parisian delicacy of the spring morning, with faint traffic sounds and the clatter of pigeons, a puff of white cloud in the corner of the window, that big pale parallelogram of sunlight on the floor at my feet.
Then the ambulance arrived, and a curious, dreamy lentor took hold of everything. I suppose I expected a great commotion, sirens and the screech of brakes, boots on the stairs, shouts. Instead there was a polite ring on the bell, and two cheerful, burly men in uniform came in, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. They had an air of having known exactly what they would find. They went to work calmly, one wrapping Adele in a red blanket while the other unrolled the stretcher. Then together they lifted her deftly from the sofa, and fastened a leather strap across her shoulders and another across her knees, and one of them leaned down and brushed a damp strand of hair from her cheek. She was so pale, so peaceful now, like an effigy of a martyred child. Down in the street the radio in the ambulance muttered at intervals. They set the stretcher on the pavement while they got the back doors open. Adele woke up and looked about her wildly. She clutched my sleeve.
— What have you done? she said in a hoarse, weak wail. Oh, what have you done …
They put her in the ambulance then and took her away. In the building opposite that telephone was ringing again.
There was only one hospital she could go to, of course. I walked, silent as memory, along those familiar corridors. All was still. There were moments like that, I remembered them, when things would go quiet suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the busiest morning, and calm would spread like ether through the wards. A radio somewhere was playing softly, and down in the kitchens a skivvy was singing. They told me Adele was sleeping, that’s how they said it, she’s sleeping now, as if sleep here were a special and expensive kind of therapy. And they gave me a cold look. But when I came back that evening she was awake, sitting up straight in a white bed, like an eager bird tethered to a perch, with her thin hands clenched on the counterpane and her neck stretched out. The room smelled of milk and violets, her smell. Felix was there, and Professor Kosok. The professor sat with his legs crossed, drumming his fingers on his knee and looking at the ceiling. I paused in the doorway.
— Here’s bonny sweet Robin, said Felix. What, no sweetmeats for the fair maid, no flowers fresh with dew?
Adele’s eyes were feverishly lit, and she kept laughing.
— Look at this place, she said, what am I doing here, I’m perfectly all right.
Her gaze slid past me, it would fix on nothing. There was an angry patch of red at the corner of her mouth, she scratched it with her fingernails, scratched and scratched. She was still in her slip, with her fur coat thrown over her shoulders. She had been pulling at her hair, it stuck out, blue-black and gleaming, like a tatter of feathers. Felix spoke to me behind his hand with mock solemnity.
— She is importunate, indeed distract.
He chuckled. Light of evening glowed in the window. Outside was the top of a brick wall, and a flat expanse of roof with a chimney like a ship’s funnel, belching white smoke. The professor shifted on his chair and sighed.
— It’s late, he said to no one in particular. I have to go.
But still he sat there, with eyes upcast, his fingers drumming, drumming. A moment passed, like something being carried carefully through our midst. Then Felix laughed again softly and said:
— Yes, boss, come on, it’s time we went.
At the door the professor hesitated, pretending to search for something in his pockets. He frowned. Adele would not look at him. Felix gave him a playful shove, and winked at me over his shoulder, and then they were gone.
I watched the blown smoke outside. The evening sky was pale. In the distance I could see the faint outlines of mountains. Adele kept her face averted. I tried to touch her hand but she took it away, not hastily, but with firmness, like a child taking away a toy.
— I have no peace, you see, she said. No peace. And what will I do here?
She sighed, and shook her head, with an air of mild annoyance, as if all this were just something that had got in the way of other, infinitely more important matters that now would have to wait.
— I’m sorry, I said.
Distantly in the sky a great flock of birds soared and wheeled, dark flashing suddenly to light as a thousand wings turned as one. Icarus. Adele looked about her vaguely.
— They took away my cigarettes, she said. You’ll have to bring me some.
And for the first time since I had come there she looked at me directly, with that fierce, strabismic stare.
— Won’t you? she said. You’ll have to …
The door behind me opened, I turned, and matron stopped on the threshold and looked at us.
Order, pattern, harmony. Press hard enough upon anything, upon everything, and the random would be resolved. I waited, impatient, in a state of grim elation. I had thrown out the accumulated impedimenta of years, I was after simplicity now, the pure, uncluttered thing. Everywhere were secret signs. The machine sang to me, for was not I too built on a binary code? One and zero, these were the poles. The rushings of spring shook my heart. I could not sleep, I wandered the brightening streets for hours, prey to a kind of joyless hilarity. I was in pain. When I lay down at last, exhausted, watching the sky, the fleeting clouds, a dull, grey ache would lodge in the pit of my stomach, like a grey rat, lodging there. At ashen twilight I would rise, my eyelids burning, and something thudding in my head, and set off for the hospital.