Secret Dreams (36 page)

“Marie! Marie!” the old woman despaired. Then, pleading: “Petra, don't just stand there!” The younger woman hadn't bothered to retrieve the spilled groceries. Her coat hung off her shoulder. She looked over the kitchen in a kind of numb disbelief, then dipped her hand into the lathered dishes, shuddering in disgust. “Is this all you've done? These are from breakfast. We've been away hours. You haven't started dinner yet. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you!”

“I'm sorry,” Madame whispered to the dirty dishwater. “I'm tired.”

But Petra didn't hear her. She snatched the sugar tin off the shelf and began scooping up the mound of sugar with a spatula. “The vegetable seller knows something. He wouldn't sell to me. Just that hunchback Jew in the back of the market. Probably tomorrow the Jew won't sell to me either.”

“What about the butcher?” Madame asked faintly. She had gone back to her mound of dishes with creaky effort.

“I had my pick of the garbage pails.” As evidence, a brown-wrapped bundle leaked slow blood onto the floor. Petra scooped the last grains of sugar into the tin, while little Marie stared at nothing, idly tracing lines on the floor where the mounds of sugar used to be. Searching for a grain, licking her finger, then searching again. For a moment the child left off and quietly mumbled into the sleeve of her coat, as though piping an order down a ship's speaking tube.

“She's at it again,” Petra said with a note of dread.

Now they could hear the child's soft voice as she spoke down the tube of her sleeve. “Engine room, report. Report…” Petra gathered Marie in her arms, stroking her. And the child let herself be taken, silently curling into the young woman's arms as the older one looked on. Spilled groceries lay on the floor. The pot on the stove grew cold. A sink of dirty dishes. No one spoke.

He slid away from the kitchen, gliding toward the front of the house. Here again he found the dimming yellow bulb casting a sickly light over everything. But now the annoying vagueness was gone. Behind a cluttered desk sat a middle-aged woman. She had taken off her reading glasses and polished them on the sleeve of a plum-colored sweater, which hung above her shoulders. She resettled her glasses and turned her heavy eyes toward the papers before her. What was it about this woman? The graying hair? The strong, weary face? Her glasses? A severe tortoiseshell type, industrial looking. A central-economy standard issue, millions of people given millions of the same. The tortoiseshell frame only brought out the heavy squareness of her face —

But the dress!

Ja … once upon a time such a dress: a daring off-the-shoulder black velvet gown. Cut low over the bosom, showing off the bust as though the woman's hands were cupping them up for you herself, feeling their weight and offering them for you to admire. The youthful bosom he remembered, so strong and so yielding — Fräulein Victim's bosom, yearning to be touched. But wait now! When he bought her the dress they didn't call her Fräulein Victim anymore, no … and the way of the dress itself, it had clung to the girl like the petals of a lily.

But the woman at the desk was all wrong. Flabby and sagging, while the dress had grown frayed and worn,- the seams opening and a panel of coarse material sewn in to make room for a larger person. He no^ ticed creases in the black velvet where the heavier woman had spread where she sat. He strayed to the wide expanse of bosom, pale and luminescent. How coppery Fräuleins skin had been, even in the depths of winter. Still, the woman wore the thing with dignity, as if this were the very last garment of value she possessed. The black velvet dress recalled tender memories, sweet social conquests, and past glories in its very fabric.

And ja! Here the same row of rhinestone buttons set in silver buttercups, four of them, down the left shoulder strap. How those rhinestones had glittered! Glittered and flashed in the crystal light from his own dining room chandelier above the great honeyed oak table in the Zurich town house. Her bosom, the glittering and flashing crystal light, the gleaming table: it set a man's teeth on edge, making you think about undoing those rhinestone buttons, unbuttoning them one by one to watch the black velvet peel off her white shoulder, to see the butter-cream skin beneath. Too precious, too sweet to touch … He had picked it out himself, paid more than he could afford. It glowed so darkly in the narrow shop window as the snow curled down through a cold February twilight. Enchanting him completely, the row of sparkling buttons, the darkly gleaming torso of the mannikin sheathed in black velvet… while the decorative accessories so casually displayed — the alligator purse, the kid gloves, the string of pearls — faded before the dark power of that lush, seductive dress. He saw it and knew it had been made for her alone. How many weeks did he lurk before the window of the shop, waiting for the courage to go inside? Pondering how long till the girl herself would be ready, sane enough for a fitting? At last, before his courage failed or the dress was snatched by other hands, he did the deed. The pretty shopgirl clucked in admiration as she wrapped it in crinkly pink tissue paper. “A fine
lady's
dress,” she said with a trace of jealousy.

A fine lady. Hah! Months he had waited for her to stop smearing shit over everything and everybody and dancing about like a spastic at the drop of a hat. How long before he brought her out in public without her exploding into a fit of verbal nonsense? Ja, for this was a fine lady's dress, made for a fine lady. How many months passed before she could even do an impersonation of one? Whatever possessed him to buy the damn thing?

Because he thought he could cure a mad girl.

Cure her!

That was begging for trouble. Ja, ja, he should never have tried. Just stuck her in the dayroom, as Nekken and the rest wanted, Then crawling to the old Faker for advice! Ach! How low could you stoop …

The vision of this place and its people was slipping from his grasp. He felt the gales of wind in a bright light, gales of wind eating away the years.

He was going back again…,

Herr Doktor sat in his office on the fifth floor of the Burghölzli. The Vienna reply sat on the red leather surface of his desk. The dried coffee stain from Emma's jealous fit marred one side of the white paper. Like the long-forgotten streak of decayed food that had once defiled the wall in Fräuleins cell. How long ago that seemed….

But Emma wasn't the crazy one. The girl was. And his wife had better adjust to that fact, because he wasn't going to stop now. Not for Emma.

Not for anyone.

Now that his playacting mayhem and his wild dances with the girl had become generally known, another spate of treachery had run through the halls like a virus of malice. A crude Star of David had appeared on Fräuleins door, scrawled in red lipstick. A sign meant to cow him, to daunt and intimidate … Naturally, they never caught the prankster. But what truly frightened him was how the powers of the place —- Bleuler and Nekken — remained so conveniently neutral, obliging Herr Doktor, Zeik, or Nurse Bosch to wipe off the malicious star every time they found it. “Well, this is an asylum, you know,” Nurse Bosch remarked sadly. ‘‘Everybody's crazy….”

He turned to stare out his office window. The cold stung him. A clean blanket of March snow lay on the garden grounds in sloping drifts. The darting tracks of a hare cut across to a burrow in the bank near a vine-covered wall. How he wanted to drift out the window, find a safe burrow of his own, and sleep till spring. He leaned back tiredly in his chair. The Vienna reply seemed to hover over the desk, his lazy eyes seeing the letters blurred and hazy…. He set the paper down and let the haze gather over it as smoke from some Aladdin's lamp. Like a genie, Fräulein emerged on the surface of his desk, wrapped in a filmy sheet —- lying across his blotter like a love slave. Salome. A single eye reproached him from the folds of her turban.

“Can't I have a fantasy?” he asked.

But there came no answer. Instead she began to writhe like a serpent, her body undulating, showing him its seductive curves and voluptuous parts. He grew warm for her as she coiled on the red leather…. Her voice came for him, honeyed and melodious. A sweet voice gently urging him to take himself out of his trousers and show himself to her. Telling him she wanted to see him take it out, see him touch himself. And then to have him watch her too. Watch her while she touched all the dark and lovely places.

Her silky shadow spread over his face. It smelled like gardenias … jasmine and warm baths…. If he died now, it would really be all right. She parted herself, and he heard the words that ran down him like water … “What if the others see us?” she asked. “You and me and this?” Answering the question for him like the stroke of an omen: “Then they'll see us. And then they'll know.”

Herr Doktor lifted his head off the stained reply. Had he fallen asleep? A passage from the Vienna letter lay face-up on his desk:

But oh, God, if Fräulein made up what she saw, or what she thought she saw, or what happened long ago, or what she simply
wanted
to happen … then there'd be no unraveling the madness. No end to the fantasies, insane creations, lies, and dreck. To cure her, impossible. Impossible!

A gust of wind sucked the window shut with a metal clang! He jumped up, shouting, “Ahhh!” Then, after a moment, sheepishly latched the window, rather glad no one had seen him lean from the chair like an electrocuted frog. He waited for his heart to settle down, with the nagging sensation something was wrong nearby. He looked under his desk, feeling foolish, Of course nothing but his own limbs, some dust, and a wastepaper basket. Still the anxiety gnawed at him. Like that crooked picture on the wall Was it always tilted, or had it slipped recently?

A print, almost invisible in the gloom.
Àctaeon and His Hounds
, Actaeon, the young prince who stumbled on Artemis bathing. Lest he brag of seeing the goddess naked, the huntress turned him into a stag and hunted him down with his own dogs. The print showed the créature, man above, stag below, with antlers growing from his head and a strip of fur that ran down his neck, blending into the broad, strong haunches of the animal. Four dogs clung to its flesh, tearing him apart. The engraver showed in lurid detail the snarling teeth and the ripped entrails of the stag-man. The print had been hanging on the wall when he first moved into the office. And he didn't know if he liked it or not, … Perhaps that's why he never took it down.

He glanced out the window. A moon had risen over the garden wall, casting white light across the snow. Did the moon rise early or late this time of year? He looked at his pocket watch, but to his dismay he saw it had stopped at seventeen minutes to seven. Seven this very night, or seven in the morning — who knew? Why didn't he wind it every day, the way normal men were supposed to do?

Then he saw what was wrong.

A shadow fell across the floor in the hall. The shadow of a person standing quietly outside his door. Someone playing tricks.

“Who's there?”

No one answered. The hair on his calves had risen. The malicious star artist, come to scrawl on his office door? Now, shrilly, “See here, who's there?”

The shadow vanished. He cursed himself for being such a coward and poked his head out into the hall. Empty. Then he saw the shadow coming from behind one of the columns that flanked the turn in the corridor. He knew the form, the silhouette of folds and wrappings. A draped figure. The true goddess who chased him through his days, laid sleep upon his eyes, and caused his watch to stop. At his feet he found a book. The neurology text, given Fräulein ages ago, left out^ side his door. Well, she had supposedly been on her way to medical school, so why not give it to her? But until this very moment, Herr Doktor had not realized how much he hoped she had actually
read
the words.

Why bring the volume? As if to say, Someday I'll be better, and when I'm better I'll study neurology and learn to be a Fräulein Doktor….

“Neurology,” he said to the shadow. “Well, why not? After all, someday you'll go back to your studies. It's an open field at least. Indeed, I should know. Why
not
neurology?”

The shadow from the column wavered as if trembling in a draft. No, she had never read it. Only pawed it, smeared it with bodily matter, tearing out pages. He really ought to stop playing around with his life and try another field before it was too late. Would another hospital take him? Perhaps if he mastered a degree in surgery. Keep this book, though, keep it as a reminder of how he kidded himself for so long, hoping that if only he tried hard enough, listened closely enough, empathized enough,
sacrificed
enough …

The shadow wavered like a ribbon of smoke, threatening to disappear. But instead her voice came back at him.

“You don't know anything,” the shadow said.

As though he'd never know anything. Ever. As if he was immeasurably stupid. And would remain so. Forever.

Her footsteps pattered off. He had half a mind to chase her down, yank her roughly by the arm, and yell, “What do you want from me?” Push her against the cold marble wall, rip away her sheets and turban, while he pried her thighs apart and took her. Shouting, “Is this what you want? Is it? Is it?”

The vision collapsed with a sigh. He was too tired to follow her. He clumped back to his seat, dropping the book on his desk. The cover flew open to a dog-eared page. She had made a streak across the white paper. Ja, he knew the place. Knew it chapter and verse. Knew the very lines she'd been reading. And
now
he knew why she had come up to his office that night. Why she brought him the book. Why she said he knew nothing. She was right. He didn't know anything.