Secret Dreams (50 page)

“I still want to see you,” she implored.

“At home. You'll come to my house. I have an office there too.”

A cold look came into her face. She carefully wrapped the bit of sheet around her precious possession, then thrust it inside her steamer trunk, stowing it away with a firm, bold movement like a rejection and a reproach all in one.

With shocking bluntness she said, “You're afraid of what people think, afraid of how it looks between you and me. At first it didn't matter,- Î acted crazy all the time. So if you came to see me ten times a day, who cared? How could there be an affair between a wolf and an egg? There can't. But now I brush my hair. I sleep in a bed. I wash out the tub. Î eat my vegetables. Î go in the pot and clean it out. I'm respectable again. And so we've got to be respectable. You've got a position to think about. A reputation. How does it look spending day after day with a young lady in a garden?”

He had no answer for that. Struck dumb like a big ox. For long moments they sat together, just staring.

It began to rain, and as before, the forlorn sound of the strange woodwind floated up to the window. Herr Doktor stiffened with a growing dread: the very sound of the flute in his mountain dream now haunting him in broad daylight. If he went to the window, would he see a clearing? A cave? Gentleman Freud in traveling clothes, playing the lonely flute? Telling him, It's the only song I know … ?

The girl struggled with the window. He wanted to warn her off, but he felt nauseous and woozy “Just like last night,” she hissed, straining at the sash. “He came into my room.”

“A gentleman?” Herr Doktor choked.

She wrenched the stuck window. “Yes, with a beard!”

Herr Doktor shrank to her bed,- her dream in his dream, his dream in hers … “In fine traveling clothes?” he whispered. She struggled frantically, “Yes! I told you. He came through and went down below. He played the music!” Herr Doktor sat weakly on the bed, marrowless. Impotent to stop her. The girl groaned with a final effort. The window rattled open. She flung herself out to the waist. The tune broke off.

“Oh, that's you,” she said, a trifle disappointed, A muffled reply rose from the garden. “No, I like it. It just reminded me of something. What did you call that thing? Oh … I see,”

He wiped his damp neck. A wave of relief flowed through him. How could two people have the same nightmare? Maybe one day he would understand, but not now, not now. Below, the gardener's young helper stood on the muddy sod. He held a wind instrument in his hand, about the size and shape of a sweet potato and nearly the same color. He put it to his lips and began to blow. The sound in the damp air was simple and lovely and sad. Much like the older man's call-song in the dream, a melody of broken love, lost forever.

Fräulein rested her head on the window frame. “He's playing an ocarina,” she said softly “The street musicians at home play them for kopecks in a hat. But I never knew what it was called. An ocarina … playing Bizet. I was right. A composer named B Suite number two, ‘L'Arlésienne.'“

“He told you that?”

“Just the suite. Î saw the name Bizet on a tin phonograph cylinder. F-f-flatter used to wind up the machine and play the thing until he wore it out.”

The gardener's helper played the melody again. Fräulein touched the window. “He told me he likes to play for the flowers in the rain. He says they hear the music and come up out of the earth to see what's making such sweet noise. So he always plays them something sweet when they drink and something sad to make their petals brighter. Do you think that's true, what he says — a sweet song draws them up, a sad one makes their petals brighter?”

Who knew if it was true or not? Just as true as you wished.

“I never told you, Fräulein” — the words so difficult to say — “how very lovely you looked last night.”

After a few days Fräulein asked Nurse Bosch to help her find an apartment in town. Several trips proved fruitless. The apartments were either too expensive or too dreary. In one case she found a place with bay windows, a cushioned love seat built in, and hooks for hanging plants. The bathroom had clean black-and-white tile on the floor and up the walls, and a porcelain sink that sparkled. She liked that apartment. She could have been happy there, but it was not to be. Fräulein became so excited she began to twiddle. The landlord saw her and immediately refused to cooperate. As he explained to Nurse Bosch in private, he had a good reputation and genteel tenants, and he intended to keep it that way. No one could be expected to house diseased people.

Fräulein sat silently all the way back to the hospital, twiddling half the ride. Once in room 401, she refused dinner and went straight to bed. Later Zeik brought her a slice of chocolate cake from the kitchen. “Put it on the floor,” said the huddled lump. Another week passed before she ventured out again.

But behold! a few days later, at the warm end of May, they did find a nice apartment, a place on Fesselstrasse, street of the chainmakers. Zeik helped her with the move. But just as she had to learn about her hospital room, Fräulein had to learn about life beyond. How to talk to people she knew slightly and ones she hardly knew at all. How to pick fruit off a stall in the marketplace and choose meat out of a butcher's glass case. How to count her change and wait politely for the churlish shopgirl in the coffee shop — all the while revolted that people never wore their truthful faces in public and trying not to see them as blank dummy heads speaking in blocky phrases.

There were some failures. Vegetable sellers who barked irritably for no reason or shopkeepers who habitually counted out the wrong change, then refused to recognize their error. And after trying times like these, she went home to her flat and crawled into bed. Staying there as the day blurred into night. But Zurich was a big city, with plenty of shops….

And now she had friends.

Nurse Bosch came to see her. Zeik also. Even the gardener's helper. He always brought his ocarina to play — and one day, in a burst of pink embarrassment, the fellow admitted he didn't know how to read. So twice a week she taught him his letters from a children's primer she found in the bookstalls near the Limmat.

Her apartment had one room with its own private toilet, a bathtub, and a narrow bathroom window looking out over the roofs and chimney pots. When she poked her head out the tiny window, she saw the blue sky rising to infinity and off in the far distance the spike of a black church spire. In the main room she put her dresser, the hospital bed, and her steamer trunk. She also bought a four-franc table with wobbly legs from a one-eyed junk seller. On the top a pair of lovers had carved their initials in a rude heart with an arrow:
K& W
. She wondered whose names the letters stood for. And if they loved each other so terribly much, why had they carved their vows on the comer of a table now lost and belonging to a stranger?

A black gas range was crammed in next to the kitchen sink, and nearby stood a squat icebox. The iceman came every day if you wanted: four centimes a chunk to keep the milk sweet overnight. Her front windows looked out onto a flagstone courtyard. She could see carriages rolling by in the street through a low, arched passage. Tenants were expected to take their garbage out onto the sidewalk and leave it in barrels by the rain gutter. She bought her first pack of cigarettes in a wood-lined tobacconist's shop and learned how to smoke.

When the gardener's helper came he brought her a bottle of May wine but drank most of it himself. In this way, he studied his letters well at the start of the visit but played his ocarina better at the end. She could see he had an immature crush on her, but she never encouraged him, and for his part he never said a word. Herr Doktor saw no harm in it. No one saw any harm in it. What could be more natural for a young man taught his letters? Stranger by far was a young woman of twenty living alone. But with the university so near, such things were not totally unheard of,- a few university ladies might be in similar circumstances. Though none, certainly, fresh from a private room at the Burghölzli.

After a few days on her own, Fräulein traveled to Herr Doktors home for her first private session. The maid let her in as on the night of the dinner party. She learned many things that first time: first, just how deeply her personal situation with him had changed. Herr Doktor now saw other patients at his home, making appointments for two or three a day.

As for Fräulein, he gave her several hours of his time to start, less later on. But even these hours a day seemed much less than what she was used to. Those limitless devotions of the Burghive. Now he spent half the day at the institution and half the day at home, and Fräulein spent as much time traveling to and from his office as she did actually sitting in his presence.

She had never realized he lived three miles down Lake Zurich in the town of Kusnacht. The night of the dinner party, she hadn't known where the carriage had taken her. But since carriages were too expensive for everyday trips, she learned the ways of the tramcars, mastering rail schedules and buying tickets from mean, wizened men in thick spectacles behind dirty wire cages, then not missing her stop or losing her way to Herr Doktors house. All intricate, all difficult, all the time fighting the desire to creep into some cakeshop for a huge slice of torte, to gobble it down — then sit for an hour, twiddling like a leaf, shaking herself to death while the sugar raced through her veins.

So she learned to use the tramcar. And once in every dozen visits the sun would show itself promisingly out of a cloud bank, and Lake Zurich glittered like fish scales. And there she sat, alone in the coach, except maybe for a cheerful, toothless old granny and the driver ring-ringing his bell. And in those times she felt the worth of what she had done. For she had become her own keeper, not a clear egg without a center or a dayroom Gurgler in the zoo of the Beehölzli or a paralyzed twiddler listening to the talk of blank dummy heads, but a truly independent young woman sitting alone in the tramcar while her pale reflection flashed in the window. And she knew that splendid young woman.

Anonymous no more, but the master of her face.

She dreaded talking. Wretched words, where anything she said might bring on a sudden fit of despair or inarticulate gagging as she choked on a spoonful of gristle out of her past.

At first Fräulein found ways to procrastinate and overstay her two hours … using spells of faintness and begging harangues, pleading on her knees, even threatening to play the Queen in the public street beyond Herr Doktors door. But such ploys did not have the power over her they once enjoyed. She began to see her aberrant behavior for what it had always been: a scream of defiance from behind her fortress walls, a bestial bellow of Me — I — Me — I —! So if she stooped to smearing menstrual blood on him again or peed in the hall as the maid showed her to the door, such an act felt below her standing,

In her Burghive cell such behavior had been the sacred expression of her mortal soul, the battle of protogenesis versus dementia to birth herself anew. But here in his house she cringed at the childishness of it. At how blatantly she tried to project her power over him and their precious time. For the facts of life had changed —- she'd already been reborn.

And
now
was growing up.

Describing her past took monumental effort, and crying was tiring work. Too much as bad as too little, draining her heart empty and dry. An hour left her exhausted, and the second hour so wilted that she simply rose from his couch without saying good-bye, nodding off fitfully in the tramcar all the way home. She said the word “Father” now, calling him by name with only a moment's hesitation.

“F-father.”

But M-m-m still too difficult to say.

One day in late June she set the matching silver hairbrush and hand mirror on his desk, the ones he brushed her hair with long ago as they danced the ritual of the Queen. Touching them one last time as if their molded handles might help tell her tale. Then composing herself on his stiff leather couch. “You wanted to know who my parents were. It started with that brush and mirror. They belonged to M-m-m, and sh-sh-she always kept them on a glass table in her bedroom. At night Î used to sneak from my bed, standing in the dark hall at the crack of her door. Watching her brush her beautiful long hair.”

As Fräulein told it, the words rose into her mouth unbidden, but she hardly paid attention to what she said. For Herr Doktors couch, so strong beneath her, melted away like soft wax … and she walked again in her parents' house as a little girl of five or six. Her home came to her all of a piece: not in the bright flashes of her ancient dream tale, but the way it really used to be. A town house in Rostov on a quiet tree-lined street, in a German part of the city.

Her parents' rooms smelled of must, as if an old person lived there, hardly breathing any oxygen or stirring the air. A clean old person, dry as a stick. Maybe it smelled that way because M-m-m rarely opened the windows. The halls bare, unlit and gloomy. Her own bedroom painted a sickly off-white. Its curtained window gave onto another building, a few yards away.

She had toys, though … a tiny silver-plate tea set and a small grand piano that really played. But her grandest was a Georgian-style dollhouse with two chimneys and rooms on either side of a central staircase. The dollhouse dining room had a real glass chandelier and the kitchen an eight-ring cook stove. The water closet even had a two-seater with wooden toilet seats. She remembered the tiny dolls as they sat propped at the dining room table — miniature mama and papa, brother and sister — all wearing their Sunday best. Also two servants, a maid in black and a fat pink cook in white, bent over the fancy stove. Their blank faces painted skin tone, with red lips, blushing cheeks, and vapid, sightless glass eyes.

She also had a stuffed rabbit with long silky ears, which she took with her to bed. Herr Wilhelm Schnitzel, but she mostly called him Herr Wilhelm. And a beautiful dolly named Puppchen, with long, dark tresses, just like Mother's, which she combed out and tied in braids. But her toys weren't really hers. Mother was always popping in to see how she got on with them. With rules on the proper way to play.
Only one at a time
, ‘‘because you'll get tired and break them.”
Never more than one
.