Freud's Sister Read online

  She went to factories and incited workers to strike for shorter hours and greater pay, but the factory owners paid people to beat her so ruthlessly that she lay unconscious for days, and then, when she was back on her feet, she went to the factories again and organized the workers, and again she was beaten. She went to the spinning mills and the weaving sheds, and she persuaded the workers to join her in the battle for the same rights as men—for the right to vote, the right for political action—but the police detained her; they sentenced her to solitary confinement until her brother begged for her release. Her photograph appeared in the newspapers connected with the word anarchy. She was conspicuous by her inconspicuousness: instead of the delicate hairstyles of that era, her hair was simply short; instead of dresses with lace, bows, artificial flowers, and ribbons, she was the first woman in Vienna to wear trousers. So she was recognized on the streets, where she was pelted with coarse epithets and stones, and spat on. The more she fought for women’s self-assurance, the less self-assurance she had. All the blows against her left their mark. She lost her penetrating gaze and her confident voice; her words trembled in her throat; her gaze did not rest on a single point, but seemed to flee from where she was looking; and her body no longer had its confident bearing—she hunched her shoulders, her head drawn down. She resembled a bird huddled in the rain.

  Sometimes I took Klara with me when I went to visit my brother at the hospital, and she asked him how to help those women who were unjustly taken by force to the asylums. She told him that if a woman stood up for her rights in marriage her husband could report her as insane, and she would be placed behind bars; that if a sister sought property rights after her parents’ death, her brothers could place her in an asylum. The madhouses, Klara told Sigmund, were filled with sane women. There was nothing easier than for a woman to be accused by her father, her husband, her brother, or her son of being a danger to herself or to society, and she would end up in a madhouse. She asked him for advice on how the situation could be changed, and he told her that nothing could be changed. She continued to go from one madhouse to another, to enter into discussions with the doctors. One of the doctors responded to her with Nietzsche’s words: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

  Sarah and I knew where Klara had been by the look in her eyes. There was always something maternal in her gaze when she came from the institution she herself had taken a part in founding, an institution where women who had been driven out by their husbands were cared for. The law did not grant these women—regardless of why their husbands had driven them out—the right to take their children with them; that is, if their husbands had not thrown the children out with them. Klara helped them, but she did not idealize motherhood. She said that every mother’s experience of motherhood was different, just as each person’s life was different, no matter how similar it was to others.

  Once, when we were sitting in the butterfly house, the large glass garden with tropical plants built beside the Auerbachs’ house, where there were clouds of butterflies flying about, Klara said to us, “I have seen mothers who gave their lives for the lives of their children, and mothers who took the lives of their children. I have met women whose only thought in life was to become mothers, and women who became mothers not because they wanted to but because they had no other choice except to marry and have children.”

  “But most mothers take care of their children,” Sarah said.

  “That care is most often not a question of choice,” said Klara. “Even the most dedicated mothers I know would share the care of their children with the fathers. Their desire to share that care is a sign not that a mother loves her child less but that she needs some time for herself as well. And the belief that only mothers should look after the children is imposed by the husbands, so that they can expropriate all their wives’ free time.”

  “You are forgetting,” Sarah offered, “that in families in which all the mother’s time is devoted to the children and to the home the husband also has no free time, because he works from morning till dusk to support his family. That is a natural division that has existed since the beginning of the human race—men, as the stronger sex, were able to earn more, and the women stayed at home with the children.”

  “Today both men and women need to work, but they also need to share equally in the care of the children. But it doesn’t happen that way; it is the women who stay at home with the children.”

  “That is the natural way. The mother is the one who carries the child before it is born; it is fed from her body both before it is born and after.”

  “But each person is different,” Klara asserted. “Each mother is different. Even though every mother has carried her child in her womb, every mother has a different relationship with her child, and every individual mother-child relationship is different. The connection between the womb and the child is also a curious matter.”

  “Why?”

  “There is something curious about it, even in animals,” said Klara. Then she asked, “Tell me, which animals do you think are the most maternal?”

  Sarah thought for a moment and then replied. “The females of animals like deer, animals with hooves. It is not just that I have heard they show concern for their young, but in the eyes of does, cows, antelopes—and not only in their eyes but in their movements as well—there is something maternal.”

  “Well, I have heard the majority of such animals will reject their newborn if they do not lick it immediately after giving birth, if they do not mark it with their saliva, the sign that says specifically, ‘This is mine, this is me.’ The newborn will tug at the mother, beg to suckle, but she will turn roughly away, condemning it to die of starvation. Perhaps this explains the secret of the bond between mother and child. The mother sees the child as a part of herself, and when she does not view it that way she condemns it to death. A mother’s love toward her child is love toward a part of herself. A form of self-love.”

  I waded into the conversation. “The sacrifice some mothers make for their children is not, then, a sacrifice, because what they are doing, they are doing for themselves, for something they experience as a part of themselves?”

  “I don’t know,” Klara said. “Every destiny is its own story. At present, it is most important for us to fight for equality between men and women. They assure us that this is not possible, that men must always rule, but there was an era when women ruled. We do not need a new matriarchy, simply equality.”

  “Why not a new matriarchy?” Sarah smiled.

  “Because justice is possible only when there is equality,” Klara argued. “And when someone rules, in order to maintain that power, he also oppresses. While it is the men now, at one time, in the age of matriarchy, it was the women. When women ruled, they, the mothers, made child sacrifice obligatory. Every firstborn son was killed. They cut off the newborn’s head, drowned it in water or burned it in fire, threw it to the dogs or the swine. The mothers created that unwritten law. When the patriarchy began, the fathers continued the custom. Embedded within it was the hatred of those who ruled toward those who would rule after them, and the fear of those who ruled of the loss of their power. The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac was first a story about a father sacrificing his son. Much later, the killing of the firstborn was replaced by a symbolic sacrifice, by circumcision. Then the story of Abraham and Isaac was also changed.”

  “If the killing of the firstborn was an unwritten law,” offered Sarah, “then surely some parents experienced it as coercion. Surely some of those who were forced to kill their firstborn child suffered.”

  “By all means,” said Klara. “That is why I said that no single destiny resembles any other.”

  We never asked Klara whether she wanted to become a mother. Sarah and I sometimes spoke about motherhood, and once she said to me, “The doctors tell me that my illness will not prevent me from becoming a mother,” and she ran her hands along the metal on her legs. Klara always spoke about motherhood as
something that happened to others, and as something she both could and should help with if a mother found herself in distress. She never suggested that she herself wanted to become a mother. Once, when she was telling us how a child in the orphanage where she helped out from time to time had called her Mama, I seemed to detect from something in her voice that she was touched, some hint of desire.

  That day in the butterfly house, when Klara, Sarah, and I spoke about motherhood, Sarah pointed at two butterflies flying through the air, conjoined, conceiving their offspring.

  SIGMUND KNEW HOW MUCH SARAH LOVED POETRY, AND ON one visit he brought her a just-published translation of poems by Adam Mickiewicz. Before she opened the book, Sarah caressed the cover, which depicted a fall landscape, and remarked that she had not been to a park in years. “Then let’s go to the Augarten,” my brother said, and Sarah closed the book and set it down on her bed.

  The Auerbachs’ coach took us to the park. My brother supported Sarah under her right arm, and I under her left. It was an exuberant spring. We moved through a tangle of sights burning with color, through a symphony of the sounds of nature, through a sea of smells. Every few steps, Sarah begged us to stop, not because it was difficult for her to walk but because she wanted to look at something along the path, something to which we paid no attention because it was part of what we saw every day: a mother and child sitting on a bench, throwing crumbs to the pigeons; a painter standing beside his easel, painting a birch tree; a young woman leading an old blind woman by the hand and telling her about the world stretching out around them; two children digging in the ground with their hands while their father read a newspaper, paying no attention to their search for worms; a young man reclining as if in an armchair on the branch of an enormous oak tree, whistling softly; some young boys playing with a ball.

  “So much happiness in one place,” said Sarah.

  “I am not sure all these people are happy at this moment,” my brother said.

  “Maybe happiness, like sin, is in the eye of the beholder,” said Sarah.

  “Happiness is a short-lived phenomenon. It is the fulfillment of some pent-up desire or need,” my brother said.

  “I would not call that happiness. I would call such a fulfillment of desires or needs satisfaction.”

  “Then what would happiness be?” my brother asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Sarah. “I think happiness is one of those things for which there is no definition. It is something you simply feel.”

  We slowly reached the part of the park in which Vienna’s first kindergarten was located. We sat down on a bench beside the fence and watched the children playing on the swings. A woman came out of the kindergarten courtyard, leading a child by the hand.

  “That is happiness,” said Sarah, looking toward the woman and her child.

  “Parenthood?” my brother asked. Sarah nodded. My brother continued: “I do not see parenthood as the attainment of happiness, but as a part of reproduction, and reproduction as a part of the process of evolution and natural selection.”

  “And not as a part of your own life, something that will be a part of your own existence?”

  “My existence is also a part of the process of evolution and natural selection. Only the strong survive in this world; that is the law of the survival of the fittest. Those who are quicker and stronger have a greater capacity for survival.”

  “Which means that the world is created for the aggressive,” said Sarah, and she stood up from the bench, signaling to us with her hand that she wanted to walk without assistance. She reached the kindergarten fence and held on to the bars.

  “That is only a superficial impression,” my brother said. “But such survival is a part of the great evolution, of the advancement of animal species. And also of the human race. New generations can be stronger, faster, more adaptable than their parents, and they pass those traits on to their heirs, who are then able to advance further. Over the course of many generations, those improved traits become more articulated in the context of one animal species, and which species will survive and which will disappear depends on the development of those traits. The weak ones will vanish; that is the law of this world. We humans originated as part of the process of natural selection; we developed from lower forms of life. So that is how I view parenthood—as part of the great evolutionary process.”

  “I view it in an entirely different manner,” said Sarah, and she turned toward the children who were playing in the courtyard. “To carry a new life for months beneath one’s heart, and then to bring that new life into the world, and to see how that new life arrives, dazed, shocked by its expulsion from the womb and its encounter with a world that cannot but be unknown to it, because what it does know, it only senses; to see and feel how much I am needed by that new life, how it needs the food flowing from my breast; to observe how experience accumulates in its eyes, and to see the first hope and first disappointment of that new life; to see how that life becomes independent, how it no longer needs me, how that life that came forth from my life leaves me and embarks on the creation of a new life. That is what parenthood is for me.”

  One child separated from the others and walked right up to the fence, bent down, picked a dandelion, and handed it to Sarah through the bars.

  Before she died, Sarah found that dandelion pressed between the pages of the book Sigmund had given her. But that day in the park she held the dandelion in one hand, and with the other she reached out to stroke the child, yet before she could touch his head she stumbled, and once again took hold of the fence.

  MY BROTHER BECAME ACQUAINTED WITH MARTHA BERNAYS on his twenty-sixth birthday. The following month, he moved into a small room in the Vienna General Hospital, where he was already employed, and a month later, on the day Martha turned twenty-one, she and Sigmund became engaged.

  One afternoon at the end of that summer, Sarah asked me, “Why doesn’t Sigmund visit anymore?”

  Until then, I had not spoken of Martha Bernays in front of Sarah. As I explained to her why Sigmund no longer visited, Sarah looked at her fingers, and then she put her hand under the pillow on her bed and pulled out the book my brother had given her several months earlier. I knew her habit of dreaming atop the books she loved the most.

  Sarah slowly bent down, and although she was sitting, I thought she would fall over, that she would tumble onto the floor. But she grabbed the hem of her dress and raised it above her ankles, above her knees, above her thighs. Her thin legs, encased in the metal braces supporting her, looked fragile, like the stems of plants grown in dead shadow. Sarah began to free her legs from the braces; she opened them at her ankles, at her calves, her knees, above the knee, at her thighs, and then laid the braces on the floor. She rested her palms on the bed and raised herself up a little, attempting to stand and take a step, but her legs were not strong enough and she sat down, powerless, collapsing onto the bed. She tried again, and again her body returned to the bed as if it were toppling over. Yet again she raised herself, her lips trembling, her face contorted, tears welling in her eyes; she raised herself from the bed and toppled down again, and when she could no longer raise herself she bit her lip and cried, and struck her hands, now clenched into fists, along her powerless legs. I kneeled down beside her, took her hands, and she rested her face on my neck. I heard her sobs, her broken breathing, and I knew that the tears caused by her physical weakness were mixed with the tears caused by a different pain.

  Then she became calm, took the book she had placed on the bed, and tucked it back under her pillow.

  AFTER MY BROTHER MOVED OUT, HIS ROOM REMAINED EMPTY. Sometimes I went in and looked at the empty shelves where, until recently, his books and clothes used to be. Whenever my mother found me standing in the room that belonged to Sigmund, or sitting on his bed, she said he would be lucky if he had a little room like that for himself and Martha.

  Part of my world disappeared with the appearance of Martha Bernays. My closeness to my brother disappeared; the world of
our dreams disappeared before it had ever appeared; Venice disappeared; and the two of us together there disappeared. Sometimes, when I recalled how he greeted me before the appearance of Martha Bernays, the way he would run the tip of his index finger along my forehead, down to the tip of my nose, and across my lips, I raised my index finger, as if to point toward the sky, and then I ran it along my forehead, down the tip of my nose, and along my lips.

  WHEN I WENT TO VISIT SARAH, MORE AND MORE OFTEN I found her in the butterfly house. Even her bed had been brought there, and throughout the day she napped in the glass garden. Sometimes I found her sleeping with butterflies covering her, and as she awoke and slowly shifted her body they floated off her like clouds. She spoke more often about the butterflies, about their metamorphosis from an egg to a caterpillar to a chrysalis and, finally, to a butterfly. She spoke about their hibernation, about their migrations in which they traversed thousands of miles, about the mimicry that helped them evade danger.

  Once, I found her asleep in the glass garden, resting against a tree. When she awoke, she felt something scratching her head. Her hair was filled with caterpillars that had been crawling along the tree. I began to take them from her hair, managing to remove some, but some escaped through my fingers, releasing a slimy liquid that stuck to my skin and to Sarah’s hair. In her hands, Sarah cradled the caterpillars I had managed to liberate, and she said, “One day they will turn into butterflies. One day they will no longer be crawling—they will fly.” Then she cupped her other hand over them, as if protecting them from something. “Klara has not visited me for a long time.”