Freud's Sister Page 4

  I did not leave the barracks all afternoon. I sat on my bed, looked at Ottla’s empty bed, tossed the things she had left me from one hand to the other: several pairs of underwear, a dress, a skirt, two shirts, socks…

  Several days later, Eva gave birth. While she was in labor I sat on the bench in front of the barracks, and after the little one had been bathed I was allowed inside. They handed me the little body; I held Eva’s little daughter. I was happy. I looked back and forth from the newborn to the mother, who lay exhausted on the bed.

  “I do not know what name to give her,” Eva said. “My husband and I never came up with a name for the child; our only concern was for it to be born alive and healthy. If only I could tell him now,” she said, and began to cry. When she calmed herself, she begged me to give it a name.

  “Amalie,” I said.

  “Amalie,” Eva repeated.

  I went every day to the barracks for pregnant women and those who had just given birth. I sat on the bed beside Eva and looked at this new life. This new life breathed, looked, blinked, cried, slept, nursed. I listened to Eva when she told me how much she hoped that she and her husband would meet again.

  One morning I told Eva that all the old women in our barracks were being taken to another camp.

  “Promise me,” she said, “promise me that you will look for my husband there. Pavel Popper. Please, remember his name. Pavel Popper.”

  “Pavel Popper,” I repeated.

  “Promise me you will look for him in that camp. And if you find him, tell him he has become a father. Tell him his daughter is named Amalie. Tell him that she and I are well. And that we will meet again one day. Promise me.”

  “I promise you,” I said.

  And then I had to go. I stood up, kissed Eva on the forehead, kissed Amalie on the crown of her little head, and, before I left, reached my hand in above my heart, between my brassiere and left breast.

  “I did not give you anything for the birth of your daughter. I had nothing to give you. But now I remembered…” I said, and from above my heart, from between my brassiere and left breast, I pulled out the linen baby bonnet. “I bought this bonnet many years ago. It is older than you are.” I laughed. Eva laughed, too. “Look at it—it is falling apart. I did not know why I took it with me, but now I do. Maybe in the wintertime Amalie will need it.”

  Eva took the hand with which I held the bonnet out to her, and she kissed it.

  Looking at the palm of my hand that held the invisible trace of Eva’s lips, I slowly set off toward the door leading out of the barracks. And when I got there, I opened it; then I turned around, and I saw Eva nursing Amalie. I looked at them, my view wavering between fear and hope. I looked at Eva and Amalie as if wanting through them to look back in time, down the long chain of mothers and daughters, not only the mothers and daughters who flowed through their blood, but all mothers and daughters, from the beginning of the human race to that moment, each one blood to blood. Then I turned and left.

  I spent that afternoon in bed. From time to time, I propped the blanket up on my fingers a few inches above my head, and I looked into the white linen sky.

  The following day they shoved us into a freight train, and our trip began. In the dark railroad car, which had earlier transported livestock—one could smell the animals—we sat on the floor, pressed one against another. Closest to me were Paulina, Rosa, and Marie. We traveled a long time.

  It was night when they shoved us from the railroad car. Then they loaded us into trucks, and several minutes later they unloaded us in front of the entrance to a building sunk in darkness. A woman in uniform told us that we needed to shower before being housed. She told us that before we went into the next room we were to get undressed, and each of us should remember where we left our clothes. We undressed slowly. When I took off my brassiere, out fell the yellowed photograph of all of us: the Freud sisters, our brothers, and our parents.

  They ordered us to move toward the door. We entered a dark room. They closed the door behind us. Almost immediately there was an audible hissing sound. I sensed the bitter smell. Someone’s fingers pressed my fingers. I knew it was Paulina. I knew that on her face, even in that moment, flickered the smile that some blind people always have, even as they shrink before terror and mortal fear. Some of the old women around us screamed. Others prayed. Death was coming near me, death was before me, and I closed my eyes before my death.

  3

  AT THE BEGINNING OF MY LIFE THERE was pain. Like the quiet dripping of blood from a hidden wound. Drop by drop. Although I was sickly as a child, my pain was not my illnesses but my mother. Perhaps I was also the pain of her life, or I was the point at which all her pains converged and dispersed. My mother, Amalie Nathansohn, was still at the age of innocent daydreams when her parents, without asking her, agreed to give her in marriage to the wool merchant Jakob Freud, who was already a widower and had just become a grandfather. With her husband, who was older than her father, she had to leave Vienna and move to a small town, where she forgot both to dream and to cry. In 1856, in a rented room above a blacksmith’s where she lived with her husband, she brought Sigmund into the world; the following year she gave birth to Julius, who died eight months later; and then she gave birth to Anna. For months the only food in their home was bread and salt, and when they were down to a few handfuls of flour they decided to move to Vienna, where Jakob assisted Amalie’s father in his textile business. They moved from one apartment to another in the Jewish quarter Leopoldstadt, and on each street they lived on, yet another child was born to them: Rosa on Weissgerberstrasse, Marie on Pillersdorfgasse. I was born on Pfeffergasse, Paulina on Glockengasse, and Alexander on Pazmanitengasse.

  I was sickly as a child, and Mama was constantly at my bedside. I would see her face just as I awoke, then for several hours she would leave to scrub the floors in the homes of wealthier families, and when she returned home she would stay with me, leaving my bedside for only short periods, to straighten up or prepare something to eat. At some of those moments, while coughing, vomiting, or feverish, when I was on the brink of unconsciousness, I would hear her say, “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you.”

  At the beginning of my life there was pain, a wound wounded by the thought that my existence meant Mama’s unhappiness. Perhaps Mama could not help but cut that wound in me. I was the point at which all her pains converged and dispersed: the premature conclusion of her dreams, her marriage to a man who had just become a grandfather, the death of her second son and the raising of her children in poverty, the constant move to smaller and smaller apartments, the scrubbing of floors in the homes of the wealthy. All these things converged in me, in my illnesses, in her fear for my life. That is why she hated me so much, speaking in a voice in which one would pronounce the fatal judgment, “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you,” and why she loved me so much. She loved me to the point of forgetting her unhappiness.

  Sometimes, when I breathed heavily, she would sing me a lullaby about the mother who kept watch over her child the way the moon keeps watch over the earth. Sometimes she would take me in her arms and we would go outside the building and walk along the avenues lined with trees; with one hand she would support me, pressing me to her breast, and with the other she would reach up and pick flowers from the lowest branches of the lindens, the chestnuts, and the acacias, and then she would hold the flowers between our faces. Sometimes she would take me in her lap, and while we sat by the window with the snow falling beyond it, she would tell me fairy tales in which good always triumphed over evil.

  At the beginning of my life there was love, like a breeze that comes to warm you when life turns cold. And since then, whenever life brought cold that froze my soul, I longed for that warm breeze as for a balm. At the beginning of my life there was love: my mother’s look, her hand on my forehead, her concern for my health. In those hours in bed with fever, in my half-consciousness I could see Mama, her look of concern for my life, her
hands that placed cold cloths on my forehead, that removed my clothes, damp with sweat, and that dressed me in new ones. Yet sometimes, while my look drank in hers, her eyes would suddenly change, and where there had been concern, there would now appear hatred, and her lips would utter the words I feared as much as death: “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you.”

  Because of those words, I wanted to die and for Mama to grieve over my dead body. That change in her look and the utterance of those words lasted an instant, just an instant, but they stayed with me even when love returned to her face and to her voice; that hatred and those words slipped even into my dreams.

  During the night, I often awoke from dreams in which Mama was leading me to a river and we stopped in the shallows, but then she took hold of my small head and shoved it underwater until I lost my breath and I saw fish biting me in the face; or Mama turned into a wild beast and tore me to pieces; or I was a bird that she did not know was her daughter, and she would capture me, cut off my head, and then scald my headless body and pluck my feathers. I would wake up in the room where I slept with my four sisters and carefully get out of the bed I shared with Paulina, then on tiptoe go to the window. I wiped away the condensation that had collected on the windowpane, but I did not wipe away my tears. I looked through the window at the street, or else at the reflection of my face in the glass, and I repeated my mother’s words: “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you.” And much later, when it was too late for everything, I understood those words. Saying them to me, speaking them about my existence, she really wanted to say to herself, “It would have been better if I had not been born.” She lived in such a way that her hatred—toward her own existence, toward those things in her life that were more horrible even than nonexistence—was divided in two.

  At the beginning of my life there was love and pain. To the very end they went together, as balm to a wound, but sometimes the balm itself turned to a poison that inflamed the wound still more. My mother’s hatred hurt me most, but no one loved me as she loved me. No one, not even my brother Sigmund.

  Sigmund was six years older than I was. I remember him coming near my bed and bringing me a spoonful of honey, or an apple he would first stroke my cheek with and then bring close to my mouth. While I slowly ate the apple, he would tell me about two lovebirds. This was a story not written down anywhere, a story my brother dreamed up for me, or that I thought up much later, trying to recall my childhood. As I swallowed, he told me how, one morning, one of the birds flew off and never returned, and the other, from grief, pierced her breast with her beak and tore out her heart. When all that was left were the inedible parts of the apple, my brother would put his lips to my forehead, to check my temperature. Perhaps, because of my sickliness, my brother was more tender toward me than toward his other sisters, and before I slept he always kissed me on the forehead, in secret, because Mama would ridicule any gesture of closeness toward me. He showed his tenderness only when she was not at home, when she went to scrub floors in the homes of the wealthy, or to help my grandfather and father in the textile store.

  With the end of my early childhood came the end of my illnesses. I could now go to the back garden with my sisters, who played there with the neighborhood children, but a vague fear compelled me to remain by the window. As soon as I awoke—and I always awoke earlier than my sisters—I would go into the kitchen. I knew that Mama would be there—lighting the fire, sewing, or preparing food—and that Father would already be at the store. I would sit beside Mama, and she would give me a boiled potato or a piece of bread and butter, and while she worked, while I chewed, I would wait for my brother to come into the kitchen. I knew he was already awake and was reviewing the lessons from the previous day. After Sigmund had left for school, my sisters would go out into the garden behind the building, but I would stay near Mama and watch her work. I looked at her hands and face as she did laundry, scrubbed the floor, patched, embroidered, cooked. When my illnesses ended, Mama even stopped repeating to me that it would be better if she had not given birth to me. From then on she began to compare me with other girls, to tell me that I would never be like them, to tell me that my life would always be a painful void.

  When Mama was not at home, I went to Sigmund’s room. In each of our homes, he had his own room—these were usually tiny rooms that had been rearranged, rooms that had been pantries before we moved in. I would enter his room, with its small window that looked more like a crack in the wall, and I would stop by the bed. I would stand in one place, and only my gaze traveled: along the walls, the floor, the shelves, where my brother’s books and clothes were neatly arranged. I took care not to spend too much time in that little room, so that my mother would not return before I left it. Even before she gave birth to him, she believed he would be, as she used to say, “a great man.” When she was pregnant, my mother met an old woman who prophesied just that, and my mother often repeated the woman’s words: “a great man.” But she always called him by diminutives: “my golden Siggie,” always little, always hers.

  I wanted to be in my brother’s room most of all when he was there. I sat in the corner and watched as his eyes moved along the pages of his books, as his lips moved, silently uttering the words he read. When he had time, I begged him to read aloud to me in one of the languages he knew, or to tell me about what he was studying at that moment, which was often as incomprehensible to me as if he were speaking in an unknown language.

  My father would return from the store only after it was dark, and even then, in the little time he spent with us, he seemed absent. He would exchange a few words with Mama, ask whether everything was fine with us children, with our home, and then he would take down the Talmud and, sitting apart from the rest of us, read quietly in Hebrew, a language sacred to him but that none of us, his children, ever learned. When they came to Vienna, our parents had decided, as had many other Jews in the city, that they would pass their Jewishness on to their children only through their blood, not through religion. They hoped that their quiet assimilation, the preservation of only those invisible marks of our ancestry—those in our blood—would make us equals with the other citizens, while they themselves kept their faith as silently as Father read the Talmud. Our father drew near to us only when he shared the stories of Noah, Jacob, and Moses recast as fairy tales, but beyond that he kept his distance, always conscious—in the way that some people are conscious of having done something much later than when it should have been done—of the difference between one time and another. He looked at us children, who were younger than the children of his children from his first marriage, and perhaps his consciousness of this was the greatest gulf between us, a gulf that led us to call him Father, not Papa—Father, with the resonance of Sir. He froze all his warmth before it reached us.

  On the day I was to set off to school for the first time, I begged my parents to allow me to stay home. I stayed home the next day as well, and the days that followed. After that, when my brother returned from school I went into his room, where he took out one of his textbooks and leafed through the pages, telling me what he thought I needed to know.

  Every Sunday, Father and Mama went for a stroll in the Prater with Anna, Rosa, Marie, Paulina, and Alexander. Sigmund stayed home with me, with the excuse that he needed to study. But as soon as we were left alone he would put his book aside, and we would lie on the bed that I shared at night with Paulina and cover ourselves with the blanket, propping it up with our fingers about a foot above our heads, and then we were transported to a blissfulness where we felt like joined vessels. In that closeness—would it endure forever and a moment more—as we simultaneously inhaled and exhaled under the white blanket sky, Sigmund told me about the wonders of nature, about the longevity of stars and about their death, about the unpredictability of volcanoes, about waves that erode the shore, about winds that can caress but also kill, and I felt the intoxication of his words, of his breath, of the touch of our bodies lying one beside the other.
We remained in that intoxicated state until we were exhausted, until I fell asleep, though I would wake at the bustling sounds of Mama and Father and my sisters and little brother when they returned. Sigmund most likely awoke long before I did, or he did not sleep at all; when the commotion woke me, he was never in the bed beside me.

  On one of those Sunday afternoons, after listening to Sigmund’s words mixed with the beating of my heart, I felt myself breathing more and more slowly, my eyes closing tight. I was lying there neither awake nor asleep, in some half dream, and I heard my brother quietly, barely audibly, ask whether I had fallen asleep. I lay still, breathing calm and level, not because I wanted to deceive my brother, but because I did not want to interrupt my pleasure. Gently he slipped out from under the blanket and left the room. I remained lying there awhile and then slowly pulled off the blanket and got up. I headed out into the hallway and toward my brother’s little room, and then pushed the door open a crack and stood in the doorway. Inside, Sigmund was lying on his bed. His pants were unbuttoned and resting just above his knees, and he was looking up at the ceiling. He was moving his right hand down that thing I was seeing for the first time. I felt my heart beating in my throat and heard his panting. He was breathing faster and faster. Then I watched as he closed his eyes, and his whole body stiffened, his mouth opened, and he quietly cried out. I heard myself shrieking. Startled, my brother turned toward me. I darted back to the hallway and to the room where my bed was. Lying down, I covered my face with my hands and cried. I felt that the whole world of my childhood—the hours in which my brother had taught me in his little room, where I sat in the corner and observed how he noiselessly moved his lips while he read, the hours in which he passed on knowledge to me, the way we lay on my bed and felt that we would never be parted—all this was extinguished forever. The sense that my brother and I were parting hurt me. It was my first awareness that he and I would set off on separate paths. I tried to catch my breath. I heard his voice.