Freud's Sister Page 22

  “I remember,” I said. She hugged me.

  We went into the sitting room. She looked through the door that led to the balcony and said, “Do you remember the time we stood here on the balcony? You looked toward the sidewalk and said, ‘I want the day to come as soon as possible when I, too, will help my child learn to walk.’”

  “I remember,” I said. I felt my throat go dry. I began to cough.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am,” I lied.

  “I will take care of you,” and she hugged me. “I will sit here with you, and I will take care of you. I cared for my brother when he got sick. I took care of him, but he died anyway. You will not die. Now I know how to take better care. You will not die.”

  I asked whether she was hungry. We went into the kitchen, and while we were having some of the vegetable soup and bread left over from the previous day, she told me about the residents of the Nest who continued to live there. As she slurped up her soup, Klara said, “I owe you an apology.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t talk to you when you visited me. I wanted to talk to you, but I couldn’t.” She touched my fingers. “Forgive me.”

  “You didn’t offend me. There is no reason to seek my forgiveness.”

  “Sometimes, when I am afraid to fall asleep alone in my room, I become silent again and turn to stone. Then they take me from our room.” And she smiled as a person does when recalling good times past. “And they take me to one of those rooms where the patients scream, scream, scream. The screaming is a punishment for my silence. I lie there, and I feel I will suffocate, and I do not know what is suffocating me—is it the others’ screams, or my silence? And when that feeling of suffocation becomes intolerable I start to speak. Not much, a word or two, just enough for one of the doctors or orderlies to hear me and return me to our room.”

  She got up, gathered the crumbs from the table, went to the window, opened it, and threw the crumbs outside.

  “For the birds,” she said, and closed the window. “Gustav always fed them.” She smiled. It seemed as though all the layers of time had been wiped from her face and her brother were there in front of her. “Do you remember Gustav?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I remember, too,” she said, and she looked through the window where sparrows had gathered and were pecking at the crumbs. Klara began to speak quickly, in a monotonous voice. “Gustav runs around the rooms. Gustav pees behind the house. Gustav draws with charcoal on the fence post. Gustav masturbates. Gustav shouts at our mother when she bangs my head on the table. Gustav shows me a drawing of a naked woman fondling herself between her legs. Gustav has a stroke while we are eating. Gustav dies. We bury Gustav.” She turned toward me. “Dr. Goethe told me that thirteen years have passed since then,” and she shook her head in disbelief. “Is it true that so many years have gone by?”

  “It is true,” I said.

  “And now even Dr. Goethe has died.”

  “He died?”

  “Yes. Last month. Do you remember when…?” And she began to tell the story of how we taught Dr. Goethe to knit.

  It was getting dark outside. We went into my room and spoke for a long time; Klara continually began her sentences with “Do you remember…?” She returned to the past, she raced toward it, or she raced after it, thinking it would escape her, as she at one time had fled from the present to some future of hers, to those things she longed to have happen, those things she wished to accomplish. We talked until we felt our eyes closing from exhaustion.

  I left her there to sleep in my bed. I went to the bed where at one time my father and mother had slept. The thought that I had not gone to visit Klara all those years kept me from sleeping. The cowardly thought that she likely forgave me was not enough to assuage my conscience, because I knew she thought the fact that she had not spoken at that visit frightened me, cut me off. I knew she did not think that my obligation to visit her again—to ask how she was, to listen whether perhaps there was something she wanted to say or whether she wished to continue to suffocate in her silence—was stronger than my fear of her silence and of her stony stillness.

  It was past midnight when the door creaked open and Klara came into my parents’ bedroom. In her hands she carried the pillow from my bed.

  “I’m afraid to sleep alone,” she said, drawing near me. She lay down beside me and placed her head on the pillow she had brought from my bed.

  I lay awake all night, imagining her nights, trying to hear those nights, because the darkness swallowed what could be seen, and I heard the cries that broke the silence of the darkness, I heard those who were condemned to be locked in their madness and to mix their madness with the madness of others: a voice calling to its children, a voice saying it was burning and the flames were engulfing its body, the raspy voice of a woman repeating how she killed her husband. Among all those voices, there was no sound of Klara’s voice—in my attempts to hear her nights, among the cries during those nights, nights that stream into one another and flow into years, Klara remained mute, Klara yearned for quiet; Klara wanted only a small piece of this earth in which she could safely tuck her head and sleep through the night. During those nights I heard Klara breathe quickly, I heard her weep, I heard her pray, even though she did not know whom to direct her prayers to, since she had renounced God long ago, after he had renounced her; I heard Klara interrupt her prayer, and stop her crying, I heard her sniffling, and I heard her exhale; and then I heard her breathe slowly, and she seemed to push away some pain lodged in her chest. A clump has wrapped around the question “Why exist at all if one exists like this?” and she was happy as long as that clump enfolded the thought, because stripped bare, without that surrounding clump, the thought would be unbearable. And then she was overwhelmed with exhaustion from trying to cope with the noises—the whistles and shouts of the Nest increasingly seem to come from a distance, and they are no longer human voices but a sound created by the pangs of human pain, turned to rage, banging the gong of fate.

  I heard those sounds in my imagination that night as I lay awake, and I expected Klara to scream as she slept, to answer in her sleep the voices that tormented her in her reality, the voices that did not let her fall asleep, and those she had become so accustomed to that, without them, the darkness frightened her. She slept peacefully. In the morning, when she awoke, she said, “It is wonderful to sleep on your pillow.”

  We lay in the large bed in which my parents had once slept, and we looked at each other. Klara spoke about her brother’s sons. She talked about how the little Gustavs, whom she continued to call “little” even though they were now grown men, visited her at the Nest. She talked about their wives and children.

  “When they come with their children, it seems to me that the whole world is coming. One has just started to talk; another has cut a tooth; a third has fallen and scraped his knee; a fourth has learned to fly a kite, and we spend the whole afternoon out on the grounds, looking at the sky,” she said, and looked through the window at the sky. Then she turned toward me. “I would like very much for you to come to the Nest again sometime. So we can sleep just one more night together in our room.” She took my hands between hers. “I will go now,” she said. “I am going back to the Nest. That is my place. That is what the doctors say when I beg them to release me. I ran away from them this time. But that is my place. That is why I will return there.” She petted me, and while her left hand was still on my head she raised her right hand, ran it along the thinning hair on her own head, and petted herself. I hugged her. “I will run away again to visit you,” she whispered into my neck. Then she went to the door, unlocked it, and cracked it open. She turned. “But I am going now. That is my place,” she said. But before taking the step that would carry her across the threshold she remembered something and stopped. “May I take your pillow?” she asked. “It is wonderful to sleep on your pillow.”

  A LONG TIME PASSED before I went to visit Klara. When I ente
red her room, our room, she was sitting on the bed, with the pillow in her hands.

  “Let’s go to the dying room,” she said.

  The dying room, I remembered, was what we called the room where they brought those residents who were facing the end of their lives. Klara took me by the hand, clutching the pillow under her other arm, and we left the room.

  “The Good Soul is dying,” Klara said as we walked along the corridor.

  In the dying room it smelled of death, a smell of raw, disintegrating flesh, of excrement, of sweat, and, in the middle of that stench, of bodies tossing on the eve of death, and bodies stiffly awaiting it. Several of the dying, laid out on mattresses on the floor, agonized with yet one more breath. It was cold, but it seemed that something was vaporizing in that dark room.

  “This is Daniel,” said Klara, pointing to a young man I did not recognize. He was chewing his blanket, and he held his hand out to us. “And there is Helmut,” and she pointed to an old man who was lying motionless. I remembered that once, a long time ago, Klara had said that all normal people are normal in the same way, but each mad person is mad in his own way. And I thought, just as I had many years earlier when I entered the dying room for the first time, that in death everyone is different and everyone is the same. Everyone lets go of his spirit by exhaling, but each exhales in his own way.

  Klara stopped and pointed at a curled-up body.

  “There is the Good Soul,” she said.

  I continued toward the body lying on the mattress in the middle of the room. I bent down and pulled the blanket from the covered face. The Good Soul was looking somewhere off to the side. Her body was completely sunken, as if her skin had been pulled through her bones. Her lips were so stiff that she formed her words with difficulty; she continued to whisper something to Max. Only her eyes were still alive, although not with that full vitality she had had when we knew each other. Now they were alive as in a person who has seen everything, has endured everything, yet still possesses the desire to live at least one more day, the desire to continue to gaze into the emptiness and see there the one who has not existed for so many years. I looked at that vitality in her eyes, at the apples of her eyes that had shriveled and contracted, and had wasted to their hollows.

  Drawing the blanket from her face had not stirred her, so I touched her hand. She remained motionless, in the same position, but turned her eyes toward me.

  “Do you need anything?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. I did not know what to talk to her about, so I asked what it was unnecessary to ask, because I could see: “How are you feeling?”

  “Do not worry,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

  Something trembled inside me at her words; something scraped inside me, the same way her voice trembled and scraped.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “I remember,” she said, “I just can’t remember your name.” She took my hand and placed it on her breast, above her heart. “Do you need anything?”

  “No. And you?”

  “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know everything will be fine.”

  “Kiss me,” she said, and she pressed my hand still tighter above her heart. It was as if in that moment her hand touched my heart, because at the Nest we all carried those words inside us, and we hid them from ourselves, just as we hid our reason from ourselves, or those words hid from us, and we searched for them, but instead of finding them we found madness. And now here they were, after so many years, spoken as simply as a thirsty person’s request for water. “Kiss me,” the Good Soul said again, and she closed her eyes.

  I bent down and kissed her sweaty forehead. Then I said to her, “I must go now.”

  “If you need anything, come again,” said the Good Soul, watching me as I went to the door.

  “I will come,” I said.

  “And do not worry. Everything will be fine.”

  The Good Soul spoke to the emptiness for several more days, and she asked those who came to her bed in the dying room whether they needed anything, and assured them that everything would be fine.

  But that day, after the visit, I repeated to myself the words the Good Soul had spoken—“Everything will be fine”—and they paled before the question, Why did she suffer, she who had done no wrong to anyone? I repeated her words to myself—“Everything will be fine”—but they did not bring comfort. Her words came back to me in a kind of insidious mocking echo. She lay there, and something within her believed that time was not just endless self-destruction, that the universe—the entire space that stretches around us to a point unfathomable to us—is not just an immense slaughterhouse. Something inside her believed it was so. I knew this by some thread interwoven amid the weariness of her voice, by the invisible ray beyond the pain in her eyes, but to me her words, which I pronounced with her voice in my head, still came back to me with a kind of insidious mocking echo.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, the pale February sun began to melt the snow. I went out onto the balcony, and I noticed that the snow on the chair where my mother once sat had turned to liquid. It was not yet the season for sitting on the balcony; nevertheless, I set a chair for myself out there beside my mother’s.

  The snow still had not melted completely when Anna came to visit. She was then thirty-eight years old. Two decades earlier, she had begged her father to allow her to study medicine, but Sigmund did not believe that studies were for girls, and so she, as well as Matilda and Sophie, did not enroll at the university. Being forbidden an education did not distance her from him; she became yet more devoted to him, and she hated all the women who were close to him. She hated his sisters. She hated her Aunt Minna, because she often traveled with my brother. She hated the women who studied psychoanalysis alongside my brother, except for one of them, Lou Salomé, to whom she was connected by a close friendship, something that perhaps could have turned into a great and passionate love had she not promised her heart to another: her father. To his daughters, Sigmund often said, “The most intelligent young men know very well what their wives must have: sweetness, cheerfulness, and the capacity to make their lives easier and more beautiful.” And several times when I saw my niece with that mature woman, Lou Salomé, I had a feeling that Anna had discovered in her that sweetness, that cheerfulness, that capacity to make her life more beautiful and more cheerful (although Lou did not appear to anyone else as sweet, cheerful, or capable of making someone’s life more beautiful and more cheerful), and perhaps Anna wanted to make Lou’s life more beautiful and more cheerful, but she was hindered by the fact that she lived for her father, and I imagined that, after his death, concern for his works would give meaning to her life.

  His immortal works. From her earliest youth, she was determined to devote her life to him; her daily routine consisted of the arrangement of what Dr. Freud had written, in consultation about his patients, the organization of his professional travel, assisting in the management of his illnesses. Sometimes she related to him as a daughter, sometimes as a spouse, sometimes as a child, most often as a scholar. But behind her cheerfulness and chattiness, behind her grand idea to serve her great father, one sensed a kind of mute emptiness. Long ago, back in her childhood, her father, consciously or not, had laid the groundwork for that emptiness, turning Anna into his companion, his interlocutor, his confidante, and his confessor. With her, he had also broken the ironclad rule he had given to all psychoanalysts: patients cannot be people who are close to them, whether parents, spouses, brothers or sisters, or children, because that would allow for the manipulation of their everyday life, and the analysis itself would fail. His daughter, however, was his patient; she told him her secrets, hopes, dreams, and longings, extinguishing them before they became true longings, which she would have set out after, and which would have separated her from him.

  That winter morning when Anna visited me, she told me that she and Sigmund were going to a spa, and that prior to that they would stay several
days in Venice. Minna was to have traveled with them, but she had taken ill, and I could now go in her place. I smiled, and nodded hesitantly. I recalled how, many years earlier, when Rainer and I spoke for the last time, I reminded him that we had once dreamed of living in Venice.

  It was afternoon when we arrived in Venice. I did not see what I had once longed so intensely to see; a curtain fell between my eyes and Venice, a veil that through the years had become less translucent, ever darker, a curtain that divides us from everything around us, and makes it seem that even what is within arm’s reach is of another world, a world that does not belong to us, and to which we do not belong.

  My brother suggested we board a gondola.

  “No,” I said.

  “But when you were a girl you said that when we got to Venice the first thing we would do was ride in a gondola.”

  “When I was a girl,” I said.

  Anna said she would ride the canals alone. Sigmund told her we would wait for her at a set time in front of the clock tower in Piazza San Marco. I saw how the gondolier helped Anna climb in, and then she waved to us as she moved down the canal; she called out to her father that she would tell him how her trip along the canals had gone. The meaning of her life was to exist for her father; even riding in the gondola had meaning for her only if she could tell him about it.

  Sigmund suggested we go to the Palazzo Ducale, or to the Church of San Lazzaro or the Querini Stampalia Museum. I said it would be best if we took the shortest route to Piazza San Marco and waited for Anna there.