Freud's Sister Read online

  Sometimes, sitting in the corner of the room, leaning against the wall, I would fall asleep staring at Rainer’s face resting on my knees. I was wakened from one of those dreams by the sharp voice of my mother, who had returned early from Father’s store.

  “What is that stupid face?”

  I saw her look at the piece of paper with contempt. My hand trembled with the desire to hand her the paper and beg her to bring Rainer back for me. My hand hesitated, but my mother’s hands were already tearing the paper with all the abandon of a murderer who has long thirsted to take a life, and who finally carries out his crime. She tore Rainer’s face into tiny pieces, as when the murderer, after killing his victim, continues to strike, not because there is any doubt that the person is dead but because death seems too small a torment, or because not even the act of killing has extinguished his rage. My mother crumpled up the torn pieces, then opened the window and tossed out what only a few moments earlier had been Rainer’s face. She closed the window and left the room.

  I bowed my head on my knees, felt my chest shaking, my knees becoming wet with my tears, and I heard myself crying. That piece of paper with Rainer’s face had been for me a presence in his absence, a sign and a promise that our separation was not forever. And while Mama was tearing his face I felt she was destroying not only my one tangible memory of him, the one thing that reminded me of his face, but also, with his hair, his eyes, his face now only a hazy memory, the promise that our separation would not be forever.

  ONCE AGAIN, MY MOTHER BEGAN TO RECITE THE WORDS THAT had been engraved in my first memories, and that I had long forgotten: “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you.” At one time, she had said them to me when I was ill and on the edge of unconsciousness, but now she said these hateful words when I told her some naive thing that was appropriate to my young age. She also said them when I made a mistake, one that could be expected of a girl my age; and eventually she began to say “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you” instead of “Good morning” or “Good night,” instead of “How are you?” or “Do you need anything?” I heard her words even when she did not say them to me; I moved in a circle circumscribed by “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you.” I wished to free myself from that circle, and in the morning I wanted to go into the kitchen as before, when my mother would give me a hot potato and I would sit in the corner of the room, watching her work. There were many such mornings when I hoped I could again go in, and then I would ask her what I could do to expiate my guilt. Perhaps something in me hoped that my mother would greet me with her former look and we would again be close. I went into the kitchen, but now I was cut off by the coldness of her look, the roughness of her words, the way she skirted around my body as she moved about the room, and my question stuck in my throat. It remained there, and later on I wanted to vomit it up, to toss it out as one discards spoiled food, but it remained, like rotten food, stuck to me, refusing to let me go, and I carried it everywhere, a sign of some horrible guilt that does not know its crime.

  When I lay in bed at night, huddled next to the wall, my whole body trembled from fear and sadness. Falling asleep, I struggled for air, struggled to inhale and exhale. Sometimes, during the night, the strike of my hand against the wall would wake me; in my dream I was falling, and I reached out for someone’s hand, trying to grasp it, to save myself from the fall. Even in my dreams, my life turned into an undeserved gift, and the one who had given it to me reminded me continuously of this. I said nothing during these moments of humiliation, and I felt something pecking at my breast. That feeling of rejection plunged its beak into that which trembled in my breast, and that pecking bird cried with the cry of a newborn left alone, who feels that its entire world has disappeared because its mother is not there before its eyes. That is how something cried within me. I did not cry, but a tormented expression crushed my face, as if a stone had been hung around my neck and I were condemned to move with it through my childhood and beyond. I met that expression whenever I looked in the mirror. I hated my hypersensitivity. I trembled, and I wanted to be able to smother that trembling. I pitied myself, and I hated my self-pity. Once, after another “It would have been better if I had not given birth to you,” when my self-hatred wanted to kill my hypersensitivity, I hid under the bed, put my hands around my throat, and sank my fingers firmly into my neck above my collarbone, until I lost consciousness.

  Sometimes I borrowed a piece of paper and a pencil from my brother. I would sit in the corner by my bed, and I would try to draw that gaze looking into the horrible emptiness, two eyes that cried inside, but my attempt ended in a single point—the movement of my hand stopped where it had begun. Then I looked a long time at that point on the piece of paper, or I stood and looked out the window, or else I stabbed the tip of the pencil into the palm of my left hand.

  MY FRIENDSHIP WITH SARAH AUERBACH BEGAN SEVERAL months after the cessation of the drawing classes held in the courtyard of her family’s house. Until then, I had known her as only a face that watched through the window. Later, her father told my brother that Dr. Ernst von Brücke, an amateur painter and a colleague of his, would be coming to their home to hold classes for his daughter and that he was seeking the participation of another child in order to create a more dynamic work environment.

  Sarah was a year older than I was, and she had a sister, Bertha, who was three years older. Sarah wore metal braces on her legs. “I need to wear these because my legs are not strong enough to hold me up,” she told me. Someone needed to accompany her when she walked. Often she would ask me to support her, and so we walked, our sides touching, from one end to the other of the spacious room with silk-covered walls, and imagined we were walking about a park. Sarah told me that with the help of the metal braces she could walk alone, but, should she happen to fall, her bones could break, because she was anemic, and therefore someone had to support her when she walked. I did not know what it meant to be anemic, but I was uncomfortable asking. Once, as we walked about the room, our sides touching, I told her how beautiful her hair was.

  She said to me, “That’s because I am anemic.”

  I told her I did not know what being anemic meant.

  “If you’re anemic, you have moments in which all of a sudden you cannot hear anything around you. You feel completely weak. You cannot see anything. And you lose consciousness. It is all wondrous and beautiful. I don’t know why. All at once, in complete weakness, you do not know who you are,” she said, and, falling silent, she brushed back the lock of hair that had fallen across her face. Then she added, “If that is how one dies, then I am not afraid of death.”

  Instead of speaking about death, we spoke about life. Sarah tried to explain to me what menstruation was, and how she would feel the day before its onset. She would have a high temperature, and at the same time tremble from cold.

  “That is the first step toward becoming a mother,” she said.

  “When will you become a mother?”

  “That will come much later, many years after this first step. That’s what my mother told me.” Then she put her hands on her belly. “It must be a wonderful feeling, to have another life here.”

  “It seems frightening to me,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Terrible and simple, like menstruation, the first step toward becoming a mother,” she said, as she stood halfway with difficulty, then hesitantly stretched out one leg, as if she would take a step, but in fact let it hover just above the floor, and then sat down again in her chair. “My steps are always too slow….” She stood again and began to take some steps across the room. I went over to hold her steady while she walked, but she gently brushed my hand away. “Mama did not want to tell me exactly how one becomes a mother. She said, ‘This is the first step.’ And she said there are still many steps until one becomes a mother. But when I asked her what those steps were she did not want to tell me.”

  I thought about Rainer and my brother, and I as
ked Sarah, “What is the first step toward becoming a father?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  Several months later, my first step toward motherhood arrived. From that day on, the memory of the thick red fluid has stayed with me, the feeling that I was somehow cut in half, and that horrible heaviness when I told my mother, and she said to me, “From now on you will need to know your obligation, the fundamental obligation of every woman: to repay the debt for your life with the birth of new lives.”

  ONE SUNDAY MORNING DR. BRüCKE TOLD US HE HAD TAUGHT us everything he knew about drawing, and he advised us to enroll in the School of Applied Arts, where we would be able to deepen our drawing skills and learn to paint. Sarah was then fifteen, and I was fourteen; she did not even try to enroll, and I did not pass the entrance examination. The two of us continued to draw whenever we met. I drew at home as well, in secret, and sometimes, when my mother was at the store helping my father, I would lay the drawings out in the kitchen. Once, my mother returned early and stared at the drawings laid out on the table, on the chairs, on the stove, beside the window. She looked first at me, then at the drawings, as if she had caught me doing something shameful. She thought that since I had stopped attending lessons with Dr. Brücke, and had not succeeded in enrolling in the School of Applied Arts, I had stopped drawing.

  “Why do you draw at all?” she asked, as I slowly gathered the drawings, one by one, as if gathering up my shame. “Your drawing is meaningless.” I looked at the drawings that I had crumpled between my fingers. “Do you know what meaninglessness is? Meaninglessness is when something is done for no purpose. When what you do does not lead to something else. You learn to walk so you can get somewhere. You learn to talk to communicate with someone. You give birth to a child to continue life. But you, why are you drawing? It is meaningless. Since you are doing something as meaningless as drawing, perhaps even those things that do have meaning will become meaningless in your life. You will not get anywhere, even though you have learned to walk. You will have no one to communicate with, even though you have learned to talk. You will not continue life, even though you could give birth.” She covered the drawing closest to her with the palm of her hand. “Stop drawing if you want to save the meaning of your life.”

  I stopped drawing. I stopped not because I believed that if I stopped drawing I would save myself from the meaninglessness of my existence. I stopped because every time I wanted to take a pencil in my hand I recalled my mother’s words and my fingers tightened. And that afternoon, when she had ended her rebukes but continued to look at me with contempt, I crumpled the drawings, put them in the stove, and lit the fire.

  WHENEVER I WANTED TO GO WITH MY BROTHER TO THE library, where he spent hours, my mother would say that she and my father needed me at the store, and I would go with her. Later, I figured out what I had to do. As soon as my mother started a conversation with a customer, I begged my father to let me go and read, and he did; I would leave the store quickly and set off for the reading room. My brother read books for his studies at the medical faculty, while I tried to understand some philosophical works. During our reading breaks we talked, and, if he had already read what I was reading at the moment, he helped me understand what I’d found incomprehensible. When we returned home together, my mother would again greet me with reproach, blaming me for all the work she and my father had to do without my help, or she would explain again that girls belonged in the kitchen. But the hours spent beside my brother in the reading room while he looked at his books and I at mine, hours spent in conversation, had somehow made me strong, and more and more often my mother’s words rolled off me; they did not penetrate me, they did not pierce my breast, the coldness of her look did not bore into the center of my eyes. My mother sensed this, and at times her look lost its assuredness. We no longer shared equally the poison that had entered the thread between her and me but flowed only toward her. It was too powerful for her alone; it smothered her in her powerlessness. That ray of happiness that more and more often suffused my face, that hint of joy that tinged my voice whenever my brother and I returned home together, smothered her.

  When we took a break from our reading and went into the library’s courtyard, my brother explained things that were difficult for me to understand, but still I listened attentively. I knew how important it was for him to have someone to hear him out, because his friends were dedicated to medicine alone, while he wanted something more; he wanted to unravel the secrets of being human beyond anatomy. Sigmund was convinced that those secrets could be deciphered at the intersection of reason and emotion. He said that both thinking and feeling were essential parts of us, and only through the “cooperation” of those two parts could a person understand himself. Sometimes my brother would reread one of the books he had recommended to me. He liked Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes. He asked me not to read Balzac and Flaubert, because they were filled with immoral things. He forbade me to read Dostoyevsky, whom he had just discovered, because his work was filled with dark thoughts. He tried to help me understand Hegel and Schopenhauer, and I told him what I was reading of Plato, whose works he knew indirectly through John Stuart Mill’s writings.

  Sometimes, at home, I opened the Bible, and the part I liked most was when the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon, “O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised. I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.” I opened that book only when my brother was not near me; he had read only short sections and said it was full of nonsense. This was where the slender thread was broken between us and our forgotten ancestors. We were the first nonbelievers in the long line of generations from the time of Moses to our own, the first who worked on Saturdays, who ate pork, who did not go to synagogue, who did not say Kaddish at the burial and on the anniversaries of the deaths of our parents, who did not understand Hebrew; German was our sacred language. We were enraptured with the German spirit and did everything to become a part of it. We lived in Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, which was termed the “Holy Empire of the German Nation.” And with a strange enthusiasm with which we hid our shame toward our own tradition, we adopted the customs and mores of the Viennese middle class of that era.

  My brother believed that Charles Darwin had discovered man’s true place in the animal kingdom, asserting that with Darwin begins our true understanding of the human race—a natural creation that arose through the transformation of one living form into another, not a divine creation from dust and a puff of divine breath. He believed that with intellect it was possible to resolve the puzzle of our existence, that Darwin’s theory concerning the origins of man was just a beginning and what must follow the discovery of man’s origin was an understanding of what man is, what it is in him that makes him what he is. “I want to understand the complex texture around which what are referred to as fate and chance intertwine,” he said. In order to see each layer of that texture, in order to know each component of all these layers that constitute a human being, it is necessary to take the first step, to expel illusions, and he considered religion, with its dogma, the greatest of all illusions. He believed that only the mind can destroy these illusions, and he sought his predecessors in all those who believed more in intellect than in religious dogma.

  Whenever he noticed that I was not following what he was telling me, my brother would make a certain gesture that we used as both our greeting and as a sign that we should change the topic of conversation. With the tip of his index finger he would touch my forehead, the tip of my nose, and my lips, and then we would begin to talk about our dreams, how we wanted to go to Venice, just the two of us; Venice, which, in our longing for a shared existence in that city, shimmered as we imagined the moon shimmered in the waters of the Venetian canals. With its lacelike architecture that we had seen in books, Venice
appeared in our minds more real and powerful than it did to many who had been there. Venice—whenever we mentioned it, I would playfully press my two wrists together at the spots where my pulse beat, curve my fingers slightly, shaping them into a gondola, and sail my gondola-hands through the air. Through books, we discovered its painters as well: Carpaccio and Bellini, Giorgione and Lotto, Titian and Veronese, Tintoretto and Tiepolo. Through books, we also discovered painters who had never set foot in the city my brother and I dreamed of living in. We searched among the figures in the paintings of Brueghel and Dürer for fools, that subspecies of Homo sapiens that had vanished centuries before, whom we recognized by their marvelous caps, often with donkey ears or two or three points shaped like horns, and sometimes with little pompons attached; the fools, who were already amusing the rulers during the time of the pharaohs, telling them nonsense, yet concealing within it great wisdom; the fools, who were always found in the European courts alongside the kings, princes, counts; the fools, who, all the way up to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, could be found everywhere in Europe, as they wandered from city to city, village to village, receiving a groschen or two at holiday celebrations; the fools, the part of the human race that, perhaps wisely, rejected their intellect, deciding, perhaps consciously, to serve as jest for others, thus mocking the whole world, as well as the one who had so misassembled it; perhaps that awareness that the world had been put together incorrectly was the main reason to abandon one’s intellect.

  EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING A GROUP OF TEN YOUNG PEOPLE gathered in Bertha Auerbach’s drawing room, located on the floor above Sarah’s room, to show off in front of one another, attempting to say something clever about life, love, music, literature. It was like a competition to see who would leave the strongest impression. Sarah did not socialize with her sister’s friends. When I visited her on Wednesdays, we stayed in her room, talked as we normally did, and only occasionally would we hear the loud laughter, the lively discussions, or the sounds of the piano and the voices singing in concert that wafted down from the floor above.