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  In the bedroom Dr. Goethe took us to, there were ten women lying on the beds. Some were motionless; others tossed in their beds, mumbling; one of the women’s arms and legs were bound. At the end of the room, in the corner, lay Klara on one of the beds in a white nightgown. She was huddled up—legs curled, knees to her chin, and heels by her bottom. She had folded her arms and pressed them to her chest, and she was staring at the wall. The twelve Gustavs and I stood by her bed. Then the oldest of the brothers sat down beside her.

  “Auntie Klara,” said the oldest, seventeen-year-old Gustav.

  Neither the name nor the familiar voice moved her. She continued to breathe uniformly, staring at the wall.

  “We’ve come to see you,” he continued. “We are all here.”

  Klara did not move.

  The youngest Gustav came up close to his aunt and stroked her hair. He was too short to see her face turned to the wall. The oldest of the brothers, the one sitting on the bed, placed his hand on hers. Her hands were closed in fists. Not clenched, just closed into fists.

  A woman who was lying on the other side of the room began to shriek. Her shrieking impelled the other women to howl, to cry, to laugh. One of them threatened to set everyone on fire. Klara alone remained silent. Her silence was louder than all the surrounding shouts.

  The oldest of the brothers turned to Dr. Goethe.

  “Isn’t it too loud for her in here? Everyone is screaming, but she is silent.”

  Dr. Goethe wrote “No” in the air with his index finger, and then he repeated that “No” out loud several times and continued:

  “She was alone in a room until just recently. In the same room she had lived in for years. But when she was placed in that room a few months ago she did not say a word. So last week we transferred her here. Surely the quiet of the room where she was alone was killing her even more. She needs provocation. I think these cries will drive her to speak.”

  “These cries will drive her to drown in silence forever,” said the oldest Gustav.

  “You are mistaken,” said Dr. Goethe.

  “It is not important whether I am mistaken. It is important that you stop torturing her by keeping her here amid this squalling.”

  “I do not think she is being tortured here. Look at her face. When we brought her here from her peaceful room, her face was alarmed. In that room, Klara was silent and motionless, as she is now, but her face was set in an indescribable grimace. Now it radiates serenity.”

  Indeed, Klara’s face was that of a serene corpse. The sons of Gustav Klimt looked at their aunt lying there, curled up like a fetus, her face as expressionless as an embryo’s. The youngest Gustav went up to her feet and touched her heels. I placed the palms of my hands beside his, on Klara’s heels. Her heels were as cold as a corpse’s. Klara remained with her eyes fixed on the white wall and was breathing steadily.

  “What if this is self-anesthesia,” I said. “What if she is killing herself to save herself from these shouts?”

  “You are speaking about things you do not understand,” said Dr. Goethe. Then he turned to the Gustavs. “Go along now, children. You have seen your aunt. It is time for you to go home.”

  We headed toward the door. I let the twelve Gustavs out into the corridor, and then, before I could leave, the youngest Gustav turned back. He went to Klara’s bed, bent down close to her head, and set his lips as if to kiss her, but she was turned toward the wall and the bed was too high, so he could not reach her face. Then he went to the lower end of the bed and kissed her heels, which lay at the edge of the bed. He turned and ran out of the room.

  The following day, I went to see Sigmund and begged him to insist that Dr. Goethe return Klara to her room, and shortly thereafter my brother told me his colleague had accepted the request. Upon waking I would always try to convince myself that I should visit Klara again, but soon I found an excuse not to. There was an epidemic of pneumonia and the Spanish influenza in Vienna. Hundreds of people were dying every day; schools, theaters, the opera, and movie houses were closed, and people were instructed to leave their homes only when necessary. In that year, 1919, immediately following the end of the illnesses that set in after the war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, exhausted from the fighting, collapsed, and we remained in the part that henceforth was called Austria.

  It was a Sunday afternoon when we learned from Sigmund that Sophie had informed him she was pregnant with her third child. Since her marriage six years earlier, she had not been to Vienna, and during that time Sigmund and Martha had visited Hamburg only twice. The Great War had intervened, and travel was impossible, and then, at the end of the war, rail lines between Austria and Germany were broken. During those months, my brother communicated with Sophie daily by telephone; one month before the birth, Sophie told him she was feeling quite ill. The following day his son-in-law, Max Halberstadt, told him there were complications in Sophie’s condition and that she had been rushed to the hospital. A day later, Max called again to tell him that Sophie had died.

  When I saw him for the first time after Sophie’s death, my brother sat motionless, his gaze fixed somewhere in the middle of the table. As soon as he heard that we were beginning a conversation about Sophie, he said, “There is no greater tragedy than to experience the death of one’s child.”

  “Death” and “child.” At some time long before, when those two words were uttered close to each other, I felt something stab my womb.

  “There is no greater tragedy than to experience the death of one’s child,” my sister Rosa repeated.

  Martha’s quiet sobbing could be heard in the room, mixed with the clinking of the knife and fork that shook in her clenched hands and struck her plate.

  In the fall of that year, my sister Marie arrived from Berlin, several days after her daughter Martha had thrown herself from a bridge into the Spree River, where several years earlier her son Theodor had also drowned. Her husband had been dead for many years. She stayed with us until the beginning of winter, and whenever the conversation among the three of us—her, my mother, and me—died out, Marie noiselessly left the room and came back much later, her eyes red. She returned to Berlin at the end of that winter, when the snow was already melting.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1922, Mother, Rosa, and everyone in Sigmund’s household went on vacation to the Vienna Woods. It was a muggy summer. Everything was steamy, and the city shimmered before one’s eyes, as if it were about to melt in the heat. Some mornings, while it was still bearable to go outside, I walked to the building where both Sigmund and Rosa lived, and rang the door at my sister’s to awaken my niece Cecilia. She was twenty-three years old, and beautiful in the way Rosa, the most beautiful of us five sisters, had been. One morning, I saw that Cecilia had opened the windows wide; it was one of those rare mornings that summer when there was wind, and the curtains were flapping like white wings stretching toward the street. I entered the building, climbed to their floor, and rang the bell. I waited, then rang again. Then I put my hand on the door handle. It was not locked, so I entered the apartment. All the doors and windows were open. The only sound in the apartment was the sound of the breeze. I went to Cecilia’s bedroom. She was lying on the bed with a letter beside her, and an empty pillbox on her nightstand. She was lying peacefully, as though asleep. Her body was still warm. I looked at her, and I thought of my sister Rosa. I sat on the bed beside the dead body in a white nightgown. I picked up the letter, in which Cecilia explained why she had done what she had done. She had fallen in love with a married officer and had become pregnant. He told her he would not marry her. “I know that one cannot compare the horror of shame with the horror of loss,” she wrote to her mother. “But the shame would have killed me anyway, and I would not have been able to give a good life to the child I would bear. I would not be able to look after it the way you looked after Hermann and me. I would not be able to love it the way you loved us, nor sacrifice myself for it as you sacrificed yourself for us. And since I cannot give it the sort of life it
deserves, the life I am obligated to give it because that was what was given to me, it is best to give it no life, and to take my own. I know that one cannot compare the horror of shame with the horror of loss, and I cannot forgive myself that in order to save myself from the horror of my shame I am giving you two horrors, both shame and loss. But I know that you can forgive me, and I beg of you that forgiveness.” The handwriting was calm, as if she had been writing some simple message, a note to say that she was going out and would return soon. And then a white space, and below, in an entirely different handwriting, were wobbly letters, surely written when she sensed she was sinking into what resembled sleep: “Be strong, as always.”

  I set the letter on the pillow. I ran my hand through Cecilia’s hair, her long black hair. I spread it out on the pillow, across the sheets of paper on which she had written her letter. I thought of Rosa, remembering the words she had spoken after her husband’s death, when her children were young: “Now I am living only for them; if it were not for my children, I would breathe my last at once.” I remembered the words she had spoken after her son’s death: “Now I am living only for Cecilia. If it weren’t for her, I would not live a moment longer.” I placed my hands on Cecilia’s belly, there where yet another life had ended, and I felt pain in my womb. I had placed my hands on Cecilia’s belly the way one holds something alive, something that needs to be kept from decay, and my womb still ached. I then bent down and kissed her forehead.

  My sister returned to Vienna that same evening. She spent the night on the bed, in embrace with the dead body. Sigmund and I sat in a corner of the room. Every so often, one of us got up and tried to persuade Rosa to go rest. She did not listen but remained lying there, stroking and embracing the body, whispering something inaudible, and only by the tone of her voice could we understand when she questioned and when she reproached her daughter, when she pleaded with her and when she cursed her.

  “Now I have no one to live for” were the only words my sister Rosa would repeat after her daughter’s burial. All other thoughts came and went; even those everyday things, those we repeat by habit, seemed as if they would never return to her mouth after she spoke them. The one thought alone returned again and again, as if with it she were trying to convince her body that it needed to expire. Her body became weaker and weaker by the day, and the doctors advised her to go somewhere to regain her strength. She went with Mother to Bad Gastein, and they returned half a year later.

  The first evening after her return, my sister did not want to sleep alone in the apartment, so I spent the night at her place. Before we lay down to sleep, Rosa said to me, “I constantly ask myself whether I was a good mother. Did I give my children everything they needed? Did I tell them everything I needed to tell them? Did I say one word too few, or one word too many? I feel I said some things that should have been kept quiet, and I did not say some things that they needed to hear. But it is useless to think like this, because their lives are now a closed conversation, and mine as well.”

  She pulled out two photographs, one of her daughter, the other of her son, and she touched them with fingers dampened by sweat or tears.

  Around this time, my brother became alarmed about a growth of some kind in his mouth that bothered him when he ate. The doctors told him it was his body’s reaction to excessive smoking. He thought there was no need to tell his household about the minor surgical treatment; everything would be done in an afternoon, and he would be home again that evening. During the operation he lost a great deal of blood, and the hospital called Martha and Anna to have them bring him the items he would most need. The following day, however, he insisted on going home. I went to visit him that evening. Because the wound in his mouth was still raw, he could not speak, so he wrote his questions and answers on a sheet of paper.

  A day later, his son-in-law, Max Halberstadt, telephoned him. He spoke with Anna and asked whether his son Heinerle, who had just had his tonsils out, could come to Vienna for a while. He was very sickly. The doctors had examined him, but aside from the problems with his tonsils they could discover nothing, and they said that it was likely the Hamburg climate did not agree with him.

  From the moment we saw him, it was clear to us that he was not going to live long. Each of us kept that thought from the others; the thought was evident only in our eyes when we looked at him, but he just smiled when he noticed our contorted expressions riveted on his face. There was something old in that smile. He smiled at us not in the way a four-year-old does but the way an old-timer, freed from fear, sneers at death. His grandfather Sigmund, excusing himself on account of his recent operation, his many patients, and his writing, left Heinerle to be cared for by his daughter Matilda in her home. Matilda was happy with this: She had had an operation in her early youth that left her unable to have children. It was her life’s misfortune, and now she was happy to take the place of her deceased sister and provide motherly care to this youngster. She said that in the evenings she would hear sounds coming from the room where Heinerle slept, something like whispering or singing or sobbing. When she went in, she saw his lips slowly moving, emitting a barely audible sound, as if he were singing something. He sang or whispered or sobbed in his sleep. And it was like that every night.

  Heinerle did not remember his mother. Sophie Freud Halberstadt died when he was thirteen months old; he knew her face from his father’s photographs, and he had heard about her from his brother, Ernst, who was a few years older. When he saw her framed photograph during his first visit to his grandfather’s home, he recognized her and said his brother had told him she was now lying in the ground. They rarely brought him to Sigmund’s.

  “Maybe Grandpa wants me to visit him,” he said when Matilda brought him to our place.

  “Of course he wants that, but it is difficult for him to have visitors,” Matilda answered. “He was operated on two weeks ago.”

  In fact, he was busy. He was always receiving patients, and in the evenings he wrote.

  “I had an operation two weeks ago, too,” said Heinerle.

  We knew that, but no one asked him how he was doing, whether his throat hurt when he swallowed; every day we forgot to take his temperature, although his father told us the doctors said it had to be done regularly. We were all thinking about Sigmund: Anna was concerned the wound from the operation would not heal properly; my mother was afraid it was perhaps a more serious illness and not an ordinary growth; Minna made sure he had peace and quiet so he could dedicate himself to his writing; Martha did not allow him to wear himself out working with patients; Matilda constantly procured new medicines; and I did everything not to be too conspicuous in my insistence on going to visit him as often as possible with my mother. So we failed to notice that Heinerle was getting thinner and thinner, that all that was left on his little head were a few straight blond hairs, below which his bulging eyes flashed and his greenish skin darkened. No one thought he needed conversation when we heard him whispering to himself while we talked about Sigmund, nor did we ask him what he was afraid of when we saw he was frightened by a glass turned upside down on the table.

  One afternoon at the beginning of June, when Matilda had left him in my care while she went about Vienna in search of medicines for Sigmund, Heinerle said to me that it must be very beautiful now in the parks, and I just nodded my head. “And the flowers must smell wonderful,” he continued. I murmured something in affirmation, and he added that the birds must be singing more beautifully than ever, and twice he whistled through his lips, imitating the chirping of birds. I did not see him often, but even from those few meetings I knew he never asked for anything. His desires were always hidden among his words of observation, his delight, or his disagreement. He looked at me in the expectation that I might recognize his wish. I did recognize it, and I kept silent. Heinerle sensed that silence, and fled from it by turning his gaze toward the flies that flew about the room.

  “Is it true there are flies that live only one day?”

  “Yes, it is.
They are called mayflies.”

  “If you were to live only one day, then would you go to the park, would you smell the flowers, would you see the birds, or would you stay home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Are mayflies afraid of death?”

  “They cannot be afraid of it, because mayflies don’t know what death is.”

  “Is it better not to know and not be afraid or to know and be afraid?”

  “The best is to know and not be afraid.”

  “That is not possible,” he said.

  “It is possible,” I lied.

  He thought a bit, then asked, “But what do you do if you are afraid of death?”

  In his voice I recognized my own fear when I was a child.

  “We don’t disappear when we die,” I told him. “A person is like the hand inside a puppet that makes it move. When someone is born, that person slips into his body like a hand into a puppet. When the body dies, the person pulls out from it like a hand from a puppet.”

  “I’ve never had a doll that slips onto your hand.”

  I remembered he never asked for anything.

  “One day I will make you a doll like that.”

  “I’ll wait. I’m not a mayfly, so I have time.”

  When Matilda got to our place, and as she prepared to go home with Heinerle, something struck the window outside and frightened us. Heinerle said, “That was a bird. It probably thought the window was another sky.” The two of us pretended we did not hear him when he added, “I would so like to go to the park and watch the birds.” We all knew he never asked for anything. His desires were always hidden among his words of observation, his delight or disagreement. He looked at us, expecting us to recognize his wishes. We did recognize them, but we kept silent. Heinerle sensed these silences, and he fled from them by turning his gaze toward a spot on the wall, toward the flies that flew about the room, toward the window. Matilda left him alone at home more and more often when she went to buy medicines for Sigmund, and to bring them to him, and she told us that whenever she returned to her apartment she would find Heinerle seated on the floor with an open chessboard, his hands holding the figures, and he would be talking to them.