by Keith Korman
The hard sooty shingles came up in a rush. He wished he could blink, but he quietly passed through the stone instead.
The plummeting stopped with one great suffocating thump. For a long time the fall left him black. But this smothering concussion was a calming pause, for his passing had been endured and the natural order of things restored: after the enduring, the blindness…. How many years had gone by? Three or four or a hundred?
If he listened closely, would he be able to detect his living self somewhere on the European continent? He tried, and faintly — yes faintly — even in the blindness, far off he heard a patient murmuring familiar words. He knew the year now: if the thistle had plummeted upon Vienna, falling into 19 Berggasse, he would have found himself a mere five or so years younger and listening to a patient consumed with a nervous tic and boils. Dimly he could taste the cigar that burned between the listening man’s fingers. How easy to attach himself once again to his old self and travel about with the charming fellow, like a fly on his shoulder.
But he had already listened to that patient’s problems, for better or worse, and already ground out the cigar that burned between those fingers. It held little appeal. Besides, what could the dry thistle of a soul spark do? Consult in the treatment of the patient? More than likely he would give the same advice and concur.
In the consulting room of 19 Berggasse, his old self squirmed in the chair with a touch of indigestion. À bubble of lunch gas was moving through the listening man’s lower quarters. Presently his old self would have to break wind.
So that’s how your old ghost speaks to you! It haunts you quietly from a great distance, sending you a curse: a phantom of flatulence to punish you for your gastronomic misdeeds!
No death? No dying, then? No end? Just hollow repetition, like the ticking seconds within the workings of a clock with no hands to mark the passing time? Oh, God, he wished the Lord would come and take him….
The enduring was passing on. Frau Direktors blindness slowly coming to an end, her strangling asthma drawn off for the moment. So it wasn’t so easy to die after all. What a mad dream! Flying about the world and poor old Herr Professor sick … À deep hush lay upon the Rostov clinic. Her weary eyes rested on the wooden bedpost by her head. And there on the post sat a tiny fluff of thistle, waving feathery arms.
How very odd: just like in the dream …
She stared at the thistle on the worn post for a minute or an hour without the slightest inclination to move her gaze elsewhere. Sometimes the thistle became a little fly, staring back with weary eyes,- then her own eyes would blink, and no more fly! Only a wavy bit of fluff upon the bedpost. So I’m really not dead … but spared for today. … But the wooden bedpost filled the world, and the sounds outside her door hardly mattered.
What a wonderful old bedpost it was, cracked down the center, with a worn knob at the top. And a bit of fluff. Or was it a fly?
She woke again in the darkened sickroom. Bare wooden lath showed through the cracked plaster on the ceiling. The electric lamp with a blue paper shade on her bedstand burned with a dim light. And the asthma had returned, like an unpleasant friend. The bed creaked. The floor cold. She found her slippers. Standing was a problem. Clutching the bedpost helped. Her breath steamed into the chill of the room. The stuffing had fallen from a broken windowpane, letting in the winter air. She crammed the stuffing back.
Voices echoed in the lower reaches of the house, the sounds of people talking like disconnected motes. And the asthma, which had been hovering like a black angel, closed its wings. She was slipping off again. Back to the mad dreams.
A tiny fly lit on the bedpost, its buzzing innocuous and far away. How puzzling: a fly in winter. A winter fly …
Talk to me! it said. Talk!
Ah, the Herr Kinderweise fly, come all the way from Vienna to keep her company. What was there to talk about? Nightmares and bad dreams? And then it became clear. All this time the falling sparks of their minds had been hovering around each other. Touching and retouching while they gazed at the great rolling earth, all throughout each other’s long enduring. Each one had felt the other’s presence, familiar and reassuring like a silent companion. Yes, even as she choked alone in her bed — and yes, even while he lay dying, years and years apart. Long ago their pasts had mingled, so they could relive, must relive, one last time, he and she.
Forever.
Frau Direktor would endure her passing just as Herr Professor a few years later: passing in and out of their last precious days like jumbled puzzle pieces, one upon the other, joining spark to spark in their infinite final moments. Herr Kinderfly and Frau Asthma would travel together for a time. A meeting of minds, their resurrection …
So you are here,
Yes, I am here,
I must tell you something, Herr Professor,
Tell me.
Yes, tell him. Before the asthma took her away Before the huddled lump died in the bed, gripping the cracked bedpost of her future. Before the others took her children out of the country, safe and far away … But not right now. Not this second. No, rest a moment. Rest and drift along a memory. Visit her old friend and grope her way into his hidden, secret places. Back to the stone madhouse where she was truly born. Back to the whitewashed solitary room where she floated like a bubble in the air. Where she finally met jung Herr Doktor Young, No! Not right! What he said was: “Hello, I’m young Herr Doktor Jung.” Crucial difference. You should always get a person’s name right, But young Herr Doktor Jung never knew her proper name. So she kept him waiting at the throne room door. Waiting for a thousand years while young Herr Doktor Jung peeked at her through the viewing slit. Didn’t he know the viewing slit was really a rectum? The madhouse had devoured him and was now expelling him into her private room. Funny, he didn’t seem particularly worried that his head had become a turd…. Perhaps in a clean and efficient Swiss institution —
Enough! Time enough for that!
Yes, time enough for the rest, to see everything that needed seeing — her sickness, her cure, his betrayal — to know everything worth knowing.
Chapter 2
The Sphinx
They found him alone in the tower room. He had built his house when his mother died, stone by stone, until it rose to a tower where he could sit. Oh, the workmen had done the actual masonry, but he had directed the building. The circular ground floor had windows at all points of the compass,- a dug-out stone hearth in the center, with a smoke hole,- and bunks fitted into the curved walls. No electric. No gas. And, connected by a narrow stair, a comfortable crows nest that rose up higher than the rest — an aerie where he could riddle with the stars like an ancient sorcerer of old.
He had built the place because he liked to dream and had filled it with papers and books and paintings on the walls. They found their old colleague alone, spinning riddles for his own amusement. Dozens of volumes were strewn about his desk and on the floor by his chair. Broken pencils lay where he had discarded them after snapping their points in a fury of writing. A Montblanc fountain pen left on a lined pad, put down in the middle of a word and not picked up again for months. The half-written word was “Götterdämmerung,” that is, Twilight of the Gods. But the train of thought on the half-scrawled pad was long since lost.
There were books on alchemy written by wise men of the tenth century and books on Lenin the Antichrist written by cranks in the twentieth century. There were issues of Life and National Geographic and an issue of Time with Hitler on the cover as Man of the Year. There was the latest issue of Vo0e en français, cracked open to a feature in which a feathery scribbler fluttered on about Philippe de Somebody’s “horned-breast-cup velvet backless ball gown, which produced an aggressive femme fatale très moderne.” And he had torn an article from an American cooking magazine on the making of ancient Mediterranean warriors’ wine, entitled “The Drunkards of Troy.” But peeking out from under this recipe was yesterday’s obituary from the London Times:
FREUD, 83, FATHER OF PSYCHO
ANALYSIS
by. K. Spence
London. Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalytic Therapy, also the originator of the Oedipus Complex theory of human behavior and perhaps the worlds greatest living —
Herr Doktor had stopped reading right there and let the obituary become slowly engulfed under other papers he was considering. He called the process “layering” and thought it a legitimate method of letting his subconscious decide what to bring to the surface. Or bury, for that matter. Freud’s obituary had reminded him of a passage in a long-lost book. He suspected it tucked under a stack of tomes devoted to 600 B.C. black Attic vase painting.
No, no, no! Not a book,- an article on the myth of Oedipus by that half-cuckoo historian Graves. Near his feet lay a few books by the same fellow, crammed with torn slips of paper marking sections that intrigued him. He found what he was looking for. Several typewritten pages, now crumpled. A scholar friend had sent him the text of a lecture the historian had planned to give. But the event had been canceled and the text never published. A fragment of Graves’s strange lecture ran thus:
THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX
“What, being of one voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, and is weakest when it has the most?” Those who could not solve the riddle were throttled on the spot by the Sphinx.
He stopped reading, suddenly remembering that the very name Sphinx meant “Throttler.” But without trying to recall how he knew this fact, he went back to the passage:
The riddle of the Sphinx was deduced from sacred icons showing the winged Moon Goddess of Thebes: her composite body — half lion, half serpent — was a calendar symbolizing the Theban Year. A lion for the waxing spring-summer sowing time and a serpent for the autumn-winter harvest. The Queen of Thebes, a living woman, was the Sphinx’s Moon Priestess, the Goddess on earth to whom all offered their devotion and to whom a sacrificial Sun King was married for the term of a year.
Brief was the Solar King’s reign: for at the close of his season another King was chosen to take his place. And after a violent struggle, the usurper cast his master down. So a heap of skulls grew at the Sphinx’s feet. Yet the infamous riddle has been invented to explain these rotting bones of fallen kings, invented from an icon picture: an Infant, a Warrior, and an Old Man — all worshiping the Goddess.
He stopped reading again. Invented by whom? To explain a supposed sacred icon picture —- what icon picture? On a plate, a vase, a cup, a tomb? Mr. Graves never said where the picture might be found. The thought of a massive search bored him. It meant going through the whole picture catalog of the British Museum and possibly half the Greek National Museum as well. Should he write Graves a letter and ask him point-blank? Where was that rascal hiding? Majorca some-place …
That was the thing about Freud he always admired. The old Faker never failed to give his sources. And any idiot could look them up if he wished. But not the clever Mr. Graves,- no, Mr. Graves had seen it somewhere and you damned well better take his word for it.
The passage went on:
The icon picture shows not three individuals but the same man — paying his respects to the Goddess from cradle to grave. In other icons the Moon Priestess is shown in the three stages of life: young, fertile, and withering. Thus the great birth and death cycle mimics the passing seasons of the year: the flowering of the land and its fall to barren winter. Under the matriarchal system the new King was often a prisoner of war or a shipwrecked sailor — the usurper now called a “son” of the royal family. Thus when the Queen Priestess helped him seize his bloody throne, this stranger had indeed murdered his “father” to marry his “mother.”
Oedipus’ guessing of the Sphinx’s riddle still echoes the worship of the seasons. Man! is the answer. First going on four legs as a child, then on two as a youth, and in the end hobbling with a staff. Hearing the un-raveling of her cultic riddle, the Sphinx Moon Goddess threw herself off a cliff in despair.
Was Oedipus a 1300 B.C. invader who suppressed the ancient Moon Cult, seeking to end the yearly ritual king-slaying in Thebes? Did the Moon Priestess commit suicide rather than alter the ancient ways? Was the myth of King Oedipus told from the invaders point of view? An invader branding the old ways incestuous and barbaric?
If we consider the Freudian theory of the Oedipus Complex as an instinct common to all men — we must now see that such a theory was suggested by the perverted telling of the myth. And while Plutarch records (On his and Osiris 32) that the hippopotamus “murdered his sire and forced his dam,” Freud would never have suggested that every man has a Hippopotamus Complex!
He loved that last bit. What a clever retort to the old Faker, shattering his all-inclusive theory of sexuality. Ah, Mr. Graves, hiding on your Spanish isle, making provocative remarks. While singing songs of the dead ones — Plutarch, Apollodorus, Asius — making his own translations of all the lurid tales of rape and cannibalism and the bloody incest of the gods. Look anywhere on the Mediterranean: moon goddess cults flourished on every coast and in the woody depths of every mountain grove. Where June weddings saw a young man marry a Lady of the Fields, where the villagers knocked off a useless old man and planted him in the ground to seed the crops, or sent his smoke up to heaven in a cloud to lure the vital summer rains…. The human-god ritual of birth and death stretched back into the past like a well-trodden path, dwindling to the barest foot track, ending at last around a fire in the wilderness, where men in skins stared up at the moon and carved round, fat stones in worship of the dark. Small, round, eyeless things with heavy breasts and a ripe pregnant belly. Archaeologists found them everywhere neolithic man made his campsites, in and around the lands of the Mother Sea — found them in the tens of thousands. Venus stones they called them … though Aphrodite and Roman Venus were but her great-great-granddaughters. Long before the King of the Jews, a little pregnant wench was God.
Who was this stone mother? Did a race of men worship their women? Or women worship her alone? Did she have a name? A thousand names? Or a secret name, never to be spoken?
Perhaps they only called her She.
He rose from his desk and began pacing anxiously about. He felt trapped in this little room. Graves’s ideas on psychology were much too pat, too clever. And when it came to his German — “the Oedipus Complex … an instinct common to all men” — obviously the fellow had read Freud only in translation. The old Faker never used the word “instinct” when it came to describing a process of the human mind. Instinct was too knee-jerk, too goose-step. Freud saw human affairs as affairs of the heart, impulsive, compelling, contradictory. A sick man might be driven or seduced into some strange relation with his mother, but common sense told you it wasn’t instinctual, like dogs sniffing each other’s rear ends. No, a mother-tongue reader knew the old Faker used the word “drive” when referring to our human foibles and compulsions — in German, a different word altogether.
And what about the aforementioned problem of sources? How much simpler if Mr. Graves had decided to include a picture of the Sphinx icon. Was he really the gentleman scholar after all? Or would a man who misconstrued the word “instinct” be “driven” to invent an icon to fit a theory? Not the first time in the history of the Sphinx that a conqueror staged the propaganda to suit his purposes. After all, hadn’t the emperor Napoleon suffered defeat after defeat in Egypt, while sending back victorious dispatches to Paris? His callous artillerymen used the Great Sphinx for gunnery practice and finally dragged home a huge obelisk to commemorate his triumph! The obelisk stood to this day in the Place de la Concorde. And the Sphinx smiled across the Nile with her nose blown off. Even the mighty Bonaparte had failed to wrest the secret from her.
Only one solution remained: write Mr. Graves. If the scholar put him off, then perhaps the codger had been caught doing a little inventing. Ah, the perversity of man’s suspicions against a stranger when a little thing like a penny postcard of an ancient icon was left to the imagination.
Perversity.
; Had not Mr. Graves used the word himself? The Oedipus Myth perverted by an invader for his own ends … Odd choice of words.
And which was more perverted anyway, a brigand invading Thebes to kill the Moon Priestess — or sleeping with your mother? It would depend on whom you asked: the Queen of Thebes or your mother. And what about Plutarch’s poor hippopotamus, who murdered his sire and forced his dam? Herr Hippo obviously suffered from the deeply repressed wishes of a latent Oedipal complex. But whether they arose from a secret hostility toward his father coupled with a perverse lust for his mother, or simply because Herr Hippo needed more wallowing room on the mudbank, no one would ever know.
Perversion.
Not an innocent word at all. Who, indeed, had more opportunities to turn things to his own uses — a confused hippopotamus or a classical scholar translating long-dead languages, which only a handful of men really knew well? Perhaps the whole thing boiled down to one’s reputation — the preservation or perversion of it! For what was “reputation” anyway but a life path open for the world to see?
Was this, then, the riddle of the Sphinx?
What creature, being of one voice: when was it the weakest? The child or the lonely, feeble old man who walked with a cane? No, neither. It was the creature of your public face, the creature of your reputation…. What people saw of your path in life, how it bottled you and throttled you and crushed you in the end. How many men had felt the errors of their life path killing them, strangling them — and longed to see the Sphinx’s smile fade? She knew, she always knew…. She knew the errors you had made.
Jung picked up his fountain pen for the first time in three months and went back to the lined writing pad with the halfwritten word “Götterdämmerung” on it. He read once more the aging words: