Secret Dreams (7 page)

Frau Direktor rose and went to the door. Glancing back at her bed, she was dimly aware of a snuggled lump, hidden under the covers. The faded light from the bedside lamp seemed to be shining on the huddled form as from a great distance. Illuminating it, faintly, and leaving all else in gloom.

Madame had left the room, closing the door behind her. But that did not matter now, how easy to follow her down the stairs. Frau Direktor could feel the house living all around her. In the handrail she grasped, a family of termites gnawed happily and methodically away. Upon the wall, the wallpaper was becoming more and more brittle, imperceptibly peeling off the plaster. In another part of the house, a toilet flushed. And in yet another, a child cried in its sleep; then a short moment later came the sound of caring footsteps hurrying to the rescue.

She tried not to let the life of the house distract her from following Madame down the dark staircase, but the old woman seemed to be swept beyond her reach. I'm dying, Frau Direktor thought. Look, even the staircase was changing, becoming narrower and narrower and altogether black. She heard the faint sounds of people talking. But then this too was gone, as though they had stopped. The air grew hot and stuffy. The house now filmy and transparent: a ghost house, like a stage with paper doors, no glass in the windows, and walls of scrim. Snow lay on the street outside,- the streetlamps glowed. A few flakes came down, weaving in and out of the lamplight, settling on the black iron of the lamp cages. A brewer's cart with great casks strapped in place rolled down the street,- the horse team snorted in the cold. From the black sky above, snowflakes drifted down in lazy spirals. White coming out of the void … And then even the snow ceased to fall.

In the top floor of their town house, she saw the dark little room with the bedside lamp that gave hardly any light. And she saw the huddled lump in the narrow bed. Then the room faded, leaving her alone in the empty night. It was much better when you didn't have to breathe. Was this how you came to an end? With a pause in eternity stretching from one heartbeat to the next, one moment to the next, one age to the next — when nothing moves, in a deep, patient stillness? Was this the life after death? A long silence between living and dying. Yet no oblivion … Only a long gray staircase leading up and down from one moment to the next — to walk upon time as though upon a stair — when your lifetime was but a single landing.

And when you died, dissolution. An interminable fading while the intricate machine of your existence shut down. All its components taken out and disassembled. One by one each piece crushed, or melted, or rusted away,- until nothing stood on the steps of time but the soulless dust of souls. And this, too, to be swept off the gray stairway. No molecules, no atoms. Only the pause in the clock's second hand existed. One duration flowing into another, And when she had endured eternity she was in another time. Another place. Times and places, places in time. Forward or backward. Persisting. Existing.

Enduring
in the minds around her … A fresh breeze scented with jasmine and gardenia swept into a brightly sunlit morning room. The sound of a fountain pen scratched softly across a paper tablet. But that was all she knew or heard or saw: her enduring had narrowed the senses down to a slim band. As though, when swept off the staircase of eternity, all her senses had been pressed together, only to be handled selectively, and one at a time.

A writer's hand wrote with a black fountain pen,- the writer's script tilted dramatically forward, as though everything he thought was angled only toward the future. Then, as the enduring faded, a few familiar senses returned as well. She recognized the hand immediately, though it had changed with old age, the script feebler. Herr Kinderweise. As old as a man could be.

But this was not the study in Vienna, the study of the galloping man! Where were they? And even as the last shred of the enduring dissipated and her senses bloomed in all directions, Frau Direktor knew somehow one important fact — she existed no more, She was some years dead. But this did not particularly trouble her, for the police had long ago enacted whatever fate decreed, and for that she was grateful: because it seemed she had been spared the grim pain of punishment. And now her senses were free, to drift upon the wind. She forgot about Herr Kinderweise's new study and raced out to look over the world, listening for a billion heartbeats, for a billion voices,- feeling the rain in a backwater Amazon jungle and the raw bite of wind on the Greenland ice pack; brushed by the pungent smell of turmeric and reeling from the caw of parrots in a noisy, crowded Rangoon market stall. Her restored spirit reached out into the world, and then she knew for certain that all of them were gone. Her poor clinic no longer on any person's mind, not even the Russian Special Police,- a final closing of the bedroom door … not a soul on the planet remembered Frau Direktor at all.

But the motion and the voice of things were open to her: the strips of clouds in the blue sky, leaves rustling in the wind, and the trickle of water running down a gutter in a city — minor things and great things and the confused thoughts of men like the steady roar of the sea over dunes. Chaotic, for she heard the babble of many tongues: a great war was brewing across the continent of Europe, much greater than the one she had known in her youth. She saw the spray of golden showering sparks in arms factories, the shunting of trains, and the flickering needles of a thousand electric sewing machines stitching a million bits of braid on the collars of uniforms. She heard the bark of orders and the answering shouts of men, the sound of marching ants, singing the same marching song, stamping the same billion feet: soldiers' feet in every city, town, and village.

Already in the East an empire from Japan was rising like a great wave to hurl across the Pacific Ocean,- and on the mainland of China she felt their single will like a heavy canvas smothering Manchuria: a muffled scream from Shanghai, the feeble voices of people drowned out by shellfire and the moans of those trapped under collapsed buildings. While from within the great landmass of Asia, she sensed a coldly burning coal from the brain of the man who ruled Russia, He still ruled it — alive and plotting — while the ghosts of millions he had sent out of his sight hovered about him in the very bedroom where he slept with a woman. But he was a hard man, who slept soundly despite the wailing throngs beside his bed. They did not trouble him. He dreamed of adding to their millions.

And suddenly her eye lit upon Vienna. The National Socialist flags flew everywhere: the red field, grand white circle, and black swastika. They hung smartly from public buildings, and pairs of smaller flags from lampposts along the avenues,- red, black, and white bunting draped from streetfront windows, miles of it in every
Sirasse and Platz
. The city was all dressed up as though for Easter, Throngs of gray-uniformed soldiers chatted loudly on the sidewalks and shopped in the stores,- officers in gleaming boots ordered bottles of champagne in the restaurants. There seemed to be a teeming rally or party in every flat and alley, while bejeweled royalty danced gaily in the crystal-lit ballrooms of the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg.

But no music came from the Freud family house at 19 Berggasse,-no electric bulbs burned in the sockets. The Freud family had gone,-the upstairs rented out to strangers, who hung their wash in the rooms and never did the dishes, The old study lay empty — no books or pictures — and the furniture had vanished, There were cigarette butts ground into the hall carpet and muddy bootprints on the stairs. Down, down through the house she peered, looking for some clue, some trace of those who had left. Dust and dirt were crammed in every corner,- someone had urinated on a wall. The closets ripped open, empty, except for a torn dress hanging limply from a hanger,-a pocketful of change tossed on the floor. The stench of human filth grew worse in the basement,- on the concrete floor she saw what looked like a few shards of cracked pottery. The chariot frieze she liked so much, now broken junk. Recognizable only by the pitted stone. Off in a corner a fractured piece of the horse's head, ending just behind the jaw. The galloping man had fallen.

And his owner? Driven out? Run away?

How stupid to think she could be omnipotent all in a minute, to think she might swoop over the world without becoming hopelessly lost among the intricacies of a billion minds and their trillion works. Try to picture it: that brightly lit morning room, painted butter-cream yellow with white trim on the window — she only glimpsed it, and then only glimpsed his hand, scratching across a paper tablet with a fountain pen. Where was he? Someplace here in Vienna? She felt the urge to panic, to flee from street to street, shout questions at German soldiers, rip into their brains!

Stop this. Reason coolly. It had been a bright morning but now was midday in Vienna. West, then — she turned her ear, listening hopefully for that hand still scratching on the pad. Trying to shut out all else,- the Vienna cellar grew dim and gray, tissuey … the pile of yellow rubble from the frieze lay in the dark like a heap of burning coals. How many men were writing now? Where was that hand, among all the hands, where was the one she sought? Just in the city itself, many hands crawled across lined paper, writing all the time: hesitant hands, hands that pressed forward, hands that paused to doodle on an empty page. The small pile of broken stone glowed on the floor — the only thing that mattered — and slowly one by one all those other writing hands put down their pens, …

Then she heard his sound; it drew her on, separate from the sound of a thousand squints scratching their squibs across the continent. He was writing a letter, and thinking the words as he wrote:

The words were hushed, tremulous, so soft they could barely be distinguished from the babble of human noise coming from every corner of the world. His writing mind became a thin thread that never left her hand, and she ran alongside it back to the sunlit room, England. Smoggy, gray London, Steaming taxis, vistas of brick row houses … She found his new home quiet and out of the way.

His study was brighter than the old one, with a bit of well-tended garden beyond the French doors. Outside, the leaves of an almond tree stirred in the wind, their color a tender springtime green. She wanted to ask, What happened? To Vienna? To my clinic? Did anyone tell you? But though she might circle the earth a dozen times, or sink to the depths of the sea where the devilfish lit their way in the dark, she couldn't pick up a pebble. Make a sound. Or blow a fleck of lint from his sleeve. Yet she could travel in his mind. And know his thoughts. The date on the letter read 1939: six years gone by. A mere six years for all of them in Rostov to be forgotten. Not even a shred of memory fluttering in a passing thought. And as she watched his hand crawl across the pad, she could feel the man was sick. Too sick to care about anything else, Perhaps he had a month to live. Perhaps a week.

They had made yet another appointment for him at the London Clinic. A mere formality. Lün, the chow dog, lay under the desk and breathed sleepily. No formality in that. Looking down, he saw that Lün had cracked open one eye, which glanced upward at him. Then she pushed her soft, furry body past his cold legs. She circled once on the rug and sat heavily on the carpet. Often, he could walk only that far himself. A few weak steps in the garden and then back to his desk.

He had seen a picture of himself in the paper last week. It showed him standing outside his new English home, his face clamped and sour, the corner of his mouth drooping to a mushy line. The doctors had removed a section of his jaw as neatly as you'd bone a chicken. They had shown him the bone afterward: black and soft with cancer. In its place they had put a prosthetic implant that fit closely into the hollow they had carved out. Already the muscles were cleaving to it, so that he could talk, even if he slurred.

He had used those jaws — to talk and howl and laugh, to kiss and eat. How he loved meat. Roasts and steak and flanken. Chew the bones and suck the marrow out. Now the thought of all that gnawing and bone-cracking left him weak and slightly nauseous. He fed himself with a spoon at mealtimes, his old man's fingers shoving in a puree of infant's mush.

Lün lifted her head slowly and stared sleepily out into the garden. À thrush had landed on the ground and pecked daintily at the dirt. The thrush looked at the dog and the dog looked at the thrush and they held each other's gaze for what seemed a long time. Then the bird chirped once as if to say, Bye-bye, Lün! and turned tail, hopping off. It flew up into the lower branch of the almond tree and preened. The dog yawned and laid her big head back down on the carpet.

“You're a lazy hound,” the old man said. Lün thumped her tail gently on the carpet, agreeing without too much effort.

They had found a new cancer near the prosthetic implant…. He knew he smelled, that his whole mouth smelled rotten with decay. That's why the dog chose a spot on the carpet far away. Sometimes he fancied that he could still taste those Canary Island cigars he used to buy by the box, He saw it clearly: a snug balsa wood box, holding twenty Triple-A hand-rolled cigars, each wrapped with a green-and-gold band.

Pope Julius II brand, they were called,- the pontiff's profile and Medici nose were embossed on a miniature tinfoil plaque in the center of the box. His Old Jules, he used to call them, and during the long middle years of his practice each box cost twenty florins. That was the combined revenue from three and a third analytic sessions, each at six florins an hour. If he spent three hours in the morning analyzing three patients, they paid for the box of cigars he bought during lunch. But if the slow holiday season of a Vienna summer left his consultation room hideously empty, while the long afternoons slipped idly into evening, then that slim day's work barely covered a nasty indulgence. The smoke of those cigars wafted sweetly in his memory, hanging motionless in the air of the old consulting room shifting as the murmurs of his patients floated through their veils. And even now, at the end of his life, the whiff of Old Jules clung to him as cancer in his jaw.