The Death Instinct (9 page)

    In Bitburg, Younger had hospital duty. He didn't like it. The work was too regular and, if he had to be frank, too safe. One lunchtime in January of the new year, Younger was taken by surprise when an orderly tapped him on the shoulder, told him he had a visitor, and gestured to the refectory doorway, where he saw Colette in her usual wool sweater and long skirt.

    He wiped his mouth, went to her. They neither shook hands nor embraced. Soldiers pushed by Younger to enter the huge, raucous mess hall.

    'You're alive,' she said.

    'So it seems. You're causing a commotion, Miss Rousseau.'

    Several of the soldiers rushing through the doorway had skidded to an abrupt stop, causing the ones behind to trip over them, with a chaotic pileup the result, all because of the improbably lovely French girl standing in the doorway.

    'On your way, you men - on your way,' said Younger, helping one up from the floor and giving him a shove. 'What brings you to Bitburg?'

    'I'm trying to find the German army liaison office. I recognized your company colors outside. I thought I would-' She looked down. 'I wanted to apologize for that night. It was my fault.'

    'Your fault?' he said.

    She frowned. 'I flirted with you.'

    'Yes. My happiest recollection from the war. I know what kind of man you're looking for.'

    Her frown grew severer. 'You do?'

    'One you can trust,' said Younger. 'You trusted me, and I failed you. I believe I may regret it for the rest of my life. Come on - I'll take you to the liaison office.'

    'No. It's all right.'

    'Let me,' said Younger. 'They'll treat you better if you're with an American.'

    The exterior of the hospital was silent and gray, as were the streets of Bitburg, as was its sky, which seemed perpetually to announce a snowfall that never came. He led her to a squat brick building where a small staff of Germans operated a kind of lost-and-found - not for objects, but for soldiers. A queue of at least a hundred civilians stretched from its front door down the street. Colette, seeing the line, told Younger he should go back. Then someone at the door called out and waved them to the front. The line was for civilians, not army officers.

    At the counter, with Younger translating, Colette said she was looking for a soldier named Gruber - Hans Gruber.

    The stolid, thick-set German woman behind the counter eyed the French girl without sympathy. 'Reason?' she asked.

    Colette explained that she had served in a hospital for flu victims near Paris in the last months of the war. Among the dying was a German prisoner - Hans Gruber. 'He was very sad and very devout. He said his company didn't even know what had happened to him. I promised to try to return his dog tag and belongings to his parents after the war.'

    'Give me the tag,' said the woman. 'It is the property of the German state.'

    'I didn't bring it,' Colette replied. 'I'm sorry.'

    The woman made an expression of contempt. 'Regimental information?'

    Colette provided it. She was instructed to come back in seven days. 'Hut I can't,' she said. 'I have a job and - a little brother.'

    The woman shrugged and called for the next in line.

    'I'll come back, Miss Nightingale,' Younger said to Colette when they were outside.

    The reference made no impression on her: 'No, I'll find a way,' she replied.

    A sort of mush "began to fall - not snow; more like clumps of congealed rain. 'You have a new job?' he asked.

    'Yes,' she said more brightly. 'It starts in March. You were right: the Sorbonne turned me down. But it doesn't matter. I'll get in next year. Anyway, God took pity on me. Madame has offered me a position as a technician at the Radium Institute. I'll learn more there than I would have even at university.'

    'God works in mysterious ways.'

    She looked at him: 'You don't believe?'

    'Why wouldn't I believe? What an outrage - these people who hold up the deaths of a hundred thousand children from the flu and blame it on God. It's not His fault.'

    'It's not.' She turned away. Her voice fell: 'They've taken Luc. To a school for recalcitrant children. He was living with me in the basement of the institute. Madame is letting me stay there until my position opens up. It's perfectly nice. There are bathrooms, and books, and hot plates I cook on. But someone reported us to the authorities.'

    'Fools,' said Younger. 'What is recalcitrant supposed to mean?'

    'The other children are thieves and imbeciles. It's criminal. Luc learns nothing and receives no treatment.'

    'He doesn't need treatment. He needs to live.'

    'How do you know?' she asked. 'Are you a psychologist?'

    He didn't answer.

    'You could have helped him get the best treatment in the world,' she said. 'You remember how he used to write notes sometimes? He doesn't even do that anymore. He hasn't communicated with anyone for two months. Oh, why am I telling you this? Why am I here? I hate this country. I have to go - my train is coming.'

    She ran away.

    He expected to see her the following week. After ten days, he went to the liaison office to find out if she had come back. She hadn't. Younger lit a cigarette and gazed up at Bitburg's perpetually gray sky.

    In the spring, when his discharge orders finally came through, he took a train to Paris. At the Radium Institute, he asked for Miss Rousseau. The receptionist told him that Colette was out, but expected back shortly. He waited outside.

    The streets of Paris were admirable. Always a tree in the right place. The buildings handsome and large, but never too large. The smell of clean water on pavement. He wondered whether he should move there.

    Colette was halfway up the steps before she recognized him. She stopped in astonishment and broke into her most radiant smile, which as quickly disappeared. She was even thinner than she had been. Her cheeks had a pretty pointing of red, but the cause, it seemed to him, might be hunger.

    'Come inside,' she said.

    He shook his head. They went walking instead. 'Did you find your Hans Gruber?' he asked.

    'Not yet.'

    'You didn't go back to Bitburg, did you?'

    'No, but I will.'

    'Because you didn't have money for the train. Have you been eating?'

    'I'll be fine in ten days. That's when my job starts. For now I have to save everything for Luc. They don't feed him enough in school. Do I look awful?'

    'More beautiful than ever,' said Younger, 'if that's possible. I found your soldier. Hans was Austrian. He volunteered with the Germans when the war broke out. They gave me an address in Vienna. Here.'

    He handed her a piece of paper. She stared at it: 'Thank you.'

    'How is Luc?' he asked.

    'Terrible.'

    'Do they ever let him out?'

    'Of course. In fact his school goes on holiday at the end of this week. How long will you be in Paris? I know he'd like to see you.'

    'I'm leaving this Friday.'

    'Oh,' she said. 'Do come and see the institute. We have American soldiers visiting, learning Madame's radiography techniques.'

    'I know. That's why I won't go in. I've had enough of the army for a while.'

    'But I could introduce you to Madame.'

    'No.' They had come to a street with trolley cars rambling on it. 'Well, Miss Rousseau, I don't want to keep you.' She looked up at him: 'Why did you come?' 'I almost forgot. There was something else I meant to give you.' He handed her an envelope from his pocket. It contained a short telegram, which read:

    i will accept boy with pleasure as new patient. advise

    sister to call on me directly she arrives vienna.

    freud

    She was speechless.

    'You can kill two birds with one stone,' said Younger. 'Take Luc to Freud, and pay a visit to your soldier's family.'

    'But I can't. I don't speak German. Where would I stay? I can't even afford the tickets.'

    'I speak German,' he replied.

    'You would come?'

    'Not if you're going to shoot me.'

    To his surprise, she threw her arms around his neck. He had the impression she was crying.

    Jimmy Littlemore unburdened the kitchen table of his feet. He stretched his good arm, poured two more whiskeys. 'I don't get you, Doc. First you practically rape her-'

    'Completely false.'

    'You unbuttoned her shirt. What kind of girl did you think she was?'

    Younger scrutinized the autumnal color of the bourbon. 'The rules are different in war.'

    'She didn't think so,' said Littlemore. 'What I like is how she knows what she's going to do with herself. She wants her sore bun, and she's going to get it.'

    'I beg your pardon?'

    'That school, the sore bun. Wants it for her dad. That's how I feel about making it to Washington. My dad missed his only shot with the Feds. When Teddy Roosevelt went to DC, my dad could've gone with him. He was the best cop in New York, but he had family, kids - you know. I'll probably never get the shot myself, but if I do, let me tell you, that would make him proud. So when did you find out her soldier boy wasn't dead?'

    Younger's glass stopped midway to his mouth. 'How did you know that?'

    'The dog tags,' said Littlemore. 'She goes to a German army office to locate a dead soldier, and she leaves the guy's tags back in France? I don't think so. I don't think she has the guy's tags. Why would that he? Because he's not dead.'

    'I always said you should have been a detective.'

    'She's sweet on the guy, huh? Didn't want you to know?'

    Younger took a moment before answering: 'She's in love with him - her Hans. Want to know what happened in Austria?'

    'I'm all ears.'

Chapter Seven

    No city in the world was more altered by the Great War than Vienna.

    Not physically. Vienna was never invaded during the war, nor shelled, as Paris had been. Not one stone was nicked. What the war had shattered was merely Vienna's soul and its place in the world.

    In the spring of 1914, Vienna had been the sun around which revolved a galaxy of fifty million subjects speaking dozens of languages, all bound in fealty to Emperor Franz Josef and the House of Hapsburg. Vienna was rich, and its affairs mattered to the world. Five years later, it was a city of no consequence in a country of no consequence - starving, freezing, its factories shuttered, its emperor a fugitive, its empire abolished, its children deformed by years of malnutrition.

    The result was a host of contradictory impressions for travelers arriving there in March of 1919. Riding their cab from the railway station - an elegant, two-horse, tandem carriage - Younger, Colette, and Luc saw under a rising sun a Vienna superficially every bit as grand as it had formerly been. The majestic Ringstrasse, that wide avenue parade of monumentality encircling the old inner city, presented the same invincible visage that it had before the war. The Ring borrowed liberally, and without nice regard for consistency, from the entire Western architectural canon. After trotting by an oversized blazing white Greek Parthenon, their carriage passed a darkly Gothic cathedral, and after that a many-winged neo-Renaissance palazzo. The first was the parliament, the second city hall, the third the world-famous university. Even the inferior buildings of the Ring would have been palaces elsewhere.

    But the figures out for a morning stroll on the Ring, though fashionably dressed, did not display the same imperial bearing. Many of the men were maimed; crutches, dangling sleeves, and eye patches were ubiquitous. Even the able-bodied had a vacantness about them. Off the Ring, in smaller streets, children lined up by the hundreds for food packages. At one point Colette and Younger saw a clutch of these children break into a mad rush; the stampede was followed by angry shouting from adults, then by blows, then by trampling.

    Colette wanted the cab to drop her off at Hans Gruber's address.

    Younger pointed out that, because of the lateness of their train, which was supposed to have arrived the night before, they were in danger of missing their appointment with Freud.

    'Can you ask the driver how far away the address is?' she replied. 'Perhaps it's close.'

    It wasn't. Colette relented. After she had settled back, disappointed, their driver spoke to her in excellent French: 'Excuse me, Mademoiselle, but if I may: Does France's hatred of the Germans extend to the Viennese?'

    'No,' she answered. 'We know you've suffered as much as the rest of us.'

    'We do have our troubles,' agreed the driver. 'Have you noticed, sir, what is so disturbing about the dogs in Vienna?'

    'I haven't seen any dogs,' replied Younger.

    'That's what's so disturbing. The people are eating their dogs. And you must have heard of the sobbing sickness? People begin to sob for no explicable reason - men as well as women - and can't stop. They sob in their sleep; it goes on so long it ends in epileptic fits. When they wake, they have no memory of it. It's our nerves. We've always been nervous, we Viennese - gay but nervous.'

    Colette complimented his French.

    'Mademoiselle is as generous as she is charming,' replied the coachman. 'I had a Parisian governess as a boy. Here is my card. If you require a cab again, perhaps you will send for me.'

    The name engraved on the card was Oktavian Ferdinand Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau.

    'You're a nobleman,' said Younger. The word Graf is a title of nobility in German; the von in his last name carried a similar meaning.

    'A count, yes, and a most fortunate count at that. I held on to my very last carriage, and it has given me a living. A baron friend of mine sweeps floors in a restaurant. And consider my livery.'

    Younger for the first time noticed the driver's once-dignified but now-threadbare uniform.

    'It belonged to one of my servants. I was lucky there too: I had a man as short and round as his master. Here we are - the Hotel Bristol.'

    'But this - this is much too grand,' said Colette when she saw her room. Luc's eyes fixed on a table dressed in white linen, where a silver tray was piled high with pastries along with two steaming pots - one of coffee, the other of hot chocolate. He wasn't starving like some of Vienna's children, but he wasn't too far from that condition either. His sister added, 'I've never been in a room like this in all my life.'

    'And they dare to charge three English pennies for it,' replied Younger. 'Robbery.'

    Less than an hour later, in a small but comfortably middle-class apartment house on Berggasse - a narrow, cobbled lane gently sloping down to the Danube canal - a maid let Younger and Colette into Sigmund Freud's empty consultation room. 'I'm so nervous,' Colette whispered.

    Younger nodded. Well she might be, he thought: Colette would be both worried and excited about the prospect that Dr Freud might actually be able to help her brother; and she would be eager to make a good impression on the world-famous Viennese physician. But she, Younger reflected, was not the one who had disappointed him.

    Freud's consulting room was like a bath into which civilization itself had been poured. Leather-bound volumes lined the walls, and every inch not occupied by books was filled with antiquities and miniature statuary: Greek vases intermixed with Chinese terracottas, Roman intagli with South American figurines and Egyptian bronzes. The room pulsed with a rich fume of cigar and the deep crimson of Oriental carpets, which not only lay thick on the parquet floor, but also draped the end tables and even covered a long couch.

    A door opened. A dog, a miniature chow, trotted through it, yapping. The animal was followed by Freud himself, who paused in the doorway ordering the dog away from Younger's and Colette's shoes. The chow obeyed.

    'So my boy,' said Sigmund Freud to Younger without introduction, 'you are no longer a psychoanalyst?'

    Freud wore a suit and necktie and vest. In his left hand, half-raised, was a cigar between two fingers. He had grown older since Younger last saw him. His gray hair had thinned and receded; his short, pointed beard was now starkly white. Nevertheless, for a man of sixty-three, he remained handsome, fit and robust, with eyes exactly as Younger remembered them - both piercing and sympathetic, scowling and amused.

    'Miss Rousseau,' said Younger, 'may I present to you Dr Sigmund Freud? Dr Freud, I thought you might wish to speak with Miss Rousseau before meeting her brother.'

    'Delighted, Fraulein,' said Freud. He turned back to Younger: 'But you didn't answer my question.'

    'I no longer practice psychology at all, sir.'

    'You were a psychoanalyst?' Colette asked Younger.

    'Didn't I mention it?' he replied.

    'He never told you he was once my most promising follower in America?' asked Freud.

    'No,' said Colette.

    'Certainly,' said Freud. 'The first time we met, Younger conducted an analysis under my supervision - of the girl who became his wife.'

    'Oh yes,' said Colette. 'Of course.'

    Younger said nothing.

    'He didn't tell you he was married?' asked Freud.

    Colette colored. 'He doesn't tell me anything about himself.'

    'I see. Well, he isn't married anymore, in case the subject is of interest. But he's told you what analysis consists of, surely?'

    'No, not that either.'

    'I'd better explain then - take a seat, please,' said Freud, glancing at Younger. Then he called out to his maid, instructed her to bring tea, and eased himself into a comfortable chair. 'You're a scientist, Miss Rousseau?'

    'I'm studying to be one. A radiochemist. I'll be working in Madame Curie's institute. My post begins next week.'

    'I see. Good. As a scientist, you will easily follow what I'm about to say. When a child is to be analyzed, we've found it necessary for the parent - or guardian, in your case - to be informed in advance of what we analysts do. That's why Younger has given me an opportunity to speak with you first.'

    Younger and Colette had left Luc at the hotel. Paula, the Freuds' maid, came in with a tea service.

    'All neuroses,' Freud went on as the maid poured tea, 'are caused by memories, typically a memory from long ago, involving a forbidden wish. The wishes from which neurotics suffer are not unique to them. We all had them in our childhood, but with neurotics, something prevents these recollections from being forgotten and disposed of in the ordinary way. They linger in the recesses of the individual's mind - so well hidden that my patients initially are not even conscious of them. The aim of analysis is to make the patient conscious of these repressed memories.'

    'In order to forget them?' asked Colette.

    'In order to be free of them,' replied Freud. 'But the process is seldom an easy one, because the truth can be difficult to accept. Invariably the patient - and the patient's family - will resist our interpretations, resist them quite forcefully. There can be good reason. Once the truth is out, the family may be changed unalterably.'

    Colette frowned. 'The family?'

    'Yes. In fact that's often how we know we've arrived at the truth: the patient's family suddenly demands that the analysis come to an end. Although occasionally there are other, stronger proofs. I'll give you an example. I have a patient - like you, French by birth - from a family of considerable rank and wealth. Her complaint is frigidity.'

    Younger shifted. The carnal explicitness of psychoanalysis was chief among the reasons Younger didn't like discussing it with Colette.

    'In one of her first sessions,' Freud continued, 'this patient, an attractive woman of about forty, described a dream she'd had the night before. She was in the Bois de Boulogne. A couple she knew lay down on a double bed right there in the park, on the green grass by a lake. That was all - nothing more. What would you say that dream meant, Miss Rousseau?'

    'I don't know,' answered Colette. 'Do dreams have meaning?'

    'Most assuredly. I informed her that she had witnessed a scene of sexual intercourse that she was not supposed to have seen - perhaps more than one - when she was a small child, probably between the ages of three and five. She replied that such a thing was impossible, because she grew up with no mother. But of course she'd had nurses. Suddenly she remembered that her first nurse had left the family abruptly when she was five. She had never known why. I said it was likely this nurse was involved in her dream. So she made inquiries back home.

    'She asked everyone, including the longtime servants. They all denied anything untoward in the nurse's departure, and she reported back to me that I must be mistaken. Then she had another dream, in which this very nurse appeared, but with a horse-like face. I told her that this represented - but, Younger, perhaps you know what the second dream represented?'

    'No,' answered Younger.

    'No? In that case,' replied Freud, 'why don't you tell Miss Rousseau what I said it meant?'

    'I'm not sure the subject matter is appropriate.'

    'For me?' asked Colette sharply.

    'If Miss Rousseau is going to consent to her brother's treatment,' said Freud, 'don't you think she should know what she's consenting to?'

    'Very well,' said Younger. 'To begin with, Dr Freud would probably have said that the nurse's horse-like face was an example of condensation: it represented both the nurse herself and the man she slept with.'

    'Good,' said Freud, looking genuinely pleased. 'And who was that man?'

    'The patient's father was a horseman, I suppose?'

    'No,' Freud replied, giving nothing else away

    'Did she associate him with horses?'

    'Not to my knowledge.'

    Younger paused. 'But horses were kept on the property?'

    'They had a stable,' said Freud. 'For their carriages.'

    'In that case,' Younger reflected, 'I suspect you would have said that the man the nurse slept with was someone involved with those horses - but associated as well in some way with the patient's father.'

    'Excellent!' cried Freud. 'I told her that her nurse was in all probability involved with their groomsman, who was in fact related to her father. She answered that she had already questioned the groomsman he was one of the servants who had told her the nurse had done nothing illicit. I said she might wish to question him again.'

    'Did she?' asked Colette.

    'She did indeed,' replied Freud. 'She went to the man and told him she knew all about his affair with her nurse. Whereupon he confessed everything. Their tryst was the stable. The nurse would feed my patient a syrup that made her very drowsy. They would lay her down on a bed of hay and proceed to their business. The groomsman added, by the way, that the maid was quite hot-blooded - he was afraid sometimes she might die of pleasure. The affair began when my patient was three and continued until she was five, when the lovers were discovered and the maid was dismissed.'