The Magus (61 page)

Perhaps a minute passed like that. Another of the brands stopped naming. The goat-figure raised his staff, held it up a moment, then made to lay it on the table in front of him; but he must have got it caught in something because there was a comforting little hitch in the stage business. As soon as he had managed it, he raised both hands sacerdotally, but fingers devil-horned, and pointed at the corners behind me. My two guards went to the projectors. Suddenly the room was flooded with light; and, after a moment of total stillness, flooded with movement.

Like actors suddenly off-stage, the row of figures in front of me began removing their masks and cloaks. The cross-headed men by the brands turned and took the torches and filed out towards the door. But they had to wait there, because a group of twenty or so young people appeared. They came in loosely, in ordinary clothes, without any attempt at order. Some of them had files and books. They were silent, and quickly took their places on the tiered side-benches to my right. The men with the torches disappeared. I looked at the newcomers – German or Scandinavian, intelligent faces, students’ faces, one or two older people among them, and three girls, but with an average age in the early twenties. Two of the men I recognized from the incident of the ridge.

All this time the row of figures behind the table were disrobing. Adam and my two guards moved about helping them. Adam laid cardboard folders with white labels in each place. The stuffed cat was removed, and the staffs, all the paraphernalia. It was done swiftly, well rehearsed. I kept flashing looks down the line, as one person after another was revealed.

The last arrival, the goat-head, was an old man with a clipped white beard, dark grey-blue eyes; a resemblance to Smuts. Like all the others he studiously avoided looking at me, but I saw him smile at Conchis, the astrologer-magician beside him. Next to Conchis appeared, from behind the bird—head and pregnant belly, a slim middle-aged woman. She was wearing a dark-grey suit; a headmistress or a business woman. The jackal-head, Joe, was dressed in a dark-blue suit. Anton came, surprisingly, from behind the pierrot-skeleton costume. The succubus from Bosch revealed another elderly man with a mild face and pince-nez. The corn-doll was Maria. The Aztec head was the German colonel, the pseudo-Wimmel of the ridge incident. The vampire was not Lily, but her sister; a scarless wrist. A white blouse, and the black skirt. The crocodile was a man in his late twenties. He had a thin artistic-looking beard; a Greek or an Italian. He too was wearing a suit. The stag-head was another man I did not know; a very tall Jewish-looking intellectual of about forty, deeply tanned and slightly balding.

That left the witch on the extreme right of the table. It was Lily, in a long-sleeved high-necked white woollen dress. I watched her pat her severely chignoned hair and then put on a pair of spectacles. She bent to hear something that the ‘colonel’ next to her whispered in her ear. She nodded, then opened the file in front of her.

Only one person was not revealed: whoever was in the coffin-sedan.

I sat facing a long table of perfectly normal-looking people, who were all sitting and consulting their files and beginning to look at me. Their faces showed interest, but no sympathy. I stared at June-Rose, but she stared back without expression, as if I were a waxwork. I waited above all for Lily to look at me, but when she did there was nothing in her eyes. She behaved like, and her position at the end of the table suggested, a minor member of a team, of a selection board.

At last the old man with the clipped white beard rose to his feet and a faint murmuring that had begun among the audience stopped. The other members of the ‘board’ looked towards him. I saw some, but not many, of the ‘students’ with open notebooks on their laps, ready to write. The old man with the white beard gazed up at me through his gold-rimmed glasses, smiled, and bowed.

‘Mr Urfe, you must long ago have come to the conclusion that you have fallen into the hands of madmen. Worse than that, of sadistic madmen. And I think my first task is to introduce you to the sadistic madmen.’ Some of the others gave little smiles. His English was excellent, though it retained clear traces of a German accent. ‘But first we must return you, as we have returned ourselves, to normality.’

He signed quietly to my two guards, who had come back beside me. Deftly they untied the rosetted white ribbons, pulled my clothes back to their normal position, peeled off the black forehead patch, turned back my pullover, even brushed my hair back; but left the gag.

‘Good. Now … if I may be allowed I shall first introduce myself. I am Doctor Friedrich Kretschmer, formerly of Stuttgart, now director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Idaho in America. On my right you have Doctor Maurice Conchis of the Sorbonne, whom you know.’ Conchis rose and bowed briefly to me. I glared at him. ‘On his right, Doctor Mary Marcus, now of Edinburgh University, formerly of the William Alanson White Foundation in New York.’ The professional-looking woman inclined her head. ‘On her right, Professor Mario Ciardi of Milan.’ He stood up and bowed, a mild little frog of a man. ‘Beyond him you have our charming and very gifted young costume designer, Miss Margaret Maxwell.’ ‘Rose’ gave me a minute brittle smile. ‘On the right of Miss Maxwell you see Mr Yanni Kottopoulos. He has been our stage manager.’ The man with the beard bowed; and then the tall Jew stood. ‘And bowing to you now you see Arne Halberstedt of the Queen’s Theatre, Stockholm, our dramatizer and director, to whom, together with Miss Maxwell and Mr Kottopoulos, we mere amateurs in the new drama all owe a great deal for the successful outcome and aesthetic beauty of our … enterprise.’ First Conchis, then the other members of the ‘board’, then the students, began to clap. Even the guards behind me joined in.

The old man turned. ‘Now – on my left – you see an empty box. But we like to think that there is a goddess inside. A virgin goddess whom none of us has ever seen, nor will ever see. We call her Ashtaroth the Unseen. Your training in literature will permit you, I am sure, to guess at her meaning. And through her at our, we humble scientists’, meaning.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Beyond the box you have Doctor Joseph Harrison of my department at Idaho, and of whose brilliant study of characteristic urban Negro neuroses,
Black and White Minds,
you may have heard.’ Joe got up and raised his hand casually. ‘Anton’ was next. ‘Beyond him, Doctor Heinrich Mayer, at present working in Vienna. Beyond him, Madame Maurice Conchis, whom many of us know better as the gifted investigator of the effects of wartime traumata on refugeee children. I speak, of course, of Doctor Annette Kazanian of the Chicago Institute.’ I refused to be surprised, which was more than could be said of some of the ‘audience’, who murmured and leant forward to look at ‘Maria’. ‘Beyond Madame Conchis, you see Privatdozent Thorvald Jorgensen of Aalborg University.’ The ‘colonel’ stood up briskly and bowed. ‘Beyond him you have Doctor Vanessa Maxwell.’ Lily looked briefly up at me, bespectacled, absolutely without expression. I flicked my eyes back to the old man; he looked at his colleagues. ‘I think that we all feel the success of the clinical side of our enterprise this summer is very largely due to Doctor Maxwell. Dr Marcus had already told me what to expect when her most gifted pupil came to us at Idaho. But I should like to say that never have my expectations been so completely fulfilled. I am sometimes accused of putting too much stress on the role of women in our profession. Let me say that Dr Maxwell, my charming young colleague Vanessa, confirms what I have always believed: that one day all our great practising, as opposed to our theoretical, psychiatrists will be of the sex of Eve.’ There was applause. Lily stared down at the table in front of her and then, when the clapping had died down, she glanced at the old man and murmured, ‘Thank you.’ He turned back to me.

‘The students you see are Austrian and Danish research students from Doctor Mayer’s faculty and from Aalborg. I think we all speak English?’ Some said, yes. He smiled benignly at them and sipped a glass of water.

‘Well, so, Mr Urfe, you will have guessed our secret by now. We are an international group of psychologists, which I have the honour, by reason of seniority simply’ – two or three shook their heads in disagreement – ‘to lead. For various reasons the path of research in which we are all especially interested requires us to have subjects that are not volunteers, that are not even aware that they are subjects of an experiment. We are by no means united in our theories of behaviour, in our different schools, but we are united in considering the nature of the experiment is such that it is better that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose. Though I am sure that you will – when you can recollect in tranquillity – find yourself able to deduce at least part of our causes from our effects.’ There were smiles all round. ‘Now. We have had you, these last three days, under deep narcosis and the material we have obtained from you has proved most valuable, most valuable indeed, and we therefore wish first of all to show our appreciation of the normality you have shown in all the peculiar mazes through which we have made you run.’

The whole lot of them stood and applauded me. I could not keep control any longer. I saw Lily and Conchis clapping, and the students. I cocked my wrists round and gave them a double V-sign. It evidently bewildered the old man, because he turned and bent to ask Conchis what it meant. The clapping died down. Conchis turned to the supposed woman doctor from Edinburgh. She spoke in a strong American voice.

‘The sign is a visual equivalent of some verbalization like “Bugger you” or “Up your arse”.’

This seemed to interest the old man. He repeated the gesture, watching his own hand. ‘But did not Mr Churchill

Lily spoke, leaning forward. ‘It is the upward movement that carries the signal, Doctor Kretschmer. Mr Churchill’s victory-sign was with the hand reversed and static. I mentioned it in connection with my paper on “Direct Anal-Erotic Metaphor in Classical Literature”.’

‘Ah. Yes. I recall.
Ja, ja.’

Conchis spoke to Lily.
‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli patheci et cinaedi Furi?’

Lily: ‘Precisely.’

Wimmel-Jorgcnsen leant forward; a strong accent. ‘Is there no doubt a connection with the cuckold gesture?’ He put finger-horns on his head.

‘I did suggest,’ said Lily, ‘that we may suppose a castration motive in the insult, a desire to degrade and humiliate the male rival which would of course be finally identifiable with the relevant stage of infantile fixation and the accompanying phobias.’

I flexed muscles, rubbed my legs together, forced myself to stay sane, to deduce what reason I could get out of all this unreason. I did not, could not believe that they were psychologists; they would never risk giving me their names.

On the other hand they must be brilliant at improvising the right jargon, since my gesture had come without warning. Or had it? I thought fast. They had needed my gesture to cue their dialogue; and it happened to be one that I hadn’t used for years. But I remembered having heard that one could make people do things after hypnosis, on a pre-suggested signal. It would have been easy. When I was clapped, I felt forced to give the sign. I must be on my guard; do nothing without thinking.

The old man quietened further discussion. ‘Mr Urfe, your significant gesture brings me to our purpose in all meeting you here. We are naturally aware that you are filled with deep feelings of anger and hatred towards at least some of us. Some of the repressed material we have discovered reveals a different state of affairs, but as my colleague Doctor Harrison would say, “It is what we
believe
we live with that chiefly concerns us.” We have therefore gathered here today to allow you to judge us in your turn. This is why we have placed you in the judge’s seat. We have silenced you because justice should be mute until the time for sentencing comes. But before we hear your judgment on us, you must permit us to give some additional evidence
against
ourselves. Our real justification is scientific, but we are all agreed, as I explained, that the requirements of good clinical practice forbid us to make such an excuse. I now call on Dr Marcus to read out that part of our report on you which deals with you not as a subject for experiment, but as an ordinary human being. Dr Marcus.’

The woman from Edinburgh got up. She was about fifty, with greying hair cut boyishly short; no lipstick, a hard, intelligent, quasi-lesbian face that looked as if it had singularly little patience with fools. She began to read in a belligerent transatlantic monotone.

‘The subject of our 1953 experiment belongs to a familiar category of semi-intellectual introversion. Although excellent for our purposes his personality pattern is without subsidiary interest. The most significant feature of his lifestyle is negative: its lack of social content.

‘The motives for this attitude springs from an only partly resolved Oedipal complex. The subject shows characteristic symptoms of mingled fear and resentment of authority, especially male authority and the usual accompanying basic syndrome: an ambivalent attitude towards women, in which they are seen both as desired objects and as objects which havebetrayed him, and therefore merit his revenge and counter-betrayal.

‘Time has not allowed us to investigate the subject’s specific womb and breast separation traumas, but the compensatory mechanisms he had evolved are so frequent among so-called intellectuals that we may posit with certainty a troubled period of separation from the maternal breast, possibly due to the exigences of the military career of the subject’s father, and a very early identification of the father, or male, as separator -a role which Doctor Conchis adopted in our experiment. The subject has then never been able to accept the initial loss of oral gratification and maternal protection and this has given him his auto-erotic approach to emotional problems and life in general The subject also conforms to the Adlerian descriptions of siblingless personality traits.