Dreaming for Freud Read online

  “Obviously, it was all a lot of rubbish, something Frau Z. must have made up. Why did Mother just put up with it? Who would believe such a fairy tale, told to cover up a rendezvous? I certainly didn’t. Undoubtedly, they were wandering around in the woods together, holding hands or having sexual intercourse, or doing heaven knows what, and I don’t see how my mother could be so blind and foolish! Sometimes I think she doesn’t care about Father at all, that it is just an economic arrangement. It’s more convenient for her to hand over Father, who is sick anyway, to another woman. Besides, I saw how Father visited Frau Z. whenever her husband was away. He always said he had to leave on business for several days. Everyone knew what was going on, including the fräulein.

  “Also, Father gave Frau Z. money and presents, a beautiful amber necklace, and tried to cover it all up by giving Mother jewelry, too, a pair of pearl earrings she didn’t even like, and there was a quarrel over that.”

  Obviously the girl has sharp eyes and ears. He cannot disagree with her on this point or indeed any of the others she brings up about Frau Z. and her father. Her story sounds all too familiar to him.

  She seems to take his silence for assent, and it is obviously some relief to her.

  She says, without coughing and in a clear voice, “Well, at least you don’t believe I’m making this all up. At least someone will know the truth.”

  “But you tell me this is not what upset you so much, that there is more to the story?”

  “Perhaps I’ll tell you sometime,” she says and flounces out of the room looking rather pleased with herself and without coughing or dragging her leg. He smiles a little, thinking the locks, indeed, are beginning to open to his key. This may be his most successful cure.

  XI

  * * *

  BETRAYAL

  SHE LIES BEFORE HIM RESTLESSLY on his couch today, grumbling that he does not seem sufficiently moved by her story.

  “You don’t seem to take my story about Father seriously enough. I don’t know if you fully understand his treachery, and why he brought me here in the first place,” she says.

  “Perhaps you should explain it more clearly then,” he says.

  “Surely you understand that Father has just made a bargain with Herr Z. so that he can do whatever he wants to with Pippina?”

  “A bargain?” he asks.

  “He has given me up to Herr Z. so that he can have Pippina. And worse than that, instead of protecting me, taking my side, which he should as my father, surely, he denies his own obvious behavior! He claims I’m making things up, because it is not convenient for him to believe me. He puts her first. I’m just a pawn in their dirty game. He’s just using me, to keep Herr Z. quiet and complicit, and you were brought in to smooth things over,” she says bitterly.

  The doctor asks her to explain what she means.

  “He has handed me over to Herr Z. so that he can do what he wants with his wife, don’t you see? And you are to keep me complicit,” she says angrily.

  “What makes you think this?” he asks and imagines how the father would be horrified to hear her say something of the sort. When she says nothing, he asks her, “Do you really think that your father would have entered into a pact with Herr Z. to hand over his beloved daughter for the favors of Frau Z.?”

  She admits it was probably not anything that was ever expressed in so many words. “I don’t know what happens in your family, but with us and with many of the people I know, it is not necessary to discuss it. Everything is simply understood by everyone, though nothing is ever said. There is a silent language spoken all the time which has nothing to do with what is actually said. Mother says nothing to Father, though she must see what is going on. That’s what is so terrible. No one will protect me, not even you! My poor brother just tells me that we should be happy that father has found some happiness in his life, that we should put up with it, that it is none of our business. It’s all very well for him. He’s free to go out of the house and spend all day at the university and with my uncle, running around trying to help the workers, but what about me! Am I not a human being with feelings and thoughts? I have nowhere to go and nothing else to think about, and it is driving me mad. Mad! It is all the humbug that makes me so angry with Father, the way he lies while telling me I am fabricating!”

  “Ah! But that is just the point,” he says calmly, shifting his weight and leaning forward in his chair. “Does it not occur to you that this string of reproaches against your father might actually be directed against yourself? Besides, unfortunately, we cannot always change the outside world as we would like to. You must know that by now. Perhaps your father has not behaved as you would have wished him to do, as an ideal father might have, but there is little we can do about others, after all. But we can do something about our inner selves. We can at least make an effort to understand them, and be honest with ourselves, and that you must do if you are to return to health.”

  “What have I to reproach myself for? I have done nothing wrong except to love them too much!” she says, sitting up and turning toward him, tears coming to her eyes.

  He sits back in his chair and turns his head away from her, talking to a spot on the wall. “But can you be so sure?” he asks. He tells her what he is certain of, that such vehement hate is often close to love. It seems to him he has always both hated and loved someone since his very early days, often the same person, as with his nephew, and his friend who has so disappointed him and is fast becoming an enemy, Fliess.

  He tells her, “In my experience, it is often when my patients protest most strongly that I know what I suggest is true,” and he thinks of how he protested so strongly against the idea of bisexuality. “The great writers knew this a long time ago, did they not? Do you know the line from Shakespeare, ‘The lady doth protest too much?’”

  She lies back down and seems to think about that. She says she has read Shakespeare with her fräulein and even knows that famous line from Hamlet, but it makes her dizzy to think about it. It makes his whole cluttered room with all its strange statues, its pictures, its many books spin around her alarmingly. “Your words make me feel as if I am disappearing, like Alice down the rabbit hole, as though I hardly exist. If no is yes and hate is love, then who am I? If I cannot trust my own feelings, my own thoughts, how can I know who I am? What is real?” she asks him.

  XII

  * * *

  HERR Z.

  “WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO know is why you are so angry with both these men: your father and particularly Herr Z.?” the doctor says. “What has he done to you to cause your ire?”

  Would the doctor believe her if she told him all that had passed between them, she wonders. No one else will believe her. If she tells him what happened, will he just blame her, which is what the adults have done up until now? Will she be able to say the words aloud without being sick?

  And why, though he has told her she can choose her subject, does the doctor come back to Herr Z.? He seems particularly interested in him. She wonders if he is still charmed by him as she was herself initially. Herr Z.—Hans, as he has told her to call him—is handsome, she will admit, like her father, but darker haired and darker eyed and of a more solid build. Come to think of it, he looks more like the doctor himself.

  Is he still, perhaps, one of his patients, she wonders, lying on his couch. Does he, too, come and lie here where she does? Instinctively she sniffs a little to see if she can smell him, but all she can smell is smoke. Or is he now a friend? Why is it that the doctor always takes his side? He never accuses him of hate that is really love or love that is really hate. He never accuses him of anything!

  She thinks of how this has been going on for years, of all the confessions the doctor must have heard, so many secrets whispered in this comfortable, bourgeois room, all the many suffering people who have come here seeking relief from pain as she has done, people who were encouraged—well more than encouraged—to un
burden themselves, to voice their most intimate thoughts, trusting him and finding themselves speaking of things they didn’t even know they knew. Will he keep such secrets safe? What will happen to her if she tells him? She doesn’t feel she has much choice. She needs to cure her pain, and if the spilling of her secrets is the only way to do that, she will do it. It is true that she now feels better, that she looks forward to coming here every day and being able to speak truthfully to someone who listens and believes what she has to say. Also, there is something about this man, about his darkly bright eyes that she admires, despite herself.

  So she says, “Herr Z. was after me from the start. It happened the first time in his office. I wasn’t even fourteen. I haven’t ever told anyone about what happened then, and I don’t know if I should speak of it now to you, or even if you will believe me. Never having spoken of it, it hardly seems real—almost someone else’s secret,” she says.

  “But you are certain this happened?” the doctor asks, and she hears him lean forward with interest.

  “Yes! Yes! How could I make up something of this kind? What on earth for?” She may have forgotten certain moments in her life, but this she will never forget.

  Herr Z. had invited her to come with him and his wife to watch the feast of Corpus Christi at Saint Nicolaus, the church on the main square in Meran. It was shortly after the Z.’s had moved to a new house near Herr Z.’s shop that had a little balcony overlooking the square below, where the ceremony would take place. It was almost summer, a warm, sunny day for early June, when the procession took place. They often left Meran for the Italian lakes at the height of the summer, but in June they were still there.

  “I remember the organdy dress I was wearing, a new one in a deep blue, sprinkled with little raised dots of white. I had put a posy of fresh flowers at the neck,” she says.

  “So you dressed up for the occasion?” the doctor says.

  “I was only thirteen, and I didn’t suspect anything at all!” she replies. Why would she? After all, she often went out with them.

  She was just happy to be out of the house, away from her father’s sickbed for once, and on such a fine day. She remembers how sparkling and fresh it all was: the white sky, the silvery light, the new green leaves of the linden trees, the daffodils and irises, the smells of early summer in the mountain air, the sound of birdsong, and the rushing of the river. How happy she felt then just to be alive, her body without pain! What she would now give to feel like that! She had dressed up for the spring day and yes, for the children and for both of the Z.’s. “They both always said I was so pretty,” she tells him.

  She pauses, wondering if the doctor might add something about her looks. She has seen him looking at her with his piercing dark eyes when she enters his office. She wonders what he thinks of her, what goes through his mind as he sits in his chair day after day listening to women talk about their intimate lives, talk about love. Women’s lives seem so hard to her, above all so boring. They have so much time on their hands, enough for thoughts which often lead to illness.

  She knows from her mother’s comments to her father that the doctor once gave his patients massages. “Will he be doing massages?” her mother had asked. What did he feel, she wonders, touching all those warm bodies? She presumes they kept themselves covered up, but still. What does the doctor feel now, listening to her talking about Herr Z.’s desire for her? How can he really be objective about what she might say? How could anyone? Does he desire her?

  Today she is wearing a new dark blue skirt and a white blouse with a little décolleté. She crosses her aching legs on the sofa and sighs. She would so like to be free of pain as she was that day in Meran, and she wants, too, to impress the doctor in some way, she thinks, looking at all his learned books. She would like him to like her, to admire her intellectual accomplishments, to be pleased by what she tells him and not so silent and withdrawn.

  She tells him she was such an avid reader from an early age, reading whatever she could lay her hands on, whatever told her what life was really like, even if it was considered scandalous. Just like him, she was looking for the truth about life, she says.

  “I see,” he says and laughs a little at that.

  The couple both laughed at things she said, too, and complimented her on being so wise and helpful for her age. Herr Z. was particularly pleased with her when she took care of the two children while their mother, who often said she felt ill, went off with her father, she says.

  “So you took care of the children to please your father so that he could be with Frau Z.?” the doctor asks.

  She says, “Yes, I did, and also to please Frau Z., but I do also really enjoy being with little children. I like playing imaginary games and making up stories for them. I like teaching them. Often as a child I would play school with my pencils, lining them up in a row and pretending they were my students,” she says with a laugh.

  She likes the imaginary world where children live most of the time. As a child herself, it was that imaginary world that enabled her to sit patiently for so many hours by her father’s bedside. She would make up stories in her mind, pictures she could see quite clearly in the dark. “I would spin out into space like a top, leaving my body behind,” she says. She tried to amuse Otto and Clara with her stories. She says she supposed they didn’t have enough money to hire a real nursemaid for their children, so they used her. Everyone has used her in a way.

  “‘She’s just wonderful with the children, a little mother to them,’ Herr Z. would say to Father, and I would flush with pleasure. What a fool I have been! Basically I saved them a lot of money and also made it possible for Father to be with Frau Z. by taking care of the children, whom I loved so much,” she says bitterly.

  But both her father and mother impressed on her how kind it was for a man of his age and accomplishments to take such an interest in a very young girl. Herr Z. brought her presents, too, which she accepted as some sort of recompense for her labors.

  “What did he give you?” the doctor wants to know. At times he surprises her by his practical way of looking at things. He mentions the price of things frankly. She has been taught that it is not polite to talk about money or sex.

  “Chocolates, jewelry—he even sent flowers every day for a year,” she says, exaggerating a bit for effect. He wrote to her as well, when he was away, and often she was the one, rather than his wife, who knew when he was coming home. No one seemed to find this odd.

  “Because my parents accepted the situation, I did, too, you know, the way a child does—until it was too late,” she says.

  The doctor brings her back to the feast day in Meran. “So what happened that day?” he wants to know.

  She shifts around on the couch, picks up her reticule and puts it down. She starts to cough and is afraid she will not be able to stop, that she might vomit. She feels sick. “It was so awful, schrecklich,” a word she often uses. “I thought that Frau Z. and the children would be there, too, of course, to watch the procession. There was no reason for them not to be.” However, when she walked into the shop, she realized immediately in the dead quiet of the place that there was no one there. All the employees had left, too, though it was not late, and there was no sign of Frau Z. or the little children. She was immediately suspicious, standing there in the silent, empty place. She stood there nervously at the foot of the stairs, as Herr Z. called out to her that he was just shutting up.

  “Where is everyone?” she called back up to him, trying to sound cheerful. He explained that he had given his employees a half holiday because of the religious festival. “Most of them are Catholics,” he said, which was probably true.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it? When I was very little I had the wrong impression that Catholics were not considered as good as Jews, as they were so often our servants. But it didn’t take long at school to realize I was so, so wrong.”

  “But what happened in the shop?
” he says.

  “I could hear him closing the shutters and see the shadows falling across the floor of the landing. He told me to wait a moment. He was coming down. Frau Z. and the children would join us a little later. I wondered if I should just go, but didn’t want to appear rude. So often when I should have acted, I have felt obliged to do nothing from fear of being impolite.

  “There was a smell of dust in the air, a banging of the shutters, then a moment of dead silence. Perhaps he was standing looking down on me from the top of the wooden stairs. I don’t know, but suddenly, he came out of the shadows, clattering down the stairs. He clutched me hard to his chest, pressed his lips against mine, and thrust his tongue down my throat. It all happened so quickly. I could only stand there, shaking. He was murmuring words, running his hands all over me, touching my breasts and between my legs, saying that he could not stop himself, that I had bewitched him, laid a spell on him, that surely this was what I wanted, too. It was stronger than he. He was in the grip of eros—or some such stupid words. In any case it was all my fault. He could not let me go. I was irresistible. And all the time he was pressing his body against me.”

  She can still feel his arms holding her tightly, pressing her against his hard chest. It was horrifying. She was repulsed by him, the smell of smoke on his breath, his horrid beard scratching her cheek. She was so indignant: how could he behave like that with her, a child! The child of his friend! She was thirteen! She was almost sick. She was so frightened and angry that a man his age could behave in that way that all she could do was to run out the door into the street.