The Little Book (46 page)

Wheeler stood rooted to his place beside the road in the Prater as the carriage disappeared into the distance and until he could no longer hear the sound of the horses. He turned and looked back at Dilly who was approaching him cautiously.

“That wasn’t—” Dilly said, looking stunned.

They both looked down into Wheeler’s hand, at the small packet enclosed in an embroidered handkerchief. Slowly, Wheeler unwrapped the cloth until the contents lay exposed in his palm. Neither man dared breath.

Wheeler’s outstretched palm held a man’s large gold ring, studded on the sides with small diamonds, each one worthy of being the centerpiece of a necklace or brooch. In the center was a huge emerald.

Dilly exhaled in disbelief. “It’s Crown Prince Rudolf’s.” He leaned in closer to examine it. “It must be worth a fortune.”

On the way home in the cab, they discussed what Wheeler might do with the ring to keep it safe, and Dilly suggested entrusting it immediately to a bank. “It is a godsend,” he said. “There is enough there to support you for a long time.”

“To support us both.”

Dilly looked up at him sadly. Suddenly the hollowness had returned to his eyes. “I won’t be here much longer, I fear. My stay is of the shorter variety.”

“You don’t need to go. We can be here in Vienna for a long time. There is no reason—”

“You don’t understand.” Dilly had a look of quiet patience in his eyes. “I don’t have a long time.”

Wheeler could not speak. One look at his father’s face told the whole story. He shook his head. “But why?” He brought his hands up in a gesture of frustration.

“It was so when I came. It was just a chance for some extra time. An escape from the awful situation I was in.”

“You knew that when you arrived?”

“I suspected it. I mean, I couldn’t really be very upset. The pain was gone. I hoped desperately for a release from where I was, and suddenly I drifted to Vienna. It has been wonderful. I have seen my father. And my mother—” He paused and looked out the window. “My beautiful mother.” Then he looked back at Wheeler. “And you. I have had the luxury of knowing my son as a grown man and seeing what a fine person you grew to become. You have not finished telling me about yourself, about how you have been spending your adulthood. You will have to do that soon.” He nodded slowly and smiled. “It has been a happy time for me. I do not mind passing slowly away.”

“We can get you some help,” Wheeler said desperately. “Vienna is a medical center of the world.”

Dilly smiled and shook his head slowly. “How would you describe my ailment, let alone my circumstance?” He placed his hand on Wheeler’s. “I think you have to accept what is happening and be grateful for the time we have had. You did not know your father, and now you do.”

“How can you just accept it? That doesn’t sound like the famous Dilly Burden fortitude. Where is all that legendary willpower?”

“There is no alternative,” he said, still smiling. “I was given time.” He closed his eyes dreamily.

“I am not just going to let you drift off.” But Dilly was not listening.

“I have only one regret, you know—”

"I’m going to insist that we get some help. I’m going to take you to Dr. Freud at least.”

“I was hoping to see your mother again.” His eyes were still closed. “How wonderful that would have been. The crowning glory of this wonderful dream.”

Wheeler gave in finally to Dilly’s reverie and watched the Danube Canal pass by out the window on the way back to Frau Bauer’s, planning how he could get medical help to this man he had grown to love. It occurred to him in that moment and later that he had grown up with the legend of this man, a legend that had always filled him with awe. Now, he had gotten to know the real man underneath, and his affection had grown and deepened. “I think we came here to get to know each other,” he said finally.

Dilly took a long appraising look before speaking. “You know,” he said, “I think you are right.” He was smiling exuberantly.

That same afternoon Wheeler had stopped in at a few banks on the Kartnerstrasse to find out about depositing valuable jewelry for safekeeping. He had stepped into a small street to take a shortcut, hurrying along, not watching ahead, when he looked up to find a man square in his path. Both men stopped short to avoid a collision. He found himself staring into the angry face of Frank Burden. “You!” the younger man exclaimed.

Wheeler stood motionless. “You stole from me,” Frank Burden said, with a look of deep hatred in his blue eyes, his hands beginning to shake.

The two men remained paralyzed for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes. And then instinct grabbed Wheeler Burden and he bolted sideways, and in a move he had used scores of times as a famous rock-and-roll icon, he flew into a shop doorway, rushed past the few customers to the back and out through the storeroom to the alley, into a neighboring storeroom, out through the new shop door back onto the street, and gone. For a second time, Frank Burden was left behind shaking with a rage that had now become almost uncontrollable.

49

How Like a Nightmare

The story of the child in Lambach must have become for Sigmund Freud a fascinating and disturbing strand, one that he must have resisted pursuing for fear it might hinder the free flowing of the rest of Herr Burden’s complex tale, but one that now, after the meetings were no more, he had trouble getting off his mind.

A child with a sinister future, one of mythic proportion, was the antithesis of Hannibal, Theseus, Oedipus, and Joan of Arc, the heroic savior, one who was destined as an adult to pull the whole world into his hatred. How like the archetypal evil one he must have seemed, like the devil, the Antichrist, Beelzebub. “If man creates a perfect god,” he would conjecture later, “man must create a perfect evil.” It was a story about which Herr Burden seemed to know a good deal and was eager to discuss. It was clearly detailed consistently in the journal, making for meaty analysis. Freud had discovered that the details of myths and dreams and the delusions of hysterical patients all came from the rich and incredibly imaginative material of the human unconscious mind. And the imaginings he now had before him in Herr Burden’s complicated fabricated story were the richest he could imagine.

What he could piece together as summary was roughly this. The child, an Austrian, subject of excessive abuse by his father and lack of success in school, grows up to become the tyrannical and charismatic dictator of a unified Germany in the 1930s. Germany, in the meantime, has suffered humiliation and abuse itself after having lost a war in the early 1900s to England, France, and America. The aged empire of Austria-Hungary has completely disintegrated and vanished. Through the use of fear, propaganda, and violence, the demonic leader rallies his fallen country, stimulates industrial and military might, and returns Germany to a position of international power. Once in control of this power he launches a campaign of world conquest and extermination of an obvious scapegoat, the Jews. His actions cause a global war, world conflagration, and an eventual crumbling of his dynasty, but not before he has caused the systematic torture and deaths of millions of undesirables, mostly Jews. In the end, history books depict him as the most evil of figures.

While in so many ways unbelievable and grandiose, the story, a myth of the future, contains within it some fascinating details, projections of Herr Burden’s own fears and uncertainties and grandiosities.

The abusive father of the child of Lambach—no doubt abused himself as a child—was a petty civil servant of questionable lineage. He was born out of wedlock with an uncertain father, possibly a wealthy Jewish employer of the mother. It is interesting to point out here that it is not unusual in the case of mythic heroes for the parentage to appear to be mysterious. Moses and Oedipus were both foundlings, raised as princes. In this case, the illegitimate civil servant subjects his young son to regular beatings and humiliations, while the passive mother submits. The son is scarred by the beatings, but also by the tacit approval of the mother. The father, vile perpetrator of the injustices, is held up by family and society as the subject of respect and admiration. The whole world accepts the outrageous injustices as the normal course in life. The abused child becomes both respectful overtly, as the dutiful child, and resentful underneath. In this case, the mythic child of Lambach represses his monumental rage until he rises to power, with epic consequences.

The child dreams of a rise to omnipotence and the ability to turn on the abusive father, but the child of Lambach’s father is dead by the time the boy is fourteen, and the rage, which has now reached such enormous proportions, is further repressed until it can find some legitimate outlet for its release.

That outlet comes only when the adult is proclaimed chancellor of Germany. The rage is released against the scapegoated Jews and against the countries that have been strangling the oppressed Germany ever since the unsuccessful war, with catastrophic consequences that destroy cathedrals, cities, and an entire race.

How like our nightmares is this tale. The repressed rage we feel growing inside threatens to set off a world conflagration. Feeling helpless and downtrodden himself, the abused child responds not with sympathy to the downtrodden around him, but with contempt and systematic abuse in much the same way that a beaten child in turn beats his lowly dog. Ever attentive and ever suspicious, the perceptive doctor would be wondering the entire time how this grandiose story related to the humble childhood of the story’s teller.

Much as modern Viennese politicians von Schönerer and Lueger have used anti-Semitism as a rallying call for the masses, Herr Burden’s mythic twentieth-century demagogue in Germany and Austria used blatant anti-Semitism to rally millions of otherwise disparate non-Jews to his cause. According to Herr Burden’s reality, anti-Semitism became so extreme in Germany in the 1930s that Jews were taunted and beaten in the streets by special police. A Jew coming home with a bottle of milk, helpless to protect himself, could expect to have the contents of the bottle poured on his head by a brown-shirted trooper, in much the same way that a child is helpless before the tyrannies of the abusive but enfranchised parent. Jews learned to submit quietly rather than risk further injury and death.

Then, according to the patient’s tale, Jews were rounded up and shipped in cattle cars to extermination camps in Poland, designed as a final solution by the child of Lambach whose hatred has found ultimate and terrifying release. The malevolent leader is quoted at one point as saying, “If the Jews had not existed, we would have had to invent them.” But what is anti-Semitism if it is not hatred of the Jew in oneself?

Dr. Freud would have found particularly interesting in the patient’s tale that this leader was purportedly unable to have normal sexual relations. He developed such a bizarre set of sexual practices—involving being urinated on before he could attain satisfaction—that he never married or produced children of his own to abuse.

What is hatred but repressed rage at the parent? Here we have a mythic character whose repressed anger and sense of humiliation was so great that it could poison a whole nation and nearly destroy the world. And there is more.

Herr Burden even draws a number of comparisons between this mythical Hitler and the Archduke Rudolf. Claiming to have facts at his disposal not available to the general public in 1897, he speculates on the nature of the relationship between the crown prince and his father, the Emperor Franz Joseph. Apparently, Rudolf, a liberal, wished to lead Austria-Hungary away from dependence on Germany. He hated the young, belligerent Kaiser Wilhelm, his cousin, and wanted to move toward alliances with France and an embracing of the Slavic influences throughout the empire. The conservative father found his son’s overtures offensive and thwarted him, rebuking and humiliating him publicly. Filled with frustration and self-loathing Rudolf killed himself, in the ultimate omnipotent act of self-destruction and revenge against the harsh father. Rudolf’s self-hatred is simply hatred of his father?

A sensitive and artistic young man, Rudolf destroyed himself instead of waiting patiently to gain control of the whole Hapsburg empire. The mythical child of Lambach, born humbly, would rise to power on his own initiative and destroy a nation and a race in the process. How similar they are, and how revealing of the damaged psyche of the storyteller.

And what of this child of Lambach himself? Did such a child actually exist? Is there in such a child an innate goodness that is slowly being eroded and reshaped by his base treatment, or does he possess from the start an innate evil that fate and circumstance simply put in the right place at the right time? By age ten is it perhaps too late to change the direction in which his life will run, or would it be possible to lift the child out of his base circumstance and place him in a foster home where love and affectionate attention could perhaps nurture in him compassion and empathy?

Freud must have given much thought to his duty in this case. He knew enough to believe that this Adolf Hitler was in fact a real young man in Lambach and that Herr Burden and a colleague had paid the young man an anonymous visit. If either man wished to do ill to this child of supposed evil destiny, should Freud intercede in the child’s behalf?

On the other hand, Herr Burden is faced with an intriguing moral dilemma. According to the patient’s tale, both he and his colleague believe that the child in Lambach is in fact the childlike manifestation of the man who will bring so much harm and evil to the world. Imagine having that power and knowledge. Imagine similarly a man of 1897 finding himself in Corsica in 1775 in the presence of the child Napoleon Bonaparte. Could he not save the world much bloodshed and agony by putting an end to the child’s life, right then and there? Would he in fact change history, or would another character with similar motives and aspirations, perhaps even worse, rise up to fill the void? Would he have an obligation to allow history to unfold as it was intended without taking any action whatsoever?