Secret Dreams (44 page)

What long-forgotten rite was hidden in this tale? The promiscuity and the cleansing afterward … He was reminded of the maypole dances and drunk peasant fetes of early spring, which always ended with the town fool being dunked in a duck pond or a young boy and girl married by the local barber, then carried around the village in wicker chairs, while the neighbors threw corn seed and leaped around a bonfire…. A mob of fruity Swiss peasants drunk on May wine, and before you knew it — poof! Sister Anna got pregnant, and out pops a little blond girl who looks just like Uncle Horst. Alpine meadow children, smiling, blond, and yodeling. Who wouldn't want to yodel if all you had to do was massage a cow's udders and poke Sister Anna in the hay!

He pulled an old volume of Pausanias down from the shelf, thumbing through for the part about Aphrodite and her promiscuous activities. Or was it Hera who renewed her virginity in the sea? He glanced at the gruesome print of Actaeon and the hounds that hung crookedly on his wall. Oddly, he recalled that the huntress Artemiss name meant something like “Source of High Water.” The rushing mountain stream of Fräulein s dream tale? Artemis hunted stags, And men.

Coincidence? Had Fräulein read the classics too? Then she read them closer than an adolescent boy of sixteen who still dreamed of the warm place between Nanny Sasha's thighs. Might the girl have gotten this from that special book of hers?
Did she make it all up?

Or did she see things that really happened long ago? When troglodytes changed from animal to man and back again at will … Seeing them through the lens of her hysteric mind? For how else could the buried past arise through her? Boiling up like lava in the throat of a volcano, with no heavy core of sanity to keep the ancient fumes from leaking out — or to keep the visions trapped inside her cells?

Maybe that's why he dragged her toward the crazy dayroom, As if asking the girl for everything at once — to be his window into the lost past and be cured as well. Let me use your mind to see, but don't end up a dayroom lunatic…. He quaked with a forbidden knowledge,, that her dream tale, her ancient memories, were mankind's stories stored in the chemical makeup of her body, living in the nerve cells of her brain. Locked away and calling for him to tap them. How could a sane man want to cure
that?

Halt!

Get a grip on yourself. Thinking things like mankind's stories in her cells! What next? That crazy people were primitive savages in disguise? Soon he'd be having dreams like hers himself—-waking with a string of bear claws around his neck while Emma squatted by the bed rubbing sticks together for a fire.

But the details of the girl's dream story must
mean
something. Obey the rules of dream interpretation. Take the old man in the potter's hut. The potter the
pater
, the papa? He began a case note.

He stopped writing. All the cutting and slicing … An idea toyed with him.

He put down his pen again. And the antler spike at the close of the dream tale?

A fierce headache clamped its fingers onto his brain. He heard the echo of her words “all my fault…” Where was Freud's damn letter? Ah — under a stupid book. The headache blinded him to all else as he held the quivering page before his eyes. It had meant nothing to him until now. The only solid piece of advice Herr Professor had offered.

Oh, God! How many times had he meant to do just that? Why had he never done it? Because deciphering the code of her words had been his sole obsession. Forget the code, the crazy talk. Take the number alone.

Thirteen cowled infants in a shoe box.

Suppose a sick young woman of about nineteen years of age peered back along the span of her life? She would perceive herself as a child. The number 13 signified time, the number of years her torment lasted. Thirteen the long imprisonment of her illness.

Time remembered.

Time served.

Time endured.

And how cleverly the number 13 fitted into the flayed body of the hooded Green Man. That he should be buried for a year (thirteen lunar months!) and dug up again. The Green Man
was
Fräulein. Asleep in the earth … Yet long hoping to be woken from the prison burial of a thirteen-year life sentence. But when the People of the Wood flayed the old scarecrow to death, and flecks of his body wafted off into oblivion, the girl denied herself even this hope. Preferring to hide in the dismembered safety of madness …

He sighed and looked at his watch. Near eight o'clock. He had sat there almost three hours. He glanced at his notes,- a single page of Freud's letter had turned up unexpectedly. The page with that matchless phrase
the secrets of her dreams
. The headache had left a faint graininess in the corners of his eyes. All his insane devotion, all her awkward steps, all the risks — all ending in an imaginary fire from long ago and a forbidden memory long suppressed. Had he at last caught the Queen of Sparta with the hot rear end? Or had she once again slipped away, like an echo that fled from him as he searched for her in the dungeon of years … ?

“Well,” he said to his empty office. “I suppose it's a beginning.”

How tired he was. How truly tired.

“A beginning …” the old man said, nodding to himself. He raised his bleary eyes from the stone windowsill. Nothing had changed in the hearth room. He moved stiff fingers, then clenched his fist to bring the feeling back. So his second seizure hadn't killed him either. He felt a twinge of regret: all his fancy notions about the afterlife, seeing other peoples lives and being chauffeured about by flies — just so much fluff. Too bad, too bad … “It
was
the beginning,” he repeated quietly. He remembered everything now.

The door of his private cabinet stood ajar, the ring of keys still hanging from the tiny lock. The compartment had been pawed over, and a mess of papers lay on the floor. Old letters … a secret store of unpleasant reminders. Bad book reviews, hate mail he hated too much to throw away, and worst of all the letters he never intended to answer. Invariably, ones from the old Faker. And that last letter she wrote him long after her return home. A final good-bye …

The creased envelope lay on the stone sill. The stamp bore the stern, bold face of Lenin, handsome and indomitable, gazing into the vast Soviet future. The postmark showed it had been mailed in Rostov, January 10, 1933. Over six years ago now. A letter he had immediately sent into exile. He saw her slow, well-paced handwriting — a languorous, voluptuous hand. The script of a person who had all the time in the world. Trying to tell him an intern from the clinic might visit him in Zurich, a deranged child in tow. Could he see his way to helping them? She hoped to get away before the authorities came for her.

Christ, he had stopped taking on new patients decades ago, even for consultation. And especially not from her. Not for any reason. And so when her letter came, his eyes went blind, fierce hands squeezed his brain, and he banished it to the little compartment of unpleasant things, Yet now, as he squinted
—
trying to focus — he saw her words in a slightly different light. Not that she hoped to get away _ hut
wished
she could. So she hadn't been threatening him with a personal visit at all. Pity he didn't realize this at once, he might have received her intern, perhaps even seen the child. Or
had
he? Funny he couldn't remember one way or the other….

À pale-golden butterfly floated to the windowsill. Just looking at it seemed to ease the pressure in his head. What was that tale about butterflies? They were the souls of heroes? No, but close. Not heroes — Herakles. He had seen butterflies in the Herakleion museum. À carved ivory butterfly from Knossos, the size of his palm. The ivory a cool blue, its wing markings two circles like eclipsing moons about to touch, etched into the piece and painted oxblood red. What kind of butterfly he couldn't guess. One that flew over Cretan pastures four thousand years ago … The tour guide in the Herakleion museum had said that the word
psyche
meant not only soul in Greek but also butterfly. That on some ancient artifacts a young girl was shown with butterfly wings. And that perhaps this carved butterfly was a symbol for the soul.

Perhaps?

Later on the tour he had seen a royal signet ring engraved with miniature figures. The golden ring showed the goddess standing between two men. All three figures were partly insects: the men's legs barbed and jointed, their hands tapering to pincers. The same with the goddess: her arms tapering to insect arms. In none of the three could he distinguish a human face. All had small insect heads, with tiny feelers for eyes and beaks for mouths. In the sky above the goddess, two butterflies and a chrysalis floated in the air. The tour guide seemed reluctant to speculate on the purpose of the royal ring. Instead the guide praised the workmanship and left the content of the scene alone. Were these symbols for the soul?

Why
make
a symbol for the soul?

The golden butterfly from the meadow flitted to the letter, setting down with quivering wings. Whose soul was this? The old Faker's? Some lost patient's? His own?

No, he didn't appreciate his own soul staring back at him across the ledge.
“Raus mit din”
Scram! He shook the letter, and the golden butterfly leaped away. It hovered outside the window, then lazily dipped and soared into the blue. Her banished letter had fallen to the grass below the hearth room window. He stared dumbly at it. What did she really want from him? They both knew what the letter said anyhow. Hadn't he read it a thousand times? Hadn't it begged him through the locked cabinet door? Why was it he could never find her in real life? But if he closed his eyes and dreamt of her, he always found her waiting? Close his eyes and she was his…. What was she saying? Ja, ja, that he should fetch the letter. Go pick it up. And listen to what she said.

He staggered to his feet, the room gently swaying. Far below, the floorboards seemed to ooze beneath him. His left side felt numb, but he could still walk a little, dragging himself forward half a step at a time. Hours it took, hours and hours to cross the floor and pass the threshold. Outside, he sank to his knees. More hours passed as he crawled painfully around the base of the building.

He paused for a moment to catch his breath. Directly overhead, a great drop of dew clung to a bent blade of grass. The dewdrop a huge glass ball that reflected the entire world. He saw his reflection in the glistening drop and knew why he crawled so slowly. He had no face,-no legs, no arms,- his back was a stripe of wafting green fur, tipped with handsome black-haired spikes. He had become a fat green caterpillar. And he was so thirsty after his long crawl! So he lifted his head and drank his own reflection, drinking deep, cool swallows from the clinging dew….

When he had slaked his thirst, he looked ahead through the forest of grass. Her letter lay in the distance. He plodded through the tall blades like a stubborn bug. The sun burned his back. Under the corner of the letter he saw a cool patch of shade where he might rest. He was almost there. Ah, to rest in the shade of her letter, to sleep.

He struggled into the shade and rolled on his side. Her letter lay overhead, and he curled comfortably beneath it. Time to wrap himself in a blanket and go to sleep. Yes, time to change into something else. He felt a rumbling down his body,- something coming out. A fine gossamer thread that he squeezed from his tail. First he attached his head to the paper, spinning the thread round and round…. His bug face went first, then his neck, his shoulders, his handsome green fur. Winding himself into a chrysalis, woven right into the grainy paper. He slept long and deep, and through his long sleep the tides of her mind in that lost letter came to him like a melancholy sigh. Her whole being crushed by the fate of her Soviet Burghölzli. As if speaking sadly to herself.

“One child out of twelve. Not so good, is it?”

He tried to console her. If you save just one, Fräulein, that's what counts. I taught you that….

At last his black sleep came to a close in a ravenous hunger. He chewed a large hole in his cocoon and began forcing his way through. The silk thread slowly split apart. His wings were wet, and he spread them out to dry. Not the sturdy practical wings of flies, but gauzy paper ones. Fragile rice-paper wings covered in gold dust, too thin for flying in strong winds but just right for tumbling toward a run-down town house in a damp part of town … Across the yawning darkness Fräulein s school took shape,- it pulsed with a radiance that made his body thrum with strength. So he circled and dipped and soared, always swooping closer to its alluring glow. Then Frau Direktors clinic opened its front doors, taking him inside….

Petra had just helped Madame put the children to bed. Now she too could rest…. Madame watched as the housemaid lay on her cot in a wandering doze. She should take a turn herself. The waiting seemed like Christmas Eve, not being able to sleep or close your eyes. The wind outside moaned its troubles, stealing about the eaves and making them groan. The house, too, slept uneasily.