Dreaming for Freud

by Sheila Kohler

  “And you left then?” he asks in a low voice.

  “Then Pippina stumbled to her feet, with a certain dignity, I will admit. She lifted her veil, kissed both of us, and asked us please to continue to come and see them, and that she did hope we could all remain friends. And she took my hand and added, ‘If there is anything I can ever do to thank you for all you did for our Clara, I assure you I will. You can count on my support, if you should ever need it.’”

  And indeed, though she had not believed what Pippina said at that moment, she will need her support, when both her parents are dead, her mother at fifty of colon cancer, and her father, soon afterward. His money will be lost soon after the First World War with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and with the Depression.

  During the years between the wars, when bridge has become all the rage, she and Pippina will make a living by teaching the game to the society ladies of Vienna. Together they will be “bridge mistresses.” They will rent a “Bridgestube” and sit opposite each other for long, quiet afternoons among rich ladies in flowered hats and kid gloves in rooms filled with smoke and polished silver and flowers, while the servants bring in tea and the cakes from Demel’s. They will play endless games in the big rooms with only the sound of the buzzing of a fly, the ticking of the clock, the bidding, and the slap of cards on the table. She will remember instinctively each card that has been played. She will know how to chest her cards, how to send out subtle, almost invisible signs to her oldest and dearest friend: a slight widening of the eyes in disagreement, a sliver of a smile of consent, a lowered glance of warning, a frown of puzzlement. Without any men around them they are able to understand each other completely, using only the coded language of cards.

  Later, when the Nazis are hunting for her because of Otto’s Marxist affiliations, Pippina will hide her in spite of great personal danger, events she could not have foreseen that day in their parlor, as she stood so defiantly before them in her black dress.

  But back then, in their shadowy, sad parlor, she tells the professor, she turned away from Pippina, saying only, “I am so very sad about poor little Clara. I will never forget her or either of you.”

  She will remember them also when she later stands in endless queues, repeatedly told she lacks a document, or must come up with more money, if she is to be allowed to leave the country. She will go first to Paris, invited by Léon Blum, and then be driven from Paris to the South of France. She will go on to Casablanca, where she contracts cholera and lies helplessly in a hospital bed as her visa expires. Finally, thanks to her son’s connections, she is able to escape to Chicago, just as the doctor himself will one day go to England, leaving this city he both hates and loves.

  “And you told your father about this meeting, I suppose?” the professor asks.

  “Indeed I did, the moment we got home. I found Father in his study and stood before his big, pompous desk and reported our conversation. At first he looked appalled and asked me what had come over me. He said I had taken advantage of these poor people in a moment of distress, that I was a difficult child, who had caused him much grief. When I protested, and reported Pippina’s words, he finally said he hoped, indeed, that now we could all be on friendly terms once again and that he would certainly not bring up the matter again. He was glad to hear that I had not been lying to him,” she tells him, thinking that the only person she has lied to is himself, and that it was in her father’s study that she had found his book on dreams, which she had used to inspire her.

  She tells the professor she saw Herr Z. once more, by such a curious chance, that if it were not true, would seem fabricated, something out of a story. She was with her maid on a busy street, doing an errand for her mother. She had just come out of a ribbon shop, when, to her surprise, she caught sight of him. He looked up and saw her as he was crossing the street and turned to stare at her. He was so distracted that he seemed blinded and stood there motionless in the sunlight for a moment too long, and he had been knocked over by a cart. She says she remained on the pavement, watching, unable to move, and felt all the blood drain from her head. She was so upset she almost fainted, as she had once after a quarrel with her father, though she realized Herr Z. had not been seriously harmed. She watched as he picked himself up, recovered his hat, brushed himself off, and went on his way.

  “So you feel you have had your revenge on him and perhaps on me, too?” the professor asks.

  “I have not come back here for revenge, but on the contrary to thank you and tell you what I have managed to accomplish since I left. I was even hoping that now you might take me back,” she says.

  “That would no longer be possible,” he says, petulantly. He is not a forgiving man, she thinks. Does he hold grudges, just discard people after using them, or is he simply impulsive and a bit adolescent, himself, as she was?

  “I have learned a lot from you, and though I still don’t agree with everything you suggested, it has been very useful to me,” she says, as politely as possible, blinking back her tears.

  But the professor remains silent. She will have to face the future without him, and perhaps it is better like this. However diminished she is, she is now free, her own, last authority. She will have to decide what is right for herself. She will have to reclaim some of her old wildness, her belief in her own capacity to judge for herself. And she will. She will!

  Still, there are so many things she does not understand about their interaction. “Why did you always take Herr Z.’s side? Is he a friend or perhaps even a patient of yours? Was Pippina your patient?” she inquires, as she sits up and turns toward him, but can see from his closed and angry face that the man has no intention of divulging his secrets.

  Indeed, she suspects now—correctly, as it turns out—that she will never see him again.

  1901–1939

  XXIV

  * * *

  FAME

  THE PROFESSOR DOES NOT PUBLISH his manuscript immediately. He calls the first draft “Dreams and Hysteria: A Fragment of an Analysis.” It lies in his desk until he has more news of his former patient. She and her husband have had a son. She will have moved on, and his time with her will no longer have the same importance it did initially. This son will replace the other men in her life. He feels he can now, in good conscience, take the manuscript out of the drawer and send it on to his publisher.

  His collection of beautiful objects, which will grow over the years, will one day be packed up and saved from the Nazis. His sister-in-law, Minna, his wife, Martha, and the children, his own doctor, that man’s wife, his maids, and his dog, too, will escape with him to England.

  How could he envisage that the very rooms in which he had heard so much about the beginnings of the lives of his patients will serve as a Nazi transit station, where Jews will be penned before being sent off to their deaths, his sisters, including his favorite, Rosa, among them. All will die except for Anna, the oldest, who, as a young girl, was not allowed to practice the piano, because it bothered her brilliant brother. Rosa will one day tell the commandant in the concentration camp that she is Sigmund Freud’s sister, and he will tell her that, in that case, there must have been some mistake, and that she must take the next train out, only first she needs to have a shower.

  As for the doctor’s text, it is not until three years after their final visit that he publishes his account. It will serve as a model for students of the analytic process, truncated though it may be. He imagines that his followers will read and discuss it avidly. How much ink will spill because of it! This “fragment of an analysis,” as he calls it, these broken pieces of her life and of his own, will finally bring him the fame he covets.

  Over the years, as he grows more and more famous and the pain from the cancer eating away at his jaw increases, the girl, whom, incidentally, he has made infamous, will come back to him at times when he sits alone in the silence of his study. She will stand before him as she did that first af
ternoon, at seventeen, in her white dress with its green sash, trembling slightly, moving her hands in the air, her bracelets jingling, her large lucent eyes filled with anger and hope.

  December 1945

  XXV

  * * *

  LUCK

  LAST NIGHT, LYING ALONE IN her narrow bed in Brooklyn, she dreamed she was a spaniel puppy with long blond ears and no body. Somehow she was able to move around on those ears alone. She still wears her hair long, though it is quite white now. It was a dream she would like to have taken to the professor. Its meaning is clear to her: her body, so full of pain, has dropped away.

  Memories are part of her suffering body, like the heart that pumps the blood through her veins. Even during her long flight from danger, her adolescent days of shame and rage came back to her, and she would stare up at the stars in the South of France and think back to something dark and poisonous that crawled its way into her mind: those moments of her late adolescence when she had been accused of making up stories about her father’s friend.

  The morning light filters through the thin yellow curtains. Why would anyone put up such useless things? She listens to the sounds from the street and remembers the lonely sounds of the trains she could hear during the sleepless nights in Vienna. Sleep eludes her here, too. She wakes before dawn. Perhaps she should have moved the flowers. A neighbor has thoughtfully brought a small bouquet of flowers and placed it on her dresser: bright pink carnations, which she has never liked, because the petals look as if they have been stained artificially with pink ink and which are said to take up the oxygen in the night. Perhaps she is too old to sleep much. Yet, oddly, she does not feel old at sixty-three, despite the pain in her body and her lack of energy. Her mind is as active as ever, perhaps more so, with all the memories, all the life contained within her. Is all of this to be lost? Will no one share it? Yet she felt older at seventeen, hovering at the top of the stairs in a rage, making her father wait for her. Now she waits for her boy to come in the door for Christmas.

  Is it possible, now that she is safe, that all of this could come to an end? Not now, she thinks, not like this. Am I going to die alone? She is certain the doctor she saw yesterday will contact her son. Surely he will come?

  She celebrated her birthday almost two months ago at a splendid dinner at the Plaza, followed by a carriage ride in the park, all the brilliant leaves, impossible splashes of red and gold that she has never seen anywhere else amazing her. With her were her son and her new American daughter-in-law with their new daughter in her frilly pink dress and lace panties. As she held the plump little rosy-cheeked girl squirming in her arms, she had thought of her own baby boy.

  How his birth had surprised her! Perhaps all of life has surprised her, not always in welcome ways. Her son had arrived two months before he was expected, and so painfully. How little her mother had conveyed of the difficulties she would have to face. She remembers her mother saying, “You will forget the pain the moment they put the baby in your arms.” But she had not forgotten! She had not! She had never wanted to do it again.

  She remembers having told the professor she would never marry, never bear a child, that all men were traitors. And she was not wrong: even he, sitting behind her, was only waiting for her to tell him what he wanted to hear, and when she demurred, like a child in a tantrum, he would turn his face to the wall. Only her son has not betrayed her, not until now. Yet the desire to hold something so small and fragile in her own arms, that rush of tenderness, that need to protect, to shelter, to console—must always have been there, somewhere within her body, like a seed or a stone, planted deep within her flesh, immutable, even as, at eighteen, she sat in the museum in Dresden and stared at Raphael’s Madonna and Child.

  She had begun to feel the labor pains before daybreak on a Sunday morning on the first of April. She had awakened her husband, who did not like his sleep disturbed, hesitantly, not quite sure if this were true or if it were simply an urge to relieve herself. “I think the baby is coming,” she had said shyly. He had groaned unsympathetically, unconvinced. “You had better call the doctor,” she urged a few moments later, unaware of how long the process would last.

  And it had seemed to last endlessly, people coming and going confusingly around her, voices hushing her screams, telling her to bear down. She was determined the child would be born before midnight. She so desired a Sunday child, a lucky child, the kind she had never been. She fought mightily to push this heart and flesh forth, feeling it tear her flesh asunder. How joyously she had heard his cry, how fiercely she had held the baby boy in her arms, before the chimes of midnight. Clinging on to this part of her, this heart grown from her own, she had thought then that she would always have him, no matter what happened, that he would be there to listen to her heart beat its last, her life ebbing. Has her luck run out?

  Yet her boy has been so lucky and brought her luck. He has led a charmed life, leaving Czechoslovakia the day before the Nazis overran it, finding a passage on that Dutch boat and arriving in this country. He has always been surrounded by women who adore him. He has been successful already, as chorus master of the San Francisco Opera, discovering great, new voices, though she could not know that among them were to be Beverly Sills, Leontyne Price, Luciano Pavarotti.

  He has managed to rescue her and bring her here.

  She still remembers lying on the long veranda in that wretched Casablanca hospital, open to the elements, discarded there like refuse, on a lumpy pallet, with the flies, the heat, the putrid smells of death, the desperate moans and cries all around her through the long nights. It had seemed to her that the brilliant world of her youth, the world of art and song—beauty in all its varied forms—had come to an end, swept away by such cruelty and bestiality.

  Obliged to flee first from Vienna and then from France, she had escaped to Casablanca only to contract cholera there, her body burning up with fever, her limbs shaking, liquid leaking from all her orifices. She told the young Arab nurse who leaned over her in his white robe that she wanted to be left in peace to die. Such a fine-looking man—despite her agony she noticed that—he was trying to sponge her brow with a cool cloth, to bring down the fever, telling her in French that she must not die, not now. She remembers him announcing in his hopeful, grating voice that there was a letter for her. She shook her head, waving him away, unable to believe that anyone could even know where she was, let alone send her a letter. Yet her heart had tilted with hope as he pressed it into her hands, and she recognized the familiar writing, so much like her own. Through a mist of fever and pain, her hands shaking, convinced she must be inventing the blurred words before her eyes, she managed to read the few lines from her son, telling her that he had contacted the consulate through influential people he knew, and that he would be sending the money for her ticket to America. She must get well enough to travel. He had found a way to bring her to him, her Sunday boy.

  She has lived for him and through him for so many years. She remembers his first years in Vienna: the carriage rides through the Prater, his little, white-gloved hands neatly on his lap; their summers in Alter Aussee, the bicycling, swimming, and the hikes they did with her friend Hannah, who had rented a house for them and for Hannah’s child, who is now her doctor in New York; her boy’s sight reading, at thirteen, Die Walküre on the piano, amazing his teacher; his work with Max Reinhardt and Toscanini in Salzburg; and finally, at the last moment, the invitation to come to Chicago to coach a singer there.

  From the bed where she lies now, she looks around the small, neat room he has found for her, with its bare walls and floor, the deal table with the flowers, a lace doily beneath the glass vase, and the photo of him as a little boy, holding her hand. In it he turns his narrow face up to her, squinting in the sunlight, and not looking into the camera, as his father was telling him to do. They are standing in the gravel driveway beside their shiny gun-metal-gray car. How proud her husband was of that car! One of the very first priv
ate ones in Vienna, he usually kept it at her father’s factory, but this Sunday he had brought it to Dobling, to take the family for a drive in the lovely, leafy suburb. She can still see the fence with the pink, climbing roses behind her and her little son.

  What joy she had felt on leaving her parents’ somber house on Lichtensteinstrasse, where she had been so unhappy, moving on, at last, as a young married woman with her tall, handsome husband and small, lively, auburn-haired boy. Once again she was entering those big, bright rooms, surrounded by packing cases, listening to the birdsong and watching the leaves of the lindens fluttering outside the window. Her boy had stood beside her, smiling like a little cherub in a beam of light. She had picked him up and swung him around in the air, and she had thought that the world, for the moment, was good.

  She does not remember now how old he was when they moved to Dobling, such a fashionable district, where Beethoven was born. He could have been no more than three, though he always said afterward that he remembered that move, remembered the surprise of coming into those big light rooms, though surely he was too young and could not possibly have remembered such a thing. She sees it now clearly: the three floors in the quiet villa on a tree-lined street, the big airy rooms filled with sunlight; the new, modern furniture, with its severe, simple lines and light wood; the marquetry of her old desk, where she kept her diary—she must still have it somewhere, with its inscription from the professor’s book on dreams.

  What she now sees so vividly in her mind, the image coming to her repeatedly in the silence and loneliness of the early hour, are the little ancient statues on the professor’s desk. She sees him picking them up and putting them down, and she sees her father in the carriage that day he dragged her there, leaning forward out of the shadows, as they went down the hill. She hears him calling the professor a “miracle worker.” She had indeed considered him a magician, a clever one, but hardly a real doctor, surrounded by his magic objects, a doctor whom her family might well not have allowed through their front door but rather, the tradesmen’s entrance. He had listened and observed and believed what she had said, encouraging her as no one else did at the time, and had enabled her, ultimately, to confront the Z.’s in ways he might not have intended—the confrontation certainly not part of her father’s devious plan.