by Frank Tallis
‘I believe you,’ said Rheinhardt. ‘But last night, Herr Löiberger. If you could try to remember who she was with last night?’
‘A gentleman …’
‘What did he look like?’
‘A handsome fellow: high cheekbones and very bright eyes.’
‘Blue?’
‘I think so. Yes. I assumed he was a performer.’
‘Do you remember the colour of his hair?’
‘Black.’
‘Did you serve him?’
‘Yes.’
Rheinhardt paused.
‘Herr Löiberger, I am sure that my next question will strike you as rather peculiar. But I would be most grateful if you would give it your most serious consideration. What did this man smell like?’
Herr Löiberger gave the question a moment’s thought, and then burst out laughing. ‘Really, inspector …’
41
FRAU HARRER ARRIVED AT Rainmayr’s studio with her two daughters, Fränzel and Gusti. She was about to follow them inside when Rainmayr stopped her with a raised finger.
‘I’d rather you didn’t. There’s no need.’ Before Frau Harrer could object, he produced some coins and pressed them into her moist palm. ‘You can expect more, in due course.’
She took the money and called after the girls: ‘Fränzel, Gusti. Do whatever Herr Rainmayr says. Understand?’
Rainmayr had first seen Frau Harrer and her daughters in a queue, waiting to be given a free bowl of soup by workers from a women’s charity, and had offered to buy them a more substantial meal in a nearby coffee house. Frau Harrer had not required much persuading and while she and her daughters were bolting down their food Rainmayr had made his proposal. He was never in any doubt that Frau Harrer would accept.
‘Come back this afternoon,’ said Rainmayr, closing the door.
The two girls stood awkwardly in the middle of the studio. The eldest, Fränzel, was probably about fifteen. She had long straight hair and sharp angular features. Gusti, who Rainmayr judged to be a year younger, was obviously related, although her face was less severe.
‘Now,’ said Rainmayr, clapping his hands together. ‘Go behind that screen and take off your clothes.’
‘All of them?’ asked Fränzel.
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s cold.’
‘Don’t worry about that, I’ll light the stove in a minute. Besides, you won’t be entirely naked. I have some new clothes I want you to wear. Pretty clothes.’
He had learned from experience that a businesslike manner was more likely to produce compliance.
The two girls went behind the screen and Rainmayr rummaged in a bag for some garments and accessories. It was a condition laid down by his patron that the commission he was about to begin work on should feature ‘partially clothed models of youthful appearance’.
Fränzel stepped out first, her arms positioned to cover her breasts and genitals. She glanced at Rainmayr nervously, before hissing at her sister: ‘Come on — you have to.’ Gusti appeared a few moments later. Her head was bowed and she was looking at her feet.
‘Over here, you two. Don’t be shy.’
They crossed the floor, leaving a trail of footprints in the charcoal dust. Rainmayr’s eye was immediately drawn to their jutting hip bones and skeletal prominences. Their skin was perfect for his purposes: white and transparent enough to offer tantalising glimpses of internal structures. For Rainmayr, nudity was not simply about the removal of clothing. His aesthetic sensibility demanded a form of nudity that advanced one step further, satisfying a need for deeper and deeper levels of exposure. Not every model could be naked in the way that Rainmayr wanted. The opaque exterior of a well-fed woman held no interest for him.
Rainmayr opened the bag wide and showed the girls what was inside.
‘See. Pretty things.’ He then shook it for good measure.
He picked out a choker and placed it around Fränzel’s neck. Then he found a stocking.
‘Stand on one leg.’
Rainmayr knelt down, slipped the stocking on Fränzel’s foot and pulled it up to her thigh.
‘Now, the other one.’
The girl reached out to steady herself with the hand that she had been previously using to cover her genitals. Rainmayr glanced up and was pleased with what he saw.
42
THE DYING HUMAN WEAKENS the partition that separates this world from Her world. In Eastern religions it is said that the soul enters the body when the newborn infant takes its first breath. I believe this to be correct. The first breath creates an opening through which the eternal essence pours, filling the empty vessel of the flesh. A correspondent event occurs with the very last breath. The final exhalation creates the temporary corridor through which the soul must make its exit from the world, the very same corridor through which She enters to effect our liberation. Death is very much like a state of possession. In the moment of death, we are possessed by death.
You grasp, I hope, the significance of this?
Let me be plain.
It occurred to me that expiry during copulation would make communion with Her possible: as the Virgin in Majesty is transformed from Mother to Empress, so the Queen of Darkness is transformed from reaper to lover. She becomes attainable.
I searched for a fitting host but without success. I tried the obvious places — the brothels, the Prater — but none of the women I encountered seemed right. Let us say that they struck a wrong note. In the end, it turned out that my nocturnal jaunts were entirely unnecessary. You see, I didn’t find Adele Zeiler. Adele Zeiler found me.
I was sitting in the Volksgarten, admiring the Theseus Temple, when she emerged from a crowd, caught my eye, and sat next to me.
— Good afternoon.
— Good afternoon.
Pause.
An exchange of smiles.
— It’s very pleasant here, isn’t it?
Thus, with these simple words, she sealed her fate. She was flirtatious, engaging, yet at the same time oddly self-contained. Did you ever see her face? It was interesting. That said, it was perfectly clear what kind of woman Fräulein Zeiler was. We arranged to meet again and when we did I gave her the gift that she had been chasing. A hatpin. One of two hatpins, in fact, that I already possessed, having purchased them at Jaufenthaler’s — a grubby little jewellery shop on the Hoher Markt — in readiness.
Ah yes. I am reminded that this is something that interests you.
You will appreciate that my task was fraught with logistical difficulties: guns are noisy, stab wounds bleed, and the time a poison takes to act impossible to calculate. By contrast, the method I chose was silent, clean, and allowed me to determine precisely the moment of communion. Did I think of it myself? No, I didn’t. I learned about it during a chance conversation with a gentleman by the name of Doctor Buchleitner. He was called upon to embalm the body of a twelve-year-old baron who had been accidentally killed by his older brother — a cretin — while writing a letter to his absent father. The cretin had come up behind him, picked up a freshly sharpened pencil, and had then thrust it into his brother’s neck. Unfortunately, the pencil was not stopped by the floor of the skull but went through the foramen magnum and into the brain. Of course, the boy died instantly.
Fräulein Zeiler.
We met in Honniger s, a little coffee house in Spittelberg. I gave her the hatpin and promised her more baubles in due course. Our conversation was frivolous, but we both knew that a contract had been made and that she would honour her obligation. Therefore I was not surprised when she suggested that we go for an evening stroll in the Volksgarten. By the time we arrived there it was almost dark.
I will assume that you are not interested in our preliminary embraces and kisses. Such things, I dare say, you can imagine. You will be interested in what followed: communion.
43
PROFESSOR FREUD TOOK A panatella from the cigar box on his desk. He had already told Liebermann two jokes that he had heard while playing tarock on Saturday
night with Professor Königstein, and was about to tell a third.
‘The villagers went to the cattle market and there were two cows for sale. One from Moscow for two thousand roubles and one from Minsk for a thousand roubles. They bought the cow from Minsk. It produced lots of milk and the people were delighted with their purchase. So much so that they decided to get a bull to mate with the cow. If the calves born of this union were anything like their mother, the shtetl would never be short of milk again. They scraped together just enough money to buy a strong, handsome bull and they put it in the pasture with their prize cow. But things did not go to plan. Whenever the bull approached the cow she did not respond to his bovine ardour. The villagers were very upset and decided to consult their wise rabbi.’ The Professor lit his cigar before continuing. ‘Rabbi, they said. Whenever the bull approaches our cow, she moves away. If he approaches from the back, she moves forward. When he approaches her from the front, she moves backwards. An approach from the side, she edges off in the other direction. The rabbi thought about this for a minute or so and then and asked: Is this cow — by any chance — from Minsk? The villagers were dumbfounded, as they had never mentioned the provenance of their cow. You are truly a wise rabbi, they said. How did you know the cow is from Minsk? The rabbi looked at them all with a sorrowful expression, shrugged his shoulders and answered: My wife is from Minsk.’
Freud allowed himself a sly chuckle, and looked to his guest for approval. Liebermann had anticipated the punchline and was only mildly amused. Undeterred, Freud continued: ‘Jokes frequently contain a fundamental truth concerning human behaviour. Why is libido distributed unequally between the sexes? I have no ready answer. In the subject matter of jokes, we find a very worthy agenda for psychoanalytic inquiry.’
Ever since Erstweiler had told Liebermann about his beanstalk dream the young doctor had been reflecting on a particular passage in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passage, perhaps only four or five pages long, was concerned with the origin of the psychoneuroses and made many references to Sophocles’ great tragedy Oedipus Rex. Liebermann succeeded in steering the conversation away from jokes and towards theories of aetiology. Freud did not resist the transition. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk about this aspect of his work.
‘I had been thinking about this possibility many years before the publication of my dream book.’ He counted off the fingers of his left hand with the thumb of his right. ‘Since ’eighty-seven, to be precise. I can remember sharing my thoughts with Fliess and recounting an incident from my early years. I was two — or perhaps two and half — and travelling on a train with my mother from Leipzig to Vienna. An opportunity arose to see her,’ he paused, embarrassed, and ended his sentence in Latin, ‘nudam.’ Freud’s eyes glazed over with memories. He puffed on his cigar and the action seemed to pull him back into the present. ‘In the intervening years, since writing to Fliess, I have become increasingly confident that love of the mother and jealousy of the father are a general phenomenon of early childhood.’
‘General?’
‘Yes. That is why I introduced the notion in my chapter on “Typical Dreams”. It is remarkable how frequently the same themes emerge: for example, death of the parent who is of the same sex as the dreamer. Such dreams are very common among children aged approximately three years and over. They reveal — I believe — a wish to eliminate a rival. In Sophocles’ drama, King Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. The Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognises because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfilment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his current state. Oedipus’ destiny moves us only because it might very easily have been ours — the oracle has laid the same curse upon us before our birth as it has upon him.’
‘Are you suggesting that, ultimately, there is no escape from neurotic illness?’
‘Allow me to clarify.’ Freud drew on his cigar again and stared through the dissipating cloud with penetrating eyes. ‘I am not suggesting that this general phenomenon of childhood is the cause of the neuroses. But rather it is the failure to resolve these issues of love and hate which can be pathogenic: if prohibited desire and rage linger in the adult unconscious, then mental equilibrium will be disturbed.’
Freud caressed one of the statuettes on his desk: a little bronze Venus admiring herself in a mirror. A diadem circled her head and her legs were covered by a hanging garment. Her shoulders were narrow, her torso long, and her breasts pert.
‘Most mothers would be horrified,’ Freud continued, ‘if they were made aware that their affectionate gestures were rousing a child’s sexual instinct and preparing it for its later intensity. A mother will regard what she does as innocent — carefully avoiding excitation of the child’s genitals; however, we now know that sexual instinct is not only aroused by direct excitation. What we call affection will unfailingly show its effects one day on the genital zones as well. Be that as it may, an enlightened mother — conversant with psychoanalysis — should never reproach herself. She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love. After all, he is meant to grow up into a strong and capable person with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during his life all the things that human beings are urged to do by their instincts.’
Liebermann changed position and as he did so Freud pushed the cigar box towards him. The young doctor declined.
‘This Sophocles syndrome ...’ said Liebermann tentatively. ‘When unresolved, does it always produce neurotic disturbances? Or do you think it might also be associated with more severe forms of mental illness, for example dementia praecox?’
‘It is impossible — as yet — to say.’
‘And how is the syndrome resolved?’
‘The process of resolution must require the detachment of sexual impulses from the mother and the forgetting of jealousy for the father. But how this is achieved and by what mechanism I cannot say. The dissolution of this syndrome presents us with complex problems, and our burgeoning science has yet to furnish us with a comprehensive answer.’
Liebermann smiled inwardly. The professor had exhibited a peculiarity of speech with which he, Liebermann, was now very familiar. Whenever Freud could not explain something he tended to blame psychoanalysis for the deficiency — never himself.
On his way home Liebermann thought deeply about his conversation with Professor Freud. Had he ever hated his father as a rival? Hate was too strong a word. No, he had never hated his father; however, he had to admit that their relationship had never been entirely satisfactory. He had always been a little uneasy in his father’s presence and this subtle underlying tension — which had no obvious cause — had persisted, taking different forms, throughout his entire life. Did this underlying tension have an Oedipal origin? Although Liebermann was prepared to accept Freud’s theory — at least provisionally — with respect to his father, he just couldn’t do the same with respect to his mother. He had never loved his mother in that way!
Suddenly, he was disturbed by a realisation that the converse might be true. His mother adored him, of that there could be little doubt …
The dramatis personae abruptly changed position, discovering — in the process of reconfiguration — a new way in which their emotions could be triangulated.
An uneasy question rose up into Liebermann’s mind.
What if his father, Mendel, secretly hated him for stealing his wife’s love? What if his father had an unresolved Cronos syndrome and, like the mighty Titan, wanted to kill his usurping child? If such a desire was lurking in his unconscious, was it any wonder that they had never been entirely comfortable in each others’ company?
A carriage passed and the curtain was drawn aside by a gloved hand. Liebermann glimpsed the face of a stunning young woman who was wearing a tiara. The vision of her beauty rescued him from the quagmire of his ow
n self-inquiry.
He had never intended to consider the personal relevance of Freud’s theory. He had only wished to discuss the Sophocles syndrome with Freud for one reason. Liebermann had sensed that within the tortured family dynamics of the Greek drama was the key to understanding Norbert Erstweiler.
44
THE CARRIAGE FOLLOWED THE Ringstrasse around the western edge of the Innere Stadt before turning into Rennweg and heading south towards Simmering. Rheinhardt opened his bag and handed Liebermann an envelope. The young doctor tipped the contents out onto his lap.
‘She was discovered in the gardens of the Belvedere Palace,’ said Rheinhardt, ‘in the early hours of Monday morning.’
Liebermann studied the first photograph: a long shot of a woman lying in the middle of a sunken lawn.
‘Who found her?’
‘The head gardener. He was out early collecting slugs and snails.’ Liebermann sifted through the photographs until he came across a close-up of the woman’s face. ‘She was stabbed with a hatpin,’ Rheinhardt continued, ‘just like Fräuleins Zeiler and Babel. In the relative isolation of the Belvedere gardens the fiend was once again emboldened to use his preferred technique. Remarkably, when Haussmann arrived he was able to identify the body.’
‘They were acquainted?’ said Liebermann, surprised.
‘No,’ said Rheinhardt, shaking his head. ‘He had seen her performing at Ronacher’s. She’s a variety singer. Cäcilie Roster.’
Liebermann noticed the beauty spot under her eye and the dimple on her chin. He imagined the sound of her laughter — loud and life-affirming.
‘Haussmann and I went to interview the theatre manager, who suggested that Fräulein Roster was an inveterate flirt. He also directed us to one of her haunts, Löiberger’ s, a coffee house patronised mostly by actors and poets and which is situated a short distance from the theatre. Herr Löiberger remembered serving Fräulein Roster on Sunday night. She was in the company of a gentleman with black hair and blue eyes. It must have been Griesser.’