Clara (13 page)

WITH ALBERT AWAY
she threw herself fully into her studies. 1935 would bring her sixth year at university. Dr. Freud had withdrawn to his medical practice and to write, but in the spring the increasing numbers of book burnings in Germany prompted her and Erika to initiate a petition asking him to come and examine the issue. Freud agreed.

He came and stood on the dais and held up his three most recent books:
The Ego and the Id, The Future of an Illusion
, and
Civilization and Its Discontents
.

“You want me to talk about the book burnings,” he said. “In truth, they don’t deserve talking about. Some forms of denial are so transparent as to be childish. Burning books to deny what’s in them. Think about it. In time they may move on to burning the authors also, as they did in Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts. We shall see.”

He said it was possible Europe was entering another era much like those dark centuries, where power was given not to those who had earned it and would use it to the benefit of society, but to those ready to support the self-serving intentions of their masters.

“Will it come to its senses and end soon? Probably not. Will it come here too? Probably. We shall have to see. For now it does not deserve any kind of serious investigation. You might say we refuse to stoop to that.” He put the books down on the desk. “Let’s instead move on to something much more interesting.”

He said the office had asked him to consider delivering one more set of lectures. He could do that, he said, but he would be practising his English on them and if theirs was better than his, they were welcome to help out; he said he would also be recording the lectures for his own purposes. Later it became clear that he had used the occasion to practise his ideas in English for the day when he would leave Vienna.

The series he began that day consisted of six lectures on what he called
Practical Psychology for Everyday Life
. There was the usual informality about them that worked well, and they were interesting. She filled three notebooks, one for each topic. After the first session, word of the event spread among students, and for the second lecture the auditorium was filled, seats and standing room. The doors were opened and students pressed in from the hallways to hear.

The lectures were on women’s relationships with other women, then on men’s relationships with other men, and finally on men’s and women’s relationships with each other.

As usual, Freud spoke off the top of his head, without notes. He stopped frequently, turned away and coughed into his handkerchief. He took a few deep breaths and continued. On occasion he asked if there was a better English word or phrase for what he had just said, and if one was offered, he would look around for consensus and then write it on the blackboard.

Essentially he said that women’s relationships with each other turned on common experience as the co-endurer, and on the intuitive feminine; on likeness and recognition, and on empathy rather than competition, at least as long as there was a common fate and there was not much at stake beyond a sharing of experience. But if women were in competition with each other for anything – the love of a man, for example, or interesting work and recognition – then it was tooth and nail, the fiercest struggle of all.

The relationships of men, he said, turned on competition and power. If a man smelled fear in another, or weakness, or an eagerness to be accepted, then that man was already as good as dead, or at least discounted. Respect and honour once lost could hardly ever be regained because a truth had been glimpsed, if only for a moment, like a door opening and closing. Trust and true friendship among men, because they were about admitting weaknesses, took a long time to develop. It was about strength. About
dominance and submission, as among wild animals, he said. Throughout history, how many men had killed the competitor; how many fathers had killed the son, how many sons the father?

With men and women, he said, it was much more complicated. He challenged the class to define the words
liking
and
loving
, and to carve out the line between them. Then he added sex to the discussion, and asked them to define sexual love. He asked them to think about what it was women wanted from men, and men from women.

A sea of hands went up, and words flew out:
Love, Sex, Money, Children, Family
. He stood by the desk, never far from his microphone and bulky tape recorder, and he rocked back and forth on his Oxford brogues.

“Yes,” he said, and, “Yes, yes. All of that. But what else? Let’s do this the Socratic way. You will have studied Edmund Husserl. What does he say?”

“Ask what is the thing in itself,” someone shouted.

“Ah,” Dr. Freud said. “Close. And have you done that?”

He told them to look at his book,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, switched off the tape recorder, and left for that day.

For the sixth and final lecture, university staff placed a second microphone on his desk and ran wires to loudspeakers out in the halls.

Dr. Freud stood there as usual in suit and tie and fobbed watch chain, and he began by saying that one had to accept the fact that humans were in most ways no different from
animals; in fact, they were animals enfeebled by morality and social influences.

But creatures of deep nature, humans were, he said, and nature cared only about one thing. And that thing was
More
. More trees and more flowers with a billion seeds drifting on the air and perhaps one of them falling on good soil; more monkeys, more whales, more human babies, even if they starved to death in desert lands, and drowned to death in flood zones, and were strangled by their parents because they kept on coming.

Nature was a blind multiplying machine, he said. And nowhere did the notion of human happiness let alone dignity enter into her gears. Nature’s job was
quantity
, not
quality
, even though quality might once in a while be the accidental by-product of quantity. And so, as to the question what did men want from women, and women from men, and how could they live happily together, one might apply Husserl, he said; but one had better not. It would be too sobering.

“Sexual tension,” he said. “The push for
more
, at all ages and in all situations. The added tension of the unavailable, the luring, the romance. But behind it all, the blind and ruthless and single-minded sex drive. A woman in her mature years looking on her flock of children, six, seven, eight of them, all forever with their beaks open. And she, wondering where her plans for her own person had gotten lost in all that procreating. I see them every week in my practice.”

He looked at the class, gave a rare smile, and added, “However wonderful and exciting at your age you may feel sexual tension is. I don’t wish to take that away from you.”

There was not a stir in the auditorium, and none in the hallways. In his pauses one could hear the echo from the loudspeakers out there in marble corners and ceiling vaults of this ancient university.

“As to the basic question you have been pondering,” he said. “All answers are fine, but not even the sum of them is adequate. Not adequate because of the X-factor. We’ll come to that later.”

In one way, what men wanted from women were kind breasts, he said. They wanted nurture and warmth, kindness, even sweetness and understanding. They wanted neither competition nor argument nor challenge, of which they had plenty from other men. They wanted sex.

And likewise in one way, what women wanted from men was security and containment; it was being desired and valued and understood. Beyond that of course it was about having a sexual mate who provided and protected, and on close inspection all of it, absolutely all of it, had to do with nature’s
More
.

He put his hands together and said, “Well. So it is Husserl in essence, but that essence is enormously overshadowed by our complicated psyches.”

He gave examples of sexual desires and sexual acts in direct contradiction to natural and moral laws, perversions always rooted in childhood, he said, which in turn
set up great inner tensions and misdeeds and unhappiness later in life.

“So,” he said. “Where does that leave us with our question of what men want from women and vice versa?” He stood and looked around at the class, from front row to doorway and standing room at the back.

“Where indeed?” he said. “I invite you to continue the exercise with your boyfriend and girlfriend. Ask her or him to put into words what it is he or she wants from you. If they think long enough and are honest, they will discover that what they want from you is a feeling that is in turn the result of something that is rather more difficult to define, but that stems directly from their own individual psyche, be it healthy or sick. Why are they with you? They are with you because being with you makes them
feel
a certain way. And why are they leaving you? They are leaving you because, be they psychologically healthy or sick, they are
not
feeling the way they want to feel. And that one phrase”—he paused and looked at his enormous class—“that one phrase,
psychologically healthy or sick
, is always the great unknown. It is the X-factor in the formula of human relations.”

He bent over his tape machine and took his time searching for the right button. He punched it and picked up his cold cigar that had been lying on the desk. He coughed and wiped his lips.

“So,” he said. “I refer you to my books
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
and
On Narcissism
. If you can find them. Are there any questions?”

ONE DAY AROUND THAT TIME
there came a knock on the door of the Leonhardt apartment in Vienna. Cecilia was about to go into a coaching session, but she opened and looked out the crack. When she told the story later to Clara she said that all she could see was the doorman standing there in his admiral’s uniform and behind him a young man, a tall boy.

“He insisted,” the doorman said to her, and he stepped aside.

A tenor was warming up in the bathroom, but she had a moment. The boy was carrying a brand-new leather briefcase. He was dressed in long trousers baggy at the knees and a suit jacket. In his lapel she saw the Red Cross button some of them were wearing now since the swastika was banned.

The boy stepped forward and said he had been a friend of Theodor’s and he was bringing something for her. She unlatched the chain and let him in.

As soon as he was inside, he leaned and peered around the doorway to the living room. “What is that noise?”

“A singer. Carry on.”

He said he was from Mr. Seyss-Inquart’s office and he had come to present her with the Blood Order in recognition of Theodor’s sacrifice for the cause.

She sat down on the bench in the hall, under the wall-mounted telephone box there.

“What order?”

“The
Blood
Order,” the boy said proudly. “It’s an award, like a medal.” He unbuckled the briefcase and reached inside. “This,” he said.

He took out a sheet of paper and held it for her to take. He stood in the light of the ceiling lamp with his keen boy-eyes glinting and the shadow of his nose cast down on his mouth and chin. He shook the paper at her.

She reached but then lowered her hand.

“Take it! That noise,” he said irritably. “Can’t you stop it?”

“No.”

She could see black printing on that paper, some Gothic calligraphy, the prominent heading,
BLOOD ORDER, awarded to …

She shook her head.

“Read it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Theodor gave his life for our cause. Take this in his honour. There is also an actual medal, but we don’t have it yet.”

“He didn’t
give
his life,” she said. She stood up and walked to the door and opened it. “What pompous nonsense. He was simply gunned down in some field.”

“He was not the only one that day,” said the boy. “Take it. Take it for Theodor. These first editions have been signed by the Führer’s undersecretary in person.”