Free The Dark Meadow by Andrea Maria Schenkel Page B

madman would never show remorse. Even with an ice-cold murderer, sooner or later a motive would be seen, and then the case could be explained.
    â€˜Believe me, Frau Zauner, transferring him to a mental hospital will surely be easier for him to bear in his present state of mind than staying in prison. There can be no question of reopening proceedings; no new evidence has turned up. I’m very sorry, but that’s all I can still do for you.’
    And with that he hung up.
    Theres stood there for a moment longer, and then sheput the receiver back on its stand. All she said to the housekeeper, who was looking at her enquiringly and curiously, was, ‘They’ve taken him to the Carthusian hospital.’
    Then she left.
    It had begun drizzling outside. Theres took no notice of the rain. It began raining harder and harder, but that made no difference to her. She finally got home drenched to the skin.
    Two days later the official letter came. It said where exactly Johann had been taken, and that now he wasn’t in prison but in the closed section of the psychiatric hospital she would be able to visit him more often if she liked. The very next week she went to see him and stayed as long as the doctors would let her.

Johann
    In the hospital there were four or six of them to a room, in contrast to his prison cell. The light never went entirely out even by night; there was dim illumination all the time. As soon as it got dark outside the barred windows he became restless. He couldn’t stay in his bed; he walked around or sat very close to the other patients and stared at them. If he was taken back to his own bed by the nursing staff and tied to the bedstead by his arms and legs, to keep him from wandering around again, he began screaming. Usually he calmed down after a while; sometimes, when he didn’t, he was taken out of the room and brought back next morning, still upset and exhausted by the night he had passed.
    He spent his days sitting on his bed in the room orwalking up and down the long corridor, hour after hour. At first he counted his footsteps, counted the number of times he went along the corridor, but gradually he forgot the numbers. Other wretched figures like him sat in the whitewashed corridors. Sometimes he babbled to himself, screamed or wept. Every mood could change to the next within a second. He was living in his own little world, separated from everyone else, incapable of speaking to the others or showing interest in anyone – like the toothless old woman who always waited for him to pass her room. Then she would hurry towards him, grab his face, try to get her fingers in his mouth, his nostrils. She was not to be shaken off, she thrust her dry forefingers into his eyes. He defended himself as well as he could, shouted for help until the male nurses came and took the old woman away.
    On many days he could not bear to feel his shirt next to his skin. However often the male nurses tried to dress him he tore it off. If they tied his hands behind his back he rolled on the floor, trying to get an end of the fabric in his teeth so as to pull it away, get rid of it, like a lizard shedding its old, dry skin.
    In the rooms with doors on the other side of the corridor patients sat disentangling wool for hours on end. If they had freed a strand of any length from the bundle,they would tie it to the other strands and roll them up into brightly coloured balls.
    The doctor told him to join in the work in this room, and Johann, who wasn’t used to being indoors all day, obeyed, sat with the others and disentangled woollen threads.
    In time, he saw only a fragmentary view of all around him. The days were like each other, broken only by visits from the doctors. The one thing he noticed was that his thoughts were wandering more and more, and even his faith was no comfort to him. He tried to resist the loss of it, he wanted to write down his tormenting thoughts to be rid of them, but his hands