Dreaming for Freud Read online

  She remembers the hotel’s shadowy pine forest on one side and its lawns that run down to the scintillant water, the elegant guests with their parasols sauntering indolently across the smooth green grass in the glare of white light.

  They all took the train together from Meran, she says. He thinks of his early train journeys and remembers the glimmerings of the lamps, the overnight train trip, and the glimpse of his mother’s white body in the dark of the compartment as they voyaged to Vienna for the first time, this city which he both hates and loves.

  But the girl is lovingly describing her arrival at the lake hotel. They were ushered through the high-ceilinged halls and up the stairs to the bedrooms and along a white corridor, with the bellhops carrying all their many suitcases—they were there for a month, she says. Little Clara and Otto—“Their little boy has the same name as my brother, which made him all the more dear to me,” she says—who had been cooped up during the long train ride, skipped joyously ahead, hand in hand, the silent corridor now ringing with their laughter and cries. She remembers the slight smell of disinfectant soap and, when the bellhop opened the doors on the rooms, the puffy white counterpanes on all the beds, the flowers fanned in silver vases, the large windows with the silky green curtains caught back with golden ropes, the balconies on each of the big sunny rooms, and the view of the sparkling lake below.

  “It was a little like a dream—or perhaps even paradise at first. It seemed the loveliest place in the world,” she says. She recalls how the children went running from one room to the next, taking off their shoes and bouncing on the beds and then joining hands and singing the Italian song they had learned from their mother, something like ‘Giro giro tondo, Casca il mondo, they all fall down!’ And then lying flat on their backs on the beds and laughing.”

  “So, you were happy there?” he asks, imagining the lovely place and wishing that it were summertime and that he were free and could leave this small room and his chair to go walking in the mountains, which he loves, looking for mushrooms with his own children. What if he had the means to take his own family to that lake that he knows well and admires?

  He thinks, too, of the freedom of his own early childhood in Freiberg, the clucking of the poultry, the blue-gray hills in the distance, the sweet fragrance of the fields, the river, the throbbing song of the larks, his mother’s youthful form bending over him adoringly. He has never escaped his longing for this lost paradise, the beautiful woods of his early home. He thinks of how all of that came to an abrupt end when he was hardly four years old. But the girl is going on about the light on the Lago di Garda.

  “I was so, so happy to be there in that lovely place with the Z.’s, who had been so kind to me! I was happy to be with their children, particularly the delicate little girl, who loved me so much and whom I loved, still love so much.” Her father had reserved suites for both the families and also several smaller rooms at the end of the corridor for her fräulein and her own beloved Otto whom she was hoping would arrive in a few days.

  At first, each family occupied its own sunny suite: a large bedroom and sitting room for the parents adjoining a smaller one for the children. The nights were deliciously cool; the beds soft and comfortable, with puffy white eiderdowns; the breakfasts of café-au-lait, fresh rolls and brioches, and baskets of fruit were brought to their rooms; the long walks along the edge of the lake with the little children running ahead were joyful. She told them stories, and they played imaginary games: she was Marie Antoinette escaping the revolutionary soldiers, or she was Persephone collecting flowers when Hades comes to kidnap her and carry her off to the underworld, to Hades. How they laughed!

  In the evenings after dinner, she was allowed to walk with the grown-ups into the small town for the passegiatta, as Italians do, carried along by the flow of people down the main street, everyone chatting and flirting. She would often walk a little behind with Herr Z., who would talk to her about books—she was reading von Hofmannsthal, who had begun publishing his poetry at such a young age, and she felt very grown up and important. He knew some lines by heart and would quote to her, she remembers:

  “You are the garden locked / Your childlike hands are waiting / Your lips are without violence”—while her mother would walk ahead with Frau Z. in one of her elegant hats, and her father and sometimes other friends. Frau Z., of course, spoke Italian as well as German and sometimes Italians joined them after dinner, simple people who laughed loudly and had a good time.

  “I suspected that it was Father who was paying for both families because the Z.’s, I knew, were not as wealthy. I was so pleased by what I thought of as Father’s generosity to these people whom I liked, and who said they liked me so much. Everyone seemed in such high spirits. What a fool I was!” she exclaims.

  “Then, one evening, suddenly everything changed. Father announced something that upset me terribly. The evening had started out so well. Mother had, unusually, allowed me to stay up for dinner and eat with the grown-ups. We were all sitting outside on the terrace at a round table in the splendid restaurant that looked over the lake, the sky lit up by all the stars shimmering in the blue night sky.

  “Frau Z. was looking more beautiful than ever, with the perfect oval of her face and her mysterious smile. She is a beautiful woman, I know, and she seemed to me particularly lovely that night. It was warm, and her white, smooth shoulders and arms were bare, and she had a new sickle-shaped pin which glittered in her fair hair. Probably Father had bought it. I remember it all so clearly,” she says.

  The fräulein had helped her dress, pulling in her waist tight, and even putting her hair up, and her mother had allowed her to wear her best white dress, with the décolleté—“I was starting to have something to show off at that point,” she says, putting her hands to her chest and her string of pearls. Her father had even placed her at the table in the best position—or what he probably considered as such, between himself and Herr Z. and with a good view of the lake.

  “I felt so grown up. Father said to Herr Z., looking at me, ‘Well, look who is the little lady tonight.’ And Herr Z. said, ‘Indeed,’ and smiled at me and said that I looked, well, so pretty. I blushed, but I felt for a moment the center of attention, all eyes on me, like being at your own birthday party, if you know what I mean?”

  He says nothing to that and so she continues.

  “As the grown-ups were sipping their sparkling white wine, and we were all eating dessert—I still remember what it was—a delicious, sweet blancmange—Father stroked his mustache with his two fingers, the way he does, you know”—and she copies the gesture for him—“and said calmly that he needed a quieter place to work and that, since he often rose in the night and might disturb the family, he had decided to move down the corridor into one of the smaller rooms.

  “‘I’ll take the room reserved for Otto, as his highness has apparently decided not to grace us as yet with his company,’ he announced.

  “At first I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, or I didn’t want to know. I looked across the table at Mother to see her reaction, but she lowered her gaze and said nothing, as usual. They just went on eating their blancmange,” she recounts bitterly. “Then I watched Pippina in her low-cut black dress, her thick blond hair arranged in soft ringlets around her face, smiling slightly ironically at Father. It all seemed unbelievable to me in a way, and for a moment I thought I might not have heard Father’s words correctly, with them sitting there so calmly and going on eating their food as if nothing had happened, while I was trembling, terrified by what this might mean, that my suspicions might be confirmed.”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “The very next day, after Father had moved down the corridor, Frau Z. did, too, as I was so afraid she might. The fräulein was brought to sleep in the room with the children on the pretext that they were keeping the couple up, and Frau Z. moved into the fräulein’s small single room at the end of the corridor, on some excu
se of exhaustion, so that she and Father were each sleeping alone and opposite one another and thus could quite easily go into one another’s rooms.”

  “And this is why you are so angry with your father? Because you are jealous of Frau Z.?” he asks her.

  “If that was all he had done, I wouldn’t be here today, I don’t imagine,” she says crossly.

  IX

  * * *

  MINNA

  THE DOCTOR IS LOOKING THROUGH his letters on the silver salver in the entrance hall, his hands shaking. Still nothing from Fliess, he sees, and his heart tilts with sadness.

  He stands for a moment in the hall, gathering himself together. Whom will he confide in, if not his beloved friend? Women have never filled this role for him. Perhaps there were too many around him as a boy, too many sisters, one arriving after another in quick succession. Now not even his sister-in-law, the passionate Minna, fulfills that role, he thinks as he enters the dining room and is glad to find her well enough to sit in her habitual place at the breakfast table. He has worried about her after the necessary intervention and her stay in the spa in Meran.

  He takes his place in silence at the head of the table, nodding to his wife and his sister-in-law and wishing the children a good morning. The two women sit in silence, facing each other on either side of him with the six children all sitting meekly upright around the table, waiting for their father to begin eating. His soft-boiled egg is waiting for him, getting cold, he sees, in its porcelain eggcup. He is the only one who has the privilege of a daily egg, on the pretext that he needs to keep up his strength. Sometimes he will cut off the top and give it to the child sitting nearest to him.

  The honey shimmers golden, the butter shines, wrapped in its green leaf. He can smell the fresh, warm kaiser rolls. Everything in its appointed place. Martha gives him a disapproving glance, purses her lips, and glances at the clock, because he is a few minutes late, and they have all been waiting. Then she pours the coffee and the frothy hot milk from the large blue porcelain pitchers with the gilt edges she brought from her own home and passes them down the table.

  He glances at Minna, widening his eyes with mock guilt, pulling his lips down at the sides. His sister-in-law has long been his ally and companion on his extended voyages. Almost from the start he has used her, first to pry Martha free from her possessive family and an undesired closeness with her mother, and now for other purposes.

  Minna looks at him with a little laugh in her dark, sloe eyes and a slight smile of complicity. Such an intelligent woman, the younger, taller sister is, with her narrow, jolie-laide face, her thick braid of silky hair, her arched nostrils, her sly, slanting, mocking eyes. She watches him from across the breakfast table, as Martha breaks off the end of a roll in disapproving silence.

  How much does his Martha know about his closeness with her sister? How much does she condone? How much is simply convenient for her to ignore? Perhaps she, too, prefers to keep all this safely and quietly, and above all disease-free, within the family and under the same roof, occasionally sending him off with her blessing on his voyages of exploration with her energetic younger sister to let off some steam. How much of this is partly a relief to her, freeing her, as it does, from his unwanted nightly urges? A prudent and sensible woman, his little princess has become over the years a woman of tact, intelligence, and control.

  Many years later she will be the one who, with her quiet calm, will get the Gestapo to give up their guns and sit down in their living room by telling them firmly that they never keep guests standing in their home. She will tell them to help themselves to the large amount of cash they have on hand, which will call forth his remark about never having been paid so much for one session.

  Now he thinks of her unexpected arrival that day at the hut on Mount Rax. At first he had thought it was an apparition—she had always said she was not able to hike to that altitude, but then he had realized it was his wife who had followed him, standing in the low doorway, looking flushed and pretty in her dusty boots, delighted with her prowess and with the splendid view. How happy she was, how grateful for his promise to leave her free, to have her life back, after six children in eight years, after his promise of abstinence.

  It is the only way. He remains opposed to coitus interruptus and to masturbation and even to the use of condoms, which he finds too difficult to use and are not reliable anyway. Besides, his frequent failures and distressing performances with his wife recently make him prefer abstinence with her. The sexual side of his marriage, he thinks sadly, has been amortized.

  He doubts that Fliess’s wife is able to help him much in this way, either. He knows Breuer has planted the seed of jealousy in that woman’s narrow mind and seeks to stir up trouble between the two. How strange that Fliess’s wife and his young patient should have the same name, not a name he likes particularly.

  He has to admit though that things are proceeding nicely and quite easily with this new patient at last. Despite a difficult beginning she is proving easier, or perhaps he is more experienced than he was with Ilona W., though she was one of his most successful cures. He still remembers the satisfying glimpse he caught of her dancing, once he had uncovered her repressed love for her brother-in-law, a girl who had come to him unable to walk.

  This one, too, seems to be walking and above all talking more easily. The locks are opening to his key now, he has written to his friend.

  He sees it all quite clearly and he already feels this case will be one to help him prove his theories and achieve the fame he so desperately seeks.

  He knows his prudent Martha, who eats her roll and butter and sips her hot coffee so daintily in silence at his side, would like him to receive the professorship, which would bring both prestige and higher fees at last. She, too, is impatient for his success. He thinks of Goethe’s words, “Decorations and titles ward off many a shove in the crowd.” Martha, despite her tact and her sweetness, is no fool. It was she who suggested he send his book on dreams to an influential colleague. “Perhaps I should write first and ask if he’d like to read it?” he had asked.

  “No, no, just send it. Who can resist picking up a book and at least reading the first page or two?” she had replied. Women, he realizes, can be a definite help as well as a hindrance in his career.

  They have ridiculed his book on dreams. No one will accept the simple truth that all dreams conceal wishes. Why is it that human nature denies what they can see so clearly before their eyes? Well, he will give them some indisputable proof. All he needs now from this girl are a few dreams. How he would like to discuss this case with Fliess!

  Fliess’s wife is jealous of her husband’s close relationship with him, just as this patient seems to be jealous of her father’s friendship with the Z.’s. Yet he still dreams of going to Rome with Fliess. He thinks of Rome, like the mind, as a place with ancient secrets to discover. What could be more pleasurable than discovering the secret streets of that city that he has dreamed of again and again with his magician, the only one besides Minna who has really had faith in his work. Ah, Rome: how he longs to go there! He knows it is a necessary part of his voyage of self-discovery, and yet he fears to go to the city which his childhood hero, the Semitic Hannibal, had never managed to take during his fight against the Romans, which he thinks of as the fight of Jewry against the Catholic church; he thinks of Rome as the city that could be conquered by him who should first kiss the mother as the oracle had foretold.

  He eats his buttered roll and sips his coffee in silence as the servant comes and goes in the room. It is Minna who tells young Martin not to chew with his mouth open. The boy looks at his father for support, but the doctor says nothing. How could he contradict her? He remembers the brief, stolen August days they spent in the Schweizerhaus, in Majola, the high, attic room, number 11—he will never forget the number, or the slanting ceiling, or the sunshine coming in and shining on the crumpled sheets, on the bread crumbs from breakfast,
and on her long, black hair, tumbling down her smooth, bare back, the beads of perspiration on her long upper lip.

  X

  * * *

  PROTEST

  “WHAT WAS GOING ON WAS perfectly obvious to anyone who had eyes to see, as the fräulein herself said,” the girl says, going on with her story without any prompting from him this afternoon.

  “Did you say anything to anyone?” the doctor asks.

  “Indeed, I did!” she says. “My brother wasn’t there, so I couldn’t confer with him, and I’m not sure he would have done anything anyway, but I decided to speak to Mother myself. The fräulein encouraged me to speak up, too, for her own reasons, reasons that became obvious to me.

  “Walking with Mother by the lake the next day, I pointed this all out to her. ‘It’s not right! Can’t you see that? It’s embarrassing and humiliating! How can you just remain silent! The whole hotel knows what they are doing together in the night. You have to say something to Father!’ I told her. I was so angry.”

  But her mother had explained that life was not always as simple as her daughter seemed to think. Men, she said, had to be allowed a certain latitude, at times, and women were obliged to look the other way. Marriage, if it was to go on smoothly, sometimes required certain compromises. She had reason to be grateful to Frau Z., very grateful. Indeed, they all did. She herself should be grateful to Frau Z.

  “Why should I be grateful to her!” she had asked.

  “For saving your father’s life,” her mother had said dramatically.

  When she asked for further details, her mother explained that on an impulse one evening after dinner, Frau Z. had followed her father into the pine forest. She was worried because of certain remarks he had made during dinner that he might take his life. Not far from where she and her mother were walking and talking now, her mother told her, in the dark woods on one side of the hotel, Frau Z. had found her father distraught, walking in the shadows of the tall trees with a gun in his hands, which she had managed to convince him to relinquish. It was thanks to Frau Z. that her father was still alive today and with them, continuing to make their lives so comfortable after all, her mother added, gesturing to the lake and the gardens. What would they all have done without him?