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  The face of Dürer’s Melancholia is sunk in shadow, and from out of that shadow the whites of her eyes glitter, and her gaze is fixed on some absence. In the background glitters the sea, like the whites of Melancholia’s eyes, and in the sky, with its wondrous glow, there is a comet that will soon disappear, and once again Melancholia’s world will sink into gloom. Somewhere near that great watery expanse, a city is just visible, but Melancholia is separated here, alone. I, too, was peering into an absence, my sky empty, gloom enveloping me. Around me was desolation, and those who were closest to me were separated by an unbridgeable eternity, one that Zeno alone could explain.

  In the engraving, Melancholia employs several things for salvation from her pain. Behind her hangs a square talisman on which sixteen numbers are inscribed; it is to attract Jupiter’s healing powers, which can overpower the sorrow that Saturn brings. Beside the talisman is an hourglass, and above the talisman a bell, and also a scale. Half the sand in the hourglass has streamed through, the balances of the scale are in repose, and the bell is still, although at any moment it could toll the final hour. Or perhaps time has stopped, and the sand in the hourglass will stop, neither here nor there, and the pans of the scale, balanced, demonstrate that everything is already the same, without meaning, and the bell has no reason to strike.

  Melancholia sits in front of her unfinished building, tools all around her; she is seated and looks as if she has rejected everything, as if something tells her that construction will never be completed. A ladder leans against the building, and on the ground beside the lower rungs lies a stone block—is Melancholia to mount it, then climb the ladder to the building? But the stone block is unwrought. Melancholia is surrounded by many tools and implements for carpentry and stonecutting, but everything is in repose; she knows that nothing will be completed, she knows that everything is pointless. It is pointless even to make all the things of this world. Meaninglessness has entered everything. That building behind Melancholia is, in fact, her life, the life that will—no matter how it is lived, no matter what is built—remain unfinished, be lived in vain. Is the scale beside Melancholia there only because it is needed for measuring weights for construction, or is it also a symbol of constant weighing, constant measuring, constant vacillation?

  To live or not to live? That is the question in the engraving, in the face drowned in darkness, the whites of the eyes glittering. In Dürer’s engraving, Melancholia has wings, but no one would think she had ever flown with them; they are not even an adornment. Perhaps she has wings solely to hinder her steps as she walks, to weigh her down, to remind her that she could have flown but that now it is too late.

  “To live or not to live?”—the question that Dürer’s Melancholia seems to ask herself—became a question of my own existence. I tried to avoid it, the question that some shadow in me asked, just as I avoided looking in mirrors. My home was itself a kind of mirror, a shadow of the shadow asking me the question that weighed existence and nonexistence, and because of this, even when the cold seeped into one’s bones, even when the wind blew so strongly that one’s eyes had to close, I wandered the streets, lingered on bridges, walked into a synagogue or church, sat on a bench, and in doing these things I aired out my soul as if it were a fabric that had absorbed a bitter smell. In my wanderings through the city, my gaze would sometimes fall on a large plate of glass, or on the surface of the river, or on a puddle, and, without meaning to, I would come eye to eye with my face, its gaze peering into an absence. And no matter how much I silenced my inner shadow, no matter how much I turned my gaze toward the light that should have destroyed the shadow’s existence, it constantly asked its question: To live or not to live?

  One afternoon, when I had returned home from a meandering walk through the city, my mother said to me sarcastically, “There is a jovial young man looking for you. He asked to wait here. We spent some time together in your room, but he’s not exactly talkative.”

  I went into my room. There on my bed sat Rainer.

  “I’m back,” he said.

  He stood up. I went near him. We touched our heads together; our temples touched. Blood pulsing against blood. I heard his tired breathing.

  “I have come back, but I do not know why….” he said.

  Slowly, I separated my head from his. His look had changed; in his eyes I now saw an emptiness, and that emptiness stared back at me. He was thirty-four years old, one year older than his mother was when we met her that Monday morning in that neglected quarter of Vienna, and he resembled her, not in his looks—she had told him, years ago, that she recognized him because he looked like his father—but in the way he had aged: his hair was thinning, his teeth were worn down, his bones warped, his fingers strangely twisted and gnarled. We sat down on my bed. He told me that all that remained of everything his adopted parents had left him was the house in Vienna on Schönlaterngasse. Everything else had gone to drink and gambling, or, more precisely, everything had gone to gambling while drinking.

  We held hands. At one time we had held each other like this, and beyond the life of our bodies we had felt the tenderness of our souls. Later, we had grown to feel nothing. But now, interwoven with our bodies, prematurely foreshadowing old age, there, though chilled and more fragile than tender, our souls were present once again, and we felt the vague tremors of our spirit.

  We left the apartment under the derisive send-off of my mother’s gaze. We said nothing until we reached Rainer’s house. It looked abandoned, even though nothing had changed. Everything was in its place, but the years of no air and the layers of dust gave the interior a different appearance and a certain deadness. Our footsteps left traces in the dust on the floor. Rainer pulled back one of the curtains, and a cloud of dust swirled out. As I wiped the dust off the mirrors with my fingers and the palms of my hands, I heard Rainer say as he walked about the room, “I know you think I returned to find comfort. I am not looking for comfort. Those who still have life in them seek comfort. Everything inside me is dead. There is no longer anything that could restore life to me. Forgive me, but not even your love could do that—your love, which sustained me at a time when I was on the precipice. Now, even a precipice from which I could fall does not exist. Now nothing exists for me. Neither struggle nor pleasure. I struggled with the thought that I had been rejected. I never struggled for your love. It was a gift to me. Perhaps that is why I rejected it, for we value a gift only if we have earned it. Then I set out to conquer love. I did not know that love was not a prize and could not be won. I lost the prize, and then set off in search of pleasures. I did not enjoy them, but destroyed myself through them. Each experience was more insipid than the last; the most intense pleasures lost their taste. I lost all my ideals. And, with them, I lost myself. Now everything is meaningless. Both life and death. That is why I am saying I did not come back for comfort. There is no comfort for me. I do not know why I came back.”

  I wiped off the last mirror, and in the reflection I saw Rainer standing behind me. I turned toward him. As we kissed, we could taste the dust that clung to our lips. When he drew his lips apart from mine, he said, “I used to ask, ‘Who am I?’ and I hoped that through questioning I would find a reason for my existence, something that connected me to everything in the universe, a stage that everyone who poses that question must reach. I used to ask, ‘Who am I?’ and now I know: I am nothing.”

  The following day, I spoke with my brother. He agreed to see Rainer in his office, but after several sessions he told me, “There is no one who can help him. He does not want to be freed from his torment. His problem is simple. Deep inside him is buried the trauma he experienced when he was a year old and his mother gave him to others. But he does not want to solve his problem. He enjoys it.”

  “He does not enjoy it,” I said. “He is suffering.”

  “Enjoyment, suffering, they are the same. It is called enjoyment of negative pleasure,” my brother told me.

  MY MOTHER LEFT for several months to visit the spas at B
ad Gastein, and I left to live with Rainer. The first morning I woke in his house he said to me, “I dreamed that I was building a house. I was building a house downward, not upward. I wasn’t building it, I was digging it. I asked myself whether this was going to be a house for me or a pit. I dug, and dug, and dug. I was amazed at how quickly my hands were digging, as if they were swallowing the earth. I looked up to see what kind of house I had excavated. And there above me I could see barely a ray of light. The sky was a small point. I continued to dig, because I could not return to the surface. I continued to dig until the last ray of light disappeared, in order to forget what I had done.”

  Sometimes we looked together at portraits of him made by the man who had been like a father to him.

  “These are all that will remain of me,” said Rainer, gathering the portraits. “And they, too, will one day turn to dust. But I am no longer connected to them. At one time there was a thread connecting this child, this boy, and me. There was a thread linking us, one soul through time. Many things would fall away, and new things would appear, things unknown until that moment, yet my soul’s spark stayed the same. Now I have nothing in common with any of them. Now I am no one. Now it will be best if I turn as quickly as possible into nothing.”

  I told him that his soul’s thread, the thread that binds him from the moment of his birth until this moment, could not be cut. I told him that despair prevented him from seeing that thread, but he shook his head and said it was not despair that prevented him from seeing it but the way he himself had changed that had cut the thread.

  There was no longer passion or pleasure in his body when we made love. He seemed to use lovemaking merely to attempt to push away his despair, and so his despair became even more present in our bodies when they were conjoined. Still, I continued to feel my heart, my womb, and between my legs beating as one; I felt that sweet pain and that bitter yearning to create a new life.

  “I want us to have a child,” I told Rainer one morning.

  “So that we can throw it into the senselessness of existence?”

  Several weeks later, I was sick to my stomach and vomited. I felt nauseated the following days as well, and I had another, much stronger reason to think I was carrying a new life within me. I went to the doctor, and after he examined me he confirmed it: “You have reason to be happy. You are pregnant!”

  While walking the streets, I felt how happiness inhaled and exhaled with me.

  “You are very happy,” Rainer said when he saw me. “I would like very much to be able to join in that happiness, but my despair is stronger than my desire.”

  “You should be happy, too,” I told him. “Do you want to become a father?”

  “I have already told you: I do not want to create a life that will fall into the meaninglessness of its existence immediately upon its birth.”

  “Why must its existence be meaningless? It’s up to us how our child will experience his existence.”

  Rainer did not respond. And then, when I had gotten up from the bed and gone to the window and was pulling aside the curtains, I heard him say, “I want to see my mother.”

  As we had many years earlier, we set off to find his mother. We reached her street and entered the house. In the hallway, a girl was taking money from a hunchbacked old man, who, a bit embarrassed, quickly left the house. The girl looked at me and Rainer.

  “I want to see Gertrude,” Rainer said.

  “Gertrude?”

  “Yes,” said Rainer, and, uninvited, he went into the room where he had been born. “I met her right here, fifteen years ago.”

  “Gertrude is dead,” the girl said. “It’s been a few years. It was wintertime. She died from hunger or cold, one or the other. It’s common for those of us in this line of work to die from that. We buried her as most of us are buried—not in a grave but in the pit where the homeless and the poor are buried. Just don’t think it was a poor funeral. Even emperors would envy a funeral like that. All of us who do this work gathered. Hundreds of us girls and women were there around the pit. Our tears mixed with the snowflakes melting on our faces.”

  Rainer slowly approached the bed where, years before, his mother had sat while telling him that this was where she had given birth to him. He sat down on the bed and ran his fingers along the dirty cloth.

  “So why are you looking for Gertrude?” the girl asked.

  Rainer stood up from the bed and thanked the girl, and we left the house.

  While we walked, he looked at the ground. Then he said, “I could have done something for her. Even many years ago, I could have done something for her.”

  I wanted to tell him not to blame himself, but I knew that words would be little comfort.

  As we passed the Karl Theater, we saw the large poster in front announcing performances of several classical tragedies. On the wall of the theater, someone had written in charcoal a line from Pindar: “Man is a dream of a shadow.”

  We said not a word until we reached the Danube Canal. Rainer thought of that line and said, “That man continues to be only a dream of a shadow is what sustains our tragic sense from the very origins of the human race up to the present. Kierkegaard once said that, despite all the changes in the world, the tragic has remained essentially unchanged, just as crying has remained natural to man—although I do not believe the tragic is always connected with tears. At the base of human existence is the question of the meaning of life. Whoever reaches that base will, at least for a moment, come face to face with the meaninglessness of existence and with the tragic. There are people who peacefully and quietly experience their existence as tragic. The tragic consists in the actual experience of one’s life as meaningless, not in the way that experience is expressed.”

  I did not want him to be consumed by such dark thoughts, and so I said, “I would like us to go somewhere. For a few days. Do you remember how we once dreamed of living in Venice?”

  He nodded and swallowed. He stopped a moment, and then we continued walking along the quay. It looked as if he also wanted to start a different conversation, but the bitter sediment gathered in him did not let him speak of something else. He seemed to be struggling with himself, and I wanted to pull his thoughts from that struggle, but I knew that confrontation was not a cure for his pain. So I pointed to the shadow that a tree on the quay cast on the water.

  “Do you remember how we played with the shadows of our fingers when we were children?”

  “Man is a dream of a shadow,” said Rainer.

  I said not a word.

  “Will you remember me for the good things?” he asked me.

  “Why are you speaking like that? Nothing has ended.”

  “You cannot remember me for the good things. I not only disregarded the life of the woman who gave birth to me, I not only destroyed my own life, I destroyed your life as well.”

  “Do not talk like that.”

  “You remained alone because of me.”

  “I am not alone. You are with me.”

  “I no longer exist. Will you remember me for the good things?”

  “There is no reason to remember you. I will be with you.”

  “For the good things,” he said with a pleading voice.

  He put his right hand into his pocket and pulled out a red patch. Many years earlier, when we were children, I had torn off that small pocket and given it to him at our parting so that he would remember me. Now he scrunched that red patch, the size of a child’s heart, into the palm of my hand. Then our palms separated, and he took a step. And another step. And another step, toward the river. I saw his last step before he fell into the water and it swept him away.

  I ran along the quay. I pleaded for help and watched his body disappear. Then I felt a weariness that pulled me away from my pain and toward unconsciousness.

  THE RIVER CAST THE BODY UP AT THE EXIT FROM THE CITY. I was brought to the hospital by people who saw me running along the quay, pleading for help, falling to my knees, pounding the palms of my hands on the q
uay, and falling into unconsciousness.

  I lay in the hospital bed and looked at my bloodied palms. A quiet madness saved me temporarily from the pain. I spoke with Rainer, and in those moments he was still alive to me. That is how I survived. “You will return,” I told him. “Everything is past, your eternal search and eternal loss of self, your cruelty toward me and my desire to return that cruelty to you, all the pain, everything is past. Your question to life—Who am I?—has been answered with your death—You are nothing!—and with the way you confronted death eye to eye and your desire to fall into it. You will return, Rainer,” I told him. “The river is only a great purgatory. Do you hear me, Rainer? It is only a sailing away. I will be waiting for you at the end of the river, Rainer. I will be waiting there where it flows out into another existence. I know that you are here, Rainer. Here is my hand. Look at my hand, Rainer. Everything will be fine, believe me. When you finish your voyage, when you come out of the river, you will just need to change your clothes. You will need to put on new clothes, and everything will be fine. Believe me, Rainer, believe me, as I believe in myself. Here is my hand, Rainer. Grab hold of my hand, and I will pull you out, and then we will set off toward a different existence.”

  I spoke those words to myself, my eyes closed, and I stretched my hand toward Rainer, but my hand struck the wall. I opened my eyes. All around me were hospital beds.

  I returned to reality and felt fear. Young women my age, when they were unmarried and became pregnant, often killed themselves to preserve the family from shame; or, rejected by their families, they left home and worked as prostitutes; or they secretly obtained abortions.