Freud's Sister Page 5
“Please, don’t cry.” His fingers, sticky and with a strange smell, stroked my fingers that covered my face. I felt my heart beating in my throat. “Don’t cry, please,” he repeated. He was beside me, so close and so distant. With his hands, he took my hands from my face. I looked at him, and it was as if I were looking at a different Sigmund and some other I were looking at him. I closed my eyes and felt my tears welling up. I hugged my pillow. He remained by my bed with his hands on my head. My sobbing quieted down, my rapid, broken inhaling and slow, drawn-out exhaling grew softer and softer. I remained with my head in the pillow; my brother remained beside me.
We heard the apartment door open.
“I will tell them you are sleeping,” he said, and he left the room, closing the door behind him. At that same moment I felt my tears overpower me again, and I pressed my face firmly into the pillow, clenching it so that no one could hear my voice. I lay there awhile, and then I fell asleep.
The following day I avoided my brother. I left my room only after he had gone to school, and I returned to my bed before he got home. I did not go to his room, as I had always done when he was at home, nor did he come looking for me, as he had done when I failed to knock on his door. That day, everything disgusted me, from the water to the food, my body, words, and the air, which, with repulsion, I inhaled in shallow gulps and quickly exhaled, then waited as long as I could until the next breath. A strange fever gripped me; it simultaneously exhausted me so I could not stay awake, yet shook me so I could not fall asleep. I spent the next day in bed. In my delirium, my body and soul found a way to keep me from thinking about the changes that a single sight had wrought. I do not know whether my brother had told me, or whether I had made it up myself, the fairy tale about the bird that lost its beloved and, in its grief, pierced its breast with its beak and tore out its heart. While I lay there half conscious, I felt that something was pecking at my chest, as if it wanted to reach my heart.
Those evenings, from the moment I lay down until I fell asleep, I remained turned toward the wall with my eyes closed, and I felt pain and fear beat inside me with the same rhythm. I was afraid of life, of what must come with it, and I ached with that fear. It was my awareness of the difference between my body and my brother’s that hinted at the changes that must come, and that I did not know about. Much as I feared that difference, and much as the thought pained me, I was equally afraid of, and pained by, the mystery of relations with other bodies. It is something that is passed down from generation to generation long before one hears of it, before it is seen or experienced, a record carried in the blood, firmly etched but cloudy and inexplicable in childhood. I began to experience pain, and fear of that trace written in the blood, with my awareness of the difference between my body and my brother’s.
Many years later I read a study in which Sigmund, then middle-aged, explained how one becomes a woman. He wrote that the female child begins to become a woman “when she sees the genitals of the opposite sex for the first time. She immediately notices the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance.” With this observation, every girl “feels that she is seriously damaged,” and therefore “becomes a victim of penis envy. All this will leave indelible traces on her development and the formation of her character.” If womanhood is indeed achieved not through something essential within a woman but through something external to her, her observation in childhood that she does not have the same sexual organ as a male, her observation, as my brother stated, that she has been “castrated,” then why is the result of that awareness envy, and not sadness, or fear, or indifference: sadness that the sexes are different; fear of that difference, fear of the other sex; indifference toward the difference? My brother did not allow that observed difference to give rise in any of the girls-who-are-becoming-women to other feelings except envy; he placed that envy as the locus around which the I in every woman is created. When my brother communicated this to the world as absolute truth, he did not recall my pain that afternoon when he was thirteen years old, and I was seven, that pain and fear produced by the sight of the differences in our bodies, of the thought of growing up and separating from childhood, from the presentiment that my life and his life were not going to continue together and would march on separately toward death. He forgot that afternoon and the sadness and fear that flowed from it and descended on me like a shadow transforming itself into a different sorrow, into a different fear, pouring into other sorrows and fears. He forgot. And to the maturation of every girl, that process he called “becoming a woman,” he attributed one trait only—envy.
In my childhood, in my fear and my pain, only Mama noticed that something had been severed between my brother and me. She knew, not only because in the mornings I began to come to her in the kitchen only after I had heard my brother leave for school and to withdraw to the bedroom I shared with my sisters before he came home, but also by the way my face changed when my brother and I happened to be in the same room, how we avoided looking at each other, how our breathing altered. My brother no longer went on walks with me, nor did he play outside with children his age, because his time for games was over; his friends sometimes came to see him in his room, and when he went out to visit one of them Mama would come over to me and say, “Today is a beautiful day,” as she drew back the curtains to let the sun enter the room. Slowly, I began to go out with Mama. We went to the market or to the shop where Father was. Sometimes I went down the stairs alone and out the front door of our building, down to the end of the street, and back again. From time to time, without saying hardly a word, Sigmund would give me a book he had borrowed for me from the school library. Likewise, after I had read it, I would silently return it to him and wait for him to bring me another. Even when he was not at home, I never entered his room. I avoided being in the same room with him; however, just as before, I waited for his return from school, or from visiting a friend. And when I heard his steps in the hallway I lay down on my bed, pulled the cover over my head as we had once done together, holding it with our fingers above our heads, and in place of my former joyful intoxication I felt a pain pecking at my chest, as if trying to reach my heart.
4
SHADOWS, WITH THEIR HINT THAT PERHAPS we, too, are shadows of some essence that will remain a mystery to us until we return to it, are one of the wonders of daily life that often go unnoticed. Only occasionally will someone peer into the shadow thrown by clouds or by a tree, or into his own shadow, and that moment will seem to hint at some revelation.
There was something of that union of shadows, that touch of reflections, that weaving of two intangibilities, in those moments when Rainer and I were together. I met him when he was nine years old; I was two years older. He had eyes that were different from the eyes of every child I had seen. His were eyes that cried inward, with tears that fell somewhere deep inside him, and they did not bring him the release that comes with weeping. Until then, I had been afraid to get close to other children (to me, my brother Sigmund was never a child); some sort of strange unpleasantness washed over me even in the presence of my sisters. But as soon as I saw Rainer I wanted to be near him. Little by little I drew close, and once I called to him so our shadows could play. It was autumn, and I said, “Our shadows can touch each other even if we don’t touch.” And our shadows played together.
That was the year my brother enrolled in medical school. It was a time of changes. Grandfather had died, and his store had passed to my parents. Mama no longer scrubbed floors in the homes of wealthy families but helped my father in the store. We moved to a larger apartment on Kaiser-Josef-Strasse. That year I wanted to learn to paint. Sigmund and I had long been distant, but this desire of mine renewed our closeness. We were eating dinner when I said I wanted to learn to paint. Mama had a good laugh at that. She said I had not wanted to go to school because I was incapable of basic learning. She said I also did not know how to converse, and so I did not play with other girls; she said painting was not for girls.
My brothe
r remembered my wish, and a week later he told me there was a painter who gave free drawing lessons in the home of one of his professors. The painter, whose name was Friedrich Richter, was from the area around Munich. He and his wife had lived in Vienna when their son was born, and had then returned to their estate near Munich, but now they had come back to Vienna because they had heard that Dr. Otto Auerbach, my brother’s professor, could help children whose souls were filled with sorrow. Because Dr. Auerbach believed that proximity to other children would help Rainer, he allowed Friedrich Richter to hold drawing classes in his home for the children of the professors in the medical faculty who were the age of his son. My brother had asked that I be allowed to attend the classes, and every Sunday afternoon he brought me to the home of his professor.
Out in the garden, when weather permitted, or in the house when it was cold, Friedrich Richter taught us how a point develops into movement and line, how a line widens into a surface, how a surface becomes space. When the classes were held in the garden, we often noticed Sarah, Dr. Auerbach’s daughter, watching us from the window of her room. Sigmund told me that Friedrich Richter gave her drawing classes on other days, because Sarah Auerbach had difficulty walking, and our drawing classes were more of a game, a pastime, child’s play, and less about mastering the skill of drawing. The game’s purpose was to cure Rainer, but he remained distant from the other children, distant from everything in this world.
I knew only a few things about Rainer, things my brother had heard from his professor, Dr. Auerbach. Dr. Auerbach refuted his colleagues’ hypotheses that Rainer’s sadness stemmed partly from the fact that his mother and father became parents in their later years and seemed more like his grandmother and grandfather. He had grown up near Munich, but was still steeped in nature; while his father painted, he stayed near his easel in the fields, near the brooks, and in the forest around his home; the remainder of the day he spent with his mother, who sometimes read him poetry and played for him on the piano. Yet that idyllic existence did not lessen Rainer’s sorrow. The child remained immersed in his pain, as if sunk in water, as if some torment had pushed his head down and forced him to sink into this pain, and only occasionally allowed him to surface above the water to catch his breath.
No one knew where his melancholy came from, or what provoked his sighs or turned his gaze aside. Even when his mother stood before him and explained something, Rainer stared into an absence, as if he were staring in the direction where something had disappeared and would never return. His gaze fled from everything and fastened on the emptiness. Sometimes a child would pass a ball to him, but Rainer did not stretch out his arms; another child would say something to him, but Rainer would not respond; yet a third child would tug him by the sleeve, but Rainer would not move or shift his gaze. The other children went on with their games, but I stayed beside him.
Many pains occur in the course of a life. Some disappear; others stay with us until death. But only that first pain is our true one. Every other pain aches through that pain; every pain that follows hurts deeply only if it approaches that first one, only if it contains something akin to it. My pain had a name: the pain preserved in my first memories, and to which all later pains attached, had the name of my mother. Rainer’s pain was nameless. Although it was always present and always with him, he had forgotten it, and his gaze, which drifted somewhere to the side of people who stood near him, somewhere into the emptiness, seemed to seek out that pain, the pain his parents also sought, hoping, with the help of doctors, to cure him.
We were children, and we were at the time of our first pain; our pains met each other, and perhaps that is why we became so close, close like wound and balm, closer than two happy children, because pain is the strongest bond. And so we stood alone, one beside the other. All around us the other children hopped on one leg, tossed a ball, skipped rope, chased one another around the trees, but Rainer and I stood there. I looked at him, and his gaze sometimes fell on me for a second, and then fled again into the emptiness. I sometimes told him tongue twisters, riddles, fairy tales, and once I began to tell him about my mother, about her words of contempt and ridicule about how I ate, how I laughed, how I walked, about how when her friends visited us at home with their young daughters she would tell them, in front of me, that I did not know how to talk, to laugh, to walk as they did. I told him what words she used to wound each of my delights and each of my joys—my delight in his father’s talent, my joy at meeting him, Rainer, each Sunday afternoon, even though he was silent.
Then, for the first time, Rainer spoke to me. “But my parents love me,” he said, yet there was such pain in his voice. Pain such as children have when someone close to them has just abandoned them.
For a moment or two I looked at him in silence, and then I said, “My parents love me, too. I know Mama hates me because she loves me. And when she says those words to me I no longer listen to her. That is, I do listen to her, but her words do not hurt me. They go past me, because I am thinking of you.”
For the first time Rainer looked me in the eye for longer than a second. A ray of happiness crossed his face and took the sadness away. I wanted to ask him what it was that had made him happy, and he also seemed to want to tell me something, but his parents, who were sitting on a nearby bench, had noticed the change.
“Rainer smiled,” cried his mother. His father came running. But the sadness had fallen once again across their son’s face, and his gaze was lost in the emptiness.
The following Sunday, when the grown-ups had gone into Dr. Auerbach’s house and the children were running about the yard, I proposed to Rainer that we play with our shadows. He said nothing, but I told him that our shadows could touch, even if our bodies were far apart. We began to play with the shadows of our fingers, holding our hands apart, mine from his, but on the ground the shadows of our hands intertwined. Slowly, we moved our fingers closer through the air, moved them around, and watched as their shadows joined together and moved apart. Rainer watched the shadows, and for the first time his eyes refrained a long while from fleeing into the emptiness. I held out my hand toward his and told him that I sometimes dreamed I was falling and held out my hand to grab on to someone else’s, and my hand really does reach out while I am sleeping, and it strikes the wall, and the impact wakes me up.
“Sometimes,” I told him, “when I am awake and things are hard for me, I want to have a hand near me, and for that hand to grasp mine.”
Then the shadows of our hands overlapped, and his hand and mine entwined their fingers.
Mr. and Mrs. Richter were grateful to Dr. Auerbach, because their son pulled his gaze more and more often from the emptiness, and he sometimes answered other people’s questions, not only his parents’. Occasionally, he even smiled.
Soon, owing to Rainer’s improvement, his parents decided to return to their estate near Munich.
“One day we will be together again,” Rainer said to me at our parting.
“But until then,” I said, “it will be hard for me until you come back.”
“For me, too,” Rainer said. “So that it will be easier for us, let’s think of that day when we will be together.” Then he handed me a piece of paper he held in his hand. “This is for you,” he said. “A remembrance.”
I took the sheet of paper, and there was Rainer. It was a portrait his father had sketched in pencil. I looked at the drawing, and then I looked at Rainer. I looked at his eyes that cried inside and imagined the tears falling inside him. I wanted to give him something, too, something he would remember me by, something that would remind him how our shadows played together, how he touched my hand, what he promised me at our parting. I wanted to give him something, but I did not have anything, and then I thought of tearing off the pocket of my little red dress, a hand-me-down from my older sisters.
“It is very hard for me that you are leaving,” I said, and I began to tear the pocket from my dress.
“It is for me, too,” said Rainer, and he placed his hand a
t the pit of his stomach, as if he were placing it on a wound. “It hurts me here for you.”
I tore the red pocket off the dress. I stared at that small piece of cloth the size of a child’s heart.
“This is so you can remember me,” I said, and I scrunched the little pocket into the palm of his hand.
When he left Vienna, Rainer was ten and I was twelve. Often, some boy on the street would look like him to me, and I would set off toward him, my heart beating joyously, and then my steps would stop abruptly, because the face was not the one I expected. I would recall his look whenever I awoke during the night at the moment when my hand, seeking in my dreams someone else’s to take hold of mine, struck against the wall. And then I would hug my pillow, thinking of his words that one day we would be together, and I wanted to fall asleep and sleep through all the days and nights that had to pass until that promised day, and then awaken.
IN THE MORNING, WHEN MY SISTERS AND MY YOUNGER brother left for school, and Sigmund went to his lectures at the university, after Mama went to help Father in the store, I pulled from under the carpet where I had hidden it the piece of paper with the drawing of Rainer’s face. My gaze caressed the paper. I looked at Rainer’s full lips, at his carefully combed hair, at the thoughtful line between his eyebrows, at the eyes that cried inside, and I thought that perhaps at that same moment Rainer was sitting in his room, and just as I was looking at this piece of paper he was looking at the red pocket I had given him to remember me by.