Chapter 106 A Sound Body ...
Despite the fact that Dr Kauffmann's manner was polite and professional,
Erika's knees wobbled slightly as she rose from the bed upon his request. She
felt sure that she had been examined by doctors before, but even so she turned
away from Kauffmann shyly as she slipped the pale green nightgown off of her
rounded shoulders. The frilly garment had fallen to her hips before she
realized that she was standing obliquely in front of the mirror. When she
raised her eyes, they found Dr Kauffmann's dark eyes in the glassy reflection.
She watched him watching her for a moment. His gaze wase fixed on the
smooth skin of her bare, tapering bare back, but he looked at her body not with
the eyes of a doctor, nor even with the eyes of a lecher, but rather with the
suppressed excitement of a connoisseur who has come across a work of art of
indescribable beauty. His lips were parted as if in wonder and he seemed to be
holding his breath.
His admiring demeanor helped her overcome her shyness and she let the
nightgown slip to the floor, watching with a secret smile as Kauffmann's eyes
watched its gentle descent, as it slid slowly downward over her hips, her
buttocks and her bare legs.
Then she turned to look over her shoulder at him, and with the merest hint
of coquetry in her voice, said, "Well, Doctor?"
"Er, yes," Kauffmann stammered, and then he stepped forward to check to
see how Erika's injuries were healing. Her body was young and strong and
remarkably fit, as if she had recently been through a vigorous regimen of
physical exercise. In the days since Schumacher had come across her, cloaked
and unconscious, on the doorstep of the consulate, the dozens of marks on her
body had grown fainter with each passing day.
When he had first examined her, several days ago, Daniel Kauffmann had
been startled by the fact that the beautiful young blonde seemed to have beaten
with a veritable arsenal of different implements, judging by the different size
and shape and depth of her various of her cuts and bruises. Odder still, on
that first morning there had been clear imprints of human hands on her flesh,
particularly on her breasts. But the finger-marks had been surprisingly small,
as if it had been a woman or child who had gripped her flesh so forcefully as
to leave lasting marks. He had yet to come up with any reasonable explanation
for that odd circumstance.
Dr. Kauffmann felt Erika wince as his practiced hands touched the most
sensitive areas on her back and bottom and thighs. Marks that had been scarlet
weals and purplish bruises a few days earlier were now only faintly discolored.
The powder he had give her to add to her bath yesterday seemed to have expedited
the healing process as well. He applied a cooling salve to the most severe of
the weals, most of which appeared to have been inflicted by a cane or rod of
some sort, and then asked his patient to turn around.
Erika slowly turned toward him, modestly lowering her right hand to
cover the blonde triangle that guarded her pubic area, and raising her left to
partly conceal the provocative swell of her breasts. Daniel Kauffmann examined
the vestigial marks on her thighs carefully, and then those on her flanks and
belly, before gently moving Erika's left hand away from her breasts.
Erika flushed slightly, feeling her flesh pinken with embarrassment.
She knew that the doctor had treated her before, and had surely seen and touched
her nude body, but he had never done so while she had been fully conscious. She
winced again as his hand traced the marks on her firm young breasts, while his
eyes narrowed in concentration.
From the first moment he had seen her, Daniel Kauffmann had concluded
that Erika's tormentor or tormentors had stripped her naked before beating her.
Her lack of clothing under the dark cloak in which Schumacher had found her had
suggested as much, but the nature of her injuries had removed all doubt. The
nature and number of the now-faded weals on her breasts also suggested that
sexual obsession, had been the principal motive for the perpetrator's savagery.
This was no crime of random violence or ordinary spousal abuse. Whoever had
beaten Erika Weiss had been in the grip of a sexual fury, one that sought, it
seemed, to punish this remarkably attractive young woman for her beauty. And
yet, puzzlingly, her face remained as fresh and unmarked as when she had been a
pig-tailed schoolgirl back home.
********
Back in Vienna he and the young colleague that he had mentioned to Erika
earlier, had spent endless hours in the coffee shops of that distant capital,
sometimes playing chess long into the night for a friendly stake, sometimes
discussing the peculiar workings of the human mind, a subject which fascinated
both of them. His friend had maintained that carnal impulses were at the root
of much human conduct and that, and that obsessions, sexual and otherwise,
accounted for many of the otherwise inexplicable aspects of human behavior.
Kauffmann, like many young men of his age, had rather more interest than
first-hand experience in sexual matters, and, together he and his friend had
studied the writings of the notorious Frenchman, de Sade, and they had even, on
one occasion, shared coffee and strudel in a secluded corner of a cafe with
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the brilliantly literate but slightly unstable author
of "Venus in Furs". After seeing that his two interlocutors were serious
students of the human passions, the Galician author had unburdened himself and
spoken freely, albeit in a hushed whisper, of his unusual need to be dominated
by women.
All of these discussions had heightened Kauffmann's interest in the
subject of sexual obsession, and he had read everything he could get his hands
on that concerned itself, however remotely, with that esoteric subject. But all
of his research had still not really prepared him for the livid marks that had
marred the peaches-and-cream perfection of Erika Weiss's stunning body when he
had first examined her.
********
Erika's skin fluttered gently and she shivered slightly as the doctor's
hands touched the softness of her breasts. It seemed to him that her breasts,
which were still painfully tender, seemed to have suffered a disproportionate
share of the mistreatment meted out by her attackers. Kauffmann's well-trained
eye noted that some of the marks resulting from her cruel flagellation seemed to
wrap themselves around the curves of her full breasts, as if they had been
delivered by a whip with some elasticity, while others sliced across the upper
surfaces of her pale, faintly blue-veined breasts at a tangent, as if inflicted
by a more inflexible instrument, such as a rod or cane. When they had first
discovered Erika, one of the lacerations on her left breast had been tinged with
dark crimson, while a thicker trickle of blood seeped from an even deeper gash
on her right breast. Two of the nastiest streaks had fallen just above and
below her pink nipples, leaving little doubt that the cane-wielder had targeted
those sensitive buds - and had delivered a number of blows with devastating
accuracy.
Lifting her left breast gently, Kauffmann saw that there were two marks
along its undercurve. While several of the marks on her breasts had clearly
been inflicted by blows delivered at a downward angle, the dark streaks on the
soft undersides of her creamy breasts tended to confirm his forensic conclusion
that at least one of the guilty parties had been considerably shorter than this
beautiful young woman. Unless, that is, she had been coerced into a very
unusual position.
Erika began to feel more and more uncomfortable as Kauffmann examined her
breasts with meticulous care, as if he were mentally cataloguing each blow with
minute detail. Finally he finished and took a seat on the bed and gently moved
her right hand away from its defensive position in front of her golden-thatched
pubic mound.
While it had immediately been obvious, when they had discovered her, that
she had been sexually assaulted by her captor or captors, there seemed to have
been no dangerous physical injuries to this part of her body. Her genitalia
were slightly bruised and inflamed, but nothing more. Kauffmann had given her
a more thorough gynecological inspection upon first treating her, and had done
what he could to reduce the risk of pregnancy.
Finally the meticulous physician lowered his hands to his knees with an air
of finality, which Erika took to mean that she was free to slip into her gown
again. She bent down to pick it up, blushingly conscious of how the motion
emphasized the fullness of her breasts, just as he reached for the gown to hand
it to her.
As he did so, their heads bumped together and they exchanged pained smiles.
Then, while Erika donned the thin gown, Kauffmann apologized for his clumsiness
with good grace and continued on. "You are improving each day, Lorelei," he
said, using the name he had given her. "Within a few days all but two or three
of those abrasions and contusions should be fully healed. In a week, perhaps a
little more, no one will be able to tell that you have had such an unfortunate
experience."
He stood up from the bed, gesturing for her to take his place and as she
did so with an easy, graceful movement, he went on. "Tell me. Has anything
else come back to you since we spoke yesterday?"
"No, not really," Erika began in a soft voice. "But ..."
"Yes?"
"Well, last night, I had another strange dream ..."
"Yes ... go on."
Kauffmann listened to her with rapt attention, occasionally interrupting to
pose a question, while Erika blushingly recounted the horrific happenings of
her strange nocturnal vision -- floating helplessly on the mountain lake, the
bizarre banquet, and the peculiar tale of the gnome with the whip. She included
as many details of her surroundings as she could remember, passing quickly over
the more lurid aspects of her nightmare.
"Interesting, interesting. Your ability to remember these details confirms
my impression that you have suffered no brain damage whatever during your
ordeal, Lorelei. You have not lost your ability to remember; it is just that
shock and fear have taken from you the desire to remember. Your amnesia is what
my learned friend in Vienna used to refer to as a 'defense mechanism'; you have
repressed the terrible memory in order to spare yourself the pain of
recollection. In most cases, we have found, people are able to compartmentalize
that repression, to isolate certain memories and bury them deeply in a secret
place in their mind. But in your case, the incident was so frightful, the
thought of it so overpowering, that your memory seems to have shut down
entirely. At least as regards the events of the last few years."
Erika nodded uncertainly.
"Forgive me," the doctor went on, "for asking you to confront these
terrible memories. But one of the reasons I administered the tincture of
morphine, was to induce such dreams. Somewhere in them, I'm sure, is hidden the
key to your past, and to your identity." He turned toward the window and looked
out over the city, taking in the crowded confusion of Shanghai in a single
glance, and then he turned back toward the bed. "Can you remember anything else
from your dream? Anything at all?"
Erika's brow wrinkled in concentration. "Y-yes. There was one other thing
- or perhaps it was just my imagination. It's ... it's probably nothing."
She paused pensively, but Doctor Kauffmann gestured for her to continue.
"Perhaps, perhaps not. The slightest detail may prove to be immensely
important."
"Well, as I told you the little man was just about to strike me with the
whip ..." she paused, as the doctor's eyes narrowed slightly. "You must think
I've read too many fairy tales," she said with a sheepish smile, feeling a
little foolish to be telling this linguistically-gifted physician about a
character who was probably no more real than Rumplestiltskin.
"No, not at all, Lorelei. Go on. It is important that you tell me
everything."
"As I was saying, he lashed me across the back. Hard. And I screamed, or
rather I tried to scream, but it was not my voice that cried out in pain. And
then I woke up, or I think I did, and heard a man's say, 'Schweig!' - Silence!"
She looked at Daniel Kauffmann confusedly. "But it's all so mixed up. I'm not
sure where my dream left off, if it left off at all. Sometimes," she said
sadly, "I think this is all a horrible dream."
Kauffmann's eyes had narrowed, but were both dark and bright at once as he
considered the import of Erika's words for a moment.
"I see ... I see," he said at last. "You have given me much to think
about today, fraulein. Get some rest, now. And we will continue our course of
treatment this afternoon."
