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Kindermann’s clinic, I felt the ropes mooring me to consciousness slacken, and I was adrift, moving slowly away from the shore, Meyer’s voice already too far away for me to hear what he was saying.

    After four days in the clinic I was feeling better than I had felt in four months. As well as my vitamins, and my diet of kelp and raw vegetables, I’d tried hydrotherapy, naturotherapy and a solarium treatment. My state of health had been further diagnosed through examination of my irises, my palms and my fingernails, which revealed me as calcium-deficient; and a technique of autogenic relaxation had been taught to me. Dr Meyer was making progress with his Jungian ‘totality approach’, as he called it, and was proposing to attack my depression with electrotherapy. And although I hadn’t yet managed to search Kindermann’s office, I did have a new nurse, a real beauty called Marianne, who remembered Reinhard Lange staying at the clinic for several months, and had already demonstrated a willingness to discuss her employer and the affairs of the clinic.
    She woke me at seven with a glass of grapefruit juice and an almost veterinary selection of pills.
    Enjoying the curve of her buttocks and the stretch of her pendulous breasts, I watched her draw back the curtains to reveal a fine sunny day, and wished that she could have revealed her naked body as easily.
    ‘And how are you this beautiful day?’ I said.
    ‘Awful,’ she grimaced.
    ‘Marianne, you know it’s supposed to be the other way around, don’t you? I’m the one who is supposed to feel awful, and you’re the one who should ask after my health.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Herr Strauss, but I am bored as hell with this place.’
    ‘Well, why don’t you jump in here beside me and tell me all about it. I’m very good at listening to other people’s problems.’
    ‘I’ll bet you’re very good at other things as well,’ she said, laughing. ‘I shall have to put bromide in your fruit-juice.’
    ‘What would be the point of that? I’ve already got a whole pharmacy swilling around inside of me. I can’t see that another chemical would make much difference.’
    ‘You’d be surprised.’
    She was a tall, athletic-looking blonde from Frankfurt with a nervous sense of humour and a rather self-conscious smile that indicated a lack of personal confidence. Which was strange, given her obvious attractiveness.
    ‘A whole pharmacy,’ she scoffed. ‘A few vitamins and something to help you sleep at night. That’s nothing compared with some of the others.’
    ‘Tell me about it.’
    She shrugged. ‘Something to help them wake up, and stimulants to help combat depression.’
    ‘What do they use on the pansies?’
    ‘Oh, them. They used to give them hormones, but it didn’t work. So now they try aversion therapy. But despite what they say at the Goering Institute about it being a treatable disorder, in private all the doctors say that the basic condition is hard to influence. Kindermann should know. I think he might be a bit warm himself. I’ve heard him tell a patient that psychotherapy is only helpful in dealing with the neurotic reactions that may arise from homosexuality. That it helps the patient to stop deluding himself.’
    ‘So then all he has to worry about is Section 175.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    “The section of the German penal code which makes it a criminal offence. Is that what happened to Reinhard Lange? He was just treated for associated neurotic reactions?’ She nodded, and sat herself on the edge of my bed. ‘Tell me about this Goering Institute. Any relation to Fat Hermann?’
    ‘Matthias Goering is his cousin. The place exists to provide psychotherapy with the protection of the Goering name. If it weren’t for him there would be very little mental health in Germany worthy of the name. The Nazis would have destroyed psychiatric medicine merely because its leading light is a Jew. The whole thing is the most enormous piece of hypocrisy. A