Freud's Sister Page 19

  From that moment, she spoke less and less. She kept silent the way people do when they are waiting for something, with a kind of tension. She did not repeat those words of departure, but by her silence I knew she was waiting to carry them out. And that is what happened when her brother appeared.

  “I want to leave here,” she told him.

  “You want to return home?” asked Gustav.

  “I want to leave here,” she repeated.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Adolfina will also be leaving,” Klara said.

  We packed up the few things we had. I put mine into the small suitcase in which at one time I had kept the little clothes for the baby I never gave birth to, Klara put her things into her small suitcase, and then we left. The Nest was a half hour between the home Klara needed to return to and the home I needed to return to. We embraced each other, parted, and I continued on my way. I arrived at the building I had departed from years before, climbed the stairs, took the key from my bag. The lock was the same. I turned it twice. I opened the door and went inside. I stood in the foyer, and the odor was the same as before I left, that smell we had brought with us when we moved into this building, when I was eleven years old, and that remained even after Sigmund moved out, when I was twenty-one, after my sisters married and left home, after my brother Alexander moved away from home; that smell of our apartment remained even after my father died, when I was thirty-four years old, one year before I left for the Nest. It had stayed the same even without me these seven years. I slowly moved through all the rooms, and finally entered my room. On the wall by my bed there was still the trace of my unborn child. I bent toward the wall and rubbed my cheek along the faded bloody trace. Had I been able to cry, the blood would have combined with my tears; as it was, my dry cheek stroked the dry trace. I went into the kitchen. On the table lay the box of silverware. I sat down. With a cloth I began polishing the spoons, the forks, the knives. I heard the door creak. I picked up one of the knives. The door to the kitchen opened.

  “You have come back.” I heard my mother questioning and confirming at the same time.

  “I have come back,” I said, running the cloth along the knife.

  My mother sat down beside me. She took the candle from the candleholder that stood in the middle of the table and began rolling it between her hands, like someone who has nothing to say, or who has so much to say that she does not know where to begin. I set down the knife, picked up another from the box, and ran the cloth across its blade.

  “In the end, we need to learn to talk to each other,” my mother said.

  I continued to rub the knife, although it was already polished. My gaze fled to my mother’s fingers still turning over the candle. The cloth slipped, and I ran my fingers down the knife blade instead of the cloth. My mother quickly got up, brought some alcohol, a bandage, and cotton, and bandaged my fingers. Then she sat down again at the table.

  “We need to learn to talk to each other,” my mother said. Then she lifted the candle again, sank her nails into it, and picked at it. Small pieces of wax fell to the floor. I looked into her face; I looked into that face for the first time in many years. She lifted her gaze, and we looked at each other, eye to eye. I bent my gaze toward my bandaged fingers. My mother bent down to gather the pieces of wax from the floor.

  “How is Anna?” I asked.

  “She is well,” my mother said, straightening up and then sitting again at the table. “And Sigmund’s other little ones are well, too.” That is what she called the grandchildren she had from Sigmund, Sigmund’s little ones, and it was only when she spoke of them that she called him Sigmund and not her usual My Siggie. She looked at the pieces of wax in the palm of her hand. “Do you want to see them?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  IT WAS NOT YET afternoon when we set off for Berggasse 19. In the way we walked beside each other, in the way we were silent, and in the way that from time to time we broke the silence with a few words, I felt for the first time how much I had changed in the course of the past years at the Nest. I also felt how much my mother had changed, as if an abyss had opened between our former lives and our current ones, swallowing our bitterness and hatred, leaving only blunt reconciliation and a thick silence.

  At my brother’s, it was Martha who greeted us. Anna appeared from behind the door.

  “Your aunt has come to see you,” her mother said to her. I went up to Anna, hugged her, and kissed her forehead. She pulled away from me, wiped the wet trace of my lips from her forehead, and ran from the room.

  “Where is Sigmund?” I asked, turning toward Martha.

  “In Venice. With my sister,” Martha said.

  In the years spent in the insane asylum, where my existence was an escape from reality, I had forgotten that not even once in my life had I been outside Vienna, forgotten that when I was a young woman Rainer and I had dreamed of living in Venice.

  “They were in Venice a few years ago as well,” said Martha. I remembered that that was the day after my child was taken from me. “I could not travel, because of the children, and so this time, as before, my sister went with him.” Then she asked, “Will you stay for lunch?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  WHILE MY MOTHER and I were returning home, I recalled the years of my childhood when I had grown apart from Sigmund, and when I went out only with her; we would walk side by side to the market, or to my father’s store, and something in this return home reminded me of our earlier walks.

  “I made a veal stew this morning,” my mother said as we stepped across the threshold. “Let’s have lunch.”

  “It is just enough for you,” I said.

  “We will divide what is for me,” my mother said.

  “I want to rest,” I said.

  We went into my bedroom. My mother walked over to the windows and drew the curtains.

  “I changed the bedding regularly,” she said. “I thought you might return any day. I kept everything else the same as when you left.”

  She looked toward the faded trace of blood on the wall. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her. I headed to the cupboard, where years before I had collected the clothes for the child I carried in my womb. I opened it, and there before me were the diapers, tiny shoes the size of a finger, a knitted baby bonnet, a baby’s cape. I picked them up. They were exceedingly light, just as in those intervening years my soul had been lightened of its despair. I lifted them to my eyes one after another; they were moth-eaten; they looked like spiderwebs. I picked up the little bonnet. I got into bed. For a long time I looked at the frayed threads, I looked at the moth-eaten fabric, and then I slept.

  MY BROTHER AND MINNA returned from Venice several days later. At Sunday dinner at their home, they spoke at length about their trip. I interrupted them with a banal remark: “So it really is as beautiful as everyone says.”

  “It really is,” said Minna. “But I cannot describe it to you. You need to see it for yourself.”

  “There are some things that need to be seen at the appropriate time,” I said. “Not too early and not too late. If you see them too early, or if you see them too late, it is worse than if you had not seen them at all, because even if you do not see them they live their life within you, helped by your imagination, or else you first dream them, and you give them life within you. And if you see them too early, or too late, it is like killing something inside you, something that had lived within you until that moment, or something that first had to be born within you.”

  “You continue to think fatalistically. Just like before you went to the psychiatric clinic,” Minna said.

  “No matter how I think, it is too late for me to move to Venice,” I said.

  “I did not say to move to Venice but to visit it,” Minna said.

  “Ah, but at one time I dreamed of moving to Venice.”

  Then the conversation set off in another direction. Minna tried to tell me about the successes my brother had attained while I was
absent, things he had not mentioned when he visited me at the Nest; she spoke about his books that had forever changed people’s understanding of the human race, about his work with his patients, about his university career, about the founding of the Psychoanalytic Association. I listened attentively. Minna spoke; the others ate.

  My brother, despite his obligations, continued to visit our mother every Sunday morning, and we went to his place for Sunday dinner. Every morning, I went down the stairs to the exit of our building, walked to the end of the street, and then returned home. Each time I went out, I walked a bit farther. I walked aimlessly. During one of these strolls, I ran into Dr. Goethe. He asked me how I was getting on in my life after my departure from the Nest.

  “Well, I walk,” I told him.

  I asked him about life at the Nest. He told me the Good Soul’s brothers had brought their sister back to the Nest as soon as they learned of Max’s death. The Good Soul either would not or could not believe Max was dead, and she spoke with him constantly, barely noticing the others. Seldom did she ask her question, “Do you need anything?” She looked into the emptiness; she asked questions of the emptiness; she gave answers to the emptiness; everywhere in that absence around her, Max was present. I knew that the Good Soul’s battle against meaninglessness with the help of the most meaningless thing—conversation with the emptiness—was meant to give meaning to meaninglessness; the world has always been filled with people who look each other in the eye and carry on empty conversations.

  When I met with Klara after leaving the Nest, I felt that life could have meaning. Since leaving, she had assumed the motherly care of fourteen children. While she lived at the Nest, her brother had become a father several times over. He had impregnated women who appeared ten years older than their true age and who cleaned his atelier, young women who modeled for his paintings, workers who returned from the factories, exhausted, late in the afternoon. The children Gustav fathered with these women were for him the fruit of a short act, completely finished, over and done with. “I do not worry about what I have consciously created,” he told Klara, referring to his paintings, “let alone about something I was not even thinking I was creating, while I was doing something completely different.” It was as if his children had no father, but they had two mothers—Klara took care of them as if they were her own. All were male, all had different last names—the names of their mothers—and all had the same given name: Gustav. “My fourteen little Gustavs” is how Klara referred to them.

  She raced from one end of the city to the other to help their mothers. She brought the sickly Gustav, son of Elsa the seamstress, from doctor to doctor; she took care of Gustav, son of the sickly salesclerk Hannah, whenever she took ill; she raced to the Central Vienna Prison to beg for the release of the oldest of the fourteen Gustavs after he had become embroiled in a fight with another boy his age and wounded him with a knife. Once a month, she took money from her brother for the support of his sons and gave it to their mothers. Three times a year, she made her way through Vienna with all the Gustavs to buy them clothes. I saw her less and less. She spoke about the fourteen little Gustavs only if I asked, and only after she had asked how I was. But when I did ask her she spoke of them with joy, with a kind of concealed pride, and with a certain discomfort, as if to apologize for what she was saying. Then she spoke about other things that made her happy. She asked me whether I had heard that wives were now allowed to seek divorce and to possess their own property in marriage. Had I learned that, henceforth, women would have the right to vote? Did I know that workers were now able to organize to fight for their rights? I met her less and less; with each new child of her brother’s she had less time and one more household. With the years, our meetings were reduced to a wave of the hand whenever I saw her racing along the streets with several of her fourteen little Gustavs in tow.

  In the summer of 1914, the Great War began and quickly spread through Europe. The young men were mobilized; my sister Rosa’s son was sent to the front in September, and several months later Sigmund’s sons were sent. Martin fought the war in Russia, Ernst in Italy, and Oliver was a member of the military engineering corps, building tunnels and military barracks in the Carpathians. Lists of those who had recently perished on the battlefields were posted at the entrances to buildings; on the streets, we met war invalids. The war brought poverty: we had no soap, no fuel, no flour, no bread; we ate mostly potatoes and rice. Those who wanted to taste meat during those years caught squirrels in the parks or kept rabbits in their apartments. We had neither coal nor wood to burn, and in the winters we sat wrapped in blankets, with hats on our heads and mittens on our hands.

  One of those winters during the war years was the coldest I remember; the cold kept us from sleeping at night, so my mother and I stayed awake in the darkness of the sitting room, stamping our feet on the floor and rubbing the palms of our hands together to get warm. We spoke a few words, and then, when night had passed, when the morning had passed, and when the approaching afternoon had softened the cold a little, we went to our rooms and slept. Sometimes there was some news that cheered us, such as when a telegram arrived informing us that Sophie, who three years previously had married the photographer Max Halberstadt and gone to live with him in Hamburg, had given birth to a son. This was my brother’s first grandson, and they named him Ernst. One evening several days later, Sigmund told me that Hermann, our sister Rosa’s son, had died with a hundred other soldiers when several grenades had been thrown into their trench and exploded. Their bodies had been scattered, the corpses intermingled—severed arms, legs, heads—and rather than being buried in a grave, they were left there in the trench.

  When I went to see Rosa the following day, I found her curled in bed, her head resting on her daughter Cecilia’s shoulder. It seemed as though, in less than a day, she appeared diminished, as if all the energy she needed to look after her son had left her body with his death. “Now I am living only for Cecilia,” she said. “If it weren’t for her, I would not live a moment longer.” And then she began to moan, as if slowly tearing old fabric.

  During those war years, I slept at Rosa’s from time to time. Sometimes while we talked, we walked about the apartment, circling the rooms, the hallway, the balconies. On these long walks in that enclosed space, the only room we did not enter was Hermann’s, where he had slept until he went off to war. Only once did Rosa crack open the door, and before closing it she said, “I always think he will return. That is why I keep his clothes, and I leave the things in his room the way he had them arranged when he left. When I sit by the window at night, I hear footsteps, and I recognize in them the sound of his steps; I get up and open the window, but there is no one in the street. Sometimes his laugh wakes me from my sleep; I go and open the door. His room is empty, but it smells the way it smelled when he was a young boy after I bathed him. When I eat, I think he is hungry. Had his body been brought back, it would have been different. How can I believe he died in a trench with a hundred other soldiers?”

  At the end of the war, during one of our family gatherings in his home, Sigmund read aloud a telegram that had just arrived with the news that his sons would soon be returning from the front, and I thought of Rosa but did not dare look at her. I thought of her those days when I saw mothers on the streets embracing their sons returning in columns from the front.

  The first spring after the war, I met Johanna Klimt. A year earlier I had heard that Gustav had died, but I did not go to the funeral; I did not go to see Klara, nor did I contact her.

  “After his stroke, my brother lay motionless a whole month before he died,” said Johanna. “Klara spent those thirty days at his bedside. Then, several weeks after his death, his two oldest sons died, one after the other, on the front. After that, Klara just sat in the corner of the room, not saying anything, not answering our questions. I brought the Gustavs to her, because she had taken such good care of them, and I thought concern for someone would return her to this world. But she stayed in some oth
er world. That is why I decided to return her to the psychiatric clinic. Now I am taking care of the Gustavs: I visit their homes where they live with their mothers; when they are sick, I take them to the doctor; once a month, I bring them money from their father’s estate. But I know I cannot care for them the way Klara did. The mothers of the Gustavs say, “Your sister was the best mother in the world,” and the Gustavs agree. They constantly beg me to take them to the Nest to visit their aunt, but I refuse. “That is no place for children.”

  Johanna set off for her home, and I for mine. Then I changed my mind, and I headed to the Nest. On my way there, I imagined Gustav lying on his bed after the stroke, unconscious, and Klara sitting beside him; she knows he is going, and for the first time she looks at him—seeing him not as her brother and protector but as her child—and she tries to wake him from that which is not sleep, and from which he will never return. She speaks to him, and it is no longer the voice of the sister who begged him to protect her from their mother; it is now a mother’s voice trying to comfort her child in his mute pain, a mother’s voice, different from their mother’s voice, a voice with which Klara tries to assure him that everything will be fine, that this will pass, not realizing that this is her way of reassuring herself. And when she learns about the loss of the two oldest young Gustavs she cannot reassure even herself.

  “Do you want to see Klara now?” Dr. Goethe asked when I entered his office at the Nest.

  “I will see her when I come with her Gustavs,” I said.

  I was there with the twelve of them one week later. Dr. Goethe told us that Klara had been placed in another room.

  “Why isn’t she in the room she spent years in?” I asked, but Dr. Goethe only waved his hand.

  We walked along the corridors. From some of the rooms, heads popped out—pensive heads, frantic heads, dreadful heads, terror-stricken heads; they looked at us with their tired eyes, their empty eyes, their eyes filled with fear, rapture, insane joy, unfounded hate, and unfounded love, eyes filled with disgust and delight. They pursed their lips in silence; they thrust them out in wonder; through them they emitted some barely audible word. They blessed or threatened; they shouted in pain and in joy. Several of the Gustavs were quite frightened. The youngest, four-year-old Gustav, held me firmly by the hand and clung to me, hobbling me as we walked.