Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Chinua Achebe, Alai, Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Michel Faber, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Klas Östergren, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Donna Tartt, Su Tong, Dubravka Ugresic, Salley Vickers and Jeanette Winterson.
WHERE THREE
ROADS MEET
Salley Vickers
To my dear friend, Petrie Harbouri,
and in memory of Spyros Harbouris,
who first took me to Delphi.
“An unapparent connexion is stronger than an
apparent one.” Heraclitus
Oedipus, the son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as an infant because an oracle had informed the father that his as yet unborn son would be his murderer. He is rescued and grows up as the son of a king at a foreign court until, unsure of his origins, he consults the oracle himself and is advised to avoid going home since he is destined to become the murderer of his father and husband to his mother. On the way from what he thinks of as home, he encounters King Laius and kills him in a fight that erupts swiftly. He then approaches Thebes, where he solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx barring the way; the grateful Thebans express their thanks by making him king and giving him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He rules for many years in peace and honour and, together with the woman he does not know to be his mother, has two sons and two daughters – until a plague breaks out, occasioning a fresh consultation of the oracle, this time by the Thebans…
* * *
The plot of the play consists quite simply of the gradually intensifying and elaborately delayed exposure (not unlike the task of psychoanalysis) of the fact that Oedipus is himself the murderer of Laius as well as the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Shattered by his unwittingly performed atrocity, Oedipus blinds himself and abandons his homeland. The words of the oracle are fulfilled…
* * *
If King Oedipus is no less unsettling for modern man than it was for contemporary Greeks, the answer can presumably only be that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not rest on the contrast between fate and human will, but must be sought in the special nature of the material used to demonstrate that contrast…The only reason why his fate grips us is because it might also have been our own, because prior to our birth the oracle uttered the same curse over us as over him. It was given to us all, possibly, to direct our first sexual stirring at our mother, our first hatred and violent wish at our father; our dreams persuade us of that. King Oedipus, who struck his father Laius dead and married his mother Jocasta, is simply the wish-fulfilment of our childhood years…As the playwright, in the course of his investigation, brings to light Oedipus’s guilt, he forces us to acknowledge our inner life – in which the same impulses, albeit suppressed, are still present…
* * *
Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes so offensive to morality with which nature has burdened us and following the unveiling of which we should no doubt all rather look away from the scenes of our childhood.
Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams
An Old Story
An Old Story I know you thought I knew it not
But though that age is half forgot
I’m mistress in my house still,
And all my art and all my skill
I used to bring him close to me,
Afraid of him should he choose free,
Afraid my face would not move
His years’ desire, and thus prove
A bane to me. This my subtle scheme.
You know the plot, here is the theme:
I, Jocasta, knowingly said
“Bring my son to my bed”.
Spyros Harbouris
“The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
Heraclitus
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Where Three Roads Meet
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also By Salley Vickers
Copyright
WHERE THREE ROADS MEET
Early in 1923, in his sixty-seventh year, Sigmund Freud, originator of the theory and practice of psycho analysis, and the radical and provocative Oedipus complex, discovered a growth in his mouth. He consulted Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist acquaintance in Vienna, who indicated that the growth was almost certainly the result of years of heavy smoking. Freud was abstemious with alcohol, mistrusting anything likely to cloud his wits, but he found nicotine a powerful stimulus to thought and it had become one of his chief sources of daily pleasure. Perhaps aware of the implications for his most treasured habit, or perhaps because, since a suspected coronary thrombosis at the age of thirty, Freud was perpetually on the lookout for signs of his impending death, he did nothing for several weeks after Hajek’s diagnosis. Then, one morning, without informing either friends or family, he turned up unannounced at the outpatient clinic of the hospital where Hajek worked and asked that the growth be removed.
Later in the morning his wife, Martha, and their youngest daughter, Anna, were alarmed to receive a call from the clinic requesting that they bring over Freud’s night things. They were even more unnerved when they arrived to find Freud sitting unattended in a chair in the outpatients’ department, his usually immaculate shirt and jacket stained with blood. The loss of blood from the operation, conducted under local anaesthetic, had been so profuse that it was thought prudent Freud stay overnight at the clinic. As there were no private rooms and there was a shortage of overnight beds, a temporary ward was contrived by rigging up a curtain across a small room already occupied by another patient, a dwarf receiving treatment for cretinism.
That afternoon, the wound from the operation began to haemorrhage. Freud was unable to attract anyone’s attention as the bell by his bed was defunct and the operation had left him in no condition to shout. In the end it was the cretinous dwarf who hurried for help and very possibly saved his roommate’s life. Freud’s daughter Anna, who thereafter faithfully provided her father with any necessary nursing, remained with him through the following night, during which, she reported, her father was semi-conscious from loss of blood and sedative medication.
When examined, the growth proved to be cancerous. This news, however, was kept from the patient by Hajek and by another doctor friend and future psychoanalyst, Felix Deutsch, whom Freud had also consulted. An intensive and enervating radium therapy was begun which left him in debilitating pain for many weeks.
At this same time his favourite grandchild, Heinz – whom Freud regarded as exceptional and with whom he had formed a close bond – had his tonsils removed. In the aftermath of their related operations, four-year-old Heinz and his grandfather compared notes about
their progress. But the boy was delicate and four months later he died of TB. Freud loved Heinz very deeply and the news of his untimely death was the only occasion on which he was known to have shed tears. It precipitated his first bout of real depression. He proclaimed, “Everything has lost its meaning for me” and the loss of Heinz – which was to be compounded by the later loss of Heinz’s mother, his beloved daughter Sophie – affected him more seriously than his own mortal illness. After this, Freud declared, he could never become emotionally attached to any new person again; and about this time he turned to dogs, especially the three chows he came to own, as objects of fresh affection.
Shortly after this series of traumas and discouragements, Freud took his daughter Anna on a visit to Rome, and during the journey his mouth haemorrhaged again. Deutsch had already consulted Professor Hans Pichler, a highly regarded oral surgeon, over Freud’s case. Pichler, when he examined Freud on his return, decided that further and more radical surgery to the palate and jaw was called for. The true state of Freud’s health was still kept from him, perhaps because of his notorious preoccupation with his own death; when eventually this precautionary censoring was revealed to him, predictably, Freud was furious. For this reason, in 1929 he engaged Dr Max Schur to be his personal physician on the absolute understanding that no medical detail, however unpropitious and dismaying, was to be kept from him and that Schur would help Freud to “die decently” should he come to find the effects of the cancer more than he was equal to.
The second operation was a major undertaking. It was conducted in two stages during which Pichler slit open Freud’s cheek from mouth to right ear and removed the best part of the upper palate and a large section of the jawbone. Here began sixteen years of treatments and operations, thirty-three all told, attempting to contain the cancer. This was not helped by Freud’s unwillingness to forgo his customary indulgence in cigars. Apart from a brief period of abstinence which he found almost unendurable – the more so as he was convinced that a deficiency of nicotine impaired his ability to think – for most of the rest of his life he continued to smoke twenty cigars a day. The treatment for the cancer proved as invasive and undermining as the illness. With a major part of the palate missing, the nasal cavity was open to the mouth, so an oral prosthesis which Freud nicknamed “the monster” was devised to enable him to speak – a necessary function of his clinical work – and to eat, which from this time onwards he preferred to do alone. The ill-fitting prosthesis, which had to be modified repeatedly, caused constant irritation and persistent ulceration to the soft tissues of the mouth. Visitors had to acclimatise themselves to Freud’s habit of holding the device in with his thumb while he spoke, if “the monster” had been reduced too far in size. As a result of the botched initial operation, Freud’s ability to open his mouth was compromised (he was only able to smoke his cigars by forcing open his teeth with a clothes peg); if the prosthesis was too tight and was removed, for even a few hours, to give its wearer some relief from its insufferable pressure, the surrounding tissues in the mouth shrank, making it appallingly hard to reinsert. On more than one occasion, medical help had to be summoned to get “the monster” back in or out again.
In 1933 the Nazis embarked on their anti-Semitic demonstrations and Freud’s books, branded “pornography”, were publicly burned. On 12 March 1938 Hitler invaded a compliant Austria and Freud wrote in his diary: Finis Austriae. Although many of his colleagues had left years earlier, Freud, refusing to accept that not merely his books but his life itself was in danger, remained in Vienna. On 13 March the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society voted to dissolve and recommended that its members leave the country immediately. Freud’s home was raided twice and on the second occasion his daughter Anna was arrested and taken for questioning by the Gestapo. Various well-connected friends and contacts weighed in on Freud’s behalf and the Nazis, after months of prevarication, finally consented to the departure of Freud and his immediate family on condition he signed a document attesting to their good treatment of him. (Permission for his four sisters to leave was denied and all died in concentration camps.) According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud, with characteristic mordant irony, wanted to append a sentence to the unctuous official document: “I can recommend the Gestapo heartily to anyone”.
The Freud family reached England via Paris on 6 July 1938. Towards the end of August another carcinoma appeared in Freud’s mouth and early in September Pichler travelled to England to perform further extensive oral surgery. Freud was given morphine as a matter of course during his hospital stays and welcomed the palliative effects. But once home he refused any painkiller stronger than aspirin. “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly”, he wrote.
While Freud was in hospital his wife and his sister-in-law, Minna, moved into 20 Maresfield Gardens, a comfortable redbrick house close to Hampstead Heath. He joined them after his discharge, along with the constant Anna (referred to by Freud as his “Antigone”) who, as ever, had remained with her father throughout his hospital stay. The furniture and effects of Freud’s Viennese study had been faithfully reassembled in the long light room that looked on to a loggia and a pleasantly sequestered garden. His prized collection of ancient artefacts, mercifully rescued from the Nazis’ depredations, had been transported to England. To one piece in particular, a small statue of Athena, the Ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, Freud attached great significance. Before the safety of the rest of the collection was assured he singled this out among all his treasures to be sent on in advance of his own departure. When the family finally reached England Freud wrote, “We arrived rich and proud under the protection of Athena”.
The little bronze figure of Athena without her spear had pride of place on Freud’s desk, with other precious relics of past civilisations. Here, sitting in the distinctive tripod-like chair – specially designed to accommodate its occupant’s habit of reading with one leg slung over the arm – alongside the Persian-rug-draped couch, the green velvet tub armchair where he sat to analyse, and his extensive and arcane library, Freud continued to work: to think, to write, to talk to colleagues and his many distinguished visitors, and to analyse a few patients, though by this time his ability to speak was severely impeded by “the monster” and talking at any length was painful and tiring. In addition, as a result of the many operations and subsequent infections, he was all but deaf in his right ear. To make matters worse, the novocaine injections, which had formerly acted to relieve the severer bouts of pain, had begun to lose their efficacy and to cause side effects.
Some time during February 1939 another growth appeared. This time it was inoperable. Over the course of the next months, as Freud grew increasingly weak from the aggressive radium treatments, the tumour increased in malignancy and size. By August, the cancer had eaten through his cheek and he was in unabated pain. Into the bargain, the stench from the sepsis in the wound had become overwhelming. When his much-loved chow, Lün, whom he had insisted be brought from Vienna in the family’s flight from the Nazis, shrank from the smell and refused any longer to be petted by her master, it was a dereliction which Freud found unbearable.
On the morning of 21 September, less than three weeks after the Allies had declared war on Germany, Freud sent for Max Schur who, save for a short visit to the USA, had continued to oversee Freud’s care. Taking his friend and physician’s hand he said, “My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more”. He added, “Tell Anna about our talk”. Early the next morning Schur administered two centigrams of morphine and his patient lapsed into sleep. After twelve hours the dose was repeated. Sigmund Freud died just before midnight on 23 September 1939. His body was cremated three days later. The ashes were interred in one of his favourite Greek urns.
1
Vienna, 20 April 1923
— Forgive me, Dr Freud?
— Who is this? Is that you, my small fr
iend? I am a little better, thanks to your prompt action. When I am out of this place you must, please, come to my home. Berggasse 19. I would like to give you something, a token, a mark of my gratitude, from my collection. I have a considerable collection. Things I have gathered over the years. Artefacts from the past. All our pasts.
— I see you are unwell. I shall come back another time.
— Who are you? You are not the dwarf. Are you a doctor? The bleeding has stopped, thank you. I was sleeping a little. I found the injection helpful. Do you want to give me another? The effect is surprisingly agreeable. Or do you wish to discuss the case with me? Hajek tells me it was a simple leucoplakia, nothing to worry about. But I wonder.
Well, don’t stand there, man. Tell me what you want. You’re not death, are you? I’ve been expecting death to show up.
— No, I am not death.
— In that case, ring my daughter, my wife. Make an appointment. I’m in no shape to speak to you now.
2
Vienna, 11 October 1923
— Dr Freud?
— What is it? Who’s there? You again? What have you come for now, in God’s name? Can’t you see I’m unwell? Half my mouth has gone down the drain and the best part of the jawbone with it. Spitting blood I was, in that train to Rome. I bit on a crust and whoosh – blood all over the shop. Poor Anna was terrified. She didn’t show it, though. She’s a brave girl.
— It is good to have a courageous daughter. But not surprising in your case, Dr Freud.
— Who are you? What do you want? Why do you come to me only when I am ill?
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