He goes to visit her. Inspired by guilt for not having gone sooner. He worries about how she is being treated and cannot stop thinking about her wearing the blue striped robe.
As a journalist, he has written about standards of care at psychiatric facilities and published a news story about a semi-paralysed patient who was placed in a bath with the hot water running, scalded to death. Difficult patients are pacified with scopolamine, he writes, morphine, cold compresses. They are terrorized with injections and abused with harmful poisons. The school of psychiatry seems slow to understand that mental patients are like normal people, they suffer emotional pain, they can be made angry, and irritated, and sad.
He speaks to the chief psychiatrist about her condition. They have tried everything but her symptoms continue to deteriorate. He is provided with an outline of her present medical status – psychomotor inhibitions, given to agitation, absent-mindedness, sexual arousal, manic fantasies, acute paranoia and wild imagination, hallucinations. She speaks in a High German accent one minute, then falls back into a rough Viennese dialect. She is often lewd. She talks to people that don’t exist. Flies into sudden rages. Smears her food onto the walls. She has been exhibiting suicidal tendencies and frequently has to be tied down in a cot with bars at night – the patient is suffering from serious schizophrenia.
The chief psychiatrist sits behind his desk going over the reports, hoping to unlock the secret to her suffering. Frieda, he says, reading from the report, does not allow herself to be examined. Refuses to answer questions. She is frequently silent and distant, unable to recognize people. She is troubled by the brief affair she had with a violinist and the abortion that brought an end to her pregnancy. She says there is a cesspit inside her and describes herself as perverse.
He tells the psychiatrist that Friedl experienced traumatic sexual episodes in her early life. He confirms the pregnancy that was terminated during their marriage. Is there a possibility that her affair and the resulting abortion triggered her illness? Did this event kill off some vital avenue to happiness?
The ghost in the marriage?
The psychiatrist explains to him that there is no known cause for schizophrenia. There is no known cure either, but there may be some therapeutic way in which a husband can influence her condition.
Everybody is following Freud and Jung. People in white coats exploring the unknown frontiers of desire and sexual intelligence. Every experience, every orientation, every deviation to be explained and corrected. Literature is full of women thinking about sex.
There is a concerned look in the psychiatrist’s eyes as he discusses these clinical matters with her husband. Her behaviour has become increasingly lewd, he says, both in action and in words. Her sexual fantasies are often accompanied by an urge to be freed from all human restraints, running naked through the sewing room. He suggests a practical way of helping to alleviate those patterns of distress and arousal.
You should try to pacify her, he says.
Pacify?
She may be seriously ill, but she has normal desires. There are moments when she is completely lucid. Have sex with her. Please her. Satisfy her. Only you have the power to assuage those passions.
But is she in her right mind?
That’s up to you to find out.
How?
Only you can get inside her head, the psychiatrist continues. You can enter those wild areas in her consciousness that we have failed to reach.
She’s a ward of court.
She is your wife.
My wife? It’s impossible for me to imagine that the person I love most in the world can have anything wrong with her mind. It’s such a cruel contradiction. I cannot understand how a woman so beautiful can be mentally ill.
The psychiatrist closes the case notes and offers a piece of personal encouragement.
Look, he says, there is a degree of guessing involved in every sexual encounter. None of it is entirely rational. It’s two people agreeing to suspend disbelief. Lots of emotional trading. Lots of assertion and surrender in both directions. We’re all crazy when it comes to love.
How do I know it’s love?
Love, lust, need, sexual healing, call it what you like. Make her happy.
Here, in this place?
You’re a writer. Use your imagination.
He is brought to her room. He describes the corridor with a series of numbered doors, like vertical coffins. He hears the keys rattling and the door to one of the vertical coffins being opened. She sits with her back to the wall and her eyes fixed on the far corner. Her legs are folded back to breaking point underneath her. The door is locked behind him and he is left alone with her inside a padded cell. There is no furniture, no bed, nothing but a wooden stool bolted to the floor.