The Hypnotist (40 page)

“Please sit down, Erik,” said Rainer.

“Thank you, I’d prefer to stand,” I said curtly, but regretted it at once. What the hell had Maja Swartling been doing in here? Perhaps she had come to my defence. After all, she was one of the few people who had a real, detailed knowledge of my research.

Annika Lorentzon was standing by the window on the far side of the room. I thought it was both odd and impolite of her not to welcome me. Instead she stood there with her arms wrapped around her body, staring fixedly out the window.

“We gave you a real opportunity, Erik,” said Peter Mälarstedt.

Rainer Milch nodded.

“But you refused to back down,” he said. “You refused to step aside voluntarily while we conducted our investigation.”

“I could reconsider,” I said quietly.

“It’s too late now. We could have used it to defend ourselves the day before yesterday; today it would just look pathetic.”

Annika opened her mouth. “I’m going to appear on TV tonight to explain how we could have allowed you to continue,” she said faintly, without turning to face me.

“But I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “The fact that a patient comes along with ridiculous accusations surely can’t be allowed to negate years of research, countless treatments that have always been beyond reproach— ”

“It isn’t just one patient.” Rainer Milch interrupted me. “It’s several. In addition, we have a contact who has been studying your work for several years. In her opinion, you have overreached, and almost all your theses are built on castles in the air. You have no proof, and you constantly disregard the best interests of the patients in order to ensure that you are right.”

I was completely at a loss. “And the name of this expert?” I asked.

They didn’t respond.

“Is her name perhaps Maja Swartling?”

Annika Lorentzon’s cheeks flushed red. “Erik,” she said, turning to face me at last. “You are suspended from today onwards. I don’t want you in my hospital any longer .”

“But what about my patients? I have to see— ”

She cut in. “They will be transferred.”

“That won’t do them any good, they— ”

“Well, whose fault is that?” she said, raising her voice.

There was total silence in the room. Frank Paulsson stood with his face averted; Ronny Johansson, Peter Mälarstedt, Rainer Milch, and Svein Holstein remained seated, their faces expressionless.

“So that’s it, then,” I said emptily.

Just a few weeks before I had stood in this same room and been allocated new funding. Now it was all over.

When I reached the lobby, a group of people were waiting for me. A very tall woman with blonde hair thrust a microphone in front of my face.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “Do you still believe that hypnosis is a good form of treatment?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“So you’re going to continue practising?”

I turned away, but the television cameraman followed me, the black gleam of the lens seeking me out. I looked at the blonde woman, read the name badge on her chest, stefanie von sydow, saw her white crocheted hat and her hand, waving the camera over.

“I wonder if you’d like to comment on the fact that another of your patients, a woman named Eva Blau, was committed last week to a secure psychiatric unit.”

“What are you talking about?”

The white light streaming through the tall hospital windows at the end of the corridor was reflected in the recently mopped floor of the secure psychiatric unit at Southern Hospital. I passed a long row of locked doors with flaking paint and rubber strips around their edges and stopped outside B39. Looking back down the corridor, I noticed that my shoes had left tracks in the shining film covering the floor.

From a distant room, loud thuds could be heard, then the faint sound of weeping, and then silence. I stood for a while trying to gather my thoughts before I knocked on the door, turned the key in the lock, and went in.

The waft of disinfectant I brought in with me blended with the miasma of sweat and vomit in the dark room and almost made me retch. Eva Blau was lying on the bed with her back to me. I went over to the window to pull up the roller blind and let in some light, but the mechanism was stuck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Eva starting to turn over. I tugged at the blind but lost my grip and it flew up with a loud crack.

“Sorry,” I said, “I just wanted to let in a bit of light.”

In the sudden brightness, Eva Blau was sitting up and looking at me with heavily drugged eyes, the corners of her mouth curving downwards bitterly. My heart was pounding. The tip of Eva’s nose had been cut off. She was hunched over, with a bloodstained bandage around her hand, just staring at me.

“Eva, I came as soon as I heard,” I said.

She banged her clenched fist slowly against her stomach. The circular wound from the severed tip of her nose glowed red in her tortured face.

“I tried to help you all,” I said. “But I’m beginning to understand that I was wrong about almost everything. I thought I was on to something important, that I understood how hypnosis worked. But I didn’t, I didn’t understand anything. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, not one of you.”

She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, and blood began to trickle from the wound above her mouth.

“Eva? Why have you done this to yourself?” I asked her.

“It was you, you, it’s your fault!” she yelled. “It’s all your fault. You’ve destroyed my life, you’ve taken everything I have!”

“I understand that you’re angry with me because— ”

“Shut the fuck up, You don’t understand anything. My life has been destroyed, and I will destroy yours. I can wait, I can wait as long as it takes, but I will have my revenge.”

Then she started to scream, her mouth wide open, the sound hoarse and insane. The door flew open and a doctor came in.

“You were supposed to wait outside,” he said. He sounded shaken, but he was angry.

“The nurse gave me the key, so I thought— ”

He pulled me into the corridor, closed the door, and locked Eva in.

“Haven’t you done enough harm? This patient is suffering from persecutory delusions— ”

I interrupted him with a smile. “I don’t think so.”

“That is my assessment of this patient,” he said.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

“Hundreds of times every day she demands that we lock her door and lock the key inside the key cupboard.”

“Yes, but— ”

“And she keeps saying she won’t testify against anyone, that we can subject her to electric shocks and rape, but she won’t tell us anything. What the hell did you actually do to your patients? She’s terribly frightened. I can’t believe you went ahead and— ”

“She’s angry with me, but she isn’t afraid of me.”

“I heard her screaming,” he said.

After my visit to the hospital and my encounter with Eva Blau, I drove to Television Centre and asked to speak to Stefanie von Sydow, the TV news reporter who had tried to get a comment out of me earlier. The receptionist dialled an editorial assistant and then handed me the phone. I said I was ready to do an interview if they were interested. After a little while the assistant came downstairs. She was a young woman with short hair and an intelligent expression.

“Stefanie can see you in ten minutes,” she said.

“Good.”

“I’ll take you to make-up.”

The interview was brief. When I went home, the entire house was in darkness. I called out but there was no reply. I was surprised to find Simone upstairs sitting in front of the television, but it wasn’t switched on.

“Has something happened?” I asked. “Where’s Benjamin?”

“He’s at David’s,” she answered tonelessly.

“Isn’t it time he was home? What did you tell him?”

“Nothing.”

“But what’s the matter? Talk to me, Simone.”

“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”

Anxiety rose sharply within me like mercury in a thermometer; I moved closer and tried to brush a strand of hair from her face.

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped, snatching her head away. “What is it? Talk to me, Simone.”

She nodded, and in a voice full of pain, she said, “Erik, please tell me the truth. Have you been unfaithful?”

My heart raced, but my voice stayed gruesomely steady. “What are you talking about?”

“Who is Maja?”

“Maja? I don’t know . . . should I know who that is?”

“Have you been cheating on me?” Simone’s lips quivered.

“Simone? What is this about?”

My thoughts swirled. How could she know? “I would never . . . I get it . . . You’re talking about Maja Swartling. Yes? She hates me for some reason, she’s already influenced the board, and— ”

“Erik,” Simone interrupted. “You get one more chance. Have you slept with another woman?”

“No.”

“You have not been unfaithful. You give me your word?” Her eyes filled with tears.

“I promise,” I whispered.

She opened a pale blue envelope and tipped out several photographs: I saw myself posing in Maja Swartling’s apartment, then a series of pictures of her dressed only in those pale green panties. Tresses of her dark hair curled over her broad white breasts. She looked happy, blushing high on her cheeks. A number of photographs were close-ups of one breast in varying degrees of fuzziness. In one of the pictures she was lying with her thighs wide apart.

“Sixan, let me try to— ”

“I can’t cope with your lies,” she said, and hurled the photos at me, one by one.

The evening news was on. Suddenly there was a report on a scandal brewing at Karolinska University Hospital, involving a hypnotist. Annika Lorentzon did not wish to comment on the case during the ongoing investigation, but when the reporter brought up the significant funding recently allocated by the board to the hypnotist in question, Annika Lorentzon found herself on the defensive.

“That was a mistake,” she said.

“What was a mistake?”

“Erik Maria Bark has been suspended until further notice.”

“Only until further notice?”

“He will not be practising hypnosis at Karolinska Hospital in the future,” she said.

Then I saw my own face on the screen; I was sitting in the television studio looking frightened.

“Will you be continuing to practise hypnosis at other hospitals?” the interviewer asked me.

For a moment I looked confused, as if I didn’t understand the question, and then I shook my head almost imperceptibly.

“Erik Maria Bark, do you still believe that hypnosis is a good form of treatment?” she persisted.

“I don’t know,” I answered feebly. “Will you continue to practise?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“I will never hypnotize anyone again,” I replied. “Is that a promise?”

“Yes.”

Erik gives a start, and the hand holding the coffee cup jerks and spills the liquid all over his jacket and shirt cuffs.

Joona turns to him in surprise and without a word pulls a tissue from a box of Kleenex on the dashboard.

Erik looks out at the big yellow wooden house, the garden, the lawn, and the enormous Winnie-the-Pooh with the fangs drawn on it.

“Is she violent?” asks Joona. “Who?”

“Eva Blau.”

“Maybe. I mean, she’s certainly capable of it.”

Joona switches off the engine and they get out of the car. “Just don’t expect too much,” he says in a melancholy tone. “Liselott Blau might have nothing to do with Eva.”

“No,” Erik replies absently.

They walk up a path made of flat, dark-gray slate. A heavy white veil of little snowflakes whirls in the air.

“We have to be careful,” says Joona. “Because this could actually be the haunted house.” His face lights up in a faint smile.

Erik stops in the middle of the path. The wet fabric around his wrist has grown cold. He smells of stale coffee. “I should explain. The haunted house is a house in the former Yugoslavia,” he says. “It’s also an apartment in Jakobsberg, a gym in Stocksund, a pale green house up in Dorotea, and so on.”

He can’t help smiling as he meets Joona’s questioning gaze.

“The haunted house isn’t a specific place, it’s a term my hypnosis group adopted,” he explains. “One member called the place where he had been traumatized the haunted house, and it became what we called anywhere that their abuse had taken place.”

“I think I understand,” says Joona. “Where was Eva Blau’s haunted house?”

“That’s the problem. She was the only one who didn’t find her way there. Unlike the rest of the group, she never described a central place.”

“Well, maybe this is it,” says Joona.

They stride up the path. Erik fumbles in his pocket for the box with the parrot and the native on it. He feels sick, as if his emotional responses to the events he’s recalled have been suspended in his nerve centre, as powerful and confusing as ever. He wants to take one of his pills, yearns for a pill, but he knows he must remain absolutely clear-headed. He has to find Benjamin, he has to stop taking the pills, he can’t go on like this, he can’t keep hiding.

He pushes the doorbell, hearing the deep chime through thick wood. He waits, although he wants to pull the door open, rush inside, and shout Benjamin’s name. Joona’s hand is tucked inside his jacket. After a little while the door is opened by a young woman with glasses, red hair, and a patch of tiny scars on each cheek. Erik studies her carefully.

“We’re looking for Liselott Blau,” says Joona.

“That’s me,” she replies warily.

Joona looks at Erik, who shakes his head slightly. This is not Eva.

“We’re actually looking for Eva,” Joona says. “Eva? I don’t know any Eva. What’s this about?” asks the woman. Joona shows her his police ID and asks if they can come in for a while. She hesitates, looking back nervously into the house. “Or talk to us out here, if you prefer. You should put on a jacket, though, it’s chilly,” he says.

A few minutes later they are standing on the lawn, crunchy underfoot with frost, their breath forming white condensation in the air as they speak.

“I live alone,” she says, hugging herself.

“Big house,” Joona says, nodding at the large structure.

The woman smiles thinly. “I’m in a fortunate position.”

“Is Eva Blau a relative?”

“I told you, I don’t know anyone called Eva Blau.”

Joona shows her three pictures of Eva that he has taken from the video recording, but the red-haired woman simply shakes her head.

“Look closely,” says Joona firmly.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she snaps.

“I’m asking, for now.”

“I pay your salary,” she says. “My taxes pay your salary.”

“Please look at the pictures.”

“I’ve never seen her.”

“This is important,” Erik says. “To you, maybe, but not to me.”

“She calls herself Eva Blau,” Joona goes on. “Blau is quite an unusual name in Sweden.”

Erik sees a curtain suddenly sway in an upstairs window. He bolts for the house as the others call after him.