City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (10 page)

That was when he swooned. He tried to move away from the table, but his legs were suddenly as heavy as bags of sand, and he slid down to the carpeted restaurant floor. Fainted away, just like some little virgin—the last thing he remembered being the not unpleasurable sight of their worried and astonished faces.

Sigmund Freud awoke to find himself staring into the face of Carl Jung. He closed his eyes again.

“How sweet it must be to die,” he murmured.

“How’s that?”

Freud’s eyes snapped back open. Jung’s balding, bullet-shaped head was still hovering over him.

“Never mind.”

He sat up on the sofa where they had carried him and where Jung had laid him out like a schoolboy, feet crossed over each other on the soft red cushions.

“It must have been the wine,” he said weakly. “I hardly slept last night, I had the most extraordinary dream.”

Jung smiled patronizingly, his eyes skeptical behind the flattened orbs of the pince-nez.

“Naturally, we will not let Papa pay for us anymore,” he said to Ferenczi.

Freud got quickly to his feet, buttoning his coat and smoothing his hair to mask his agitation. Jung offered his arm, but he shook his head, leading the way back to the table, ignoring the other, whispering diners—already analyzing his own behavior.

“There was, perhaps, an element of guilt involved,” he conceded, once he had regained his seat. “Over getting you to break your abstinence, I mean.”

Jung contemplated him for a long moment—then resumed his dissection of the fish.

“Perhaps,” the crown prince said—and Freud had the sudden, irrational desire to snatch off the pince-nez and grind it under his heel until he heard the glass snap. Instead, he smiled inquisitively.

“What, then?”

“Well, it’s just that you fear me as a usurping son,” Jung said. “Taking your place.”

“Really? You deduced all that, just from one fainting spell?”

“It’s just a hypothesis, of course,” Jung said calmly, springing his trap: “If I could psycho-analyze you, perhaps on our voyage over.”

“Perhaps,” Freud said darkly.

“There may be an element of truth in what both of you were saying,” Ferenczi intervened sweetly, always the precocious child, mediating between his quarreling parents.

“The two greatest psycho-analytical minds in the world, searching for a solution! Think of it!”

“We shall see,” Freud told him. “We shall see.”

After lunch, Jung hired an automobile to take them around town. Another patronizing commentary on his age, Freud thought, but he was secretly grateful not to have to walk, after his experience at the
Essinghaus.

They drove toward a Viennese cafe Jung knew, on the banks of the Weser, but they had to stop to let a regiment of German artillery pass, on their way back from field maneuvers. Jung had insisted on climbing down from the car, peering closely at the long gray line of men and cannons as they swung past.

“Of course, the captain of the Swiss army reserves must inspect the kaiser’s troops,” Freud had joked with Ferenczi, but he soon found himself staring as well.

The Germans moved quickly, serious and deadly as the guns they towed. By the time they had passed he realized he was holding his breath, and looking around he saw that Ferenczi was staring, too—mesmerized by the murderous living machine moving past them.

This was nothing like the Imperial Austrian army of Freud’s own military reserve experience. Then he had crouched in a trench, the generals parading above him in their sky-blue and yellow uniforms like so many parakeets. A major approached, his tunic the color of a baboon’s ass, and handed Freud the list of wounds he could expect as company medical officer.

“Large intestine and stomach wall repeatedly perforated,” he had read. “Spine severed at the second vertebrae. Lower jaw and tongue shot away, upper palate severely mutilated—”

The troops lay all around in great, grotesque piles, faking slaughter.

“Prepare!” the officer snapped at him.

“Prepare? But how am I to prepare for such wounds? What could I possibly do?”

“Prepare!”

That night he slept restlessly, despite his exhaustion, but with no dreams he could remember. The next day they took the ship train on up to Bremerhaven, and boarded the
George Washington,
a large, elegant ship of the North German Lloyd line. Their cabins were exquisite, and a wealthy woman patient who lived in Nassau had surprised them with a splendid bouquet of orchids.

Freud was pleased, and he tipped the steward to put them in a vase on their table in the dining room, where he could share them every night with Jung and Ferenczi. Already his mood was improving, and he was sure now that all he needed was the sea air to be back in fighting trim again, ready for his triumph.

The weather changed that afternoon, though, before they were even out of port. It began to rain in sheets, driving them all off the deck and back into the dining room, where everyone was wondering if the weather would keep Captain Spelterini from flying his hydrogen balloon over the Alps, and ruin the air show.

Freud retreated to his stateroom, to watch the tugs churn through the purple water of Bremerhaven harbor, and ruminate with his cigars over his nagging doubts. He was never afraid to examine and reexamine everything; that was his great strength, even if he did not always admit it to others.

“I have the spirit of a conquistador—a Cortés, or Pizarro,” he had written about himself, and he was pleased with the analogy, despite its ruthlessness.

He had no fear of the voyage itself. He loved the ocean, was never seasick in even the roughest weather. He did have some doubts about the lectures: he was worried the Americans would be too prudish, too easily shocked. There would be the usual outcry when they heard his ideas firsthand, perhaps even some more Jew-baiting.

“We could soon be up shit creek the minute they come upon the sexual underpinnings of our psychology,” he had confided to Ferenczi, but he had been through all that before. Here, for the first time, was an audience ready to honor him—before they had even heard his lectures.

It was something more that was making him uneasy. Something hidden, and primal, he sensed, like the enormous painting of the white horse with frenzied eyes and flaring nostrils that dominated his study on the Berggasse. His literal nightmare, rearing its head from the darkness.

He could not shake, for one thing, his memories of the military training camp, and the officer with his terrible list. Jung’s image also stayed with him: the expressionless, bespectacled face, hovering over him, peering in so intently at the awful gray German guns as they passed.

Then there was the joke about the porcupine he felt compelled to keep making. It was something from Schopenhauer, he realized—a line about how porcupines had to be the most solitary of animals, for their barbs kept them even from huddling together against the elements. Yet what that had to do with his own situation he could not yet imagine.

He mulled it over until well after they were under way, then he risked a brandy and climbed into his bunk. Lying there, he remembered a favorite saying of Napoleon’s mother:

He couldn’t help adding the next line to himself:

They met on the beach at Coney. He was making his way through the Sunday crowd, looking out for his opportunities, and when he happened to glance down there she was: buried up to her thighs in the sand like a child, wearing a shiny green mermaid’s bathing suit, still wet from the sea, and brushing out her hair with a silver brush.

Esther felt him over her, blocking the sun. She looked up and smiled to see him there—looking so solemn, in his flashy suit the color of peach ice cream and a brilliant blue bow tie. He tipped his hat to her, and held out his arm, and without even thinking about it she reached up and took it, and let him guide her back toward the parks.

Anyplace else, she would never have done such a thing. Anyplace else but on the beach on Coney Island, on a beautiful Sunday morning. She put the cheap, silver-painted brush she had bought at Wanamaker’s away, and took his arm, and let him lift her up, watching him watch the skirt of her costume slip slowly down over her bare, white legs.

“Let me treat you,” Kid told her.

Esther laughed at him, but there was something very serious in his face.

“Treat me?”

“Anything you want,” he told her impulsively. “The best piece of goods there is!”

“My Rockefeller prince!”

She laughed again, and let him take her back up the beach, toward the pavilions of fun, trying discreetly to brush the last of the sand off her legs, the green-gold imitation scales of her suit glistening in the sunlight.

Up on the boardwalk, up on the breezeway at Feltman’s they ate lobster and clams and corn on the cob, until their tiny white-tableclothed table was drenched in melted butter and warm sea brine. A band in lederhosen was playing Viennese waltzes, and everyone was laughing. Esther even let him give her some of his beer; she thought it tasted awful, but she wanted to know what the goyim went padding down into the German saloon beneath their tenement for.

“You like it?” Kid asked, nudging her. “Beer agrees with you, moon?”

She shook her head, and smiled secretly to herself.

“Hertzalle meine,”
he beseeched her. The usual seducer’s words, but he said them flatly, as if he were trying to convince himself more than her. A hand lay on her knee under the little table, the fingers trembling slightly. Esther pushed it casually aside, used to much more from the factory foremen, and there was no resistance.

“How can you be here with me?” he asked her—trying to smile, but actually very serious again. “How do you know what kind of man I am?”

“I like you,” Esther shrugged, trying to sound bold, and brazen, groping for reasons. “I like how you laugh. And you have kind eyes.”

Why was she there?

“But I could be the worst
yentzer
in the whole world!”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But you don’t know what I am.” Completely serious again, his eyes large dark circles.
He did have nice eyes—

“What does it matter?” she said, as bluff as she could manage.
What a strange seducer, warning her to look out.
“What does it matter, here and now?”

“I guess you’re right there,” he laughed uncertainly, and went back to tearing up his lobster.

After lunch, they walked hand-in-hand to the Steeplechase, past the chop suey joints and the shooting galleries. Past the player pianos and the beef dripping from a spit and wash-boilers full of green corn, and the men taunting them from the quick-lunch stands:

“Who’s your sweetie?”

“Where’re you two goin’? Off to see the elephant?”

He only glowered at them and pulled her on, through the shuffling, indifferent crowds.

A million encounters,
she thought.
A million encounters every day, all meaning nothing—

He towed her through the Gates of Mirth, into the glassed-in Pavilion of Fun, with its sheared-off, manic head, grinning from ear to ear:

The track wound around the entire park, long and undulant, and lined with American flags. He paid her quarter fare, and a grinning youth in blackface and tattered jockey’s silks stepped forward, to help her mount the mechanical horse.

“Up you go—”

“No, you don’t!”

He pushed the attendant away and helped her on himself—staring at the white flash of her ankles again, as she swung her leg over. He climbed on behind her, and she didn’t protest. All around them other men were bowing and smiling, helping other women they had just met onto their mounts.

A million encounters, meaning nothing

“Better hold on, little dove.”

She could feel his warm breath on her cheek, murmuring into her ear.

“It gets going.”

But it didn’t. The horses didn’t go very fast at all, that was the attraction. Another youth in checkerboard silks and painted darkie face blew a trumpet, and bells clanged, and the horses shot off—just fast enough to send the women squealing into their escorts’ arms. They moved so slowly the men didn’t even need a hand to hang onto their hats. They could devote both arms to the work, hands sliding and grabbing and caressing.

The horse soared effortlessly up and the whole expanse of the parks spread out beneath her, inexpressibly beautiful. It was the smoothest ride she had ever felt—as smooth as air, smooth as pudding under her feet. She had gone fast before. She had felt the speed in one of her brother’s new automobiles, or when some idiot of a conductor took the el, fast as he could hold her, around the Dead Man’s Curve on 110th Street. But she had never known anything like this—fast enough but smooth, too, as smooth as fine lawn—

They glided back down, the rest of the park beneath her, all the rides and attractions shining beneath its glass trellis like jewels through ice. The Mixer, and the Barrel of Fun, and the Bounding Billows, and the Golden Stairs, and the Razzle Dazzle and the Cave of the Winds. And around them, all the distended men and women, still shuffling relentlessly forward—

A million encounters, all useless

He slid his arms around her waist, and leaned them expertly into the curves. Soon they were out ahead of the rest, a small breeze blowing pleasantly across her face. At her waist, she could feel his hands beginning to move on her: still hesitant, awkward but gentle now, caressing her through the mermaid costume.

“You’re all soft silk and fine velvet,” he murmured in her ear, and she wanted to laugh to hear him say it.