Arthur hadn’t needed to be asked twice to take on the job. ‘If I said no, I would feel as if I was playing truant from school,’ he had said to Hinda, and his sister had replied, ‘No, Arthur, what you’re playing truant from is life.’
The journey was quick today, and in Heiden he even had time to call in at the Schützengarten for half an hour. His Zurich dialect sounded exotic in Appenzell, and when he ordered a coffee he was immediately marked down as an outsider. Here they drank beer at all times of day, or a nice glass of red wine.
Two pipe-smoking men were sitting at the regulars’ table talking about politics. They were united in their noisy conviction that Hitler wouldn’t survive for long in Germany. He had picked a fight with international Jewry, and that was always a mistake.
On the steep road that led from the village to the children’s home Arthur drove too quickly and nearly missed the entrance.
Fräulein Württemberger, the director of the home, was already waiting for him. Her little office was furnished with two over-full shelves of books, like a study. ‘I came to Switzerland with nothing but a box of books,’ she liked to say, and did nothing to dispel the impression that she had voluntarily left much more valuable things behind in Germany to save her library. She was what Chanele would have called ‘a late girl’, in this case an academically late girl. She liked to slip into conversations the fact that she had sat at Heidegger’s feet as a philosophy student, and although her great master had later become a member of the Nazi Party and rector of ‘Führeruniversität Freiburg’, she continued to defend him. ‘Freiburg is the only university where books were never burned,’ she said, continuing to defend him in the face of all objections, taking from her shelf, as her definitive proof, what was probably her most precious possession, a personally signed copy of the Yearbook of Philosophy and Phenomonological Research from 1927, with the first part of the famous treatise on Being and Time.
Fräulein Württemberger loved books significantly more than she did people, because people refused to fit into any rational system, instead rebelliously insisting on their own unclassifiable individuality. The fact that she had taken the job in the Wartheim at all she saw as a sacrifice of the kind that emigrants often have to make. In her introductory speech she had treated the well-meaning ladies from the Women’s Association with such polysyllabic contempt that they saw her as an experienced pedagogical expert and employed her on the spot.
‘I’d expected you earlier,’ she said by way of greeting. With a disparaging expression, as if the ritual of a handshake were far too intimate, she held out her fingertips. ‘Chewed nails,’ thought Arthur, as he did every time. ‘She wouldn’t let the children get away with that.’ Fräulein Württemberger withdrew her hand straight away, as one takes a fragile object from a clumsy child, and ran her hand in a nervous gesture over the severely tied bun on the back of her head. She was looking for unruly strands of hair like a prison warder for escaped prisoners.
‘There are four today.’ Fräulein Württemberger said it as reproachfully as if Arthur were personally responsible for this unfitting high state of illness among the children of the Women’s Association. As always, she hadn’t offered him a chair. Arthur doubted whether anyone had ever been allowed to sit in the precisely arranged visitor’s armchair in front of her desk, just as he sometimes suspected that the glasses in Fräulein Württemberger’s round spectacles were made of clear glass, and had the sole purpose of making the director of the children’s home seem even more intellectual than she did already.
There was no separate consulting room in the home; even if there had been room for one, it wouldn’t have been wasted on the Women’s Association children. As long as the little patients were not bed-bound, they had to turn up in an orderly line — ‘No talking!’ — outside the ironing room on the second floor and wait for the doctor there. The big table, on which linen sheets and pillow-cases were usually laid, served as the examination couch, and if the children had to get undressed, their clothes ended up in a laundry basket. A whiff of soap-flakes hung in the air, and gave the place, otherwise so unsuited for consultations, a suggestion of antiseptic cleanliness.
‘Consultation’ was, however, a very euphemistic term for a process in which the children were not really consulted about anything at all. Fräulein Württemberger insisted on being present during every examination, and on answering Arthur’s questions herself.
‘He’s so clumsy,’ she complained about a little boy who had cut deep into the ball of his left thumb while peeling potatoes. ‘I’ve shown him ten times how to hold a knife, but he simply refuses to understand it.’
The boy did not contradict her, and did not cry when the gaping wound was cleaned with iodine. Only when Arthur bent over to him as he stitched up the wound did he say timidly, ‘I’m left-handed.’
‘Is that why you cut yourself?’
‘When I use my right hand I can’t really…’
He got no further than that. ‘There is one pretty little hand, and one ugly little hand,’ Fräulein Württemberger cut in. Martin Heidegger himself could not have delivered the axiom with greater conviction. ‘A pretty one and an ugly one. You must learn that, or you’ll never come to anything in life.’
Arthur secretly winked at the little boy to say to him, ‘You don’t need to take things so seriously.’ But the little boy didn’t react to the gesture, he just said very politely, ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ and left the room.
Arthur knew the second patient already. She had — ‘Because you always run, rather than walking like a sensible person!’ — broken her arm a few weeks previously, and Köbeli, the janitor of the Wartheim, who was slightly mentally handicapped but a skilled craftsman, had sawed open the plaster on Arthur’s telephoned instructions that morning. The fracture had healed without a hitch.
‘I hope you kept the plaster as a souvenir?’ asked Arthur. He remembered the other children immortalising themselves on it with signatures and little drawings.
‘We place great value on hygiene,’ Fräulein Württemberger, rather than the girl, replied. ‘We have of course thrown it away.’
Next he was presented with a boy who had, in Arthur’s opinion, nothing at all wrong with him. He had just recently started wetting the bed — ‘At the age of eleven!’ — and although Fräulein Württemberger had done her pedagogical best to prevent such a thing — she made him wash the soiled sheet with his own hands every day, and as it dried on the line, he had to stand next to it while the other children laughed at him — even though she had done everything, therefore, that one might reasonably have expected of her, he simply wouldn’t stop. Fräulein Württemberger, who considered all psychology to be unscientific, insisted that the bad habit, regardless of fear or loneliness, must have a physiological reason, and repeated the formulation three times, as people do when they are proud to have understood a specialist term from a field alien to them. After a lengthy discussion, Arthur could do nothing more for the boy than prescribe him a weak sedative, even though he knew from his own experience that nightmares cannot be banished by sleeping pills.
‘But there really is something wrong with the last one,’ said Fräulein Württemberger, as if half-severed fingers and broken arms were not accidents, but merely annoying malfunctions. ‘She’s coughing blood.’ And she added in a people-are-always-causing-me-problems voice, ‘I was only told about it a few days ago.’