Freud's Sister Read online

  During the course of an examination, the doctors noticed a new growth in Sigmund’s mouth. We worried increasingly about his health, and we did not notice that Heinerle was weakening by the day. We thought the temperature of his forehead was part of his excitement from the change of setting, his coughing due to a cold—up until the morning he could no longer get out of bed, and several days later when the doctors diagnosed miliary tuberculosis. He was placed in the children’s wing of the Vienna General Hospital, and Matilda and I spent several days in his room taking care of him. When the doctors said his condition was taking an irrevocable turn for the worse, his father caught the train from Hamburg, hoping to find him still alive.

  While I sat by Heinerle’s hospital bed, I tried to turn his attention away from his body’s torments. He was breathing heavily, and his breath was cut short by coughing that tore at his chest. From time to time he wiped his sweaty palms on his pajamas.

  “Where’s Grandpa?” he asked.

  “He is sick,” I said. Sigmund was preparing for his next operation. The whole family was also preparing for it. “He can’t come.”

  He wanted to say something, but his words ended in coughing. I wiped his mouth, and he wiped his sweaty palm on his pajamas, then rubbed his forehead with his palm, and again wiped the sweat on his pajamas.

  “You once promised to make me a doll,” he said, and of everything he had said, that recollection was the closest he had ever come to making a request.

  “I will make you one.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  “Can you make it now?” He tried to prop himself up on the pillow, but he couldn’t and so remained lying down. I adjusted his pillow, half resting it up against the wall, so that he could lie with his head elevated a bit.

  “I don’t know if I will find everything I need here,” I said, and I looked around for fabric with which to make a puppet. Everything was white, all part of the hospital inventory. “I will make you a puppet at home, and I will bring it to you tomorrow.”

  “Please,” he said. He had never pleaded before, as if he felt that even his pleas were too much like demands. “Now,” and he wet his dry lips with his tongue.

  I took one of the two white cloths that had been left on the nightstand by his bed. I pulled a thread from it and tied it around where the neck should be. From my purse I took out a fountain pen, and with the ink I dripped two dark blue eyes on the puppet’s head.

  “Here you are,” I said, and handed him the cloth. “When we find everything else we need, we will make it hair, a mouth, and a nose.”

  He thanked me, and with my help put his hand inside the fabric.

  “What will you name it?”

  “Heinerle,” he said. “The doll is me.” He smiled. “You told me that when a person dies he comes out of his body like a hand out of a puppet.”

  “That is how it is,” I said.

  Heinerle coughed, then brought his fabric-covered hand to his mouth. When he took it away, the puppet’s face was bloody. Heinerle’s eyes rolled back, and he lost consciousness. I took the damp cloth that was lying on the nightstand and wiped his forehead. Heinerle regained consciousness. He looked at the puppet on his little hand. Then he looked at me. He tried to say something, but his tiny voice had completely dried up, and his gaze, turning toward the puppet with the bloody trace across its face, slowly died away. His hand fell to the bed. I closed his eyes and slipped his hand from the puppet. A strike at the outer windowpane startled me. I turned, but there was nothing there. Surely a bird had struck the glass, “thinking it was another sky,” as Heinerle had said.

  His father arrived that evening. The following day, he boarded the train to Hamburg, carrying his son with him in a small coffin.

  That afternoon, Sigmund had his second operation. Several days later, against the doctors’ advice, he left on a trip to Rome with Anna. On the second day of their trip, a scab tore from his unhealed wound, and it had been almost impossible to stanch the flow of blood that filled his mouth. When he returned to Vienna, he was diagnosed with cancer. In October of that year he had two more operations, and in November another. Glands beneath the upper part of his lower jaw were removed. His upper jawbone and palate were removed. A large prosthesis separating his oral and nasal cavities was inserted, enabling him to speak and eat.

  The first time the family had lunch together after Sigmund’s prosthesis had been inserted, we recalled Heinerle and the way he talked to himself. Then we talked about other things. While listening to the others talk, I rummaged several times through the pocket of my dress. There I kept a small piece of cloth, the hastily made puppet with the bloody trace across its face. I kept that scrap of cloth for years in the drawer with the photo albums in the cupboard where I kept my clothes, and sometimes I carried it with me. Once, when I was moving it from one place to another, I left it somewhere in the apartment. Later, I found my mother holding it, looking at the trace of blood.

  “This must be blood,” she said when she saw me come into the room.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “Blood is red, and this has a brown tint.”

  “Then this blood must have dripped a long time ago to have turned brown, and for the brown to have faded like this.” She opened the window. “I will let it fly away,” she said, and she threw the scrap of cloth out the window.

  IN THE LAST YEARS of her life, my mother became frail. Before that, she had possessed the gait of a young woman. She walked every day to see her friends (she was a half century older than some of them) and to play cards; once a week she went to the movie theater, and she never missed a theatrical premiere. When the first automobiles roared through Vienna and my brother was trying to learn to drive, she said to him, half in jest, half seriously, “My golden Siggie, buy me an automobile. I will learn to drive.” She was like that up to her ninetieth year, and then it seemed that all those years when time had stopped had caught up with her, and suddenly she looked old; only the features of her face remained the same—sharp, as if chiseled in stone. She no longer wanted to see anyone who was not family. She walked unsteadily and did not leave the house unaccompanied, and even those walks ended quickly; she would stop, say that she no longer recognized the city, and then she would turn back toward home. She did not recognize some of her women friends she would meet by chance on her walks, and when they came up to her she would hide her confusion by asking general questions. And then she began not to recognize things, to get them confused. She once took out a knife to cut bread, but then, thinking it was a needle, asked me to bring a shirt so she could mend it. She arranged potatoes in the shoe cupboard. And that rag puppet with the faded bloody trace on it? It had likely turned into a bird the moment she held it, and she let it fly away.

  It was August when my mother could no longer leave home. Every afternoon she leaned against me, and the two of us went out on the balcony. We sat for a long time and looked out at the street through the bars of the balcony railing. My mother used to comment on each passerby; now she looked with an absent gaze and said nothing. In the course of that summer, the features of her face, sharp her whole life, softened all at once. She had a look that now, in place of its former sharpness, had something that resembled tenderness but was actually disorientation; and her lips, rather than being pursed, now relaxed at the edges and drooped. She no longer looked like herself. One afternoon, while we were sitting on the balcony, my mother asked, “Will he come?”

  “Who?”

  “Sigmund.”

  “He will come. He always returns to Vienna at the end of September.”

  “He needs to come earlier this time.”

  Sigmund spent the first half of his summers in Italy, Greece, or at a spa, the second half in the Vienna Woods, where he had a cottage. My mother and Rosa went to the Vienna Woods with Sigmund’s family, and sometimes they also went with him to the spa. That summer—1930, the last summer of her life—my mother stayed with me in Vienna. She sensed she wou
ld never again see the spas, or the Vienna Woods, and so in our conversations she recalled her former travels, what had happened when and where—events with her grandchildren, conversations with Sigmund, Rosa, Martha, and Minna—and then her voice would suddenly change, and she would say, “But those summers you stayed here alone.” One of those afternoons, after I had carried chairs out to the balcony and helped my mother sit down in one of them, I noticed on the balcony railing a dead swallow. When she saw me putting it into a box, my mother asked, “What is that?”

  “A swallow,” I said, shutting the box.

  “Will you keep it closed up inside?”

  “It is dead. I picked it up to throw it away.”

  “Dead…to throw it away…” she said, then placed her hands on the arms of the chair, as if she wanted to get up. She turned toward me. “Will Sigmund come?”

  “He will come,” I said. “He always comes back after his holiday at the end of September.”

  “This time he will be late,” she said.

  “No. He will come at that time again.”

  “He will come at that time, but he will be late.”

  Whenever Sigmund called, I told him that our mother wanted to see him. Our mother had been going deaf for years, and she could not hear anything over the telephone. While I spoke with Sigmund, she understood from my words that I was speaking with him, and she looked at me with the gaze of the aged who—without fear, only hesitation—are preparing to die. As soon as I finished our conversation, she said to me, “Take me outside.”

  I grasped her under her arms, and slowly we went out to the balcony. Stooped, diminished, she sat in the chair with her arms on the arms of the chair, not to lean on them but as if clenching them to keep herself from falling to the floor. She was silent a long time, and then she said the words she had held in her mouth while I was speaking with Sigmund: “That means he is not coming.” And she slumped even farther down in the chair. Everything around us was steaming from the heat. The street was empty; flies flew about in the air. My mother started to tremble, and she said, “It has never been so cold.”

  At one time, a time when I was helpless, when she crushed me with her words and actions, I longed for the moment when my mother would be physically weak, wished for the time when I would be able to pay her back, to avenge myself. Now she was helpless, and had she been only physically weak I could, perhaps, have returned the pain she had caused, but the Amalie Freud who cut with her words no longer existed. In her helplessness I recognized the helplessness of my childhood and my youth, and understood that each of my unfriendly words or actions toward that being who was slowly dying would be not revenge but cruelty against myself, against my memory of that child, that girl, against that young woman I once was.

  At the beginning of September, my mother developed gangrene in her right leg. While I bandaged it, she seemed to look with resignation at the open wound. Whenever she rapped her cane on the floor, I knew she wanted to go out on the balcony. Supporting her, I led her out; she moved by hopping on one leg and leaning on me and on her cane. We sat and looked toward the street.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “We just ate lunch,” I said.

  “I am hungry for the food I ate as a child. I want bread. Just bread.”

  I brought some bread. She lifted it to her mouth, moistened it with her saliva, and crumbled more than swallowed it. Then she set the rest of the piece in her lap alongside the crumbs and looked a long time at the scraps. When she raised her head she said, “Look at that child flying.”

  “That is not a child,” I said. “It is a balloon.”

  “A balloon,” she repeated, as if she did not recognize the word. “Now even looking makes me tired,” she added, and closed her eyes.

  At one point her hands, which had been firmly holding the arms of the chair, relaxed, and her head rolled slowly forward, as if she were bowing deeply to someone. She fell asleep. It was a warm September day, but I knew she was cold, and I knew the cold made her dream of winter and frost. She dreamed that she had been left somewhere alone, and that snow was falling on her. I got up and went into the apartment for a blanket. When I returned, I saw that sparrows had gathered in my mother’s lap and were pecking at the breadcrumbs. She was still sleeping peacefully—perhaps in her dream the sparrows were singing her a lullaby with their chirping. When I drew near her, the sparrows flew off; I brushed away the droppings some of them had left in her lap. Then I covered my mother with the blanket.

  When she awoke, it was already growing dark. I gently helped her up from the chair, led her into the apartment, and brought her to her bed.

  “Stay with me tonight,” she said.

  Although during the thirty years since my return home we had somehow grown close, some lingering trace of our former enmity remained, and something kept me from lying down beside her on the side of the bed my father had slept on until his death.

  “I will sit,” I said, placing an armchair by the bed.

  We spent the night beside each other, barely saying a word. I sensed she wanted to tell me many things, but she said none of them. Thoughts and feelings shimmered around her like a blue light around the moon, but not a single one was turned into words. I looked at her; I had a premonition that this was her last night. And I remembered those nights of despair in my youth, a time when my mother, with ruthless delight, poured salt into the open wound of my soul. I remembered that during those nights I longed for this night, for her last night; ten thousand nights before this night I wanted revenge, and revenge could come at only the moment of her greatest powerlessness, to remind her, in her powerlessness as she was facing death, of my powerlessness and of her cruelty in my suffering. Yet now I looked at this Amalie who had nothing in common with that Amalie, and although the powerlessness of this dying woman reminded me of my former powerlessness, I either did not want or was unable to awaken in myself the cruelty she used to have within her and with which she pressed me so that I sank ever deeper, the cruelty with which, had I awakened it in myself, I would truly have been her daughter not only by blood but also by the cruelty that would make her suffer because of her own cruelty, my cruelty that would take delight in her despairing remorse.

  I looked at her, and she looked at me; we said not a word. Before the night was over, she fell asleep; her dream, her last dream, was calm, short. Before she awoke, she stretched out her hand, as if seeking someone in her dream. She opened her eyes; I did not recognize her look; it was as though she were looking not at me but at some other woman. She stretched out her hand toward me. I offered her my hand.

  “Mama,” she said to me.

  When I heard someone call me Mama, for the first and last time in my life, time collapsed. At one time, my mother’s mother had thought my mother was her mother and I was her daughter Amalie. Now my mother thought I was her mother. She held me by the hand awhile, and then her eyes rolled back, she began to breathe heavily, foam formed on her mouth. I called the doctor. When he arrived, he examined her and said she would die that day. I sat by her bed, I held her hand; I listened to her raspy breathing. Somewhere around noon her hand let go of mine. I closed her eyes, stood up, and went out on the balcony. A light September rain was falling, and I brought inside the two chairs my mother and I had sat on during the summer afternoons.

  After my mother’s death, months passed and no one came to the apartment, where I remained alone. Sometimes I went to Rosa’s. She spent the better part of the year at the baths. On Sundays we always gathered for lunch at Sigmund’s, but after our mother died he no longer came to my place on Sunday mornings. Once a month, I made a beggar’s gesture: I stretched out my hand to my brother for money to live on. The nights were different now, the quiet thickened in them, and I thought it would begin speaking to me. I became indifferent to maintaining the order of daily routines: the dust piled on the floor and on the windowsills; spiderwebs hung on the walls and on the chandeliers; the dishes remained unwashed for days and grew moldy
. I ate as stray dogs eat, with no order to my meals, no set place to eat. I did not know where or at what hour I bit into my food, chewed, swallowed. In days that flowed one into another, I walked along the streets, my eyes cast down, the way lonely people walk, as though they believe their rejection by the world is written in their eyes.

  Both fall and winter passed, and then, as I did every spring, I took two chairs out to the balcony. That spring and summer, I sat alone on the balcony, and I no longer looked toward the street but at the empty chair. That fall, when the weather turned cold, I gathered up my chair but left my mother’s outside. I watched as the wind sometimes blew through it, carrying a dried leaf, or while some bird—a little sparrow, a crow, a pigeon—stood on it to rest, to sharpen its beak on the metal arms, or to leave its droppings. And then one winter morning I went out to the balcony, and I saw that snow had fallen on my mother’s chair and covered her empty place.

  On one of those lonely winter days, I was startled by the sound of the doorbell; no one had rung it for so long that I had forgotten it existed. I went to the door, unlocked it, and pulled it open. There on the threshold stood Klara Klimt. More than ten years had passed since I had visited her at the Nest with the twelve Gustavs.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked.

  I remembered, although the Klara I had known and the Klara who was standing before me were two different women; between them yawned the abyss that divides the shore of madness from the shore of normality. The mute and motionless Klara I had seen ten years before was the same Klara I had met earlier, when she went about Vienna with the little Gustavs, the Klara I had lived with at the Nest, the Klara I had met years before when life opened before us with its promise. This Klara stood on the other shore; aside from the ten years between our two encounters and the small shifts in her jawline and her demeanor, there was something else in her appearance and demeanor, something that shifts with the crossing from one shore to the other.