Freud's Sister Read online

  “Do you really not want to see anything?”

  “I am no longer capable of seeing anything,” I said.

  “You speak as if you were dead.”

  “No,” I said. “I speak as if I were between life and death. Neither here nor there. I believe that those things in what is called death are much more alive than what is in me now; when I die, I will be more alive in spirit than I am now. I am now at the transition between two existences, between life and death, neither alive nor dead.”

  My brother raised his hand and moved it in front of his face as if waving away flies. He did this whenever he thought what he had been told did not deserve a reply.

  We set off along the narrow alleys and small bridges across the canals; surrounding me was one of my life’s dreams, Venice, but I stared at the road in front of me, my head bowed. Although he had waved away my words, my brother could not contain his disagreement, and several minutes later, as we were walking along, he said, “You know, long ago I wrote that religions were born of the need for consolation, consolation for all the torments life gives us, comfort for all the pleasures life does not give us, comfort for the fact that death separates us from those closest to us, and from ourselves, comfort because after our short stay on this earth nonexistence follows. And this explanation of mine, that religious belief originates in the search for comfort, will last longer than any religious belief.”

  “Is that your comfort? The thought that you will live eternally through your works? The belief that the interpretations of dreams, the human unconscious, the death instinct and the life instinct will be remembered forever? Is that the comfort with which you promise yourself victory over death?”

  At that moment, we heard singing from below the bridge we were crossing; for the first time during that walk, I pulled my gaze from my steps and looked toward the canal, where several young people glided past in a gondola, singing. I tripped and fell. My brother bent down and helped me up.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. I felt a pain in my knee. I shook the dust from my clothes. Then we continued walking. I was hobbling.

  “Does your leg hurt?” my brother asked.

  “A little,” I said. “My knee.”

  “Here,” my brother said. “We will cut behind this corner and come out on the square.”

  When we reached the square, the first thing I saw was the clock tower. We still had an hour before we were to meet Anna.

  “Let’s go into Saint Mark’s Basilica,” my brother suggested.

  “The Correr Museum is here somewhere,” I said. “Do you remember when two of Bellini’s paintings from that museum were exhibited in Vienna? You and I stood in front of them for hours.”

  My brother led me toward one of the palaces on the square. We walked through the halls without stopping, until we reached the one that held the works of Bellini. My brother immediately pointed to the painting of the Virgin Mary holding the young Jesus. Once again, after so many years, I encountered that sadness on the face of the child, the half-closed eyes that look out with the gaze not of a child but of someone who has seen much more than childhood. It is a look directed not in front of him but toward some great pain, some terrible loss, as if the child senses his destiny, and his separation from the one who stands behind him so peacefully and protectively at that moment, and who, many years later, beside the Cross, will be in despair herself, because she will be unable to do anything to prevent her separation from him, her loss. That pain has descended even onto the child’s lips, and in the gesture of his hands—he has placed one high on his chest, above his heart, and with the little fingers of his other hand he holds his mother’s finger, and with his index finger seems to point downward. His mother cannot see her child’s sad disquiet; she is looking toward some other place, somewhere far away. The point where her gaze is directed is somewhere beyond the painting. Although the mother cannot see the disquiet in her child, perhaps she senses it. Perhaps she, too, knows what will be, but she knows it must be that way. She knows this is how it should be, and in this reconciliation she is calm. Her look directed toward the horizon outside the painting is perhaps a look into some other reality, where everything is preserved, and where everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be acquires its true meaning.

  “Here, this is what people expect from religion, this kind of parental protection,” Sigmund said, pointing at the painting.

  “Protection.” I only whispered, but my brother took it as disagreement.

  “That’s it exactly—protection! They expect religion to protect them just as their parents protected them when they were children. Religion is a store of ideas born of the need to make man’s helplessness bearable, created out of the memories of our childhoods and the childhood of the human race. It sees death not as an extinction, a return to inorganic lifelessness, but as the beginning of a new kind of existence. In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished—all the terrors, the sufferings, and the hardships of this life are destined to be wiped away. Life after death, which continues our life on earth, brings to us all the perfection we may have missed here.” He coughed. “Do we need to believe in such infantile ideas? Do we need to deceive ourselves in this way so that we can endure life more easily? Or is there a better way to endure one’s own existence? If we knew we were left to our own resources, that would already be something. In that case, we would learn to use them properly. Man is not completely helpless. Beginning in the days before the Flood, science has taught man many things, and his power will increase still more. As for the great necessities of fate, against which nothing can be done, he will learn to endure them with resignation. Withdrawing his expectations from whatever follows in the life beyond the grave, and concentrating all his liberated forces into his earthly life, man will possibly succeed in making life for everyone endurable. And that is the most humane, the highest goal: for each person to have a life without burden.”

  “You know that is a utopia.”

  “And is that sufficient reason for me to seek consolation in a belief that death is not the end of existence? We need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that death is not a transfer from one type of existence to another but a cutting off of existence. It is simply nonexistence. Death is cold comfort—a person expects it to give what life has denied him.”

  “You are even more afraid of death than those who seek consolation in the idea of immortality,” I said to him.

  “But that does not compel me to give myself false hope, to flee from my fear.”

  “You do not have fear. You express your ideas about the nonexistence of immortality with such indifference, as if you were convinced of your immortality.”

  “I do not understand what exactly it is you are trying to say.”

  “I am trying to say that you speak about the cessation of one’s existence as if you were condemning all of us to it but excluding yourself. There is something in your voice that says, Yes, immortality does not exist, everyone is mortal, expect for me. The coldness with which you condemn everyone to the cessation of their existence shows how much you believe that you, however, will continue to live.”

  “I have always had an unshakably negative view toward the idea of the soul’s immortality.”

  “You are not promising yourself immortality through the eternity of your soul. You are promising yourself a different kind of immortality. Someone who does not believe that the soul is eternal can hope, nonetheless, that something of his will live on; that he will, by some means, outlive death, through what he has created. One can create works or children. Children, although they are blood of their parents’ blood, are something other than the parents—often their negation, a repudiation as terrible as death. You have chosen the best path, my dear brother: you believe you will continue to live through your works. You know that humanity will read and reread your works, that it will discuss what you have said about being human, about man’s dreams and his realit
y, about his conscious and his unconscious, about the totem and the taboo, about patricide and incest, about Eros and Thanatos. This is what you expect after death: to be a prophet of prophets, not one of those who said what man would be on this earth and above the earth but what he has within him, and what he can become, and what can be explained by what he has within him, not knowing it is within him. And even now, while you are still alive, you feed on that immortality. Conceited and arrogant, you condemn us from some other place to death, us mortals. As if we did not deserve even a tiny ray of our light to endure. Yes, only one who believes absolutely that he will exist after death can speak with such arrogance about death to those he consigns to nonexistence. Only allow me to consign something to you. All those who believe they will be immortal through what they have created—regardless of whether it is the children they conceived, and whose blood carries on their own, or their artistic or scientific works—all those people are horribly deluding themselves that this ensures their immortality. Know that all this is created in matter, and that one day this matter will be extinguished and will disappear. Know that even your works, which will be read and interpreted as long as mankind exists, will one day die, and your immortality will die with them, because one day even the last person will die. You must know that you, too, are mortal, that the immortality you believe in is not immortality but an endless dragging out of your death.”

  “Let us say that it is,” my brother said. “Even so, your entire accusation that I am chasing away my fear of death with a belief in the immortality of my works does not prove the immortality of the soul.”

  “The question is not whether something of the person—let us call that a soul—continues after death. The question is this: If it does not have a higher meaning, is our existence here completely meaningless?”

  While we were talking, we walked along the perimeter of the room, without looking at the paintings hanging on the walls, and, walking in circles, I thought of the circle of life and of the unending cycle of births, deaths, births, deaths, births, deaths, births….

  “The idea of a meaning to one’s life is simply a concealed need for constant happiness,” my brother said. “Or, perhaps more precisely, the need to search for meaning arises due to the impossibility of realizing constant happiness. What is called happiness in the strictest sense of the word is an unexpected fulfillment of pent-up needs, and by its very nature can be only an episodic phenomenon.”

  “Your definition of happiness has nothing essential in common with happiness. But your definition does imply that everything is filled with meaning, not only happiness. Is all the sadness in the universe error or chance? And where does this sadness go, together with all of the past, with everything that has occurred in time? Where do the thoughts, the feelings, go? Where are all the gestures and words that have been made and spoken since the beginning of time until this moment? If they have disappeared as if they never existed, why did they occur at all? Why were there all those joyful stirrings of the heart and the heart’s despairing turns? Why were all those words of truth and of deception spoken? Why all those hopes and those disappointments? Why those wise thoughts and foolish thoughts? Why that joy and that grief? Why those evil deeds and why those good works? If time is not preserved, if every moment is not saved in some form, then time itself is meaningless, everything that occurs in time (and everything that occurs is in time) is meaningless, and everything that once was, that is now, and that will be is completely meaningless. Completely meaningless if time is a self-destructive category that inclines toward nothingness, a nothingness that devours everything that was, that is, and that will be.

  “But there is that other possibility,” I continued, “that all time exists somewhere in an eternal present, in some other dimension; there is the possibility for all times, for everything that has ever been, to exist, pulsing in parallel and synchrony, and for everything that is now, and everything that will be, to be transferred to that other dimension; and only there, and only in that way, through the encounter of all temporal layers and all existences, will everything comprehend its own meaning, which is unfathomable to us in our ephemeral existence. There what has already once decayed—and everything has decayed once already—will not decay, in the dimension where everything is preserved and saved for eternity. There, where through countless intersections each gesture and each word, each smile and each tear, each enchantment and each moment of despair, has its justification and its purpose, a purpose unfathomable to us now. This existence is, perhaps, only a riddle that will be unraveled when our existence, as it is known to us, will end, and then it will acquire its full meaning.”

  “Rather than your infantile conjectures, a person needs to ask himself a more modest question: What can people discover about the goal of their lives on the basis of their conduct, what they seek from life, what they want to attain? There can be no mistake about the answer: they strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. And those who torment themselves most with these questions concerning the meaning of life are those who, in their yearning for happiness, have succeeded least in attaining it.”

  “That is probably true,” I said. “Those whose earthly purpose, the meaning of their daily lives, was taken from them, seek this greater, celestial meaning. Well, then, let that be a comfort; let those who struggle with meaninglessness in their daily lives be allowed this comfort. Although I know it is not just comfort. In cosmic time, everything is meaningless, because in it, everything will end and lose its meaning. But in eternity everything that ended in cosmic time will once again achieve its meaning, a meaning not given to us to understand and experience while we are in our time.”

  At that moment, Sigmund stopped and raised his hand as if waving away flies. He raised his hand again but did not wave it—he held it in front of his face, not in consideration of some thought about meaning and meaninglessness but because he was looking at his wristwatch. “Anna is waiting for us,” he said.

  I turned to the wall. We were standing immediately beside Crucifixion. It held no promise. On the face of Jesus there is only resignation at the horror; on the face of his mother, horrid despair. Resignation and despair, just as in that other painting Madonna and Child, only now resignation is filled with horror, Jesus’ resignation at the moment of his expiring, and his mother, standing by the Cross, is in despair, her hands folded, her head bowed, her gaze blind to everything around her except the pain in her soul. Her eyes seemed wasted to their hollows, and in their place despair alone remained.

  “Let’s go,” my brother said, and I set off with him, leaning on his arm, limping, turning back toward the mother and the son, toward their separation.

  I SPENT THOSE SEVERAL DAYS in the hotel room. Anna and Sigmund begged me to explore the city with them, but I complained of the pain in my knee. I was, in fact, limping. I sat in my room and thought of my conversation with my brother. I thought of the humane sentiment he had expressed as we stood between the older Madonna with the crucified Jesus and the Madonna with the child Jesus: that the greatest aim the human race must strive for is to allow each person to live his life with the least possible suffering, and for each person to contribute to the realization of that ideal. On that February day in 1933, Sigmund truly believed this, but a different sequence of events was already in motion. Germany had a new leader, and our sisters had returned to Vienna. When the new German leader occupied Austria as well, my brother left for London with those whose lives he had chosen to spare; we, his sisters, were deported first to one camp, then to another. In those moments of suffering that my sisters and I lived through, his words that each person should strive for there to be the least possible suffering in this world sounded to me like ridicule.

  On our last morning in Venice, after Anna and Sigmund had gone off to explore the city, my desire to see once more those two paintings of the Madonna and Jesus was more intense than the pain in my knee, and I left the hotel. I set off toward the square, and on one of the side stree
ts I ran into a crowd. In the years that followed, I often peered at such crowds through the window of our apartment in Vienna, but this crowd was made up not of uniformed people but of masked ones. The Carnival of Venice was taking place, and every sort of creature ran past me: princesses and beggars, rulers and slaves, fish-people and bird-people. We were going in the same direction, but they were moving quickly, and as I fell behind I pressed myself against the wall of a house. I looked at their faces and bodies, at the feathers, scales, beaks, fins, and wings with which they had disguised themselves. Among them I saw a man dressed as a fool, with tight trousers, a bright shirt, and a hat with pompons. I pulled myself away from the wall and went toward him. The people were going by very quickly; they knocked into me, and I fell. I lay on the street with my hands protecting my head, and I saw dozens of feet running past me and heard happy shouts, songs, and laughter.

  After the crowd had scattered, I stood up slowly and shook the dust from my clothes. I looked in the direction the crowd had taken, toward Piazza San Marco. At the entry to the piazza, a woman was sitting on the ground, with one arm outstretched for alms and the other holding a child. I stared at her and saw her raise her hand to wave at me. I raised my hand and waved back. She lowered her hand, and I realized that she had likely mistaken me for someone else, or that she was waving not at me but at someone else, or that she was not waving at anyone, that her gesture was, perhaps, meant to brush away her thoughts, to stop herself from contradicting herself. Then she pulled out one of her breasts and began to nurse her child.

  Ten years passed from that moment to the end of my life, and I forgot the woman at the entry to the piazza nursing her child. In those ten years my sisters Paulina and Marie had to leave Berlin, and we lived once again in the apartment they had left when they married; after the occupation of Austria, Rosa joined us, too. My brother compiled a list of people who could leave Vienna with him, and we believed that, even from London, he would manage to pull us from Vienna. We believed this up until his death. We lived in poverty and fear, and then one day they loaded us onto a train and brought us to one camp and then another. And at the moment they led us into the room where we heard the hiss of gas and understood that we were standing face to face with our death, I remembered the woman nursing her child.