Freud's Sister Read online

  “But who said anything about healing? After all, no one here is sick; everyone here simply lives in his own world.” I straightened the glasses on his nose, which had turned a bit red from the alcohol. “Come so I can show you the other rooms,” I said, and we left the hall and hurried along the corridor. “This is the library. You see, it is small, but it has lovely books, and there are enough even for those who will stay here for the rest of their lives.” Then we set off back down the corridor, and we reached the dining hall. “This is where we eat.” Then I took him to the workrooms, to the one in which objects were made of wood, and to the sewing room, the weaving room, and the room where we embroidered and knitted. “Klara and I taught Dr. Goethe how to knit.”

  “And does he?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I took him to the last room that I wanted to show him.

  “And here is where people die,” I told him, cracking open the door. My brother knew what he would see inside, and he did not want to enter. “Please, come in, you are welcome here.” I entered first, and he followed. There, as always, it smelled of death, of raw, disintegrating flesh, of excrement, of sweat, and, in the middle of that stench, of bodies tossing on the eve of death, and bodies stiffly awaiting it. Several of the dying, laid out on mattresses on the floor, agonized with yet one more breath. “In life everyone is different, while in death everyone is different and everyone is the same. Everyone lets go of his spirit by exhaling, but each exhales in his own way.”

  “A little water…a little water,” begged an old man dying on a mat under the window. The on-duty nurse was handing out drinks at the carnival, and there was no one to give water to the dying.

  I took my hands from the bundled shirt I was holding against my stomach under my dress so that I could take the bottle of water from the table, and I poured several drops into the pleading mouth. The old man thanked me. As I was returning the bottle to the table, the shirt, no longer supported, slipped from under my dress and fell to the floor. I bent down, picked it up, bundled it up again, and placed it by my left breast, cradling it in my arms the way one holds a nursing baby. My brother watched me.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we exited the room that smelled of death.

  We went out of the hospital, stood at the top of the entrance stairs, and looked toward the grounds, where the guests and residents of the Nest had become intermingled. They danced, they sang, they created quite a commotion, chasing one another, conversing, or arguing.

  “Sometimes I recall those words of yours,” my brother said.

  “Which words?”

  “That beauty is comfort in this world.”

  “Look how much beauty there is around us. Which means how much comfort. And that, in turn, means how much pain, because comfort always appears for a reason.”

  “Yes,” my brother said, “how much beauty.”

  We went down the stairs and walked over to the tables. My brother was already drunk—his face was red, his movements quicker than usual, and he spoke with the warmth in his voice that he had had when he was a young man, and I a child.

  “I have had enough to drink,” he said, and paid them to refill his empty glass. Then we moved away from the tables where they were serving drinks. “I think of you often,” he said.

  “Often,” I repeated.

  “And do you also think…”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the world outside here…”

  “No,” I said. “Ever since I got here, it is as if nothing outside these walls exists.”

  He took a sip, his hand or his mouth trembled, and the rest of his drink spilled to the ground.

  “Yet another reason for yet another glass,” he said, and he set off back toward the tables. On his way there, he stumbled. I wanted to go to him, but as he straightened up he signaled to me to stay and wait for him. He paid, they poured him a drink, and he came back to me.

  “I promise this is my last glass,” he said. I smiled. “Yes,” he continued. “There are so many things I want to tell you, but I do not know whether you want to hear them, and I do not know whether there is a reason to tell you….”

  “What things?”

  “About our mother, about me and Martha, about the children, about Minna. About our sisters. About the city. About everything…You have been here for years…. There are so many things I want to tell you, but I do not know whether you want to hear them, and I do not know whether there is a reason to tell you….” He spoke with his eyes fixed on the ground. Then he looked me in the eyes. “Do you have anything you want to tell me?”

  “I do not know whether you want me to tell you something. I do not know what you want me to tell you.”

  “Everything,” he said.

  “Everything,” I repeated. “But what I have to tell somehow does not exist in words. It exists only in images, and even those are merging one into another.

  We said nothing.

  “Does something hurt you?” he asked. I had heard his voice tremble only a few times in my life.

  “What should be hurting me?”

  “Something from the past.”

  “No,” I said. “It is as if nothing ever was before. As if life began the moment I got here. Or ended at that moment.”

  He raised the glass of schnapps to his mouth, but rather than put it to his lips he brought his index finger to his teeth and bit it. Then he drank the schnapps. The glass fell to the ground. His whole body was shaking. He took my hand in his hands and kissed my palm. Then he hugged me, pressing my head to his chest with his hands, and he said, “O my sister…O my sister…” as if by stating our kinship he was stating my whole fate, everything he knew and everything he did not know, and he cried between each utterance of our relationship; he lamented what was expressed in that utterance, “O my sister.” He kissed me on the forehead. I remembered how in our childhood he would kiss me on the forehead secretly somehow, when our mother was not around, because she scoffed at such tenderness. It seemed to me that I was not breathing, it seemed to me that I did not feel anything, only the touch of his lips on the crown of my head, the warmth of his breath that smelled of alcohol, and the firmness of his hands pressing my head to his chest.

  “Oh, what passion!” Suddenly, Augustina’s voice could be heard near us.

  I felt the pressure of my brother’s hands slacken. I straightened my head and moved away from him.

  “Sir, I need a little tenderness, too,” shrieked Augustina, while my brother wiped his tears. “Give me a little tenderness, too, sir.” She went up to him and grabbed him between the legs.

  “Didn’t we say nymphomaniacs were to stay in their rooms?” Hilda the nurse was calling from somewhere. My brother was pushing Augustina away, and then the orderlies came and led her away. “And make sure the other nymphomaniacs are locked up tight!” Hilda called after them.

  People with wings, people with dragons’ heads, people with fish-scaled clothing, danced, forming a circle around us. My brother staggered and then vomited. I held his head up, placing my palm on his forehead. Dr. Goethe appeared from somewhere.

  “When I said alcohol would be served only to visitors, I did not imagine they would drink more than the mad people would if they were allowed to drink!” Dr. Goethe said. My brother wiped the vomit from around his mouth with a handkerchief. “As for the choice of costume, I can only praise you,” Dr. Goethe went on. “It looks cut to your measure,” he said, grabbing the pompons on the cap perched on my brother’s head. “But it is time for you to return to your false clothing and go home.”

  We went into the Great Hall. My brother began to change his clothes, and I turned to the wall and listened to the conversation between Dr. Goethe and Dr. Freud.

  “You know,” said Dr. Goethe, “I respect your efforts to come to a new understanding of human beings, but the very method in which you carry out your so-called psychoanalysis—your patients lying on a couch while they natter on about something, and you watch them, but they cannot
see you…that is a bit of a fraud.”

  “What do you mean, a fraud?” my brother said angrily. “My patients do not natter on while lying on the couch in my office. I prompt them to talk about their problems through free association, through spontaneous conversation, so that I can reach beyond the symptoms of their illness to their childhood traumas, which, together with their primary instincts, are buried in their subconscious, and in this way I can come to a true understanding of their illnesses and to the treatment of the disorders that arise in the processes of feeling, thinking, and behaving. Because I have listened to my patients attentively, I have come to important conclusions about the way a human being functions. With my discovery of the subconscious, and the explanation that it is precisely the part hidden and unknown to us that determines our thoughts, feelings, and actions, I am on a path to change the world. This will be the third great revolution—after those of Copernicus and Darwin—in human understanding of the world and of themselves. Copernicus showed the human race that it was not the center of the universe; Darwin, that it derives not from God but from an ape; and I, that a person is not who he thinks he is.”

  “You are lying. A greater revolution for humanity than these three theories put together came with the invention of the toilet bowl. Until several decades ago, people emptied the contents of their bowels into chamber pots and then threw those same contents out the window, occasionally onto the head of some chance passerby. Some homeowners had toilets in their courtyards. But in 1863, several years after Darwin had informed the world of his theories on the origin of species and natural selection, Thomas Crapper patented a bowl for the toilet bucket. So what if we know the earth revolves around the sun? So what if we know we are not the center of the universe? So what if we know we are descended from apes? So what if we are conscious that we are almost completely unconscious? That will not change anything. But the bowl for the toilet bucket…Is it really necessary for me to explain to you how greatly that changed people’s lives?”

  “Even if you are correct about the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin, with my discoveries it will be different, because my theories discuss what is most essential in man. Copernicus’s theory describes the relationship between man and the cosmos; Darwin’s theory, the origin of the human race. But my theory speaks about what a human being is in relation to himself and to other people, as well as about the source of every human thought and emotion. Therefore, in contrast to the theories of Darwin and Copernicus, mine will be applicable.”

  “All the more frightening,” said Dr. Goethe. “Think what will happen when some people understand your theories incorrectly, and adopt them incorrectly. And just consider that not all your theories will be correct, and in that incorrect form people will use them to help themselves. I tell you, Dr. Freud, the bowl for the toilet is the greatest invention since the discovery of the wheel.”

  I imagined my brother had finished changing, so I turned around. He was already in his suit.

  “Perhaps the toilet bowl is the greatest human invention since the wheel, but only from the point of view of technology. Psychoanalysis is something much greater, something more essential. Its very name tells you that, from psyche, soul—” my brother explained drunkenly, but Dr. Goethe, smiling, interrupted him.

  “The bowl very effectively cleans the excrement from the toilet bucket, my dear colleague, but I am not convinced that your psychoanalysis can clean the excrement from the human soul.” Then he extended a hand to Sigmund. “On your head you still have this hat, which suits neither your attire nor your work,” he said, removing the hat with the green pompons from my brother’s head. “Go now. I will see you home, and there in your warm marriage bed you will be able to dream peacefully—it is all the same whether consciously or unconsciously.” Uttering these last words, he turned to me, winked, and continued, “You know, your brother recently published a book about dreams, about some sort of Oedipal complexes, about parricide and mother-desire, about the conscious and the unconscious. Yet he cannot tolerate a few sips of alcohol.”

  The two doctors set off toward the hospital exit, and I went to my room. Klara was standing by the window, looking out over the hospital grounds. As soon as she heard my steps, without turning around she said, “How happy it is.”

  I lay down on my bed, set the shirt rolled up like a newborn beside me, and sank my head into the pillow.

  “This revelry, I see, is going to last awhile. Why didn’t you stay?” she asked.

  I did not answer. I heard her walk toward me, felt her sitting beside me on the bed, stroking my head to comfort me, but I cried inconsolably on that night filled with beauty. I had not cried in years; from my eyes not a single tear had fallen since the day my child was taken from my womb, and now I cried inconsolably. Klara lay down beside me on the bed and hugged me. I felt myself lost in pain and in dream, or was it unconsciousness, and I heard Klara’s voice comforting me: “It will pass…. It will pass.”

  MY BROTHER VISITED ME again several weeks after the carnival. We sat face to face, barely uttering a word, as was usual when he came to my room. Before he left for home I asked him, “Do you remember the fairy tale about the bird that you told me when we were children?”

  “What fairy tale?”

  “The one about the bird that pierced its breast and tore out its heart after the bird it loved flew off and never returned.”

  “I did not tell you such a fairy tale.”

  “Try to remember,” I told him. “You told it to me.”

  “There is no such fairy tale,” my brother said.

  “If there is no such fairy tale, then you made it up.”

  “If I had made it up, I would remember it.”

  “But I remember you telling it to me.”

  “You made it up yourself, and you told it to yourself.”

  WHENEVER MY BROTHER LEFT for home after his short visits, I would lie in my bed, draw the blanket over me, propping it up with my fingers a foot above my head, and look into the white sky.

  “TO DENY A PEOPLE the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly—especially by one belonging to that people.” That is how Moses and Monotheism begins, and with that sentence my brother expressed the aim of the entire work: to take Moses away from his people and to prove that Moses was not a Jew. Not only did he proclaim Moses “a distinguished Egyptian, perhaps a prince, priest, or high official,” he even described the Jews of that era as the opposite of Moses: “culturally inferior immigrants.” Why, he asked, would such a distinguished person leave his country together with these “culturally inferior immigrants”?

  Moses, my brother found, was an adherent of the first monotheistic religion, established by the pharaoh Akhenaton, who forbade polytheism, threatened death to those who prayed to the gods they had believed in for millennia, and declared Aton the one true God. Seventeen years after introducing this new religion, the pharaoh died. The former priests, humiliated during Akhenaton’s reign, now with the passion of vindictiveness and fanatical revenge, commanded the people, who had never forgotten the old gods, to demolish the new temples, and they forbade monotheism, bringing back the old, polytheistic religion.

  Moses, whom my brother supposed had been close to the pharaoh Akhenaton, could not renounce his devotion to the god Aton, and so forged a plan “of founding a new empire, of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained.” Thus, according to Moses and Monotheism, the Jews were chosen not by God but by the Egyptian Moses: “These he chose to be his new people,” and set off with them in search of the Holy Land.

  But these people could not relinquish their old beliefs, their Semitic polytheism; everyone who rejected the faith in this new god was, on Moses’ command, punished by his close supporters. So, my brother claimed, Moses did not die of old age, as it says in the Bible; rather, “The Egyptian Moses was killed by the Jews, and the religion he instituted abandoned.” What happened to them later, afte
r they killed the one who had chosen them for his people and who had promised them that they were a people chosen by God? They later “united with tribes nearly related to them, in the country bordering on Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula, and Arabia, and…there, in a fertile spot called Qades, they accepted, under the influence of the Arabian Midianites…the worship of the volcano-god Yahweh.”

  According to my brother, the cult of Yahweh was spread among the Egyptians by a Midianite shepherd with the same name as the Egyptian leader, Moses. But this one, this second Moses, preached a God who was the complete antithesis of Aton: Yahweh was venerated by the Arab tribe of Midianites as “an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the light of day.” Although “the Egyptian Moses never was in Qades and had never heard the name of Yahweh whereas the Midianite Moses never set foot in Egypt and knew nothing of Aton,” they stayed in memory as one person, because “the Mosaic religion we know only in its final form as it was fixed by Jewish priests in the time after the Exile about eight hundred years later,” by which time the two men named Moses had already been fused into a single person, and Aton and Yahweh into a single God, as different in their essences as day is to night, precisely because He is two gods in one.

  Moses and Monotheism contains both a denial—Moses is not a Jew—and a condemnation—the Jews killed Moses. It expresses both revulsion toward and vengeance against his own people. But why? For my brother, being a Jew was a part of his destiny, something that had been imparted to him at birth, something that was not of his own choosing. Where there was no choice, in his blood, he was a Jew. Where a choice could be made, he had chosen German culture: he wanted to belong to it in the same way that he felt the fruits of that culture belonged to him. Before the end of his life he said, “My language is German. My culture, my achievements are German. I considered myself intellectually to be a German, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudices in Germany and in German Austria. Since then, I prefer to call myself a Jew.” He said it just like that: “I prefer to call myself a Jew,” and not “I am a Jew.” When he was asked, “What is left in you that is Jewish, when you have abandoned everything that you had in common with your people—religion and national feeling, tradition and customs?” he answered, “The most essential thing.” He never said what that was, but it was understood: his blood, the thing he could not change, and he felt a kind of shame toward it.