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  FREUD’S

  Sister

  FREUD’S

  Sister

  Goce Smilevski

  Translated from the Macedonian by

  CHRISTINA E. KRAMER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Penguin Books 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Goce Smilevski, 2011

  Translation copyright © Christina E. Kramer, 2012

  All rights reserved

  The Macedonian edition published as Sestrata na Zigmund Frojd by Dijalong in 2011 has been edited and translated for this publication.

  A portion of this book appeared as “Fourteen Little Gustavs” translated by Ana Lucic, in Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, published by Dalkey Archive Press.

  This is a work of fiction based on real events.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Smilevski, Goce.

  [Sestrata na Zigmund Frojd. English]

  Freud’s sister : a novel / Goce Smilevski; translated from the Macedonian by

  Christina E. Kramer.

  p. cm.

  “The Macedonian edition published as Sestrata na Zigmund Frojd by Dijalong in 2011 has been edited and translated for this publication.”

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60361-1

  1. Freud, Adolphine, 1862–ca. 1942—Fiction. I. Title.

  PG1196.29.M58S4713 2011

  891.8’193—dc23 2012020979

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Electra • Designed by Sabrina Bowers

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  Author’s Note

  THIS IS A NOVEL BASED IN FACT. ALTHOUGH Sigmund Freud wrote that “reality will always remain unknowable,” we do know about Freud’s exit visa and the opportunity it represented for his sisters, and about Freud’s final months spent in exile in London—they are documented in detail. We also know about the fate of Freud’s sisters. Their final months, however, are lost to history.

  In one of his letters, Freud refers to Adolfina as “the sweetest and best of my sisters.” His son Martin is not as kind toward his aunt. Reading the few lines that refer to her in Martin’s book about his father, we can conclude that Adolfina was underestimated by her family, and sense the pity that family members felt for her. From letters we also know that she was mistreated by her mother, that she lived with her parents as an adult and cared for them until their deaths, that she spent her life in loneliness. And that is all we know about her. The silence around Adolfina is so loud that I could write this novel in no other way than in her voice. The well-known facts of Sigmund Freud’s life were like scenery, or like the walls of a labyrinth in which I wandered for years, trying to find the corridors where I could hear Adolfina’s voice so I could write it down, and in this way rescue in fiction one of the many lives forgotten by history.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Acknowledgments

  1

  AN OLD WOMAN LIES IN THE DARKNESS. Her eyes closed, she sifts through her earliest memories. Three drift into her mind: at a time when many things in the world still have no name, a boy gives her something sharp and says, “Knife”; at a time when she still believes in fairy tales, a voice whispers to her the tale of the bird that pierced its breast with its beak and tore out its heart; at a time when touch tells her more than words, a hand approaches her face and strokes her cheek with an apple. The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund. The old woman dredging up memories is me, Adolfina Freud.

  “Adolfina,” said a voice in the darkness, “are you sleeping?”

  “I’m awake,” I said. My sister Paulina was lying beside me in bed.

  “What time is it?”

  “It is probably around midnight.”

  My sister woke up every night, beginning the same story with the same words:

  “This is the end of Europe.”

  “The end has come to Europe many times.”

  “They are going to kill us like dogs.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  I said nothing.

  “It was like this in Berlin in 1933,” continued Paulina. I no longer tried to stop her from telling me what she had told me many times before: “As soon as the National Socialists and Hitler came to power, young people took to marching down streets to the beat of martial music. Just as they are marching here now. Banners with swastikas flew from buildings. Just as they are flapping in the wind here. You could hear the Führer’s voice from radios and public-address systems that had been set up in the squares and parks. Just as we hear it here now. He was promising a new Germany, a better Germany, a pure Germany.”

  It was 1938. Three years earlier, my sisters Paulina and Marie had fled Berlin and returned to the apartment they had left when they married. Paulina was nearly blind, and someone always had to be at her side; she slept in the bed where our parents had slept, and Marie and I took turns sleeping beside her. We took turns because Paulina woke up every night, and either Marie or I, depending on which of us was in the room with her, would be kept up all night.

  “It will be the same here,” continued my sister. “Do you know how it was there?”

  “I know,” I answered sleepily. “You’ve told me.”

  “I’ve told you. Men in uniform burst into Jewish homes at night. They broke everything; they beat us and ordered us to leave. All those who did not support the Führer, and who dared to express their views publicly, disappeared without a trace. People said that anyone opposing the ideals on which the new Germany would be built would be taken to camps and put to hard labor. There they were tortured and killed. That is
what will happen here, believe me.”

  I believed her, but I said not a word, because every word I said would compel her to say more. Several weeks earlier, German troops had marched into Austria and set up a new government. Sensing danger, our brother Alexander had fled with his family to Switzerland. On the following day the borders were closed, and anyone wishing to leave Austria had to report to the newly opened emigration office. Thousands applied for exit visas, but only a few were granted permission to leave.

  “If they are forbidding us to leave, it means they have a plan for us,” said Paulina. I said not a word. “First they will take everything from us, and then they will fill ditches with our bodies.”

  A few days earlier, uniformed men had entered our sister Rosa’s apartment and shown her a document stating that her apartment and everything in it was to be taken from her. “Now there are officers sleeping in the beds where my children slept,” said Rosa on the afternoon she moved into the building where I lived with Paulina and Marie. She brought nothing with her but a few photographs and some clothing. So now we four sisters were living together in the same home, just as we had so long ago.

  “Are you listening to me? They are going to fill ditches with our bodies,” Paulina said more emphatically.

  “You tell me the same thing every night,” I said to her.

  “And still you do nothing.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You could go see Sigmund and persuade him to request exit visas for the four of us.”

  “And then where would we go?”

  “To New York,” Paulina replied. Her daughter lived in New York. “You know that Beatrice will take care of us.”

  When we awoke the following day, it was already noon. I took Paulina by the arm, and we went for a walk. While we were walking down the sidewalk, I saw several trucks roll by. They pulled to a stop, and some soldiers jumped out and shoved us into one of them. The truck was filled with people, all of them terrified.

  “They are driving us to our death,” said my sister.

  “No, we’re taking you to the park, to play with you,” one of the soldiers guarding us said, laughing. The vehicles circled around the Jewish quarter where we lived, and stopped from time to time to load in more people. Then they did indeed take us to a park, the Prater. They pushed us out of the trucks and forced us to run, squat, stand, jump; almost all of us were old and weak. When we fell down from exhaustion, the soldiers kicked us in the groin. I held Paulina by the hand the whole time.

  “Spare my sister at least,” I said to the soldiers. “She’s blind.”

  “Blind!” They laughed. “Wonderful! That’ll be even more fun.”

  They forced her to walk alone, her hands tied behind her back so she could not touch things in front of her. Paulina walked until she bumped into a tree; she collapsed on the ground. I caught up with her and bent down, wiping her face clean of the dirt and blood that ran down her forehead. The soldiers laughed, a sound sweet with carelessness and sour with the enjoyment of someone else’s pain. Then they led us to the edge of the park, lined us up, and aimed their rifles at us.

  “Turn around,” they told us.

  We turned our backs to the rifles.

  “Now run home if you want to save your lives!” one of them shouted, and hundreds of old legs set off running. We ran, we fell down, we stood up, we began running again, while behind us we heard the soldiers’ laughter, sweet with carelessness and sour with the enjoyment of someone else’s pain.

  Rosa, Paulina, Marie, and I passed the evening in silence. Paulina trembled, perhaps not so much out of fear for her life as at the thought that she would never again see the one closest to her, the one who had come from her womb. Rosa’s and Marie’s children were dead, and the sole remnant of the family I never had was a fading bloody trace on the wall by my bed. They say it is more difficult for those with offspring to depart from this world: death separates the one who received life from the one who gave it. Paulina sat in the corner of the room and trembled, sensing that separation.

  The next day, I went to see Sigmund. It was Friday afternoon, the time he devoted to his ritual cleaning of the antiques in his study. I wanted to tell him what had happened to Paulina and me the day before, but he showed me a newspaper clipping.

  “Look what Thomas Mann has written,” he said.

  “Marie and Paulina are more and more afraid,” I said.

  “Afraid…of what?” he asked, setting the clipping down on the table.

  “They say the same thing is going to happen here that they saw in Berlin.”

  “That they saw in Berlin…” Then he picked up one of the antique objects from the table, a stone monkey, and began cleaning it with a small brush. “None of that is going to happen here.”

  “It is already happening. Violent gangs are breaking into apartments in our quarter, beating up everyone they meet. Hundreds of people committed suicide last week; they could not take the pressure. Crazy people entered the Jewish orphanage. They broke the windows and forced the children to run across the shattered glass.”

  “Forced the children to run across the shattered glass…” Sigmund passed the small brush across the monkey’s body. “All this will not last long here.”

  “If it is not going to last long, then why is everyone who can getting an exit visa and fleeing the country? Out on the street, have you met any of the people fleeing? They are leaving their homes, leaving them forever; they have gathered up their most important things in a bundle or two and are fleeing to save their lives. There are rumors that death camps are going to open here, too. You have influential friends here and around the world; they can arrange for you to get as many exit visas as you want. Ask for enough for the whole family. Half of Vienna is trying to get these visas, without success. Use your friends to get us out.” Sigmund set the monkey down and picked up another figurine, a fertility goddess. He began to brush the nude body. “Are you listening to me?” I asked, my voice dry and tired.

  My brother looked at me and asked, “And then where would you go?”

  “To Paulina’s daughter in New York.”

  “What is Paulina’s daughter going to do with four old women in New York?”

  “Then at least try to get an exit visa for Paulina.” He was looking at the nude mother goddess, and I was not sure he had heard me. “Are you listening? Nobody needs to see Rosa, Marie, or me. But Paulina needs to be with her daughter. And her daughter needs to be with her mother. She wants her mother to be safe. She calls every day, begging us to beg you to request an exit visa for her mother. Are you listening to me, Sigmund?”

  He set the mother goddess down.

  “Would you like me to read just a few words from Mann’s article? It is called ‘Brother Hitler.’” He picked up the clipping and began to read: “‘How a man like that must hate analysis! I have the deep suspicion that the fury with which he carried out the recent invasion of a certain capital city was fundamentally directed at the old analyst who lived there—his true and authentic enemy—the philosopher and unmasker of neurosis, the great deflator, the very one who knows and pronounces on what “genius” is.’” Then he set the essay on the table and said, “Mann wrote that with such subtle irony!”

  “The only true statement in what you have read is ‘the old analyst.’ I am telling you this with no subtle irony. And regardless of whether the assertion that you are Hitler’s worst enemy was written with irony or not, it sounds like common nonsense. You know the reason for the occupation of Austria is the start of Hitler’s grand campaign to conquer the world. Then he will wipe anyone who is not of the Aryan race from the face of the earth. Everyone knows that: you, Mann, even I, a poor old woman—even I know that!”

  “You needn’t be so alarmed. Hitler’s ambitions cannot be fulfilled. In just a few days, France and Britain will force him to withdraw from Austria, and then he will be defeated in Germany as well. The Germans themselves will beat him; the support they are giving Hitler no
w is only a temporary eclipse of their reason.”

  “That eclipse is lasting years.”

  “Correct, it is lasting years. But it will end. Dark forces guide the Germans now, but somewhere inside them is smoldering that spirit on which I, too, was nurtured. The nation’s madness cannot last forever.”

  “It will last long enough,” I said.

  My brother had been infatuated with the German spirit since childhood, and even then had inculcated that love in us, his sisters. He convinced us that German was the only language in which one could fully convey the greatest achievements of human thought; he passed on to us his love of German art; and he taught us to be proud that, even though we were of Jewish blood, we belonged to German culture because we lived on Austrian soil. Even now, when he saw how the German spirit had been in decline for years and how the Germans themselves were trampling the most significant fruits of that spirit, he continually repeated, as if to convince himself, that this was a temporary madness, that the German spirit would regain its luster.

  SINCE THAT DAY IN his study, whenever we called Sigmund we were told that he was not at home, or that he was busy with patients, or that he was not well and could not take our call. We asked repeatedly whether he was going to file an application for exit visas, but his daughter Anna, his wife, Martha, and his sister-in-law, Minna, said they knew nothing about it. A whole month passed without our seeing our brother. On the sixth of May, his eighty-second birthday, I had resolved to drop by his place with Paulina. We took a small gift, a book we thought he would like, and set off toward Berggasse 19.

  At my brother’s home, it was Anna who opened the door for us.

  “You have caught us working….” she said, making enough space between herself and the door to let us in.

  “Working?”

  “We’re packing. We sent off ten large boxes yesterday and ten the day before. We still need to select which of the many gifts my father has received we will take with us.”

  “You’re leaving?” I asked.

  “Not immediately, but we want to get everything packed as soon as possible.”