Chapter 101 Memories of Suffering
'Lorelei' woke a few hours later to the soft strains of a piano being
played softly in her room, and the sound of the knob on the door to her room
turning. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a slender young Chinese maid give
the room a final approving glance, before slipping almost soundlessly out of the
room. Erika lay in bed humming under her breath for a minute or two until the
player had finished the short piece.
"That was lovely," Erika complimented the dark-suited player hunched over a
piano on the far side of the room, beneath the portraits of the bushy-whiskered
Emperor and his stern Reichschancellor, Otto von Bismarck. "Schubert, was it
not?"
Daniel Kauffmann lifted his slender fingers from the keyboard and spun
around, smiling. "Yes! 'Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel'. You remind me of her
somehow. It is charming, isn't it? To think that a boy of seventeen could
compose with such sensitivity!" Kauffmann rose from the piano and came toward
the bed. His patient had propped herself up among a sea of peach-colored
pillows and, as he had since the first moment he had set eyes on her, he was
struck by the flawless beauty of Lorelei's complexion, and the golden storm of
blonde hair that cascaded over her rounded shoulders. She seemed unconscious of
the fact that her nightgown had slipped off of her left shoulder, revealing the
upper slope of a creamy breast that still bore the crease of a livid weal.
Struggling manfully to retain his professional decorum and to meet her
troubled gaze, the doctor smiled and said, "I did not mean to wake you, but I
studied in Vienna for a time with a man who has given much thought to the
workings of the mind. It was from him that I got the idea that listening to
familiar music might unlock the key to your memory."
'Lorelei' looked at him sadly. "It is strange that I should remember
Schubert, when I can not remember who I am."
"Your condition is called 'amnesia' - it's a Greek word for loss of
memory."
When Erika gave him a mystified glance, Daniel Kauffmann continued,
warming to his subject as he did so. " They understood the importance of
memory, the ancient Greeks. They believed that there was a river in the
underworld, Lethe, whose waters could induce forgetfulness. They imagined that
among the female Titans, the great beings who had ruled the world before the
dawn of Olympus, was Mnemosyne, or Memory. So magnificent and revered was she
that Zeus himself could not refrain from coupling with her, and together they
fathered the Muses, the sacred offspring who inspired tragedy and comedy, poetry
and dance."
Kauffmann paused, his dark eyes bright with the excitement of a man
speaking on a topic close to his heart. But then, noting the somewhat
bewildered expression on Erika's face, he continued. "Forgive me; we doctors
have been treating the body for two thousand years. We are only just beginning
to treat the mind and my enthusiasm for these new researches sometimes gets the
better of me. My friend in Vienna ... " Then he stopped himself again. "You
see? There I go again. But you don't care about trends in modern medicine, I'm
sure," he said as he took her hand in a friendly way. "You are interested in
your own condition. Actually amnesia is not uncommon among soldiers and others
who have suffered shocking and painful experiences. There were a number of cases
after the war with France in 1870-71. But tell me - Has anything begun to come
back? Have you no recollection of all of how you came to sustain your injuries?
I'm not sure that we have the means to apprehend the guilty, but we could
certainly take our case to such authorities as there are here in Shanghai."
Lorelei leaned back and stared intently at the ceiling for quite a long
time before shaking her head slowly from side to side. "I know it must sound
foolish, but everything is topsy-turvy, chaotic." Her eyes narrowed as she
continued, "I seem to remember a lake, a beautiful lake in the mountains. The
sun was hot, terribly hot. And I was tired... and afraid." Her voice was
little more than a hoarse whisper. "And I seem to remember a house, a small
house - a house of evil. There was ..." and she stopped. "I'm sorry," she said
apologetically. "It's gone. I'm not even sure that it was not a dream." Erika
looked at the doctor sadly, fearful that these fleeting, troubling images would
prove to be of no help in establishing her identity.
Dr Kauffmann had been listening intently, trying to decide whether his
striking young patient's fragmentary recollections were real or fanciful. In
some ways, he thought, it did not matter to her present state of mind. When he
saw that she had finished unburdening herself, he nodded thoughtfully. "Do not
underestimate the meaning of dreams, Lorelei. I truly believe that they hold
great secrets."
Erika Weiss saw that Daniel Kauffmann's dark eyes once again contained the
bright embers of a man discussing a favorite subject.
"When I arrived in Shanghai," he went on, "I attended a lecture given by a
brilliant man, a professor at their university here."
Erika's brow wrinkled as if those words had stirred some deep-seated
memory. She pursed her lips thoughtfully and slowly repeated, "A professor
..."
"Yes," Kauffmann hurried on, "but you could hardly have known of him. He
was a classical scholar, but something of a recluse, aside from his duties at
the university. But, as I was saying, during his lecture Professor Leung
recounted how Confucius had taught that men could master their emotions by
exercising the full powers of their minds. He spoke of many things that night,
but I was intrigued by the story he told of a man named Chuang Tsu, who, upon
waking from a dream, said, "I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I
was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."
"Think of it!" the young doctor rattled on excitedly. "Two millennia ago
this Chuang Tsu had inserted a key into the lock of our cabinet of dreams. And
still no one has turned that key. But soon we will. My friend in Vienna thinks
..."
Dr. Kauffmann, seeing that his patient had drifted off into her own
thoughts, and was paying little heed to his academic ramblings, stopped himself.
"Forgive me, I must be boring you."
"A professor..." Erika repeated, knitting her brow in concentration. Then
she shook her head sadly. "No, doctor, not at all. It is not you who are
boring me. It is my inability to remember that must be tedious for you."
Erika's sky-blue eyes were despondent. "I fear that I am too tired at the
moment to fully understand such things. Tell me," she asked, brightening, "Why
are "you" in China?" She smiled forlornly. "I might as well ask since neither
of us has any idea why "I'm" in China."
"As far as yourself, fraulein, do not fear. It may take some time, but I
think your memory will return." He frowned. " I only hope that when it does,
the memories will not prove to be too painful. You must have had a dreadful
experience to cause you to repress your memory so completely."
"As for me," Kauffmann continued, as he strode toward a window and threw
the curtains back, allowing bright sunlight to stream into the bedroom, "I
studied both linguistics and medicine back in Vienna. I have a bit of a gift
for languages, and I wanted to see something of the world before settling into
a medical practice. So I induced a well-connected friend to mention my name to a
colleague in the German foreign office there as someone who might be useful as a
translator. My Chinese is hardly perfect, but few in Germany speak it at all.
And Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and Russia all have interests in China, so
the vice consul keeps me quite busy. In fact, I have hardly had an occasion
to open my medical bag until you showed up on our doorstep a few days ago."
"I am grateful that you were here," Erika said with a warm smile. "You
have been very kind." Then she lay back down, wincing. "I just wish that
everything didn't hurt."
"The sedative I gave you last night is probably wearing off. I'll give you
another injection later on. But first, I have arranged for you to have a bath.
In fact, the maid had just finished drawing it a moment before you woke."
Kauffmann reached into a pocket of his waistcoat and withdrew a vial containing
a greenish powder. "Here," he said, offering her the little bottle. "Sprinkle
this in the bath water. An elderly Chinese woman who helps with the laundry
here, pressed it upon me after I sprained my ankle a few months ago, and it
seemed to reduce the swelling overnight. Then, while I was still limping around,
I slashed my hand open trying to slice a roll. Oy! There was blood from here
to the Forbidden City it seemed, and my hand hurt like blazes. But I couldn't
use an opiate (they're easy enough to find here, of course) because I had to
translate later that afternoon. But once I had stopped the bleeding, I soaked
my hand in water to which I had added this powder - it may be essence of
Himalayan yak dung for all I know - and the pain subsided quite quickly and the
wound healed faster than I could have imagined. I tell you, the Chinese have
secrets that the leading doctors in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris would trade their
best scalpels for. Or would, if they had a proper respect for the wisdom of the
east."
Daniel Kauffmann saw that Lorelei was trying desperately to keep herself
from laughing, amused by his story, but not wishing to offend his amour propre.
"So you think that my tragedies are amusing, do you?" he added with a twinkle
in his eye. "Well, I shall forgive you this once." Kauffmann extracted a
gold-rimmed pocket watch from his vest and checked the time. "Ach Herrje! I
must be off. The tub is in the corner over there," he added. The water should
still be quite warm. I will send one of the maids up to assist you."
"Vielen Dank, Herr Doktor," Erika added, as Kauffmann closed the door
behind him. The blonde in the pale, lacy nightgown turned to sit sideways on
the edge of the bed before trying to stand, and then stood up, only to be
overcome by a wave of dizziness. She sat back on the bed again and stared at
the surface of the bath water glistening in the sunlight. And once again the
image of a long-ago lake flashed in front of her eyes. A lake, beautiful and
still, like the bathwater, but one in which evil spirits seemed to dwell.
Flashes of remembered pain jarred her fragmented memory, the dull ache of
exhaustion and the burning, stinging of torment, as she tried in vain to piece
together the feelings and images that had unhinged her memory.
The fearful thoughts passed after a minute or two, and Erika, trying to
summon her strength, took a deep breath and rose again, this time more
steadily. She walked gingerly toward the open second story window, enjoying the
warmth of the sun, and looked down into the teeming labyrinth of streets in that
quarter of the city. In the distance she could see steamers, tall-masted
sailing ships, and colorful junks and sampans in the harbor. She stared out at
the vast panorama of Shanghai that lay below her for a minute or two before
fixing her gaze once again on the largest vessel for a moment. On one such
ship, she reasoned, she herself must have come to China. But when? Why? How?
Turning away from the window, she stepped back toward the steaming tub,
opened the vial the enthusiastic young doctor had given her, and sniffed at it
doubtfully. Then she shrugged her shoulders and emptied a third of its contents
into the bathwater, and swirled the pale green powder around until it dissolved.
As she did so, she noticed a full-length mirror which hung from the wall
opposite the wall with the portraits, as if to give the emperor and his
chancellor an opportunity to straighten any microscopic crease that might have
disturbed the be-medalled splendor of their attire.
Stepping in front of the mirror, she began to undo the buttons of her lacy
nightgown, half-anxious, half-dreading to see the full extent of her injuries.
She gasped as the gown fell open to her waist, revealing the faded vestiges of
an assortment of once-livid marks on her breasts and belly. She pressed her
slender fingers gingerly against one or two of the darkest marks as she studied
her upper body in the mirror, and then was overcome by a strange sensation that
someone was watching her. Pulling the bodice of the nightgown tightly against
her chest she spun around quickly, but there was no one behind her, save for the
stern-looking visages of the two men who ruled her homeland.
Exhaling a sigh of relief, Erika turned back toward the mirror and let the
nightgown fall to the floor in a pale puddle of fabric around her feet.
