FICTION
Dr. Tillmann's Consultant: A Scientific Romance
by Cherry Wilder
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The season was late spring but the weather in the Alps was chill and
changeable. Rosalind drove up from the station wrapped in a treasured Russian
coat that reached to her ankles. She was exhausted from journeying, drained of
hope. The familiar trees on the avenue filled her with a painful
expectation — Oh Lucas, oh my love! — but she could not help noticing that
the driveway was neglected. A few patients were on the Terrace and she saw at
once that they were veterans: "wounded soldiers."
In the hall she found a village girl mopping the marble floor. A gruff old orderly did not remember her but he became excited when she asked for Dr. Lucas Tilmann.
"The English girl!" he cried. "Are you Rosalind did not like "making herself known" but felt it necessary. "I am Miss Lane, Dr. Tilmann's Verlobte, his betrothed!" she announced. Old Fritz was already hurrying her off to the Oberin, the Matron. He flung open the double doors to the Matron's Parlor and cried out: "She has come! Fraulein Lane, his English girl!" Dr. Daniel, the intern, came toward her with outstretched hands and the new Oberin, rustling from behind her desk, was Sister Luise. Rosalind, trembling, could not hold back any longer: "Oh tell me!" she cried. "What has happened to Lucas Tilmann? Is he here?" "Yes, he is here!" soothed Dr. Daniel, smiling.
"We were to be married! I sent telegrams, letters "Hush! He will be all right!" said the Frau Oberin. "Now that you are here." "I have heard nothing for five years — since 1915!" They sat her down with a reviving little glass of herbal schnapps and began to explain. Lucas Tilmann was a convalescent, one of the "wounded soldiers," discharged seven months ago from an orthopedic ward in Munich; he had lost his left leg at the knee when a field lazaret caught a shell on the Somme.
That was really not all of it, she could see. Dr. Daniel spoke of trauma, from
the battlefield; she first heard from him the English word shell shock.
The former Director sat alone in a darkened room. "Please! I must go to him at once!" Dr. Daniel hurried off to prepare Lucas for a visitor. Rosalind knew that there was still more to tell, concerning the hospital itself; but now that she was alone with the Frau Oberin she blurted out a quite different question and was able to observe the result. "Sister Luise, what has become of the patient in the Annex; what has become of Medvekhin?"
The Frau Oberin gave a puzzled smile. "Well, there is no one up in the chalet
now," she said. "And I don't recall any Russian patient with that name. Rosalind felt a warning chill: she knew better than to protest. Sister Luise had been made to forget. "Who was the last patient up there?" she asked. "Was it Miss Courtney?" "Yes, of course!" said the Frau Oberin. "Such a remarkable recovery! Poor Dr. Tilmann's sleep cure!" "Surely there were two gypsies, up in the clearing, living in their caravan?"
"Yes indeed! Kaspar is still here, working as an orderly, and Marja is in the
kitchen. If anyone asks we say they are Hungarians. Then the Frau Oberin directed Rosalind up the stairs — the lifts were not working. So she came to the rooms in the East Wing that Lucas Tilmann had inherited when his father retired to Switzerland. Dr. Daniel stood at the door of the sitting room motioning her inside with an encouraging smile. She looked into the large room, dark now because of the bright day outside. She saw a figure hunched at a small desk, outlined against the French windows on to the balcony. Rosalind saw her life, her future, her dear love whom she must heal; she rushed into the room and fell on her knees beside Lucas Tilmann. "Is it you?" he whispered. "Is it you?"
"Oh yes!" she said "Oh yes, my dear, my soul. Dr. Daniel closed the door, satisfied, as they embraced. Rosalind asked a question or two and knew that she could not pursue certain subjects. Lucas Tilmann had no memory of Medvekhin; she could not tell if this amnesia was part of an alien command to forget or if it was deepened by his war trauma. Lucas counted his long recovery from the moment of her arrival, but Rosalind knew that it was made possible by his insight into his own case. In no time he was managing the clumsy prosthesis well enough to walk up and down the sitting-room. Then, mastering the confines of the room he set out, battling his agoraphobia, to explore the suite, to stand on the balcony, to plan a descent to the garden, to the village — in particular, an official visit to the picturesque baroque Rathaus: the Burgermeister was in his debt. Lucas no longer owned any part of St. Verena's Hospital. His family's long association with the Russians was regarded as disloyal to the Kaiser while the two Empires were at war. He had been more or less forced to sell his shares to the Town Council of Mariensee. The shares of his Russian partners (who could now be described as White Russians) had simply been confiscated. The Burgermeister's plans to develop St. Verena's as a Luftkurort, a health resort featuring mountain air, were delayed by lack of funds and personnel. The presence of Lucas Tilmann was an embarrassment to the Town Council and the staff of St. Verena's. He was a reminder of past glories, and at the same time a physician who could not heal himself. The Burgermeister, in these circumstances, was able to arrange for a civil marriage, with an English bride, pending a journey to some other country. The two lovers planned their future with a blend of realism and romance which Rosalind thought of as "postwar." After the ceremony in the Town Hall they would drive into Switzerland in the sturdy old Daimler and take their way down into Italy, to Venice, where they would take ship for England. Lucas had money in a Swiss bank account; she had her nest egg in the Bank of England plus a few pieces of jewelry that the Countess had pressed upon her in lieu of salary. The Ostrov family had lost a large part of their fortunes but they were not completely ruined. After the large estates had gone, there remained the small places — the hunting grounds, the horse farm — which could be sold sometimes, before they came into the power of the state. And as for their lives they owed these to Kyril Mihailovitch Azlov, who was in the forefront of the Revolution. When the palace in Moscow was requisitioned he made sure that the family retained comfortable living quarters. Rosalind spoke to him with keen interest about the great meteorite of 1908, believed to have fallen in the region of the Stony Tunguska River. Kyril Mihailovitch had not only rejected his title and made over all his personal fortune to the Cause, he had changed his name. He called himself Erlik, the name he had used to sign his folktales; this name, he told Rosalind, was a Siberian name for the Firegod. When the great meteorite fell down, simple folk said it was the Firegod Erlik, who came to Earth in the guise of a Bear. Comrade Erlik was a Party Member of the second wave, due to be purged about 1936, not long after Dr. Jacob Daniel, the Director of St. Verena's Sanitarium, lost his civil rights and went into exile. Two days before her marriage, before she left St. Verena's forever, Rosalind visited the chalet. The weather was cool but clear with scarves of mist on the upper slopes of the mountains. She set off up the path to the clearing, which was overgrown: the benches were wet, covered with leaves. The horse and the caravan had gone and the icon of St. George had been taken from the wayside shrine. Yet as she climbed the right-hand path toward the chalet she remembered, she had preserved the memory of that joy, that well-being that had streamed out to her. The chalet itself was clean and well-kept; Rosalind went from room to room flinging open the shutters and the windows. She began to weep. Tears slid down her cheeks for the lovers who had shared the narrow bed, for millions dead, for Leonid Ostrov, dead near Vilna. The large back bedroom was quiet and still, with no hint of its former occupant; when she stood at the open window she saw that the path to the higher meadow had been picked out with white stones. Rosalind dried her eyes. She went out of the back door and began to climb up through the pines and the larches, coming into new leaf. When she passed the spring, bubbling in its ancient stone basin, she wrung out a handkerchief in the icy water and wiped her face. She came out into brighter sunshine and turned left, pacing slowly through the long grass at the edge of the round meadow. She found the grave just within the shade of the trees; a network of green had spread over the black earth; some larger stones at the head of the grave formed the letter M. Nearby there was a block of wood, cut from a tree trunk, as if someone else came to sit in this place, as she did now, contemplating the grave. It seemed to Rosalind that nothing had taken place; the story would never be told; no researchers would ever find their way into the subarctic wastes — and that Medvekhin had willed it this way. This impossibly lonely death was an essential act, the contribution of the Akuine race of star-travelers to the history of the world. Presently she heard a voice and saw the gypsy, Kaspar, striding up the path. He was just as he had been, a muscular, jolly man with a piercing glance; she stood up and they shook hands. His smile was melancholy.
"We know who lies here "The woods are full of graves, Miss," he said. "If the grave is marked then Christians will not disturb it." He made the sign of the cross with two fingers like an Old Believer. She had to ask the questions — yes, the Master had passed on in 1915; both Dr. Tilmann and Sister Luise had assisted at this burial on the meadow.
"They have been made to forget. Kaspar laughed aloud. "Oh we've seen it happen many times, Marja and I. He could make any human forget his own mother, just like that, in a breath!" He snapped his fingers. Rosalind hardly questioned the fact that Kaspar and Marja still remembered. She believed it was another odd class thing. Medvekhin knew his true servants: at the last he protected his story, in what was almost a reflex action, from his doctor and his nurse. "And would this loss of memory last — forever?" she asked. "I asked that question myself," replied Kaspar, frowning. "And our dear Master said that memories might return." This was all the reassurance that she received and it had to be enough. She bade farewell to Medvekhin and to the human being who had been pressed into alien service. She walked down the mountainside through the trees, passing through light and shadow. She thought of England, projected her thoughts into that future time, that future moment in the English woodland when she would bring out the black notebook and present it to her husband. [ THE END ] |
This story copyright © 1997 by Cherry Wilder. Used by permission. All rights reserved.