Freud's Sister Read online

  In my brother’s study there were souvenirs, books, boxes large and small, antiques strewn everywhere, everything anyone had ever given him and he had saved. Sigmund sat in his large red armchair in the middle of the room, surveying the objects spread about on the floor. He turned toward us, barely nodded, and turned his attention back to the disarray. I told him we had come to wish him a happy birthday. He thanked us and set our gift on the table beside him.

  “As you can see, we are leaving,” he said. “For London.”

  “I could help you,” I said. “With the packing.”

  Anna said she would hand me the things to be discarded; I would put them in a box while she organized the objects in the boxes they would later mail to London. Paulina remained standing by the wall.

  “This cigarette case?” asked Anna, turning toward her father, displaying a silver box set with several green stones.

  “A gift from your mother. We will take it.”

  Anna put the cigarette case in the box beside her.

  “This ivory domino?” asked Anna.

  Sigmund thought a moment or two, then said, “I do not recall who gave it to me. Throw it out.”

  Anna handed me the domino, and I dropped it into the box beside me.

  “This?” asked Anna, picking up a book and bringing it closer to Sigmund’s eyes.

  “That Bible was a gift from your grandfather Jakob for my thirty-fifth birthday. We will take it.”

  Anna said she was tired because she had been working since morning and wanted to take a small break. She went into the dining room to stretch her legs and get a drink of water.

  “So you requested exit visas from Austria after all,” I said to my brother.

  “I did,” he said.

  “You assured me there was no need to flee.”

  “This is not fleeing. It is just a temporary departure.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Martha, Anna, and I are leaving at the beginning of June.”

  “And those of us left behind?” I asked. My brother said nothing. “When are Paulina, Marie, Rosa, and I leaving?”

  “You aren’t.”

  “We aren’t?”

  “There is no need,” he said. “I am going not because I want to but simply because some of my friends, diplomats from Britain and France, have insisted that the local offices give me exit visas.”

  “And?”

  My brother could have staged a farce, could have told us that some foreign diplomat had pleaded that he and his wife and children be allowed to leave, and that he himself was powerless to do anything to save others. He could have staged a farce, but that was not his genre.

  “They allowed me to make a list of people close to me who would leave Austria with me,” he said.

  “And there was not an instant in which you thought to put our names down?”

  “Not an instant. This is only temporary. We will return.”

  “Even if you do return, we will no longer be here.” He did not say a word. Then I said, “I have no right to ask, but I will anyway. Who is on the list of those close to you that you need to save?”

  “Indeed. Who is on the list?” asked Paulina.

  My brother could have staged a farce, could have told us that he had written down only the names of his children, his own name, and his wife’s—those whom the officials would have expected to be on a list of people to be saved—only his closest relatives; he could have staged a farce, but that was not his genre. He pulled out a sheet of paper and said, “Here is the list.”

  I looked at the names written on the paper.

  “Read it to me, too,” said Paulina.

  I read it out loud. My brother, his wife, their children, and their families were on the list, as were his wife’s sister, two housekeepers, and my brother’s personal doctor and his family. And at the very bottom of the list: Jo-Fi.

  “Jo-Fi,” said Paulina, laughing. She turned toward the sound of Sigmund’s voice. “Ah, yes, you are never parted from your little dog.”

  Anna came back into the room and said, “I didn’t ask whether you wanted something to drink or whether, perhaps, you were hungry.”

  “We are neither hungry nor thirsty,” I said.

  Paulina continued as if she had not heard Anna’s words or my own: “It really is lovely that you thought of all these people. You even thought of your little dog, and your housekeepers, and your doctor and his family, and your wife’s sister. But you could have thought of your sisters, Sigmund.”

  “If it were necessary for you to leave, I would have thought of it. But this is only temporary, because my friends insisted that I leave.”

  “So why did your friends insist that you leave, if it really isn’t dangerous to stay here?” I asked.

  “Because, like you, they do not grasp that this situation will last only a short time,” said Sigmund.

  “Well then, if this terror is going to last only a short time, why aren’t you going alone, for only a short time, to placate your friends? Why aren’t you going alone, rather than taking not only your family but also your doctor, his family, two housekeepers, and even your little dog and your wife’s sister?” I asked.

  Sigmund said not a word.

  “Sigmund,” said Paulina, “unlike Adolfina I believe you. I believe that this whole terror will last only a short time. But my life will last a shorter time than this terror. And I have a daughter. You, Sigmund, you could have thought of your sister. You could have remembered me, and that I have a daughter. You surely remembered, because ever since I came from Berlin, and my Beatrice left for New York, I have spoken often of her. I have not seen her in three years. By just writing my name, you could have helped me see my daughter one last time,” she said, and at the word see she turned toward him her eyes that see only contours. “You could have put my name down, between the name of your wife’s sister and the name of the dog. You could even have written it below your dog, and that would have been enough for me to be allowed to leave Vienna and be with Beatrice. I know now that she will never see me again.”

  Anna tried to get us back to separating the things to be packed from those to be left behind.

  “And this?” she asked. She held a wooden object in the palm of her hand—a gondola the size of a finger.

  “I do not know whom it is from,” said Sigmund. “Get rid of it.”

  Anna handed me the gondola, the present I had given my brother for his twenty-sixth birthday. I had not seen it since, and now here it was, floating down through time. I placed it gently in the box among the other objects to be thrown away.

  My brother stood and walked toward the opposite wall, toward the canvas on which seven decades earlier we had been painted, the Freud brothers and sisters. Alexander, who was a year and a half at the time the portrait was made, later recalled that when he had grown up a little, Sigmund told him, pointing to the painting, “With our sisters we are like a book. You are the youngest and I the oldest. We need to be the sturdy covers that hold and protect our sisters born after me and before you.” And now, many years later, my brother stretched his hands toward the painting.

  “We will pack this separately,” said Sigmund, reaching to take the canvas down from the wall.

  “You have no right to that painting,” I said.

  My brother turned toward me, holding the painting in his hands.

  “It is time for us to go,” said Paulina.

  At the entrance to the building we met Sigmund’s sister-in-law coming in. She said that she had been buying some basic things she needed because she was to leave Austria the following day.

  “Have a nice trip,” Paulina said.

  I led my sister homeward, holding her by the hand. From her clenched fingers, I knew how she felt. I looked at her from time to time; on her face flickered that smile which some blind people have fixed on their faces, even when they are feeling fear, anger, or terror.

  ON A HUMID DAY at the beginning of June, Paulina, Marie, Rosa, an
d I set off for the train station to see my brother off, along with Martha and Anna, the last on Sigmund’s list to depart from Vienna. The three of them were standing at the open window of their compartment; the four of us were standing on the platform. My brother held his little dog in his arms. When the whistle announcing the train’s departure shrieked, the dog shook with fright and, panic-stricken, bit Sigmund’s index finger. Anna took out a handkerchief and tied it around the bleeding finger. The whistle sounded once again, and the train set off. With one finger bandaged, the other four curled tight, my brother waved goodbye, the outstretched finger and bloody handkerchief moving through the air.

  2

  THE EVENING OF THE DAY OUR BROTHER left Vienna for good, my sisters quietly discussed how important it now was for him in London, with his friends’ help, to make it possible for us, too, to leave as quickly as possible. I listened to my sisters’ reports of horrors, but in place of the apocalyptic events they spoke of, there appeared before my closed eyes only my brother’s bandaged index finger waving through the air.

  In the months after my brother’s departure, Martha and Anna called us occasionally from London. They told us that Sigmund had had new operations on his mouth, that he was getting better, but that he could no longer speak. The cancer had also damaged his hearing so much that he communicated with them in writing. I recalled the time when we were children, and my brother was teaching me how to write. Martha and Anna told us that they were living in a beautiful house in a quiet London suburb, and they reassured us over and over that Sigmund’s friends were doing everything they could to help us get visas out of Austria, and then we would all be together in their house.

  The four of us learned to live with our fear; it was a fear not of death but of torture. We had to wear the Star of David on our sleeves so that the restrictions imposed on all Jews could be enforced: we were no longer able to go to the theater, the opera, a concert; we could not go to restaurants or parks; we were not allowed to ride in taxis; we were allowed to board trolleys, but only the last car; we were allowed to leave our homes, but only at strictly defined hours; our phone lines were cut, and we were allowed to use only two post offices in the city.

  It was a September day when one of the sons of my friend Klara’s brother came to our home to tell me that Klara had died at the Nest, the psychiatric clinic where she had lived for years. He asked me whether I would go with him to the burial. My sisters were at a neighbor’s; on a piece of paper I wrote them a note telling them where I had gone.

  Several months prior to this, the new municipal leaders had decreed, as one of the many changes in Vienna, that those who died in a specialized clinic could not be buried in public graveyards, but only on the grounds of the clinic. And so these dead were buried there in shallow holes, placed not in a coffin but in a sheet.

  I entered the room where Klara’s body lay. I was told that she had died in her sleep; her face was so peaceful that no trace could be seen of her sleep, of her life, or of her death. She lay curled up as she always was when she slept, with her legs folded up, her head down on her chest, and her hands clenched to her stomach. Her body was already rigid. We wrapped her, still curled like this, in a sheet.

  “Just like a fetus,” I said, when they carried her from the room she had called a womb.

  “Too big for a fetus, too small for a person,” replied one of the doctors.

  In fact, no one would have thought there was a human body wrapped in that sheet.

  It was raining hard, and there were barely twenty of us who went outside. The others remained standing by the hospital windows, where they watched through the bars. We laid the sheet with the body in the waiting hole. People shoveled mud onto the sheet.

  Later that afternoon, I returned home. My sisters were sitting at the table in the dining room. Rosa looked at me with red-rimmed eyes and said, “Anna called. Sigmund died last week.”

  “Klara died. Last night,” I said.

  “They cremated him.”

  “We buried her today on the hospital grounds. We dug a shallow grave. We didn’t have a coffin. We wrapped her in a sheet. It was raining.”

  It was raining outside. The raindrops struck hard at the windows. The sound they made struck at our words.

  I went to my room and lay down on the bed. I thought of my brother. I did not try to imagine the last moments of his life. I did not try to imagine him barely moving. I did not want to hear how the last drops of strength forced him to inhale and exhale, nor did I want to know what was going through his head in those moments—whether he was tormented by the thought of his sisters who had repeatedly called his home, begging for some way to be found to get them out of Vienna, whether he had any weight on his conscience from suspecting that they, too, would be taken to the death camps. I did not try to think of the last moments of his life. It was enough for me to know that he was dead, that he was at peace, without bodily pain, without spiritual torment, because surely in the next world the soul is liberated from all suffering and self-reproach. It is only while it is here that the soul cannot be completely assured that everything is as it should be, and that it has done what it had to do in order to fulfill some higher, yet unfathomable, plan.

  I woke up in a sweat. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the darkness was descending through the dark purple of the clouds. I remembered my dream. In it, Sigmund was dead.

  “I am very much alone,” he said, “although alone is not the right word. One can be alone only as long as others exist. Look, there is no one around. There is no one here.”

  “Everyone is right here,” I said to him.

  He shook his head.

  “No, there is no one,” he said.

  “Everyone is here,” I said. “You just need to look for them.”

  “I am looking,” he said. “But no one is here. Everything here is empty. Take a look. Here there is only light, and nothing else. And when the light is alone, without anything around it, it is empty, bare. It is the most awful prison, from which there is no escape, because there is nowhere to escape to. The deadly light is everywhere. And there is no one else in it.”

  “Everyone is here,” I told him. “It’s just that you are looking too much at yourself, so you cannot see the others.”

  “No,” he said. “There is no one here. But perhaps that is what death is: to exist forever, to be conscious, and to be completely alone. Completely alone. It would have been better if I had simply vanished after death, better if I were not present. I once believed that that is what it would be like after death. Even a vision of the most terrifying hell is less dreadful than this hellish detachment, this eternal wakefulness in a deathly emptiness.”

  “No,” I told him. “We are all here. Just turn your gaze away from yourself. We are all here, the living and the dead.”

  “You stay here at least,” he said.

  “I am staying here. We all are. You just need to see us.”

  “This is punishment,” he said, and he clenched his fists and slowly raised them toward his head. “I am being punished with this frightening emptiness.” He lowered his head and banged his forehead on his fists. “And I know why I am being punished.”

  “You are not being punished,” I said.

  “I know my own guilt,” he said, and he looked at his fists. “Forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “You have not done any evil. You neglected to do a good thing; in our lifetime, all of us neglect to do many good things. And we cannot measure which lapse will allow evil to swallow someone.”

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  His appearance slowly began to change. He began to return to a time many years before. He was getting smaller, and he reached an age at which I had not known him, an age before I was born. He kept getting smaller and smaller, until he was a tiny nursling. A naked, crying baby. I scooped him up in my arms, uncovered my drooping shriveled breast, and brought it to his lips. As my brother pulled milk from my withered breast, I fel
t a wondrous pleasure from the contact of his lips on my nipple. And, as I woke, I knew that I was waking, and I regretted that the bliss of nursing him would not last.

  AFTER THE DEATH of our brother, Paulina, Marie, Rosa, and I sometimes went to the building in which he had lived prior to his departure from Vienna and looked through the windows of his apartment. A man in uniform now lived there. From time to time, a neighbor or a friend would drop by our apartment for a visit, and the conversation would turn to the impending war. “Yet another great war”—that is what everyone was saying, and then, in fact, the war did begin. Young people were mobilized and taken to the front; lists were compiled of the residents of our quarter, who were then loaded onto trains and carried away from Vienna forever. Although it was said they were being taken off to perform hard labor, we knew they were being taken to death camps. We knew, and we waited for our turn to come. One morning, soldiers distributed lists to the buildings along our street, informing us of what we would be allowed to take with us, and ordering us to be at the train station at the end of the quarter at six in the morning, on the twenty-ninth of June of that year, 1942.

  The morning of the day prior to our departure, we packed in small suitcases everything we would need until the end of our lives. I spent that afternoon walking about our apartment; I went from one room to another, my way of saying goodbye to our home. My sisters spent that time looking through old photograph albums; they laughed at the clothing we had worn a half century before, at our serious faces, at bodies frozen at the moment the photograph was taken, and from time to time I heard a sigh, probably for someone in the photographs who had died, most likely one of Rosa’s or Marie’s children. It was not yet dark when I grew tired and stopped walking about the apartment; my sisters, however, continued looking through the albums. Marie and Rosa told Paulina what was in the photographs, and Paulina asked questions while running her hands over their smooth black-and-white surfaces.

  I slept peacefully that night, and when I woke at dawn I turned to the bloody trace on the wall by my bed. That faded trace, more faded than old age, will remain even when I no longer exist, and then that trace, too, will disappear, together with the wall, together with my home. With my lips set for the release of my soul, rather than for a kiss, I kissed that dried stain of blood. Then I woke my sisters; we ate breakfast, picked up our suitcases, and set off. But, just as we were stepping out of the apartment, Paulina said, “Let’s not forget the photographs.”