Dreaming for Freud Page 12

  “Another betrayal, eh?” the doctor says.

  “Don’t you agree Father has betrayed me by bringing me here, so that you’ll get me to do what he and Herr Z. want me to?” she asks.

  XIV

  * * *

  MISSING FLIESS

  HE SITS ALONE IN HIS study after dinner while the rest of the family sleeps. He wonders if it is his book on dreams, which Fliess helped him write, that is the real cause of his drifting away and not the quarrel over bisexuality. Fliess had read all those pages as he wrote them, with such diligence and perception, advising the removal of certain dreams, critiquing the writing in detail in the most helpful way. His encouragement, his critiques, his insight were all essential to him in the process. Fliess’s belief in the brilliance of his discoveries enabled him to continue. He could not have written the book without him. Is it possible that such a generous, fine, upstanding man could actually be jealous now that the book is finished and out in the public eye, despite its poor reception? Could this be the cause of his friend’s hurtful silence?

  He paces back and forth in his dimly lit study smoking his cigar. The night is cold but dry, the air filled with the odor of smoke and dead leaves that lie in the courtyard outside his window. He cannot sleep. He knows Fliess, his liebster Freund, was right about bisexuality—is not this obsession with Fliess himself proof enough? And he knows, too, that it was Fliess who had brought this up first. It was a case where he himself had protested too strongly, scoffing at the idea initially. Afterward he had to acknowledge that Fliess was right. Now his young patient is confirming his friend’s theory and the importance of bisexuality in the neuroses.

  He remembers their walking tour from Hirschbuhel to Salzburg almost ten years earlier and how close he had felt to him then, how full of admiration. He was aware, even then, that his friend was searching for a subject that would fully engage his original and lively mind. He recalls how tactful, how helpful Fliess had been, when the doctor had experienced an acute attack of train anxiety. How could he go on without him? Is he to lose this friend, too, as he lost Breuer? This would be a worse blow. He was never this close to Breuer.

  He would so much like to talk to Fliess about this latest case. The girl seems to be opening up to him completely, and though she has never admitted to feeling desire for Herr Z. or for himself, she may be about to do so. He has to acknowledge there are moments when he finds her most appealing himself.

  He stops his pacing. On an impulse, he picks up his hat and his coat from the chair where he left them earlier in the day. He smooths back his thick hair and adjusts his hat in front of the mirror, rearranges his bow tie. Not a bad-looking man, he thinks. Surely not old yet! he thinks and remembers his patient’s unkind words about men his age. He has never had a patient this young, beautiful, and brilliant—or this rebellious. Despite the late hour he decides he will go for a walk. The cold air will do him good, the exercise will help him to sleep, perhaps.

  He walks fast in the empty, cold street for a while, not looking up, hugging the walls. He walks past his patient’s house, glancing up to see if the lights are still lit in the windows, but the family seems to sleep. Suddenly, he hears a loud, high-pitched laugh. In the light of the street lamp he sees an elegantly dressed woman with a painted face, a fox fur around her white neck. She walks toward him on the arm of another woman similarly dressed though obviously not as young. The younger one covers her mouth with a hand when she sees him. The laughing lady glances at him from the corner of her eye, leans toward her companion, and murmurs something incomprehensible, their mocking, rouged faces close.

  Expensive whores, the doctor can see, which does not mean that they might not carry disease as the others do, he thinks. He glimpses a flash of white breast, smells a pungent odor of hyacinth before the women turn and disappear into a doorway. He hears the clack of a door with a tilt of his thudding heart.

  He walks on, his thoughts reverting to his young, rebellious, and attractive patient. The girl’s words ring in his ears: “A woman’s body is always much more beautiful than a man’s, isn’t it?” Though at times he has little sympathy for this spoiled girl, he would be sorry to lose her, he thinks. Very sorry. He is so used to her coming in his door day after day with her strange and interesting story. He waits for her arrival with impatience. Her case preoccupies him, he has to admit, has preoccupied him since his first glimpse of her: he has entered into her concerns, he is aware, understood her stratagems, and gone ahead of her in her tale of woe, glimpsing clearly the underpinnings. He almost knows what she will say before she says it in the strangest way. He thinks about her more than he should. He remembers her father saying, “I have spoiled her, I’m afraid. We grew too close when I was ill. I used her as a confidant, a friend, and not the child she was. And now she is so angry with me. It’s breaking my heart.” Has the doctor let her grow too close? Would losing her break his heart?

  He is both entirely on her side and completely against her. They are engaged in a battle of wills. He understands what she feels, admires her quick mind and plucky spirit, and at the same time is exasperated by her childish, superficial attempts to manipulate men. This girl is trouble and will probably always be trouble, he thinks. He both envies and feels sorry for the man who marries her, if she ever marries. But then who can understand the mysterious life of a woman? And who can entirely understand the life of a man? And how we hold on to our enemies, he thinks. In the end they may preoccupy us, and be closer to us than those we love.

  He keeps walking and is out so late that when he comes back into his building the milk wagon already stands before the house, and the maid is there in the dawn light, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the entrance. He watches the movement of her ample buttocks in her gray skirts as she scrubs. He thinks of his dream of entering a small gate between two marble buildings. He stands there aware that he is aroused.

  XV

  * * *

  AT THE LAKE

  “IF YOU REALLY WANT TO know everything that happened with Herr Z., as you say you do, I will tell you the whole story,” she says this afternoon, coming into his room, walking without any difficulty, her voice clear, and almost throwing herself down on his couch, “because you do seem to be the only one who believes me, or at least you believe me when I tell you what Herr Z. has done. And you do listen to me, at least. Perhaps if I tell you what really happened, you will be on my side and not Father’s and get him to leave Frau Z., to banish both of them from his life and my own.”

  “I’m not so sure that that would be helpful to you. It would only reinforce the idea that being ill makes people do what you want them to do, that you can use illness for your own ends,” he says. “But go on, tell me what happened anyway,” he adds. “At least it may help you to see it all more clearly.”

  He does seem ever curious, sitting there so quietly behind her in the shadows of his shadowy room.

  She says this happened on a visit to the lovely hotel on Lago di Garda.

  “On the same visit when you discovered your father’s affair with Frau Z.?” he asks.

  “No, no, this was much later. We had gone back there one summer, when I was fifteen. Mother told me to accompany Herr Z. on a walk one afternoon and it was then that he dared to renew his attack. What he didn’t know was that I had spoken recently with the fräulein.”

  “Your French fräulein?” the doctor asks.

  “No, no, this was the Austrian one whom the Z.’s had hired that summer, a pretty, redheaded girl with green eyes, and quite young—a simple girl who came from some small town in the mountains. Poor thing, she was obviously in love with Herr Z., just as my own fräulein had been with my father. Herr Z. had even managed to seduce the foolish girl, as he was trying to seduce me, by playing on our sympathies, saying how alone he felt and telling her that he could get nothing from his wife.”

  She can still see the scene very clearly: sitting down beside him o
n a bench in the shade. “We had taken the ferry across the lake and then gone walking together on the path along the edge of the water. It was a hot day, and we had stopped so that I could catch my breath.” She has difficulty breathing if she walks for any length of time. Perhaps she was also feeling anxious to find herself alone again with Hans.

  “At first he rolled a cigarette for me and asked me if I would like to smoke, which I refused, and then he leaned toward me. I could see how red his face had become and how he drew his fingers through his curly dark hair so nervously. He told me that he was so unhappy with his wife. They had become increasingly estranged. Now they slept in separate rooms all the time—as I well knew. He could get nothing from his wife. He actually used exactly the same words that he had just used with his fräulein, which unfortunately for him she had confided to me. How little imagination the man has!” she says with disdain, feeling a pain down her right side and her throat closing up as she speaks.

  “What else did he say?” the doctor asks.

  She wants the doctor to know and manages to speak.

  “He said he did nothing but think of me, that he could not get me out of his mind, that he wanted me so desperately, he was willing to leave his wife and start over again with me—and a lot of clichéd statements of that kind that I didn’t believe for a minute! His eyes seemed to bulge like a frog’s, and I could smell his perspiration, and I wanted to tell him to stop talking about such things. He clutched at my hands, there on the bench in a public place! I was only fifteen! But he held on to me and went on talking about his poor wife, poor Pippina, and how cold and distant she was to him, how lonely marriage could be, how it had all been such a mistake, and it was me he desired and me he wanted to spend his days with.

  “That was when I freed my hands and slapped him hard across the cheek. I kept thinking all the time that his trite words were the same ones he had just used with a servant! Who did he think I was?”

  “So what you felt was jealousy? And what happened then?” the doctor asks.

  She says, “I got up quickly, and I just left him sitting there and rushed home. I wanted to tell Mother what had happened, though he caught up with me on the ferry and begged me not to mention it to my parents.”

  She had waited a few days to tell them, but this time she did have the courage. She told her father what had happened. But when her father and her uncle questioned Herr Z., he had had the audacity to tell her father she was making it all up, that it was all a figment of her disturbed mind. “He dared to say that it must have come from the texts I had read too young, which had influenced me and given me such unhealthy ideas. He knew that I was reading what he called unsuitable literature because his wife had told him!” she says, waving her hands in the air. “And Father believed him and Pippina rather than me! All Father would say was that I must go with him to see his doctor who would get me to be more reasonable.

  “Don’t you finally understand that both of us, you and me, are being used by Father in his sordid game? Are you willing to go along with this just because he is paying you? Are you going to just do what Father asks for money like a prostitute?” she asks him angrily.

  The doctor says, “I’m not so sure it is as simple as you make it out to be. Could this not have been a serious proposition from Herr Z.?” he asks. “Was it not possible, after all, that he had really fallen in love with you and was really considering leaving his wife to start his life again with someone new, someone young and fresh? Perhaps he really means to marry you one day when you come of age, even if the man may have chosen his words poorly? And would that not be, perhaps, the best solution for all parties involved?”

  She sits up and turns to him, coughing. She says angrily, “He would never leave his wife if only because of the children, whom he does really love.” She adds, “Would this have been your advice if one of your own daughters had come to you at fifteen after receiving a proposition from a married man?”

  He says nothing to that, just turns his face away. She goes on, “If he were really in love with me, if it were true, he would have found some new way to say it surely and not used the words he had just used with a servant!”

  As she limps out of his room, pains in her legs, leaving the doctor slumped there unmoving in his chair, she wonders how he can put forth a theory of this kind. Has he perhaps discussed the matter with Herr Z.?

  XVI

  * * *

  REVENGE

  IT’S ONLY FOUR THIRTY BUT already almost dark when she gets home. The inner courtyard, with its creeper-covered walls, the little fountain in the middle, and the cedar trees is still and dim. Without thinking, she walks along the dark corridor and into the quiet of her father’s study. The maids have already drawn the curtains on the encroaching darkness. She lights a lamp. Her brother must be out at the university, or perhaps meeting with his friends, and her mother down in the kitchen supervising the preparations for dinner or chasing after the maids somewhere in the rest of the house. Her father is away on a visit to one of his factories in Bohemia where there has been trouble once again.

  There is rarely anyone in this room at this hour of the late afternoon. Indeed, it is a room that is seldom used. She does not risk being disturbed.

  She stands, feeling her heart beat fast. Something is about to happen but what, she is not sure. Something has to happen. She hears the slow ticking of her father’s green and gold clock on the mantelpiece, the distant, mournful sound of a train’s whistle.

  She smells her father’s cigar smoke in the air. As she looks at the sweep of his large, shiny desk, the silver paper knife glints invitingly against the dark mahogany. She thinks of the young Werther again, in her favorite book.

  She unpins her hat, runs her hands through her unruly curls, throws off her coat and lined gloves onto his leather armchair by the window, and stands uncertainly, her fingertips on the desk, trembling a little all over, her legs aching, her throat sore from coughing. As she thinks of the doctor’s words—“Perhaps he really means to marry you one day when you come of age, even if the man may have chosen his words poorly? And would that not be, perhaps, the best solution for all parties involved?”—she is coughing again and has a terrible pain down the right side of her stomach and her leg. What is the point of going on?

  She picks up the paper knife and walks over to the round gold-framed mirror on the wall between the two windows. She looks at the pale face, the dark, wild hair, the large dark eyes, now filled with tears. Who are you? What will become of you? And who cares? She looks down at her slim wrist, finds the blue vein, and runs the serrated edge of the knife lightly across it. Then she presses down harder, looking up at her face.

  The lines from Goethe’s lovely poem come to her:

  The little birds fall silent in the forest;

  Just wait, soon you too shall rest.

  Is this her only way out?

  Is it what she really wants, to rest eternally, or is it just to be able to see their faces when they find her resting, lying in a pool of blood on the floor? Would she like to come back to her own funeral to see them weep? What she wants is revenge, revenge on all the adults around her who have failed her again and again—all of them. How can she get back at them? How can she make them weep? How can she at least get them to pay attention to her suffering heart?

  How can the doctor imagine that Herr Z. would really leave his lovely wife and small children to marry her? How can he take the hackneyed words Herr Z. used to seduce her seriously, exactly the same ones he had used with his children’s governess who had just been seduced? What a gullible man, who sometimes seems so innocent or ignorant to her despite all his fancy learning.

  And how could the doctor imagine she wants to marry a man the age of her father, an old adulterer, a wrinkled Don Juan, when she has a fresh-faced, dimpled, and innocent young engineering student already in her mind and heart. Why would she choose the old, dull, and gray over t
he young, shiny, and fresh skinned?

  Why should she want to marry an old man of the doctor’s age? How can he imagine this as a solution? Is it perhaps because he, himself, would like to start his life over with someone young, pretty, and fresh like herself? Is he tired of his wife?

  But what other choices does she really have? Is this what her father has in mind for her? Has the doctor promised him to get her to be reasonable, to do as her father wishes? Have they made an agreement of some kind? Is she to be sold to this old lecherous man in exchange for his wife’s favors? What can she do? How can she protect herself? Who can she turn to? Who will help?

  She stares at the bookcases, with all the bound books, running along one wall behind her father’s pompous Empire desk with its dark wood and heavy gold filigree. Her father is not a real reader as she is, and most of the elegant bound volumes with their gold lettering and shiny covers remain untouched except by the maids, who dust them daily, and by her mother who checks daily to see that they have been dusted. It is all just a shiny facade maintained to impress visitors, or perhaps to convince her father, himself, of his culture. All the many volumes of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hegel and Schopenhauer, of Goethe and Schiller—there are even little white china statues of Goethe and Schiller in their frockcoats—are all there for show. Like so much about her father, they are all just a handsome exterior to seduce, to manipulate, to get what he wants from others.

  She searches the volumes to see if there is anything that might help her in her battle with the doctor. As she stands there, biting her lips, her breath coming and going irregularly, pains in her legs, she spots a book on a high shelf with a gray cover and the name: Dr. Sigm. Freud. It is his book on dreams, which her father has shelved in an inaccessible place like something prohibited, and thus all the more attractive to her.