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  At the end of Moses and Monotheism, my brother also blamed the Jews for the sufferings they have endured throughout the millennia. Patricide, he asserted, is at the very beginning of religious belief. Religion, at its origin, is an attempt to expiate the sin committed by the sons who killed their own father in the battle for dominance and then glorified him as their divine ancestor. Christianity, my brother maintained, is an admission of this murder: with the killing of Christ, the human race confesses the killing of its own father. Christianity was created by the Jews and disseminated by the Jews, but “only a part of the Jewish people accepted the new doctrine. Those who refused to do so are still called Jews. Through this decision they are still more sharply separated from the rest of the world than they were before. They had to suffer the reproach…that they had murdered God…. Through this they have, so to speak, shouldered a tragic guilt; they have been made to suffer severely for it.” And so the Jews became guilty of their own suffering; my brother found justification for each crime against them. He would do this at a time when his people would need support, when the blood flowing through our veins would quake with the same horror that shook our ancestors.

  THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, my brother tried to prove in his works that the essence of the human race is guilt: everyone was guilty because everyone was once a child, and in the competition for its mother’s love, every child desires the death of its adversary, its father. That is what my brother Sigmund said. He blamed the most innocent; the most innocent and the most helpless carried this primordial sin. He accused those who had just entered into life of desiring the death of those who had given them that life. In addition to this guilt, present in every human being, he took another upon himself: he maintained he remembered that when he was only one and a half years old, he had wished for the death of his newborn brother, Julius, who died six months later. So my brother was also Cain, and God’s words pertained to him: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!” And he was Noah, the one who, before the Flood, had gathered into the ark his family and “every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings.” But for the four of us sisters there was no room on our brother’s list. He was Oedipus, he was Cain, and he was Noah, but in those desires that he did not wish to acknowledge to himself he wanted to be a prophet, and so he took Moses away from the Jews. My brother wanted to be unique, autonomous, self-made; and that is how he imagined the one proclaimed by his people to be what he himself wanted to be. Just as Moses had led a people to freedom, to the Promised Land, Sigmund wanted to lead the human race to freedom from the I, to free humans from the fetters of repression and the dark abysses of the unconscious. It was as if my brother were crying out from every page of his book about Moses, “Neither he nor I am a Jew. Like him, I am a self-made leader and prophet!”

  THE HUMAN FATES at the Nest wove wondrous, often invisible nets. Sometimes in the dining hall there would be a woman who had poisoned her husband, eating side by side with a man whose wife had swung an ax but had not managed to strike him. A girl plucked blades of grass as she walked the hospital grounds, and then scattered them around her; an old woman, before falling asleep, imagined herself pulling up the grass in front of her home and scattering it. Here were people who could not fall asleep, and people who lay as if in eternal sleep. Here were people who were afraid to fall asleep, and people afraid of waking. A young man was brought to the Nest because he kept telling everyone that he had no head, while another young man was brought because he tried to convince others that they had no heads. In the small library, a man clutched his head and shouted, “The words are flying from the pages! The words are flying from the pages!” He would shout repeatedly until the other readers protested, and the orderlies would take him to his room. A woman moved her head left and right whenever someone spoke to her, because it seemed to her that the words were flying toward her and could plunge into her forehead. There were people who contorted their faces, altered their voices, and presented themselves as devils; they offered to buy souls, they announced apocalypses, they warned that the coming of the kingdom of darkness was at hand. There were people who sought salvation from demonic forces, not from those who claimed to be such forces but from those who were for the rest of us invisible demonic beings. They spat into the air, they ran from the air, they struck at the air, they threatened the air, they screamed in fright while looking at the air. Whenever the orderlies told us that our time for walking the grounds was over and that we had to return to our rooms, a girl would lie on the ground and hug the nearest tree, and until they managed to pry her loose she would put up a long fight, screaming, “I am this tree’s dream! If you pull me from this tree, it will stop dreaming of me and I won’t exist!” Another girl sometimes repeated, “My dreams have leaves and branches, my dreams have a trunk and bark, my dreams have flowers and roots…. My dreams are trees, or perhaps the trees are my dreams.”

  The human fates at the Nest wove wondrous, often invisible nets.

  IT WAS ALMOST NEVER QUIET in our room. In the room above ours, Hans and Johann paced; one walked with slow and heavy steps, the other quickly and decisively. From out of the rooms next to ours came self-accusations, feverish giggling, head-banging, fists and feet against the walls. Even when those nearby sounds subsided, through the windowpane the din from other rooms at the Nest reached us.

  Sometimes Klara’s voice woke me during the night: “Wake up—it’s quiet!” And sometimes when I woke up, if no sound reached us—and that was a rarity—I said to Klara, “Wake up—it’s quiet!” We had agreed to wake each other whenever a moment of silence could be captured. Then we lay in the darkness, silently in the quiet, but as soon as we heard the first noise or the first shout we would again close our eyes and try to fall asleep.

  KLARA AND I WERE AMONG those who were allowed to leave the hospital sphere and, in groups, accompanied by the orderlies, walk about the city. Neither she nor I ever wanted to leave the Nest, however, so we remained with those who were forbidden to go outside the psychiatric clinic. There were those who begged Dr. Goethe to allow them to leave the Nest for just a few minutes. They clasped their hands and fell on their knees in front of him, but he did not give in, even though some of those who begged him were peaceful and would do no harm outside the hospital, nor would they run away. Dr. Goethe explained to them that going into the city would have an ill effect on their psychiatric health. So they waited at the doors to the Nest for the return of those who were allowed to go out; they waited for them with the expressions of those who await news from a far-off country, and they begged them to tell about the city, about the people, about everything that began just steps from where they slept.

  GUSTAV VISITED KLARA on the first Wednesday of each month. At one of their meetings he said to her, “Mama has died.” Klara said not a word. “Do you want to come home?” Klara continued to say nothing. “Home,” said Gustav.

  “No,” said Klara.

  WHEN HELLISH SCREAMS SPREAD through the Nest, when those cries fed one another, encouraged one another, strengthened one another, it seemed to me that we had been thrown into some unknown, frightening world, yet also a place where we were protected by the walls of our room. Sometimes, when hellish screams spread through the Nest, when those cries fed one another, encouraged one another, strengthened one other, Klara would say, “Our room is like a womb.”

  On the first Saturday of each month, Dr. Goethe held lectures for us in the Great Hall. He explained madness; he was certain that his lectures were another way to provoke change in some of us, but we sneered at him, shot crumpled papers at him, made noises to confuse him while he spoke. Yet he continued to expound on madness.

  “But what is normality?” Klara asked him at one of those lectures.

  “Normality…?” Dr. Goethe was confused for only a second. “Normality means to
function in accord with the laws of the world in which we live.”

  “But if we follow your logic on madness, one could also say that normality is nothing but a respect for established norms.”

  “BUT WHAT IS MADNESS?” I asked Klara before we fell asleep.

  If I asked my brother, he would tell me that madness arises when the human I unconsciously creates a new internal and external world simultaneously, that the new world is constructed according to the desires of the unconscious, and that the reason for the split from the external world is the serious and apparently unbearable conflict between reality and one’s desires.

  Klara said nothing. The following day she proposed to Dr. Goethe that, on the first Saturday of each month, instead of us listening to him lecture, we would speak about our illnesses. Several times thereafter we gathered in the Great Hall, and Dr. Goethe asked what madness was for us, and we spoke.

  We said, “To be mad is the same as being in danger. You try to call for help, but nothing comes out of your mouth; your throat tenses, your tongue, your lips. Everything is useless. There are people near the person in danger, but their backs are turned, and they do not realize what is happening, because they and the person in danger are looking in different directions, toward different landscapes, toward different skies. Yes, we look toward different skies.”

  “Madness is an oar that strikes the wall instead of water, and it strikes the wall, and strikes, and strikes, and strikes….”

  “Madness is moving but standing still.”

  “Madness is a door without a knob.”

  “Madness is when you see that something is green, but everyone assures you that it is red.”

  “Madness is when everyone waits for you to speak, and they demand that you speak, and you talk and talk and talk, but no one hears you. Your mouth does not obey you; it stays closed while you talk, talk, talk, and everyone says you are mad, because they demand that you talk and you are silent, silent, silent. They do not hear you talk, talk, talk.”

  “A doll that is not fully alive.”

  “A dream dripping into your eye. An eye dripping into a dream.”

  Dr. Goethe kept repeating, “What you are saying is ordinary foolishness.”

  Klara once said to him, “Those of us who are mad say an endless amount of nonsense, an endless string of disorganized, unconnected, irrelevant things, and in the middle of all of them we will put some of the things that are most important to us and see whether others notice the difference.”

  FEW OF US CAME to those meetings in the Nest’s Great Hall. The only ones were those who felt compelled by our madness—either always or from time to time—to discuss philosophical topics. At those meetings we looked like people at once thirsty for conversation and coerced into conversation, as if some nagging force inside us did not give us peace and we wanted to purge ourselves of it with words. Very often, we discussed why normality and madness were like two different worlds.

  “It is misunderstanding that separates normality from madness,” Dr. Goethe once said. “Madness does not understand normality; normality does not understand madness.”

  “No,” said Klara. “Madness does not understand itself, and normality does not understand itself. And what separates normality from madness is fear. Normality fears madness, and madness fears normality. If madness were to accept normality’s reality, it would perceive the unrealities it has created, and they would disappear, and, with their disappearance, the madness itself would disappear. If normality were to peer carefully into madness, it would perceive unbearable truths not only about madness but also about itself, and then its façade would crack, its armor would disappear, and out would come all the abnormalities that what calls itself normality carries within itself, and, in place of that destroyed normality, madness would then rule. For both madness and normality, to confront the other means death.”

  THERE WAS A CERTAIN GIRL at the Nest everyone called the Good Soul, because she asked everyone, “Do you need anything?” When we walked the grounds, she gathered flowers, or tore blades of grass, or broke branches from trees, and then she looked for people with despair on their faces and handed them the flowers, the blades of grass, the branches.

  WHEN MY SISTER ROSA came to visit me after the death of her husband, we sat a long time on my bed. She held a picture of her children, Hermann and Cecilia.

  “Now I am living only for them,” she said several times in the course of our conversation, whenever her gaze fell on the photograph.

  ERIKA WAS DEVOTED to her family. Wherever she went, she brought her closest family with her. Sometimes Erika begged the nurses to let her leave her room in order to come to the room where Klara and I lived. As soon as she entered, she would sit on one of the beds, take from her pocket a piece of cloth, and place it on her knees. She would untie the cloth and show us what was inside: several small twigs. She would take them out and run her fingers along them in a kind of caress.

  “This is my family. This is my mother, this is my father, this is my husband, and these are our children,” she would say, separating the twigs. “We are a happy family.”

  She moved the twigs, one after another, on the cloth a little longer, then tied them up and returned her family to her pocket.

  She always carried the cloth with her, and often during meals, or rest periods out on the lawn, or at work in the sewing room, she would take it out of her pocket and arrange the twigs on it. One day, she did not have her piece of cloth; either she had lost it or someone had stolen it. She mourned a great deal for her twigs; the doctors tied several twigs in a cloth and gave them to her. She unfolded the cloth, ran her fingers along the twigs, and said, “This is not my family.”

  SOMETIMES DURING OUR AFTERNOON walks, Krista would approach Dr. Goethe and say to him, “I want to go home.”

  “Where is home?” Dr. Goethe wanted to confuse her with the question.

  “Home is home.”

  “Here is home,” Dr. Goethe told her.

  “No,” said Krista. “Home is where my little daughter is.”

  Dr. Goethe said nothing.

  “I want to be where my little daughter is.”

  “Fine. We will let you. Just complete your walk around the grounds and we will let you go.”

  And that would calm Krista. She would be quiet for a day or two, and then ask to go home again.

  SOMETIMES KRISTA’S PARENTS visited her. During those visits she would disappear. When her parents were beside her, she could neither speak nor see. Her gaze was fixed on a point, as if there, where her eyes looked, something immobile swallowed her gaze, swallowed her very self. Her parents tried calling to her, but she stayed fixed on that point. A few times, Krista’s parents brought her little daughter with them. The little girl carried notebooks from school with her, or a drawing or two. She would spread them out in front of her, tell her mother what was in the drawings, read to her from her notebooks, but Krista remained as if swallowed up by the thing that drew her gaze but that no one else could see. Then her little daughter would fall silent, gather her drawings, and close her notebooks. She would look back and forth, from her grandmother and grandfather to her mother. No one said a word. From time to time, the daughter looked in the direction where Krista looked; she knew there was something there that only her mother saw, something they could not see but only imagine—the something her mother was focused on, that swallowed her. Then her grandmother or grandfather would stand up and say, “Let’s go….” The parents touched Krista’s hands in parting, the little daughter threw herself around her neck and hugged her, but her mother remained frozen. And then they left. After these visits, Krista would remain seated, stiff, for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, she would return to the world, always in the same way: she would begin to roll on the bed, growl, kick, strike with her hands, throw herself against the wall. The orderlies knew what she would do at the end of these visits, and even before she regained consciousness they had bound her, and then, bound, she would cry out,
“I want to go home. I want to be with my daughter. Do you hear me? I want to go home. Let me go home!”

  Her lament echoed through the hallways.

  “Why don’t you let her go home?” Klara once asked Dr. Goethe.

  “She feels bad only when her daughter comes here. The little one has to disappear for her. Disappear forever.”

  Krista’s little girl stopped coming. Perhaps Dr. Goethe had asked this of her parents. And they, the old people, came less and less often.

  From time to time, Krista would stop Klara outside.

  “I will tell you a secret,” she would say. “I will tell you a secret, but do not tell anyone.”

  “I will not tell anyone,” Klara promised.

  “They are going to let me out of the Nest. They are going to let me go home. Forever.”

  “They will let you go,” Klara would tell her, in the same confidential tone.

  “They really will let me go,” and she repeated this as a sort of solace, as when a child repeats a lie, not to believe it through constant repetition but in order not to think about the truth.

  A YOUNG WOMAN whose name I did not know shook her shoulders and waved her arms as if they were wings, and gazed up toward the hospital roof.

  “There is my home. There is my nest,” she repeated.

  We walked by without reacting, because her daily attempts and her words had become routine for us. Every day she tried to get to her home, to her nest.

  MANY OF THOSE who had been brought to the Nest by force asked to be released. Some begged quietly, clasping their hands or falling to their knees before the doctors, others screamed pleadingly, some threatened. “I will send you all to hell,” shouted those who believed they were gods, gods who had fallen to earth for only a short time. Those who were convinced that they were great warriors now imprisoned by their opponents threatened that as soon as they regained power—if they were not released with goodwill—they would take their revenge. And there were also those whose threats were simple: they would wring the doctors’ necks or stab them with a knife.