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Of the Klander Institute in History:
Moses Klander, a disciple of Freud, practised, like his illustrious mentor, in Vienna. Peter Flusser was Klander's favourite student. All three were victims of a tarnished future. For together the pupils saw off their old teacher at the Nordbanhof, 4th June 1938, when the Great Man, then aged eighty-two, left Vienna to die in England. It was a deceptively bright summer's day, the baroque facade of the station gleaming in its lost imperial splendour. The sun massaged newly familiar uniforms, mud brown and jet black. Three months earlier the National Socialists had marched in, their fifes and drums punctuating the New Order: Austrian-German Anschluss. A plebiscite held two months prior to that had proved 99.75 per cent positive. The People's Choice! Does anyone cavil? Who dares represent these as false hopes?! To the gallows, Jews, Commies and their hybrid, the psycho-analysts ... So many Aryan faces glowing radiant in the gloom of newsreel theatres. Yet the patriarch of escaped dreams and nightmares, with his snow-white beard and his thick bifocals, was helped aboard the Orient Express, occident-bound, young Flusser grabbing hold of his elbow as he seemed for a moment to totter on the high carriage step. His wife and his maid followed him up, waving their white lace handkerchiefs at the small group of apostles who stood tearfully on the platform as the train chugged off under a fresh awning of swastikas, black, white and blood red.Again, an era comes to an end.
A seven-year interval, as the lights dim and fail. Holocaust, Donner and Blitzen. Peter Flusser found his way to Palestine, enrolling in the Zionist cause (the Jewish Brigade, Palmah Commando - Medical, psycho department). Klander vanished for the duration into the rotting corpse of Europe. It was rumoured that he fulfilled secret tasks, for the Zionists, the Allies, for the Red Army. The true facts, as usual, remain veiled. Suffice to say, eliding controversy, he emerged in 1945, as night and fog lifted, to rejoin his former pupil in Palestine. In '46 they received a brief from the British Mandate authorities to found in Jerusalem, the Holy City, an Institute of Advanced Psychiatry. It would be dedicated to the Progressive Approach in the treatment of mental affliction, with particular emphasis on those whom the Holocaust had plunged into their own twilight. Their motto would be "Nil Desperandum" - the heart and the mind can be salved. Yes, Klander believed in phoenixes rising from the ashes of Faith ...
Today the Institute is a complex of three buildings on a hill in the south-east of the City, overlooking the Valley of Kidron and the Jericho Road, just between Abu Tor and the Claire nuns, up away from the Hill of Evil Counsel: 25 Rabbi Nahman Me'Bratslav Street, named after the old mystic story-teller. (In fact the Institute was originally named for Reb Nahman, an institutional parapraxis perhaps, or just a ploy to schnorr some orthodox funds?) It lies on the route of the Seven Aleph bus, which leaves the corner of Strauss Street every hour. From the city centre, it meanders up the dusty Hebron Way, turning left up the brown pine-topped terraced hill to stop right by the gates of the nuthouse. Until 1940, the main building of the Institute had been the well-known Scottish Sisters' Hospital. Till 1948 it remained a central location, but then, for nineteen years, until 1967, the Institute found itself spot on the border between Arab and Jewish Jerusalem. Bare and bold, it looked out over the Kingdom of Jordan, devoid even of the buffer of the wide swathes of No-Man's-Land that divided other parts of the City - pitted with craters, bristling with barbed wire, dotted with the rusting carcasses of old armoured cars and trucks. Indeed, patients would now and again wander off, abroad, down the hill, to be handed back later at the Mandelbaum Gate, drooling and jacking off cheerfully in full sight of the United Nations.
How came this lump to be on the map, this hilltop, sticking like an engorged prick into the arse of the Hashemite Kingdom? This is the alleged tale: Moses Klander, Psychology Officer of the newly formed Israel Defence Forces, was providentially present, in the summer of '49, at the actual drawing of the armistice borders between the State of Israel and Jordan. It is claimed that Major Abdullah, Jordanian in charge, left the room for an extremely brief moment to relieve his bowels in the john. Klander, peeking at the map, noticed, to his chagrin, that the pencil line dividing the City had been drawn just across the lower, Hebron Way end of Reb Nahman Me'Bratslav Street. Seizing the time, and the pencil, he swiftly erased the line and re-drew it round the top of the hill. Moshe Dayan, who was also present, turned his eyepatch to the occasion. Major Abdullah, who had not closed an eye for three days and was still recovering from the sight of the Jewish emissary Mrs Golda Myerson disguised in Arab headdress for her meeting with the Hashemite King, was in no condition to spot this small act of skilful fraud.Thus the Institute remained in Hebrew hands, and now stands gazing absently over newly conquered vistas: the walled Old City, Bethany, Silwan and all that lies between; a landscape not quite yet lobotomized by the bulldozers of constructive progress. Klander's heritage: the three-storey main building, the staff annexe, Annexe B, of Nachtnebel fame ... All the buildings were of quarried Jerusalem stone, as decreed by the wise Colonialist Sir Ronald Storrs, overseer of the New City's architectural harmony until the new concrete Israelites, post-'67, began to dethrone his concern ... The lawns, the curling paths of crazy paving, the old Andronicus sundial ... not to mention the morgue, connected to the main building by the underground tunnel, of which more, so much more, later. And above, the waving bougainvillaeas, the fair cypresses and the pines. Patients ambling about, counting the pine cones, listening to the tweet of the birds. A well-planned, respected refuge for certain categories of the psychotic. For the Progressive Approach has its limitations. Klander introduced mixed wards, allowed patients and staff to wear their own clothes and abolished, way back, the electro-convulsive machine - though, of course, he embraced chemo-therapy. He was a pioneer of group therapy, about which he wrote volumes. Flusser, taking over after Klander's sad and abrupt demise, was even more prone to lean with the winds of change agitating the clover fields of shrinkdom, his goal as different as possible to T-t's, the State Mental Hospital, where electro-therapy and psycho-surgery reigned under the gibbous moon. But the open approach meant the Institute could not cater for the Criminally Insane. People who had chopped their grandmother into segments with an axe, or disembowelled their cousins, or tried to burn down the Al-Agsa Mosque hoping to precipitate World War Three, could not be admitted to Klander and had to chance their luck with the eager sawbones and electricians of T-t. Alas, sometimes patients who had not previously exhibited any symptoms of violent aggression fell from grace, and a small locked ward was available for such eventualities. On such rare occasions Male Nurse Elkayam, who had been a strong man in the Egyptian circus in his youth, did the honours, and, as successfully as he had wrestled with orang-utans in Luxor bore the unfortunate malefactors of Klander off to their padded cells.
This, then, was the place to which Justice Ben-Horin consigned Blok for a month after rejecting his plea that, in the matter of his alleged infringement of Mr and Mrs Friedman's legal right to do nookie in peace and privacy, there was really no case to answer.(Klander said:
" We have stood on the edge of a great and dreadful abyss and looked down, and seen there that multitude of dry bones, heaped high upon each other, many pits filled with the charred remains of once-great forests, decked with the green leaves of spring, open to the blue canopy of hope. And we cried out as the stench of the dead invaded every orifice, every pore of our skin, as bulldozers ripped and rent more heaps of broken dry bones on across the muddy ground towards the great mass graves. And we vowed that never again would we come close enough to see that sight, to bear the odour of our own decay. This time, we said, we'll build a true new world, dependent not on the great nations that had let us rot, but on our own devices. And we vowed that we ourselves would never tread upon the slippery path that might lead us, too, to the burial ground as executioners. We would deal with our fellow man, we said, according to hallowed principles of mutual respect, eschewing all forms of coercion, domination, arbitrary compulsion. Ah, we made a powerful mountain of vows, we did, which storm winds of reality have ripped and torn and stripped of many a decaying layer, since then ... How mightily we huffed and puffed to blow life into the dry bones, and yet, was all the flesh and skin we seemed to conjure up to cover them and fill them with life, just one of those far lost mirages of our might-have-beens?")
Everything You May Have Wanted to Know About Blok But Didn't Bother to Ask (I):
He was born on the illegal immigrant ship Irma Klein, approaching the waters of Palestine. Talk of the birth trauma! There they were: Rosa (Shoshana) Blok, mid the reek of engine grease and three hundred incontinent wretches saved, as the leaflets put it, from the Ovens of Europe; Baruch Blok, out with dysentery, up on deck, miserable; Mendel Plekhanov (no relation), ship's doctor and shoddy raconteur, holding her down on a plank in the galley while cauldrons of thin gruel (specialite de la maison) slopped about beside her, caressing her brow and whispering sweet nothings in Yiddish and the only Hungarian phrase he knew- "How deep are your blue eyes, maiden of the far flung marches" - in her ear.
Then heave ho! plunk! Blok was born, grabbed and tossed, like a lump of dough, by Maitre Plekhanov, who said, "Voila, another one with no passport." Blok screeched in impotent despair.
His first real memory, apart from flashes of Jerusalem sky glimpsed from his pram, was the first day at kindergarten, when Mama Blok deposited him at the gate and then vanished, leaving him clinging to the wrought-iron railings, rattling them and screaming in desperate rage. Resentment at such helplessness was his first true emotion. "I don't care about the education laws," he once told Flusser. "They could have made an exception for me."
He next remembers standing alone, his back to a wall, holding a rye bread sandwich, while other kids cavorted about, mocking his ignorance of the Hebrew language and chanting in fake Hungarian: "Egan megan fritz mit shnegan, kick the magyar in his teacan." He learned the virtues of silence.
During his first year at primary school he did extremely well in algebra, of all things, a subject he later succeeded in forgetting to the last square root and fraction. In his second year he discovered girls, mainly by the agency of the pigtail. This was in another school, for his parents had moved to a quieter suburb after living for a number of years in a small narrow street running from the Jafa Road towards the border district of Musrara.
They had a ground-floor flat in a large Arab house surrounding a courtyard, with a matsoh-bakery in the back. Pungent smells and loud oaths issued from there as the Passover season approached. There was a hole in the bakery roof through which Blok and the neighbourhood kids would peep at the feverish activity as lanky men with beards and gnarled elbows sweated, coiled twists ofdough and thrust them into the ovens. A favourite game was to spit as a man bearing a tray passed directly below and run as the occasional bull's eye brought forth dire threats of revenge. The well in the centre of the courtyard was a great source of mystery, and there were railings on the windows of the apartment, in which Blok tended to trap his head at the most inconvenient moments. One time he was stuck so fast that only the combined efforts of the entire personnel of the Hebrew Broadcasting Service, domiciled one block down the road, procured his release from bondage.
Two or three times during their residency firing broke out across the Jerusalem border, about four hundred yards east, bringing the sephardi inhabitants of Musrara streaming up the winding street carrying babies, bundles, cooking pots and light wicker chairs (they were ready for any emergency), to sojourn in the courtyard and the cavernous ground-floor Blok living room. Mama Blok, the spectre of unity banishing all ethnic differences, served up helpings of goulash in the Passover soup plates (Preservation of the Soul defers Sabbath) and Papa Blok tried in vain to pretend all was normal, attempting to read the Hungarian newspaper Ujkelet by the light of a candle, seated among the multitude in his Haganah issue tin helmet . . .Several years pass.
Blok never had the full confidence, in his childhood, to do what everyone else of his age did with glowing panache: riding a bicycle with no hands, falling off the top branches of trees. He never broke an arm or a leg and was looked down on by his contemporaries. He was thin and physically awkward and was totally useless at games. His gym teacher was later to say of him: "Blok, you are the most dismal example I have ever known of physical decadence."
Let it not be thought, though, that Blok shunned all youthful activities. As mentioned earlier, he discovered the pigtail and the strange feminine creatures attached to it. He hurled rubber bands and erasers at them, but could not quite understand why. The problem of the hour, in this second grade, was the practice of corporal punishment by the teacher, an elderly gorgon of twenty-eight, administered by means of a ruler upon the palms of disobedient pupils. A clique formed, of which Blok was a member, whose purpose was to steal the tyrant's rulers when her back was turned and hand them over to Kalderon, the class basketball champion, who hurled them far into the fields. This is the first known instance of a Blokkian rebellion, if one discounts, at a far earlier age, the stubborn withholding of faeces.
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