(1998) Denial Read Online Free PDF

words sharpened.
    On the front page of the file was typed:
Dortmund
, Herman Baruch. b. 07–02–1907. Dortmund was dying of terminal cancer, colon cancer originally, but now his body was riddled with secondaries. Somehow he kept going: inside his skeletal body was an inner strength, some residue from the demons that had once driven him and which he was trying now to exorcise. He got through his daily life having retained a fragile sanity. It was all he could hope for. And, Michael thought, more than he deserved.
    But Michael was too much of a professional to let Dortmund’s past affect his judgement or his treatment. The man had been prosecuted at Nuremberg, but had escaped the gallows. Since then, tormented with posttraumatic stress disorder and guilt, every night for fifty-four years Dortmund had travelled to hell and back.
    Sometimes just looking at this man made Michael shiver. He tried to imagine what it might have been like to have been in Belsen in 1943, with Katy, but separated from her by a twenty-foot-high chain-link fence, women and children one side, men the other, smelling the death and decay, seeing the smoke rise from the ovens.
    These thoughts
were
unprofessional, Michael reminded himself, but how could anyone detach that from his mind? He looked back at Dortmund and revulsion squirmed through him. Even so a part of him felt sorry for the man. There were even moments when Michael liked him: in thepresence of this former Nazi, he was reminded that we all have the potential to do evil, and that sometimes, although we condemn a man’s behaviour, we can still accept him as an individual. And this particular individual intrigued Michael.
    Dortmund was ninety. Liver spots stained his face, and his mouth curled down at the corners. His shiny pate pushed up through thin strands of hair, like a porcelain bowl nestling in straw. He never smiled.
    ‘I need to ask you . . .’ Dortmund said.
    ‘Yes?’ Michael replied, gently, encouraging him.
    ‘Can you keep a secret?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Patient confidentiality? The Hippocratic oath, yes?’
    Michael hesitated. Not all doctors took that, these days, but he was too tired to go into details: Dortmund was an early bird. He liked to come in at seven thirty in the morning, almost as though he could retreat back to his lair before the rest of the world was up and about and avoid facing the world. Michael didn’t mind coming in early once a fortnight like this. It enabled him to get some paperwork done in the hour after Dortmund had left. ‘Correct,’ he said.
    Dortmund stared at him as if uncertain whether he was taking the mickey. Even after all these years in England, Dortmund’s grasp of the language was limited. Michael had found on many occasions that it had been dangerous to attempt to crack a joke. Jokes depended so often on subtleties of language. These eluded Dortmund.
    ‘Yes.’ The old man nodded. ‘You know, it’s a long time I have this secret – since I am small boy, since maybe I was seven, eight years old.’ He got up from the sofa, tottered across the room and stopped beneath the porthole window. Morning sunlight illuminated him like a relic in a display case. ‘I know things that are going to happen, Dr Tennent. I see things, sometimes. Always bad things.’
    Michael watched him, waiting to see if he was going to continue, then said, in a neutral voice, ‘You are psychic? Is that what you are saying? Is that your secret?’
    Dortmund walked towards him, stopped, placed his bony fingers on the polished mahogany handle of his walking stick, and stared at him with rheumy eyes.
    ‘I do not have very much in my life to be proud of,’ he said. ‘And I’m not proud of this.’
    ‘Tell me what kind of things you see.’
    ‘I know when a tragedy is to happen to someone. I made the decision to undergo analysis because I wanted to find redemption before I die. I am not finding that, not yet, but I am seeing something, and perhaps this is why