by Keith Korman
“Feel better?” she asked softly from the pillow.
‘Yes, better,” he said.
She patted his hand, pressing it to her belly. “I’m so tired,” she murmured. “So lazy … But I’ll get up. Get up in a second. You stay in bed. I’ll make breakfast.” She sighed into the pillow, dozing off once more.
Was he better?
A few weeks passed in the drowsy limbo of summer’s close. Fräulein no longer came for her morning sessions. But this did not strike him as so unusual. She had begun the first semester at the university and had once mentioned something about a waitress job. Had she decided to leave him alone? Was she hoping he would come for her? He gave up the question. Surrendering the struggle for a choice. It seemed far simpler to let Emma speak for him right now. Think for him. Exist for him.
Just at this time another letter arrived from Herr Professor in Vienna. The president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, America, wanted both of them — elder man and younger man —- for a series of lectures in late September. Travel expenses would be forthcoming. Should they leave from Trieste, sailing through the Mediterranean? Herr Professor wondered. Or meet in Bremen, sail down the Weser and out the dreary North Sea? Prepare a lecture, young man! And prepare for a bit of fame, the letter warned. Bring your tuxedo. There will be newspapermen and photographs taken.
He prepared a lecture, taking some desultory notes from Fräuleins dusty and voluminous case file. He had to force himself through all the pages devoted to her. How lifeless they seemed to him now, how dull. He found it more exciting by far to jot down ideas from the troubles of a new patient, lately come to his office.
He had his tuxedo pressed.
Steamship tickets departing via the Mediterranean were not available on such short notice. So they booked passage on a ship from Bremen. A few members of the Wednesday Society planned a bon voyage party: lunch for seven at the Bremenstadt Musiker Hotel. In the waning months of summer, he concentrated on the fascinating troubles of his new patient.
As for Fräulein, she had not forgotten him, nor let slip one moment of their last hour together. She fretted, as if waiting for an obscure decision from a court of faceless judges. A decision that never came. Yet there were tides of hope — and then tides of despair. Yes, she thought, he was going to leave Emma. He was coming now. Walking from his house, the woman’s sobs fading in the wake of his footsteps. He was taking the tram with a single suitcase, hat and coat slung over his arm. She saw so clearly how he crossed the courtyard. How he mounted the stairs, sweat dampening his shirtsleeves. She left her apartment door unlatched, so that when at last he knocked, the door would creak gently aside, inviting him in….
And then the sinking knowledge. Back from a day at the university or an evening at the café, where she took orders all night long — she ran home, pounding up the creaking stairs. In dread that the flat was empty.
She left the door open. But he never came.
In the end she broke down and went groveling to his house. And for the first time in her life she fully understood what it meant to grovel. Not just cower in terror but with a clear mind abase yourself before others. Humiliating yourself by begging for what you want to come true.
Emma let her inside but did not invite her upstairs or into the kitchen. Those times were over, as though they never happened. The woman was pregnant….
“You’ve come for your glove.”
“My glove?”
Emma handed over a black kid glove. Fräulein twisted the limp thing in her hand. Wasn’t it strange how the word “glove” was made up mostly of the word “love”? For a few seconds Fräulein forgot entirely what she had come to say. Emma stared at her, plainly hoping she would leave. “Can I … Can I …” Fräulein put the love-glove on her hand, wriggling her fingers into place.
“Can I see him?”
“He’s with a patient now.”
“Can I come back later?”
She felt the embarrassing urge to twiddle,- in fact, the hand dangling by her side began to twitch. God, how hopeless, with Emma barring the way. Fräulein almost told the woman all of it, blurting the truth. You don’t want him. You can’t please him. You only decided when you saw yourself losing him, getting pregnant just to keep him! But if Fräulein burst out with this, she really would descend into an attack of the twiddles. If only Emma’s baby died, if only she could kill it before it grew … Somehow she managed to draw off her black glove and shove it in her purse.
“Thank you for saving this for me,” she said before she left.
“You’re very welcome.”
As Fräulein walked down the stone path from the house, she felt Emma’s cool eyes upon her. The door latch shut, metallic, cold, and final. The woman had not even said good-bye. A growing blackness like a cloud covered her mind: she had not even managed to see him. Must she corner him in the hospital? Catch him on a street corner?
At home she took out fresh white paper and began to draw. The paper slowly filled. The Howling Women, the Deer Man, the Lady of the Veils: she drew as many in a single night as she had in all the years past. And when at last the sparrows sang in the blue-blackness of dawn, she had smudged her writing arm with graphite from wrist to elbow. Still she drew on — until the sun rose redly and her eyes burned. She tossed the pencil aside and fell into bed, a dead thing.
When she awoke the sky outside was white-gray like milk. A shower helped to clear her head. A change of clothes felt even better. She went to the four-franc table and gathered all the drawings she had done. She carried them to the post office under her arm. There she bought a manila mailer, put the drawings inside, and went over to one of the high oak tables to write out the address.
The address …
Fräuleins hand hovered over the envelope. 17 Berggasse? 16 Berggasse? She knew it once, had seen it on a letter or a paper. She tried to recall … Number 14? Number 15? Bergasse? Berggasse? Or something-else-strasse? She threw down the pen in disgust and stalked from the post office, the manila envelope clamped under her arm.
Herr Doktor came to his hospital office at the end of the day, a secretary in tow. Bleuler had given him an assistant, a pale, earnest young man with a runny nose and bulging eyes, who followed him about like a lost spaniel. Herr Doktor seemed taken aback to find her sitting behind his door, but only Fräulein noticed, for he calmly controlled his face,
“Leave us for a minute, will you, Frederick?” he asked the secretary. And when they were alone Herr Doktor sat at his desk, putting the big piece of furniture between them both. “I expected you for your daily sessions,” he went on quietly. “But you never came. Would you like your regular hour back?”
She stared at him, incredulous. Expected her? And never wrote, never telephoned? Her love-glove hand began to twiddle in disbelief. She struck it against her thigh to kill it.
“Oh, here now! You can control that if you want to.”
She broke, not trying to hide her twiddle any longer. “You were waiting for me? Emma turned me away! Î came to see you, and all I got was this!” She wrung the glove off her twiddling hand and flung it at his head.
“Try and be reasonable. People outside can hear us. You’re not crazy anymore, you’re —”
“No!” She cut him off. “Not anymore. But who are you? Herr Doktor Touch-Kiss? Do you think they can hear me now?”
“Yes, I’m sure the whole floor knows now.”
“They should know. How you used me. How you opened me up and took me. Was it because my parents didn’t pay my fee? How much do I owe you? How much do you want?”
“Nothing! Nothing! You owe me nothing —”
“But you owe me.” Her voice sank dangerously. “You owe we.”
Herr Doktor wilted in the chair. “I never promised you anything.”
“Curing me was a promise. Buying the dress was a promise. The way you touched me was a promise! You were supposed to be my doctor/’ she hammered. “My friend.”
“I know," he m
umbled into his hand.
“You were supposed to know what to do," she sobbed. “Supposed to want what I want too.”
“I know.” He cowered. “I know….” His contemptible, pathetic cringing set her free. She swept the papers and pencils off his blotter. A crystal paperweight fell to the floor with a crack.
“You saved me and then you used me. You betrayed me and then you raped me. You’re nothing but a liar,” she choked. “A liar and a coward!”
The man covered his face, arms up about his head. “I know.” Someone knocked on his office door. Frederick, the secretary, warning them in a quavering voice that people outside were complaining of the noise.
“Why are they complaining?” Fräulein shouted at the shut door. “They didn’t when I was crazy. So why now? Because I’m sane and say what I like. Then I want everyone to know:
“You saved me just to use me.
“You betrayed me and you raped me.
“You’re a liar and a coward.
“And I wish I never met you!”
Dead silence beyond the door …
Her head felt light, her stomach queasy. She spied a letter fallen from the desk. An inkpot had tipped over it, gurgling its contents onto the carpet. Black drops splattered the letter’s white face. A letter from Herr Vienna Professor. She immediately recalled the address.
19 Berggasse.
Fräulein staggered back to her seat, collecting the envelope. The room felt empty. “You should have left me the way you found me/’ she said to the hollow room.
“The way I was.”
Chapter 6
Train of Thought
Herr Professor of 19 Berggasse sat in the deep plush of a private compartment on the Bremen train. On his lap lay the sheaf of the Schanderein girl’s drawings. By coincidence they happened to arrive the day he left on his trip to America. In the rush to pack, he had not found the opportunity to look the pictures over. Frankly, he doubted whether he should study them at all. She was Jungs patient, not his own. What was so impossibly urgent that he breach their privacy? Once at the hotel, he told himself, he’d do the proper thing: post the drawings back to Zurich immediately, sealed and intact.
But as he sat on the rumbling Bremen train, a deepening curiosity came over him. A growing sense that these pictures were in some way part of young Herr Doktors secret trouble. “We’ve had a falling-out,” the young man had written since that Wednesday visit. “I gather she is sending you a list of grievances.” What an unhappy word, grievances. A death word.
The stub of a cigar burned between his fingers. Nicotine had stained them yellow, a permanent discoloration, like the taste of ashes that never went away The mark of a crucial flaw. Most mornings he hated himself for smoking.
Herr Professor suddenly undid the envelope. In each picture the people were naked. In rags or drapes. They reminded him vaguely of ancient Greek vase paintings on cups or vessels. But the Schanderein girl’s drawings were stupendously shocking. In one drawing two women played over the dismembered parts of a man’s sexual organs. In another, a man wearing the skull of a deer raped the headless body of another man, penetrating the gushing stump of his rival’s neck. In yet another, a man squatted in the act of elimination — passing a huge egg out of his behind, and from the egg a woman was being hatched. The woman smiling coyly.
Herr Professor was awed. “My God,” he murmured. “This girl is absolutely crazy.”
And one more shocking than the rest. A man clad in the pelt of a deer was entering a woman’s lavish vagina. His whole body entering. He had penetrated past his head and shoulders, nearly to his elbows. His arms pinned, his hands fluttered impotently at his sides.
And the woman was laughing.
At first Herr Professor felt the powerful urge to deny it. The brutality. The animality. Transgressing in the cave of your mind was one thing. Cunning greed. Desperate lust. Sweet revenge. But to act it out. No, that was no longer of the mind. But of the world, of life and death. If young Herr Doktor had actually touched the girl, actually made love to her …
Deep perversion.
No! No! No! The devil wouldn’t dare! Let these drawings be mere fantasies, misunderstood desires, hopes, and wishes. Sick dreams. But not histories. Not chronicles of their intercourse.
His denial felt like an actual weight, a stone upon his chest. A great weariness fell over him, a terrible exhaustion making him close his eyes to what he had seen and what it meant. Close his eyes and rest, forget and rest, leave the whole problem to someone else and rest.,.
The red afternoon sun slanted into the compartment, peaceful and quiet, as if the train had slowed to a halt. The man gazed dreamily out the window. Squinting through the fiery shafts of sunlight on his eyelashes, he glimpsed the queerest faraway place. A wonderland. A sanctuary. Like a miniature stage in a theater in the house of dreams:
He saw a wall of snow-covered mountains. A village huddled in a lower valley. Sun on a patch of pine trees. Water sparkling as it fell from a cleft of a crag. He heard the brass tinkle of sheep’s bells on the flocks in the hills above. Yes, he realized, this is where it happened. The things from the crazy girl’s drawings. The place of all the young man’s troubles. Where it all began …
The perfect little images of the village enticed him out the window. The finery of his traveling clothes melted off his limbs. He saw himself clothed in rags. The starry night rose like a temple dome. Two women were leading him by a rope around his neck, like a bull to slaughter. Emma and the girl, he thought, …
By the light of the fire, the women anointed his head with oil. They splashed his legs with wine. Then cloaked him in the flayed hide of a deer, putting the horned skull upon his head. From out of the dark a man appeared. The stranger held a sword. Naked. Faceless … The wind moaned over the fluttering fire. Or was it the women?
Herr Professor awoke with the name Pygmalion on his lips. The luxurious train compartment came back to him strongly. He fumbled to gather the girls drawings. Outside the window he saw the gray steel and concrete pilings of an industrial town. The rusty brick walls of warehouses. The train rattled heavily over the switching tracks of a railyard. The conductor tramped along the corridor, rapping his knuckles on each compartment door. A whistle shrieked. Bells clanged.
They were pulling into Bremen station.
Older man and younger man embraced in the hotel lobby, kissing one cheek and then the other. But the crowded lobby was no place to talk. They escaped to the hotel’s glass palm house, where they could stroll along the gravel paths. The plant beds rose in neat terraces around them. At the center stood a wide stone basin with a bronze fountain cast in the shape of a pudgy laughing boy. The little boy was thrusting out his hips and peeing a stream of fountain water back into the pool. The stream splashed on another bronze casting, that of an irate duck, flapping its wings and squawking out of harm’s way
The elder man thought young Herr Doktor seemed outwardly calm, but he sensed the faint acrid whiff of expectation — perhaps distress. “Did you look at the drawings?” he asked at once. “They were drawings, weren’t they?”
“Yes, I looked…. But I posted them back from the front desk. Should I have kept them so you could see too?”
“Heavens, no!” the younger man said with some alarm. “I think she and I have been to bad enough places enough already.”
Odd choice of words, the elder man mused…. Been to bad enough places enough already. As if to say, Now enough is enough already! For a fleeting second he saw the mountains in the house of dreams, the leering faces around the fire. Why just then he did not know — but it made the sweat break out across his neck. And he said abruptly:
“Your patient’s dream is very contagious.”
The young man glanced up sharply, as if some dread possibility were coming true. But the older man took him kindly by the arm as they strolled about the palm house.
“You know, my friend, when a patient lays all his hopes and fears upon us, we risk an entang
lement. This, as you know, we call the transference. And from start to finish we risk lapses and failures along its stages. One of those lapses is the inevitable and diabolical counter-transference. For there comes a time when each of us hopes for things that cannot be. Hoping for things from our patients and ourselves which we have no right to expect. Or demand. Special favors …”
And here he paused. “Even gifts of love —-”
“Are you lecturing me?” The young man’s eyes flashed. “Do you think I’ve done something wrong?”
“Have you done something wrong?”
The younger man disengaged his arm. “Haven’t you ever been accused?”
“Me!” the elder burst out. And he laughed until he sat weakly on the lip of the stone basin in order to catch his breath. “Patients of mine have publicly accused me of many grand feats. Of defecating on one man’s head. Of demanding homosexual intercourse with another. Of receiving it in my consultation room under the guiding eye of my wife —”
“And in each case,” young Herr Doktor asked sharply, “weren’t those patients simply responding to your unconscious desires? Things you wanted to see come true?”
The older man pondered this for some time, thoughtfully stroking his face. He left off and caught his friend firmly by the elbow, pulling him down to the stone edge of the basin, where he could whisper the darkest confession: