That was the question. Was this real? But it was not only coming from my “history.”
I could see how she could make a watertight case. The patient comes to therapy and repeats the trauma. Wasn’t that what therapy was about? Reexperiencing the trauma? So it loosens its hold? But what if the therapy itself was repeating the trauma? How then was I supposed to “work it out”?
I stared at Greta.
She picked at a spot on her dress.
I said, “I can’t work this out with you if you continue to hide within this therapy structure. You said that women have to change the structures. What about you? Or is it too much of a risk?”
The bridge in the dream, no way to turn back. I unclenched my hands.
“Is this a so-called brilliant move on your part, leaving the ending in suspension to see how I will react?” I said.
She would become apocryphal, like the analyst in Anna’s story who would not rule out the possibility of an affair, the one who refused to rule anything out. In theory.
Greta’s eyes moved quickly from side to side, as if searching for guidelines.
No rails.
“I am not you,” she said in a voice so naked it went down my spine. “But with you now I have taken a risk. I don’t know if it was wise.”
She sat back, receding into herself.
I unfolded my legs and lay down.
Outside the window, the sky was an unsuspecting blue, the color of angels, the color of virgins. The branches of the tree reached into the blueness, wind sweeping away the last vestiges of the year that was coming to its ending, the Roman calendar timed to coincide more or less with the solstice, moment of turning away from darkness and into the light, the stars reminding, shining, remember, remember the light, remember that once there was light, long light stretching endlessly, like sand flats at low tide.
“What is it you want to end?” I wondered aloud.
She reached for her bag, which contained the apparatus of endings, her book, her bills, ladders of escape. I wanted to climb out the window onto the tree, sit astride one of the branches and ride into the onrushing night, away from this house, looking for the window of another house, a different house, where the talk was not of endings, of the necessity of ending.
“But I’m not talking about endings,” she said, removing a Kleenex, blowing her nose.
The words barely made their way through the barriers, whistling, high-pitched sounds, drowning, confusing, love, misleading, leading me into temptation, into wanting now, yet again, what must not be given, what cannot be given, what will be taken away, forever and ever, amen.
Unless?
“Do you want to play this out with me now?” she said, her voice no longer stripped.
“Me? It is not my game.”
Ending? I will have nothing to do with ending. If you want to end it, end it. I saw red.
“I see what you do,” I said. “You sew your heart into someone’s psyche, using wide, basting stitches so that when the time comes, when the therapy is finished, you can easily cut the threads. And then sew your heart into another.”
“Why don’t you ask me? Why do you tell me?” Greta said.
“Because you tell me one thing and then I see another. I need to know from you now if this time you mean it. If this time you are in it for real.”
“It is real.”
The thin air of the winter evening, the moon rising, pale crescent of white light in an inky blue sky. Star light, star bright. Wishing, once again, dangerously wishing. Reaching like the leaf-barren arm of the tree into the elements of your presence, long moment, breath-holding time, to see if you, if she wants to turn with me toward the light of a new season, the lengthening light of winter a harbinger of spring.
I got into my car and turned on the engine. The Eva Cassidy cassette rewinding, spinning. The voice began, You’ll remember me when the west wind moves among the fields of barley, you can tell the sun in his jealous sky when we walked in fields of gold.
I turned the corner onto Beacon Street and pulled over to the side, tears streaming down my face. In his arms she fell as her hair came down among the fields of barley, will you stay with me, will you be my love?
4
I SPENT CHRISTMAS IN GMUNDEN WITH MY MOTHER’S COUSIN Lily. They had grown up together. Lily would come to visit us in Cyprus, but my mother never went back to Austria. I understand, Lily said. I could never again live in Vienna, but the Salzkammergut, the lake district—she closed her eyes and let out a sigh—it’s different.
Outside, the Trauensee, the lake where she and my mother swam as girls, was still visible in the fast-falling light.
Lily’s face was longer than my mother’s, her blue eyes darker, her features had a woodcut angularity. Your mother was the beautiful one, she had said the last time I had seen her, at Simon’s and my wedding, the comparison very Viennese. Who was the smarter, the more beautiful? It was a legacy my mother had refused.
Her husband, Hans, was making a Stroganoff for dinner. He gave me the onions to slice. “It’s good for the jet lag,” he said, handing me a board and a knife. “They don’t know how the onions work, but they do.” He smiled, warmth radiating from his face. The bowl holding the onions came from the local ceramics factory, the mossy-green glaze, the swirl of the spiral pattern, the clay itself almost like porcelain, part of the history of this region, clay and salt, mountains and lakes. Hans had named the lakes on the way back from the airport in Salzburg, German words softened by the lilt in his voice, the light in his eyes.
I had finished my paper for Vienna the night before I left Cambridge, its sentences reverberating like the thrum of jet engines. I sank into eiderdown and slept without dreaming, the window open, mountain air filling the room. In the morning, snow had silenced the world.
For a week, it was the three of us, a mix of familiarity and strangeness. We had been in one another’s lives but I had never been alone with them. Lily was an eagerly anticipated visitor in our childhood, arriving with chocolates and presents. My mother and she lingered over coffee, speaking German. Shoene tochters, beautiful daughters. She beamed at us, promising to play after they finished their coffee.
I wanted to talk with her now about my mother. I think you will find this visit interesting, Greta had said, the word noncommittal. Yet she had come forward as the therapy ended. At the last session, she lit a candle. A birthday, a yarzheit, Shabbat? All three, she said, a shyness in her face. A beginning, an ending, a wish for peace. When you come back, we’ll see where we are. I watched the candle flicker. What did it mean for her—to suspend rather than end? Outside it was December dark. When it was time to go, I thought of blowing out the candle. I remembered Anna’s song. So roll me in your arms, love, and blow the candles out. Greta took one of the marble eggs from the collection on her shelf and gave it to me. It glowed in the light, swirls of deep yellow and white, a line running down along one side. I held it, solid in my palm. Thank you, I said, for everything. I’ll miss this, I said, and smiled, tears running down my face. I’ll miss this too, she said. For a moment I was puzzled—but you do this, end therapy, all the time, I thought. It was part of her practice.
Lily wanted to know what Anna and I were doing, what our lives in America were like. She and Hans lived simply, ran a small travel business. Their passion was walking, hiking in the mountains. You will see, she said, her face coming to life.
She and Hans declared that I needed first to rest, “just for one day or two.” Lily needed to finish preparing for her sons and their families, who were arriving for New Year’s. The room they had added onto their house, a small winter garden, was filled with presents. I felt Lily watching me, making a decision.
The next night at supper, there was a box next to my plate. “These are for you,” Lily said. “I kept them for you and Anna, as well as for myself. They are the letters from your mother.” I drew back, as if I had been handed her ashes. But this was a living presence. “I would have sent them to you, b
ut I couldn’t part with them.” Her eyes teared. Had Anna known about this, would she have come? I waited until supper was over and took the letters to my room, to read them alone.
I expected the family news, descriptions of daily life familiar from the letters she wrote us. I anticipated the impact of hearing her voice, the immediacy of her speaking. It was her candor with Lily that surprised me. Dearest Lily, I am so grateful for your letter. This has been a difficult time, one of the hard times in a marriage. I feel very alone now, especially with the girls away at school. Mischa says nothing is wrong, but I know this is not true. Do try to come in April, even if just for a few days. I am longing to talk in the way that we can, holding nothing back, and the sea air will be good for your health.
Had my mother lived, would she and I now talk in this way?
It was late when I folded the last of the letters back into its blue envelope and turned off the light. Sentences floated in the darkness. I am worried now about Kyra. I will tell you more when you come. I knew I wanted to talk with Lily, but now I had a new sense of the possibilities of that conversation. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. But then I dreamed about my mother. I was in a room, a large, bare studio. The door opened and she came in. “We have to talk,” she said. “But honestly,” I said.
At breakfast, Lily announced, “This is Kyra’s and my day,” glancing at Hans, who was reading the paper. What she meant was she was taking the car. She had picked out a walk, a place for lunch, my feet snug in the hiking boots she lent me. I had added a second pair of socks.
We drove into the mountains, the sky blue, more snow forecast for late in the day. Shorn of husband and household, Lily became more energetic, her voice freer, her body lighter. “I was always sorry, Kyra. I wasn’t able to help you more during that terrible time, especially after your mother died.” Her eyes focused on the road. “I have always felt simpatico with you.” She glanced at me. “I once thought of studying architecture myself, but then Hitler came.” Her voice choked on the name. “I too have known disruption, upheaval, loss. It is my hope now that we can become friends.”
She parked the car, and we followed the path through a snowy meadow, Lily setting a fast pace. At the edge of the woods, the trail narrowed, went through a birch forest, and then climbed steadily until we reached the lake, its frozen surface glistening, the sun high in the sky. I opened my jacket, also borrowed, Lily took the water bottle out of her rucksack. The physical exertion overcame the shyness I felt after reading the letters. She was my mother’s friend and, yes, she had given me the letters, but I wasn’t sure on what grounds we would talk. I was afraid she still saw me as something of a child. I wanted her not to hold back.
“It was intense for me, reading those letters,” I said, my eyes fixed on the lake.
“I would think so. Your mother was a remarkable woman. I have never experienced that kind of a friendship with anyone else. We could talk with each other about things deep in the heart.”
“I saw that,” I said. “I was a little envious. I didn’t know women of your generation would speak so openly about their marriages.”
She laughed, her eyes mischievous. “That’s the naïveté of each generation, to think they’ve invented love and sex. But in some ways I think we may have spoken more openly about the usual problems of life. We assumed them, so we could speak about them. We knew what real trouble was, and your mother had more than her share of that.”
She meant Anton, my half brother, and also the political crisis, first Hitler, then on Cyprus. To go through that again was too much. Austria, shrouding itself now in neutrality, had tried to put a good face on a bad history. “It doesn’t work,” Lily had said, “but at least we don’t have war.”
She capped the water bottle, and we followed the path around the lake. I knew about my mother’s childhood, I said. But I never really knew her as a woman, except as a child knows things. I was away at university, and then I married. I assumed we had all the time in the world.
I wanted to know about my mother’s marriage, but it turned out I already knew. “They were in love with each other,” Lily said, “no doubt about that. They went through some hard times, everyone does.” I could see why she had shown me the letters, there was nothing in them to hide. It was the closeness between them that was special. I had that with Anna.
We had reached the end of the lake. The path followed the shore. Clouds gathered in the distance. “There is a chalet just a little farther, on the other side of the lake.” She knew the couple who ran it. “The food is simple but good, and it’s a place where we can talk.”
She chose a table next to the window, looking out on the lake. “Have the schnitzel,” she said. “It’s the real thing.” Lily ordered two glasses of Riesling.
I took a sip. My head tingled. I decided to plunge in.
“In one of the letters, my mother said she was worried about me. Do you remember what that was about?”
Lily hesitated, her face clouding. Had she forgotten or was she unsure whether to say?
“My mother is dead,” I said. The word sounded finality. “I think it would be fine with her for me to know. We were always close. She told me there was nothing I couldn’t tell her. I think now the same would apply to her.”
Lily searched my eyes.
“It was about your marriage. She felt it was too soon. She wanted you to have more experience of life.”
A dart.
We had been on the beach, the day unseasonably warm. I wanted to swim. I took off my sweater and shirt, unclasped my bra. A look of consternation on her face. I thought it was about swimming. I hesitated, my breasts soaking in the sun. It’s hot, I said, unsnapping my jeans, suddenly self-conscious. I had started sleeping with Simon. I wondered if she could tell. What do you think of Simon? I asked her. He seems very nice, she said, her voice flat.
“Was it Simon?” I asked.
It was hard to breathe.
Lily put down her fork.
“Your father thought highly of Simon, embraced him as a son. She saw this, and she worried about Anton. I’m sure she would have spoken about that. But she also had other reservations. She wasn’t sure he was right for you.”
Not right for me? Did she question my judgment, she who claimed never to judge? You will know, she would say. I had fallen in love, it was the first time, I knew how I felt. My face went numb.
“She cherished you, Kyra, maybe a little too much. She had encouraged your gifts, and she wanted you to have the freedom to explore them. Simon was a very impressive young man, ambitious. Your father saw that and helped him. It would be easy to fall in love with him. She worried, though, that he would constrain you, not in some horrible way but in the way of such men. She thought you needed more time, more experience, before you would know what you wanted in life. In her eyes, you were very young.”
“But it was a shared ambition,” I said, needing Lily now to see how I saw it. “It was a vision we held in common, mine as much as his, to create a socially transformative architecture that would sustain and nourish democratic values. This was something we deeply felt. I believe in it as strongly now as I did then. It’s my life’s work.”
Of this I was certain. Still, something was troubling.
A conversation with my mother in the kitchen. She was making lunch, I was peeling cucumbers at the sink. Long green shapes. Are you using a pessary? she asked out of nowhere, the word quaint. They’re called diaphragms, I said. Had she found it in my drawer?
You know, Kyra, Greta’s voice now, I cannot help but wonder about your relationship with Simon. It’s easy to idealize someone who has died and forget how it really was. I’ve never heard you talk about any difficulties between the two of you.
With Simon, once, I was on a lake, like this one. We’d gone on a hike, taken a picnic. I spread the cloth on the ground. It was early spring, the ground covered with cowslip. He said he imagined us doing this someday with our children. We had just been married. I said someday ma
ybe. He said soon. He wanted five children, God willing, he said. It was superstition. He wasn’t religious. He lay back on the cloth, admiring the sky. I unpacked the sandwiches. One, I said, or at most two. He sat up. Kyra, he said, I’ve always wanted a large family. Just think what our children would look like, his eyes taking me in. But not really. You don’t listen to me, I said, it’s all about you, what you want. He said that’s not true. It is, I said. Listen to yourself, you don’t hear how it sounds to me. Five children, can you imagine what my life would be like? Hurt crossed his face. I thought that was something you wanted, he said.
“Coffee?” Lily asked. “They make an excellent strudel.”
I scanned her face.
Was there more she hadn’t told me?
“How did she feel after the marriage?”
Lily put her hand over mine.
“She hoped you would wait to have children.”
The night before I left Lily’s house, the run of the Gloecklers took place, a ritual dating from pagan times, said to chase away the evil spirits. Streetlights were turned off, the sound of cowbells approaching, and then men dressed in white shirts and pants, wearing traditional Gloeckler caps—huge paper sculptures built on wooden frames, lit from the inside by candles. The candlelight and the sound of the cowbells worn on their belts were intended to call the good spirits of the coming year and scare the bad spirits away. We stood in the cold night, Lily and Hans, their sons and their families, watching the dancing caps move down the street. We followed them down into the town square, men converging from all directions, falling into the prescribed formations, which was called “running the figures.” The celebration ended with singing. It was January 5, the night of Epiphany.
If there is magic, if there can be hope here, in this lakeside town in upper Austria, this was its expression. Hundreds of hours had gone into making the sculptures, the requirement being each design can be used only once. I turned to Lily and saw my mother. What would she have made of this ritual? Multicolored caps lighting the night like stars, beauty mixed with superstition, the number of men in each group must be uneven. Yet here was this family, united rather than riven, gathered rather than scattered, everyone miraculously alive. I let out my breath and watched the heat of my body evaporate in the cold night air. What Lily had said about Simon was something I had known—that he required a kind of submission to him, subtle, but there. Still, it didn’t change the fact that I loved him, deeply and genuinely, and I always would.
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