by Keith Korman
Didn’t her parents really say those words? But not in any make-believe railway train. They’d said them in his office at the time of their interview long ago. Herr Doktor was having some trouble recalling their faces. Far, far too easy to see them as dummy plaster heads, just as Fräulein did.
But slowly the parents’ faces did come back. The father with that roguish highwayman look and the sly curl of his pipe smoke … While Frau Schanderein sat like the Empress de la Valse, bolt upright in her china-blue dress and her bold, jutting breasts staring him in the face. Her strong red lips and mobile mouth and her eyes cold as the blue silk of her clothes. The embroidered masks of comedy and tragedy with their laughing and crying mouths. There were blank sockets in those eyes too.
“We’ve tried,” Frau Schanderein told him. “But there’s no room for this in our lives.”
Her husband seemed a little softer, eyes dark with dread, with suffering — his own and the girl’s. “But the way she is now, day after day. You wear out. It never leaves you alone.” The man’s eyes flitted weakly away as his voice dropped, plainly unsure whether what he said or thought was right or wrong. Or ever had been.
Odd coincidence, their choice of words. How remarkable the girl should pick them up, even in a different context.
There’s no room.
Leave us alone.
Did Fräuleins parents drum that into her for years? Pounding it in until Mama’s and Papa’s own faces had mutated into blank, emotionless headpieces with painted expressions of hilarity or anger, change ing with the hollow meaning of their hollow words? Herr Doktor pushed the unfinished case notes across his desk. They no longer interested him. By accident, the reply from Vienna appeared. A single page, evidently lost for some time. How had it gotten separated and stuck among his ragged pile of papers? A clever losing if there ever was one. And a cleverer finding. How annoying the page should turn up now. A sear of jealousy scorched his neck. Instantly wishing he’d thought of the lines himself;
In the secrets of her dreams you will find the wounded demon, shrieking to escape. Find him and you’ll unravel the knot of her existence. But let her find the demon and she may yet weave a life of her own free will….
The secrets of her dreams. If only he could write a sentence like that, the secrets he would show the world! Yet what conceivable difference did it make if he found her demon or she did? Why such a fine distinction? He vacillated between gusts of jealousy and doubt, tempted to sweep the Vienna letter off his desk and let it lie on the floor till the end of the world. Did Fräulein dream at all? And come to think of it, did crazy people have crazy dreams — or did they dream of normal life, a confounding paradise, forever beyond their grasp?
Herr Doktor sat back blankly in his chair. He found he had been sawing his thigh with the edge of his hand for quite some time….
Him twiddling.
Ach! So you’ve regressed to her level, my good man. Wonderful.
And that stopped him cold. Not just because of the remark’s cruelty (true enough), and not just because it showed his cowardice (also true), but because it held a grain of truth. His cruel, cowardly thought had brought back the word “regression.”
During the tale of the laughing horse, the girl had not merely been degenerating, not simply meandering, but regressing to something. In order to enjoy a forbidden act, indulge a starving wish. Throughout the long period of her horrid shrieking, the smearing of the menstrual blood, the making of the cowled dolls … these were messages, tokens, signs. But she had changed. By throwing things, by striking him and playing the Queen, she now engaged in long-denied actions. An infantile tantrum was clearly regressive, clearly demented in the common sense of the word, but also an achievement. Clawing back into her past to taste a pleasure, buried deep, a sweet revenge.
To right a wrong, administer a punishment long overdue. Flagellating the lone straw man of those relentless monsters out of the “Before Time” — throwing objects at Herr Doktor — but actually beating Empress Mother and Highwayman Father: doing the deed to Matter and Flatter.
Regression wasn’t going back. But living over again what you might have done. Finally taking for your own what rightfully should have been. Ja, ja, a demon cutting his way out. And hers was a laughing demon, clawing anyone who held out a helping hand…,
Chapter 13
Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream …
At first she remembered only fragments, littered like shattered glass on the bare floor of her mind. On a raw night in late March the wind gusted onto Fräuleins window in noisy blows. She quailed at the black glass, so thin and trembly, such a fragile wall against the wild beyond. She took a long time to wrap herself, so that if the black sky broke into her room, the snug cocoon would keep her safe from its snatching fingers. And as she slipped off into sleep, she saw in her mind the page from the neurology text. That ugly, deceitful page she loathed so much. With the words “dementia” and “incurable.” The very same page she had rubbed to death, until she wore the damning words away …
Standing on the high moors of sleep, she saw once more the lovely, hidden words she found beneath the bitter page: proto … genie … Repeating them to herself as the drowsy heather rose to take her and the black sheets of wind slapped against the windowpane. Proto … genie … proto … genie … proto.
Fräulein found herself sitting in a green leather chair in a cozy room. A fire burned in the grate. A black briar pipe rested in the well of an ashtray standing by the chair’s thick leather arm. A thread of smoke wound languidly from the pipe as if recently abandoned. In her lap lay the book from the Before Time. The book that vanished and came again during the long years of nothingness. If only she could show Herr Doktor Pants the pictures in it, so he might know how she died:
The Exegesis of Aching Dottery
No, dammit, see it right! And as if by magic, the title of the book seemed to change. Now it had another title, a more correct title. She whispered it out loud:
“The Evidence of Ancient Pottery.”
What a grand book. Bound in pressed linen, its thick cover marbled in swirls of blue and green. And now she saw quite clearly a raised subtitle, printed in gold lettering:
Artifacts from the
Prehistoric Peoples
of the
Péloponnèse
As she stared, the book slowly opened its covers, and the pages began to turn. She felt herself shrinking in the green leather chair. A tiny Fräulein doll, tiptoeing over the book’s turning leaves. And as she skipped over the turning pages, she felt herself sliding back year after year, age after age. Back to the old time. To the time she really was the Queen …
The pages stopped turning.
Beneath her feet lay an engraved illustration. The lithograph showed the carved stone face of a goddess fitted into the mud brick of an ancient wall. A face of terror to ward off intruders and brigands: the face of a woman with tangled hair, lips pulled back, tongue hissing through bared teeth. A puny, stunted body dangled from the swollen head. Stout little legs pumping furiously up and down. A gigantic head, running madly …
Fräulein searched for some clue to explain this strange carved head fitted in the wall. Far away at the bottom of the page she spied the letters of a caption. She walked the length of the page to read it. Talisman of a Gorgon in a village wall was the disappointing answer.
Gorgon? What was a Gorgon?
Beneath her feet the stone head moved its lips.
The Grim One …
Fräulein looked doubtfully at the picture. Had it really spoken? Her head bumped against the mud-brick wall. She touched the dry stone carving. Quite dead. But the stone spoke words…. So dreams could have their own dreams.
She beheld a silver ribbon that wound down from the hills, watering a shallow plain. Terraced fields. Clustered trees in orchards. Beyond the fields the land rose sharply: grazing pastures of high grass, green spears waving in the wind. A dark forest cloaked the knees of the hills. Inviting woo
ds, calling her to sit under their cool boughs, to ponder the stillness and the way of their dappled leaves. The Gorgon’s Wood? The Queen’s? But the leaves only danced upon the wind in answer.
Higher up, pine trees stalked the naked slopes of stone. And higher still, the bare flanks of the mountain, home of rock and sky. The glint of ice burned in the shadows of the mountain’s crags. Empty but for the lonely cold and the tang of spring that spiked the air.
Abruptly Fräulein stood in the midst of a village. A mere few cottages of mud brick, bleached white from endless seasons. Some faded rags hung limply from a line strung between two huts. “Is anyone here?” she called. But only silence came. A village dog trotted past, sniffing at every empty door.
She dipped her hands into the cool depths of a wooden trough. A mud-brick kiln sat near the wall of the potter’s cottage, a kiln built in the shape of a beehive. And here again, on the oven door, she saw the Gorgon’s terror face scratched in the clay.
Within the hut an old man of skin and bone lay on a mess of straw. His eyes bright and sharp, but his thin mouth drawn. Above his head a tattered robe hung on a peg. It might have been purple once but now was as faded as the man. He raised a tremulous arm, his bony fingers pointing silently across the room.
In a dingy corner squatted a small figure, a naked girl of eight or nine, hands and feet bound with cords. On her face a mask of clay with the same face as the kiln’s, as the stone in the wall, but painted. Black-rimmed eyes, red open lips — as if the mask itself had been feeding on an open wound. The girl wriggled and whimpered in her bonds. The old man took a skin from the wall and poured a draft of dark-red wine into a small stone cup. Red drops ran out the crack in the cup’s rim, dripping on his hands. He went to the child, tipped her chin, and poured the wine down the mask’s open mouth. The girl choked and sputtered, streams of wine running down her chest.
Once more Fräulein stood upon the picture book. How could she tell Herr Doktor any of this? Whatever she said sounded so stupid. Oh yes, Herr Doktor, last night I had the strangest dream, …
So instead she told him:
“Last night I went to the place where the Queen came from. To the cave where the world was born,”
Chapter 14
The Cave Where the World Was Born
They sat in the Burghölzli garden, under the hundred window-eyes of the hospital. It was the first of April. Herr Doktor had been careful to wipe down the stone seat by the garden wall, for it had rained the night before, and he’d placed his topcoat under them so they might sit. A ground mist lay in the hollows of the garden, raindrops clung to the naked thorns on the vine.
The gardeners had begun their season’s work despite chances of a sudden frost. Herr Doktor and the girl watched silently as the head gardener inspected a flower bed near the glass-enclosed dayroom. The headman rubbed the dirt in his palms and muttered to himself, while his young helper, a cheerful lad (rumored to have a police record), leaned on his spade and stared pensively into a sad gray sky that threatened snow. All about them the buds and shoots on the trees were swollen and ready, needing only the sun and moon of summer to set them free.
“In my dream I’m sitting in a room,” Fräulein told Herr Doktor. “In a green leather chair. Then I go to another place. It’s the same time of the year as now. But far away. And very old.”
“Sparta?” he asked.
“No!” she snarled. “Didn’t you hear me? I said old. Before they called it that. A village. And a Lady of the Wood. Lady of the water we drank and the mountain stone. Lady of the earth and sky. I was her daughter of the night…”
Before she had only sputtered in fits and starts, spitting out phrases with intricate meanings. But now she said things. Who cared if he didn’t understand it all. They were finally talking — where he might say things too and she might listen. A great passion bloomed in him. For he had led her from the solitary room into the waiting trees of springtime. Him alone.
“Where were the people? No one in the village. All gone into the hills to watch the sky and count the days. Only Grandmother Gray Face knew the time to come down, to dig the Green Man from his grave and plant him in the fields. We had other names for Gray Face. The Hag. And Moon Watcher.
‘And the Lady of the Wood had many names. Î saw her face staring from the village wall. From the potters kiln. On every painted mask … Queen of the Mountain. And we loved them both together. Hag and Lady both. Though one was old as a grasshopper. And the other made of stone.”
She called her tale a dream, but it seemed far too detailed for that. And as she spoke Herr Doktor realized the Queen of Sparta ritual they played was but one of its acts. Clearly hers was not the Sparta of the Heroic Age, of Troy and Mykonos, but far earlier. Fräulein seemed to be describing what sounded like the long-forgotten rites of season and fertility. The moment of magic, of ceremony and passage, where the extended family of rugged hill tribes gathered for the spring sowing of the land. And as she told him her dream, he ceased to notice the chill garden, even the hard stone seat on which he sat. She spoke and he listened, as when they first played the Queen. And as before, there came the insistent prodding of invisible hands, the whispered urgings of hushed voices —– unintelligible, yet dreadfully familiar. The muffled sounds of people gathering in the dark. Waiting for some signal to begin. “I go to the Gathering,” Fräulein whispered. “I see it in my lap, in the book. And I go there. In the dusk the people of the wood went with the old man and the girl. Gathering together under the oaks …”
A sliver of moon rose above the trees, shedding a faint light on the rushing stream that wound down from the hills.
Fräulein stood on a path strewn with crackling leaves. The smell of sap issued out of a thousand trunks and boughs. She heard the sounds of bells shaken, and a lone voice singing words she did not understand. She felt the press of bodies all around. And the steady stamp of feet marching higher along the wooded path. While down below, the village lay dark, all the hearth fires cold.
They went to a clearing cut in the knees of the mountain: a low cave like a toothless mouth opened on the face of the slope. Before the cave the Last Fire burned. Now the people of the wood came to seize these last red coals, to bring the village hearths to life. While she whom they called the Gray Face poked at the dying embers, sending sparks into the starry night.
“I saw another person by the rushing water. Not a person. A rock. Sloping head. No eyes. A crack for a mouth. A figure partly carved and partly left alone. When the rain fell on her, we said she was crying. Urania. Queen of the Mountain. Mother of Stone. And Hers was the birthing cave where the world was born. Where the women groped out blindly in the dark for the old Hags hands. And when the pain came, praying with their birth beads clutched to dry, cracked lips … Then rubbing them against their foreheads as they soaked the floor with their sacwater and their blood, even as they chewed their birth cords free. For it was Her name they gasped in the moaning cave. Panting: Mother, help me. Mother, please!”
Herr Doktor gripped the edge of the stone seat. Birth beads! Now where in hell … Ja! In a grimy glass case in the British Museum: little bits of carved antler, or stone or coal — most no larger than a knucklebone. A faded caption card inside the display read:
Deer Beads
Aurignac Caves
Uncovered 1887
&
By some oversight the discovers’ names had been overlooked by the museum’s curators. But they called them deer beads because of their shape. Always carved in the shape of a pregnant doe’s body, with the back-jointed hind leg of a running animal. Never any head or hoof, and the ripe pregnant belly looked almost human. Half human female, half female animal … Hundreds had been found across Europe, buried in the floors of caves with the chewed bits of umbilical cords — shreds of Motherflesh as gifts to the Goddess? They found one bead from Peterfels, Germany, still freshly carved, as though never handled, showing none of the incessant rubbing that all the others evidenced.
Had women giving birth rubbed them smooth as the pangs came on and the hours wore away … ? Were they magic charms, lucky pieces passed on — from mother to daughter, sister to sister — in hope and prayer for a healthy birth? And if stillborn babies came, or the mother died, were the unlucky pieces cast aside and never touched again? Were Catholic rosary beads and Arab worry beads distant relations, faded reflections of a long-abandoned practice? For a fleeting moment he saw the countless birth caves of Stone Age man. In Germany, in France, everywhere, a thousand tribes, a thousand worm-crawls, a thousand women’s cries of Mother, help me, Mother, please, for a thousand years, ten thousand, more! Cries that rose and fell while the cave’s stone walls slowly darkened over time. And when in the course of civilization the mute holes ceased to hear womankind’s cries, laden with the death-life struggle of human birth, had man as well? Who really knew … ? Herr Doktor had given up and turned away from the dusty glass case.
He wished he could have taken notes as she hurried on, but he would have made her repeat things like Moon Watcher and Green Man and Mother of Stone. So he let her gallop forward, blurting out the rest, losing details in confusion and finally coherence:
“But our night of the Gathering was not for the birth of one child only. No. Tonight we gathered for the birth of us all. Moon Watcher kept count of the days. Knowing when to plow and when to sow. The huntsmen trapped a stag for the blooding. For the Inescapable One. Dragging it to Mother of Stone still alive.
‘“Now bring him to me,’ Moon Watcher cried. ‘Bring him low!’ And they laid the beast against the standing rock. The circle of faces wore clay masks with open, howling mouths, tangled vines and leaves in their hair. Wood people … The old man strode out of the circle, dragging the little girl by a rope at the neck. She stumbled to the feet of Mother of Stone. Her clay mask fell away. And I saw my face, my face on the little girl’s head.