There was something wrong inside her; she felt something slip and swell. She hurried into the bathroom and was sick.
She wrote in her notebook, her hand flying over the pages. The Treaty of Vienna what year? reinstated the Savoyard Kings and gave them suzerainty over the city of. Adelaide of Susa married Otho son of Humbert the White-Handed. His hands are mottled, old. Suzerainty over. How would they not be when the rest of him is old? The child with no face. No the doll had no Jace. Emanuele Filiberto the Iron-Headed. White hand iron head no face. Father. I am writing down these things so you will know. It is because of you that 1 am here. I asked you how to live and you said not to live but only act. And laughed. I do not know what to do. All the time I feel I am Jailing. He will not catch me. The ancient marquisates of Ivrea and Monferrato, iron mountain does that mean ferrous ferrous, at the foot of the iron mountains the mountains the mountains
He asked her what she was writing, tried to read over her shoulder. He sounded like her father, the way he spoke, teasing her, making fun of her. He imitated her accent, called her his colleen, his Cathleen Ni Houlihan, his wild Irish girl. She saw herself lying down under his hand, docile as… as something, she did not know what. She devised ways of making him attend her. She saw herself as a puppet, with lacquered cheeks and fixed mad grin, popping up in front of him, look at me, look at me! She told him about Otho and Adelaide. He only laughed. The weeks went on, the summer burgeoned. The voices spoke to her about him, always about him, now. His hands were beautiful, she was afraid of them, those long, fine fingers. Again and again he asked her what Max Schaudeine had told her, demanding to know. She lied to him, said she knew nothing more about him than that he had written those things for the newspaper. Then he would look at her, thinking, thinking, his jaw working. He was afraid of her, she could see it. But she would not harm him. No, she would not harm him. Harlequin.
Many years ago, in America, I found myself stalled for a couple of semesters on a high, snowy campus way out west. I was waiting to take up the first of what would prove to be a pleasingly ascending succession of posts at Arcady, and had been invited to fill the interval at Frozen Peaks, where what was to be required of me in the way of work would be happily small and the remuneration seductively large. Magda liked the place, its bleak Slavic prospects, its white birches and blue birds, and we might have stayed if I had let her have her way. We had been there a week, huddling against the cold in a rented, grey-painted wood-frame house with a swing on the porch and a big tree in the garden scrambled all over by beady-eyed squirrels, when we were invited by the President of the college to a party celebrating the end, or the beginning, of some part of the university year – for all the time I spent in the academic New World I never quite got the hang of its rituals. It was a not disagreeable occasion. The President lived in a fine old colonial house on a hill above the campus. There was an enormous log fire in the entrance hall that gave off cracks like gunshots, and we were greeted by a soft-spoken elderly negro in a white jacket and white gloves bearing silver mugs of steaming and, as I was quickly to discover, extremely strong punch. Magda and I knew no one, but it did not matter. People kept coming up and talking to us, in that breezy and yet intimate, indeed faintly suggestive, way peculiar to college people and their spouses in the more out-of-the way necks of the American wood. Polka-dotted bow ties were much in evidence, and the dresses the women were wearing diat year were tight in the bosom and full in the skirts, and after the third mug of punch and a week of breathing the thin mountain air, I was overcome by the blurred sense of having stumbled into die midst of a flock of brightly plumed, cacophonous birds, the females of which all seemed plumply, pinkly available.
President Frost – how he loved his title – was a big, rangy, robust Swede with a shock of flaxen hair and an open smile and a handshake diat could have cracked walnuts. He welcomed me with warm indifference and introduced me to his wife, a handsome, large-boned woman in shimmering scarlet who for some reason thought I was Russian, and remarked widi an apologetic laugh that she was sure the bitty old snowfalls in this part of the world could not compare with the boreal blizzards to which I must be accustomed. She immediately took charge of Magda, whom she somewhat resembled, while the President plucked me by the sleeve and led me off into a corner of the room where, as he said, we could be out of die way of all diis flapdoodle. He spoke of this and that in a practised, easy way, rocking relaxedly on his heels and looking out over the heads of his guests – we were of a height, the two of us – like a scout scanning the mountaintops, not waiting for a contribution from me, and probably not listening to himself, eidier. Then he paused and turned widi his woodsman's lopsided grin and looked me speculatively up and down. "Let me give you a piece of advice, son," he said. "You're a fine-looking young fella, despite your war-wounds, and I don't doubt half the female students here will fall for you. But go careful, and remember: never screw a nut." We were both silent for a moment – what could I possibly have said? – and he went on looking into my face with an admonitory twinkle, then gave a great plosive laugh and, having driven a punch playfully into my shoulder, linked his arm in mine and said we should go and join the ladies.
I have been looking into Mandelbaum's Syndrome. It was not easy to find information on, for Mr. Mandelbaum is choosy, and comes to call only on a select, misfortunate few. The malady will present itself in disparate forms, which makes it difficult to identify with certainty, but there are a number of telltale signs which are constant. The seizures, presaged by their aura, most commonly a phantom odour or perfume, are characteristic, and frequently they lead the physician mistakenly to diagnose epilepsy. Schizophrenia too is a common misdiagnosis, although there are some authorities who consider the syndrome to be no more – no more! – man a rarefied form of that deplorable affliction. In Doctor Vander's opinion, Mr. Mandelbaum occupies a redoubt three-quarters of the way toward the bad end of the scale between manic depression and full-blown dementia. The patient will suffer delusions, hear voices, manifest compulsive behaviour, and will be prey to bouts of paranoia, sometimes of an extreme nature. I am quoting here. There is no cure. Palliatives have been tried, Oread, for example, and the lithium carbonate – based Empusa, and even the various Lémures and Lamia, with discouragingly poor results. The prognosis for those inflicted with the syndrome is not a promising one, although long-term statistics are scarce, since sufferers rarely survive – rarely permit themselves to survive, that is – into old or even middle age.