Fatal Lies (31 page)

Kessler looked at Liebermann directly. The moistness in his eyes evinced the authenticity of his regret.

‘None of us,' said Liebermann, ‘are perfect – and medicine is an inexact science.'

An hour later, Liebermann was sitting with Thomas Zelenka's parents in the Third District. It was a difficult situation: Liebermann was only
there because he wanted to ask one question – a question which he knew would sound utterly absurd without first establishing some sort of context. Thus he set about the formidable task of influencing the flow of conversation such that its end point would be the gustatory preferences of the Zelenkas' dead son.

Although getting the conversation from introductory remarks to the desired topic proved every bit as challenging as he had expected, once the subject had been broached Meta Zelenka, engaged in an extended reminiscence about her son's healthy appetite.

‘Did Thomas,' said Liebermann – as casually as he could – ‘have a particular fondness for almond tarts?'

‘No . . . not that I can remember.'

The young doctor – recognising that he was perhaps already pushing his luck – changed the subject.

When he was about to leave, Fanousek, who had been eyeing him with some suspicion, said: ‘I thought you'd come about the dictionary. I thought it might have been found by now.'

Liebermann remembered Rheinhardt saying something about such a volume.

‘I understand that it was very expensive,' said Liebermann.

‘Very expensive,' said Meta. ‘More than we could afford.'

‘Do you remember who published it?' said Liebermann, for want of a better question to ask.

‘Yes: Hartel and Jacobsen – of Leipzig. We had to order it directly.'

Something stirred in Liebermann's mind – a recollection. Where had he last seen a Hartel and Jacobsen dictionary?

‘But why that particular dictionary?' said Liebermann, his curiosity aroused.

‘It was recommended.'

‘By whom?'

‘By one of the masters.'

‘Which one? Can you remember?'

Meta shook her head, and looked at her husband.

‘I think it was . . .' Fanousek pulled at his chin. ‘Herr Sommer. Yes, it was Herr Sommer.'

DREXLER HAD BEEN
expecting nightmares – but when they came he was surprised by their power and intensity. They were not like ordinary dreams at all. They were vivid and possessed an extraordinary physicality.

One of them – a macabre recreation of the night they had journeyed into the woods to bury Perger – was particularly disturbing. Drexler had finished filling the grave and was ready to leave. However, he had tarried a moment in order to flatten some loose clods with the blade of his shovel. A pale hand had broken through the earth and the fingers closed tightly around his ankle. He had struggled to get free but it was impossible: the hideous grip was like the teeth of a bear trap. He had called out: ‘
Help, help . . . Wolf, Freitag, Steininger . . . help me
' – but he had lost his voice. Horrified, he watched them walking away, Wolf's lamp fading until its flickering sentinel light was extinguished by a cloak of darkness. What had really frightened Drexler, however, was what had happened next. On waking, he discovered that he could not move his leg. He could still feel Perger's bone-crushing hold around his ankle. Panic had threaded through Drexler's body – and his breath came in short, sharp gulps.

‘Not again, Drexler!' Wolf had reprimanded him. Yet the sound of Wolf's heartless voice had been strangely comforting – a reminder that a real world existed in which corpses could be relied upon to stay dead. Sensation had flowed back into Drexler's paralysed leg and
the ring of pain around his ankle had become first a dull ache, and then nothing – a memory.

Drexler had once overheard one of the masters talking about a doctor in Vienna who could interpret dreams. If so, he did not need his services – he already knew what these dreams meant.

That afternoon, while sitting in the library, he had decided that he must do something.

Drexler crossed the courtyard with his head bowed. The rain was making circles on islands of reflected sky. He entered the chapel and inhaled the familiar fragrance of incense and candle wax. Dipping his hand in the font, he anointed himself with holy water, genuflected, and found a place on a pew with the other boys who were waiting to make their confessions.

In due course he entered the confessional box, knelt down, and observed the shadowy figure of the priest crossing the air through the window grille.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .'

He had disobeyed his mother and father, he had deceived others, he had shown disrespect to his elders, he had failed to attend Mass. His confession flowed fluently and easily, but his resolve faltered when he attempted to unburden his conscience of the single sin that – in his estimation, at least – would consign him to hell.

‘Father . . .' He hesitated.

‘Yes, my son?'

‘I . . . I have . . . I have . . .' He could not do it. ‘I have been to see the whore in Aufkirchen.'

The priest, who had been perfectly still, shifted – as if suddenly interested.

‘Ahh . . . the whore in Aufkirchen, you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘And what – exactly – was the nature of your sinful act?'

‘Father . . . we had relations.'

‘Relations . . . I see, I see. Did she perform impure acts about your person?'

‘She . . .'

‘Come now, my son . . .'

‘We had relations.'

‘You penetrated her?'

‘I did.'

The priest took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly.

‘And did she . . . perform any unseemly acts with her mouth?'

‘We kissed.'

‘Yes . . . but did she degrade herself using your person?'

The inquisition went on for some time. When the priest was finally satisfied that he had a complete and thorough understanding of Drexler's transgressions, he offered him counsel with respect to the temptations of the flesh, and warned him that he should not replace one vice with another – especially the vice of
self-pollution
– which would have grave physical and spiritual consequences. The priest then gave Drexler absolution and a penance of prayer.

Drexler did not do his penance. Instead, he marched straight out of the chapel, across the courtyard, and sat in the cloisters, fuming. It was all such nonsense! The priest had clearly been titillated by Drexler's erotic adventures in Aufkirchen: how could such a pathetic individual mediate between him and God? This was not what he wanted . . . He wanted to be truly absolved. He wanted to be absolved to the extent that he could sleep peacefully again and be free of his terrible, terrible guilt, the sheer magnitude of which made the rest of life seem an empty, hollow, meaningless charade by comparison.

To atone fully, Drexler realised that he would have to pay a forfeit more costly than a few prayers. Such mumblings were not a penance, and would do nothing to ease his pain.

THE LECTURE THEATRE
was almost empty – in fact, there were only five attendees including Liebermann. Professor Freud pointed to a small semicircle of chairs in front of the tiered auditorium and said: ‘Please, won't you come nearer, gentlemen.' He smiled, and beckoned – wiggling his clenched fingers as one might to encourage a shy child. The tone of his voice was exceptionally polite, but his penetrating gaze was determined. The audience, which comprised professional men in their middle years, accepted his invitation and made their way down the central aisle.

Liebermann was already sitting in one of the chairs at the front. He had attended many of Freud's Saturday-evening lectures and knew that a request for greater proximity would be issued sooner or later. The Professor did not like straining his voice, and tried to create an intimate and informal atmosphere when addressing small groups.

Whereas other faculty members might have appeared clutching a thick wad of foolscap, dense with inky hieroglyphs, Freud arrived empty handed. He always preferred to extemporise.

Once, just before Freud had been about to speak, Liebermann had asked him: ‘What are you going to talk about?' ‘We shall see,' Freud had replied. ‘I am sure my unconscious has something planned.'

The Professor consulted the auditorium clock, which showed seven o' clock exactly. He coughed into his hand and stood erect, as if startled by the occurrence of an unusually arresting idea.

‘Gentlemen,' he began. ‘One would certainly have supposed that there could be no doubt about what is to be understood as
sexual
. First and foremost, what is sexual is something improper, something one ought not to talk about. I have been told that the pupils of a celebrated psychiatrist once made an attempt to convince their teacher how frequently the symptoms of hysterical patients represent sexual things. For this purpose they took him to the bedside of a female hysteric, whose attacks were an unmistakable imitation of the process of childbirth. But with a shake of his head he remarked, “
Well, there's nothing sexual about childbirth.
” Quite right. Childbirth need not in every case be something improper.'

Liebermann was the only member of the audience who smiled.

‘I see that you take offence at my joking about serious things,' Freud continued. ‘But it is not altogether a joke – for it is not easy to decide what is covered by the concept
sexual
.'

And so he went on, improvising with extraordinary fluency, exploring a range of subjects relating to human sexuality (many of which he chose to illustrate with clinical examples drawn from his own practice). Liebermann was particularly interested in a case of sexual jealousy . . .

When the lecture ended, at a quarter to nine, Freud took some questions from the audience. They were not very searching, but the Professor managed to answer them in such a way as to make the questioners appear more perceptive than they actually were. It was a display of good grace rarely encountered in academic circles.

Liebermann lingered as the auditorium emptied. He approached the lecturer's table. The Professor shook Liebermann's hand, thanked him for coming, and remarked that he would not be going on to Königstein's house to play tarock, as his good friend had caught a bad head cold. Moreover, as it was his custom to socialise on Saturday nights – and he was nothing if not a creature of habit – he wondered
whether Liebermann would be interested in joining him for coffee and a slice of
guglhupf
at Café Landtmann. The young doctor – always eager to spend time with his mentor – accepted the honour readily.

They made their way to the Ringstrasse while talking somewhat superficially about the attendees. Two of the gentlemen, Freud believed, were general practitioners – but he had no idea as to the identity of the other two. It was truly astonishing, Liebermann reflected, how Freud's public lectures rarely attracted more than half a dozen people. The Professor commented, as if responding telepathically to Liebermann's private thoughts, that resistance to psychoanalytic ideas merely confirmed their veracity.

A red and white tram rolled by, its interior lit by a row of electric lights. The passengers, staring out of the windows, seemed peculiarly careworn and cheerless.

Liebermann asked the Professor some technical questions about the case material he had discussed in his talk – and, more specifically, about the patient he was treating who suffered from sexual jealousy.

‘Yes,' said Freud. ‘Sane in every respect, other than an absolute conviction that when he leaves Vienna his saintly wife enjoys assignations with his brother – a celebrated religious in their community. The man reminds me of Pozdnyshev in Tolstoy's
The Kreutzer Sonata.
Have you read it?'

‘I have.'

‘You will recall then how Pozdnyshev suspects that the musical evenings his wife enjoys with the violinist Trukhachevsky are merely an artful deceit. So it is with my patient, who has come to believe that when his brother and wife are supposedly praying together, they are in fact enjoying the forbidden pleasures of an illicit union.'

‘In the end, Pozdnyshev kills his wife – does he not?'

‘Indeed . . . Tolstoy understood that jealousy is the most dangerous of passions. The doctor who takes such a patient into his care can
assuredly expect his nights to be much disturbed by fearful imaginings.'

The Professor proceeded to make some distinctions between different forms of jealousy, namely neurotic and pathological – the latter being more severe than the former. Then he suddenly seemed to lose confidence in his delineations.

‘The problem is,' he continued, stroking his neatly trimmed beard, ‘that one cannot love without experiencing jealousy. It is one of the many common forms of unhappiness that we might ascribe to the
human condition
. In matters of the heart, the boundary that separates that which is normal from that which is abnormal all but dissolves. Possessed of this knowledge, the physician must be extremely wary with respect to what he identifies as an illness.'

‘Surely,' Liebermann ventured, ‘in cases of sexual jealousy where there is insufficient evidence to substantiate an allegation of infidelity, we can reasonably describe the symptoms as delusional.'

Freud shrugged and stopped to light a cigar. He offered one to Liebermann, but the young doctor declined.

‘I remember . . .' Freud said, ‘many years ago, when I was only recently engaged to be married . . .' He paused, sighed, and whispered almost incredulously, ‘A situation arose which caused me much mental turmoil.' The Professor began walking again. He was looking straight ahead, but his gaze had lost some of its characteristic probing intensity.

‘I once had a dear friend,' he continued. ‘Wahle was his name. He was an artist of considerable talent . . . he had also been, for a long time, a brotherly friend of my beloved Martha – and, naturally, they corresponded. I should mention that Wahle was already engaged himself – in fact, to Martha's cousin. So . . . there was never any reason for . . .' He hesitated, drew on his cigar, and exhaled, uttering as he did so the word ‘Suspicion.' He nodded grimly. ‘However . . .
one day, I came across some of their letters, and detected in their content certain
meanings
. . . I discussed my discovery with Schönberg, a mutual acquaintance, who confirmed my fears. He said that Wahle was behaving strangely, that he had burst into tears when he had heard of my engagement to Martha. Clearly, I could not allow this situation to continue – a sentiment which Schönberg appreciated. He subsequently organised a meeting in a café, where he hoped we would be able to resolve matters civilly.