Dreaming for Freud Page 8

  She writes:

  “On the island, in the shadows of the overhanging willows, we strip off all our clothes. Quickly, I wade into the water, and he follows me. We walk naked into the warm water up to our waists, our chests, toes sinking into the mud. I turn to splash his pale chest. His shoulders are beautifully broad and pale. His fair curls are on his forehead. We dive down together into the depths, kissing below the surface.”

  That would be something too sacred to tell the doctor.

  She knows what he would say about this scene and what she really wants and it is certainly more than the touch of the young man’s hand. He doesn’t understand that that is really what she wants. She does feel desire, but it is a vague, diffuse feeling spread all over her body. She blots her words and closes her diary, sitting at her desk and looking out the window at the gray winter sky striped with the pink of the sunset. She feels it is a sky of the end of the world.

  In reality, she did meet someone that summer at the lake, but not the engineering student whom she had met at a party at her Aunt Malvine’s house. Her aunt’s husband, who also comes from Budapest, had invited the young student, who loves music as much as she does, and who intrigued her immediately in his extravagant cloak and big butterfly-shaped bow tie. She was standing talking to her uncle in the small garden of their villa in Dobling—it was when her aunt and uncle lived in the nineteenth district—as the violet and gold evening floated around them, when they heard a lightweight carriage rolling up with a clatter of hooves. They watched someone lithe and fair haired, in an elegant gray suit and cloak, spring down fast and walk up the short path from the garden gate toward the front door, his hair worn long and somewhat wild about his head. Her uncle greeted him and introduced them. Then someone called out to her uncle from the lit interior so he left them together in the gloaming of the garden. The student told her he came from Budapest and that his parents had both died there when he was very young. “How sad,” she said, moved for him, imagining the little boy alone. He had been brought to Vienna by the great actor von Sonnenthal. “Despite his modest beginnings, he has been made a nobleman by the emperor because of his great art. I admire him immensely,” he says. “He has brought me up, though naturally I don’t see him very often except on the stage. Have you ever seen him perform?” the young man asked her, and she was obliged to shake her head. “Oh, you must come one evening with me to the Burgtheater and see him do Mortimer in Maria Stuart. Would you come with me as my guest one evening perhaps?” he asked, and she smiled back at him and said she was not sure her family would allow that.

  He spoke of his desire to become a composer. He plays several instruments including the piano, the fiddle, the trombone, and even the organ and makes extra money for his studies playing at weddings and balls and even at the Zoo restaurant. Perhaps one day he will be able to conduct and have his own orchestra, he said. She listened to the melodious sound of his slightly accented voice as he spoke to her in German, and the garden grew dark. She was touched by his orphaned state, his wild hair, his wild dreams, and wanted to help and protect him.

  Later she was to realize she had overlooked his inability to face reality.

  Unlike the doctor, in their brief and secret meetings her young student has told her that she is beautiful and brilliant, pure and good, and that he wants to spend his life with her. She has not mentioned this to her father as the man is just a student, an orphan with no money and no real prospects, or even much interest in the engineering he is supposed to be studying. She is afraid her father would not approve. But she has met him in secret at the museum, and once they went to the theater together to see Adolf von Sonnenthal, and he took her backstage afterward to meet the great actor. She was sorry she had gone, as she realized he was not at all a handsome man, but seemed able to transform himself into whatever he wanted on the stage. Her student sends her letters and sometimes postcards from Budapest when he returns there, which she treasures and hides in her desk, locked away in the folds of her secret diary.

  Why does she have to remain immobile on the doctor’s couch, day after day, just to be told that everything is her fault! What sort of creature will emerge from his silken cocoon at the end of her time there—the doctor has said it might be a year! When she does come forth she will be transformed into something small, pale, and deformed, a slug, something no man would want anyway, worming its way across his silky carpet, leaving behind its trail of misery like a snail’s trail.

  Why should she believe that her illness is her own fault, brought about by masturbation. (The very sound of the word seems shameful to her and makes her shudder.) She wonders how sick she really is. If she manages to relax her whole body she can almost make the pain go away completely. But how can one concentrate like that continuously? The pains come and go so mysteriously. At one moment she feels her whole body wracked with pain and then at others she feels nothing. Sometimes if she manages to walk in the woods on a spring day she feels so much better, looking up into the trees, studying the birds, feeling part of the nature around her.

  Just lying there, listening to the doctor mention hidden desires, makes her want to touch herself, it is true. She has done it from time to time in bed, unable to sleep, where she makes up strange stories with pictures to accompany her gestures. Her fantasies, like her diary, are also a place of freedom, though they make her feel guilty, which her diary does not. She has never written down her fantasy or told the doctor about that! There is always a little boy in her stories and a beating.

  Over and over again she makes up this same beating fantasy sometimes with some small variations. Sometimes the fräulein wears a blue skirt and not a brown one. Sometimes she has an assistant, a young blond man whom she calls upon to beat the little boy with a stick when he is bad, or sometimes he even gives the boy an enema as punishment, but parts of the story are always the same. The little boy is always sitting in a big bay window in the sunlight when the fräulein comes bursting into the room in her long dark dress that rustles as she walks. The little boy can hear the sound of her long petticoats and see the skirt that froths like foam around her slender ankles as she comes over to him, and he knows what she will make him do as she holds him in her arms.

  Without the doctor making her feel even worse with his words, she always feels very guilty afterward, as much for the strange story she has made up as for the actual touching.

  She remembers her fräulein lying next to her on the bed once while she crossed her legs with her hand between them, her whole body trembling with pleasure. The fräulein said, “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Just scratching,” she had lied, not really aware of what she was doing, though suddenly realizing this was not acceptable behavior.

  As she thinks about it now, sitting at her desk in the late afternoon with her diary before her, she runs her hands over her body. She feels the slight swell of her new breasts, her stomach through her wool dress, the strangeness of it all. Is this me? Who is this girl? What does she want?

  She pulls up her white skirt and petticoats and slips her fingers down beneath her long underwear and between her legs and holds herself tight, holding on to herself as though she might otherwise disappear. At the same time she conjures up images:

  A boy child sits alone in the sunlight in a bay window. He hears the sound of his fräulein’s long skirts rustle as she comes into his big empty room in her brown dress. The fräulein looks around the room disapprovingly and says as she always does: “What is going on here?” which already makes the boy feel guilty though the bare room is very clean and tidy, not a toy out of place.

  “Have you been a good boy?” the fräulein asks in her accented German.

  “Oh, yes, very good,” he says, as always.

  Then she smiles at him sweetly with her large glistening mouth, her lips very red, and undoes her bodice and then her tight low-cut blouse letting her heavy breasts swing free. “Come, let me see,” s
he says, and she gathers him up in her arms and holds him close against her soft body. She thrusts her thick brown nipple into his mouth and tells him to suck.

  “No! No!” he says, trying to turn his face away, with disgust, but she holds him too tightly and then he does suck as he always does with more and more pleasure. When his body responds to this, she says disapprovingly, touching him in his private place, making him swell and swell, “Well, well, look at you! I don’t call that a good boy, do you? No! No! Not a good boy at all,” and she turns him over on her knees and beats him on his buttocks and tells him he is a naughty, naughty boy.

  Then the man who is usually young and fair haired and beardless like her engineering student changes in the picture into an older, dark-haired man with intense eyes, emerging from the shadows of the room. At first she thinks it might be Herr Z., but then she recognizes him with a little shiver. It is the doctor himself, looking grim and cross, piercing her with his deep disapproving gaze, grunting and straining and sweating a little in his starched white shirt and mournful bow tie as he bends over her to gather her up and hold her hard, asking her if she has been a good girl, then he is turning her over his knees, and beating her hard, while he presses his legs against her sex and runs his hands all over her to make her keep still. She gasps a little, her fingers damp, and lets her head lean back against the hard chair.

  She wonders if the doctor touches himself sometimes even now. Surely not. She cannot imagine it! And perhaps all he has to suck on are his terrible, foul-smelling cigars. Perhaps that is his problem. He seems a very controlled and diligent person and probably did not dare touch himself anymore, even as a child, once his nursemaid or his mother had told him it was dangerous, that it would make his penis drop off, or would make his brains rot. Perhaps he is not even able to make love to his wife anymore. Does the doctor have sexual intercourse with his wife, she wonders, and thinks that probably he does not and that is why he wants his patients to talk so much about their secret desires.

  VIII

  * * *

  SUBTERFUGE

  TO HIS SURPRISE SHE DOES come back the very next day, and on time, sweeping into his office, looking flushed and a little disheveled. On such a cold day, her head is uncovered, her long, glossy hair whipped by the wind, in unruly curls on her shoulders, her cheeks pink. She lies on his couch, fidgeting distractedly, pulling at her gloves, and coughing from time to time as she goes on talking monotonously about her father’s lies. That is what is making her ill, she insists.

  “Which ones this time?” he asks, stifling a yawn.

  She says she will tell him if he really wants to know. She might just as well get it over with.

  “Start away,” he says.

  She tells him about what she calls the “subterfuge.” She explains how she and her family had met the Z.’s in the spa town south of Innsbruck. Actually, it was thanks to her that they all met.

  He notices with some satisfaction that she seems for the first time willing to answer him, to talk of the Z.’s, speaking more easily without coughing as much. He is finally getting somewhere, he thinks, despite her bad temper, and relaxes a little in his chair, listening to her tale with interest.

  “It was their little girl I noticed first, actually,” she says. She was having tea on the terrace of a hotel in Meran one afternoon with her parents. They had gone there for a treat—perhaps it was even her mother’s birthday—she doesn’t remember exactly, she says, or perhaps it was simply because of the splendid view over the valley. She was sitting on the terrace, feeling bored, when she first noticed the family. She was eating creamy chocolate cake and drinking cool lemonade. Her brother was not there, and she missed him particularly as there were no other children. She looked up and saw the couple enter with their two children: the little boy, fair headed and rosy cheeked like his mother, in whose arms he wriggled, and the pale, dark-haired girl, who held her father’s hand and looked so old-fashioned as she gazed at them with her large eyes.

  From the start the child intrigued her. There was something so serious and contained about the small girl, and she had felt from that moment that something might happen to her, though she wasn’t sure what it might be.

  Besides, she has always liked playing with younger children, teaching them, playing school, and this little girl had such a strange and grave expression.

  The Z.’s were led to a less favorable table than theirs, she remembers, one with limited shade that hot summer afternoon. She watched the little girl with her old-fashioned face, her dark hair tied back from her high forehead, whom she caught staring at her with her light blue eyes. She looked like a child in an old painting, sitting there so quietly, unnaturally still for someone that age. Hardly moving, she seemed pinioned by the white mountain light, her skin almost transparent. Her stillness contrasted with her wriggling brother, who was making a terrible fuss, kicking his red boots against the table leg and spreading strawberry jam all over his smart sailor suit. A little boy who couldn’t keep still, she says.

  “The little girl smiled at me and slipped suddenly from her wicker chair in her smocked sundress with its little wing-like sleeves—I can see it all so clearly—and came running over to our table. She stood beside me and stared up at me as I ate my chocolate cake. I looked over at the child’s mother, who was trying to cope with the naughty boy. I asked if I could share my cake with her little girl. Frau Z., for it was she, the mother, smiled graciously, nodded her head in assent, and laughed a little at her daughter. Frau Z. is, I will admit, very lovely when she laughs, perhaps you know, her mouth very red and her teeth unusually white and even,” she says.

  “How old were you?” the doctor asks.

  “I was twelve years old—almost thirteen that summer, I think, and the little girl, Clara, must have been around three or four.

  “After that we often met in the town where the Z.’s lived. Herr Z. had a shop there, which you probably know, and Frau Z. made hats. She is very gifted with her hands. She makes wonderful, extravagant hats with wide brims, feathers, and ribbons, and once even with a fake bluebird, although she, too, was often ill and had to go away one summer to a sanatorium. Mother bought several hats in their shop, for her and also for me. Together Father and Frau Z.—Pippina, she told me to call her—took the ‘grape cure,’ the curative grapes, which grow in the area, and sometimes they took the ‘whey cure’ in the summers, and the waters and the baths for all their ailments. Or we just met on the Wassermauer, the promenade, in the old town,” she tells him.

  “Both Herr Z. and his wife were exceptionally kind to me,” she admits. “At first I wasn’t sure which one I liked better. At first, in my ignorance, I thought they were so kind because I was precocious and well read, so clever and amusing. They made me feel I was an especially gifted child. What an idiot I was!” she says bitterly. They both made her feel so pretty and bright. They invited her to quote the poetry she knew by heart and marveled at her memory. Or they asked her to play the piano, which she did gladly for them.

  Much of the time, though, she had sat beside her father in the dark room when he had trouble with his eyes and recited poetry for him.

  “Then Frau Z. began nursing Father, too—‘You go outside and play with the children. They would love that. They are so fond of you, and you are too young to have to sit for such long hours in a dark sickroom,’ she would say to me when Father was very sick and when Mother felt incapable of helping, and Father refused to have a nurse,” she says. “I thought her so kind and thoughtful! And I was so happy to play outside with her children. I’ve always loved both of them but particularly the little girl, who would follow me around like a shadow. I taught her how to say some things in French and play simple pieces on the piano.”

  One summer they had all left Meran and gone on holiday together to a hotel on beautiful Lago di Garda in Italy. “Frau Z., Pippina, comes from northern Italy, perhaps you know, from the lake country,” she says
. “And I think it was she who chose the luxurious hotel at the lake where we all spent that summer. I had not quite turned thirteen.”

  She will never forget the place, she says: the laughter at the tables on the terrace; the sparkling white wine she was allowed to sip for the first time; the dark-haired, hard-working Italian waiters who huddled in a corner by the bar in the shadows, waiting for the first guests to arrive when the restaurant doors swung open in the evening. “They would watch me as I entered, staring as I walked across the terrace to our table, and making me blush to the roots of my hair.”

  She remembers the large balcony off their room with its round wicker table and chairs, where Pippina had patiently taught her to play endless games of honeymoon bridge, the game that would one day save her life. From the start she took to bridge where she starred and was able to exercise her excellent memory, and she had a feel for cards, which Frau Z. would praise profusely. “You remember every card played, don’t you?” she would say, watching her with admiration. “And I do,” she tells the doctor proudly. “‘This child is amazing! What a memory! She’s quite brilliant!’ Frau Z. would exclaim, which made me so happy.”

  “Yes, and what happened there that summer? You spoke of subterfuge,” the doctor says, hoping she will not be sidetracked again by accounts of her intellectual prowess. What a show off! But she takes her sweet time, showing off her descriptive powers, her vocabulary in various languages.

  “I don’t know why,” she says, “but I remember that place so clearly, perhaps it was because I got my period there for the first time—not that anyone said much about that! Except to explain at length the hygiene involved and to make me feel I was much too young for this to have occurred.

  “‘I was sixteen,’ Mother kept saying disapprovingly, as though this visible sign of being a woman were somehow a fault or at any rate a weakness.”