SCARCELY HAD MY TRAIN arrived in Baden, and scarcely had I managed with some difficulty to climb down the carriage steps, when the magic of Baden revealed itself to me. Standing on the wet concrete platform, peering around for the hotel porter, I saw three or four fellow patients getting out of the same train that I had been on, all suffering from sciatica, as was clearly visible from the tremulous clenching of the buttocks, the halting gait and the somewhat helpless, pained facial expressions that accompanied every cautious movement. Each of them had his own speciality, his own variety of suffering, and hence his own way of walking, of hesitating, of hobbling, of limping, and each had his own form of grimace, but the predominant factor was what they had in common—I could see at a glance that all of them were sciatica sufferers, my colleagues, my brothers. Anyone who knows the games played by the nervus sciaticus—not by way of the medical handbook but from the personal experience which doctors call ‘subjective sensation’—will understand exactly what I mean. I stopped in my tracks and gazed at these marked men. Lo and behold, all three or four were pulling faces worse than mine, were leaning more heavily on their sticks, flexing their hams more twitchily, treading more warily and fearfully—they were all more agonised, miserable, ailing and pitiful than me, and this did me a great deal of good, and remained a constantly recurring, inexhaustible source of comfort to me throughout my stay in Baden—everywhere you looked, there were people limping, people crawling, people sighing, people in wheelchairs, and they were far sicker than I was, and had far less reason for good humour and hope than I had! And so during the very first minute of my stay I had discovered one of the great secrets and magic potions of all health resorts, and I savoured my discovery with true delight—the Pain Cooperative Movement, the socios habere malorum.
When I left the platform and cheerfully tackled the gently sloping street that led down towards the baths in the valley, every step confirmed and enhanced this invaluable experience—patients were creeping and crawling everywhere, or sitting bent and weary on the green painted benches, or hobbling along in chattering groups. A woman was being pushed in a wheelchair, letting out a tired laugh, with a half-withered flower in her limp hand, while behind her, bursting with energy, strode her blossoming female carer. An elderly gentleman came out of one of the shops where rheumatics buy their postcards, ashtrays and paperweights (they need a lot of those, though I never found out why)—and this elderly gentleman who came out of the shop needed a minute to negotiate every step, and he looked at the road ahead of him like a man at the very end of his tether, suddenly confronted by a huge and unexpected task. A young man wearing a grey-green military cap on his bristly head was vigorously manipulating two sticks, though he could still scarcely move. Oh, those sticks, which were here, there and everywhere, those damnable, deadly serious sticks, which ended in rubber tips at the bottom and sucked on the asphalt like leeches or babes at the nipple! I too used a stick, a stylish malacca cane, whose support was most welcome, although if necessary I could also walk without it, but no one had ever seen me with one of those miserable rubber-tipped suckers. No, it must have been obvious to all who saw me how swiftly and athletically I sailed down this pleasant street, how infrequently but playfully I wielded my malacca cane—merely an ornament, a decorative accessory—how very slight and harmless was that characteristic sign of sciatica in me, the agonised clenching of the upper thigh, perhaps just hinted at, like the most rudimentary sketch, and how smoothly and elegantly I trod this path, how young and healthy I was compared with all these older, poorer, sicker brothers and sisters, whose afflictions revealed themselves so clearly, so undisguisedly, so relentlessly! From every step I drew their recognition, savoured their acknowledgement, and I felt almost fully fit, or at least infinitely less unfit than all these poor folk. Indeed, if these half-crippled hobblers could still hope to be cured, these rubber-tipped stick-walkers, if Baden could still help them, then my little beginner’s pains must disappear like snow in the foehn, and in me the doctor would see a shining example, a phenomenon to give thanks for, a small miracle of curability.
Well, I enjoyed the pleasures of this first day to the very full, indulging in orgies of naive self-congratulation, and it was all highly beneficial. Drawn by the ubiquitous figures of my fellow patients, my less fortunate brothers, flattered by the sight of every cripple, inspired to joyful sympathy and empathetic self-satisfaction by every approaching wheelchair, I strolled down the street—that oh so cosily, comfortingly designed street, along which guests arriving from the station are wheeled to the baths, and which curves gently with a pleasant, even slope down to those ancient baths, thence to disappear like a dried-up riverbed into the entrances of the spa’s hotels. Filled with good intentions and happy hopes, I approached the Heiligenhof, where I expected my journey to end. The idea was to spend three or four weeks here, taking the baths each day, walking as much as possible, and avoiding as much as possible all sources of anxiety and excitement. Perhaps it would occasionally become monotonous, and indeed it could hardly pass without periods of boredom, because the prescription here was the exact opposite of the high life, and for me—the old recluse deeply and painfully averse to any sort of domestic or hotel living—there would be a few problems to cope with, a few obstacles to overcome. But without a doubt this new, completely unfamiliar life, despite its perhaps rather bourgeois, rather soft-centred character, would bring me some interesting and entertaining experiences. And was it not high time that after years of living in primitive peace, in rural isolation, absorbed in my studies, I now spent some hours with my fellow humans again? And the main thing was that beyond the obstacles, beyond the now beginning weeks of treatment, lay the day on which I would make my sprightly way up this same pretty street, would leave behind these hotels and, healed and rejuvenated with elastically flexible knees and hips, would bid farewell to Baden as I danced my way to the station.
1923