Dreaming for Freud Page 5

  “But what possibilities do I have to help my fellow man or even myself, for that matter? And though he always says he loves me, and I know he does, what has my brother ever done for me in reality? He almost always takes Mother’s side in the end,” she says and clenches her fists against the rug on the couch.

  She runs her fingers over the silky soft Persian rug which covers the couch where she lies, wondering why something that belongs on the floor should have been put on a couch.

  She traces the zigzag of the pattern of white birds and the strange winged creatures with fanned tails. She is in a cocoon spun of silken threads by skilled hands. The doctor and her father are trying to lull her into a false sense of security with all this false luxury, this appearance of calm, the shutters drawn on the afternoon sun, the inner courtyard sounds muffled by thick walls, the silky carpet to caress her body, so that she will tell them her secrets, but she knows she is in danger in this place.

  She has been carried off by her father into this dim, silent, shadowy room, an Aladdin’s cave or perhaps even the lion’s den, and if she doesn’t speak, if she doesn’t find the right words, like Scheherazade she will be put to death. This doctor trades in dangerous secrets in this small dark room, she suspects. What will he do with hers should she be so foolish as to share them with him?

  From the doctor’s silence, she deduces he is not particularly interested in her studies or lack thereof, nor the injustice of her brother being able to study when she cannot.

  “I have tried to learn what he was learning by reading on my own or with the fräulein and going to visit museums. Like you, I am interested in art. I have been to the Secessionist show several times.”

  She wonders whether the doctor has so many art objects in his cluttered consulting rooms because he is afraid of emptiness, of space, of silence. What did the art teacher in the evening class call that? Something like horror vacui?

  She stares at all the ancient figurines, deities and seers perhaps, from different places and ages that the doctor has collected. She doesn’t feel his answer to her question about them explained anything. She likes the little statue of a child, perhaps Roman, who has an old face, because it looks the way she feels, an adolescent who is already old. But he says nothing about that so she goes on, still bent on impressing him with what she considers her valiant efforts to learn.

  “I love listening to music. I play the piano every afternoon and have piano lessons twice a week. We often go to concerts and operas. Father took us to see Die Fledermaus at the Hofoper and also The Geisha recently, which I liked so much. I even managed to persuade Father to let me attend night classes for women, but they don’t teach the same things. It is a losing battle.”

  He makes no comments on her efforts to become cultured, to shine in some intellectual way, which is so important to her. He does not even make any sympathetic noises, nor does he proffer any words of advice or encouragement, as her brother, at least, does. This is not the story he wants her to tell, she understands.

  Probably he thinks women’s education a waste of time, as most men his age do. Probably he thinks women belong in the home with their children. Only the young engineer she has met—such an elegant young man, in his gray cloak and butterfly-shaped tie, with his long fine fingers, has been sympathetic to her complaints, has even met her at the museum, and has listened with interest to her comments on the paintings.

  So she returns to the subject of her illness, which is, after all, why she is here and which does seem to interest the doctor.

  “I don’t remember when it all began. Otto, my brother, always got the illnesses first.”

  “How much older is he than you?” the doctor now asks.

  “Eighteen months older,” she replies and tells him her brother always had a more mild case, the lucky thing, and then, of course, he would pass the disease on to her. “I would always be much more severely ill than he was,” she says, aware of the bitterness in her voice.

  She thinks how everyone in her family gets things from each other. The men, if she has understood rightly, mostly passing on their illnesses to the women. No wonder women prefer not to give men what they demand in the dark; no wonder her mother prefers to polish the furniture, to wash, to dust, to clean. Her father has passed on his shameful illness to her mother, she knows. And what of her own body’s leaking, which it does so embarrassingly, staining her undergarments so that she scrubs them at night herself to keep the maids from seeing the shameful yellow stain? But how could she speak of that?

  Instead, at his urging, she says it was when she was eight that things changed for her. She started getting the cough then, and somewhat later, around twelve, the awful migraines and the constipation, the pains in the stomach and legs a little later. The migraines went away, but she still gets the cough, which frightens her and makes her feel she might suffocate.

  “The doctors all did such ghastly things to me to get rid of it, giving me electric shocks all over, even in the most embarrassing places, and thrusting things down my throat, so that I felt I would choke. Sometimes I passed out with the pain and the fear, or I vomited. They wrapped me in cold sheets, sprayed my body with hard, cold showers, and almost drowned me in cold baths. They tortured me! Really they did!” she says and sits up and waves her hands around, her bracelets chinking, exaggerating a bit for effect.

  Some of these remedies were not quite as unpleasant as she has made out. Sometimes the warm baths and the massages had been quite pleasant and relaxing and made her feel a bit better.

  “But really, in my opinion,” she says grandly, feeling quite clever and grown up to have thought of it, “Modern doctors are not much better than the fake one I read about in Molière.” She says the title, showing off her good French accent, Le Malade imaginaire.

  “You read that?” the doctor says, sounding quite shocked.

  “Yes, I did, with the French fräulein, and we laughed a lot. She introduced me to all sorts of things,” she tells him with a certain pride, giggling a little, thinking of the girl in the play, who like her has lost her voice, and of the pretend doctor who says he needs to give an enema to the wet nurse, whom he thinks of as a tasty crumpet, only to have Geronte ask why she needs to be irrigated if nothing has blocked her.

  “And your fräulein considered this appropriate reading for a young girl? What were you, fifteen or so?” the doctor asks, sounding really rather prudish. Could he actually be a prudish man under all this exterior of frank talk and spilled secrets?

  “Well, I thought you said we should call a chat un chat,” she cannot help responding, feeling rather pleased with herself and spreading her pretty organdy skirt with the fine embroidery across his couch, playing with her glossy ringlets. Perhaps this will be more entertaining than she thought. Perhaps he is not all that brilliant, after all, if he needs to have things both ways.

  “Doctors have done me more harm than good,” she tells him rather smugly, folding her arms and turning up her toes in her soft, shiny leather boots, which fit her like gloves, adding that they seem to be mostly a band of quacks. Finally, she refused to see any more of them.

  “But in my case your father insisted?” the doctor asks.

  “Yes, because you had helped him when he was so ill.”

  The doctor gives a sort of little snort which might be either a chuckle or a sound of disapproval; she’s not sure. Perhaps he agrees with her about the other doctors, or perhaps he, too, has used electricity or who knows what drastic methods himself.

  She fears that if she talks about her cough, it will start up again, and she will not be able to breathe, or perhaps she will lose her voice completely. So she simply changes the subject.

  V

  * * *

  HER FATHER’S ILLNESS

  THE DOCTOR TOLD HER ON the first visit that she could talk about anything she wanted to, and that he wished to hear her side of the story, so this time sh
e decides to speak of her father rather than her intellectual prowess, which does not seem to have impressed him particularly. She wants the doctor to know what an exceptionally good, loving daughter she has been, until it became impossible to continue.

  She says that she had always loved her father. “Unlike the way I felt about Mother, the way I felt about Father seemed as natural, as much a part of me as the beating of my heart,” she says, crossing her hands and laying them flat against her chest. She is not quite sure where her heart is. She was so afraid he might die.

  “We had to move to Meran in the South Tyrol. It was such a long way from Vienna—more than two hundred miles,” she tells the doctor, though he probably knows. “Everyone told me how lucky I was to go there, how beautiful it was with the blue mountains and the rushing river and the flowers. You must know the place—it’s so well known. Perhaps you have visited it with your family?” she asks.

  The doctor says nothing in response, but her father will tell her later that both the doctor’s wife and his sister-in-law have visited the spas in the town, and much later, of course, more than seven years later, she will hear that the doctor has sent his own eldest daughter, Mathilde, there. Now he only tells her to go on with her account.

  “I wish we had never gone there.”

  “And why is that?”

  “If we had never had to move there then nothing bad would have happened. We would never have met the Z.’s, Father and Mother’s friends, such bad people whom I hate! Hate!”

  “The Z.’s? Bad people? And why do you hate these people?” he asks.

  “I don’t want to talk about them,” she says and goes on about leaving her home.

  “It was all so awful from the start: the move from our big house in Vienna was so sad. I remember standing alone in the empty nursery with its pale-green walls and only the three beds for me, my brother, and the nursemaid, and the three bedside tables with the china chamber pots beneath them still remaining. I was looking around for my lost doll.”

  “A doll?” the doctor asks.

  “I still have her—a lucky rag doll with a black face, you know, one my great-uncle brought back from a trip to New Orleans—Brigit, I call her. She still lies on my pillow and protects me, in her old threadbare dress, from harm, or so I imagine.

  “Do you believe in magic, Doctor? Do you think all these old statues will protect you?” she asks, pushes her hair back from her face, and wonders if some of the little statues are fakes. It would be easy to fake things of that kind, surely. She wonders if the doctor paid a lot of money for them.

  But he doesn’t talk about magic or even money, just tells her to go on with her story, the move to Meran.

  “I was sucking my thumb—I was a thumb sucker and must have been seven or eight—but I can still see myself standing at the door of the nursery in a red smocked dress and pigtails, breathless, and hear Mother’s voice calling me to hurry up and come along—when the breeze lifted the curtain and I spotted my lucky doll, Brigit, on the windowsill of the big bay window. I ran across the room to pick her up, wiping away tears. My poor brother was even sadder than I was to have to leave the house and particularly the two big dogs. He wept so bitterly.

  “Then I had to go and say good-bye to my cousins and my dearest Aunt Malvine, who was so often ill. I remember kissing my three cousins, three girls, who lived nearby, embracing them standing there so solemnly in their pinafores and plaits in the dark hallway of their house, as though I were the one who was dying. I remember the umbrella stand with the canes with funny handles, and the portrait of some old man looking down at me disapprovingly, and the narrow stairs that I ran up to find my aunt who lay on her daybed, looking so pale, with such dark rings under her eyes, lying there on her soft white pillows.”

  “This is your father’s sister?” the doctor asks.

  “Yes. You see I have always felt so much closer to my father’s side of the family. I take after them in every way. I look much more like them physically than I do like Mother and her family, who are small and plump and have fine fair hair. We are all tall and have thick dark hair, though father has red in his hair, and none of us are good eaters. We are slender, and if I say so myself, handsome, and much more intelligent than Mother’s family—or anyway Father certainly is, and I’m afraid many of us are ill—my uncle, too, Father’s brother is often ill—perhaps it runs in the family—but I was particularly fond of my Aunt Malvine, Father’s sister.

  “That day I remember how she stretched her arms out to me and said, ‘Come and kiss me, darling child,’ and I ran to her. When she reached across and picked me up and held me tightly in her thin arms, I could feel her ribs and smell the odor of sickness on her breath. I so hated to leave her and to know I would never be able to go down the road with my nursemaid to visit her in the afternoons. Unlike Mother, and though she was so ill, she would always find time to read to me or answer my questions, or play imaginary games. She let me play with her jewelry and her cosmetics: her creams and lotions—I would put them all over my face, and heap her jewelry around my neck and wrists, sitting at her dressing table.

  “I was so afraid that if I left her she would die, which was what happened, of course. I was right. She was such an unhappy lady—her marriage was not a happy one, so she was often alone, and she died very young.

  “There has been so much illness in my family, in my life,” she tells the doctor. “Death always seems so close to us, hovering, right here,” and she puts her hands to her chest and coughs, “with my dearest aunt, my father, with his bad lungs, his tuberculosis, his blind eyes, even Mother often, too, and then Frau Z., but I don’t want to talk about her.”

  She remembers arriving in Meran and being carried half-asleep into the carriage from the station, dark clouds passing across the sky, and the mountains seeming to loom over her, dark and frightening, and the wild sound of the rushing water.

  “They told me the air up there was clearer, purer, and would be good for Father’s bad lungs, but I felt I could hardly breathe,” she says and feels again that breathlessness in this small dark room. “I wondered how anything could flourish up there: flowers or trees. It seemed so airless and quiet.” The cluttered space in the room, too, is silent, apart from the sounds from the courtyard: the raucous cry of a crow. The ceiling seems low and the clutter makes her feel hemmed in as the mountains had done.

  But she tries to go on with her tale at his urging: “The air was too thin, and all the lights faintly glimmering in the small windows looked like trapped stars. It seemed such a grim place to me from the start, and I began coughing immediately as we entered the dark rooms of the old hotel with all the heavy furniture, the curtains drawn, the doilies on the arms of the heavy chairs with claws for feet, the big fires blazing in the fireplaces, though it seemed so warm to me.

  “I was so frightened by the strange medicinal smells and the sight of so many sick people, many of them elderly, being pushed around in wicker bath chairs with blankets over their knees or walking around with the help of canes.”

  She sat staring in silence through what seemed to her endless dull meals—she ate now with her parents in the silent, vast dining rooms of the hotel, the staff coming and going noiselessly in soft shoes and white gloves, serving course after course, all in rich sauces she didn’t like. She listened to the scrape of silver on porcelain, the murmur of soft voices. There were so few children her age, and those who were there, she did not know. Some of them were foreigners: Russians, Poles—people came from all over, her father told her, because of the mild climate and the curative powers of the grapes and whey. Many spoke in strange tongues. There was no one there she loved, except for her father and her brother, but he was soon sent away to school and her father had to lie in a dark room. She was bored and lonely. She was taught at home by the fancy new fräulein, who was engaged for her, though there was a Catholic school for girls, run by the nuns.

 
“Father didn’t want me to go there, because he said they would want me to convert, so that I wouldn’t be damned and have to go to hell and be consumed eternally in the fire,” she says. Catholics always did, according to her father, as they thought you went to hell and were eternally burned in the fire if you were a Jew or even a Protestant and did not believe in their Savior, which always seemed odd to her as the Savior, Jesus of Nazareth, was himself, after all, a Jew and presumably was not consumed in any fire.

  She met no one outside the house that they moved to eventually, spending all her free time in the dark room beside her father, whom she loved so much and whose illness worried her terribly. She shared a nursery with her brother and the fräulein for a while, but mostly she was in her father’s dark, close room. The worst moments were when he lay very still on his bed, helpless—he could hardly move his limbs at all—and seemed to have lost his mind.

  “You must know how ill father has been on and off, ever since I was six years old. He often called on me to nurse him, and I went gladly, hoping to help him in some way. When he had to lie flat on his back in the dark after the operation on his one good eye, I sat beside him and whispered to him. I recited his favorite poems. Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluehn? Im dunklen Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel whet, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeen steht.” As she recites the lovely words by Goethe, lying on the doctor’s soft carpet, her voice trembles with emotion, tears coming into her eyes as she remembers those moments in the half dark with the odors of illness in the airless room, her father’s hand in hers, the fear that he would be completely blind and unable to see her or anything else, that they would all be left without any means of making a living.