by Keith Korman
Maximilian had finally managed to reach the door and close it. A new length of ash was beginning to grow on Madame’s Balkan cigarette. Petra finished crossing her legs, laying her hands in her lap like dead fish. Everyone moved slower and slower, as though wading through a pool of mire — and Frau Direktor began to feel the heat of their thoughts glowing in their brains: little flickers of flame behind their eyes…. Their minds lay open for her.
Inside Maximilian a curl of resentment rose like a tidal wave: what a waste, the clinic, the effort, the children. Did anyone really believe a silly letter to Mister Jung in Zurich would change anything? Then a weak, diabolical stab: what if he, Maximilian, could save the clinic? Just find the right levers of power. The proper official in control. If you just found him and reasoned with him — that would fix it. After all, Maximilian wasn’t “political.” He could take all the children into his own care and start afresh. It was the others who were condemning them to ruin. Frau Direktor obviously had not been in touch with the proper authorities. A series of waxy faces drifted across his mind, colleagues at the Hermitage Hospital, surgeons, administrators, research scientists: they’d vouch for him all right — they’d know the proper steps to take, they’d know the real official in charge!
Then all at once this silliness collapsed with the flat slap of despair. There was no help for it, no mysterious official with the proper levers of influence. Max’s silver ball clattered around the roulette wheel, hopping back and forth over the green double zero. As the croupier with the pencil-thin mustache called out, Messieurs et mesdames, les jeux sont faits! Les jeux sont faits! What rubbish, him thinking he wasn’t part of it. So how the hell were they going to get out?
A hot cinder burned in young Petras head. Ex-chambermaid! Ex-housekeeper! No more beds, no more laundry, She preened inside…. Intern Petra. She’d flee the country with Marie. Then a sharp twinge. Alone? With who, then? That old badger, Madame? Ugh. Or the other? The man. Why did his Houdini eyes seem so terribly a part of everything now? She imagined her fingers touching his dark hair while he slept upright on a steamer trunk in the baggage coach of a train. She saw herself brush the locks from his forehead, touching the faded purple scar, whispering, Don’t leave me, stay and sleep, darling, stay with your Petra and sleep, … Then a bitter swallow as she suppressed the whole thing. What the devil was the man to her? She could get on without him. As well as anybody. And with the children too …
Madame Le Boyau’s mind was the smoky glow of a wick after the candle had been blown out. She had long ago dismissed the idea of fleeing as absurd. She felt too old to go begging at the doors of famous strangers. She would wait with Frau Direktor until the end. Let them take her brittle bones. Better to die dignified, sitting in an old dining room chair, than tremble in a cold, muddy ditch with ice at the bottom, while the whole countryside was out searching high and low, … Better to sit it out and wait.
And yet part of her wondered how in heaven she would manage cigarettes in the days and weeks following her arrest. She quickly began to scheme this way and that — which merchant she might pay for an extended period of credit, which jailer she might corrupt to smuggle in her Balkan brand. How to achieve it — seduction or bribery? Ah, you flatter yourself, ma chère, Inevitably she’d lose a percentage off the top. From the merchant to the guards, they would all cheat ruthlessly. And what if they sent her to a camp? There must be all kinds of contraband floating about, plenty of thieves and racketeers. What had she to offer any rascal in exchange for the simple creature comforts? Therapy?
The three of them had become transparent. Had Frau Direktor become transparent too … ? And they to each other? When the policemen came to take their bodies away, would their minds return to the dilapidated living room, the familiar hallways of the clinic? Where was Herr Kinderweise right this very moment? And what of her remote Herr Doktor in Zurich? Was either of them alone? Reading in his study? Listening to a patient? Or with his wife? No, she sensed Herr Kinderweise’s thoughts turned elsewhere. And her precious Herr Doktor had long ago managed to banish her out of mind.
There came a sinking, the air barely reaching down her trachea. The asthma very bad. She heard the labor of her breathing.
Maximilian, she thought, said, “What’s the matter? Can we get you something? Look out!”
The room turned on its side. Max’s face peered at her, upside down. He was saying, “Someone, quick! Get me a pillow for her head!”
Chapter 5
The Enduring
The slowness of everything made her think of dandelion puffs floating through the air, lazy specks drifting aimlessly across a summer field. The wall of glass between herself and the others had become thicker and thicker. But now blurring, glazed over as if with frost. Maximilian’s head tilted gently from side to side,- he looked concerned and puzzled, like a troubled dog who can’t understand laughter or tears. Madame Le Boyau flickered through the cigarette smoke. “I’ll prepare the bed,” she said, and was gone.
She guessed they were planning to carry her upstairs. Why so soon? There was so much left to do, so much to discuss and decide. Frau Direktor wanted to stop them, saying, “Never mind me, let’s get on with it,” but moving her mouth was such a great effort, her tongue as thick as leather. Her body felt impossibly heavy, arms and thighs like sacks of meal. “Check her pulse,” a voice said. Then, “Loosen her clothes!” A harsh light glared into her eyes; Max was holding up an eyelid. His thumb seemed as large as a brick. Get your damn thumb out of my eye! But her tongue was too thick for it. They lifted her, Max on one side, good thorough Petra on the other.
“Can you walk?” Max asked. “Come along now, try to walk. We’ll go to bed. You’re just tired, that’s all. Too much housekeeping.”
She tried to smile into Max’s face. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. They stumbled up a long flight of stairs that went on endlessly into darkness, one weary step after the next. But all the while Max’s face stayed right beside her own, the sweat running down his shaven cheek. She felt like telling him what a nice fellow he was to keep her company this way. Just say, You’re a nice fellow, Max —- but she was simply too tired to make the words come out…. Besides, her tongue felt so awfully thick. Lungs all choked. Tubes blocked. Just no extra breath for it.
They carried Frau Direktor into her tiny room. A small electric lamp stood on a nightstand by the bed. It burned, shedding a pale white light.
Did she faint? she wondered stupidly….
Petras voice now: “Look, look at her hand! It’s twitching. Stop it! I can’t stand to see it twitch like that!”
Twitching, she called it? No, that was wrong. They used to call it by another word. Twitting. Twiggling. No, wrong. Twiddling. Yes, twiddling! What a funny word. Try to tell Petra. Try to say it out loud for her: twid-twid-twid. Oh, Petra, listen carefully and you’ll hear it on my breath: twid-twid-twid …
The ring of faces around the bed had grown blurry. “She’s barely breathing. Is this asthma?” Madame asked. “I’ve never seen it this bad. Will it go away?”
No answer …
After a moment Max said, “There now, Frau Direktors sleeping.” But he was wrong. She was looking straight up at the cracked ceiling through half-shut eyes. She tried to focus on his face, but she saw only a round blur like a rising moon…. One by one the faces floating about the bed drew off. Everyone was leaving. Madame, last of all, shuffled stiffly to the door. She tried one last time to call out for her to stop, but she kept on shuffling. Barely picking up her feet, the dry steps fading out the door. Please come back, don’t go. Wait for me! I’m coming! Wait!
Frau Direktor rose and went to the door. Glancing back at her bed, she was dimly aware of a snuggled lump, hidden under the covers. The faded light from the bedside lamp seemed to be shining on the huddled form as from a great distance. Illuminating it, faintly, and leaving all else in gloom.
Madame had left the room, closing the door behind her. But that did not matter now, how ea
sy to follow her down the stairs. Frau Direktor could feel the house living all around her. In the handrail she grasped, a family of termites gnawed happily and methodically away. Upon the wall, the wallpaper was becoming more and more brittle, imperceptibly peeling off the plaster. In another part of the house, a toilet flushed. And in yet another, a child cried in its sleep; then a short moment later came the sound of caring footsteps hurrying to the rescue.
She tried not to let the life of the house distract her from following Madame down the dark staircase, but the old woman seemed to be swept beyond her reach. I’m dying, Frau Direktor thought. Look, even the staircase was changing, becoming narrower and narrower and altogether black. She heard the faint sounds of people talking. But then this too was gone, as though they had stopped. The air grew hot and stuffy. The house now filmy and transparent: a ghost house, like a stage with paper doors, no glass in the windows, and walls of scrim. Snow lay on the street outside,- the streetlamps glowed. A few flakes came down, weaving in and out of the lamplight, settling on the black iron of the lamp cages. A brewer’s cart with great casks strapped in place rolled down the street,- the horse team snorted in the cold. From the black sky above, snowflakes drifted down in lazy spirals. White coming out of the void … And then even the snow ceased to fall.
In the top floor of their town house, she saw the dark little room with the bedside lamp that gave hardly any light. And she saw the huddled lump in the narrow bed. Then the room faded, leaving her alone in the empty night. It was much better when you didn’t have to breathe. Was this how you came to an end? With a pause in eternity stretching from one heartbeat to the next, one moment to the next, one age to the next — when nothing moves, in a deep, patient stillness? Was this the life after death? A long silence between living and dying. Yet no oblivion … Only a long gray staircase leading up and down from one moment to the next — to walk upon time as though upon a stair — when your lifetime was but a single landing.
And when you died, dissolution. An interminable fading while the intricate machine of your existence shut down. All its components taken out and disassembled. One by one each piece crushed, or melted, or rusted away,- until nothing stood on the steps of time but the soulless dust of souls. And this, too, to be swept off the gray stairway. No molecules, no atoms. Only the pause in the clock’s second hand existed. One duration flowing into another, And when she had endured eternity she was in another time. Another place. Times and places, places in time. Forward or backward. Persisting. Existing.
Enduring in the minds around her … A fresh breeze scented with jasmine and gardenia swept into a brightly sunlit morning room. The sound of a fountain pen scratched softly across a paper tablet. But that was all she knew or heard or saw: her enduring had narrowed the senses down to a slim band. As though, when swept off the staircase of eternity, all her senses had been pressed together, only to be handled selectively, and one at a time.
A writer’s hand wrote with a black fountain pen,- the writer’s script tilted dramatically forward, as though everything he thought was angled only toward the future. Then, as the enduring faded, a few familiar senses returned as well. She recognized the hand immediately, though it had changed with old age, the script feebler. Herr Kinderweise. As old as a man could be.
But this was not the study in Vienna, the study of the galloping man! Where were they? And even as the last shred of the enduring dissipated and her senses bloomed in all directions, Frau Direktor knew somehow one important fact — she existed no more, She was some years dead. But this did not particularly trouble her, for the police had long ago enacted whatever fate decreed, and for that she was grateful: because it seemed she had been spared the grim pain of punishment. And now her senses were free, to drift upon the wind. She forgot about Herr Kinderweise’s new study and raced out to look over the world, listening for a billion heartbeats, for a billion voices,- feeling the rain in a backwater Amazon jungle and the raw bite of wind on the Greenland ice pack; brushed by the pungent smell of turmeric and reeling from the caw of parrots in a noisy, crowded Rangoon market stall. Her restored spirit reached out into the world, and then she knew for certain that all of them were gone. Her poor clinic no longer on any person’s mind, not even the Russian Special Police,- a final closing of the bedroom door … not a soul on the planet remembered Frau Direktor at all.
But the motion and the voice of things were open to her: the strips of clouds in the blue sky, leaves rustling in the wind, and the trickle of water running down a gutter in a city — minor things and great things and the confused thoughts of men like the steady roar of the sea over dunes. Chaotic, for she heard the babble of many tongues: a great war was brewing across the continent of Europe, much greater than the one she had known in her youth. She saw the spray of golden showering sparks in arms factories, the shunting of trains, and the flickering needles of a thousand electric sewing machines stitching a million bits of braid on the collars of uniforms. She heard the bark of orders and the answering shouts of men, the sound of marching ants, singing the same marching song, stamping the same billion feet: soldiers’ feet in every city, town, and village.
Already in the East an empire from Japan was rising like a great wave to hurl across the Pacific Ocean,- and on the mainland of China she felt their single will like a heavy canvas smothering Manchuria: a muffled scream from Shanghai, the feeble voices of people drowned out by shellfire and the moans of those trapped under collapsed buildings. While from within the great landmass of Asia, she sensed a coldly burning coal from the brain of the man who ruled Russia, He still ruled it — alive and plotting — while the ghosts of millions he had sent out of his sight hovered about him in the very bedroom where he slept with a woman. But he was a hard man, who slept soundly despite the wailing throngs beside his bed. They did not trouble him. He dreamed of adding to their millions.
And suddenly her eye lit upon Vienna. The National Socialist flags flew everywhere: the red field, grand white circle, and black swastika. They hung smartly from public buildings, and pairs of smaller flags from lampposts along the avenues,- red, black, and white bunting draped from streetfront windows, miles of it in every Sirasse and Platz. The city was all dressed up as though for Easter, Throngs of gray-uniformed soldiers chatted loudly on the sidewalks and shopped in the stores,- officers in gleaming boots ordered bottles of champagne in the restaurants. There seemed to be a teeming rally or party in every flat and alley, while bejeweled royalty danced gaily in the crystal-lit ballrooms of the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg.
But no music came from the Freud family house at 19 Berggasse,-no electric bulbs burned in the sockets. The Freud family had gone,-the upstairs rented out to strangers, who hung their wash in the rooms and never did the dishes, The old study lay empty — no books or pictures — and the furniture had vanished, There were cigarette butts ground into the hall carpet and muddy bootprints on the stairs. Down, down through the house she peered, looking for some clue, some trace of those who had left. Dust and dirt were crammed in every corner,- someone had urinated on a wall. The closets ripped open, empty, except for a torn dress hanging limply from a hanger,-a pocketful of change tossed on the floor. The stench of human filth grew worse in the basement,- on the concrete floor she saw what looked like a few shards of cracked pottery. The chariot frieze she liked so much, now broken junk. Recognizable only by the pitted stone. Off in a corner a fractured piece of the horse’s head, ending just behind the jaw. The galloping man had fallen.
And his owner? Driven out? Run away?
How stupid to think she could be omnipotent all in a minute, to think she might swoop over the world without becoming hopelessly lost among the intricacies of a billion minds and their trillion works. Try to picture it: that brightly lit morning room, painted butter-cream yellow with white trim on the window — she only glimpsed it, and then only glimpsed his hand, scratching across a paper tablet with a fountain pen. Where was he? Someplace here in Vienna? She felt the urge to panic, to flee from
street to street, shout questions at German soldiers, rip into their brains!
Stop this. Reason coolly. It had been a bright morning but now was midday in Vienna. West, then — she turned her ear, listening hopefully for that hand still scratching on the pad. Trying to shut out all else,- the Vienna cellar grew dim and gray, tissuey … the pile of yellow rubble from the frieze lay in the dark like a heap of burning coals. How many men were writing now? Where was that hand, among all the hands, where was the one she sought? Just in the city itself, many hands crawled across lined paper, writing all the time: hesitant hands, hands that pressed forward, hands that paused to doodle on an empty page. The small pile of broken stone glowed on the floor — the only thing that mattered — and slowly one by one all those other writing hands put down their pens, …
Then she heard his sound; it drew her on, separate from the sound of a thousand squints scratching their squibs across the continent. He was writing a letter, and thinking the words as he wrote:
20 Maresfield Gardens
London N.W. 3
April 1, 1939
Dear (name mumbled, didn’t catch it)
It is surprising how little we can foresee the future. If you told me before the war — or twenty years ago — that a society for psychoanalysis would be founded in London, I would never have imagined that a quarter of a century later Î might be living next door. And, even more unlikely, that, while living next door, S would still not be able to celebrate the occasion with you. Accept these good wishes in lieu of my presence.
Unhappily, people here are trying to lull me into an atmosphere of optimism, I don’t believe it, and I don’t like being deceived. If only some kind of intervention would cut short this cruel process.