فصل 10

CHAPTER 10

BREUER DIDN’T MOVE when the door shut—and was still sitting, frozen, at his desk when Frau Becker hurried in.

“What happened, Doctor Breuer? Professor Nietzsche just bolted out of your office, muttering that he’d return shortly to get his bill and his books.”

“Somehow I botched everything this afternoon,” said Breuer, and briefly recounted the events of his last hour with Nietzsche. “When, at the end, he picked up and left, I was almost shouting at him.”

“He must have goaded you into it. A sick man comes for treatment, you do your best, then he fights with you about everything you say. My last employer, Doctor Ulrich, would have thrown him out long before, I swear it.” “The man needs help badly.” Breuer got up and, going to the window, mused softly, almost to himself, “Yet he’s too proud to accept it. But this pride of his—it’s part of his illness, just as much as if it were a diseased body organ. So stupid of me to raise my voice at him! There must have been a way to have approached him—to have engaged him, and his pride, in some treatment program.” “If he’s too proud to accept help, how can you treat him? At night, while he’s sleeping?”

There was no response from Breuer, who stood looking out the window, rocking slightly back and forth, full of self-recrimination.

Frau Becker tried again. “Remember a couple of months ago, when you were trying to help that old woman, Frau Kohl, the one who was afraid to leave her room?”

Breuer nodded, still with his back to Frau Becker. “I remember.”

“And then she suddenly broke off treatment just as you had gotten her to the point where she’d walk into another room if you were holding her hand. When you told me about it, I remarked how frustrated you must feel to bring her so close to cure and then have her quit.” Breuer nodded impatiently; he wasn’t clear about the point, if there was one. “So?”

“Then you said something very good. You said that life is long and patients often have long careers in treatment. You said they may learn something from one doctor, carry it inside their heads, and, sometime in the future, be ready to do more. And that meanwhile you had played the role she was ready for.” “So?” Breuer asked again.

“So, maybe that’s true for Professor Nietzsche. Maybe he’ll hear your words when he’s ready—perhaps sometime in the future.”

Breuer turned to look at Frau Becker. He was moved by what she had said. Not so much by the content, for he doubted whether anything that had transpired in his office would ever prove useful to Nietzsche. But by what she had tried to do. When he was in pain, Breuer—unlike Nietzsche—welcomed help.

“I hope you’re right, Frau Becker. And thanks for trying to cheer me up—that’s a new role for you. A few more patients like Nietzsche, and you’ll be an expert at it. Who are we seeing this afternoon? I could do with something simpler—perhaps a case of tuberculosis or congestive heart failure.” Several hours later, Breuer presided over the Friday evening family supper. In addition to his three older children, Robert, Bertha, and Margarethe (Louis had already fed Johannes and Dora), the party of fifteen included three of Mathilde’s sisters, Hanna and Minna—still unmarried—and Rachel with her husband, Max, and their three children, Mathilde’s parents, and an elderly widowed aunt. Freud, who had been expected, was not present—he had sent word that he would be dining alone on bread and water while working up six late hospital admissions. Breuer was disappointed. Still agitated by Nietzsche’s departure, he had looked forward to a discussion with his young friend.

Although Breuer, Mathilde, and all her sisters were partially assimilated “three-day Jews,” observing only the three highest holidays, they sat in respectful silence while Aaron, Mathilde’s father, and Max—the two practicing Jews in the family—chanted prayers over the bread and wine. The Breuers followed no dietary restrictions; but for Aaron’s sake, Mathilde served no pork that evening. Ordinarily, Breuer enjoyed pork, and his favorite dish, a prune-latticed pork roast, was often served at his table. Moreover, Breuer, and Freud as well, were great devotees of the crisp juicy pork wieners sold at the Prater. While walking there, they never failed to stop for a sausage snack.

This meal, like all Mathilde’s meals, began with hot soup—tonight a thick one of barley and lima beans—and was followed by a large carp baked with carrots and onions, and the main course, a succulent goose stuffed with Brussels sprouts.

When the cinnamon-cherry strudel, hot and crisp from the oven, was served, Breuer and Max picked up their plates and walked down the hall to Breuer’s study. For fifteen years after Friday-night dinners, they had always taken their dessert and played chess in the study.

Josef had known Max long before they had married the Altmann sisters. But had they not been brothers-in-law, they would never have remained friends. Though Breuer admired Max’s intelligence, surgical skills, and chess virtuosity, he disliked his brother-in-law’s limited ghetto mentality and vulgar materialism. Sometimes Breuer disliked. even looking at Max: not only was he ugly—bald, blotchy-skinned, and morbidly obese—but he looked old. Breuer tried to forget that he and Max were the same age.

Well, there would be no chess tonight. Breuer told Max he was too agitated and wished to talk instead. He and Max rarely talked intimately; but aside from Freud, Breuer had no other male confidant—in fact, no confidant at all since the departure of Eva Berger, his previous nurse. Now, though he had misgivings about the extent of Max’s sensitivity, he nevertheless plunged in and, for twenty minutes without pause, spoke about Nietzsche, referring to him, of course, as Herr Müller and unburdening himself of everything, even the meeting with Lou Salomé in Venice.

“But, Josef,” Max began in an abrasive, dismissive tone, “why blame yourself? Who could treat such a man? He’s crazy, that’s all! When his head hurts bad enough, he’ll come begging!”

“You don’t understand, Max. Part of his disease is not to accept help. He’s almost paranoid: he suspects the worst of everybody.”

“Josef, Vienna is filled with patients. You and I could work one hundred fifty hours a week and still have to refer patients out every day. Right?”

Breuer didn’t reply.

“Right?” Max asked again.

“That’s not the point, Max.”

“It is the point, Josef. Patients are banging at your door to get in, and here you are begging someone to let you help him. It doesn’t make sense! Why should you beg?” Max reached for a bottle and two small glasses. “Some slivovitz?” Breuer nodded, and Max poured. Despite the fact that the Altmann fortune was founded on wine sales, their small glass of chess slivovitz was the only alcohol either man ever drank.

“Max, listen to me, suppose you have a patient with—Max, you’re not listening. You’re turning your head.”

“I’m listening, I’m listening,” Max insisted.

“Suppose you have a patient with prostatic enlargement and a totally obstructed urethra,” Breuer continued. “Your patient has urinary retention, his retrograde renal pressure is rising, he’s going into uremic poisoning, and yet he absolutely refuses help. Why? Maybe he has senile dementia. Maybe he’s more terrified of your instruments, your catheters, and your tray of steel sounds than of uremia. Maybe he’s psychotic and thinks you’re going to castrate him. So what then? What are you going to do?” “Twenty years in practice,” Max replied, “it’s never happened.”

“But it could. I’m using it to make a point. If it happened, what would you do?”

“It’s his family’s decision, not mine.”

“Max, come on—you’re avoiding the question! Suppose there were no family?”

“How should I know? Whatever they do in the asylums—put him in restraints, anesthetize him, catheterize him, try to dilate his urethra with sounds.”

“Every day? Catheterize him in restraints? Come on, Max, you’d kill him in a week! No, what you would do is try to change his attitude toward you and toward treatment. It’s the same thing when you treat children. Does a child ever want to be treated?” Max ignored Breuer’s point. “And you say you want to hospitalize him and talk to him every day—Josef, look at the time involved! Can he afford so much of your time?”

When Breuer spoke of his patient’s poverty and his plan to use the family-endowed beds and to treat him without a fee, Max grew even more concerned.

“You worry me, Josef! I’ll be frank. I’m truly worried about you. Because a pretty Russian girl whom you don’t even know talks to you, you want to treat a crazy man who doesn’t want to be treated for a condition he denies having. And now you say you want to do it for free. Tell me,” said Max, wagging his finger at Breuer, “who’s crazier, you or him?” “I’ll tell you what’s crazy, Max! What’s crazy is for you always to bring up the money. The interest on Mathilde’s dowry keeps accumulating in the bank. And later, when we each get our share of the Altmann inheritance, you and I both will be swimming in money. I can’t begin to spend all the money that comes in now, and I know you’ve got a lot more than I have. So why bring up money? What’s the point of worrying about whether such-and-such a patient can pay me? Sometimes, Max, you don’t see past money.” “All right, forget the money. Maybe you’re right. Sometimes I don’t know why I’m working or what’s the point of charging anyone. But, thank God, no one hears us: they’d think we were both crazy! Aren’t you going to eat the rest of your strudel?” Breuer shook his head, and Max lifted his plate and slid the pastry onto his own.

“But, Josef, this is not medicine! The patients you treat—this professor—what’s he got? The diagnosis? A cancer of his pride? That Pappenheim girl who was afraid of drinking water, wasn’t she the one who suddenly couldn’t speak German any more, only English? And every day developed a new paralysis? And that young boy who thought he was the emperor’s son, and that lady who was afraid to leave her room. Craziness! You didn’t have the best training in Vienna to work with craziness!” After eating Breuer’s strudel in one mammoth bite and washing it down with a second glass of slivovitz, Max resumed. “You’re the finest diagnostician in Vienna. No one in this city knows more than you about respiratory diseases or about equilibrium. Everyone knows your research! Mark my words—some day they’ll have to invite you into the National Academy. If you weren’t a Jew, you’d be a professor now, everyone knows that. But if you keep treating these crazy conditions, what will happen to your reputation? The anti-Semites will say, ‘See, see, see!’”—Max stabbed the air with his finger—“That’s why! That’s why he’s not the professor of medicine. He is not fit, he is not sound!” “Max, let’s play chess.” Breuer jerked open the chess box and angrily spilled the pieces onto the board. “Tonight I say I want to talk to you because I’m upset, and look how you help me! I’m crazy, my patients are crazy, and I should throw them out the door. I’m ruining my reputation, I should squeeze florins I don’t need——” “No, no! I took the money part back!”

“Is this a way to help? You don’t listen to what I ask.”

“Which is? Tell me again. I’ll listen better.” Max’s large, mobile face grew suddenly earnest.

“I had in my office today a man who needs help, who is a suffering patient—and I handled him poorly. I can’t correct the situation with this patient, Max, it’s finished with him. But I’m seeing more neurotic patients, and I have to understand how to work with them. It’s a whole new field. No textbooks. There are thousands of patients out there who need help—but no one knows how to help them!” “I don’t know anything about this, Josef. More and more you work with thinking and the brain. I’m at the opposite end, I——” Max chortled. Breuer braced himself. “The apertures I talk to don’t talk back. But I can tell you one thing—I get the feeling you were competing with this professor, just like you used to do with Brentano in philosophy class. Do you remember the day he snapped at you? Twenty years ago and I remember like yesterday. He said, ‘Herr Breuer, why don’t you try to learn what I have to teach rather than prove how much I don’t know?’” Breuer nodded. Max continued, “Well, that’s what your consultation sounds like to me. Even your ploy of trying to trap this Muller by quoting his own book. That wasn’t smart—how could you win? If the trap fails, he wins. If the trap works, then he’s so angry he wouldn’t cooperate anyway.” Breuer sat silent, fingering the chess pieces while he considered Max’s words. “Maybe you’re right. You know, I felt even at the time that probably I shouldn’t have tried quoting his book. I shouldn’t have listened to Sig. I had a premonition that quoting his words to him wasn’t clever, but he kept parrying me, goading me into a competitive relationship. It’s funny, you know—all during my consultation I kept thinking of playing chess. I’d spring this trap on him, he’d get out of it and spring one on me. Maybe it was me; you say I was like that at school. But I haven’t been that way with a patient in years, Max. I think it’s something in him—he pulls it from me, maybe from everyone, and then calls it human nature. And he believes that it is! That’s where his whole philosophy goes wrong.” “See, Josef, you’re still doing it, trying to punch holes in his philosophy. You say he’s a genius. If he’s such a genius, maybe you should learn from him instead of trying to beat him!”

“Good, Max, that’s good! I don’t like it, but it sounds right. It helps.” Breuer drew a deep breath and exhaled noisily. “Now let’s play. I’ve been thinking about a new answer to the queen’s gambit.”

Max played a queen’s gambit, and Breuer responded with a bold center-counter gambit, only to find himself in deep trouble eight moves later. Max cruelly forked Breuer’s bishop and knight with a pawn and, without looking up from the board, said, “Josef, as long as we talk such talk tonight, let me talk, too. Maybe it’s not my business, but I can’t close my ears. Mathilde tells Rachel that you haven’t touched her in months.” Breuer studied the board for a few more minutes and, after realizing he had no escape from the fork, took Max’s pawn before answering him. “Yes, it’s bad. Very bad. But, Max, how can I talk to you about it? I might as well talk directly into Mathilde’s ear, because I know you talk to your wife, and she talks to her sister.” “No, believe me, I can keep secrets from Rachel. I’ll tell you a secret: if Rachel knew about what’s going on with me and my new nurse, Fraulein Wittner, I’d be out on my ass—last week! It’s like you and Eva Berger—screwing around with nurses must run in the family.” Breuer studied the chessboard. He was troubled by Max’s comment. So that was how the community viewed his relationship with Eva! Though the charge was untrue, he felt guilty nonetheless about one moment of great sexual temptation. In a momentous conversation several months ago, Eva had told him she feared he was on the brink of entering a ruinous liaison with Bertha, and had offered “to do anything” to help him free himself from his obsession with his young patient. Hadn’t Eva been offering herself sexually? Breuer had been certain of it. But the demon “but” had intervened, and in this, as in so many other ways, he could not bring himself to act. Yet he often thought about Eva’s offer and sorely regretted his missed opportunity!

Now Eva was gone. And he had never been able to set things right with her. After he discharged her, she never spoke to him again and had ignored his offers of money or assistance in obtaining a new position. Though he could never undo his failure to defend her against Mathilde, he determined now that he could at least defend her against Max’s accusations.

“No, Max, you’ve got it wrong. I’m no angel, but I swear I never touched Eva. She was just a friend, a good friend.”

“Sorry, Josef, I guess I just put myself in your place and then assumed that you and Eva——”

“I can see how you’d think that. We had an unusual friendship. She was a confidante, we spoke about everything together. She got a terrible reward after all those years of working for me. I should never have knuckled under to Mathilde’s anger. I should have stood up to her.” “Is that why you and Mathilde are—you know—estranged?”

“Maybe I do hold that against Mathilde, but that’s not the real problem in our marriage. It’s much more than that, Max. But I don’t know what it is. Mathilde is a good wife. Oh, I hated the way she acted about Bertha and Eva. But in one way she was right—I paid more attention to them than to her. What happens now, though, is strange. When I look at her, I still think she’s beautiful.” “And?”

“And I just can’t touch her. I turn away. I don’t want her to come close.”

“Maybe that’s not so uncommon. Rachel’s no Mathilde, but she’s a good-looking woman, and yet I have more interest in Fraulein Wittner—who, I must admit, looks a little like a frog. Some days when I walk down the Kirstenstrasse and see twenty, thirty whores lined up, I’m very tempted. None of them are prettier than Rachel, many have gonorrhea or syphilis, but still I’m tempted. If I knew for sure no one would recognize me, who knows? I might! Everyone gets tired of the same meal. You know, Josef, for every beautiful woman out there, there exists some poor man who is tired of shtupping her!” Breuer never liked to encourage Max in his vulgar mode, but couldn’t help smiling at his aphorism—true in its own gross way. “No, Max, it’s not boredom. That’s not the problem for me.”

“Maybe you should get yourself checked out. Several urologists are writing about sex function. Did you read Kirsch’s paper about diabetes causing impotence? Now that the taboo about talking about it is lifted, it’s obvious that impotence is far more common than we thought.” “Impotent I’m not,” replied Breuer. “Even though I’ve stayed away from sex, there’s lots of juice flowing. That Russian girl, for example. And I’ve had the same kind of thoughts as you about the prostitutes on Kirstenstrasse. In fact, part of the problem is I have so many sexual thoughts about another woman that I feel guilty touching Mathilde.” Breuer noticed how Max’s self-revelations made it easier for him to talk. Perhaps Max, in his own crude way, could have handled Nietzsche better than he.

“But even that’s not the main thing,” Breuer found himself continuing, “it’s something else! Something more diabolical inside me. You know, I think about leaving. I would never do it, but over and over again I think of just picking up and leaving—Mathilde, the children, Vienna—everything. I keep getting this crazy thought, and I know it’s crazy—you don’t have to tell me, Max—that all my problems would be solved if I could only find a way to get away from Mathilde.” Max shook his head, sighed, then captured Breuer’s bishop, and began to mount an invincible queen’s side attack. Breuer settled back heavily into his chair. How was he going to live through ten, twenty, thirty more years of losing to Max’s French defense and the infernal queen’s gambit?