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  MADNESS ORIGINATED AT the same time as the human race. Perhaps the first person, the one who first said “I,” experienced his I breaking apart. Later, in mankind’s early childhood, members of the community looked on those who were different the way one regards with wonder something for which there is no ready explanation, the way one observes the wonder of the sun moving from one edge of the sky to the other, or a flash of lightning.

  Aeons passed, and man began trying to explain things: thunder was the heavenly spear of an angry god, the sun was a god who traversed the sky, and madness was the result of being possessed by divine or demonic forces. Did these people, the possessed, flee from their homes and crawl into animal dens, unaware that the wild beast crouched inside would tear them apart? During the hunt, rather than hurling their spears at their prey, did they set their weapons on the ground and bow to the hunted animal? Did they throw stones at the sun, thinking they could extinguish it? In all primitive societies, the cure was the same for anyone believed to be possessed by demonic forces: small holes were drilled in their heads to release the demon. The bodies of those who did not survive the exorcism were thrown a distance from the human dwellings, lest the demon enter another person in the community.

  Aeons passed, and man began to explain things differently: lightning was the result of clouds striking each other, the sun was a heavenly body that revolved about the earth, but madness was still the result of being possessed by divine or demonic forces. In the Bible, madness is a punishment for disobedience to God. This is how one is punished according to the Old Testament: “The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart.” In the New Testament, madness is understood as possession by evil forces that must be driven from the one they have possessed. In other religions as well, madness results when one has fallen under the influence of dark forces, a consequence of the battle between God and Satan.

  But there have been others who sought a different cause for madness. At a time when his compatriots and contemporaries explained madness in terms of the influence of the goddess Hera, or of Aries, the god of war, Hippocrates wrote that it is neither the forces of light nor those of darkness that induce madness but our brain alone that makes us “mad or delirious, brings us dread and fear.” Several centuries later, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, in his work On the Causes and Symptoms of Acute Diseases, writes: “A patient may believe himself to be a sparrow, a cock, or an earthen vase; another may think himself a god, an orator, or an actor, and carry a stalk of straw believing it to be the scepter of the world. Some cry like an infant and demand to be carried, or they believe they are a grain of mustard and constantly tremble in fear that they will be eaten by a hen.” The Cappadocian researcher of illnesses posited melancholia and mania as the two poles of madness: “The melancholic isolates himself, he is afraid of being persecuted and imprisoned, he torments himself with superstitious ideas, he hates his life,” he “curses life and wishes for death.” Those who are possessed not by melancholia but by mania, however, are in an uncontrolled fury, agitation, or exhilaration, and under these conditions may feel inspired to great deeds that they have no basis for performing, or else they might kill someone for no real reason. Sometimes the two poles of madness appear in the same person: “Some patients after a bout of melancholy have an attack of mania” yet again, while someone who was euphoric due to mania is overtaken by melancholia, so that “he becomes, at the end of the attack, languid, sad, taciturn, he complains that he fears for his future, he feels ashamed.” And then the circle turns again in a constant cycle of melancholia and mania.

  Centuries passed, and it became clear that the sun does not orbit the earth; rather, the earth orbits the sun, and explanations were sought for natural phenomena. Yet divine intermediaries continued to declare the mad to be possessed by the Devil, and executing God’s will, they determined whether they would be healed by prayers or sent on a pilgrimage to a holy place that could heal them. If, however, it was determined that it was not possession but a voluntary pact with the Devil, the punishment was to be burned at the stake or hanged or drowned.

  When the Age of Reason began in Europe, the insane were viewed not only as sinners who had fallen under the sway of demonic powers but also as dangerous beings, or beings who could not contribute to society and whose existence hindered its functioning. Yet even then, one of the explanations for madness was God. During the Renaissance, madness was understood as a consequence of three basic sins: madness of the imagination, whereby a person believed he was someone or something he was not; madness as a curse from God; and madness as a result of great passion. At that time, every large city had a prison for the insane. There they were not treated but punished; madness was considered not an illness but a crime. Those whom society considered normal needed to erect a barrier between themselves and those they declared to be mad. The rulers of coastal cities bribed sailors to gather up those thought mad, and then the boats sailed off with the unfortunates lashed to the decks. If they survived thirst and hunger, if they had not been defeated by the wind or the cold, they were secretly unloaded at the first harbor, and if that was impossible they were tossed in some desolate place or thrown into the water.

  In the seventeenth century, Reginald Scot, Edward Jordan, and Thomas Willis asserted in their studies that madness was neither a pact with Satan nor possession by him but an illness of the nerves and the mind, yet the conviction that the eclipse of the mind was provoked by forces of darkness would continue to be held even by intellectuals. At the end of the seventeenth century, Ernst Wedel, a professor of medicine at the University of Jena, explained to his students the ways in which the Devil manifested himself in people through madness. But it was too late. John Locke had already declared that religion, too, must be rational, and Thomas Hobbes had explained madness as an error in thinking provoked by a defect in the workings of the body. In spite of their works, the sanatoriums for the insane continued to resemble torture chambers for criminals. In the two most renowned asylums, the Salpêtrière and the Bicêtre in Paris, the sick were kept like animals. Some were even kept in underground cells with chains around their necks, and as punishment were confined to pillories. If some lout on the outside wanted to observe them and enjoy their torture, the guards granted that pleasure for a bit of money, and sometimes even struck the unfortunates with whips, as if it were some sort of circus performance.

  In the nineteenth century, religion and penal institutions finally handed the insane over to psychiatry. Madness was no longer a sin against God or a crime but a barren existence, a failed life, a lost opportunity. That which a human being receives but once—his life—he destroys by his madness, because even though he lives it, he lives it to no constructive end. A life of madness is a mistake, a failed investment, of nature and of God.

  ALL THE WINDOWS of the rooms at the Nest looked out onto the grounds in the middle of the hospital. The grounds were covered with soft grass and crisscrossed with pathways, with benches set along them. In several areas, clusters of trees called to mind a stage set representing a forest. Toward evening, when dusk fell, Klara and I would stand by the window and watch it grow dark.

  AT THE NEST there were people who were as afraid of darkness as of death.

  WHEN WE SENSED QUIET set in, Klara and I would immediately stop talking, no matter how important the conversation we were having. We loved the quiet all the more because it was such a rarity at the Nest. Hans and Johann lived in the room above us. One walked with slow and heavy steps, as if he had hooves instead of feet; the other walked quickly and decisively. In the room next to ours, Krista talked loudly to herself nonstop, most often accusing herself of something. In the room on the other side of ours, Beata and Herta often giggled feverishly. Occasionally they banged their heads or their fists on the wall. Dull blows like forgotten pain. Yelps, howling, weeping, and laughter, clangs, squeals, and blows reached us from other rooms near ours. Quiet was such a rarity that we yearned for it, and in those moments when it
set in we fell silent, perhaps without thinking. We stopped our conversation, not deliberately, in order to enjoy the quiet; rather, words escaped us, as when a miracle occurs.

  THE HUMAN RACE HAS always sensed—and, being unable to prove whether it is truth or self-deception, will ever only sense—the feeling that at the very core of a human being glimmers an incorporeal light, something that may continue to burn even after the body has died. That light consists of a large number of rays, each of which is one of the essential human traits. People, then, owing to the similarity of the rays they carry within them, form human-constellations. Countless people are a part of each of these constellations; each person belongs to as many constellations as the number of rays that constitute his light. Countless people are connected in each constellation even when they do not know one another, even when they will never see one another. In order to be a part of the same human-constellation, it is important not to be close to, or even to live at the same time as, the others in that constellation, but to carry, in one’s incorporeal light, the ray characteristic of that constellation. Some of these rays are traits of madness. The constellations that madness creates are interwoven with the other human-constellations, because they share the same people, and yet it appears that each of these constellations of madness sparkles in a separate sky, alone.

  THE NIGHTSTANDS BESIDE THE beds at the Nest held the most varied souvenirs of past lives.

  On her nightstand, our neighbor Krista kept a lock of hair from her daughter’s first haircut, and the first tooth she lost. Whenever someone went into her room, during the course of their conversation Krista’s gaze would turn toward the small table, and, forgetting the countless times she had said it before, she would say, “This is my little Lotte,” and she would pick up the lock of hair and the baby tooth and hold them in the palms of her hands, looking at them the way children look at a sliver of broken glass, as though it were some kind of precious object.

  Everything imaginable was on the nightstands at the Nest: pieces of brick, photographs, postcards written in faded ink, bird feathers, the legs of chairs, pillowcases, scraps of curtains, torn-off pockets, buttons, small mirrors, pebbles, carved pieces of wood, shoelaces, hatbands, diapers, beads, the hands, feet, bodies, and heads of dolls, and here and there a complete doll….

  On some tables the objects were arranged with care, sometimes in a strictly determined order, while on others they were scattered, chaotic. By the chaos or the order on a nightstand, by the manner in which the objects were arranged or scattered, by that remarkable geometry of order or chaos, one could read the geometry of someone’s past, something that those who lay beside those tables and who had lived those lives with wondrous geometry could not, or did not know how to, put into words.

  On Klara’s nightstand was a sketch that no one would imagine had been drawn by her brother: a woman, her back turned, poised on the edge of something.

  My nightstand was empty. There were many empty nightstands at the Nest.

  AT THE END of the east wing of the hospital building, there was a small library. There some of us quickly paged through books from the first page to the last, and then from the last to the first. Some, from the time they sat down to the time they stood up, did not turn a single page but looked at a letter or a period, a comma, an exclamation point, or a question mark. Some of us read.

  SOMETIMES KLARA WOULD PICK UP the sketch that lay on the table beside her bed—the sketch, drawn on a small piece of paper that her brother happened to have in his pocket during one of his visits. Gustav had a habit of keeping his hands in his pockets while he talked, and at the end of the conversation he would suddenly take them out, and then pencils, pieces of chalk, erasers, coins would fall from his pockets. During one visit, as he pulled his hands from his pockets a rumpled piece of paper fell to the floor. Since then, Klara kept that sketch on her nightstand; sometimes she held it in her hands and stared at it. There, on that small piece of paper, a woman stands on the edge of something, her back turned. Beyond the edge stretches a void. Once, after staring at the drawing a long time, Klara said, “I ask myself whether this woman is looking into the abyss or whether she is standing on the edge with her eyes closed.”

  ON AFTERNOONS WHEN THE WEATHER WAS fine, we would go outside to walk the grounds. If someone had a good enough reason, he could remain in the hospital building. Sometimes I stayed in my room because of stomach pains or a headache. I would stand by the window and study the others who were outdoors. Some ran about the grass like children; others sat on benches and talked; a third group argued; some stood alone, pensive, or laughing, or tearful, or indifferent. The window framed the world below, keeping me separate in some other world, from where I could observe myself.

  ONCE, WHILE LOOKING OUT from behind the window, I noticed a man leading two children by the hand approach one of the women walking by herself on the grounds. When she noticed him she stopped stone-cold, and that somehow froze her three visitors as well. Her husband said something, pointed to the children, and rested the palms of his hands on their heads for several moments. He paused as he spoke, probably expecting her to say something. She stood unmoving, as I looked at her from behind. I could not see the expression on her face, nor did I know whether she was even able to say anything. The expression on her husband’s face showed that he was continually failing to extract a single word. At one moment, his face showed that he had given up. Then he took a step toward her and hugged her, and her hands made a barely perceptible motion, as if she were attempting to return his embrace. The children drew nearer. The two of them hugged her, clasping her around the waist. She did not bend down, or did not succeed in bending down. The husband and the children set off toward the Nest’s exit; before they passed through the gates, they turned back toward the woman, raised their arms, and waved. She raised her arm as if it were a heavy object; she made a barely perceptible motion that resembled a wave, and then slowly lowered her arm beside her body. One of the children separated from the husband and took two steps in the woman’s direction, two steps that could have turned into a run, but then stopped suddenly. The child turned back and joined the other child and the grown-up, and out they went through the gate. For a long time, the woman remained standing stock-still. Although she was standing there on the hospital grounds, I had a feeling that she was standing on the edge of some abyss. I tried to imagine her face but couldn’t. I asked myself whether she was looking into the abyss or standing on the edge with her eyes closed.

  THE LIFE OF KRISTA, our neighbor at the Nest, turned upside down in an instant. This happened just before they brought her to the Nest. Perhaps it was the death of her husband, but when madness is in question one can never be sure. All at once, she stopped recognizing the people around her. She looked at her parents as if she were looking at a wall. She looked at her little daughter, born several months earlier, as if she were looking at an object. When Krista was brought to the Nest, something immediately revived in her. She began to move, to eat, and to bathe herself, to walk the grounds, and to weave during the work hours. But when her parents and her little daughter came to visit it was as if some part of her past returned, and her whole body stiffened. Then, after they left, she cried for her daughter, and begged for her to be brought back to her. Once, when her parents learned what would happen when they headed home after their visits, they took Krista home, and she spent several weeks with them, completely impassive. So they returned her to the Nest, and as soon as they had left, Krista stirred and began to moan for her little daughter.

  Her loud moans of despair lasted for hours after those visits. We would go into her room and assure her that we would bring her little daughter to her, but it was as if she were incapable of hearing us. At the moment the falsehood touched her consciousness, Krista would simply nod, fall silent, and life would continue.

  AT A TIME WHEN people still believed the earth was as flat as a dinner plate, when people trembled before the Last Judgment, feared hell, and hoped in heaven, it
was customary in every city for the mad folk to be locked in cages from time to time and brought to the town square. There all the city’s inhabitants are gathered: the municipal dignitaries and the craftsmen, the clergymen and the soldiers, the fine ladies and the washerwomen, the children and the old folk, the physicians and the fishermen, the honest folk and the thieves. They wait in anticipation for the grand festivity, which begins when the cages are opened and those imprisoned come out. Their exit is greeted by the delighted cries of the crowd; they step from their cages with their strange looks, their incomprehensible mutterings, their tattered clothing. The guardians of the city, in a wide circle around them, make sure they remain in a tight cluster; the guardians stand with their legs spread, getting down as low as possible so as not to block anyone’s view. Everyone looks at the mad folk, and they look back at the people gathered in the square, and at themselves and at one another. Someone from the crowd—clergyman or thief, it’s all the same—tosses out some insult or other. Some of the mad ones reply, while others remain in their rapture with their saints, or in their confusion as to why they have found themselves before so many eyes. And the crowd waits. A child picks up several small stones, bends down between the spread legs of one of the guards, and begins to throw. A woman who greedily chews her fingers is struck in the forehead. Another stone strikes the leg of an old man, who tries to warn the others by chirping like a sparrow. The third stone misses its target; it falls somewhere among the mad people. The woman stops chewing her fingers and begins to scream in panic. The old man stops chirping like a sparrow and begins to yell at the assembled throng. And the other mad folk become agitated; some join in the old man’s howling at the crowd; others begin to run in place; a third group rolls over on the ground; someone laughs with a sound like the shriek of a bird; someone scratches himself from head to toe and back again. The gathered crowd is excited by the view, by the tumult, the writhing, by the rage and despair of the insane. One of the madmen stands with arms outstretched and begs to be crucified. “Crucify him! Crucify him!” shouts the crowd. Someone calls out that he is the god of the sun and that all he needs to do is blow and the sun will burn out. “Can you extinguish the sun by peeing on it?” shouts a voice from the crowd, and the man drops his pants, urinates into the air, toward the sun, and pisses all over himself. The crowd roars with amusement. “Where is my baby? Where is my baby?” screams a woman in the mad cluster. Some in the crowd tell others that the madwoman’s child died at birth, but others say she never had a child but told everyone she was pregnant. “Where is my baby?” wails the woman, and someone from that happy crowd who is enjoying the show takes off his shirt, quickly rolls it up, and throws it to her. “Here is your child!” he calls to her. “My baby! My baby!” cries the woman, hugging the bundle to her breast. She hugs it and does not stop her joyful exclamations: “My baby is back! My baby is back!” Everyone delights in the spectacle: the municipal dignitaries and the craftsmen, the clergymen and the soldiers, the fine ladies and the washerwomen, the children and the old folk, the physicians and the fishermen, the honest folk and the thieves. Now comes the most enjoyable part. The guardians begin to flick their whips, and, as if driving livestock, they herd the mad people toward the gates of the city. The crowd steps along after them, some in the throng bend down, take a stone, and hurl it at those being snapped by the whips, who scream from the blows, try to run away, and make strange acrobatic movements in response to the lash of the whip. Finally, they arrive at the exit through the fortifications surrounding the city. The gates open. The guards give the final cracks of their whips and then call out, “And now you are free!” and let them pass through the gates. And they run away, not knowing that behind them the city gates will close and they will be left beyond the fortification, not knowing that in this way the cities, every few years, drive out the insane. Some of them continue circling the fortifications for a while. A few will even manage to push their way back in, but others wander a long time in the trackless terrain, across the fields, along the rivers. The woman who was greedily chewing her fingers will freeze to death that same winter. The old man who whistled like a sparrow will be ripped apart by a wolf. The young man who, even while walking, scratched himself from head to toe and back will reach the fortified walls of another city, and will want to enter, but he will be killed by a knight who just days before had won his beloved in a chivalric contest and dedicated to her a song whose rhymes told of his love. The woman who had sought her baby will be raped by highway brigands, who will take her with them and later abandon her, and she will die in her sleep, beside a tree, hugging the bundle of rags, her child.