By Blood (16 page)

I could not bring myself to go home. Not knowing where else to go, I asked the taxi driver to take me to the Palace. The hotel must have a bar, I thought, where I could prepare myself for the long ride out to Ocean Beach. But in the lounge I found only two drunken men accompanied by three prostitutes. Stretching out behind them, all across the back bar, was a large, garish mural painted by Maxfield Parrish: the Pied Piper leading children up a rocky promontory. There was something grotesque in this larger-than-life-size Piper with his hooked nose, the children’s phony, chub-cheeked innocence, the impossibly purple sunset behind them; the live prostitutes painted almost as shamelessly as the mural. I fled the bar, crossed the street, stepped over the desperate men sprawled in the doorway, and rode the elevator up to my office.

There I lay in the dark, trying to make myself comfortable on the small settee. The Palace’s rooftop pink-neon sign, three stories high, loomed over the window. The first letter A was defective, and I watched the restless oscillation of Palace, P lace, Palace, P lace, as I tried to empty my mind of the evening’s events.

I must have dozed off, for the next thing I knew, I was being startled awake by a thundering slam. It took me a moment to realize it was a door closing. Then, hearing footfalls on the other side of the wall, I knew the slam must have come from the door to the next room—Dr. Schussler’s office!

What would Dr. Schussler be doing at her office late at night on the Friday before Christmas? It must be a special cleaning crew, I thought. But I heard no vacuum, no sound of a trash cart being wheeled along the corridor. There were only the continuing footfalls, and then the thud of something heavy, perhaps a briefcase, landing on a surface—Dr. Schussler’s desk, judging by the direction from which the sound had come.

Gott!
came in a huge sigh, as the analyst (for now I knew it could only be she) threw herself into her chair much as she had thrown down her briefcase.

I dared not move. The settee upon which I lay was old, poorly built, given to creaks and moans. I was aware of the quiet in the street below, the absence of the Palace doorman’s taxi whistle, which earlier had repeatedly pierced the night; of the silence in the building but for a hum I had never heard before, a strange, high whine that seemed to emanate from the building’s very core.

Above all I was aware of Dr. Schussler’s stillness. She had not taken off her coat, and I could clearly imagine her sitting in her chair, still bundled against the chill night, her head against the neck rest. Her weariness was palpable through the wall. I suddenly saw us as if from above, Dora and I on either side of our thin common door, neither of us here for happy reasons, the Palace sign flickering over us—Palace, P lace, Palace, P lace—our common bath of light, the unreliable hopefulness of its pink-neon glow.

I wanted the moment to stretch on and on; I thought I could remain immobile for hours, if only Dr. Schussler would do the same. But my hope was dashed when the doctor abruptly stood, removed her outer garments, and hung them on a rattling rack on the back of her door. After bustling about briefly, she sat down.

There came clicking sounds I could not identify, then a whir, then another click, after which the doctor said, Testing, one, two, one, two. There were further whirs and clicks, then the repetition of Testing, one, two, one, two—and I understood that Dr. Schussler was speaking into a tape recorder.

Friday night, she began, December 20th, one a.m. Then she laughed. Saturday morning, she began again, December 21st, one a.m. Journal of work with patients previously coded as one and two. Journal of consultations with Dr. Gurevitch concerning the patient coded as three.

She clicked off the machine.

I could barely constrain my body. Patient three! This Gurevitch was the doctor she had turned to for “consultation”! For I instantly remembered the urgent calls, always about a “patient three,” always after difficult sessions with the patient—our patient,
my
patient. To whom else could Dora Schussler be referring? Patient three! I had to still myself in that creaking settee; had to calm my heart; had to ignore the electric adrenaline that shocked me as if I were a dead frog galvanized into twitching on the dissection table. I heard the scrape of Dr. Schussler’s match; smelled the burnt phosphorus, then the tease of smoke from her Viceroy. She exhaled: a breath of exquisite slowness and depth. I had to, had to, had to constrain myself! She inhaled and exhaled again, then again, and yet a third time.

A clack: At last Dr. Schussler switched on the tape recorder. She cleared her throat then said into the machine:

Patient one remains cathectic upon his former wife, V.

The therapist went on speaking, but I had the sense that I had suddenly lost the ability to understand English. It seemed that V had a new husband, E, and there was a teenage son of someone called B, whose boss, W—no, that couldn’t be right. W must be the boss of patient one. There were several cathexi, and characters named E, V, M, and W. If my patient’s life had once seemed a story begun at random, this journal entry was nothing more than a scattering of Scrabble tiles. And its very incomprehensibleness seemed hostile to me, a narrative that refused to engage me—refused to distract me from my lone and sharp desire: Patient three; tell me about patient three!

Time wore on. I was cold. My coat, which I had thrown over myself as a blanket, was not sufficient to ward off the chill of the unheated office. The night seemed too still, as if no one existed but Dr. Schussler and I, and the doctor were speaking of the vanished. Patient two. A young man who could not separate from his mother. His “childhood fixations” and “transitional objects” and “organizations of reality”—I hated them, hated him, hated that he had been coded as “two,” which ordinally stood between me and the object of my desire: “three.”

Dr. Schussler had not turned on the light. She had barely moved. She was smoking constantly, one cigarette lit from another—no further scent of phosphorus had slid under our common door. And yet again I asked myself, Who was this Dora Schussler, this analyst in consultation with another analyst; this woman sitting beside me smoking in the gloom, in whose hands lay the patient’s fate?

She stopped speaking of patient two. Moments passed in which nothing happened. Then:

Note to transcriber, she said at last. Close now personal journal. Please to add the following to the journal of consultations concerning the patient formerly coded as three.

Patient three!

As we discussed, Dr. Gurevitch, said the therapist with a sigh, I continue in the analysis of this uncontrolled countertransference. I am taking careful notes in an attempt to make conscious to myself the areas in which I am overidentifying with the patient, and the effects of that overidentification.

However, she continued after a coughing spell—her deep sigh had disturbed her smoker’s inland sea of phlegm, which roiled while the doctor struggled to calm it. However, Dr. Gurevitch, despite our work, I am not certain if the client’s analysis is proceeding toward a successful outcome. I continue to feel that the damage is grave. I cannot undo my conviction that I have done irreparable harm to patient three.

Irreparable harm! I wanted to shout. What harm? What! How dare you do irreparable harm to my beloved patient! I wanted to leap up and pound on the doctor’s door. Yet I was powerless. What good would it do to intervene now? The patient would not be served if I broke into Dr. Schussler’s office and dragged the woman away.

So I remained still, cold on the settee, suppressing my breathing. The tape recorder ran on in a low whine. The doctor switched off the machine. She sighed as one in grief. Then:

Clack. The machine came on again.

Yes, I know, Dr. Gurevitch, the therapist continued. I know. My guilt is part of the countertransference. Yet, as we are telling our patients always, understanding a feeling is no protection against actually feeling it.

To summarize, she continued after another long sigh, I have come to concurrence with the idea that it was not inappropriate for me to encourage the patient to explore the fact of her adoption, specifically exploring her feelings of not belonging in her family. Unconfronted, this has led her into a neurotic pattern of letting herself be chosen by inappropriate partners, since the feeling of “wrongness of match” is what she associates with love, is what is “familiar” to her.

There is some disagreement as to whether or not her lesbianism is part of this neurosis, said the therapist. The DSM has not yet specifically addressed female-to-female relationships—the recent delisting of homosexuality as an illness relates most directly to male homosexual relationships. Yet you and I agree, Dr. Gurevitch, that patient three’s sexual love for women is not necessarily part of her internal organization regarding inappropriate partners. The specific choice of a woman partner is what is at issue here, not the choice of a woman in principle. I will therefore continue to treat the breakup with her most recent girlfriend as an opportunity for the patient to examine her affective choices in the context of her larger psychological issues.

(“Opportunity!” I thought. Her grief over this breakup is not an “opportunity,” you damned therapist!)

You have helped me to understand, Dr. Gurevitch (the doctor went on as I calmed myself ), that it was not necessarily an error to confront the patient with her continual evasions concerning her adopted status. Where I erred was doing so before I had prepared the psychic groundwork. I continued to believe that her resistance, her refusal to discuss the fact of her adoption—her habitual protection of her adoptive parents, another set of inappropriate partners, so to speak—was part of the neurotic pattern. My unconscious motive in doing so, as we discussed, was my wish that she would enact my deepest desire: to escape the sins of my Nazi bastard father.

This last statement was said with such venom that it seemed not to have come from the woman who had been speaking with such assurance in the cold argot of psychotherapy. Dr. Schussler slammed off the recorder, stood, then paced about her office. She continued to smoke, and again I saw her as if from above, the doctor circling, a trail of smoke glowing pink in the nervous light of the hotel sign.

Then she abruptly stopped and turned on the tape recorder.

Note to transcriber, she said. Delete the sentence containing the phrase “Nazi bastard.” Then: No. Keep it. STET, I believe you say. Keep it.
Ja
. Keep.

The doctor took a long drag on her Viceroy. Then, still standing, she said:

Transcriber: Please to note my pause, my initial instruction to delete the “Nazi bastard” sentence, and my subsequent decision to retain it. Now, continuing with the journal of consultations with Dr. Gurevitch concerning the patient previously coded as three:

I have already spoken to you, Dr. Gurevitch, about my family history. But this aspect of our discussions was quite brief, as we were necessarily focused upon the patient. However, before we can understand fully all the factors at work in this countertransference, you should know that my father was not simply an officer in the German army, as I perhaps led you to believe. He was not merely a foot soldier in the Wehrmacht, not merely one of those men who fulfilled what he believed was his duty to his native land …
Nein
…

Wind gusted at our windows, which shuddered in their old frames. The doctor fell into her chair.

My father was a member of the Schutzstaffel, she said. An
Obersturmbannführer
. A true believer in the Führer and the Master Race. When he was at home, he wore his uniform at the dinner table, so proud of his collar insignia with its three diamonds, his hat with the twin lightning bolts of the SS. Hitler had just come to power.
Vater
made us to stand behind our chairs and shout “
Heil Hitler!
” before we could eat, a new form of saying grace, said our mother. Even our little brother, five years old, saluted perfectly with a stiff hand and an upraised chin.

The doctor laughed.

I was fifteen, very sheltered, still a girl. My sisters were nine and seven. We could not help but find all this saluting very funny. We shouted “
Heil Hitler!
” and giggled, to
Vater
’s rebukes, which made us only to giggle the more …
Aber
… But of course … it was not funny … You see: My father was instrumental in the deportation and murder of the Jews of France.

This last statement was spat out to the best of Dr. Schussler’s Germanic abilities: the
F-
sound start of
Vater
like hot steam through her teeth.

Before the invasion of France, she went on in the same mode,
Vater
’s job was to get money to amenable French candidates for office. Fascist rightists. Anti-Semites. Nationalists who wanted to purify
la belle France
. My father did his work well, evidently. By the time German tanks had poured through the Ardennes Forest, and the Wehrmacht had erased the Maginot Line, the friends of Germany were waiting for him.

But, ah! I do not suppose he had to work so very hard. The government of Léon Blum—when was that? 1935? ’36? What a trauma it must have created for the French to have been led by a Jew! What nightmares it must have engendered to have had this Jew—so Jewish-looking!—at the helm of their nation while the rest of Europe could not wait to throw their own Jews into the fire. How ready they must have been to rid themselves of this psychological stain upon
l’honneur de la France
.

Dr. Schussler stopped; stood.

I am sorry, Dr. Gurevitch, for this tone of cynicism, she said. But to know one’s father was at the heart of it …

The therapist remained standing, mute, as the recording machine ran on, the threading tape flapping against the take-up reel. Finally Dr. Schussler slowly sank into her chair and said:

You may recall, Dr. Gurevitch, that I had to watch the war from afar. I was in this country when Hitler invaded France, beginning my studies for the doctorate at Columbia University in New York City. There I met Helmut Schuessler—still spelled with its Germanic
E
to reflect our lost umlaut—Helmut, who was already an American citizen, and who would soon become my husband. And then I, too, became an American. So it happened, Doctor Gurevitch, that all at once I became a candidate for a doctorate in psychology, a wife, an American, and a registered enemy alien.

The doctor paused.

Our neighbors would not speak to us, she went on. Only our colleagues at the Analytic Institute would befriend us.

She paused.

Mostly Jews.

And paused again.

We were imprisoned as enemy aliens. Perhaps you do not know this: Many Germans were imprisoned throughout the war, not on the scale of the Japanese concentration camps, but imprisoned nonetheless. We went to … Never mind. The point is that we might have remained imprisoned for the duration of the war had not our colleagues at the Analytic Institute worked so hard to see us freed. Then we did our best to stop being Germans. We dropped the E from our names. We became the
SHOE-slurs
. Helmut changed his name to Harold. Can one cut off one’s inheritance so easily? Perhaps not. We never managed to lose our accents.

The doctor breathed haltingly, as one about to cry, then said:

I worried about the welfare of my family,
naturlich
, as would anyone whose loved ones—mother, sisters, brother, cousins, aunts—lived in a war zone. And I was anxious to hear from them. In the beginning, said the doctor, sighing and arranging herself in her chair, before the Americans entered the war, my brother and sisters sent letters in which they bragged: about Hitler, about how Germany would conquer all of Europe. And, most of all, about our father’s successes. Such praise for
Vater
, his life in Paris among rich, powerful men whom he now could dominate. To this very day they believe in all that claptrap; they defend him. They say, He saved us from “those anti-German elements.”

Dear
Vater
. He was the one who soothed the tiny consciences of the French. It did not take much, I should say, to convince that nation they should surrender their Jews. Father only had to assist in the maintenance of a little fiction. Send us only “foreign Jews,” he said, not “French Jews.” Such a small crumb to throw them: only the riffraff of Belgium or Poland, Czechoslovakia or Russia. Foreigners. Not decent French men and women such as yourselves. He helped to spread this nationalist strategy, which would come to be so useful everywhere.

And then my father asked for more Jews and more. The French resisted only briefly: They tried to shield the Jews who had lived in France for generations, the aristocrats, the “French Israelites,” as they preferred to call them. And the decorated heroes who had served France during the Great War. And the war widows. But their resistance was nothing, a tissue. As
Vater
knew, it was but a balm to soothe what little was left of their better natures. Soon the French sent everyone: the veterans, the war widows, the “French” Jews of old families; the bearers of
l’Insigne des Blessés Militaires, la Médaille d’Honneur, la Croix de la Valeur, la Croix de Guerre, la Croix du Combattant
—all those Jews with all those crosses, even grandfathers clutching
les Médailles Militaires
—their service to
la France
meant nothing. Their medals went into the flames along with them.

The threaded tape flapped on as Dr. Schussler paused.

Meanwhile, the doctor continued, what elegant dinner parties
Vater
attended. Parties arranged by a fool named Louis Darquier de Pellepoix—that idiot with his monocle and the ridiculous “de Pellepoix” he insisted upon appending to his name, as if he were something more than a scheming boulevardier. There
Vater
was, drinking champagne with Pierre Taittinger, who contributed his wealth to the cause. And with Eugène Schueller, owner of L’Oréal, another grand contributor. I can never again drink champagne, Dr. Gurevitch. I will never wear products from L’Oréal or indeed—

Forgive me … I am ranting. All I meant to say is that the family letters came, and then they came more rarely, and then not at all. Yet I knew what was happening. And here I remained as the death machine rolled on.

I am tired now. It is—what time? One? Two in the morning? I have been Christmas shopping—the packages are all around me on the floor—and I thought, while I was downtown, I might record my thoughts. I am glad I did, despite the hour. I see I must return to my own therapy if I am to do decent work for patient three. I cannot simply turn her away—as you said, Dr. Gurevitch, such a move would be experienced by her as a casting out, yet another abandonment, inducing yet more harm. So I must make conscious my own internal crosscurrents, all that churned inside me as I read the letters from München, and when they came no more, and when the war was over and everyone knew what I had known.

The doctor switched off the machine; stood; walked about the office. Then came the sounds of paper crackling, plastic bags rattling. She must be leaving, I thought, gathering her purchases, her Christmas presents, going home to Helmut or Harold or whatever his name was now, returning to her life—absolved! cleansed!—forgiven by recounting her sins to this Gurevitch, this therapist-confessor. I would follow the doctor, I thought, accost her in some way—but how? And what good would it do? If I did … the therapist would know of my existence, my precious existence as the watcher over the patient … my dear patient …

The crackling stopped. Then there was only the sound of the wind, the scrape of a match. Smoke slid under the door, the snake of smoke. The doctor went to her chair, sat down, turned on the recorder.

Dr. Gurevitch, she said in a hoarse voice, you asked if I could recall a distinct moment, or a series of moments, when I believe the deviation toward extreme countertransference began. I am embarrassed to say that I knew the answer immediately, even before you had completed your question. No, I should not say “embarrassed.” Of course not. The moment, as it had unfolded in time, had been just one of many vivid instances that occur during the course of a patient’s therapy. It was your question that brought its significance into relief.

It took place but a few months ago—how can that be? But yes, it was only last September. We had returned from the summer hiatus, and I had led the trail of talk back to the central unexamined trope of the patient’s life: I was urging her, once again, to explore the emotional effects of her adopted status. She resisted, as usual, and I pressed on. I thought I was in control of the session. I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

It was a bright day. The sun pierced the blinds, painting lines across the floor and walls. I remember this because of the way the light struck her, as you will see, because it is the light that brings the moment back to me with such clarity.

I said to the patient, Do you see? Do you see how your relationship with your girlfriend Charlotte mirrors your relationship with your mother?