Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler Read Free Book Online Page A

at the memory, seeing herself running fast, laughing in the woods that were close to their home, teasing her nursemaid, going through light and shade, running away from the poor, stout, breathless woman in her white cap and apron. She had even tormented her poor brother, touching his bed when he didn’t want her to. “Please don’t touch my bed,” he would say miserably, and she would do it again with the tip of her finger just to torment him.
    As she lies there a memory comes to her unbidden, and she finds herself telling the doctor: “Sometimes I was even cruel. I remember making a ring with some other girls—it was at my cousin’s house, I think, at a birthday party, holding hands and circling a poor girl, a foreigner who came from England. We taunted her, telling her she had killed Joan of Arc. ‘You killed Joan of Arc!’ we shouted at her. I suppose we must have learned about it in some history lesson as being the fault of the English.
    “In those days I didn’t have any trouble with my voice or my bowels. The whole world seemed a brighter place, lit up, sunny, and clear. I felt so clever. Everything came easily to me. Sometimes I would even sign my letters ‘from an undiscovered genius,’” she says and giggles at the thought. “I was not quite sure whether I would be a great writer or a great musician, but something great, I was certain. I knew I couldn’t be a painter as I was no good at that, though I do love to look at paintings. There
were
famous women writers, were there not, like the English writers Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, but the only great women musicians I could think of were sisters or wives: Mozart’s sister and Schumann’s wife, Clara. I wonder if I’ll be known only as Otto’s sister?” she asks the doctor and giggles.
    The doctor does not giggle. He says nothing to all of this. He probably thinks she is far from a genius. He probably thinks there is no such thing as a girl genius, or certainly no girl who needs to tell her story to the world. Yet how important it seems to her to record what she imagines and feels, to share it with someone even if it is only her secret diary.
    She hears nothing but the ticking of the clock, the occasional crackle of the fire that burns in the tiled stove, and the muffled sounds from the courtyard, the voice of a servant girl shouting out something.
    “A wild girl? In what way?” the doctor asks eventually.
    She tries to go on with her tale, her cough interrupting her words: “I felt I was just as clever as my brilliant brother—though perhaps he has a better memory than I do. He can quote endlessly from books. Did you know he wrote a play about Napoléon when he was just nine? Still I felt that there was little he could do better than I could, and certain things I understood much better than he did.”
    The doctor does not show much interest or comment on her brother. Many years later, when Otto has indeed become famous, a charismatic social leader, she will learn that the doctor has advised him not to try and make people happy, because that is not what they really want.
    Still she continues, “We were inseparable. I loved—still love him so much, more than my life. One of my earliest memories is of sitting very close to him with my arm around his neck and pulling on his earlobe and sucking my thumb. We were sitting up in the bay window in the nursery, and it was almost as if he were part of me, and I were part of him,” she says, so sad in the silence of this dim room that what she remembers is no longer the case—that she is now here alone with this silent, distant man.
    What
is
the doctor doing back there? What is he thinking? She doesn’t hear him writing down her words or even moving. Could he have passed out, fainted, as she has done before? Is he dead? She doesn’t dare look back. She is like Orpheus in the underworld, unable to look back or the doctor will disappear. She doesn’t want him to disappear.
    Or perhaps he is