Freud's Sister Page 13

  I lay in the hospital bed, my hands on my belly, and looked up at the white ceiling. I recalled the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed.” I lay in the hospital bed with my hands on my belly, and I looked up at the white ceiling. And then I closed my eyes. I tossed in the bed and cursed. I cursed the moment of my birth; I cursed my mother, who had not pressed her legs together to crush the small bloody head that had barely come out of her. I cursed my mother’s womb, which had held me for nine months, that it had not become my grave. I cursed my father’s seed, and his desire to approach my mother during the night of my conception. I cursed that night of conception. I cursed the first day of the first people, and their first passion. My despair had turned into physical pain. I tossed in my bed and cursed. I had no other cure for the pain. But the pain continued, as if it were stripping the flesh from my bones, and even my bones ached with despair. I could not breathe. I cursed my breathing as well, and that unstoppable need to inhale and exhale—if my breathing were to cease, I told myself, my suffering would cease. Then I thought the pain would not cease. I thought my despair would last forever. I did not yet know that I was separating from them—the pain, the despair.

  When I left the hospital, I went, we—the child in me and I—went to the Danube Canal, where Rainer had disappeared. I stood there a long time, staring into the water. I bent down and dipped one hand into the water. The other I held to my belly. Thus our threesome bid farewell to one another.

  That evening, I called Sigmund. He said he had a little time the next day, and that we could talk while he visited “The Mother and the Son of God,” an exhibit at the Kunsthistorisches Museum for which hundreds of paintings representing the Virgin Mary and Jesus had been brought from around the world.

  We stood a long time in front of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child and Crucifixion, brought from the Correr Museum in Venice. We observed how the Virgin Mary holds the young Jesus. Sadness flickers on the child’s face. His half-closed eyes look out with the gaze not of a child but of someone who has seen much more than childhood. It is a look directed not in front of him but toward some great pain, some terrible loss, as if the child senses his destiny, and his separation from the one who stands behind him so peacefully and protectively at that moment, and who, many years later, beside the Cross, will be in despair herself, because she will be unable to do anything to prevent her separation from him, her loss. That pain descends even onto the child’s lips, and in the gesture of his hands; he has placed one high on his chest, above his heart, and with the little fingers of his other hand he holds his mother’s finger, and seems to point downward with his index finger. His mother cannot see her child’s sad disquiet; she is looking toward some other place, somewhere far away. The point at which her gaze is directed is somewhere beyond the painting. She protects him completely; the child is leaning his back on her arm, with one shoulder against her left breast, just above her heart. Although the mother cannot see the disquiet in her child, perhaps she senses it. Perhaps she, too, knows what will be, but she knows it must be that way. She knows this is how it should be, and in this reconciliation she is calm. Her look directed toward the horizon outside the painting is perhaps a look into some other reality, where everything is preserved, where everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be acquires its true meaning.

  Then we looked at Crucifixion, at the face of Jesus, which holds only resignation at the horror; at the face of his mother, filled with horrid despair. Resignation and despair, just as in that other painting, Madonna and Child, only now resignation is filled with horror, the resignation of Jesus at the moment of his expiring, and his mother, standing by the Cross, is in despair, her hands folded, her head bowed, her gaze blind to everything around her except the pain in her soul, her eyes that seem wasted to their hollows, and in their place despair alone remains.

  We looked at these two paintings for a long time, and then I said that all the theologians and philosophers I had read, and who had written on this theme, agreed that with the appearance of Christianity, and the concepts of salvation and resurrection, the tragic disappears. They asserted that in Christianity the tragic is destroyed. Either those who suffer have sinned and are punished with suffering or those who suffer without fault will be rewarded in the afterlife, and theirs will be the kingdom of heaven. These philosophers and theologians are convinced that the concepts of salvation and immortality negate the tragic.

  “However,” I said to my brother, “look at this painting. Isn’t the tragic strongest here, in that moment when the mother sees her son dying?” My brother said nothing. I stretched my hand toward Crucifixion, toward the eyes of the mother standing beside her dying son, toward the crucified body expiring before the eyes of the one who gave birth to him. “Do salvation and resurrection destroy the tragic, or are they only consolation?” I asked, while continuing to hold out my hand toward the mother and son. “There is no justice in this world. No single punishment can correct an injustice, because what is past cannot be changed, and those to whom injustice was done remain with their loss. But even if justice were attained in some other world, for what was lost in this one, if in some other world those who had been injured had returned to them what they had lost here, that is not a return of their life’s fulfillment; it is only consolation. What is lost at a certain moment can never again be compensated, because what is lost was needed at the moment it disappeared. So even if our existence continues in some other world after our death in this one, our existence in that other world will be only a consolation. In the material world, everything is a great injustice, and since we do not know whether we will go on after this life to exist in some other reality, in some consolatory existence, our only comfort in this world is its beauty.”

  My brother smiled. “Although it is not a precise statement, it sounds beautiful: Beauty is our only comfort in this world.”

  I moved my hand away from the man bleeding on the Cross, and away from his mother, who looked inconsolably at him, but my brother continued looking at that beauty, at that comfort.

  “I am carrying a child,” I said. “Rainer’s.” My brother looked away from the painting, but he did not look at me. “Rainer is dead.” I ran my hands across my belly. “Someone needs to take this fetus from me.” My brother said not a word, and he looked at the floor in front of him. “I want you to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Take the fetus from me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You know how.”

  “I know how. But I cannot.” He said that he would find a good doctor, and a nurse who would look after me as long as I needed help. “We need to hurry. The day after tomorrow, I leave for Venice.”

  “Venice.” I remembered how Rainer and I dreamed of living in Venice. “I do not want to go there.”

  “To Venice?”

  “I do not want to go to the hospital. I do not want to lose this child in the secret unit for abortions. I want it”—and when I said the word “it,” I felt something pain me in my womb—“I want it done on my bed.”

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I lay on my bed with legs spread. In the corner of the room, Dr. Kraus was preparing the instruments. Next to him, providing assistance, was Frau Grubach, the nurse. My brother sat on the bed beside me. He sensed my fear.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said to me, and he put the palm of his right hand on my left temple. His palm was trembling. “Everything will be fine.”

  “Fine? Perhaps it will be fine, but not everything,” I said. “After this, there will be nothing.”

  “No,” said my brother, and he ran the palm of his hand from my sweaty forehead to the crown of my head. “Everything will be the same as it is now.”

  “That is the most terrible.” I took his hand between the palms of my hands. “For everything to be the same as it is now.” I lowered my hands and his to my belly. Motherhood is the giving of a new l
ife, but for me it was something more than that; it was a continuation of an existence that had ended. “Everything will be the same, and everything will be nothing.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” my brother said, and he lifted his hand from my stomach. My two hands grabbed his and held it over my eyes. “Everything will be fine.”

  The doctor asked Sigmund to leave. Frau Grubach was standing above my head, holding a cloth soaked in a bitter liquid to make me fall asleep. My brother made our secret greeting from the time when I was a girl: with his index finger he touched my forehead, then my nose, then my lips. I wanted to return the greeting, but I only pursed my lips and closed my eyes tightly. I felt my brother stand up from the bed, and then I felt the bitter cloth on my mouth and nose. While I sank slowly into unconsciousness, there appeared before my closed eyes a memory from long ago: At a time when many things in the world still had no name, my brother gave me something sharp and said, “Knife.”

  HOURS LATER, while I was regaining consciousness, the first thing I felt was the pain in my womb. Slowly, slowly, I brought my fingers to my stomach. I opened my eyes, and everything before me shimmered; I could barely make out the contours around me. I did not know where I was, or who I was. And the first thing I remembered was my brother’s name.

  “Sigmund,” I said as loudly as I could, whispering.

  “Your brother is in the next room,” said a female voice through the haze. It was the voice of the nurse who was to stay with me as long as I needed help. “Should I call him?”

  I nodded.

  A short time later, the door opened. I could see a bit better, although still indistinctly. I saw that it was my brother Sigmund. He approached the bed and sat down beside me. He placed the palms of his hands over my hands.

  “You are fine now,” he said.

  “I can never be fine again,” I said. I turned my head to the wall. I saw there a trace of blood. My brother saw my gaze pause.

  “That is due to Dr. Kraus’s carelessness,” he said.

  That bloody trace on the wall was all that remained of my unborn child.

  We said nothing. Then I said to him, “It is time for you to go.”

  “I will stay here tonight.”

  “You need to leave.”

  “I am leaving tomorrow.”

  “You need to get ready.”

  “I am ready.”

  I felt the delirium slowly passing, and in its place I was overwhelmed as I sank into bitter pain, and then I said, “I beg you, go.”

  I made our secret greeting from the time when we were children: I stretched out my hand, and with my fingers I touched his forehead, then his nose, then his beard. My vision was cloudy, and I could not see whether there were tears in his eyes. He bent down and kissed my forehead. I turned my head toward the wall, toward the bloody trace, and he hastened to leave the room.

  I SPENT THOSE DAYS in confusion because of my awareness that I could not feel pain, as if, along with the fetus, the part of my soul that could suffer had been removed.

  When my mother returned from Bad Gastein, she noticed the bloody trace on the wall by my bed, but she said nothing. She suggested we visit Sigmund, who had just returned with his family from the Vienna Woods, where he had spent the remainder of his vacation after his trip to Venice. I told her to go alone, and I no longer went with her to those shared lunches. When my brother came, as always, to visit her on Sunday mornings, I left the house before he arrived.

  Our mother’s birthday was approaching, and the family had decided we would all gather in our home. I spent days getting the apartment ready, and I prepared the food. On the evening of the eighteenth of August, guests began to arrive. For the first time in many years, Anna had come from America with her family, and Paulina and Marie from Berlin with their families. Rosa sat with her hands crossed on her belly—she was pregnant. We were still waiting for Sigmund and Alexander to arrive in order for the celebration to begin. My mother’s grandchildren played around her. I listened to their happy voices, and I wanted to say something, too, but I stood by the door and remained silent.

  “There is nothing more beautiful for a mother than to see her children happy,” said our mother, stroking her grandchildren’s heads. “Of course, Adolfina remained single.” Then she turned toward me. “I told you that you would be alone. I saw that you did not know what you needed to do in your life. I gave you advice, but you did not listen. Now look. Look at their happiness. But your life is one big emptiness.”

  Anna, my brother Sigmund’s youngest daughter, who could still barely walk, came up to me and threw herself at my feet. I took her in my arms and brought her close to my face. She laughed and happily struck my cheeks with her little palms.

  Then my mother said those words that she had forgotten for years but had said to me at the beginning of my life: “It would have been better if I had never given birth to you.”

  At the beginning of my life there was pain. Like the quiet dripping of blood from a hidden wound. Drop by drop. And now, when again I heard those words that long ago had opened that first wound, I felt all the blood that flowed from it, and from all the later wounds.

  I slowly set Anna on the floor and went to my room. I opened the cupboard, which held the suitcase with infant’s clothes. I opened it and took out everything that was inside: the knitted cap, the little mittens, the tiny shoes the size of a finger, the little cape. I left those things in the cupboard and filled the suitcase with my clothes. Then I closed it, took it with me, and left the room. The little girl was still waiting for me in the hallway, and she started toward me again. I set off toward the other door, then opened it and went out. As I went down the stairs I heard the little one rapping her little palms on the door.

  When I entered Klara’s room with my suitcase, she was not surprised. She only asked me, “Has the fear gone?”

  I nodded.

  I picked up my suitcase. We opened it as if we were unswaddling a baby, and we took out my things and placed them in the small cupboard by the bed.

  When I opened my eyes the first morning that I awoke at the Nest, I heard Klara’s voice: “How was your night?”

  I turned toward her. She was lying on the bed by the opposite wall of the room.

  “Fine,” I said, and placed my hand on my chest.

  “Does something in your chest hurt?” she asked. I said nothing. “It is life that is hurting you,” she said. “But that, too, shall pass.”

  No one before had given any indication of having noticed my pain, the thing that since my childhood had ached so much that it seemed to tear my heart from my chest. Although neither that pain nor the invisible wound it had opened existed any longer, Klara noticed the traces of them that remained.

  In the afternoon Klara went to the knitting room, where she had to spend her working hours that day. I did not feel well, and I was lying on my bed when one of the nurses on duty entered the room.

  “Someone wants to see you,” she said.

  As soon as the nurse moved from the doorway, my brother entered the room.

  “Dr. Goethe told me you were here,” he said.

  “Yes, I am here.”

  I invited him to sit on my bed. I stood up, took the pillow in my hands, and sat down on one side of the bed, and my brother sat on the other side.

  “Why did you leave home?” he asked. I did not know how to answer him. “You could at least have said where you were going.” I said not a word. “But that is not important now. You are going home today.”

  “I can never return there.”

  “You have no other place to go. That is your only home. Even if you do not want to go back, you must.”

  I said nothing.

  He looked at me a long time, then said with authority, “You are coming with me.”

  “I am staying,” I said.

  6

  ALL NORMAL PEOPLE ARE NORMAL IN THE same way; each mad person is mad in his own way.

  THE PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC the Nest was loc
ated in the very heart of Vienna, and yet it was cut off from the rest of the world.

  At night, cries break the silence of the large sleeping rooms. These are the cries of those condemned to share their madness with the madness of others. The nights stream into one another and flow into years, and among those who cry out are others who remain mute, who yearn for quiet, who want only a small piece of this earth in which to safely tuck their heads and sleep through the night. At night they breathe quickly, or they weep, or they pray, even though they do not know to whom to direct their prayers, since they had renounced God long ago, after he had renounced them. Or else they simply breathe slowly, and through that inhalation and exhalation they gently push away some pain lodged in their chests, a clump that has wrapped around the question of why they exist at all if they exist like this, and they are happy as long as that clump enfolds the thought, because stripped bare, without that surrounding clump, the thought would be unbearable. Finally, they are overwhelmed with exhaustion from trying to cope with the noises. The whistles and shouts of the Nest increasingly seem to come from a distance, and they are no longer human voices but a sound created by the pangs of human pain, turned to rage, banging the gong of fate.

  In other bedrooms, with only two women or two men, happiness and misfortune wind together in a knot.

  In the course of a single day, a girl counts her toes, an old woman tries threading string through the eye of a needle, an old man talks in the corner, a young man trembles in fear at the right sleeve of his shirt, a woman…a man…In the course of a day and in the wakeful hours of the night, all those at the Nest do something that cuts them off from others, leaving them in their own worlds, separate, alone.

  Every night, before falling asleep, a woman gazes for a long time into the darkness and then whispers, “World, good night.”

  MY BROTHER WROTE THAT each person remains “a child of his epoch, even with regard to his most personal traits.” One could say even that each individual madness is a child of his epoch, but also that the most personal traits of madness are the same in all epochs.