A visit in my room

I HEARD A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, and quickly put my notebook under the mattress. I thought that lunch was over and that one of the orderlies had come to call me to the second part of the therapeutic conversations. But no: when I opened the door, Martin Amis was standing there. “May I come in?” he asked and pushed past me without waiting for a reply. Okay, I thought, he must have a reason for this rude intrusion into my privacy. I closed the door and he sat on the edge of my bed. He looked agitated.

“Can you imagine?” he said. “I went to the boss, that oddball Goldberg, and told him that I was withdrawing from the therapy and leaving. He demanded to know my reasons. I wanted to tell him that his therapy was like something out of a bad novel, a malicious joke, more psychological violence than treatment. But at the last moment I thought better of it. I realised that open conflict with the patient, for Goldberg is sick, there’s no doubt about it, would do more harm than good. So I lied. I said that in my case the therapy had been more than successful and that I could, thank God and him, perhaps more him than God, carry on writing. Therefore, I would like to bid him goodbye and thank him for the successful treatment.”

I didn’t know how to respond; it seemed to me that he hadn’t finished. And his silence didn’t last long.

“Guess what he said. That premature departure was not possible. That it would cause irreparable harm to the others. That I must wait, at least until the end of the current phase of treatment. Until the interloper had been unmasked. Only then could I leave, he said.”

“But we’re not on forced treatment,” I said, trying as hard as I could not to show how much his news had shocked me.

“Yes, Berghof is a well-known psychiatric institute, but our department is something else, we came here voluntarily and we have paid for treatment. For God’s sake, no one can keep us here if we decide to leave. We haven’t signed anything.”

He bowed his head and said: “I have. I signed a declaration agreeing that I knew how complex it was treating writer’s block and for success it is necessary to persist until the experts agree that they can do nothing more.”

“I signed nothing like that,” I said. “Unless I have forgotten doing so. I forget many things, but something like that I wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure?” he looked at me. “I’ve spoken to the others and they all say they’ve signed a similar declaration.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Except if the declaration was signed by my publisher, who sent me here and covered the cost of therapy. But he shouldn’t be able to sign something like that without my knowledge.”

“Lucky you,” said Amis. “You at least have a theoretical chance of challenging the validity of the signature and winning your freedom. The rest of us are trapped here like prisoners – I can’t find a more appropriate word.”

“I think you’ve misunderstood the declaration,” I tried to comfort him and even more, myself. “It’s probably consent in principle, which can’t be legally binding. After all, Switzerland respects the rule of law.”

They have deliberately pushed us to the edge of sanity,’ he said in an emphatically accusatory tone. ‘And where is the assurance that they have not succeeded?'”

“Come on,” he grimaced, “as a writer you know that the law can be abused in a thousand different ways. Unless you really are the interloper we are supposed to recognise, of which I’m increasingly convinced. Italy also accepts the rule of law, so why is it run by the Mafia?”

“I’m not the interloper,” I replied, “and your conviction that I am is your affair. The only problem is that if you really think so, then there is no chance of us having a serious conversation.”

“But our conversations are not serious,” he once again raised his voice slightly. “We already know everything about writing and literature. What’s the point of exchanging our views on the problems of writing, if we have nothing new to say to each other? In any case, writing is something different for each of us. Even in a much bigger group, you wouldn’t find two individuals who wrote in the same way. If the only purpose of our pointless conversations is to uncover which of us is hiding behind a well-known name and isn’t a writer, or at least not the one he claims to be, because we cannot exclude the possibility that he may be a writer, how can that discovery help us rid ourselves of the writer’s block which brought us here in the first place?”

“But if you knew that,” I objected, “you wouldn’t need treatment, then you wouldn’t have come here, you wouldn’t have signed the declaration, which, it seems, I haven’t, the only one who hasn’t, for I wouldn’t forget something like that, although it’s not impossible considering what they’ve done to us since we arrived.”

“They have deliberately pushed us to the edge of sanity,” he said in an emphatically accusatory tone. “And where is the assurance that they have not succeeded? Then they changed us into detectives, merely for their own amusement. What if they are all interlopers, except for me and perhaps you and Bellow, who I know personally? And what if there is no interloper and we are all who we say we are? That’s not excluded either.”

“That’s precisely why our conversations can be useful,” I suggested, rather than saying with great conviction. “In the end, it may turn out that they are a crucial step in the treatment. For although it seems that we know everything about literature, or considering our fame we should know, it may not be so. It seems to me, at least, that we all know something different, something very personal and special to us, and that through the one-to-one conversations they have prescribed for us, all the individual ideas, experiences and opinions might be condensed into a collective answer to the question as to what the telling of stories actually is and why we need to continue with it. Not for ourselves, for royalties, awards, fame, or for people to admire us, read us, but for the good of mankind, for the good of the world, for the future good.”

“You know what,” he straightened up and grimaced, “your statements sound increasingly like those of a secondary school teacher addressing his pupils. Such naivety always pains me, but never as much as now. You should be writing fairy stories for children, the kind that teachers like more than children do, with a didactic undertone. Maybe you do write them and I’m not aware of it.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I said, which at that moment was the only response I was capable of. I was aware that Martin Amis was cynical, condescending and at moments even malicious, but his disdainful statement exceeded everything that he had ever said or written. That’s just the nature of a writer who is striving to match up to and transcend the reputation of his famous father, Kingsley, author of the novel Lucky Jim, which after it first appeared in 1954 was to be found in the hands of every literate person in Britain. I decided to respond in equal measure. “Among your father’s novels, my favourite was always Lucky Jim,” I said. “I doubt you will ever match that. It seems that in almost every case, the sons of successful writers are condemned to limp along behind their fathers. And that at a certain point, they even begin to hate them.”

“I don’t like to repeat myself,” he said, without looking at me, “but what I said before still goes. Fairy tales are your natural domain.” He went to the door, opened it, went into the corridor and slammed the door so hard that it almost came off its hinges.

Well, I thought, I’ve acquired yet another enemy among my colleagues, but so what – considering how many there are, one more won’t make a decisive difference.

The door to my room suddenly opened again and who should come in but Martin Amis.

“Look,” he said and then paused for a moment. “I didn’t come here intending to offend you in any way. The words slipped from my tongue because of my growing anger at everything that has happened to me here. If I decided to write the most unlikely novel, my imagination would come up against a brick wall even before realising that Goldberg isn’t the clinic director, but a patient. Is all this just a terrible nightmare? Or does reality have more imagination than we are capable of? Although, hand on heart, what some authors come up with, especially authors of fantasy literature, which is increasingly fashionable because we are increasingly disinclined to understand humankind and its essence, goes far beyond the bounds of common sense. But that’s a literary niche that doesn’t have to be taken seriously, let the sociologists deal with it. To keep it brief: I came to you to suggest that we escape. Together.”

His words were followed by a tense silence.

“Escape?” I finally repeated. “And go where?”

“It’s not important where, what’s important is that we get away from here. And go home, probably. To where we live and work. It’s important that we escape the danger, which is much more real than many of our group take it to be. These so-called therapists scramble our brains and keep us here as objects of their research. They can do that legally. It’s not exactly an everyday theme, writer’s block. What if someone wants to get a doctorate out of it? To write a book about it? Get a research grant? Can you at least consider that possibility?”

“I can consider it,” I replied. “But I also notice that the majority of patients have unusual psychological issues. In fact, I can’t claim that for everyone, because psychological instability is characteristic of writers, but I can say so for myself. And for you. In my case, my confusion is growing; in yours, paranoia. How it is with the others I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out during the following confrontations.”

“So, you’re going to continue?” he looked at me accusingly.

“I see no other possibility,” I replied. “Fleeing from the operating table in the middle of surgery because the anaesthetic is easing off doesn’t seem very sensible. Fleeing because, at first sight, I don’t like the weird treatment method?

I’m interested to see how it will all end.”

“And what if it doesn’t?” he almost bleated back. “Or if it all ends badly? There’s a telephone in the castle, not just one, quite a few. Why won’t they let us make phone calls?”

“Probably because,” I said, “making connection with our previous world, which is perhaps one of the reasons for our writer’s block, would slow down the healing process, if not end it.”

“Okay,” he said and headed for the door. “I’d hoped you were thinking like me. I’ll just have to escape on my own.”

from My Kingdom is Dying, translated by David Limon

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Evald Flisar, born 1945, is a novelist, playwright, essayist and editor. He was president of the Slovene Writers’ Association from 1995 to 2002, and since 1998 has been editor of the oldest Slovenian literary journal Sodobnost (Contemporary Review). He is the author of eleven novels, eight of which were nominated for the Kresnik Award ­– the ‘Slovenian Booker’ – two collections of short stories, three travelogues, two books for children and fifteen stage plays. He is a winner of the Prešeren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for prose and drama, and a recipient of the prestigious Župančič Award for lifetime achievement. My Kingdom is Dying is published in paperback by Istros Books.
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David Limon translates literature for children and adults from Slovene into English. His translations include the prizewinning novels Fužine Blues by Andrej Skubic and Iqball Hotel by Boris Kolar, as well as five previous novels by Evald Flisar, three of which were published by Istros Books. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana.