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  Our heads drew near each other’s. I felt his breath on my face and my chest beating wildly, as was his. Our chests touched before our lips did. We were so close that it seemed to me the whole world consisted solely of Rainer’s eyes. He closed his eyes for a moment, seeking that bodiless female being he had found there at the time he separated from his childhood. Then he opened his eyes and smiled, finding me in front of him; he closed his eyes again and opened them again, as if wanting to confirm the affinity between that faceless being, woven from the light flickering before his closed eyes, and me. Our lips touched, and then I closed my eyes, and in the sweet touch of our tongues I felt something like a promise that the sweetness would last forever. At that moment, if someone had told us this was our final moment on earth, and that later no trace of us would remain, it would not have pulled us from our rapture, because we believed that what was between us, what made the two of us one, was eternal, and that if our material being were taken from us we would continue where the forces of nature and the laws of decay and transience have no power, and where the human soul is stronger than all the heavenly bodies, because they are condemned one day, millions of years after their creation, to burn out, whereas the soul in which our rapture and yearning were interwoven would last even after not a single particle of dust from all the matter in the universe remained.

  As we walked through the city, Rainer checked the scrap of paper on which were written the names of the streets we needed to travel in order to reach the house where his mother lived. “We are getting close,” he said when we entered that part of the city known to me from the outing with my brother when he wanted to show me what the depths of Vienna looked like. The streets were sleepy after the work of Sunday night. We reached the street we were seeking. Several boys were kicking around some scattered garbage. A drunk was rolling about on the sidewalk. An old woman was sitting on the stoop of a small house, singing a song about luckless love. Two children were throwing two broken broomsticks high into the air, catching them before they hit the ground and then throwing them skyward again. Rainer asked them if they happened to know where a woman by the name of Gertrude lived. One of the children pointed to a house where clothes were hanging in the windows in place of curtains. We knocked on the door. The children told us not to wait but just to go in. The door was open. In a small corridor that smelled of mold, one of the doors was ajar. We went into the room and looked at the damp walls. A woman walked in, leaning on a cane. She looked at us and said, “This is no room for a wedding night. What are you looking for?”

  “I am looking for Gertrude,” Rainer said. “I do not know her last name.”

  “What’s Gertrude to you?” asked the woman, hissing the words through her gap-toothed jaws, and running her fingers, like a comb, through the sparse straight hairs on her balding head.

  “I want to speak with her,” Rainer said.

  The woman pointed to the chairs beside the table, and we sat down.

  “I am Gertrude.”

  “Then I have made a mistake,” said Rainer. “You must have the same name as the woman I am looking for. She is about thirty-three years old.”

  “Yes,” said the woman, as she poked her tongue through the gaps where her front teeth were missing. “I am thirty-three.” Then she sat down on the bed opposite us. “And it looks to me like I can guess why you’re looking for me. You look like someone I haven’t seen for a long time, but when I knew him he was your age.”

  The mother was looking at her son; she knew she was right, because he said not a word. She stretched her hand out to him. It was a slow movement; perhaps she wanted to caress him. Then, before she touched him, she turned her hand toward herself and just as slowly brought it close to her face, but before her hand touched her face she dropped it into her lap, onto her shabby dress.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” his mother continued. “And you were certainly not expecting me to be…like this.”

  Rainer was silent.

  “So, you are silent,” she continued. “Everything a mother needed to tell you, some other woman told you. What you want to know—who I am and what I am—is unnecessary. I have often wondered what I would say to you if you turned up one day. But everything I would say to you would be an excuse. I was raised by humble and honest parents. I was barely fifteen years old when I got pregnant. I was a young girl who knew nothing about the facts of life. In our yard I had seen roosters mount hens, at the neighbors’ I had seen a ewe give birth to a lamb, but there are many ways in which a human life is different from the lives of birds and animals. Different, and yet the same. Your father was handsome, and everything that happened between us took place in the neighbors’ stable. Before I got pregnant, all I knew about him was that he had come to our town, really more like a village, a few months before to fix the wheels on the horse carts. When I told him I was pregnant, I found out a bit more about him. He not only fixed things; he also stole things. He was a thief who traveled from town to town, so he wouldn’t get caught. And then he set off for another town. Yes, my parents were humble and honest, and on account of that humility and honesty they kicked me out of the house. They wanted to save my sisters’ honor, and they knew that no one would want to marry them if word got out that I was pregnant. They gave me a little money and sent me off to a distant relative here in Vienna, and I never saw them, my sisters, or your father again.” She looked down at her hands. “The people who adopted you seemed to me like good people. They told me they didn’t have any children, they told me they had lived awhile in the city but were now getting ready to return home. They wanted to go back with a child. You were barely a year old then.” She ran her hand along the bed she was sitting on. “I gave birth to you on this bed.”

  Rainer looked at the bed. I suspected that for the past eighteen years this woman had earned her living on that bed. Her pinched face, her gap-toothed mouth, her thinning hair, could probably still deceive a drunk or two in the darkness of the evening alleyways.

  “Well, that’s it—that is what I planned to say to you if you ever came. I have been repeating those selfsame words to myself all these eighteen years. This is the first time I have ever said them out loud,” she concluded, and turned her head toward the cracked mirror on the wall and half smiled at her reflection. Then she turned to Rainer.

  Rainer stood up.

  “As for you,” the woman who had given birth to him asked, “did you think of anything to say to me while you were looking for me?”

  Rainer headed for the door; I set off after him.

  “Some questions are better left unasked. Some answers better not given,” his mother said. He no longer looked at her. She followed us to the exit of the dilapidated house. I heard her footsteps behind us even in the narrow alley. I heard her footsteps and the striking of the stick she was leaning on. I looked at Rainer’s steps. The sound of her footsteps stopped; his steps continued. As we turned into another small street at the corner, I looked around and saw Rainer’s mother standing beside the wall of the house, and passing the fingers of her right hand across her face.

  That afternoon, Rainer decided to leave Vienna. The answer to the question he had repeated aloud, “Who am I?,” shook him to the core. My assurances—that he was who he was, that his I was not dependent on the person who had given birth to him or the fact that he had been cast aside after his birth—were useless. “Who am I?” Rainer repeated with eyes closed, with eyes pointed toward the mirror, with eyes staring at me. He believed that if he went as far as possible from the city in which so many things conspired to convince him that he did not know who he was, then he would manage to find the core of his I.

  AFTER RAINER LEFT, I WENT TO SCHöNLATERNGASSE EVERY day. I knocked on the door of his Vienna home, but there was no one to open it. The line of hope that sustained my waiting for his return was cut off by the fear that woke me every morning, the fear that did not sleep and that tormented my dreams. I believed Rainer that he would return, but I feared that his despair wo
uld cast him into a nothingness from which he would be unable to fulfill his promise. Sometimes, when my fear conjured the thought that he would take his life, I wanted to ask my brother for money so I could go find the estate near Munich where Rainer had grown up and where he most likely was now, but I knew that in order for him to make peace with himself, to find an answer to the question “Who am I?,” he needed to be alone. That is why, when he left the city, he did not take my address, nor did he give me his, and so even by letter we could not tell each other how we were or what we were doing.

  My mother sensed my fear, although she did not know where it came from. My fear, born of Rainer’s despair, revealed itself in the way my body cut through the air as I moved, in the echo of my words, in the shadow of my glance. And my mother picked up the traces of my fear; she plunged her words into my vulnerability. She told me I would be alone my whole life, I would drown in my solitude, I would remain unmarried and be an embarrassment to the family. I said not a word, and I thought of Rainer. My anxiety about whether he would return and my belief in his promise to return battled inside me.

  ONE MORNING, A YEAR AFTER RAINER LEFT, AS I WAS approaching his home I saw him standing at the window.

  Our two worlds were again one, and we filled our joined world with our daydreams. Rainer wanted us both to study philosophy at the University of Vienna; with him, I wanted to fulfill the dream I had had at one time with my brother Sigmund: to live together in Venice.

  Then we crossed the distance that seems immeasurable to the innocent, the distance between the contemplation of the sexual act and the uniting of two bodies. Our glances shyly explored our nakedness, and we searched each other’s eyes—I his, he mine—and then our glances fell to the floor, out of shame, out of confusion, out of fear. Everything was for the first time, the glance at a naked body, those few steps to the bed, made with such tentativeness as if we had just learned to walk, the drawing together of our bodies, and the way they completely entwined, and our breathing, which was as strong as at birth.

  One day he said to me, “I want to visit my mother.”

  I waited a long time for him to express that wish again, and later I reminded him of it.

  “I am afraid,” he told me.

  Then we talked about his fear and about many other things; we spent days in which, just as we explored our bodies, just as we searched our bodies, discovering the source of so much love for precisely that body, we also searched each other’s souls: we wanted to know what pain meant and what pleasure meant for each other. We asked each other and we asked again and again what love was, and infidelity.

  We were in those years of inexperience when one still thinks with the heart, when one believes unquestioningly in the ideas written down by the philosophers, when one feels as one’s own the sweetness of verses sprung forth from happiness, the bitterness of poems wrung from despair. We were in those years when words are born not of emptiness but of the essence of one’s being. We were in the years of inexperience, unencumbered by the deathly triviality of life, and so we could speak naively about elevated things, things experience discards because they are as useless and unnecessary as a patch of sky.

  We asked ourselves what we were now, but also considered what we had been, because we knew that all layers exist within a person, that in the present there are glimmers of everything that has been important at one time and that has become not a stunted relic of the past but a source of light that brightens one’s countenance. We told each other about our past. I told him about myself, about my mother and my brother, about Sarah and Klara. Rainer recalled the moments with those who had loved him as their own son.

  Then I reminded him of his desire to meet his mother again. He evaded my reminder, recalling a fear he had had since childhood, when he was afraid he would lose his parents. Everything seemed to portend such a loss; perhaps fear had nested in him because of some hazy memory of his first year of life, when he had been abandoned by his mother, and this fear, that he would lose everyone he loved, persisted.

  “What if I lose you, too?” he asked. “What if it is my fate to lose the people I love the most? What if you reject me, the way my mother rejected me?”

  “I will always be with you,” I told him. “But now let’s go visit your mother.”

  Rainer shook his head.

  WHEN RAINER SHOOK HIS HEAD, I WAS REMINDED THAT THERE was also someone expecting me. I recalled the words Sarah had said to me at our last meetings: “Do not forget Klara. And help her if you can.”

  I visited Klara less and less. During those visits, while she and I sat opposite each other, Gustav would break the silence. He always talked about the same things: how his mother had spewed rage at his sister when she was just a girl; how Klara was beaten for organizing protests for the rights of women, children, and workers; how gradually her courage and spirit became imprisoned in her empty world. I knew these things, and I saw how Klara tormented herself by closing herself in, but I listened attentively to Gustav, because I felt he needed to talk in order to ease himself a little of his suffering.

  Sometimes, when she emerged from her passivity, Klara ran away from home. The police would find her lying on a bench, sitting propped against a tree, leaning out over the railings of a bridge. When she was returned home, Gustav would ask, “Why did you run away?” And she always answered the same way: “I am not at home here.” Gustav then decided to place Klara in the psychiatric clinic the Nest. When I first visited her there, I saw in her look, in the movement of her body, in her voice, that slowly her confidence was returning.

  “I have finally found my home,” she told me.

  I became acquainted with the head of the Nest, Dr. Goethe. He explained that directness was the new method for treating madness. While he was explaining this, a patient came up and spat in his face. He carefully wiped away the spit with a handkerchief and continued: “Patients with mental disturbances loathe their healer; they see in him a God who punishes them, a tyrant who does not allow them to create their world, but I do not interrupt their outbursts. I listen to them when they curse or insult me, as I would someone outside the Nest. And when faced with their absurdities I tell them it is foolishness. Yes, that is exactly what I tell them.”

  “Yes.” Klara smiled. “That is the word Dr. Goethe uses most often: foolishness.”

  “You see,” said Dr. Goethe, “directness is a first step toward creating a true relationship between patients and their doctors.”

  As in all madhouses (Dr. Goethe resisted the fashion to call madhouses psychiatric clinics), classification was the first principle of the Nest: men and women were segregated. There was a wing for tranquil patients, another for the helpless, who needed constant care, a third for manic patients, who needed to be bound or placed under constant supervision if they were not too dangerous, and a fourth wing—for the senile. Only some of them ever met: in the large dining halls, in the Great Hall, in which Dr. Goethe gave lectures, or when they walked the grounds. Here, as elsewhere, the rich and the poor were separated; those whose families paid large sums had their own rooms or were housed two to a room. Klara had her own room, and Dr. Goethe persuaded me to go there to do crafts with her. He believed that work could cure madness, or, at least, help to cure it. The only ones at the Nest who did not work were the senile, the paralyzed, and those who lay motionless in their beds. Not only did Dr. Goethe consider work a cure; it was also a way to fill the Nest’s coffers, because there were many people there for whom no one paid. Those whose stay was paid for by their relatives did simple jobs: embroidery, sewing, knitting, rug making; the men’s section made artificial flowers out of paper and wooden figures. The others did the more strenuous jobs: they laundered clothes and bedding, they made buttons and shoes….

  “You are welcome to visit our shop by the exit,” Dr. Goethe told me. “Everything there has been made by our dear patients: socks and shawls, nightgowns and dresses, handkerchiefs and towels, wooden crafts.” Then he continued telling me about lif
e at the Nest. “Wake-up is at six. First everything that was disturbed during the night is cleaned up under the supervision of the nurses, and that is not as simple a task as it might initially seem. For example, someone defecated in the middle of the room, someone wedged his pillow between the window bars, a third spread his blanket in the middle of the room, a fourth hid everyone’s slippers under his mattress…. Then the doctors visit the patients. After that, we go to breakfast; we have six dining halls in total, completely adequate to hold our patients. Then we begin our work, up until lunchtime. After lunch, we have a short rest, and then we work again, since, as I said, work created the man and will make a man again out of the one who avoids responsibility. That is how it is: to be mad is to avoid the responsibility of being a person. Then we go to dinner, and afterward we have a little social time before bed.”

  While we were walking along the hospital corridor, a woman approached Dr. Goethe, fell to her knees, and begged him to let her go home. He simply walked around her, and the woman continued to scream until attendants arrived and carried her off somewhere. Dr. Goethe noted how upset I was by what I had seen, and he said, “Ah, do not look at everything so blackly! You should look at even the most terrible things with at least a little irony. You know what my grandfather Johann said about irony: ‘It is that little grain of salt that alone renders the dish palatable.’”

  “But this is not lunch; it’s life,” I said.