by Keith Korman
Then one morning Petra the housekeeper appeared on their front doorstep as if to save them, “I’m back,” she said simply. “I missed Marie.” And with no further fuss, Petra, that good, thorough girl, went quietly to her tasks as if nothing had happened. But still, the daily routine — wash, cook, clean — was grinding them down. And so the accumulation of their errors began. First casting off one minor chore and then another. Telling themselves it was really much quicker that way. Then giving up cleaning the toilets or preparing every meal,-losing their grip one thread at a time. Until it was all they could do just to rise from bed in the morning and face the day …
And so who was worse off? A child like Marie, returned to the mother who made her want to drown — or the children with no parents at all? Their fate lay in the hands of the state. A few miles across Rostov stood the new city orphanage, the Home for Children, installed in the altered hulk of a bank. Children surrounded by walls of grieving marble, rows of metal beds with crusty paint flaking off and thin mattresses over the coiled springs. A place of communal showers and lukewarm meals spooned onto dented tin trays. Frau Direktor had seen a notice in the press praising the home for being “modernly efficient” and housing five hundred. Five hundred what? Tons of sausage? The newsmen slurred words together for the sake of rendering complex thoughts into digestible hunks; modernly efficient — as if a Home for Children were some kind of meat-packing plant, where they packed little living sausages onto coil-spring beds and kept them fed and washed and warm enough till the next meal came around.
Frau Direktor ceased squandering her time on dark thoughts,- for better or worse she had put her hopes in a cold box on an empty street. No use dwelling on outcomes she could not affect. No, she must stand before her interns. Tell them what she had written and show them what they must do. Run. Fly from this place. They had to try.
Her two interns rose to greet her. “Thank you,” she said. “It would have been hopeless here the last few days without your help. Most of all, you, Petra, who came back heaven sent.” Their young housekeeper sat shyly on the couch like a wallflower at her first dance, clearly in awe of her sudden admittance to the inner circle of the clinic. Nighttime pressed against the windows,- the streetlamps outside shone like yellow coal miners’ lanterns in a smoky tunnel. Upstairs the children slept, that whole part of the house breathing as one.
“We have to get out,” Frau Direktor said. She waved her hand about the four corners of the dilapidated living room. “It’s over.”
At first the blank eyes stared dully back. The slaves had adjusted to their extra burdens, to the lack of sleep, the gritty food. They had stopped looking forward — plodding on like yoked oxen, never raising their heads. Their backs about to break, and they didn’t even know it.
Madame Le Boyau perceived her exhaustion first, nodding slowly as if she’d finally seen the future. “How much time do we have?”
Frau Direktor could see their minds furiously spinning, tracing paths of flight; quick mental head counts of the children tossed like photographs, snap judgments weighing one child’s merits over the next. Which ones would travel well? Which the best in crowds? Easiest to feed? Or in the toilet?
“Do you want me to choose for you?” Frau Direktor asked thickly. “In a few days and with a little luck, you’ll be on your way out of the country. You may be lost in an unfamiliar city, or running in a railway station with minutes to catch your train. There’ll be a policeman at the end of the platform, checking papers, and a family of fat Slovaks pushing you from behind. You’ll have a mentally disturbed child on your hands, threatening to explode. Maybe more than one. So if you have to rely on me for your analytical technique to get you on that train or out of that public rest room, you’re in serious trouble. Because I’m not leaving. I’m staying here. For the police.”
This left her breathless,- she felt a constriction in her chest, a faint whistling…. Asthma. Her first attack in years. She tried to ignore it. God, how awful! The choking on her own tubes, the frantic drowning with air all around. Why was she staying behind? To give the authorities their victim? No: to punish herself. Because she had failed. Failed to secure the safety of the clinic and its most precious wards. The subconscious strangling the life out of her body,- soon it would strangle her to death….
Madame Le Boyau’s cigarette had grown a long dangling ash — precarious, yet intact. Like all of them: so fragile, wanting only the slightest tremor to break and fall.
“It’s our fault too,” Max said, a note of panic in his voice — as if ready to overlook anything so long as he got the last seat on the train. He forced a smile and gave a little nervous shrug. “We’ve been sitting under the ax so long, I guess we didn’t see it anymore. Just slipped our minds. When what we really needed was a good Fehlleistung,”
Our minds?
How could a thing like that just slip your mind?
Max had used the German. Fehlleistung, Fehl meaning faulty. Leistung meaning achievement. Not a simple slip but a veiled accomplishment. A hidden gain. Frau Direktors obvious failure had been to ignore the voice of doom when it cried Beware! But whatever in this mess could be construed as an achievement?
The asthma that strangled her? Perhaps … as a timely message. For it forced desperate life to rise inside. Commanding her to take a chance. Throw the dice. Play out the game to the bitter end. And Frau Direktor heard those same tirgings in all the other German words for clever mistakes: versprechen, vergreifen, vertun. misspeak, mistake, misdo.
A mere slip of the tongue was easy to grasp. Easy to say, easy to laugh at, easy to misunderstand. With a simple slip there might be faults but not much achievement. Nowadays people called it a Freudian slip, as if the man himself had concocted the thing in a dim, gaslit nineteenth-century laboratory and quietly infected the world. Somehow his “slip” managed to escape its glass test tube, to spread unchecked from city to city like a runaway virus. All mankind catching the same nasty cold, the Freudian flu.
So her stubborn denial of their common danger was more accurately: a Vergreifung. A mistaking. But the greifen in Vergreifung also meant to snatch, to catch hold of, as if by making this error she really tried to grasp the thing that lay just beyond her reach. Frau Direktor began to murmur softly, recalling a passage in a book. She struggled for the air to say the words out loud:
“‘When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings kept hidden within them …”‘ — and here, she gasped for breath —’“by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was harder than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret….’“ She filled her lungs. “If his lips are silent he chatters with his fingertips,- betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And this task of revealing the most hidden recesses of the mind is quite possible to accomplish….’“
When she found the air to quote the source, her voice had fallen to a whisper. ‘“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’ Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 1905. Later reprinted in the Sammlung kleiner Schriften, 1909. At one time, my friends, the most scandalous piece of prose available to the reading public. When scandal and shame were inseparable. You read your filthy book alone, you stared at your dirty pictures by yourself….” She gasped for air, pawing the armrests of her chair as if that-helped. “But a certain Herr Professor Freud had the bad judgment to publish a paper where he claimed his young patient Dora had a goodly knowledge of sexual practices. Some she repressed, others she misunderstood, and some she applied to inappropriate persons. Now, to say that little girls might have sexual thoughts hidden under their lace petticoats was evil enough. To publish it as a truth of nature — this was unforgivable.”
Frau Direktor strained to breathe. Her hands futilely gripped the armrests of her chair. “I doubt the man sold three hundred copies of his work in twenty years.”
She clutched her chest, trying to press the tightness to other parts of her b
ody, where it wouldn’t matter so much. “Forgive me,” she said hoarsely. “I get carried away…. But in the matter of our immediate future, this asthma of mine is really a soggy way of shouting: See, you dolts! Achtung! It’s not too late!” She brought out a carefully handwritten copy of her miserable letter. Now Frau Direktor unfolded the paper and passed it around for each of them to see.
“However, it has never been my intention to send you out into the void. There’s someone you can contact; someone who knows what we do and knows me well. I’ve written a letter of introduction. Perhaps someone who can help …”
Chapter 4
Herr Kinderweise
To her eyes the living room had taken on a yellowish tinge, as though seen through old glass. Everything gone flat and pale, all the blood and color drained off. It seemed too that the people were hardly moving, like life-size dolls sitting placidly in their chairs. Waiting for what? For their Frau Direktor to take them by the hand and lead them out? She had tried to show them there were really two men who understood their struggle. The one in Zurich, with food and clothing and shelter and money, a man of connections and influence who could help them work the complicated machinery of life.
And then the other, the older one, in Vienna: too frail now to ease their road, but who had smiled upon her long ago. Whose written words and thoughts would light the way even in the dark. The words of that certain Herr Professor echoed faintly in her head:
He that has eyes to see … Mo mortal can keep a secret. Betrayal oozes out at every pore.
But those stiff dolls sitting there like lumps, did they really see the man who wrote those words? Did they know his smile, feel the terror in his growl or the bark in his laugh? And when she said “Monatsschrift” could they feel the thin waxy paper of this publication? Or know his entry was just one among others? Other essays, soberly weighed and gravely discussed. While his at the time — “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” — was studiously ignored. His and his alone.
Decades passed before the man became a target worthy of abuse. Years in which solitary people studied him in countries far away, applying fragments of his method with untrained hands. Her own imperfect cure had been a product of such times. In the years when his Wednesday Society grew to fullness, many who knew those sessions knew them by that chance name, given simply because Wednesday was the day chosen for the group to meet. This when the circle was a scant handful of five or six men. Those evenings they talked about what they knew of their own minds and what they guessed of the minds of others, sharing the strange cases they had known, and always, always the dreams…. She had gone there herself once, in her first bloom of sanity, gone to touch the hem of his magic robe and thank him. Arriving one Wednesday of the latter days, to give a paper she had written and to be admired. The highly polished dining room table where they sat glowed black … and the faces gathered round were reflected back again, as though gazing upward out of a deep pool of dark water. Here the images of speakers mouthed soundlessly from below what was said above. Pale ghosts speaking out of a lagoon, past the ashtrays and aperitif glasses that floated upon its sullen surface.
The conspiracy of sitting around a shadowy hidden pool, and the sudden laughter when someone made a slip of the tongue. For the guilty mishandler, there was no escape. All case discussion ceased: the rest of them examining his faulty achievement, peering into the cracks of his character, while the image of the poor speaker drowned helplessly below in the black depths….
The scent of tobacco smoke preceded him like invisible cherubs, their nakedness garlanding him in the sweet whiffs of a good cigar. She met Herr Professor for the first time in his downstairs hallway. He cleared his throat softly before he spoke, saying, “Mein liebes Fräulein Doktor!”
And she was embarrassed at the title,- for she had been Fräulein Doktor only such a little while. He took her hand, covering it in both of his. “At last,” he said. “We know each other’s face.”
But what of his face, then? The portraits taken in the early 1900s were stiff, dead things. He posed for them as though he were sitting for an oil: regal, motionless, dignified. Posing as he wished the world to view him, posing for a public of strangers. But in real life his face fairly rumbled,- his eyes roving over you, though without making you feel exposed. He led her up a flight of well-worn stairs, countless feet having rubbed the steps smooth. Climbing one-two-three! Arriving in the parlor out of breath.
A rug filled the room, a Persian carpet, colored tiger rose, with cobalt tracery in the pattern of a battlement, with spearheads bristling behind as though hidden men waited for an assault. And then within the battlement, the white crescent moon of Allah and his white scimitar, repeated endlessly like soldiers of the faith. And yet deeper inside the fortress of this Persian carpet there came a line of flowers, blue irises and yellow daffodils: a garden kept inviolate behind the wall of spears and swords. The innermost panel of the carpet was laid out like a royal garden, with tracery walks and azure pools, green grass, more daffodils and fountains. The flowers were very human, for the daffodils’ little faces thrust out of the stiff collar of white petals and they half pranced on the twining paths, tipping their heads this way and that like the court princesses of Suleiman the Magnificent, out for a dainty stroll. Making young Fräulein Doktor think suddenly, Is this where they keep their women? In a gardenr safe behind swords and spears?
“You’re wondering what kind of men would keep their women behind battlements and swords,” he said. I am.
Yes, what kind of men?
If Allah kept his women behind battlements, perhaps God and his Prophet knew better than to trust their men with women. Or perhaps the women were a kind of luscious bait to lure infidels on to a futile assault upon his walls. Enemies of the faith martyred on the altar of their sisters and mothers. Was this why Allah’s people cherished the story of a flying carpet — a carpet ready to fly them from the prison of their passions, over the walls of a garden forever under attack?
A beautiful bas-relief hung on the wall of his study: a Roman copy of a Greek temple carving. Small, intricate, perhaps made of yellow stone, not plaster — for in places it was polished smooth and pitted with age. The frieze showed a man riding a chariot, the rider whipping the horses to a gallop.
“Look at the galloping man,” he said. And with those words, her host’s real name no longer rang the same again. No longer was he Herr Professor Freud of 19 Berggasse,- no, no longer just a signature at the end of a handwritten letter, or the coda of the strangely familiar hand that led her up the carpeted parlor stairs. In that moment she found her own name for him. A private name, only for him. Like the taboo names of the South Sea Islanders, which they tell to no one. Only now could young Fräulein Doktor claim a shred of his soul for her very own, like the lock of hair one treasures for a keepsake. For when her host said, “Look at the galloping man,” and not, “Look at the galloping horse,” he said it as a child might say it, knowing the frieze in its overwhelming entirety. Binding the man and the horse, the chariot and the speed, as one. For it was only dull adult minds that saw things in their separate logical parts, squeezing out the life in crushing correctness, Herr Kinderweise. Herr Child-wise.
“Look at the galloping man,” he said, “how they both have the speed and the power. He is the horse, and the horse is him. The chariot spokes are his bones, and the horse his muscle. They are the rush of air, the clatter of hooves, a harsh cry on a dusty road. They are the crack of the whip and the sting of a pebble as it shoots from under the screaming wheels. An earthquake. A tempest. A swirling cloud flattening everything in its path. He is the Horse God. And the beast — the God of Horses. Riders of the mighty wind!”
Herr Kinderweise. Herr Childwise. She never spoke that name for him out loud, fearing it might slip off her tongue and lose its magic forever. Yet for the rest of her life, it was carved and pitted in her brain, like the yellowing stone of the man and the horse.
Her interns were moving sluggi
shly like marine plants, sea anemones swaying gently in deep ocean currents. Yet she felt an invisible wall of glass between herself and everyone else, dividing them in time and place, As in the vastness of space, where the movements of the stars, coming from such great distances, had long since ceased to occur. An ash from Madame’s cigarette took many seconds to fall to the floor. Max had risen to close the living room door, which had yawned open, but he walked like a slow drunkard. Petra crossed her legs, but temptingly, luxurious and sexy — not at all what she intended.
Frau Direktor heard the young woman ask, “What — is — the — matter —- with — you?”
She tried to touch her own face. The fingers seemed to take an age to move. Finally, after a great effort, her leaden palm came off the chair. What was happening? Was this Newton’s world of ordered rules — or was their hollow room but a shabby cardboard box in time, the people stuck within like porcelain dolls, expressions painted on their faces?
No, like stones … Like the carefully nurtured stones in a Japanese rock garden, Their bodies weighing them down: planted stones. Silent, Immovable. Stable for a lifetime. Forever, compared to the lightning flash of the mind. There in the garden they sat: the weathered, craggy stone in a smooth sea of raked sand, a scrap of moss quietly thriving in the shade, and nearby a miniature shrub of pine, standing in repose. Fifty years it took the gardener to arrange this garden of stone, as all the while the air around it was vibrating and alive. While rain came and snows. And sun again. An irreverent butterfly lands on a stone pinnacle of their little rock and then flits off into eternity A wisp of thought on its own wings: gone in a sky of blue and gold …