by Anna Vaught
Yes Bertha, says Violet. A touch over-confident, wasn’t he?
Oh indeed. If I ever have a man—and I’m not so keen—I’d want one that was provisoire... tentative. Blanche sniggers and pretends to faint as she announces this.
Bertha laughs: Yes, with purpose, but questioning! Now, while he, Breuer, (and I’m sure he, Freud), did think that daydreaming was within normal, he considered me excessive. That in my case the ground was thus prepared for my hysteria; for my madness. Don’t I sound like the other madwomen, though? As I say, I had more freedom than any of you, my darlings, my lieblings, when the madness was quiet. But still. Bound up and bound over. Described and... anatomised. Incarcerated, but not only in body. Called to needlework or the debutante ball: as proper aristocratic girl, for you Violet, or, for Blanche, to perform on cue. Stopped up: the lauded novelist’s mad daughter. Isn’t that the same expectation in another context? And I suppose, in a way, my doctor understood this. That I had no... no outlet for my intelligence.
So.
My heart bleeds for vanished women, for us, for you three. I had more. I was out. Looking after the children, the young mothers with babies; keeping them safe and ensuring they knew how to take care of themselves and their infants. I had strong views on my faith but I was also prepared to change and adapt and I lived long, strong and happy in my social work and in boldness trying to help empower Jewish women. As I said, I got out; to be and to do. There were some things I missed. Love. It did not come to me. Children. I loved them. I adored them, read stories—The Junk Shop—to them, as I began it for you on the beach in Normandy, and wrote for them. Some of this you have heard, in the second chances I was given, by my friends and the passerines of the air and by their eternal singer and muse, Violet Gibson. But I know that, when I was gone, more happened which, had I seen it, would have ushered in a heart gone to dust. I learned from Lucia and from you, Violet, that they put me on a stamp. Can you believe in such? Deutsche Bundespost. Bertha Pappenheim. Helfer Der Menschheit. The Benefactors of Mankind series! 1954. It is extraordinary and I am flattered and embarrassed, too! But there was more.
I was on fire. Things to do and which—and you remember what I told you about my extensive imagination, my theatre, as Dr Breuer had described it!—had to be done. It is as you have said, Violet: that imagination is strongest in those who are confined. This is how I had felt and how I continued to feel.
So, at Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt Am Main, we founded the home of which you heard me speak. I was determined we would better the lives of vulnerable Jewish girls or those girls or women endangered by prostitution, trafficking or all ugly force in whatever form it might take. I had learned so much and thought so much in my years of social work. And I knew—I knew so well—what it was to be ill, to have your life set out by another, ascribed or described. And I knew detractors would come aplenty. Orthodox Jewish circles thought the founding of the home to be a scandal, and that I was, in effect, tolerating prostitution and immorality and encouraging others to do the same. What was I, then? An owl? A raven? A vulture? No, I was a songbird: a passerine, full throated and determined. As you would be, Violet! So I had to think, think, think. And sing, too. Yes! We all say it now! Imagination is strongest in those who are—I learned this phrase from you, Violet—confined! What could I do? Ah, in order to reintegrate into the Jewish community the single mothers, young prostitutes and their children, who in most cases had been disowned by their families, all these girls and women... Oh, I loved them all, tried to understand them all, well I had to talk. The talking cure. So we tried, patiently, to encourage families who had disowned my women, my girls, to mend their relations with them. No, that was not easy. For me, for us, or for these families. And I dressed myself in the greatest cloak of confidence I could and, where we knew who the fathers were of the babies cast out with their mothers, we did our best to persuade these fathers to marry the mothers of their children or to pay them maintenance.
And here is a choice, of what I would have, if I could. I hope, in years to come, so very far beyond me, that women of all walks will provide solely for themselves, should they need to. But that will be the work of another. I hope, too, that these women can be led to understand that you do not need to heal completely to be effective; to be in the world and build things for it. I timidly ask, though: did I walk one step for them, for us, in that direction? Now there is a hope of what might have been and what will be? I have taken a long time to make a request but that is all I want. Hope. Reassurance.
So. All must die. Father long gone, and when Mother was lost, in 1905, I lived alone. Ah, Mir ward die Liebe nicht, I wrote in my poems.
Bertha has been so brave, I feel like it punches through the wisp of cloud, warms our bones, and so I repeat her words, translating, Love did not come to me. I’ve felt that too. I want to shout it and translate it back and forth, into further languages. As I like to do. It really got on barnacle’s nerves and I’d quite like to go back and do it a whole lot more since Mother abandoned me. Yes, and I’d quite like to shout out, in Daddy’s words of Poor Isa in Finnegans Wake, Be good enough to simpersise! below the Paris window of the nephew, keeper of the flame. He’s possibly misunderstood himself but, having rubbed much of me out, I’d be less inclined to listen.
Oh yes. Violet has filled me in on that. That boy is never getting a Christmas present or gold in his Christmas stocking once I’m out, I think. Then I realise I’ve been spouting all this aloud and Violet tells me she has plans to change what happens to my future story and its curation, but also barks that I ought to shut up so that Bertha—who’s infinitely more polite than me—can continue. Oh, and I feel the sentiment in Bertha’s poem: love did not come to me. I said this already, but it cuts through me.
I think, says Bertha, pointing at me, laughing: that girl—that Lucia Anna—should have been able to do anything. She is so very alive and so full of good words and ideas! And I wish for—oh the friendships and the loves I might have had. And yet, I will describe what follows only elliptically, because love defies description and it is not... is not...
Binary? This I, again.
You know, Lucia, I once thought I was the polyglot, then the thesaurus, but no! I was saying, I met Hannah Karminski when she took over the leadership of the Jüdischer Mädchenclub.
Jewish Girl’s Club, I say. (That’s enough now, you naughty girl! This Violet, with a sweep of a caress on her laughing, tear-stained face from Blanche.)
Oh, how wonderful she was. I did not have to explain myself to her and she was the only person I told about my past and how I had been. And she understood that, despite my struggles now, my nightmares, phantasms, panics—for oh Dr Breuer, oh Dr Freud, I did not need to be perfected, to be always well to do what I did: do you see?—I could do more partly because of the exigencies of physical health and the arid days in clinic and sanatorium. Hannah understood me and we spent our free time together as much as we possibly could. When Hannah moved for a time to Berlin, in 1925, just a year before your much-reported travels on the continent, Violet, and our travels just then to Campidoglio, we wrote to each other almost daily. Did you know that, in May 1926, I even wrote to her about you?
Did you hear what happened and what is ongoing? said I. A funny old woman in Rome and yet, have they not really looked at him? How could they think she was more dangerous than him, as he spat up his hysterics to the baying crowd? said I.
And Hannah said, because he is man and she is woman, because he is glamour and she is dirt, a row of missing teeth and fouled clothes, because he is youth, still, and she is crone, because he is Duce and she, despite the fact she is an aristocrat, is lacking refinement, I’d say.
It wasn’t so long before my health deteriorated and, then, my tumour found at the Israelite Hospital in Munich. But I was not finished. There was work to do, meetings to attend. So. Do you know that, during my last days when my illness was bad I was told to go the State Po
lice Station in Offenbach, the reason being denunciation of Hitler by a Christian employee of the home? A poor girl, a girl who could not think straight or account for herself, made a comment about Adolf Hitler. She did not know! She could have been describing her cross grandfather or the terse old man that delivered vegetables to us. This I said, then refused to appear. Ill health. In my heart, I thought Nonsense. Cruel. No good will come of this. I heard he, Hitler, said, ‘He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future!’ But I looked at those in my care and thought only of how I had worked, always, to set them free and to tip the future from my old hands into theirs, for their love and strength. The hearing for it. The 16th of April... 16th of April. Oh yes, Lucia. The birthday of Charlie Chaplin. How did I know that? Yes, we learned so much about each other, in flight! You did impressions of him, didn’t you? Violet told me! Yes April 1936. I was calm, but I was firm. And the month later, I was gone. Right up until the end, Hannah cared for me. I was buried next to my mother at the Rat Beil Strasse Jewish Cemetery in Frankfurt. The Old Jewish Cemetery. My mother had once shown me the oldest graves there, the very oldest from 1272. It was a beautiful place.
But I was not buried next to Hannah, oh no. This is the story that I have in my hands now, with extra time to learn. From books, from you, my friends.
A dwindling of the work.
1938. The November pogrom.
All this, Violet, I learned from you. From talking to you. Just two years after I had gone. The day after, our work was gone. Did the jackboot brutes have fun as they battered it down, torched, burnt it, shredded and desecrated? Hold me, Violet, Lucia, Blanche. They took many to Theresienstadt, I know that now. And Hannah. Oh, hold me. The 4th of June, 1943. Murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. You told me about the camps; helped me to understand. But give her back to me, just for a moment.
Says Violet: Close your eyes, lovely lady. Imagine her there, hold her hand. I want to take you through a way. Could there be a way? Could we have warned them, told them to run? Her, Hannah?
To where? Where could they have gone? Bertha is sure, now. She thinks Some evils are too wide; cannot disentangle them. But still. Violet comforts her: Then, we saved some, when we shot Il Duce, but others we abide with through love in our storied minds. She can never not be. And you loved her. Saved?
Something for you Blanche? Tell us, I ask. Sweet lady, make Violet feel happy and assure her that, in prompting this story, she has been of purpose. If you had a choice, what would you ask for, for yourself?
Blanche ponders, sighs and begins: And I, said the lark? Well you see, some of it was true. What they said of me. About my madness. I want to talk a little more of this, for who else could I ever, or can I ever talk to, mes belles confidentes?
You know, continues Blanche, of course, that a hospital can send you insane? Not to have liberty is prison even if it be gilded, verdant or in a room full of artists and great ones who admire you and might be your lover. So no, I cannot say I was always entirely sane, but I would dispute the causes. And I cannot say, as I told you before, that I was entirely without ruse, because to be such an exhibit meant I was, for a while, away from the others. If you could ever call me a slyboots, then think where the impulse was rooted. When Charcot came, he made things better; he began to take away the cages for the most ill and the pallets with straw on them that served as beds. But who was to say, when his theatre of neurology was over, that these would not return? And even so, it was a vast necropolis, a place of all human decay and of suffering. For the old, the blind, the orphans as well as us mads. My forever place. You told me to forgive any wiles I might have used, Violet. I try.
No, Charcot was not my lover, just as Dr Breuer was not Bertha’s when she was Anna O. Bertha told me that she heard people gossiping about that and it does not reflect well on them. Quite: these gossipers should have more sympathy! Yes, Charcot had a glamour. For a time, he might, as I understand it, have been the world’s most famous doctor. He could dissect a brain downstairs, a professor of pathology, and from all that gore he could sweep upstairs and still, then direct a room. I suppose, in a way, he was dissecting me, too. Publicly.
I believe he had the eye of the artist and were you to look at the photos he kept there—always he was photographing and ordering—you would note a fine arrangement of bared teeth, happy smiles, heads hunched into chests and the reclining, standing, crouching lady. I was just one. But this is sad, isn’t it? I think that he will have given much to history and time to come: an understanding of malady and of our poor nerves when they disassemble and come unstrung or are spotted with plaques. Poetry! But what happened to us, the hysterics, was no organic thing: it was suffering. What we felt was pain and this was a dance summoned up in us. After a while, and after he had gone, I was different; I did not quake or fit and no other would have held me in a room, with my shirt fetched up.
History, as women know, does us a disservice. They thought our wombs wandered! At the Salpêtrière, Charcot believed that lesions in our brains came and went; we had inherited these things. Were they stimulated by trauma? When we died, the scars on the brain, the swellings that caused la grande hystérie, would fade away as we shrivelled in our old gowns. I heard it said that there was more hysteria in the nineteenth century than at any other time. Quelle coïncidence! Eye of the artist, hand of the surgeon, curiosity of the pathologist, digging and slicing.
But this is what I wanted. I have already mused that when the show was over, I would go back to my ward. It was locked of course. Do you know who was there? Old women, scabbed with poverty, beatings by their drunk old men who had dropped them at the door. Old crones whose children had sucked at their breast and then despised them. How do you live with that? I would have loved to mother, to love like that, to birth: but would I have been too frightened, knowing what I knew? Child of your body spitting on your memory or saying you were dead. These were stories the old crones told me and their sorrow rushed at me in my dreams.
There were pockmarked whores. But their essential beauty could not be washed away, though they stank of men’s sex and were steeped in dirt and would talk of what they had done and what they had been made to do. I could not help the way the images swooshed together when my eyes were closed. Staff photographed the inmates barking and crawling on fours; reclining; supine; helpless and luxuriant on their beds or a soft chair given to them, that time, by Charcot. The women laughed: Men paid me to do this! Some of them were excited by the filth that we now demonstrate—looked at us, poor desperates, from the mind of a pervert, or a most particular customer!
But I looked at their eyes and their eyes were not laughing.
Beggars in rags: got off the street! Hysterics! Papers stamped and scribbled on, and now the streets are tidier and le tout Paris need not abide its feet on the pavements where the cockroaches lay before. The mad through sex. Through venereal disease, or so they thought. Or just the mad. That was the story of this place. I don’t mind saying. Cannot sorrow derange you and the thought that no-one cares or loves and then you are an exhibit? This was an enormous place. It was not a prestigious hospital, so I could say we were lucky to have such a man as Monsieur Charcot studying here; in time, he took away the worst of cages and pallets and chains, as I told you. Whichever of his proclamations must be proved right and whichever wrong, we were subjects and objects: a stable field of study: a circus which did not travel. It was a groaning prison under the sky. Do you know Baudelaire’s Alchimie de la douleur? Remember the teacher I told you of, my fellow inmate? Well that is how I learned about it. In the first verse, this, Ce qui dit à l’un: Sépulture! Dit à l’autre: Vie et splendeur!
It is about how something that speaks to one of tombs and death, speaks to another of splendour, life. I would cling to this beautiful idea. In the midst of what we saw, I must transform my thought, if I could, and find a golden impulse to life. During the rounds of jangling keys. Screeching and the wails for someone to come. Piss and
shit everywhere. Cross people with mops and a lovely drawing room, wherein the court painter would come. And he painted me! And I saw the golden impulse to life.
And of course, we notice things, we women. We know where the jangling keys are and where the drugs are, for the most crazy. The hypnotics and all. I know where the needles are because of rooms I have glimpsed on the way to my showroom. We know where the straps and restraints are, and the camisoles de force. On portrait day, I was especially alert of who was where and what was where because on that day they were especially genteel to me. And I saw.
So this is what I want: Take me back. And this time I don’t want to spectate, so you be my guests!
I saw keys. And I saw eight thousand and thirteen women. I am the next digit. What a rabble we would be, if we got out. We are cunning. Shuffle up to the window girls. Do you see her, me? In that room, as Monsieur Brouillet paints. It’s the fourth day and the final day. Tonight—it is Friday, nearly their weekend (in the asylum days of the week do not matter)—and the exhibition in the hospital salon only runs on Tuesday and Friday. So during the week, Violet, Bertha, Lucia, you could dance through the streets. Lucia: you know this place, Paris, well and I think you will come back. Violet: you told me that in years to come, after I am gone, extraordinary people will run in these streets in peacock colours and auburn mop-head haircuts; novelists and artists and mad, mad, mad. I wish that I could see it, then. But for now, during this week, Lucia, take these fine birds round the city you know, though before your time—and enjoy it, won’t you? Take your coffee and your little cakes and go to the galleries. I have never seen what is in them, but of course I imagine and I hear whispers of the wonders within. Do you think the painting of me will live in a gallery one day? Ça fait tout. Here is what we do on Friday. Our special Friday, when the Queen of the Hysterics performs in the mad salon.