Freud's Sister Page 18

  Some lied to themselves and to others: “We are just passing through, you know, we are staying in this hotel for today only, but tomorrow…” And they pointed somewhere with their hands.

  Pleas made during work hours, when the doctors worked alongside us, weaving, knitting, or making wooden objects, were especially intense. Then voices poured out in chorus across the room, begging to leave the Nest. A composition for human voices, with entreaties, complaints, assurances, reverberated between the walls; scores of voices intermingled in this composition, weaving various rhythms, tonalities, tempos, and among the intelligible words there also sounded indistinct murmurs and yelps, wondrous sounds—of chattering teeth, buzzing lips, of one voice repeating, of the imitation of sounds heard only in a dream or a nightmare—and somewhere beyond the words one sensed the fate of those who spoke, moaned, buzzed, clacked, murmured, yelped.

  “Why don’t you let those who want to, go home?” Klara asked Dr. Goethe one afternoon in the room where we were knitting.

  “Because their place is not there, but here.”

  “How do you know their place is not there but here?”

  “Because the law commands that those who have gone mad should be protected from their madness, and that normal people should be protected from the mad ones.”

  “If they have not broken any law and they do not want to be here, they have the right to be freed,” Klara said. “Or does madness itself constitute breaking the law?”

  “In madness itself there is the potential to do something illegal.”

  “Every human being has the potential to do something illegal. Why don’t we just place the entire human race in prisons and madhouses?”

  “Sometimes I think the fact that you are one of the few who have never sought to leave here is a result of your pleasure in making observations and finding errors. Errors exist everywhere. They have to exist, because no system is perfect. But this system of care for patients with mental illness is the best way possible.”

  “No. Freedom is the first condition for any type of care for anyone. But the majority of us feel like prisoners here.”

  “You must understand that those who are mad, wherever they are, feel imprisoned; perhaps the first step toward madness is the feeling that the world is a prison. The world, with its laws—I am thinking not solely of societal laws but of natural ones as well—is experienced as a prison; perhaps this is what leads to the creation of one’s own world, with one’s own laws, yet the feeling of imprisonment remains forever.” A ball of wool rolled from Dr. Goethe’s lap and fell to the floor. He leaned forward, retrieved it, sat down again, and, resuming his knitting, continued to talk. “But for you and your friend,” he said, pointing to me, “it is easy. You are acting out half madness, half normality. What you call here a prison is really, for you, freedom from the prison you felt outside. I grasped that immediately. You are here as if on a long vacation. That is wonderful, really wonderful. Your brothers pay for your stay, you experience your freedom in this prison—as you call our hospital—as opposed to the constraint and coercion you felt outside, constraint and coercion far less than what the truly sick feel. Nonetheless, your constraint and coercion can be reduced to family conflict, not to some deep discord within yourselves. Yes, you really are here as if on a long vacation. And I respect that, I respect your choice, only I beg you, also respect my work and do not meddle in it,” said Dr. Goethe, and he continued knitting a long black shawl.

  ONE OF THE TREATMENT methods Dr. Goethe employed was like stamping upon the madness. He would gather twenty patients in one of the large rooms in the hospital, and he would begin a game with one of the patients in which he portrayed the madness as stupidity. Sometimes these games seemed good-natured and light, as when he asked someone who believed he was Casanova about his amorous adventures, or when he asked someone who insisted he was Napoléon about his military campaigns. At other times the games were torture, as when Dr. Goethe contradicted the claims of patients who spoke obsessively about those close to them whom they had lost, or when he persistently asked Hans—who struck his head against the wall whenever he heard the word why—“Why are you striking your head against the wall?” When the game turned into torture, Klara would ask Dr. Goethe, “Why are you doing this?”

  Dr. Goethe (who stretched his arm in front of a patient aimlessly moving about the room, in order to block her path, but she bent down, circumventing the obstacle, and continued walking about the room) answered, “My goal is not to force someone to ask why I am doing this but why this patient reacts the way she does.”

  “How should she react?”

  “She should stop when I block her path, and not squeeze under my arm. You should have noticed that. That is the goal—for some of those present here to notice that something is not right with her behavior.”

  “The only thing I noticed was that you were being aggressive with her,” said Klara.

  “No. I do not imagine this as a torture chamber but as a theater.”

  “Theater?”

  “Yes, theater. Those who could grasp that she reacts incorrectly would, through that realization, enjoy something like a catharsis, which could help them out of their situation. This does not relate to you. You are in an excellent situation; I have long understood that you are here on a long vacation. I was thinking of the others,” said Dr. Goethe, pointing to the others in the room. “Yes, were they to understand that she reacts incorrectly, that knowledge really could have a cathartic effect.”

  “All of us understand that you are behaving incorrectly, but that does not provoke a catharsis in us,” said Klara.

  “That is because your understanding is incorrect,” said Dr. Goethe, and once again he stretched out his arm in front of the girl who was walking quickly about the room. “One of the basic characteristics of people who are mad is that they demonstrate, through their actions, intentions, and utterances, that they are leading a senseless existence, but they are not aware of it. Were they to comprehend the senselessness of their actions, intentions, and utterances, it is very possible they would break off this existence, which is caught in the trap of senselessness, and return to a sensible existence,” said Dr. Goethe.

  “Aren’t all these senseless actions, intentions, utterances a result of the fact that those who are mad have understood that existence itself—whether reasonable or unreasonable—is senseless, and the only difference is the manner in which one expresses oneself, and they have decided to live that senselessness in an unreasonable manner, which is termed madness?” Klara asked him.

  “I do not have an answer for such a question. Ask me a simple question,” said Dr. Goethe, and he approached a young woman who was standing in the corner of the room. No one knew her name; we called her the Good Soul. “Now, this young woman here never resists aggression.” Dr. Goethe took a needle from his pocket and poked the tip into the girl’s forehead. She remained calm. She did not move even when Dr. Goethe approached her head with the needle, she remained calm even when the tip of the needle was poked into her forehead. “I am hurting her, but she does not defend herself; she doesn’t even try to get out of harm’s way. Do you understand? She is behaving unreasonably.”

  “The Good Soul is not behaving unreasonably; your actions are unreasonable,” said Klara, and she continued to argue with Dr. Goethe.

  While that argument went on, Max separated from the group of patients standing by the window, went over to the Good Soul, and removed the needle from her forehead.

  THE LOVE BETWEEN the Good Soul and Max began the moment he stretched out his hand toward her forehead and removed the needle that had been stuck there. Their love—it was not love, because love is only what those in love call it, and the Good Soul and Max did not give any name to what was between them. It was as if they kept alive a quiet fire that warms the soul.

  Max spent his working hours in the woodworking section of the Nest, and the Good Soul spent hers in the sewing room, and when they met during the time for
outings on the grounds she would take out a small handkerchief, cloth, or apron, which she had tucked into her brassiere by her heart, and he would hand her a small horse, flower, or angel made of wood. He arranged the cloths, handkerchiefs, and aprons both underneath and on top of his pillow, and slept on them; the Good Soul arranged the little wooden horses, flowers, and angels on the nightstand by her bed. And then, people said, then the Good Soul whispered his name in her sleep. And Max, people said, Max tried to find out her name, but nobody knew it; she had been the Good Soul ever since she had come to the Nest.

  Max and the Good Soul grew close to each other, the way the sky and the earth draw close together at some distant point—they merge in the eye that looks toward them on the horizon, yet for them there is neither union nor separation. That spring, there were moments when all of us at the Nest forgot about our madness, moments when our madness forgot about us, and we thought about the Good Soul and Max, and we often uttered the word love.

  “Love cannot begin here,” Dr. Goethe said.

  “What does this place lack so that love cannot begin here?” Klara asked him.

  “I was not thinking of the place. The realization of love is not possible between those who are mad, because madness has a mortal fear of love. In madness, hate of others and love of others are equal dangers; both love and hate threaten the destruction of the mad person’s I.”

  “But isn’t that the most terrible?” said Klara. “Because the I that barely flickers desires so achingly to be loved. Something in the person whose I has been pulled apart tells him—even when he does not want to acknowledge it—that only love can save his I, but the fear of love is always stronger than this awareness, and so he shoves that knowledge into oblivion or conquers it with an even greater fear.”

  “In madness, love can arise only toward some imagined, dreamed-up person; love toward a real person, and that means a true and real love, is impossible, because for the other to be loved means for the mad person to be one with the other; but to be one with the other means to lose one’s self. Therefore, some imagined other is loved, one who is a reflection of only a small fragment of that broken I. To love and to be loved is more dangerous for the mad person than to feel mortal hatred or to be mortally hated.”

  “But,” I asked, “don’t some who are mad have a despairing need to love and be loved, and isn’t that need as strong as life or death? It is a need to dig out the madness and to return to life.”

  That spring, the spring in which the Good Soul and Max kept alive some quiet fire that warms the soul, lasted a whole lifetime for them. Max promised the Good Soul what he had once wanted life to promise him. He promised her the most ordinary things, things that people do not promise each other, because these things are a given in life and they see no need to desire them; there is no precedent for longing for such things, because such longing arises only when something is difficult to attain. We listened to Max as he promised her a shared bed in a room with a window that looked out onto a street bustling with people (how similar and how different from the windows that looked out onto the hospital grounds, where patients and doctors strolled), as he promised days in which they would teach their children to talk and be happy, as he promised how close their bodies would be before falling asleep and in sleep. He promised her absolutely ordinary things, so ordinary that people do not think to promise them to each other.

  That spring, the spring in which the Good Soul and Max kept alive some quiet fire that warms the soul, lasted a whole lifetime for all of us at the Nest; it was as if all of us felt, after aeons of ice ages, that something once again warmed our souls. While we watched them outdoors, while we listened to their conversations and retold them to one another as we thought about what would happen to them, we forgot about our madness, and our madness forgot about us.

  One cloudy spring afternoon, when we expected rain and remained in our beds instead of going outside, the Good Soul’s brothers came to the Nest. Someone had told them things that were untrue about their sister, had described that tending of a quiet fire between her and Max as something different, as who knows what else. When they entered Dr. Goethe’s office, the first thing they told him was that they had brought their sister to a psychiatric clinic not to whore around but for treatment, and they demanded he take them to her. They then went into the large room where, in two rows, fifty women lay in their beds. Although Dr. Goethe had begged them not to tell her that they were taking her home—he had told them to tell her they were taking her on an outing—the brothers told her she was going home forever.

  “I want to stay here,” said the Good Soul, scrunching up in her bed.

  “Here no longer exists for you,” one of the brothers shouted. He seized her by the shoulders and dragged her from the bed. “We are taking you home forever!”

  The Good Soul stretched her hands toward the table by her bed and grabbed several small wooden horses, flowers, and angels, managing to shove them into the pockets of her nightgown before her brothers could carry her from the room.

  One of the women in the Good Soul’s room opened the window and shouted, “Hey! Everybody! They are taking the Good Soul away! Everybody! Come out and say goodbye to the Good Soul. The Good Soul is going. She is going forever!”

  The windows of the Nest opened; we stood by the bars and watched as the door of the hospital opened and the two strong men led their sister away. She was in her nightgown and slippers; as she was jostled between her two brothers, little wooden horses, flowers, and angels fell from her pockets.

  Then we heard Max’s wail, protracted and anguished, like a moonlight lament. For a second the Good Soul’s brothers stopped, and the Good Soul stopped between them, turning her head back toward the place she was moving away from. And Max’s wailing stopped. We silently watched from behind the bars of our windows; we watched as the Good Soul moved farther away, turning her head toward those bars where Max stood. She walked like that, with her legs carrying her toward one side of the world, her eyes looking toward the other. And when she reached the exit, before passing through the gate out of the Nest, she pulled one hand from her brother’s, raised it, and waved. She waved as people do when waving for the first time; she waved as people do when waving for the last time. Her brother grabbed her by the hand and led her out. Her body disappeared before our eyes.

  That afternoon, everything drowned in a strange silence.

  WE SPOKE ABOUT the Good Soul for days. We hoped she would appear, and then we forgot her. We remembered her only when we looked into Max’s face, but we saw him less and less. He stayed in his bed, lying motionless for hours, days, weeks, biting the handkerchiefs, cloths, and aprons he had collected under his pillow.

  “WAKE UP,” I heard Klara say in the middle of the night. “It’s quiet.”

  That was our agreement from my first days at the Nest—if one of us awoke at a moment of quiet, we would wake the other up as well. I got up. I went over to Klara. We stood by the open window. We looked into the darkness out toward the grounds. It was a summer night, and a warm muteness shimmered around us. I turned toward Klara. She had closed her eyes. I did the same, and I breathed in the calm. From a distant room a shriek was heard; it swept across the space and died away. Then feverish laughter was heard, joined by a dry weeping; clumping steps heavy like hooves began moving along the floor of the room above us; from a room beside us came blows against the wall; from the other side, grumbling; from somewhere else came indistinct words seeking help, words expressing thanks, words expressing indignation, words pleading for release into freedom; from somewhere else, human voices that sounded like the gurgle of water, like an animal’s roar, like a bird’s call, voices that sounded like wind through branches and voices that sounded like the strike of stone against stone.

  Then, all at once, everything grew quiet again, as if something had smothered all those open throats. Quiet. And then all the voices thundered again, crying and giggling, shouts and roars, gurgling and buzzing, pleas and laments, tha
nks and curses.

  Klara closed the window and said, “All normal people are normal in the same way; each mad person is mad in his own way.”

  7

  ALL NORMAL PEOPLE ARE NORMAL IN THE same way; each mad person is mad in his own way,” Klara repeated, standing by the closed window. I had already covered myself with my blanket and was struggling to fall asleep.

  “What is that thing over there?”

  “What thing?”

  “That…over there, by that tree,” said Klara.

  I stood up and drew near the window. Klara was pointing toward a thicket of trees.

  “It’s dark,” I said. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Something is hanging from one of the trees. Something or someone.”

  “You are imagining things.”

  “No,” said Klara. “Something or someone is hanging there.”

  We stood by the window and looked into the darkness. The darkness began to lose its thickness; it was thinning, acquiring a pale rosiness.

  “Someone is hanging there,” I said.

  That morning they lowered Max from a pine branch. No one knew how he had stolen from his room, or how he had left the building unnoticed. He had climbed the tree and tied the rope around his neck.

  Later that day, Klara took from her nightstand and tucked into her pocket the scrap of paper on which her brother had drawn a woman, her back turned, standing on the edge of an abyss.

  “I want to leave here,” she told me. “When Gustav comes, I will leave. You will leave, too,” she said.