Secret Dreams (49 page)

“I don't think it would fit,” Herr Doktor replied, suddenly disengaging his arm.

“Are you worried your head is too big — or too small?” the older man asked wryly. “Either way, it doesn't matter. We'll
make
it fit.” And once again they both laughed until a nurse came along and hissed at them for silence,

“I hear she came to dinner this evening,” the elder man whispered in his colleague's ear.

“Why, yes … yes, she did…. I suppose I should have invited you.”

“I wouldn't have been able to come in time.” Herr Professor sighed. “In any event, it's best I wasn't there to distract everyone.”

They had reached the fourth-floor landing. Orderly Zeik snoozed in his chair, the cat curled in his lap. “Zeik,” Herr Doktor said, gently waking the orderly, “I'd like you to meet a good friend of mine. A very knowledgeable gentleman who has come for a brief visit to see the results of our work.” But when he turned to present Herr Professor, the older man had vanished from sight. Then Zeik too, leaving only the cat in the chair, flicking her tail. Uncertainly, Herr Doktor began fingering the rope tassel of his satin robe, suddenly ashamed of padding about the hospital wearing nothing but his nightclothes. Perhaps Herr Professor had dashed on ahead to visit the girl in her room. “Herr Freud?” he called down the hall. “Are you there?” The nerve! Going off to see the girl without her own physician present. He became very angry and hurried on after him. Geschrei scampered ahead. The large orange house cat stood on her hind legs, pressing her forepaws against the door of 401. The door eased open, and the cat slipped inside.

Fräulein sat on the bed in the dark, as if she'd been waiting for him. Geschrei purred quietly in her lap.

“I came …” He felt really foolish now. “I came to see if you got home all right.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I got home quite safely.”

“Did you see my friend? An older gentleman. He came to see us.”

“Yes, Î saw him,” she replied. “He came through just a moment ago.” Her eyes drifted to the window. “He's out there, I think. He wanted to see the place where we did our most recent work.” Then, casually, “He's not your friend, by the way.”

“No? What is he, then?”

The girl smiled as she stroked the cat. Geschrei flicked her tail in saucy silence. Why had the man come at all? To see how well his holy Method got along under his disciple's hand? No! The old Faker came to steal … to graft his prize student's technique upon his own. For the feat of saving a demented girl in under a year. Go snoop in the garden all you want, old man! You're just groping in the dark.

Now through the window came the soft and lonely sound of a flute being played. Not a flute he recognized, nor any tune he'd ever heard … A song of river reeds and mourning doves, of tree frogs and loons catching wriggling fish in their sharp beaks, a song of children playing by the slow current of a sandy bank …

“Go on,” Fräulein taunted him. “Look while he's still there.”

Out beyond the window he sensed things he had never known before.

Things he never dared to feel. Blind lust. The death rattle of a strangled man in his hands. A woman's pleadings as he took her on the ground, fighting him, crawling on her hands and knees … Away to find her, to be together in the dark. All out there waiting —- in the prissy Swiss garden — if he dared to seize it for his own.

He floated to the window and pressed his face to the glass. No garden. Instead a great grove of trees rose into the starry night. And he, as if on a cliff, looked out onto the broken face of a mountain. A stream fell at the edge of a clearing. A black stone stood by the lip of the water. The mouth of a cave. Of course! It was
her
dream he was dreaming. Mother of Stone, the birthing cave! The girl's sacred wood …

Herr Professor stood by the clearing's small fire, playing his lonely flute. He looked completely at home down there, even in his traveling suit, top hat, and polished boots. His white fingers danced over the tone holes,- he blew a long melodious sigh, lilting away to silence.

The flute dangled loosely in his hand. He glanced at it, the hollow instrument no more assuming than a dried stick lying on the ground. The elder man turned it over in his fingers as if wondering what his song had meant. And who he played it for.

“Just noises in the dark,” the younger man murmured. He saw a score of bodies slipping quietly through the trees, like the Gathering in the girl's dream. The loose throng filtered steadily into the clearing until they surrounded the elderly man. Herr Professor looked inquiringly up to the window. “Herr Jung, do you know these people? Have I met them before, at a concert or a lecture? Am I supposed to know them?”

“Tell him at a lecture,” the girl prompted.

No, that wasn't right. For suddenly he knew exactly who the people were. A mob, a gang of ingrates. They were patients the man had failed and people he owed money. There were pompous committees who banned him and a man who had picked his pocket in a department store on the Ringstrasse. A furtive lad who sneaked after him in a Parisian pissoir, hoping for a romantic liaison, and a buxom waitress he tipped badly the day before. People who hated him for no reason and a sad girl with blue eyes he once mistakenly thought he loved. There were even some dead people, come back to say one last word before going off once and for all.

“They're all your old friends,” Herr Doktor said quietly. “Come to say hello.”

A murmur of approval ran through the crowd.

“Are you sure?” the elder man asked doubtfully.

“Of course,” Herr Doktor reassured him. The mob was moving now, wading over the shallow stream, closing in around the edge of the clearing. Herr Professor dropped the flute and backed away from the dying fire.

“If they didn't like the music, they didn't have to listen,” he called up to the window. “It's the only song I know how to play!”

It was too late to be sorry. Already an arm of the mob had cut off the elder man's escape. He turned round and round like a wobbly top. His burgundy cravat fell off.

“Help me, Jung!” he cried to the window. “Only you can stop them. Only you!” But the old man's plea died in a muffled shriek as the ring closed in. Twenty hands tore at him,- pieces of his top hat went flying. Shreds of his coat and shirt flew off. The bodies pulsed over him as bits of his pants came flying out. And then, as suddenly as the tearing started, it stopped.

The gentleman huddled whitely on the ground, stripped and naked, with red weals along his flanks where the mob had torn the expensive suit from his limbs. His body was hideous: middle-aged legs like stringy old meat, belly sagging from too many dinners, his buttocks wrinkled and pathetic from a sedentary life. A faint stripe of black hair ran down his jutting spine. A body better clothed, better sitting behind a desk.

Beside him lay the discarded skin of the devoured stag. The mob had yanked it from the standing stone and left it on the ground like the scab from a cut. The elder man hugged it over his pitiful nakedness. Rain began to fall … fat drops that puffed the pile of coals. Soon the rain came harder, gray sheets turning the clearing to muddy milk. The last thing Herr Doktor saw was the bony white legs crawling across the clearing. They vanished into the black mouth of the cave as the heavens poured down.

Back in Fräuleins room, the raindrops thundered against the glass, obliterating everything from his head. She had dressed like the Queen of Sparta, winding a sheet around her hips, and painted her lips very red: they glistened as they parted to kiss him, opening to devour him. But-but-but, he stammered, what about Herr Freud in the cave? He tried to hold her off with all his strength, but her arms encircled him, touching here and there, her eyes commanding him to silence.

“The old man's finished,” she whispered in his ear. “Now there's only you….” She pressed into his arms, limbs molding along his length. And her mouth came. She was kissing him, kissing him again and again —

* * *

“Carl?” A rough hand yanked his shoulder. “Carl, wake up.”

Emma leaned over him in bed with an annoyed expression on her face. “You were shouting in your sleep. Shouting and —”

He grabbed her by the arms and drove her body into the mattress. “Never wake me again. Never!”

The woman frightened to silence. A bead of sweat ran down his face.

The drop fell on Emma's throat. There was a pause and a waiting. Her thighs rubbed together, pressed along his flank.

“Can't help it …,” she said meekly.

Gray light came in the window. Geschrei sat on the sill, looking calmly at them in bed, while the sound of rain on the roof pattered over their heads. A green glassy sheen had come into Emma's eyes,-she wriggled deliciously under his hands. He held her elbows close, feeling her move beneath him.

“I just can't help it,” she repeated sullenly. She made a tiny, futile effort to escape. But the gesture only made her seem more vulnerable, exposed. Her eyes were heavy-lidded. The corners of her mouth turned down in a mischievous way. I just can t…

They were on the verge — she wanted it. The blood coursing through, a mindless insane heat. He knew she'd spit and claw, but she'd take it any way he chose to give it. Fast and rough or long and easy — like a duchess or a slut — just so long as they couldn't help themselves, so long as it was soon. She parted herself for him, presenting herself, guiding him, melting all around. She was ready.

Ready
now
.

Herr Doktor did not manage to arrive at the hospital in time for rounds with Bleuler and company. As he often came late, no one remarked upon it. So the workday began without him. The act of spreading Emma and making her shout into the pillow had devoured him. Afterward, he dozed for half an hour and woke ravenous.

In a café near the hospital, he sat under an awning in the bracing May mist, plowing through rolls and coffee, three soft-boiled eggs, and four slices of ham in ten minutes. He even made notes on the napkin about his wonderful crazy dream. A rivalry between him and the old man —- what delectable nonsense! No, the message of the crazy dream lay in his own prehistoric childhood…. Nanny Sasha scratching red weals down his father's back. Prehistoric childhood. Damn good phrase, remember it! Besides, if he had nutty dreams after wild dinner parties, whose fault was that? He and the girl had essential things to talk about today, whatever his nightmares.

High time she moved out.

Fräulein woke in the cold gray light. Her bare feet touched the floor and she shivered, a wave of creaky cold passing through her…. What had she dreamt last night? Her bed still bore the warm imprint of her body. If only she could read the mute riddle of the wrinkled sheets. But no, her sleeping brain had been wiped smooth, and soon so would the bed.

A strange, forlorn sound rose from the garden: a low musical note, rising and falling and tapering off. The player played a kind of flute. Something primitive, like a Jew's harp, only with a hollow, haunted strain. A dreadfully familiar melody, which tugged you to stop and called you to its song.

She knew the music, had heard it before. A composer named Bee — no, but … She faintly tried to carry the tune. Flashes of last nights dream came to her, all confused with the dinner party. A mountain outside her room. Herr Doktor wearing a bathrobe. An orange house cat. Or had she simply seen the cat sitting on the parlor chair as she lay exhausted at the evening's close?

The playing stopped. She gave the window a shove, and it opened with a groan. “Keep playing!” she called out. “Play more!”

No one answered.

She drew her head inside with a defeated sigh…. To sit by the window in silence, to wait for the player to play again. The tune wove in and out of yesterday: getting dressed,- the way the crystal glittered on Frau Emma's table. Even the loathsome borscht, the dollops of sour cream, the bloody drops splattering her neck. How everyone talked with blank, empty phrases. The hand that nearly twiddled —

Yes, she had been very lucky to escape without doing anything crazy Very lucky Then remembering the blue paint in m-m-m's awful kitchen. The ticking cuckoo clock. The gag spoon. The frothing bowl of gizzards.

“It's not the clock that's cuckoo! It's me! It's me!”

She shut the window. Clouds like floating mountains hung in the sky. She couldn't recall the song at all now.

“Enroll in medical school at the university,” Herr Doktor told her. “I'll write you a recommendation. And you can move into town. The rent on an apartment is considerably cheaper than your room here. What's more, the hospital is doing nothing for you that can't be done better on the outside. You won't have to move immediately. I've paid your bill through the end of next month.”

Fräulein sat in the chair by the window. Her hand began to twitch on her thigh in a halfhearted twiddle.

“And cut that out!” Herr Doktor said harshly, a little surprised at his fury. She winced at the hardness of his voice, but she had controlled it before and did so again. The twiddle defied her for a few seconds, then frittered off to nothing. Fräulein looked dismally about her room. A sort of sorrow came to her eyes, as though she would be saddened to bid the room farewell. The clean brass chamber pot. The copper tub. The flowers on the dresser and the icon of Christ on the wall, with bits of leaves and sprigs from the garden tucked in the frame.

“Take it all with you/' Herr Doktor told her. “The bed, the dresser, everything. It's a start. A way to begin.”

She clutched something close to her, wrapped in a scrap of sheet. One of her books. The one from home? The one hidden in the trunk all this time? The way she stroked it reminded him of Geschrei the cat and the ancient mountain dream. He wished she'd stop petting the book like that, almost sexually. The edges of the cover were frayed and worn: she must really have loved that book, poring over the pages until finally they fell apart. What subject? What title? She noticed him staring and ceased to stroke it.