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  “All the more so,” said Dr. Goethe. “Without irony, life would be bland. And frighteningly unbearable.”

  We continued walking along the corridors. From time to time, Dr. Goethe would open a door enough for me to peek inside. The whole time he noted my horrified expression and looked for ways to calm me.

  “Things are perfect here. Do you know how it is at the Salpêtrière, in Paris? They sleep on mattresses on the floor. They lock up the patients and do not allow them outside. The patients do their business in the middle of their rooms, and there is excrement on the floor and the walls. Though there is not too much excrement, because they feed them just enough to keep them alive, and even if they gave them sufficient food, why amid that stench would they eat more than just enough to stay alive? The excrement is cleaned from the rooms once a week. The doctors make their rounds only to determine which patients need to be restrained and to untie those who have now become exhausted from rage. And that is how it is in Paris! But here, on the beautiful blue Danube”—and through his lips he whistled a few bars of the waltz—“there is no need to tell you, you can see for yourself. You should count yourself fortunate that your friend went mad in Vienna.”

  “Klara is not mad,” I told him. “Klara just needs time to come to herself.”

  “Well, what do you think madness is? Something monstrous? No, madness is a condition in which people are not themselves. And here we apply the best methods to help the patients come to themselves. Do you know how they treat them in Paris? With fear! They think that if they pour great quantities of cold water on them, if they beat them, if they threaten to cut out the tongues of those who scream, that it will bring their minds back. Yes, yes, that is how it is in Paris, but here, on the beautiful blue Danube…” Again he whistled a few bars of the waltz. I wanted to tell him I knew that even in Paris they no longer treated patients the way he was describing, that it was precisely the methods Dr. Pinel had introduced decades before in the Salpêtrière that he himself now preached here, but I said not a word and continued to listen. “Here we treat patients through conversation, with the aim of getting at what is tormenting them. We converse with them about what they want to talk about, which is usually nonsense, but, in the end, out of all that nonsense they will also reach some wise conclusions. I am not saying all of them, but some will be fortunate enough to return to normal.”

  While we were walking along the bars of the fence toward the exit, Klara said to me, “Yes, some of us will be fortunate enough to return to normal. All that’s needed is time.”

  I passed through the gates, and as I moved down the street I turned around several times. There was Klara, still standing behind the bars.

  TIME PASSED, AND A CHILL SETTLED BETWEEN RAINER and me. When our bodies intertwined, his related to mine as toward something mechanical; when he looked at me, it was as if he were looking at something lifeless. And I no longer recognized his voice. A suspicion was awakening in me, something like what we feel when we dress in a fine garment and a needle unexpectedly pricks our body. Rainer was studying philosophy at the time, and at first I attributed the change to his dedication to his studies.

  One afternoon, he said to me, “It is time for you to leave. My classes are beginning.”

  “I can accompany you to the university,” I told him.

  “No,” he said. “I beg you to leave. I need to go alone.”

  He pushed me toward the door. He had not been tender with me in a long time, but now, for the first time, he was rude.

  Some dark shadow in me told me that he was not going anywhere. I knew that he was waiting. I did not go far from his house. Upon reaching the spot where the road curves, I waited. Not much time passed before a young woman approached the house. The door opened, and she went inside. I wanted to be there, too, and to be hurt by what I would see. I remained where I was, leaning against the wall of a building. I dug at the wall with my nails. I do not know how long I stood like this, and when the young woman left, I wanted to go to Rainer’s house. But I set off for home.

  The following day I told him what I had seen. He did not deny anything, and when I fell before him weeping, the pain trampling my dignity, he did not try to comfort me. I raised my arms, touched his fingers, seeking some kind of hope and support, but his fingers remained limp. As I knelt there on the floor, I raised my head and stared into his eyes. I could not recognize his look, a look that had been like that for some time, foreign and altered, but now, for the first time, I grasped the true reason for the change.

  “It is time for you to go,” Rainer said, looking at his watch.

  I got up from the floor and left.

  I had not reached the end of the street when the young woman appeared and went into Rainer’s house. I waited a long time, and when she came out I ran after her. Hearing the hurried footsteps, she turned around. She had a frightened expression, probably expecting me to do something to her. When I was just a step away, she covered her face with her hands, as if to protect herself.

  “I want to talk to you about Rainer Richter,” I said to her.

  She lowered her hands.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I only repeated, “I want to talk to you about Rainer.”

  “What do you want to know about Rainer?”

  “I know everything about him. Or almost everything. It is only your presence in his life that I do not know enough about.”

  “Ah, you must be…” she said, and from the expression on her face, with the nonchalant gesture of her hand, it was clear that Rainer had mentioned me.

  “I want to know something more about you. And I want to know what you want from Rainer.”

  “Why do you want to torture yourself?”

  “I just want to know,” I said.

  “Only someone who wants to torture herself would want to know what you are asking me to tell you. If you had even the slightest self-respect, you would forget that Rainer exists.”

  I wanted to tell her that once certain events have happened to us, we cannot forget the people who were connected with them. But she had already turned and headed off in her own direction. I did not go after her. I turned back to Rainer’s house, but I did not knock on his door.

  Walking slowly, I made my way home. I looked at the happy faces of the people on the streets and recognized my own face in the unhappy ones with downturned mouths. I watched as the bag an old woman was carrying ripped, spilling apples to the ground. As she bent down to gather them, some tough kids ran up and snatched them. A young man and a young woman seated on a bench looked lovingly at each other. A child wandering away from his parents came up to me, bit off half of the chocolate bar he held in his hand, and offered the other half to me. There are moments when even the sweetest things are bitter.

  I arrived home. My father looked at me and smiled; for a long time he had been losing his vision.

  “Our daughter is becoming happier and happier,” my mother said to Father.

  I went into my room. It belonged to me alone. My parents and I were the only ones remaining in the house. Right after Sigmund went to live in the hospital, Anna had gotten married, and she and her husband had left to live in America. Then Paulina and Marie got married and moved with their husbands to Berlin. The year Rosa got married, Alexander also moved out of the house. I remained alone with my parents, alone with myself, and I no longer had anyone to share my pain with, not even within my room, because in conversation with those closest to me I never shared my troubles.

  I lay down on my bed. I turned my head to the wall.

  For several days I did not go to Rainer’s, and then when we saw each other he said, “You should not have tried to speak with her.”

  “I had to. I thought that if she let me speak with her I could make her leave you.”

  “She asked me to force you to leave. Do not come here any longer.”

  “I cannot not come.”

  “Forget that I exist.”

  “I cannot,” I said.
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  “If you had the slightest bit of dignity, you would forget about me,” he said.

  “It is not a question of dignity but of love.”

  “What you call love is self-degradation and self-torture. Leave and do not come here again.”

  I told him that I would not come again, yet while I was going home I already wanted to return to him.

  Rainer became for me a constantly present absence. He was not beside me, but he was more present than I was. I forgot about myself. I walked along the streets, I crossed the bridges, I stared into the river. Sometimes I lifted my gaze skyward. I sat on a bench. In the evening, I roused myself and looked into the darkness. I did all these things, yet I was absent; Rainer was always there. The thought that he was whispering words of tenderness to a young woman, the thought of their bodies conjoined, their assumptions about their future, a future that Rainer and I had sometimes dreamed about, eternal love, family, a home in Venice—these things were in me more than I was in myself.

  But within me I still had a flicker of hope that Rainer would return to how he had been before, and all that had passed in the interim, all the disappointments and pains, would be carried away as if by a flood, and our souls would regain their purity and move toward maturity. And so I went again to Rainer’s, and there his coldness awaited me, and the reminder of my promise that I would never come again. I left his house, yet a part of me remained there, like a shadow on the floor.

  Years before that, when I was a frightened young girl, despairing of my mother’s hatred, I believed that one day a hand would appear that would lead me to another existence. Sometimes I even dreamed of that hand, and in my dream I stretched my hand toward it, and my hand would strike the wall and I would awaken. At that time, I eased my despair with the belief that my suffering would end the day I found that other hand, when my hand and someone else’s hand joined and set off through life together. And then I gave my hand to Rainer. When his hand no longer needed support, that same hand pushed me into despair as if into a vacuum, where with equal speed, with equal slowness, fall feather and lead, blood and soul. In that vacuum, all the despair one has lived through exists layer inside layer. New hurts cause all past hurts to ache; the despair of my childhood aches through my current despair. Had I not despaired as a child, Rainer’s unfaithfulness would have been only a short-lived pain; I could have turned my back on it and then moved on. But now this new pain cut open the old wound. Rainer’s unfaithfulness brought back that young girl who, at the beginning of her memories—those memories she called her life—had pain, something like blood dripping from a hidden wound. She was not the woman I was now but the girl I once was, whose wound continued to bleed inside me even in those moments of my life when I did not sense it, the girl who compelled me every morning, even before I was fully awake, to go to Rainer’s and, with a feeling of guilt, beg him to let me into his house. That long-ago pain drove me to ask him where the Rainer was who was once afraid he would lose me just as he had lost those who had adopted him, the Rainer who was afraid I would reject him just as he had been rejected by those who had conceived him. I asked, he said nothing, and when the questions turned to weeping or accusations he forced me to leave.

  One morning, one of those mornings when I begged Rainer to let me into his house so that I could beg or accuse, he told me that the love affair between him and the young woman had ended.

  “That means we can be together again,” I said.

  “That means I am leaving Vienna,” said Rainer.

  “Then I want to come with you.” I touched his shoulder with my fingers. “Wherever you go.”

  “I do not know where I am going. Maybe to Venice.”

  Venice had been our dream ever since our age of innocence.

  “I will go with you to Venice,” I said.

  He removed my fingers from his shoulder.

  “You may go wherever you wish. But not with me. You were born to be a stone, a stumbling block for those you deceive yourself that you love. You cannot love. Those who truly love do not overburden with their pain those who have stopped loving them. You want only to bring unhappiness. To yourself, and to those you deceive that you love them.” I stretched my fingers out toward his shoulder once more, but he pushed them away before I could touch him, and added, “I never want to see you again.”

  I wanted to hurt him. In a few words, I wanted to inflict on him as much pain as he had inflicted on me during these past months. I said to him, “You are the same as your father. Not the one who raised you but that thief who, as soon as he heard he had conceived you, ran away from the one into whose womb he had sown his seed. You are the same as your mother. Not the one who raised you, who taught you to play the piano and who taught you to love poetry. You are the same as the one whose blood you carry, and who, had she not given you up for adoption, would have tossed you out to die in the street, so that you did not bother her when her customers lay between her legs. You used to ask yourself, ‘Who am I?’ Now you know the answer. You are the fruit of a thief and a whore. That is who you are.”

  Rainer slowly sat down on the bed. He put his elbows on his knees, leaned his forehead on his palms. I drew near him and apologized, but he did not say anything. I heard his breathing. I sat down next to him, and I begged him to say anything at all, even the coarsest word. He said nothing. We sat like this a long time, one next to the other, without words. Evening came, but he did not move from that spot. I stood up and told him I would come again the next day. The following day I did not find him at home. Nor was he there for days afterward. Then one of the neighbors told me that Rainer had moved away.

  ONE NIGHT, WHEN I AWOKE AND THE TRACES OF MY DREAM had me believing that Rainer was in bed beside me, I felt for the first time how my heart, my womb, and that place between my legs were beating together as one. Until then, that sweet pain and that bitter yearning to bring forth a new life had been unknown to me. I got up from bed and stood in front of the mirror. I slowly slipped out of my nightgown and dropped it to the floor. The moon cast its light on my body. I placed my hands on my belly, as if to cradle the life within it, although my womb was empty.

  Awake, I waited for the morning, and then I went to visit Klara at the Nest. We recalled the conversation about motherhood that she had had with Sarah. Then we went to the shop that sold things made by the residents of the Nest. I passed the display cases. My fingers touched the decorations made of wood, paper, and metal, the clothing and household furnishings. An item would linger in my hand, and I would put it into my bag. When I went to pay, and I emptied out my bag, Klara said to me, “You want to become a mother.”

  I looked at what I had taken, and in front of me lay a baby bonnet, a small cape, tiny shoes the size of a finger.

  When I got home, I put these things into a suitcase in the cupboard in my room. From time to time I would pull the suitcase out, take the objects from it, and lay them on my bed.

  Years passed, but I did not forget Rainer, and my love and hate toward him hurt me in equal measure. I often went to his house. If it was daylight, I knocked on the door; if it was dark, I looked to see whether there was light behind the curtains. But it was empty there, just as it was inside me. I felt love and hate tearing me apart, and both were leading me to despair, because they had nowhere to go: I was absent from the life of the one they were directed at, while he was more present in mine than I was myself.

  I went less and less often to see Klara, and one time I told her, “I want very much to see you, but I am afraid to come here.” I did not tell her what I was afraid of, but she sensed I was afraid not of what I saw there but of what I carried inside me.

  Years passed, and one October day my father died. Afterward, whenever my mother saw me in the morning, instead of responding to my wishing her a beautiful day, she would tell me that another empty day awaited me. In the evening, when I wished her a good night, she told me how she pitied me because of my empty bed. Between morning and night she shared from the Jewish holy bo
oks a bit of wisdom, which perhaps she had invented: that a woman without offspring is not a human being. And to that wisdom she added, “Your life is meaningless.”

  MY BROTHER, after he married Martha, opened a practice in his home, and he worked there with patients who had psychiatric problems. I begged him to let me move in with him, but he explained that they did not have enough money or enough space, because every year another child was born: first Matilda, then Martin, then Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and finally Anna. All the same, every time we were left alone at least for a moment—and it was rare to be left alone for longer than a few moments—I would beg him to let me live in their home. I begged him until the day he told me that Minna, his wife’s sister, was moving in.

  The years passed, and I felt I was not myself. When I got up in the morning, part of me remained in bed. Perhaps it was because I wanted to free myself from my very self, from that part that ached with despair, but the despair continued to ache, no matter how much I divided myself. That destructive pain became my only biography. In the uniformity of the everyday, the same banalities would repeat, and I did not notice how the years rolled by. Even my dreams resembled one another. Once, I dreamed that my home was flooded. Water was pouring in from everywhere. “Is this the Flood?” I asked myself in my dream. I wanted to flee, but a child’s cry could be heard from between the walls. “My children are in there! Someone has walled them in,” I told myself in my dream. I scratched the wall, I tore at the wall, the wall tore at my nails. The water was rushing in with greater and greater force; it covered my head and was drowning me. But even underwater I could hear a child’s cry from between the walls.

  I AVOIDED LOOKING IN MIRRORS, BUT WHENEVER I LOOKED at a certain print by Dürer, it seemed as though I were looking at myself. The woman in the engraving, caught at an instant when she is peering into the nothingness, has wings, but she is not an angel; she is an allegory for melancholy. Her head is inclined, and were it not supported by her hand, clenched in a fist, it would fall to her breast. Her other hand, placed in her lap, is relaxed and holds a pair of compasses. My head also leaned, but fell to my breast. One hand, clenched into a fist as if to protect itself from pain, could not support itself and fell to my lap; the other hand relaxed, because I knew I would not save myself from sinking by grasping at straws.