Secret Dreams (60 page)

“Thank you for saving this for me,” she said before she left.

“You're very welcome.”

As Fräulein walked down the stone path from the house, she felt Emma's cool eyes upon her. The door latch shut, metallic, cold, and final. The woman had not even said good-bye. A growing blackness like a cloud covered her mind: she had not even managed to
see
him. Must she corner him in the hospital? Catch him on a street corner?

At home she took out fresh white paper and began to draw. The paper slowly filled. The Howling Women, the Deer Man, the Lady of the Veils: she drew as many in a single night as she had in all the years past. And when at last the sparrows sang in the blue-blackness of dawn, she had smudged her writing arm with graphite from wrist to elbow. Still she drew on — until the sun rose redly and her eyes burned. She tossed the pencil aside and fell into bed, a dead thing.

When she awoke the sky outside was white-gray like milk. A shower helped to clear her head. A change of clothes felt even better. She went to the four-franc table and gathered all the drawings she had done. She carried them to the post office under her arm. There she bought a manila mailer, put the drawings inside, and went over to one of the high oak tables to write out the address.

The address …

Fräuleins hand hovered over the envelope. 17 Berggasse? 16 Berggasse? She knew it once, had seen it on a letter or a paper. She tried to recall … Number 14? Number 15? Bergasse? Berggasse? Or something-else-strasse? She threw down the pen in disgust and stalked from the post office, the manila envelope clamped under her arm.

Herr Doktor came to his hospital office at the end of the day, a secretary in tow. Bleuler had given him an assistant, a pale, earnest young man with a runny nose and bulging eyes, who followed him about like a lost spaniel. Herr Doktor seemed taken aback to find her sitting behind his door, but only Fräulein noticed, for he calmly controlled his face,

“Leave us for a minute, will you, Frederick?” he asked the secretary. And when they were alone Herr Doktor sat at his desk, putting the big piece of furniture between them both. “I expected you for your daily sessions,” he went on quietly. “But you never came. Would you like your regular hour back?”

She stared at him, incredulous. Expected her? And never wrote, never
telephoned?
Her love-glove hand began to twiddle in disbelief. She struck it against her thigh to kill it.

“Oh, here now! You can control that if you want to.”

She broke, not trying to hide her twiddle any longer. “You were waiting for me? Emma turned me away! Î came to see you, and all I got was this!” She wrung the glove off her twiddling hand and flung it at his head.

“Try and be reasonable. People outside can hear us. You're not crazy anymore, you're —”

“No!” She cut him off. “Not anymore. But who are you? Herr Doktor Touch-Kiss? Do you think they can hear me now?”

“Yes, I'm sure the whole floor knows now.”

“They should know. How you used me. How you opened me up and
took
me. Was it because my parents didn't pay my fee? How much do I owe you? How much do you want?”

“Nothing! Nothing! You owe me nothing —”

“But you owe me.” Her voice sank dangerously. “You owe we.”

Herr Doktor wilted in the chair. “I never promised you anything.”

“Curing me was a promise. Buying the dress was a promise. The way you touched me was a promise! You were supposed to be my doctor/' she hammered.
“My friend.”

“I
know," he mumbled into his hand.

“You were supposed to know what to do," she sobbed. “Supposed to want what I want too.”

“I know.” He cowered. “I know….” His contemptible, pathetic cringing set her free. She swept the papers and pencils off his blotter. A crystal paperweight fell to the floor with a crack.

“You saved me and then you used me. You betrayed me and then you raped me. You're nothing but a liar,” she choked. “A liar and a coward!”

The man covered his face, arms up about his head. “I know.” Someone knocked on his office door. Frederick, the secretary, warning them in a quavering voice that people outside were complaining of the noise.

“Why are they complaining?” Fräulein shouted at the shut door. “They didn't when I was crazy. So why now? Because I'm sane and say what I like. Then I want everyone to know:

“You saved me just to use me.

“You betrayed me and you raped me.

“You're a liar and a coward.

“And I wish I never met you!”

Dead silence beyond the door …

Her head felt light, her stomach queasy. She spied a letter fallen from the desk. An inkpot had tipped over it, gurgling its contents onto the carpet. Black drops splattered the letter's white face. A letter from Herr Vienna Professor. She immediately recalled the address.

19 Berggasse.

Fräulein staggered back to her seat, collecting the envelope. The room felt empty. “You should have left me the way you found me/' she said to the hollow room.

“The way I was.”

Herr Professor of 19 Berggasse sat in the deep plush of a private compartment on the Bremen train. On his lap lay the sheaf of the Schanderein girl's drawings. By coincidence they happened to arrive the day he left on his trip to America. In the rush to pack, he had not found the opportunity to look the pictures over. Frankly, he doubted whether he should study them at all. She was Jungs patient, not his own. What was so impossibly urgent that he breach their privacy? Once at the hotel, he told himself, he'd do the proper thing: post the drawings back to Zurich immediately, sealed and intact.

But as he sat on the rumbling Bremen train, a deepening curiosity came over him. A growing sense that these pictures were in some way part of young Herr Doktors secret trouble. “We've had a falling-out,” the young man had written since that Wednesday visit.
“I
gather she is sending you a list of grievances.” What an unhappy word, grievances. A death word.

The stub of a cigar burned between his fingers. Nicotine had stained them yellow, a permanent discoloration, like the taste of ashes that never went away The mark of a crucial flaw. Most mornings he hated himself for smoking.

Herr Professor suddenly undid the envelope. In each picture the people were naked. In rags or drapes. They reminded him vaguely of ancient Greek vase paintings on cups or vessels. But the Schanderein girl's drawings were stupendously shocking. In one drawing two women played over the dismembered parts of a man's sexual organs. In another, a man wearing the skull of a deer raped the headless body of another man, penetrating the gushing stump of his rival's neck. In yet another, a man squatted in the act of elimination — passing a huge egg out of his behind, and from the egg a woman was being hatched. The woman smiling coyly.

Herr Professor was awed. “My God,” he murmured. “This girl is absolutely crazy.”

And one more shocking than the rest. A man clad in the pelt of a deer was entering a woman's lavish vagina. His whole body entering. He had penetrated past his head and shoulders, nearly to his elbows. His arms pinned, his hands fluttered impotently at his sides.

And the woman was laughing.

At first Herr Professor felt the powerful urge to deny it. The brutality. The animality. Transgressing in the cave of your mind was one thing. Cunning greed. Desperate lust. Sweet revenge. But to act it out. No, that was no longer
of the mind
. But of the world, of life and death. If young Herr Doktor had actually touched the girl, actually made love to her …

Deep perversion.

No! No! No! The devil wouldn't dare! Let these drawings be mere fantasies, misunderstood desires, hopes, and wishes. Sick dreams. But not histories. Not chronicles of their intercourse.

His denial felt like an actual weight, a stone upon his chest. A great weariness fell over him, a terrible exhaustion making him close his eyes to what he had seen and what it meant. Close his eyes and rest, forget and rest, leave the whole problem to someone else and
rest.
,.

The red afternoon sun slanted into the compartment, peaceful and quiet, as if the train had slowed to a halt. The man gazed dreamily out the window. Squinting through the fiery shafts of sunlight on his eyelashes, he glimpsed the queerest faraway place. A wonderland. A sanctuary. Like a miniature stage in a theater in the house of dreams:

He saw a wall of snow-covered mountains. A village huddled in a lower valley. Sun on a patch of pine trees. Water sparkling as it fell from a cleft of a crag. He heard the brass tinkle of sheep's bells on the flocks in the hills above. Yes, he realized, this is where it happened. The things from the crazy girl's drawings. The place of all the young man's troubles. Where it all began …

The perfect little images of the village enticed him out the window. The finery of his traveling clothes melted off his limbs. He saw himself clothed in rags. The starry night rose like a temple dome. Two women were leading him by a rope around his neck, like a bull to slaughter. Emma and the girl, he thought, …

By the light of the fire, the women anointed his head with oil. They splashed his legs with wine. Then cloaked him in the flayed hide of a deer, putting the horned skull upon his head. From out of the dark a man appeared. The stranger held a sword. Naked. Faceless … The wind moaned over the fluttering fire. Or was it the women?

Herr Professor awoke with the name Pygmalion on his lips. The luxurious train compartment came back to him strongly. He fumbled to gather the girls drawings. Outside the window he saw the gray steel and concrete pilings of an industrial town. The rusty brick walls of warehouses. The train rattled heavily over the switching tracks of a railyard. The conductor tramped along the corridor, rapping his knuckles on each compartment door. A whistle shrieked. Bells clanged.

They were pulling into Bremen station.

Older man and younger man embraced in the hotel lobby, kissing one cheek and then the other. But the crowded lobby was no place to talk. They escaped to the hotel's glass palm house, where they could stroll along the gravel paths. The plant beds rose in neat terraces around them. At the center stood a wide stone basin with a bronze fountain cast in the shape of a pudgy laughing boy. The little boy was thrusting out his hips and peeing a stream of fountain water back into the pool. The stream splashed on another bronze casting, that of an irate duck, flapping its wings and squawking out of harm's way

The elder man thought young Herr Doktor seemed outwardly calm, but he sensed the faint acrid whiff of expectation — perhaps distress. “Did you look at the drawings?” he asked at once. “They were drawings, weren't they?”

“Yes, I looked…. But I posted them back from the front desk. Should I have kept them so you could see too?”

“Heavens, no!” the younger man said with some alarm. “I think she and I have been to bad enough places enough already.”

Odd choice of words, the elder man mused…. Been to bad enough places enough already. As if to say, Now enough is enough already! For a fleeting second he saw the mountains in the house of dreams, the leering faces around the fire. Why just then he did not know — but it made the sweat break out across his neck. And he said abruptly:

“Your patient's dream is very contagious.”

The young man glanced up sharply, as if some dread possibility were coming true. But the older man took him kindly by the arm as they strolled about the palm house.

“You know, my friend, when a patient lays all his hopes and fears upon us, we risk an entanglement. This, as you know, we call the transference. And from start to finish we risk lapses and failures along its stages. One of those lapses is the inevitable and diabolical counter-transference. For there comes a time when each of us hopes for things that cannot be. Hoping for things from our patients and ourselves which we have no right to expect. Or demand. Special favors …”

And here he paused. “Even gifts of love —-”

“Are you lecturing me?” The young man's eyes flashed. “Do you think I've done something wrong?”

“Have you done something wrong?”

The younger man disengaged his arm. “Haven't
you
ever been accused?”

“Me!” the elder burst out. And he laughed until he sat weakly on the lip of the stone basin in order to catch his breath. “Patients of mine have publicly accused me of many grand feats. Of defecating on one man's head. Of demanding homosexual intercourse with another. Of receiving it in my consultation room under the guiding eye of my wife —”

“And in each case,” young Herr Doktor asked sharply, “weren't those patients simply responding to your
unconscious
desires? Things you wanted to see come true?”

The older man pondered this for some time, thoughtfully stroking his face. He left off and caught his friend firmly by the elbow, pulling him down to the stone edge of the basin, where he could whisper the darkest confession:

“Always, Herr Jung! Always! But since my psychoanalytic practice was so slim, Î could hardly afford the liberties of such wishes and still meet the rent at the end of the month. So I must admit, Î
rarely
acted as often as I wanted upon those perverse desires my patients sensed so sharply in their beloved and esteemed Herr Professor Sex Quack!”

The younger man broke into a slow grin of relief. “Oh, it's good, so good to see you. This thing with her nearly ripped me up, don't you know? And then when you told me you had her crazy dream too … I thought, well, maybe you were going mad like me. Or worse, some trick of hers to turn you against me —” He halted as if he'd said something dangerous. Yet Herr Vienna Professor seemed not to notice.

“That I had her crazy dream, as you call it, is easy enough to account for. You wrote about it in your first letter. Then it came up once more at my house that Thursday evening. Are we not getting together again today, a few of the very same faces around a table? But you have to remember, if I went to that old place, I went on the vehicle of my own dream, not hers. My own dream with its own drives and motives. Not hers. Because after all, we only put her name on the dream for convenience. It doesn't belong to her. How can the village I see in my sleep be the same as yours? Or the mountain you see in your head be the same one she sees in hers?”