Secret Dreams (41 page)

Herr Doktor listened with his eyes closed. She went on, spinning the yarn to heights of improbability. They had overbooked the second-class coach, packing it to capacity The passengers grudgingly shifted over to let the three newcomers enter. Fräuleins parents sat down awkwardly, hindered by their stiff mannikin bodies. Their plaster-cast heads showed painted grins, part sheepish, part wild, as if scrawled by a child. Fräulein sat between them. She was twiddling, furiously sawing her thigh near the groin, digging into the folds of her dress.

The second-class passengers stared aghast.

Until the conductor bustled in with the girls steamer trunk. He shoved the huge thing right in with them, taking up all their legroom. But instead of becoming angry, all the second-class passengers scuffled and fought for foot room — erupting in gales of laughter as if this were the funniest thing in the world. The conductor, scandalized, huffed and puffed through his walrus mustache:

“Can't you see there's no room, young lady!” As if it were all Fräuleins fault, and expecting her to fix the situation. “No room!” he snorted.

Father mannikin's lips were now painted in a somber frown. “Can't you leave us alone?” the dummy head asked.

“No room!” the conductor insisted.

Now the plaster-cast head of her father was painted in an angry shout:

“So leave us alone!”

And then Mother mannikin cried too, with hysterical gales of laughter, “Alone! Yes, alone! By all means, leave us alone!”

* * *

Fräulein came back to her hospital room, both eyes shut tight. Her hand twitched, sore from the endless rubbing. “They laughed,” she said in despair, “All they did was laugh.”

She bit her lips, afraid to open her eyes. Dreading to, look at him, because if she saw him sitting there wearing his favorite green paisley bow tie, but with a plaster-cast head sticking out his shoulders, she'd die. Die if she saw only painted sympathy on an empty shopping-store face. Just like her f-f-f, just like her m-m-m!

That day he wrote case notes, the first in weeks. Why? Perhaps because everything about her story was a complete fabrication. No horse and carriage. No second-class coach. In fact, no such thing as a Zurich Express from Rostov-on-Don. Obviously the girl had not been in a state of hysteric delusion all her life. At some time she had learned to read and write. Then a notable decline in her sixteenth or seventeenth year, ending in her seclusion at the “hive,” as he knew she called the Burghölzli. Lucky for her she remembered how to read. Those torn-up books had been threads leading her from the maze….

Was the absurd laughing horse story a similar thread? She had said, “They laughed ….,” and those words echoed faintly in his head. Weren't they spoken when she played the Queen? With smeared menstrual blood on their teeth. He bared his lips in a gruesome smile. And she bared hers back.

“Laugh,” he'd said.

She repeating it until she twiddled. Then, when he bid her farewell, saying, “Well, perhaps tomorrow,” she spoke another word:

“Always.”

Always tomorrow. Tomorrow always. He had taken it to mean they'd always talk about their playing the Queen, or her twiddle, or even her troubles. And that if they struggled on, there always
would
be a tomorrow in their future.

Or did the word “laugh” come from even further back? The laff and baff of their word association games? Baff, her second real word. Ach! At least he had listened to her then, considering it a serious request and arranging for a bathtub. If baff was the way to cleanliness — was laff a dirty word? He had a fleeting glimpse of the parents' blank dummy heads laughing as the horse moved its bowels, and another glimpse of the cramped passengers in the train compartment jammed in tight (like holding one's bowels?), all of them laughing cruelly at her discomfort. Laff dirty, then? And baff clean? Was the laughing horse story a clue, an image — a
symbol?

A
symbol of what, then?

Revenge.

What a leap of faith. But if you took the fantasy at face value, what had you got? Parents. And bowel movements. Literally a horse dropping its dung between their blank, dummy faces. In simple language, the story said: Shit on my parents.

But as for the railway compartment element, not so much revenge as a cry of reproach. Fräulein desired her parents to be thoughtful and caring, to see she traveled first class (didn't everyone want to go that way?). But no, they shoved her in second class, acted like perfect strangers, then jeered at her with all the rest.

Ah, now he saw more clearly how the choice of a “packed compartment” brought the fantasy situation completely under her own control — if choice it was. For a packed compartment was the same thing as a packed bowel. It proved she wasn't an animal like a horse, defecating anywhere, anytime — even between people's faces. No, it proved her better than that. What a clever fantasy! Combining the animalistic revenge against her dummy-headed parents with the accusation they treated her like a stranger, and squashing them all, strangers and family alike, under the huge contents, the locked soul of her steamer trunk.

In a sickening flash he recalled the girl's first day at the hospital. Two orderlies and Nurse Bosch had given Fräulein the routine de-lousing. The girl fought and shrieked through the whole procedure. She bit one orderly on the hand, and the other slipped on the wet tile of the shower. Had anyone bothered to ask the parents if their daughter was clean?

How many weeks, he wondered, did it take to unravel that bit of stupidity? The machinery of the world seemed immeasurably cruel.

When next he came to her room, she had gotten rid of the pale-blue blouse and put on a light summer frock, tugging it over her sheet. “Don't laugh at me,” she said, slamming down the lid of the steamer trunk. “Don't laugh.”

“I won't laugh at you,” he said. “But please be so good as to tell me again, Fräulein, what the conductor said.” i here s no room,

“And your father's reply?”

At the word, “father,” her lips fluttered, making the f-f-f. Her eyes and body took on a regal air, that inflated self-possession. He felt sure that in a moment she'd command him to kneel and play Queen, But instead her mouth worked and she said with great control, “My f-f-f, my f-f-father said,
‘Leave
us alone.'“
The effort had been too much,- she began pacing back and forth before the trunk. She wrenched it open and glared inside. Then pulled a strip of sheet poking from her wrist, as if to draw the whole length through her narrow sleeve. But the more she pulled, the more stubbornly it held. “Leave us alone! Alone!” she said.

Didn't her parents really say those words? But not in any make-believe railway train. They'd said them in his office at the time of their interview long ago. Herr Doktor was having some trouble recalling their faces. Far, far too easy to see them as dummy plaster heads, just as Fräulein did.

But slowly the parents' faces did come back. The father with that roguish highwayman look and the sly curl of his pipe smoke … While Frau Schanderein sat like the Empress de la Valse, bolt upright in her china-blue dress and her bold, jutting breasts staring him in the face. Her strong red lips and mobile mouth and her eyes cold as the blue silk of her clothes. The embroidered masks of comedy and tragedy with their laughing and crying mouths. There were blank sockets in those eyes too.

“We've tried,” Frau Schanderein told him. “But there's no room for this in our lives.”

Her husband seemed a little softer, eyes dark with dread, with suffering — his own and the girl's. “But the way she is now, day after day. You wear out. It never leaves you alone.” The man's eyes flitted weakly away as his voice dropped, plainly unsure whether what he said or thought was right or wrong. Or ever had been.

Odd coincidence, their choice of words. How remarkable the girl should pick them up, even in a different context.

There's no room.

Leave us alone.

Did Fräuleins parents drum that into her for years? Pounding it in until Mama's and Papa's own faces had mutated into blank, emotionless headpieces with painted expressions of hilarity or anger, change ing with the hollow meaning of their hollow words? Herr Doktor pushed the unfinished case notes across his desk. They no longer interested him. By accident, the reply from Vienna appeared. A single page, evidently lost for some time. How had it gotten separated and stuck among his ragged pile of papers? A clever losing if there ever was one. And a cleverer finding. How annoying the page should turn up now. A sear of jealousy scorched his neck. Instantly wishing he'd thought of the lines himself;

The secrets of her dreams. If only he could write a sentence like that, the secrets he would show the world! Yet what conceivable difference did it make if he found her demon or
she
did? Why such a fine distinction? He vacillated between gusts of jealousy and doubt, tempted to sweep the Vienna letter off his desk and let it lie on the floor till the end of the world. Did Fräulein dream at all? And come to think of it, did crazy people have crazy dreams — or did they dream of normal life, a confounding paradise, forever beyond their grasp?

Herr Doktor sat back blankly in his chair. He found he had been sawing his thigh with the edge of his hand for quite some time….

Him twiddling.

Ach! So you've regressed to her level, my good man. Wonderful.

And that stopped him cold. Not just because of the remark's cruelty (true enough), and not just because it showed his cowardice (also true), but because it held a grain of truth. His cruel, cowardly thought had brought back the word “regression.”

During the tale of the laughing horse, the girl had not merely been degenerating, not simply meandering, but regressing to something. In order to enjoy a forbidden act, indulge a starving wish. Throughout the long period of her horrid shrieking, the smearing of the menstrual blood, the making of the cowled dolls … these were messages, tokens, signs. But she had changed. By throwing things, by striking him and playing the Queen, she now engaged in long-denied actions. An infantile tantrum was clearly regressive, clearly demented in the common sense of the word, but also an achievement. Clawing back into her past to taste a pleasure, buried deep, a sweet revenge.

To right a wrong, administer a punishment long overdue. Flagellating the lone straw man of those relentless monsters out of the “Before Time” — throwing objects at Herr Doktor — but actually beating Empress Mother and Highwayman Father: doing the deed to Matter and Flatter.

Regression wasn't going back. But living over again what you might have done. Finally taking for your own what rightfully
should
have been. Ja, ja, a demon cutting his way out. And hers was a laughing demon, clawing anyone who held out a helping hand…,

At first she remembered only fragments, littered like shattered glass on the bare floor of her mind. On a raw night in late March the wind gusted onto Fräuleins window in noisy blows. She quailed at the black glass, so thin and trembly, such a fragile wall against the wild beyond. She took a long time to wrap herself, so that if the black sky broke into her room, the snug cocoon would keep her safe from its snatching fingers. And as she slipped off into sleep, she saw in her mind the page from the neurology text. That ugly, deceitful page she loathed so much. With the words “dementia” and “incurable.” The very same page she had rubbed to death, until she wore the damning words away …

Standing on the high moors of sleep, she saw once more the lovely, hidden words she found beneath the bitter page:
proto
…
genie
… Repeating them to herself as the drowsy heather rose to take her and the black sheets of wind slapped against the windowpane.
Proto
…
genie
…
proto
…
genie
…
proto
.

Fräulein found herself sitting in a green leather chair in a cozy room. A fire burned in the grate. A black briar pipe rested in the well of an ashtray standing by the chair's thick leather arm. A thread of smoke wound languidly from the pipe as if recently abandoned. In her lap lay the book from the Before Time. The book that vanished and came again during the long years of nothingness. If only she could show Herr Doktor Pants the pictures in it, so he might know how she died:

The Exegesis of Aching Dottery

No, dammit, see it right! And as if by magic, the title of the book seemed to change. Now it had another title, a more correct title. She whispered it out loud:

“The Evidence of Ancient Pottery.”

What a grand book. Bound in pressed linen, its thick cover marbled in swirls of blue and green. And now she saw quite clearly a raised subtitle, printed in gold lettering:

Artifacts from the

Prehistoric Peoples

of the

Péloponnèse

As she stared, the book slowly opened its covers, and the pages began to turn. She felt herself shrinking in the green leather chair. A tiny Fräulein doll, tiptoeing over the book's turning leaves. And as she skipped over the turning pages, she felt herself sliding back year after year, age after age. Back to the old time. To the time she really was the Queen …

The pages stopped turning.

Beneath her feet lay an engraved illustration. The lithograph showed the carved stone face of a goddess fitted into the mud brick of an ancient wall. A face of terror to ward off intruders and brigands: the face of a woman with tangled hair, lips pulled back, tongue hissing through bared teeth. A puny, stunted body dangled from the swollen head. Stout little legs pumping furiously up and down. A gigantic head, running madly …