The concierge--a laconic man with a hoe-shaped scar on his forehead, probably from hitting a car's windshield with his head--had booked a table for four at the Kronenhalle. It was an excellent restaurant and a pleasant walk, the concierge had assured Jack. "And because you're Jack Burns, I actually managed to get you a table--even on such short notice."
Jack went outside the hotel and watched the swans and ducks swimming in the Limmat. He checked the time on his watch against the clock towers of the two most imposing churches he could see from the Weinplatz, where he could also see a taxi stand. It was only a ten-or fifteen-minute drive to Kilchberg from the Storchen, and he didn't want to be early or late.
Jack felt guilty about how much he had blamed his mother for everything. If she'd been alive and Jack were waiting to meet her for the first time, he believed he would have felt as nervous and excited about that as he felt about meeting his dad. It suddenly seemed ridiculous that he couldn't forgive her; in fact, Jack missed her. He wished he could call her, but what would he have said?
It was Miss Wurtz who was waiting to hear from him; it was Caroline Jack should have called. But all he could think about was talking to his mother.
"Hi, Mom--it's me," he wanted to tell her. "I'm not doing this to hurt you, but I'm on my way to meet my dad--after all these years! Got any advice?"
Jack took a taxi out of town, along the shore of Lake Zurich--a nice drive, the road passing close to the lake the whole way. A theater festival had set up tents along the waterfront. It was sunny and warm, but the air was dry--mountain air, not nearly as humid as it had been in Edinburgh. There were these sudden, dramatic moments when Jack could see the Alps beyond the lake. Everything was clean, almost sparkling. (Even the taxi.)
Kilchberg was a community of about seven thousand. Because of all the sailboats on the lake--and the stately homes, many with gardens--the town somewhat resembled a resort. Jack's taxi driver told him that the right shore of the lake was slightly more prosperous. "Europeans prefer to face west," he said. Kilchberg, on the left shore of Lake Zurich, faced east.
But Jack thought Kilchberg was charming. There was even a small vineyard, or at least what looked like a working farm, and the sanatorium was high on a hill overlooking the lake, with a spectacular view of Zurich to the north; to the south were the Alps.
"Most of the patients take the bus from the Burkliplatz--there's a sanatorium stop in Kilchberg," his taxi driver told him. "I mean the patients who are free to come and go," he added--looking warily at Jack in the rearview mirror, as if he were certain that Jack had escaped. "You might want to consider taking the bus next time--the number one-sixty-one bus, if you can remember that."
The driver was Middle Eastern, or possibly Turkish. (He'd mentioned "Europeans" with evident distaste.) His English was much better than his German, which was as clumsy and halting as Jack's. When they'd first tried to speak German together, Jack's driver had quickly switched to English instead. Jack wondered why he'd been mistaken for a patient at the clinic; the taxi driver was not much of a moviegoer, maybe.
Not so the preternaturally thin young woman in running shoes and a jogging suit who greeted Jack in what he thought was the main entrance to the hospital part of the clinic. There was a waiting room and a reception desk, where the young woman was pacing back and forth when Jack came in. A fitness expert, he assumed--perhaps she was the nurse in charge of physical therapy, or a kind of personal trainer to the patients. She should put on a little weight, Jack was thinking; one can take the athletic-looking thing too far.
"Stop!" she said, in English--pointing to him. (There was no one else in the entranceway or the waiting room; there was no one behind the reception desk, either.) Jack stopped.
A nurse appeared, emerging hurriedly from a corridor. "Pamela, er ist harmlos," the nurse said.
"Of course he's harmless--he's not real," Pamela said. "The medication is working. You don't have to worry about that. I know he's harmless--I know he's not real."
She sounded American, yet the nurse had spoken to her in German and she'd understood the nurse. Maybe the thin young woman had been a patient in the clinic for a long time--long enough to learn German, Jack speculated.
"Es tut mir leid," the nurse said to Jack, leading the young American woman away. ("I'm sorry," she said.)
"You should speak English to him," Pamela said. "If he were real, he would speak English--like in his movies."
"I have an appointment with Professor Ritter!" Jack called after the nurse.
"Ich bin gleich wieder da!" the nurse called back to him. ("I'm coming right back!")
They had disappeared down the corridor, but Jack could still hear the too-thin patient--her voice rising. It registered as a kind of insanity on his part that he'd mistaken her for someone who worked at the place.
"They don't usually say anything," Pamela was telling the nurse. "Normally they just appear--they don't talk, too. God, maybe the medication isn't working!"
"Das macht nichts," the nurse told her, gently. ("It doesn't matter," she said.)
Jack Burns was a movie star in a psychiatric clinic; not surprisingly, the first patient who saw him thought he was a talking hallucination. (Not a bad definition for an actor, Dr. Garcia might have said.)
When the nurse came back, she was shaking her head and talking to herself--almost inaudibly and in German. Were it not for her uniform, and if he hadn't seen her before, Jack would have believed that her self-absorbed muttering marked her as a patient. She was a short woman in her fifties, stout and brusque with curly gray hair--a former blonde, Jack guessed.
"It's funny that the first person you, of all people, should meet here is our only American," the nurse said. "Bleibel," she added, vigorously shaking Jack's hand.
"Excuse me?"
"Waltraut Bleibel--I'm telling you my name!"
"Oh. Jack Burns."
"I know. Professor Ritter is expecting you. We've all been expecting you, except for poor Pamela."
They went outside the building and walked across a patio; there was a sculpture garden and a shallow pond with lily pads. (Nothing anyone can drown in, Jack was thinking.) Most of the buildings had big windows, some of them with those black silhouettes of birds painted on the glass. "Our anti-bird birds," Nurse Bleibel said, with a wave of her hand. "You must have them in America."