Veronika Decides to Die (On the Seventh Day 2)

While she was playing that music for the garden, another crazy person appeared: Eduard, a schizophrenic who was beyond all cure. She was not frightened by his presence; on the contrary, she smiled, and to her surprise, he smiled back.

The music could penetrate even his remote world, more distant than the moon itself; it could even perform miracles.

"I must buy a new key ring," thought Dr. Igor, as he opened the door to his small consulting room in Villete. The old one was falling to pieces, and a small decorative metal shield had just fallen to the floor.

DR. IGOR bent down and picked it up. What should he do with that shield bearing the Ljubljana coat of arms? He might as well throw it away, although he could have it mended and ask them to make a new leather strap, or else he could give it to his nephew to play with. Both alternatives seemed equally absurd. A key ring doesn't cost very much, and his nephew had no interest in shields; he spent all his time watching television or playing with electronic toys imported from Italy. Dr. Igor could still not bring himself to throw it out, however, so he put it back in his pocket; he would decide what to do with it later on.

That was why he was the director of the hospital and not a patient, because he thought a lot before making any decisions.

He turned on the light; as winter advanced, dawn came ever later. Dislocation, divorce, and the absence of light were the main reasons for the increase in the number of cases of depression. Dr. Igor was hoping that spring would arrive early and solve half his problems.

He looked at his diary for the day. He needed to find some way to prevent Eduard from dying of hunger; his schizophrenia made him unpredictable, and now he had stopped eating. Dr. Igor had already prescribed intravenous feeding, but he couldn't keep that up for ever. Eduard was a strong young man of twenty-eight, but even with an IV drip, he would eventually waste away, becoming more and more skeletal.

What would Eduard's father think? He was one of the young Slovene republic's best-known ambassadors. He had been one of the people behind the delicate negotiations with Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. He, after all, had managed to work for years for the Belgrade government, surviving his detractors, who accused him of working for the enemy, and he was still in the diplomatic corps, except this time he represented a different country. He was a powerful and influential man, feared by everyone.

Dr. Igor felt momentarily worried, just as before he had been worried about the shield on his key ring, but he immediately dismissed the thought. As far as the ambassador was concerned, it didn't matter whether his son looked well or not; he had no intention of taking him to official functions or having Eduard accompany him to the various place

s in the world where he was sent as a government representative. Eduard was in Villete, and there he would stay forever, or at least as long as his father continued earning his nice fat salary.

Dr. Igor decided to stop the intravenous feeding and allow Eduard to waste away a little more, until he felt like eating again. If the situation got worse, he would write a report and pass responsibility on to the council of doctors who administered Villete. "The best way to avoid trouble is to share responsibility," his father had taught him. He had been a doctor too, and although he had had various deaths on his hands, he had never had any problem with the authorities.

Once Dr. Igor had ordered Eduard's treatment to stop, he moved on to the next case. According to the report Zedka Mendel had completed her course of treatment and could be allowed to leave. Dr. Igor wanted to see for himself. There was nothing a doctor dreaded more than getting complaints from the families of patients who had been in Villete, which was what nearly always happened, for it was rare for a patient to readjust successfully to normal life after a period spent in a mental hospital.

It wasn't the fault of the hospital, or of any of the hospitals scattered around the world; the problem of readjustment was exactly the same everywhere. Just as prison never corrects the prisoner--it only teaches him to commit more crimes--so hospitals merely got patients used to a completely unreal world, where everything was allowed and where no one had to take responsibility for their actions.

There was only one way out: to discover a cure for insanity. And Dr. Igor has engaged his heart and soul in just that, developing a thesis that would revolutionize the psychiatric world. In mental hospitals, temporary patients who lived alongside incurable patients began a process of social degeneration that, once started, was impossible to stop. Zedka Mendel would come back to the hospital eventually, this time of her own volition, complaining of nonexistent ailments simply in order to be close to people who seemed to understand her better than those in the outside world.

If, however, he could find a way of combatting vitriol, the poison which Dr. Igor believed to be the cause of insanity, his name would go down in history and people would finally know where Slovenia was. That week, he had been given a heaven-sent opportunity in the shape of a would-be suicide; he was not going to lose this opportunity for all the money in the world.

Dr. Igor felt happy. Although he was obliged for economic reasons to accept treatments, like insulin shock for example, that had long ago been condemned by the medical profession, the same economic reasons lay behind Villete's instigation of a new psychiatric treatment. As well as having the time and the staff to carry out his researches into vitriol, he also had the owners' permission to allow the group calling itself the Fraternity to remain in the hospital. The shareholders in the institution tolerated--note that word well, not "encouraged," but "tolerated"--a longer period of internment than was strictly necessary. They argued that, for humanitarian reasons, they should give the recently cured the option of deciding for themselves when would be the best moment for them to rejoin the world, and that had led to a group of people deciding to stay in Villete, as if at a select hotel or a club for those with similar interests and views. Thus Dr. Igor managed to keep the insane and the sane in the same place, allowing the latter to have a positive influence on the former. To prevent things from degenerating and to stop the insane having a negative effect on those who had been cured, every member of the Fraternity had to leave the hospital at least once a day.

Dr. Igor knew that the reasons given by the shareholders for allowing the presence of healthy people in the hospital--"humanitarian reasons" they said--were just an excuse. They were afraid that Ljubljana, Slovenia's small but charming capital, did not have a sufficient number of wealthy crazy people to sustain this expensive, modern building. Besides, the public health system ran a number of first-class mental hospitals of its own, and that left Villete at a disadvantage in the mental health market.

When the shareholders had converted the old barracks into a hospital, their target market had been the men and women likely to be affected by the war with Yugoslavia. The war, however, had been brief. The shareholders had felt certain that war would return, but it didn't.

Moreover, recent research had shown that while wars did have their psychological victims, they were far fewer than, say, the victims of stress, tedium, congenital illness, loneliness, and rejection. When a community had a major problem to face--for example, war, hyperinflation, or plague--there was a slight increase in the number of suicides but a marked decline in cases of depression, paranoia, and psychosis. These returned to their normal levels as soon as that problem had been overcome, indicating, or so Dr. Igor thought, that people only allow themselves the luxury of being insane when they are in a position to do so.

He had before him another recent survey, this time from Canada, the country an American newspaper had recently voted to have the highest standard of living. Dr. Igor read:

According to Statistics Canada, 40% of people between 15 and 34, 33% of people between 35 and 54 and 20% of people between 55 and 64 have already had some kind of mental illness. It is thought that one in every five individuals suffers some form of psychiatric disorder and one in every eight Canadians will be hospitalised at least once in their lifetime because of mental disturbances.

They've got a bigger market there than we have, he thought. The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

Dr. Igor analyzed a few more cases, thinking carefully about those he should share with the council and those he should resolve alone. By the time he had finished, day had broken, and he turned off the light.

He immediately ordered his first appointment to be shown in: the mother of the patient who had tried to commit suicide.

"I'm Veronika's mother. How is my daughter?"

Dr. Igor wondered if he should tell her the truth and save her any unpleasant surprises--after all, he had a daughter with the same name--but he decided it was best to say nothing.

"We don't know yet," he lied. "We need another week."

"I've no idea why Veronika did it," said the woman tearfully. "We've always been loving parents, we sacrificed everything to give her the best possible upbringing. Although my husband and I have had our ups and downs, we've kept the family together, as an example of perseverance in adversity. She's got a good job, she's nice-looking, and yet..."

"...and yet she tried to kill herself," said Dr. Igor. "There's no reason to be surprised; that's the way it is. People just can't cope with happiness. If you like, I could show you the statistics for Canada."

"Canada?"