The Death Instinct

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'Which was true.'

  She looked out the window. 'You tell me nothing. It's just like lying. It is lying.'

  'Not speaking isn't lying,' he said.

  'It is when it tricks someone. I'd rather you lied. At least if you lied, I'd know you cared what I thought.'

  They sat in silence as the train rumbled along the banks of the brown, unstirred Danube. Younger watched her profile. He wondered why or how he saw vulnerability in her, when none showed anywhere on her face or figure. 'I do care,' he said.

  'You don't.'

  It was a principle with Younger not to say a word more about himself, his past, his thoughts, than he had to — at least not to women. They always asked him to; he never did. Evidently he was losing his principles. 'It was November of 1909,' he said. 'Her name was Nora. Would you like to hear about it?'

  'If you don't mind telling me.'

  'She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever met,' he continued, 'to that point. Totally different from you. Blonde. So fragile you thought she might break in your hands. Self-destructive too. I guess I liked that. We had a good six months. In my experience, that's not too bad — a good six months. But there were danger signs even then. I remember taking her shopping for wedding gowns. She got it into her head that the mannequin modeling dresses for us — a girl of about sixteen — was mocking her. I made the mistake of asking Nora what the girl had done. She accused me of defending her. I made the further mistake of laughing. That fight lasted two days. But things really began in earnest after the wedding, when she found some notebooks of mine. Psychoanalytic notebooks; case summaries. My women patients tended to — well — they usually began acting as if they were in love with me, which is exactly what's supposed to happen in psychoanalysis. You can ask Freud if you don't believe me.'

  'Of course I believe you,' said Colette.

  'The notebooks recorded what happened during each hour of analysis: what my patients said to me, my own inner reactions to them, and so forth.'

  'And so forth?'

  'Yes.'

  'You — you liked your patients? And you said so in your notebooks?'

  'One of them. Her name was Rachel.'

  'Rachel. Was she pretty?'

  'Her figure was like yours,' Younger replied. 'So yes, she was pretty.'

  'Did she want to sleep with you?'

  'She certainly did,' he said.

  'You mean you did to her what you tried to do to me — and she let you.'

  Younger only looked at Colette.

  'I don't blame you,' she said. 'A pretty girl coming to your office every day and lying down on a couch and telling you her secrets? If I were a man, I would have found that — appealing.'

  'Many analysts sleep with their patients. Freud doesn't do it. I didn't either.'

  'You did with Nora,' said Colette.

  'Not before I'd married her. And she wasn't my patient — not really.'

  'I see. You didn't do anything with Rachel; you only said in your notebook that you were attracted to her. So you didn't understand why your wife was upset with you.'

  'That's right,' said Younger.

  'Well, that was very foolish of you.'

  'Really? If women want their men never to have been attracted to another girl in all their lives, it's not the men who are being foolish.'

  'What did you say to Nora?' asked Colette.

  'I chided her for having read my notes, which were confidential. That was an error. She charged me with trying to hide my "romances" from her. She developed an elaborate theory according to which the entire notion of confidentiality in psychoanalysis was designed to allow doctors to have affairs with their female patients. A point came when not an evening would go by without some reference to my "romances." She said that I disgusted her. That I was unfeeling. That I was weak. She began to throw things. First at the walls, then at me.'

  'And you were like a stone — impassive.'

  'More or less.'

  'That must have made her even angrier,' said Colette.

  'Yes. She started to hit me. And kick me. At least she tried to.'

  'What did you do?'

  'Well, she was very young, and she'd been through some nightmarish events. On top of which she was very slight. I found it almost endearing when she tried to hit me. So I took it, suppressing my temper. Actually, I don't think I knew the extent to which my temper required suppression.

  'One evening,' Younger went on, 'I came home to find a cheval glass of ours, an antique, a wedding present from my aunt, lying in pieces on the parlor floor. It turned out that Nora had deliberately broken it. That night she fought more furiously than ever. One of her blows landed, and I finally struck her — with the back of my hand, against her cheek. The force of it was stronger than I intended. She fell to the floor. To my astonishment, she apologized. It was the first time she'd ever apologized. She railed at her own folly, praised me for my kindness, and protested her undying love for me. She threw her arms around me and begged my forgiveness. She began to cry. I thought we had finally come to the end of it.

  'Instead a pattern had begun. Our quarreling would start again, swell to its old proportions, and then we'd come to blows. Or rather, she would try to land blows until at last I struck her, at which point she would soften and beg to be forgiven. But the strangest thing of all was that I discovered that I could forestall the worst of our quarreling by — a — by cutting straight to the end of the pattern, in our intimate life.'

  'I don't understand,' said Colette.

  'No, and I'm not going to explain it,' said Younger. 'But it worked. For a while at least; not for long. When we were out in public — on a street, in a theater, anywhere — Nora began flying into rages, accusing me of being attracted to other women. Which I was, naturally, if they were attractive. At first I didn't deny her accusations, but in the end just to quiet her down, I told her she was imagining it — that it was all in her head. She knew I was lying, but she seemed to prefer the lie to the truth.

  'Then the young wife of a rich old patient asked me to make a house call. Her husband was dying. I was there a long while. Very sad. When I got home that night, I found myself concealing it from Nora. There was nothing to conceal, but the wife was famously charming — she'd been an actress — and I knew if I told Nora, there would have been an endless night of pointless recriminations. It had all become so boring, so monotonous. So I told her a different story; she believed me. At that moment, I realized I no longer loved my wife.

  'About two months later, the same woman called me again. Her husband was dead, and she was resuming her career on Broadway. She said she had a painfulness in her lower back from rehearsals. She asked me to come to her house and have a look at it. I did. After that she asked me to make house calls several times a week. I lied about it recklessly to Nora.

  'One day a note from the actress came to our apartment, requesting my presence as soon as possible. Of course Nora saw the note, and of course she understood at once all the lies I'd been telling her. She accused me of the affair; I confessed it. We divorced, scandalously, having been married little more than a year — and the most comic fact was that I hadn't had an affair at all. At least it would have been comic if Nora hadn't died shortly afterward. They wired me the news in Boston. She had fallen from a subway platform into a train. They called it an accident, but I doubt it. The one thing they did discover was that she was with child when she died. Freud says I feel responsible for her death.'

  'Do you?' asked Colette.

  'It's worse than that. I was happy she was dead. I'm still happy about it, to this day.'

  Hutteldorf Station was the end of the line. In the town center of an otherwise bucolic and thickly wooded district stood a few low apartment houses. One of these was Gruber s address, but no one by that name lived there now. Younger discovered nothing useful until he approached a matronly woman sweeping the courtyard.

  'Hans Gruber?' she said. 'Who all the girls were mad about? The tall young man with the blo
nd hair and beautiful blue eyes?'

  Younger translated this description without comment. Precisely by not reacting to it, Colette acknowledged its accuracy. He thought he saw color rising to her face.

  'Of course I remember,' said the woman. 'What a lazy, haughty one he was. He had a stipend — his father had died, maybe? — so he didn't have to work. Wouldn't lift a finger. Just took long walks in the woods, playing his violin any old place. And what a temper. Ordered us around when he was sober, and insulted us when he was drunk.'

  'It seems you're devoting a lot of effort,' said Younger to Colette after translating these comments, 'to someone who doesn't much deserve it.'

  Colette frowned and shook her head, but didn't answer.

  Younger explained their errand to the charwoman and asked if any of the Grubers still lived nearby

  'So he's dead,' replied the woman. 'Well, that's another one. No, the family I never knew. He came from one of those river towns in the west, near Bavaria. I don't know where. Ask at the Three Hussars near St. Stephen's. That's where he ate all his dinners. Maybe someone there will know.'

  The sun had set when they arrived back in central Vienna. In the taxi Younger asked the driver if he knew a restaurant called the Three Hussars. The driver said the restaurant was closed, but would be open again Thursday.

  'It's just as well,' said Colette to Younger. 'I don't want you to come with me. I've taken up too much of your time already.'

  'There's a game your brother plays, Fraulein,' Freud said to Colette that evening, 'with a fishing reel and string. He makes sounds when he plays. A sort of ohh and ahh. Do you know what he's saying?'

  'Just nonsense,' answered Colette. 'Does the game mean something?'

  'It means, for one thing, that there's nothing wrong with his vocal cords,' said Freud.

  'To play the same game over and over,' asked Colette, 'is it very bad?'

  'It's interesting,' said Freud.

  Treating his dog to its walk the next morning, as the early sunshine shimmered off damp cobblestones, Sigmund Freud held the hand of a little French boy. Their conversation was distinctly one-sided. Freud chatted amiably, in French, recounting to Luc tales from Greek and Egyptian mythology. The boy was absorbed, but did not respond.

  In a small triangular park, they came on a crowd encircling a man convulsing on the grass. His workingman's clothes were clean, if patched and fraying. His cap, evidently thrown to the ground when the fit began, lay next to his writhing body.

  'If you were out with my wife and her sister,' Freud said quietly to the boy, 'they would undoubtedly cover your eyes at this point. Shall I cover your eyes?'

  Luc shook his head. He exhibited none of the horror that children typically display in the presence of illness. Some in the crowd, taking pity on an epileptic, dropped coins into the man's cap. Eventually Freud led the boy away.

  Luc wore a thoughtful expression. Then he tugged at Freud's hand and looked up at him, a question having formed in his eyes.

  'What is it?' asked Freud.

  The boy tugged again.

  'That won't do, little fellow,' said Freud. 'I can't explain anything if I don't know what's troubling you.'

  Luc stared, looked away, stared up at Freud again. Then he began pulling his pockets inside out.

  Freud watched him, petting his dog's ears. At last he understood: 'You want to know why I didn't give the man any money?'

  Luc nodded.

  'Because he didn't do it well enough,' answered Freud.

  Younger, alone in Vienna's old quarter, happened the next day on an open-air market, large and well stocked. It was clear that Freud wouldn't take money for treating Luc, so Younger decided to have a delivery made to number 19 Berggasse: fresh fruits and flowers; milk, eggs, chickens, ropes of sausage; wine, chocolates, and a few boxes of tinned goods as well.

  But he stayed away from the Freuds' the entire day. There were several old, obscure churches he wanted to see. And there was the fact that Colette was hiding something from him.

  'By any chance, Miss Rousseau,' asked Freud that night, 'was German spoken in your family?'

  Freud had seen his patients that day, finished his correspondence, added notes to the drafts of two different papers he was working on, and apparently found time in addition to interact with Luc. He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, where Colette was helping the maid clean up.

  'We spoke French of course,' she answered.

  'No German at all?' asked Freud. 'When you were a child, perhaps?'

  'Grandmother was Austrian — she knew German,' said Colette smiling. 'She used to play a game with us in German when we were very little. She would hide her face behind her hands and say fort, then show us her face again and say da!

  'Fort and da — "gone" and "there."'

  Colette washed the dishes.

  'You're pensive, Fraulein,' he said.

  'I'm not,' she replied, looking steadily at her work. 'I was just wishing I could speak German.'

  'If what you're concealing,' answered Freud, 'is connected to your brother, Miss Rousseau, I should like to know it. Otherwise, I have no wish to intrude.'

  The Three Hussars, located on a quaint, uneven lane in the oldest quarter of Vienna, came alive at eleven-thirty Thursday morning Shutters parted, windows opened, the front door was unlocked, and an aproned waiter, all black and white, came out to sweep the sidewalk. This man was approached by a very pretty French girl, who smiled shyly and was directed by him into the restaurant.

  Younger, installed at a cafe down the street, watched and waited.

  Ten minutes later, the girl emerged, anxiety furrowing her forehead. Younger followed her.

  Every street in Vienna's old quarter leads to a single large square — the Stephansplatz — where stands the cathedral of St. Stephen, massive, dark, Gothic, and impregnable, its roof incongruously striped with red and green zigzags, its south tower as absurdly huge as the left claw of a fiddler crab, dwarfing the rest of the body.

  Colette passed through the gigantic wooden doors of the cathedral. She lit a candle, dipped two fingers into a stone bowl of water, crossed herself, took a seat on a lonely pew in the cavernous hall near a column three times her width, and bowed her head. A long while later, she got up and hurried out, never seeing Younger in the shadowy recesses of one of the chapels.

  She walked more than a mile, stopping several times to ask for directions, showing a piece of paper that evidently bore an address. Having crossed the Ring and then the canal, she entered a large, ungainly building. It was a police station. After perhaps half an hour, she came out again. Younger, smoking, was waiting for her next to the doorway.

  'So your Hans is alive,' he said.

  She froze as if a spotlight had picked her out of the darkness. 'You followed me?'

  He hadn't answered when a kindly-looking, mutton-chopped police officer hurried out of the station. 'Ah, Mademoiselle, I forgot to tell you,' he said in broken French. 'Visiting hours end at two. They are very strict at the prison. If you're not there before two, you won't see your fiancй until tomorrow.'

  'Thank you,' said Colette in the awkward silence that ensued.

  'Not at all,' replied the officer, beaming genially. He must have taken Younger for a friend or member of the family, because he said to him, 'So touching, two young people falling in love during the war, one from either side. If a single good thing can come from all the death, maybe this will be it. 'The officer bid Colette goodbye and returned into the station.

  'You should have told me,' said Younger. 'I-'

  'I'd still have brought you to Vienna. I'd still have introduced you to Freud. I'd probably have paid for your honeymoon. Whatever you'd asked me, I would have given you.'

  She surprised him with her answer: 'You want to kill me.'

  'I want to marry you.'

  She shook her head: 'I can't.'

  They looked at each other. 'I'm too late,' said Younger, 'aren't I?'

  Colette looked a
way — then nodded.

  Younger dined, despite himself, at the Three Hussars that evening, a wood-beamed, low-ceilinged restaurant with uneven floors and tables barely large enough to fit the enormous schnitzels served to virtually every customer.

  When the waiter was clearing his dishes, Younger placed a substantial number of bank notes on the table and told the man that he was looking for an old friend of his named Hans — Hans Gruber — who was in jail and who used to frequent the Three Hussars. The waiter cheerfully remarked that Hans's fiancй had stopped by the restaurant that very day, at lunchtime, adding for good measure that the girl was French, very good-looking and drooling with affection for him — but then Hans was always lucky with the fairer sex.

  Younger drove his meat knife through the wad of bank notes, pinning them to the wood table. He stood, towering over the waiter, and his voice came out barely above a whisper: 'What's Hans in for?'

  'He was in the rally,' stammered the waiter, although it wasn't clear whether he was more in fear of physical force or pecuniary loss.

  'What rally?'

  'The league rally. For the Anschluss — the union with Germany.'

  'What league?'

  'The league.'

  Younger left, not because there was no more information to be had, but because he was concerned he might hurt someone if he didn't.

  'So,' Freud said to Younger late that night in the splendid lobby of the Hotel Bristol. 'I have a conjecture.'

  The statement took a moment to penetrate. Freud was on his feet, hands crossed behind him, coat hanging down from his shoulders, while Younger sat at a low table before an empty snifter of brandy. Freud had been there for more than a minute. Younger hadn't seen him.

  'I beg your pardon,' said Younger, coming to his senses.

  'My conjecture is that you've discovered what Miss Rousseau has been hiding,' said Freud.

  'You knew?' asked Younger.

  'Knew what?'

  'That she's engaged?'

  'Certainly I didn't know. Engaged? Why didn't she tell you?'

  Younger shook his head.

  'Of the three of you,' said Freud, 'I think I'm analyzing the one who needs it least.'