Read The Pale Criminal for Free Online

sleeping?’ he said.
    â€˜Badly. Couple of hours a night.’
    â€˜Do you ever have nightmares?’
    â€˜Yes, and I don’t even like cheese.’
    â€˜Any recurring dreams?’
    â€˜Nothing specific.’
    â€˜And what about your appetite?’
    â€˜I don’t have one to speak of.’
    â€˜Your sex life?’
    â€˜Same as my appetite. Not worth mentioning.’
    â€˜Do you think much about women?’
    â€˜All the time.’
    He scribbled a few notes, stroked his beard, and said: ‘I’m prescribing extra vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium. I’m also going to put you on a sugar-free diet, lots of raw vegetables and kelp. We’ll help get rid of some of the toxins in you with a course of blood-purification tablets. I also recommend that you exercise. There’s an excellent swimming-pool here, and you may even care to try a rainwater bath, which you’ll find to be most invigorating. Do you smoke?’ I nodded. ‘Try giving up for a while.’ He snapped his notebook shut.
    â€˜Well, that should all help with your physical well-being. Along the way we’ll see if we can’t effect some improvement in your mental state with psychotherapeutic treatment.’
    â€˜Exactly what is psychotherapy, Doctor? Forgive me, but I thought that the Nazis had branded it as decadent.’
    â€˜Oh no, no. Psychotherapy is not psychoanalysis. It places no reliance on the unconscious mind. That sort of thing is all right for Jews, but it has no relevance to Germans. As you yourself will now appreciate, no psychotherapeutic treatment is ever pursued in isolation from the body. Here we aim to relieve the symptoms of mental disorder by adjusting the attitudes that have led to their occurrence. Attitudes are conditioned by personality, and the relation of a personality to its environment. Your dreams are only of interest to me to the extent that you are having them at all. To treat you by attempting to interpret your dreams, and to discover their sexual significance is, quite frankly, nonsensical. Now that is decadent.’ He chuckled warmly. ‘But that’s a problem for Jews, and not you, Herr Strauss. Right now, the most important thing is that you enjoy a good night’s sleep.’ So saying he picked up his medical bag and took out a syringe and a small bottle which he placed on the bedside table.
    â€˜What’s that?’ I said uncertainly.
    â€˜Hyoscine,’ he said, rubbing my arm with a pad of surgical spirit.
    The injection felt cold as it crept up my arm, like embalming fluid. Seconds after recognizing that I would have to find another night on which to snoop around 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.
    Â 
    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