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Book One: The Asylum
or
Going Mad In the Post Communist World.1. Leave Us Not At Drem Station.
Going mad in the post-Communist world. Its more common than you think, Doctor. I read this article in the Sunday Crimes, telling me there are two million dustmites living in the average British bed. At least, I thought, we are not alone. I took some comfort, I can tell you, in that fact. An entire small nation living underneath my arse. What am I saying, there are countries with just a fraction of that population, which are represented at the United Nations. The Seychelles have a mere sixty four thousand inhabitants, and they can throw their vote about with the worst. So my bed deserves at least a permanent seat at the Security Council. Little beasts beavering away at their mysterious dreams while I toss and turn. Building their homelands and their armies, sending out colonial expeditions to the furthest reaches of my limbs. Importing coal, from my toenails, bitumen from my eyelids, sulphur from my nostrils and mouth. In the dead of night they call my name, murmuring their incomprehensible propaganda in my ears: Awake, Daniel Hohenlohe, failed scribe and mental patient, they mumble, time to climb out of the den...
The other night I, Daniel, had a singular dream: I was travelling along a narrow potholed road in Romania, between Tirgoviste and Ploesti, in a clapped out East German Trabant. The landscape was flat and bleak, blotched with vast piles of old tin cans and torn rubber tyres. Dead rabbits lay squashed on the verges. Suddenly there was a clatter in the sky, and a drab khaki coloured chopper descended in a field just ahead of my dirt encrusted windshield. The deposed President of the Socialist Republic, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife, Elena, dressed in tattered furs, burst out of it, surrounded by a platoon of leather coated thugs. Waving machine pistols with silencers, they stopped my car with their steel-padded kneecaps and bundled the President of the Republic and his wife into the seat beside me. Three of the bodyguards then crowded into the back seat, pushed their weapons up against my neckbone, and spat: "Drive on, bastard!"
I drove on, in the direction of Ploesti. This used to be prime oil producing country, in the Second World War. I was not around at the time but the world was. Or so they say. There were five-hundred-bomber raids on the Ploesti oilfields, the entire sky darkened by khaki Lancasters, filled with Royal Air Force pilots and bombardiers, dressed in their sheepskin Biggles jackets, waggling their ginger moustaches, and falling from the sky like so many burnt moths. What ho, cripes and whizzo prang! Ex-President Ceausescu turned on my car radio and listened to the broadcasts from Bucharest. The rebels had taken over the radio station and were transmitting ecstatic accounts of the tyrant's overthrow and details of his profligate life: "He had seven hundred inscribed gold dinner plate services! His fridgidaire was stocked with prime meat sausages! His wife bathed in Bourbon whiskey! They ate an aborted fetus every Sabbath!" The Ex-President's head slumped on the dashboard, but his wife yanked him upright by the shock of his hair. She thrust a silver plated Luger up my right nostril and placed her foot on mine, depressing the accelerator pedal. But my Trabant just droned on.
"We shall go up into the mountains!" said the ex-dictator, perking up, stabbing the air with a well manicured finger, "we will organise the people's resistance! The masses will once again flock to our flag! Partisans, we shall march to the drum beat of the people's hearts! Liberty, fraternity, and egality! Long live the Communist Party of Romania and its Great Architect, my Exalted Self. Are you with us?" he asked, jabbing me in the shoulder.
Luckily the Trabant chose that moment to run out of gasoline. "I know a petrol pump just up the road," I told the dictator, "just wait here, I'll fill a jerrycan."
I trudged on, with an empty but heavy rusted old petrol can, leaving the ex-Benefactors and their goons to flag down a bewildered passing cyclist and pile aboard his back saddle. But to get back to the dust mites, Doctor. According to the newspaper they would inspire absolute terror if they were anywhere near our size, but luckily they are so small an entire convocation of them could hold a Nuremberg rally on the point of a pin. These are fellows who would obviously have no problem getting into the gates of heaven. They are, it appears, harmless, mindless and blind, carried every which way by the wind. Man is nothing but a parasite and a carrier, bearing his invisible universes with him wherever he goes. So how do I get to leave them behind, eh, Doctor? Answer me that, for God's sake!
I am not a doctor, he said, blinking at me through his dusty tri-focals. His vision was split into the close, the middle and the far distance. It was not clear where I was positioned in the languid sweep of his gaze. His sparse greying hairs drooped towards his forehead and thick strained to escape from his ears. The coastal sea fog drifted between and around us, marooning us in billows and wisps. There was an inevitable chill in the air although spring was, as it were, at the door. I could see, faintly appearing and disappearing in the middle distance, the gangling figures of Glasgow trippers, refugees from the nearby caravan site, carrying folded deckchairs as their bare feet slid and slipped on the rocks and pebbles towards the invisible beach.
I'll grow old, I'll grow old, I'll wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. This is supposed to be an outing in the fresh air, to get away from the musky odour of The Retreat at Drem. Brightly painted little rooms, with melamine bookshelves, posture chairs, daisy chains of get-well cards and old honest landscapes of Scotland, with a quartet of daubs by the local artist, Bellany, on the walls of Andrew Mackenzie's office, huge bright coloured things of staring eyes and crucified fish, just to make you feel you're not the only one around who is completely out of his or her box. There is a great, garish portrait of Mackenzie himself, just above his desk, gouging out from his bearded jovial features the inner contours of a tormented demon, with a hint of horns, sweating in some dilapidated anteroom of hell, hung with anatomical posters, the ubiquitous fish, tridents, nets and an old, pinch faced couple, all-purpose patriar-chal avatars. Mackenzie had spurned an offer of thirty thousand pounds, from the Tate Gallery in London, to have the thing taken off his hands.
"Truth will out," he stated, "ye can run, but ye canna hide."
Sweat pours down President Ceausescu's chin. I know exactly how he feels. One moment the world's your oyster, the next you're tipped into despair. The globe rolls on, turning its face away from you, revealing the shaggy hairs of its arse. If you can tell the difference. Failure has many fathers, success is an orphan. Or is it the other way around?
From the subliminal to the ridiculous. The ex-dictator twists and turns. Outside the crowd fills the streets, having ripped the central Socialist symbol out of the national flag, marching down the previously empty boulevards, bellowing the national songs. From tunnels beneath the city, the maggots of the President's secret police crawl out, firing their automatic weapons, at the rebellious armed forces. Battles erupt. Young and old, students and workers, climb aboard the army's tanks, bursting through the iron gates of power and privilege. Scenes from the iconography of our mutinous youth: the vengeance of the masses against ancien regimes. Only now it is the old revolutionaries who are being overthrown. I sit with my lifetime wife, Elena, on rickety wooden chairs facing a tribunal of my subordinates and underlings. They lambast me with imaginary crimes against the people. Horrific massacres and murders, grand larceny, treachery and betrayal. All their crimes are projected onto me. There is no point in arguing my case. I thump my fist, in vain. They pronounce sentence. I spread my palms. My wife just shrugs.
The firing squad. What else can we expect, for the lese majeste, the arrogance, the hubris, of pretending to exist? Of trying to make one's mark. Look at this man facing me. The Doctor who is not a doctor. A lay healer. Dr Mackenzie's assistant. This Doktor Blok, the trifocal man. I understand he was a lunatic himself, many years ago. The ultimate qualification for his task. Sitting on his plastic folding chair in front of me, twiddling with his clipboard, appearing and disappearing in the Lothian mist.
"The trick in carrying the past with us," he says, "is like the old child's question: What's heavier, a ton of feathers or a ton of lead? Its all a question of tension, of pressure, stress, strain and torque. Think of Salonikan porters, who carry pianos on their backs up seven flights of stairs. You and I can hardly lift the thing one inch. Its the old balance. Mind and matter. Body and soul. Lightness and dark." Luckily, its my mother who is paying for this. In the distance, a dog barks. It looms into view, chasing some metaphorical stick. Finding only us, it sniffs our ankles and returns, bounding, to its silent master or mistress, hidden out there in the fog.
Life and death. War and peace. Truth and lies. Love and carrots. Moussakka and beans. I once saw a sign on a pub blackboard: GOD AND CHIPS, £1.65. A volley of bullets, and the ex-dictator and his wife fall to the parade ground, lifeless. Sic semper tyrannis. But all my aches and pains are still here.
"Lets go back home," says Doktor Blok, lifting me by the elbow. Home! He is speaking of the Drem Retreat, of course. Haggis supper or meatballs Mackenzie, courtesy of the Bejam deepfreeze. The old nursing home, connected by its gravel umbilical to the rural heart of nowhere. Drem, of course, is Dream without the A. No aardvarks, abacuses, anchovies, adzes, aetiologies, aesthetics or acknow-ledgments, no agape nor allegories, aligators or alternates. Only the dust mites, thriving in the follicles, pores, oxters and skin of the few lugubrious inhabitants in their small bundle of somnambulant houses, nestled up against the Scotrail station (schedules to Dunbar, North Berwick, Edinburgh) and practically nothing else. And down the road, in tepid isolation, we baker's dozen of apostles or inmates of Andrew and Rhona Mackenzie's convalescent home for the Depressed. No five-hundred-Biggles-bomber raids would shift us lot from our perch, as we shuffle down the corridors, nodding at each other, with the desperate air of survivors in the same lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Which one of us is the Nazi spy? Pictures of God, snipped out of fashion magazines, float by on the oily waters, and now and again an old chair, a cuckoo clock, or a chipped plastic skeleton, rock queasily upon the waves. A smell of dried up mincemeat sticks to the newly painted walls. And what is that whiff? Rice pudding? A couple of the older inmates are without teeth, or intestines for that matter. They clink dryly as they pass. "Top o' the mornin', cock!" I should not like to see its bottom then.
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