City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (9 page)

Even as Freud watched, some of Mayor Lueger’s bully-boys caught up to him in front of the Landtman. They taunted him for awhile, and he obviously did not understand, staring back at the students in their close-cut hair, their uniform brown suits and black ties. Clutching his little pile of rags closer to his chest. They began to push him about, jostling him more and more seriously until his package fell into the street. They kicked it apart—revealing just more rags, some old vegetables, a few leaves of a book he had got somewhere.

Freud stood up at his table. Everyone else was looking away, all the
sheyne yidn,
and the contented, gentile burghers, too, staring into their coffee grounds. There was not a policeman in sight—just more shopkeepers and bureaucrats strolling imperturbably by. The man reached out blindly for his possessions—but they kept kicking them away from his grasp, knocking the skullcap off his head as he leaned over.

Freud started to step around the table—still with no good idea of what he would do but convinced that he had to do
something
—when the municipal police appeared. They shooed the youths away, took the young beggar into custody. It was safe for the Landtman’s patrons, Jew and gentile alike, to look up again. The strolling crowds quickly covered over the whole scene, like a corpse dropped into an ocean.

It was a strange scene, a disturbing augury on the eve of his great voyage, and Freud could not help mulling it over. Not that he believed in auguries, that was Jung’s department. He believed in science, even the science of the mind, and his trip would be an unprecedented opportunity to advance that Cause.

The invitation from America had been so deferential, even flattering: a generous stipend and an honorary degree from Clark University, in return for a chance to give five lectures before the greatest minds of science: Dewey, Wundt, Boas, Ebbinghaus, Metchnikoff—an incredible, waking daydream.

He had even managed to secure three lectures and another degree for Jung, his crown prince. They would travel over together, along with good old Ferenczi—his leading acolyte, aide, and errand boy of the moment. They would go through New York, take some time to tour the country—though he had joked to Ferenczi that all he really wanted was to see a porcupine.

To Jung, he had written:

“We are certainly getting ahead. If I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.”

That evening, the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society gave him a grand send-off in the Prater, the huge city park by the Danube. By day it was a crowded, roiling place, with a midway and a beer garden, but by night the park was transformed, its gracious trees wild and brooding as a Wagnerian forest.

The assembled psycho-analysts had tromped solemnly up a hill under boughs of jasmine and hyacinth, and glowing Chinese lanterns. At the top, a banquet table had been laid out, and there they sat, and feasted, and drank toast after toast of
Gewürtztraminer
to their master. They presented him with a carved African idol, some kind of gaping fertility god, and Freud held this totem solemnly beside him at the head of the table, accepting their toasts and tributes under the swaying lanterns with royal equanimity.

The previous spring he had descended on the first psychoanalytical congress like Moses indeed come down from the mountain, striding into their meeting unannounced and uninvited. He had got word that there was consternation in the ranks over Jung, the son, the heir.

“Most of you are Jews, and therefore you are incompetent to win friends for our new science,” he had told them. “Jews must be content with the modest role of preparing the ground. It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of general science. I am getting old, and worn out with always being attacked.”

Dramatically, he had grabbed his own coat by its lapels, as if to rend it.

“Don’t you see? We are all in great danger. This cannot be known as the ‘Jewish science’—they won’t even leave me with a coat on my back. Jung and the other Swiss will save us—will save me, and all the rest of you!”

Overawed, they had done as he demanded. Jung had thanked him profusely for it and sworn again his fealty to the Cause, to the new science of psychology.

Yet almost as soon as he had anointed his crown prince, he had had . . .
misgivings.
Jung had come to visit, and talked all kinds of mystical foolishness about
Nirdvanda,
and the
numinosum
of sense and nonsense.

Freud had been stunned, telling himself this was simply Jung’s age, his restless, searching intellect. But then, when they were alone in his study, a sudden, loud noise had burst from his bookcase. Freud thought one of the supports had broken, burdened as it was by his massive works of science. Everything stood undisturbed, precisely as it had been, but Jung had jumped up, breathless with excitement.

“There! I knew that would happen!” he proclaimed, pointing at the offending bookcase. “My chest felt like it was made of molten iron—and then,
voila!
A perfect example of a catalytic exteriorization phenomenon! There is a poltergeist in your bookcase.”

“Come now,” Freud had blurted out. “You must know that is sheer bosh.”

“It is not. You are mistaken,
Herr Professor,”
Jung had huffed. “In fact, I predict there will be another such noise in a moment!”

As luck would have it, of course, there
was
another such noise—Freud leaping to his feet this time, though more out of fear that the whole bookcase was about to come tumbling down on their heads than of any poltergeist. Jung looked at him triumphantly—and after that there had been no convincing him the noises were not somehow linked to their relationship.

To his extreme annoyance, Freud found himself listening to his bookcases over the next few weeks. The noises recurred, randomly, the result of the books or the house settling. He had written about it to Jung, gently chiding his “dear son” and attributing it all to the cooperation of chance.

“Whatever you do, don’t let them drag my theories down into the black mud of occultism,” he had begged him, but there was no reply.

Alcohol never agreed with him, and the grand reception in the Prater was no different. On the night train up to Bremen he tried a little more beer to settle himself but it had only made things worse. He was up half the night, padding back and forth to a filthy public toilet. There he clung for dear life to a side handle, while the train rocked and whistled through the Bavarian countryside.

Finally, he sank into a restless dream. It was part of an old dream, a dream he’d had before under similar circumstances; the primary dream of his greatest work, the
Traumdeutung—

In the dream he was in the Aula, the great ceremonial hall of the university, in Vienna. It was filled, now, with all the great scientists who would be at Clark. He felt nervous but prepared, stepping up to the lectern with his notes in hand.

But then, just as he got there, he realized that he had an overwhelming need to urinate. He muttered an excuse and stepped away, trying the doors behind the lectern, looking for a toilet. Behind him he could hear a growing murmur from the assembled scientists, a sound of indignation, but he couldn’t help it, he knew that if he waited any longer he would wet his pants right in front of them.

He found a door, and went through it. It led through a long series of rooms, all of them beautifully appointed apartments, or majestic offices of the imperial ministries—-but not one of them, a toilet.

Then the scene changed, and he was out of the Aula altogether. He was standing on a platform of the Stadtbahn, the suburban railway and holding a glass urinal—a sort of glass bedpan, with a long, penile stem in his hand—but he no longer had to pee. He was holding the urinal, instead, for an old, sick man, blind in one eye, whom he was accompanying.

It felt better, being out in the open air, but he still had a great feeling of anxiety. A conductor was moving down the platform, he realized, and neither he nor his charge, the old, half-blind man, had a ticket. Hastily, he handed the one-eyed man the urinal—then put up a disguise, a mask in front of the man’s face, to fool the conductor. A mask that was the face of the idol, the African totem he had been given the night before—

After that, the old dream faded, but he still did not sleep well. He was happier than usual to see Ferenczi’s boyish, homey face when the train pulled into Bremen the next morning. The man had already made all the arrangements and now he stood waiting on the platform, smiling cheerfully, red Baedeker guide in hand. He had everything well in hand, and they met up with Jung on schedule at the ship’s luggage depot, where he was exulting openly over their trip:

“Just think of the women we shall meet! The wealthy American females to analyze!”

“Jah,”
Freud had agreed more guardedly. “America should at least bring money, not cost money.”

The money itself, when they did exchange it, was a disappointment. It was appallingly ugly, Freud thought, a thick, dull roll of notes, all the same size, black on the front, a picture of some exotic animal he took to be an American buffalo printed in green ink on the back.

“Ah, there you are, there is no reason to go now,” he had joked with Ferenczi, still feeling relieved to be off the train. “I was only going so I could see a buffalo—or better yet, a
porcupine!”

Jung had been to Bremen before, which meant that he insisted on showing the way around the sites, the usual churches and picturesque stairs. At the cathedral there was a
Bleikeller,
a lead cellar, where they could stare down at the preserved body of a workman. He had fallen from the cathedral roof four hundred years before, and the lead had mummified his body—his skin tanned like fine leather, mouth stretched into a final scream by the contraction of the tendons in his neck, arms still clutching scraps of his medieval guild’s shift up around his neck. Looking inconceivably ancient—

Freud found the whole thing morbid, but at lunch that afternoon Jung could not stop talking about it.

“Perfectly preserved like that! A window into the past!”

“Yes, but why wasn’t he taken out of there and buried?”

“What does it matter?” Jung shrugged, knifing aggressively through his fish. “He serves our purposes.”

“But why?” Freud pondered. “Did they just go on working, with his corpse in the cellar?”

“Why not? Is a cemetery burial any less barbaric?”

They were dining at a fish restaurant, the
Essinghaus,
which had a fine menu of Rhone wines. It was a glorious summer day, bright and warm, but not too hot yet. Their dining room was full of light and flowers, and everyone was talking about the air show in Berlin, and whether Orville Wright would bring his new machine over from America.

Jung would not stop dwelling on the man in the lead cellar. Freud tried to distract him by urging him to drink some of the delicious wine. He could barely drink it himself after his night on the train but he knew that Jung had not had a drop since the start of Forel’s abstinence campaign at the Burgholzli, nine years before. He resisted for a moment, contemplating both the wine and Freud—then poured himself a full glass.

“Jah,
I am renouncing my abstinence,” Jung said with sudden decisiveness, his eyes shining. “You must encourage me in this endeavor.”

“We will make a Viennese libertine out of you yet!” Freud exulted—but Jung only resumed talking about that wretched man in the lead cellar. He began to speak of other preserved men as well, recently unearthed from the peat bogs in Penmark—all the while methodically cutting his fish to pieces.

“The acid in the peat tanned and cured the skin. The bodies were flattened by the weight of the earth, and the bones had disintegrated. But the hair, and teeth! The whole face and form of the body, the jewelry on their arms! All, perfectly preserved!”

“Why are you so concerned with these corpses?” Freud cut in peevishly.

“Think of the implications. The bodies in the bogs were even older than our friend in the lead cellar. Prehistoric, perhaps. Preserved complete with remnants of their clothing, their totemic burial charms.”

“Jah, jah
—what of it?”

“Think of what we could learn! Imagine if their brains were as well preserved as their bodies.”

Freud took a deep draught from his glass of wine to hide his exasperation, but when he put it down he only felt more irritable, and a little woozy.

“What
would we learn? We learn from the couch, from
talking
to patients. My dear doctor, a well-preserved physical specimen is no more relevant to our work than a mounted butterfly!”

“How do you know?” Jung persisted. “Who knows how the mind has evolved? Maybe they
are
different. Maybe we can find a window, deep into the primitive soul—”

“What are you talking about?” Freud snapped, his voice rising.
“Every
living person contains the
whole history
of the human race!”

He took another sip of the wine to steady himself, but the room was lurching around him. He stood up abruptly at his place, his vision narrowing to Jung’s face across the table—inquisitive as a terrier’s, the squashed circles of his pince-nez magnifying his eager, greedy eyes.

“My dear friend!”

“What?
What is your obsession with this poor man, deserted by his friends and fellow workers? Left to be a sideshow exhibit—a freak—on display for the gawking public!”

“It was just an observation, in the spirit of scientific inquiry.”

“Jah!”
Freud shot back sarcastically. “Are you sure,
Herr Doktor,
that what you are not really after is my death? My crown prince!”