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

actually snoozing after a heavy luncheon, as her father does sometimes in his study. Has he drunk a few beers or glasses of wine? He might, after all, be a drinker or even take drugs. Who knows? He sports too neat a waistcoat, too shiny a gold fob watch, and too neatly clipped a beard and mustache. He probably visits a barber daily and goes for his stroll on the Ringstrasse, marching along doggedly with a distracted gaze, like all the good bourgeois of Vienna: the very earnest sort of person who is trying too hard. He is not as elegant, or playful, or aristocratic as her auburn-haired, blue-eyed father, or nearly as handsome, though the doctor does have bright eyes that seem to see her. Nor does he have any of her father’s charm, but perhaps that is just as well. He is not an ugly man, though quite old, of course, as old as her father, as old as Herr Z.
    She speaks into the silence, “In the beginning, I could keep up with my brother, as he shared many of the books he read at the
Gymnasium
,
but now since he has continued with his studies at the university, where I am not allowed to go, he has passed me by. He is interested in things in the wider world. He worries so about the poor weavers who work in such difficult conditions, for such long hours, and for so little money in Father’s factories in Bohemia. Like my uncle, Karl, he is always talking about politics, about how he wishes to do something useful for his fellow man.
    “But what possibilities do I have to help my fellow man or even myself, for that matter? And though he always
says
he loves me, and I know he does, what has my brother ever done for
me
in reality? He almost always takes Mother’s side in the end,” she says and clenches her fists against the rug on the couch.
    She runs her fingers over the silky soft Persian rug which covers the couch where she lies, wondering why something that belongs on the floor should have been put on a couch.
    She traces the zigzag of the pattern of white birds and the strange winged creatures with fanned tails. She is in a cocoon spun of silken threads by skilled hands. The doctor and her father are trying to lull her into a false sense of security with all this false luxury, this appearance of calm, the shutters drawn on the afternoon sun, the inner courtyard sounds muffled by thick walls, the silky carpet to caress her body, so that she will tell them her secrets, but she knows she is in danger in this place.
    She has been carried off by her father into this dim, silent, shadowy room, an Aladdin’s cave or perhaps even the lion’s den, and if she doesn’t speak, if she doesn’t find the right words, like Scheherazade she will be put to death. This doctor trades in dangerous secrets in this small dark room, she suspects. What will he do with hers should she be so foolish as to share them with him?
    From the doctor’s silence, she deduces he is not particularly interested in her studies or lack thereof, nor the injustice of her brother being able to study when she cannot.
    “I have tried to learn what he was learning by reading on my own or with the fräulein and going to visit museums. Like you, I am interested in art. I have been to the Secessionist show several times.”
    She wonders whether the doctor has so many art objects in his cluttered consulting rooms because he is afraid of emptiness, of space, of silence. What did the art teacher in the evening class call that? Something like
horror vacui
?
    She stares at all the ancient figurines, deities and seers perhaps, from different places and ages that the doctor has collected. She doesn’t feel his answer to her question about them explained anything. She likes the little statue of a child, perhaps Roman, who has an old face, because it looks the way she feels, an adolescent who is already old. But he says nothing about that so she goes on, still bent on impressing him with what she considers her valiant efforts to learn.
    “I love listening to music. I play