… Paris: 1902. Age twenty-six...
Rainer wakes and is not well. Snakes from his bowels again. The basin's tepid morning water causes a repulsive shiver. Smell of soap brings no comfort, conjures only sterile things, memories of loss. There's a hunger inside him that food cannot appease. There's an ungovernable quaking in his hands.
Here is the poet abroad in the Paris lanes again like a castaway. Sea-swell of streets heavy with humanity, and this city a listing galleon on some wayward course.
Unmistakable need has overshadowed him. Despite his fear he will see a doctor. Toward the regal dome of the Val de Grâce. People are helped there, aren't they? Old venerable hospital. Why shouldn't he be helped too? Eastward along the boulevard Saint Michel, past the windows of curio shops, dealers in antiquities and ancient coins. Flavian's aquiline profile on a little circle of stamped gold or bronze. Age-old penny sold for the price of four days' food. Inflation of vanished empires. It provokes a clenching in the pit of his stomach. Whole epochs swallowed up in the interval of inhale-exhale, and the poet's own epoch traveling that course this very moment, sucked into some infallible godlike lung.
The first thing seen is the glister of embossed coat buttons. Military brass of the gendarme, and the uniformed one in regulation stance, manning the door. The poet is not to pass by. Rainer couldn't have expected this.
The guard notes his hesitation. A clean-shaven mouth clips a single word: "Oui?"
"Bonjour. Perhaps I'm in the wrong place. I'd hoped to see a doctor."
"Military only. Unless you've got a pass, you'll have to go to a civilian facility."
"The Hôtel Dieu?"
"Oui. Or the Salpêtrière, the Maison de Bicêtre, there are many."
"The closest?"
"Salpêtrière, near the Gare d'Austerlitz. A mile, maybe two from here."
"But if I were to need help now?"
A slight shrug. Hard eyes braced against conspiracy. "Hire a cab. It's faster than walking."
But that seems too great a task for one day, trying all over again.
Start back then. Back along the way that led here. The impossibly large dome of the Val de Grâce folds hidden into a clump of streets behind. Rainer rounds a corner and there beyond the rooftops rises the other dome of the Panthéon. So many grand things to shrink a soul.
He passes a shut pharmacy. Blue delft vases displayed behind the window. Cocaine, says one. Opium, another. Must go by, mustn't think of medicines.
In a stone lintel above heavy gates stand the chiseled words: maison d'accouchement. And here on the sidewalk trundles a pregnant woman, her belly hugely distended beneath a soiled blouse, something outsized and overripe within her. How violently being burgeons!
She is alone. One hand cups the torso's bulge, the other lies splay-fingered against the wall, the woman coming on slowly, slowly, with immense concentration. Her face pinched. She does not see him. She is hurrying, though her cargo impedes. Her hand coming off the wall, slapping the wall, coming off as she goes past. And her dusty skirts are wet in back. Something rustles to the pavement, something dribbling from her body: the liquid trail of her need.
The poet stops.
"Madame?" He goes toward her, reaches to touch her. "Madame?"—other words escape him now. Anyway, she does not seem to hear: her face still squinched and everything turned inward to the pain. But she halts. Stands there braced at the wall, not looking anywhere.
"Madame?"
Nothing. Rainer touches her elbow, her back, moves to impel her forward.
"Madame, mustn't you hurry?"—this in German, but she must understand.
She is very still, seems to want only rest. She fixes him with gray glazed eyes, desperately silent. Her chapped and crackled lips come open. A shudder of shocked pain. Something has been rent inside her. At her feet a pool of dark bluish murk is forming.
And this whole episode not even a dream …
Tonight, tonight: safe again in the contained danger of his Toullier quarters, Rainer will lie feverbound, captive to his memory and its convoluted echoes: the reiteration of his fists at the hospital gates, the flight of his cry into the locked courtyard. Though in life the orderlies appear at last and speed the woman inside, they do not come in the memory. They do not come, and the bursting woman's wet gray eyes remain fixed and unseeing upon him. In the worst moments the great outside need leaves him no chance of evasion. Every need becomes his conclusively, sits upon his heart like a stone. Does he dare require a doctor for himself amidst such need?
"The main thing was, one was alive. That was the main thing."
Next morning Rainer is better. The anxious feeling gone. Sensations not so bitter now. Yet one must try to get help if he is able, mustn't he? Clara will be here by next month; he must try to be well when she arrives. So he will walk to the hospital—the Salpêtrière. And he needn't even go in, not necessarily. The walk itself may be enough to clear his conscience. A doctor may be superfluous by the time Rainer gets there.
A half hour gone and then he is standing outside a factory-like building. Rows of small windows in the walls of oppressive stone. An angry arch reads consultations in rigid tombstone letters, an open door beneath.
Something sucks the poet inside—it's not a matter of decision. Something recognizes him and draws him through the door. That he may meet his brethren. And they are all inside, all arrayed in a deep, purgatorial corridor: two long benches heavy with them, one bench to each wall. Lined up like that, the wounded ones sit there and stare at their opposites as at a mirror.
Someone has given Rainer a slip of paper, the selfsame paper clutched by the many hands in this hall. There doesn't seem to be a place to sit, so he walks to the end of the corridor and as he passes in the space where their gazes meet their seeing breaks before him like a surface of water. Then they are all seeing him. And the lanky child of Prague goes ambling over the old Karl-Brücke—the bridge with its rows of opposing saints ranked above the muddy river, figures chiseled life-size from stone and blackened with soot. Their serried gazes meet above the boy as he passes between the pedestals, their grimed eyes still rueful in martyrdom. …
Toward the end of the row a man rises. A blanched and speckled face. Egglike skull where clumps of hair cling without pattern to a pink scalp. The man waves a feeble usher's hand toward the slot of surrendered bench, his mouth contorted weakly—something like a smile. An imbecilic, wandering look.
"Merci, non," murmurs the poet, and goes by.
"Upon this bench they sat, those that knew me, and waited. Yes, they were all there."
"You say you don't have any particular pain?"
The doctor is a gentlemanly fellow with colorless thin hair, his face and hands pale as a priest's.
"Non, monsieur. Besides a stitch in the bowels now and then. And of course the headache."
The headache—ruthless force, and Rainer plunging headlong through thickening silt—ah, the vise-grips of earthen plates and that space all closed and airless—
"How often does the headache come?"
"Every few weeks, I suppose."
"Always with a fever?"
"Not always. Sometimes yes, sometimes no."
"And for how many years have you been prone to the headache?"
"As long as I can remember."
"And your bowels?"
"Oui?"
"Has this stitch in your bowels always troubled you too?"
"Non, monsieur. That's more recent."
The doctor has not touched him. The doctor sits at a table with papers fanned flat before him. A pen lies there, but he does not write anything. The poet sits in a small wooden chair, sweating hands folded in his lap.
This room is not a room, it's merely a partitioned space just off the corridor where so many wait. The wall behind, in which the door stands, does not even meet the ceiling. The doctor's words travel over and ring clearly in the hall. Besides the poet's chair, the doctor's, and the table, there's nothing here but a metal tray against one wall, erected on four long metal legs each shod with a little caster—and in the room's far corner a big square-mounted sink fashioned of some unreflective metal.
"Your occupation?"
"Poet."
"And why do you come to Paris?"
"I'm writing a book about Auguste Rodin."
"Who?"
"Rodin."
The doctor kinks his brow, swings his head to stare at the concrete floor as though the name might be stenciled there. He seems to see it.
"Ah, Rodin," he says, the second syllable distinctly nasalized. "Rodin, yes …" He touches his pince-nez with very careful doctorly fingers. "Well, Monsieur Rilke, would you tell me once more what ails you exactly?"
"I beg your pardon, Doctor, I've told you already. Perhaps if you were to examine me—"
"Consultations only here. Examinations come later in the H wing. And from what you've explained, monsieur, I'm afraid your condition, if condition there be, is very slight. Indigestion perhaps, probably resulting in a bilious disturbance of the blood from which come headaches and …"
So the good doctor needs the poet to say his malady. And how can one say such a thing? How? … But the doctor is rising now, extracting something from an inner coat pocket.
"If you'll be good enough to draw back your jacket, monsieur, I might see whether your pulse has anything to report."
The doctor bends and sets a small cone against Rainer's breast, leans his ear down, attends. Against Rainer's back, attends. And what can one's heart be thought to say when hearkened to in no manner but this?
From Lost Son by M. Allen Cunningham, appearing June 2007.
Pre-order Lost Son at
Powells.com
Or at amazon.com