فصل 21

CHAPTER 21

RELEASING THE PIGEONS was almost as hard as saying farewell to his family. Breuer wept as he unclasped the wire doors and hoisted the cages up to the open window. At first the pigeons seemed not to understand. They looked up from the golden grain in their food dish and stared uncomprehendingly at Breuer, whose gesticulating arms enjoined them to fly for their freedom.

It was only when he jostled and banged their cages that the pigeons fluttered through the open jaws of their prison and, without once looking back at their keeper, flew into the blood-streaked early morning sky. Breuer watched their flight with sorrow: every silver-blue wing flap signified the ending of his scientific research career.

Long after the sky had emptied, he continued to stare out the window. It had been the most painful day of his life, and he was still numb from his confrontation with Mathilde earlier that morning. Again and again, he repeated the scene in his mind and searched for more graceful and painless ways he might have informed her that he was leaving.

“Mathilde,” he had told her, “there is no way to say this but simply to say it: I must have my freedom. I feel trapped—not by you, but by destiny. And a destiny not of my choosing.”

Astonished and frightened, Mathilde had merely stared at him.

He had continued. “Suddenly I am old. I find myself an old man entombed in a life—a profession, a career, a family, a culture. Everything has been assigned to me. I chose nothing. I must give myself a chance! I must have an opportunity to find myself.” “A chance?” Mathilde replied. “Find yourself? Josef, what are you saying? I don’t understand. What is it you ask?”

“I ask nothing from you! I ask something of myself. I have to change my life! Otherwise, I shall face my death without ever feeling I have lived.”

“Josef, this is madness!” Mathilde’s voice rose. Her eyes grew wide with fear. “What has happened to you? Since when is there a your life and a my life? We share a life; we made a covenant to combine our lives.”

“But how could I give something before it was mine to give?”

“I don’t understand you any longer. ‘Freedom,’ ‘finding yourself,’ ‘never having lived’—your words make no sense to me. What is happening to you, Josef? To us?” Mathilde could speak no further. She crammed both fists into her mouth, whirled away from him, and began to sob.

Josef had watched her body heave. He moved closer to her. She fought for breath, her head bent down on the sofa arm, her tears falling to her lap, her breasts rippling with her sobs. Wishing to console her, he placed his hand on her shoulder—only to feel her recoil. It was then, at that moment, that he realized he had come to a fork in the course of his life. He had turned off, away from the crowd. He had made the break. His wife’s shoulder, her back, her breasts, were no longer his; he had relinquished the right to touch her, and now he would have to face the world without the shelter of her flesh.

“It’s best if I go immediately, Mathilde. I can’t tell you where I’m going. It’s better if I don’t know myself. I shall leave instructions for all business matters with Max. I leave you everything and shall take nothing with me except the clothes on my back, a small valise, and enough money to feed myself.” Mathilde continued to cry. She seemed unable to respond. Had she even heard his words?

“When I know where I am, I’ll contact you.”

Still no response.

“I must go away. I must make a change and take control of my life. I think that when I am able to choose my destiny, we will both be better off. Perhaps I will choose the same life, but it has to be a choice, my choice.”

Still there had been no response from the weeping Mathilde. Breuer had left the room in a daze.

The whole conversation had been a cruel mistake, he thought, as he closed the pigeon cages and carried them back to his laboratory shelf. There remained in one cage four pigeons unable to fly because surgical experiments had damaged their equilibrium. He knew he should sacrifice them before he left, but he wanted no more responsibility for anyone or anything. Instead, he replenished their water and food and left them to their fate.

No, I should never have talked to her about freedom, choice, entrapment, destiny, finding myself. How could she understand me? I scarcely understand myself. When Friedrich first spoke to me in that language, I couldn’t comprehend him. Other words would have been better—perhaps “brief sabbatical,” “professional exhaustion,” “an extended visit to a North African spa.” Words she could understand. And she could offer them as explanation to the family, to the community.

My God, what will she say to everyone? In what kind of position is she left? No, stop! That’s her responsibility! Not mine. To annex the responsibility of others—that way lies entrapment, for me and for them.

Breuer’s meditations were interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Mathilde flung the door open, slamming it against the wall. She looked ghastly, her face pale, her hair hanging down in disarray, her eyes inflamed.

“I’ve stopped crying, Josef. And now I shall answer you. There is something wrong, something evil, in what you just said to me. And something simple-minded, too. Freedom! Freedom! You speak of freedom. What a cruel joke to me! I wish I had had your freedom—the freedom of a man to obtain an education, to choose a profession. Never before have I wished so hard for an education—I wish I had the vocabulary, the logic, to demonstrate to you just how foolish you sound!” Mathilde stopped and pulled a chair away from the desk. Refusing Breuer’s help, she sat silently for a moment to catch her breath.

“You want to leave? You want to make new life choices? Have you forgotten the choices you have already made? You chose to marry me. And do you truly not understand that you chose to commit yourself—to me, to us? What is choice if you refuse to honor it? I don’t know what it is—maybe whim or impulse, but it is not choice.” It was frightening to see Mathilde like this. But Breuer knew he had to stand his ground. “I should have become an ‘I’ before I became a ‘we.’ I made choices before I was formed enough to make choices.”

“Then that, too, is a choice,” Mathilde snapped back. “Who is this ‘I’ that didn’t become an I? A year from now you’ll say this ‘I’ of today wasn’t yet formed, and that the choices you make today don’t count. This is just self-trickery, a way to weasel out of responsibility for your choices. At our wedding, when we said yes to the rabbi, we said no to other choices. I could have married others. Easily! There were many who desired me. Wasn’t it you who said I was the most beautiful woman in Vienna?” “I still say it.”

Mathilde hesitated for a moment. Then, brushing away his statement, she continued. “Don’t you understand that you cannot enter a covenant with me and then suddenly say, ‘No, I take it back, I’m not sure after all.’ That’s immoral. Evil.”

Breuer did not answer. He held his breath and imagined flattening his ears, like Robert’s kitten. He knew Mathilde was right. And he knew Mathilde was wrong.

“You want to be able to choose and, at the same time, keep all choices open. You asked me to give up my freedom, what little I had, at least the freedom to choose a husband, and yet you want to keep your precious freedom open—open to satisfy your lust with a twenty-one-year-old patient.” Josef flushed. “So that’s what you think? No, this does not involve Bertha or any other woman.”

“Your words say one thing, your face another. I have no education, Josef—through no choice of mine. But I’m not a fool!”

“Mathilde, don’t belittle my struggle. I’m grappling with the meaning of my Whole life. A man has a duty to others, but he has a higher one to himself. He———”

“And a woman? What about her meaning, her freedom?”

“I don’t mean men, I mean person—men and women—each of us has to choose.”

“I’m not like you. I can’t choose freedom when my choice enslaves others. Have you thought about what your freedom means for me? What kind of choices does a widow, or a deserted wife, have?”

“You are free, just like me. You are young, rich, attractive, healthy.”

“Free? Where is your head today, Josef? Think about it! Where is a woman’s freedom? I was not permitted an education. I went from my father’s house to your house. I had to fight my mother and grandmother even for the freedom to choose my rugs and furniture.” “Mathilde, it’s not reality, but only your attitude toward your culture that imprisons you! A couple of weeks ago I saw a young Russian woman in consultation. Russian women have no greater independence than Viennese women, yet this young woman has claimed her freedom: she defies her family, she demands an education, she exercises her right to choose the life she wants. And so can you! You’re free to do anything you want. You’re rich! You can change your name and move to Italy!” “Words, words, words! A thirty-six-year-old Jewess traveling free. Josef, you talk like a fool! Wake up! Live in reality, not in words! What about the children? Change my name! Shall each of them, too, choose a new name?”

“Remember, Mathilde, you wanted nothing more than to have children, as soon as we were married. Children and more children. I pleaded with you to wait.”

She held back her angry words and turned her head away from him.

“I can’t tell you how to be free, Mathilde. I can’t design your path for you because then it would no longer be your path. But, if you have the courage, I know you can find the way.”

She rose and walked to the door. Turning to face him, she spoke in measured terms: “Listen to me, Josef! You want to find freedom and make choices? Then know that this very moment is a choice. You tell me that you need to choose your life—and that, in time, you may choose to resume your life here.

“But Josef, I choose my life, too. And I choose to say to you there is no return. You can never resume your life with me as your wife because when you walk out of this house today I will no longer be your wife. You cannot choose to return to this home because it will no longer be your home!” Josef closed his eyes and bowed his head. The next sounds he heard were the door slamming and Mathilde’s steps descending the stairs. He felt staggered by the blows he had absorbed, but also strangely exhilarated. Mathilde’s words were terrible. But she was right! This decision had to be irreversible.

Now it is done, he thought. Something is finally happening to me, something real, not just thoughts, but something in the real world. Over and over, I’ve envisioned this scene. Now I feel it! Now I know what it’s like to take control of my destiny. It is terrible, and wonderful.

He finished his packing, then kissed each of his sleeping children, and softly whispered goodbye to them. Only Robert stirred, murmuring, “Where are you going, Father?” but immediately fell back to sleep. How strangely painless it was! Breuer marveled at the way he had numbed his feelings to protect himself. He lifted his valise and descended the stairs to his office, where he spent the remainder of the morning writing long notes of instruction to Frau Becker and to the three physicians to whom he would turn over his patients.

Should he write letters of explanation to his friends? He wavered. Wasn’t this the time to break all ties with his former life? Nietzsche had said that a new self has to be built on the ashes of his old life. But then he recalled that Nietzsche himself had continued to correspond with a few old friends. If even Nietzsche could not cope with complete isolation, why should he ask more of himself?

So he wrote letters of farewell to his closest friends: to Freud, Ernst Fleishl, and Franz Brentano. To each he described his motivations for leaving while acknowledging that these reasons, sketched in a brief letter, might seem insufficient or incomprehensible. “Trust me,” he urged each, “this is not a frivolous act. I have significant grounds for my actions, all of which I shall reveal to you at a later date.” Toward Fleishl, his pathologist friend who had seriously infected himself while dissecting a cadaver, Breuer felt particular guilt: for years he had offered him medical and psychological support and now would be removing it. He also felt guilty toward Freud, who depended on him not only for friendship and professional advice but also for financial support. Even though Sig was fond of Mathilde, Breuer hoped that, in time, he would understand and forgive his decision. To his letter, Breuer added a separate note officially canceling all of Freud’s debts to the Breuers.

He wept as he descended the stairs of Backerstrasse 7 for the last time. While he waited for the district Dientsmann to fetch Fischmann, he meditated on the brass plaque by the front door: DOCTOR JOSEF BREUER, CONSULTANT—SECOND FLOOR. The plaque would not be there when he next visited Vienna. Nor would his office. Oh, the granite and bricks and the second floor would be there, but they would no longer be his bricks; his office would soon lose the odor of his existence. He had experienced the same feeling of dislocation whenever he had visited his childhood home—the small house which reeked of both intense familiarity and the most painful indifference. It housed another struggling family, perhaps another boy of great promise who many years hence might grow up to be a physician.

But he, Josef, was not necessary: he would be forgotten, his place swallowed by time and the existence of others. He would die sometime in the next ten to twenty years. And he would die alone: no matter the companionship, he thought, one always dies alone.

He cheered himself with the thought that if man is alone and necessity an illusion, then he is free! Yet as he boarded his fiacre, his cheer gave way to a sense of oppression. He looked at the other apartments on the street. Was he being watched? Were his neighbors staring out of every window? Surely they must be aware of this momentous event taking place! Would they know tomorrow? Would Mathilde, assisted by her sisters and her mother, throw his clothes into the street? He had heard of angry wives doing that.

His first stop was Max’s home. Max was expecting him because, the day before, immediately after his cemetery discussion with Nietzsche, Breuer had confided in him his decision to leave his life in Vienna and had asked him to handle Mathilde’s financial affairs.

Again, Max strenuously attempted to dissuade him from this impetuous and ruinous course of action. To no avail; Breuer was resolute. Finally Max tired and appeared resigned to his brother-in-law’s decision. For an hour the two men huddled over the file of the family financial records. When Breuer prepared to leave, however, Max suddenly stood up and blocked the doorway with his huge body. For a moment, especially when Max spread his arms, Breuer feared an attempt to restrain him physically. But Max simply wanted to embrace him. His voice broke as he croaked, “So, it’s no chess tonight? My life will never be the same, Josef. I’ll miss you horribly. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” Too overcome to respond in words, Breuer hugged Max and quickly left the house. In the fiacre, he instructed Fischmann to drive him to the train station and, just before they arrived, told him that he was off on a very long trip. He gave him two months’ wages and promised to contact him when he returned to Vienna.

As he waited to board the train, Breuer scolded himself for not telling Fischmann that he would never be returning. “To treat him so casually—how could you? After ten years together?” Then he pardoned himself. There was only so much he could bear in a single day.

He was heading to the small town of Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, where Bertha had been hospitalized at the Bellevue Sanatorium for the past few months. He was puzzled by his dazed mental state. Just when and how had he made the decision to visit Bertha?

As the train rumbled into movement, he put his head back on the cushion, closed his eyes, and meditated on the events of the day.

Friedrich was right: All along, my freedom has been here for the taking! I could have seized my life years ago. Vienna is still standing. Life will go on without me. My absence would have happened anyway, ten or twenty years from now. From a cosmic perspective, what difference does it make? I am already forty years old: my younger brother has been dead for eight years, my father for ten, my mother for thirty-six. Now, while I can still see and walk, I shall take some small fraction of my life for myself—is that too much to demand? I am so tired of service, so tired of taking care of others. Yes, Friedrich was right. Shall I remain yoked to the plow of duty forever? Shall I, throughout all eternity, live a life I regret?

He tried to sleep, but each time he nodded off, visions of the children drifted into his mind. He winced with pain to think of them without a father. Friedrich is right, he reminded himself, when he says, “Do not create children until one is ready to be a creator and to spawn creators.” It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future—as though sperm contains your consciousness!

Still, what about the children? They were a mistake, they were forced upon me, begotten before I was aware of my choices. Yet they are here, they exist! About them Nietzsche is silent. And Mathilde has warned that I may never again see them.

Breuer slumped into despair but quickly roused himself. No! Away with such thoughts! Friedrich is right: duty, propriety, faithfulness, selflessness, kindness—these are soporifics that lull one to sleep, a sleep so deep that one awakens, if at all, only at the very end of life. And then only to learn that one has never really lived.

I have only one life, a life that may recur forever. I do not want to regret for all eternity that I lost myself while pursuing my duty to my children.

Now is my chance to build a new self on the ashes of my old life! Then, when I have done that, I shall find my way to my children. Then I shall no longer be tyrannized by Mathilde’s notions of what is socially permitted! Who can block a father’s path to his children? I shall become an axe. I shall hew and slash my way to them! As for today, God help them. I can do nothing. I am drowning and must first save myself.

And Mathilde? Friedrich says that the only way to save this marriage is to give it up! And “Better to break wedlock than be broken by it.” Perhaps Mathilde, too, was broken by wedlock. Perhaps she will be better off without me. Perhaps she was as imprisoned as I. Lou Salomé would say so. How did she put it: that she would never be enslaved by the frailties of another? Perhaps my absence will liberate Mathilde!

It was late in the evening when the train reached Konstanz. Breuer got off and spent the night at a modest train-station hotel; it was time, he told himself, to become acclimated to second- and third-class accommodations. In the morning, he hired a carriage to Kreuzlingen, and the Bellevue Sanatorium. Arriving, he informed the director, Robert Binswanger, that an unexpected consultation request had brought him to Geneva, close enough to the Bellevue to pay a visit to his former patient, Fraulein Pappenheim.

There was nothing unusual about Breuer’s request: he was well known to the Bellevue as a long-time friend of the former director, Ludwig Binswanger, Sr., who had recently died. Dr. Binswanger offered to send for Fraulein Pappenheim immediately. “She’s taking a walk now and discussing her condition with her new physician, Doctor Durkin.” Binswanger stood and walked to the window. “There, in the garden, you can see them.” “No, no, Doctor Binswanger, do not interrupt them. I feel strongly that nothing should take priority over patient-doctor sessions. Besides, the sun is glorious today, I’ve seen too little of it in Vienna lately. If you have no objection, I’ll wait for her in your garden. Also, it would be interesting for me to observe Fraulein Pappenheim’s condition, especially her gait, from an unobtrusive position.” On a lower terrace of the extensive Bellevue gardens, Breuer saw Bertha and her physician strolling back and forth along a path bordered by high, carefully trimmed boxwoods. He chose his observation perch carefully: a white bench on the upper terrace, almost entirely hidden by the bare branches of an encircling lilac arbor. From there, he could look down and see Bertha clearly; perhaps, when she strolled by, he would be able to hear her words.

Bertha and Durkin had just passed below his bench and were walking down the path away from him. Her lavender scent wafted up to him. He inhaled it greedily and felt the ache of deep longing coursing through his body. How frail she seemed! Suddenly she stopped. Her right leg was in contracture; he remembered how often this had happened when he had strolled with her. She clung to Durkin for support. How tightly she was clasping him, precisely as she had once clasped Breuer. Now both of her arms were clutching Durkin’s, and she was pressing against him! Breuer remembered her pressing her body against him. Oh, how he loved the feel of her breasts! Like the princess feeling the pea through many mattresses, he could feel her velvet, yielding breasts through all obstacles—her Persian lamb cape and his fur-lined greatcoat only gossamer-thin barriers to his pleasure.

There, Bertha’s right quadriceps was now in severe spasm! She grabbed at her thigh. Breuer knew what would come next. Durkin quickly lifted her, carried her to the next bench, and laid her down. Now would come the massage. Yes, Durkin was taking off his gloves, carefully slipping his hands under her coat, and now beginning to massage her thigh. Would Bertha now moan with pain? Yes, softly! Breuer could hear her! Now won’t she close her eyes, as if in trance, stretch her arms over her head, arch her back, and thrust her breasts upward? Yes, yes, there she goes! Now her coat will fall open—yes, he saw her hand unobtrusively slip down and unbutton it. He knew her dress would creep up, it always did. There! She’s bending her knees—Breuer had never seen her do that before—and her dress slides up, almost to her waist. Durkin stands stark still, gazing at her pink silk underpants and the faint outline of a dusky triangle.

From his distant perch, Breuer stares over Durkin’s shoulder, equally transfixed. Cover her up, you poor fool! Durkin tries to pull down her dress and close her coat. Bertha’s hands interfere. Her eyes are closed. Is she in trance? Durkin appears agitated—as well he might be, Breuer thought—and looks nervously about him. No one there, thank God! The leg contracture has eased. He helps Bertha up, and she tries to walk.

Breuer feels dazed, as though he were no longer in his own body. There is something unreal about the scene before him, as though he were watching a drama from the last balcony row of an enormous theater. What is he feeling? Perhaps jealousy toward Dr. Durkin? He’s young and handsome and single, and Bertha is hanging on to him more closely than she ever did him. But no! He feels no jealousy, no animosity—none at all. On the contrary, he feels warm and close to Durkin. Bertha does not divide them, but draws them together into a brotherhood of agitation.

The young couple continued their stroll. Breuer smiled to see that it was now the doctor, and not the patient, who walked with an awkward, shuffling gait. He felt great empathy for his successor: how many times had he had to stroll with Bertha while dealing with the inconvenience of a throbbing erection! “Lucky for you, Doctor Durkin, that it’s winter,” Breuer said to himself. “It’s much worse in summer with no coat to conceal yourself. Then you have to tuck it under your belt!” The couple, having reached the end of the path, had now turned back in his direction. Bertha put her hand to her cheek. Breuer could see that her orbital muscles were in spasm, and that she was in agony; her facial pain, tic douloureux, was a daily occurrence and so severe that only morphine could relieve it. Bertha stopped. He knew exactly what would come next. It was eerie. Once again it felt like the theater, and he the director or prompter coaching the cast on their next lines. Put your hands on her face, your palms on her cheeks, your thumbs touching on the bridge of her nose. That’s right. Now press down lightly and stroke her eyebrows, again and again. Good! He could see Bertha’s face relax. She reached up, took Durkin by the wrists, and held each hand to her lips. Now Breuer felt a stab. Only once had she kissed his hands like that: it had been their closest moment. She came closer. He could hear her voice. “Little father, my dear little father.” That smarted. It was what she used to call him.

This was all he heard. It was enough. He rose and, without a word to the puzzled nursing staff, walked out of the Bellevue and into his waiting carriage. In a daze, he returned to Konstanz, where he somehow managed to board the train. The sound of the locomotive whistle brought him back to himself. His heart pounding, he sank his head back into the cushion and began to think about what he had seen.

That brass plaque, my office in Vienna, my childhood home, and now Bertha, too—all continue to be what they are: none of them require me for their existence. I’m incidental, interchangeable. I’m not necessary for Bertha’s drama. None of us is—not even the leading men. Neither I, nor Durkin, nor those yet to come.

He felt overwhelmed: perhaps he needed more time to absorb all this. He was tired; he leaned back, closed his eyes and sought refuge in a Bertha reverie. But nothing happened! He had proceeded through his usual steps: he focused upon the stage of his mind, he set the initial scene of the reverie, he was open to what would develop—that had always been up to Bertha to decide, not him—and he had stepped back waiting for the action to begin. But there was no action. Nothing moved. The stage remained a still-life awaiting his direction.

Experimenting, Breuer found he could now summon Bertha’s image or dismiss her at will. When he called on her, she readily appeared in any form or posture he wished. But she no longer had autonomy: her image was frozen until he willed her to move. The fittings had come loose: his tie to her, her hold on him!

Breuer marveled at this transformation. Never before had he thought about Bertha with such indifference. No, not indifference—such calmness, such self-possession. There was no great passion or longing, but no rancor either. For the first time, he understood that he and Bertha were fellow sufferers. She was as trapped as he had been. She also had not become who she was. She had not chosen her life but instead was witness to the same scenes playing themselves endlessly.

In fact, as he thought about it, Breuer realized the full tragedy of Bertha’s life. Perhaps she did not know these things. Perhaps she had forgone not only choice, but awareness as well. She so often was in “absence,” in a trance, not even experiencing her life. He knew that in this matter Nietzsche had been wrong! He was not Bertha’s victim. They were both victims.

How much he had learned! If only he could begin again and become her physician now. The day at Bellevue had shown him how evanescent had been the effects of his treatment. How foolish to have spent month after month attacking symptoms—the silly, superficial skirmishes—while neglecting the real battle, the mortal struggle underneath.

With a roar the train emerged from a long tunnel. The blast of bright sunlight snapped Breuer’s attention back to his current predicament. He was returning to Vienna to see Eva Berger, his former nurse. He looked dazedly around the train compartment. I’ve done it again, he thought. Here I sit on the train, hurling myself toward Eva, yet confounded about when and how I made the decision to see her.

When he arrived in Vienna, he took a fiacre to Eva’s home and approached her door.

It was four in the afternoon, and he almost turned away, certain—and then hoping—that she would be at work. But she was at home. She seemed shocked to see him and stood staring at him, not saying a word. When he asked if he could enter, she admitted him, after glancing uneasily at her neighbors’ doors. He felt immediately comforted by her presence. Six months had passed since he had seen her, but it was easy as ever for him to unburden himself to her. He told her everything that had happened since he had dismissed her: his meeting with Nietzsche, his gradual transformation, his decision to claim his freedom and to leave Mathilde and the children, his silent, final encounter with Bertha.

“And now, Eva, I’m free. For the first time in my life, I can do anything, go anywhere I wish. Soon, probably right after we talk, I shall go to the train station and choose a destination. Even now I don’t know where I’ll head, perhaps south, toward the sun—perhaps Italy.” Eva, ordinarily an effusive woman who used to respond with paragraphs to his every sentence, was now strangely silent.

“Of course,” Breuer continued, “I’ll be lonely. You know how I am. But I’ll be free to meet anyone I choose.”

Still no response from Eva.

“Or invite an old friend to travel with me to Italy.”

Breuer could not believe his own words. Suddenly he imagined a skyful of his pigeons swarming through his laboratory window, back into their wire cages.

To his dismay, but also relief, Eva did not respond to his innuendos. Instead, she began to question him.

“What kind of freedom do you mean? What do you mean by ‘unlived life’?” She shook her head incredulously. “Josef, none of this makes much sense to me. I’ve always wished I had your freedom. What kind of freedom have I had? When you have to worry about the rent and the butcher’s bill, you don’t worry much about freedom. You want freedom from your profession? Look at my profession! When you fired me, I had to accept any job I could find, and right now the only freedom I wish for is the freedom not to work the night shift at the Vienna General Hospital.” The night shift! That’s why she’s home at this hour, Breuer thought.

“I offered to help you find another position. You didn’t answer any of my messages.”

“I was in shock,” Eva replied. “I learned a hard lesson—that you can count on no one but yourself.” Here, for the first time, she raised her glance and stared directly into Breuer’s eyes.

Flushed with shame at not having protected her, he began to ask her forgiveness—but Eva rushed on, talking about her new job, her sister’s wedding, her mother’s health, and then her relationship with Gerhardt, the young lawyer whom she had first met when he was a patient at the hospital.

Breuer knew he was compromising her by his visit, and rose to leave. As he neared the door, he reached awkwardly for her hand and started to ask a question, but hesitated—did he still have the right to say anything familiar to her? He decided to risk it. Though it was obvious that the intimate bond between them was frayed, still, fifteen years of friendship are not so easily obliterated.

“Eva, I shall go now. But, please, one last question.”

“Ask your question, Josef.”

“I can’t forget the times when we were close. Do you remember when, late one evening, we sat in my office and talked for an hour? I told you how desperately and irresistibly I felt drawn to Bertha. You said you were frightened for me, that you were my friend, that you didn’t want me to ruin myself. Then you took my hand, as I’m taking yours now, and said that you would do anything, anything I wanted, if it would save me. Eva, I can’t tell you how often, perhaps hundreds of times, I’ve relived that conversation, how much it has meant to me, how often I have regretted being so obsessed with Bertha that I did not respond more directly to you. And my question is—perhaps it is simply—Were you sincere? Should I have responded?” Eva withdrew her hand, placed it lightly on his shoulder, and spoke haltingly. “Josef, I don’t know what to say. I shall be honest—I am sorry to answer your question in this way, but for the sake of our old friendship I must be honest. Josef, I do not remember that conversation!” Two hours later, Breuer found himself slumped in a second-class seat on the train to Italy.

He realized how important it had been for him, this last year, to have had Eva as insurance. He had counted on her. He had always been certain she would be there when he needed her. How could she have forgotten?

“But, Josef, what did you expect?” he asked himself. “That she’d be frozen in a closet, waiting for you to open the door and reanimate her? You’re forty years old, time to understand that your women exist apart from you: they have a life of their own, they grow, they go on with their lives, they age, they make new relationships. Only the dead don’t change. Only your mother, Bertha, lies suspended in time, waiting for you.” Suddenly the awful thought burst forth that it was not only Bertha’s and Eva’s lives that would go on, but Mathilde’s as well—that she would exist without him, that the day would come when she would care for another. Mathilde, his Mathilde, with another man—that pain was hard to bear. Now his tears flowed. He looked up at the luggage rack for his valise. There it was, in easy reach, the brass handle stretching eagerly toward him. Yes, he knew precisely what he should do: grab the handle, lift the valise over the metal rail of the rack, pull it down, get off at the next stop, wherever it was, take the first train back to Vienna, and throw himself on Mathilde’s mercy. It was not too late—surely, she would take him in.

But he imagined Nietzsche’s powerful presence blocking him.

“Friedrich, how could I have given up everything? What a fool I was to have followed your advice!”

“You had already given up everything of importance before you ever met me, Josef. That was why you were in despair. Do you remember how you lamented the loss of the lad of infinite promise?”

“But now I have nothing.”

“Nothing is everything! In order to grow strong you must first sink your roots deep into nothingness and learn to face your loneliest loneliness.”

“My wife, my family! I love them. How could I have left them? I shall get off at the next stop.”

“You flee only from yourself. Remember that every moment eternally recurs. Think of it: think of flying from your freedom for all eternity!”

“I have a duty to———”

“Only a duty to become who you are. Become strong: otherwise, you will forever use others for your own enlargement.”

“But Mathilde. My vows! My duty to——”

“Duty, duty! You will perish from such small virtues. Learn to become wicked. Build a new self on the ashes of your old life.”

All the way to Italy, Nietzsche’s words pursued him.

“Eternal recurrence.”

“The eternal hourglass of existence turning upside down, again and again.”

“Let this idea take possession of you, and I promise that it will change you forever.”

“Do you love the idea or hate it?”

“Live in such a way that you love the idea.”

“Nietzsche’s wager.”

“Consummate your life.”

“Die at the right time.”

“The courage to change your convictions!”

“This life is your eternal life.”

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Everything had begun, two months ago, in Venice. Now it was back to the city of gondolas he was heading. As the train crossed the Swiss-Italian border and conversations in Italian reached his ears, his thoughts turned from eternal possibility to tomorrow’s reality.

Where should he go when he got off the train in Venice? Where would he sleep tonight? What would he do tomorrow? And the day after tomorrow? What would he do with his time? What did Nietzsche do? When he was not sick, he walked and thought and wrote. But that was his way. How——?

First, Breuer knew, he had to earn a living. The cash in his moneybelt would last for only a few weeks: thereafter the bank, at Max’s instruction, would send him only a modest monthly draft. He could, of course, continue to doctor. At least three of his former students were practicing medicine in Venice. He should have no difficulty building a practice. Nor would the language present a problem: he had a good ear and some English, French, and Spanish; he could pick up Italian quickly. But had he sacrificed so much simply in order to reproduce his Viennese life in Venice? No, that life was behind him!

Perhaps some work in a restaurant. Because of his mother’s death and his grandmother’s frailty, Breuer had learned to cook and often assisted in the preparation of the family meals. Though Mathilde teased him and chased him out of the kitchen, when she was not around he used to wander in to observe and to instruct the cook. Yes, the more he thought about it, the stronger he felt that restaurant work might be just the thing. Not just managing or cashiering: he wanted to touch the food—to prepare it, to serve it.

He arrived late in Venice and again spent the night at a train-station hotel. In the morning, he took a gondola into the central city and walked and thought for hours. Many of the local Venetians turned to look at him. He understood why when he caught sight of his image in the reflection of a shop window: long beard, hat, coat, suit, tie—all in forbidding black. He looked foreign, precisely like an aging, wealthy Jewish Viennese medical consultant! Last night at the train station, he had noticed a cluster of Italian prostitutes soliciting customers. None had approached him, and no wonder! The beard and the funereal clothes would have to go.

Slowly his plan took shape: first, a visit to a barber and a working-class clothing store. Then he would begin intensive Italian instruction. Perhaps after two or three weeks, he could begin to explore the restaurant business: Venice might need a good Austrian restaurant or even an Austrian-Jewish one—he had seen several synagogues during his walk.

The barber’s dull razor jerked his head back and forth as it attacked his twenty-one-year-old beard. Occasionally it sheared off patches of beard cleanly, but more often it grabbed and tugged out divots of the wiry auburn hair. The barber was dour and impatient. Understandably so, Breuer thought. Sixty lira is too little for the size of this beard. Motioning to him to slow down, he reached in his pocket and offered two hundred lira for a gentler shave.

Twenty minutes later, as he stared into the barber’s cracked mirror, a wave of compassion for his own face swept over him. In the decades since he had seen it, he had forgotten the battle with time it had been waging under the darkness of his beard. Naked now, he saw that it was weary and battered. Only his forehead and brows had held firm and were resolutely supporting the loose, defeated flaccid sheets of his facial flesh. An enormous crevice stretched out from each nostril to separate his cheeks from his lips. Smaller wrinkles spread down from both eyes. Turkey-gullet folds draped from his jaw. And his chin—he had forgotten that his beard had concealed the shame of his puny chin, which now, even weaker, hid timidly, as best it could, below his moist, hanging lower lip.

On his way to a clothing store, Breuer looked at the dress of passers-by and decided to purchase a heavy short navy coat, some solid boots, and a thick striped sweater. Yet everyone who passed him was younger than he. What did the older men wear? Where were they, anyway? Everyone seemed so young. How would he make friends? How would he meet women? Perhaps a waitress in the restaurant, or an Italian teacher. But, he thought, I don’t want another woman! I’ll never find a woman like Mathilde. I love her. This is insane. Why did I leave her? I’m too old to start over. I’m the oldest person on this street—perhaps that old woman there with the cane is older, or that stooped man selling vegetables. Suddenly he felt dizzy. He could barely stand. Behind him he heard a voice.

“Josef, Josef!”

Whose voice is that? It sounds familiar!

“Doctor Breuer! Josef Breuer!”

Who knows where I am?

“Josef, listen to me! I’m counting backward from ten to one. When I reach five, your eyes will open. When I reach one, you’ll be fully awake. Ten, nine, eight,. . . ”

I know that voice!

“Seven, six, five. . . ”

His eyes opened. He looked up into Freud’s smiling face.

“Four, three, two, one! You’re wide awake! Now!”

Breuer was alarmed. “What’s happened? Where am I, Sig?”

“Everything’s all right, Josef. Wake up!” Freud’s voice was firm but soothing.

“What’s happened?”

“Give yourself a couple of minutes, Josef. It will all come back.”

He saw he had been lying on the sofa in his library. He sat up. Again, he asked, “What’s happened?”

“You tell me what happened, Josef. I did exactly as you instructed.”

As Breuer still appeared dazed, Freud explained, “Don’t you remember? You came over last night and asked me to be here this morning at eleven to assist you in a psychological experiment. When I arrived, you asked me to hypnotize you, using your watch as a pendulum.” Breuer reached into his waistcoat pocket.

“There it is, Josef, on the coffee table. Then, remember, you asked me to instruct you to sleep deeply and to visualize a series of experiences. You told me that the first part of the experiment would be devoted to leavetaking—from your family, friends, even patients; and that I should, if it seemed necessary, give you suggestions like: ‘Say goodbye,’ or ‘You can’t go home again.’ The next part was to be devoted to establishing a new life, and I was to make suggestions like: ‘Keep on going,’ or ‘What do you want to do next?’ ” “Yes, yes, Sig, I’m waking up. It’s all coming back to me. What time is it now?”

“One o’clock Sunday afternoon. You’ve been out for two hours, just as we planned. Everyone will be arriving soon for dinner.”

“Tell me exactly what happened. What did you observe?”

“You quickly entered a trance, Josef, and for the most part stayed hypnotized. I could tell some active drama was being played out—but silently, in your own inner theater. There were two or three times when you seemed to be coming out of the trance, and I deepened it by suggesting you were traveling and feeling the rocking motion of the train, and that you put your head back into the seat cushion and fall deeper asleep. Each time, it seemed to be effective. I can’t tell you much more. You seemed very unhappy; a couple of times you wept and once or twice looked frightened. I asked if you wanted to stop, but you shook your head, so I kept urging you forward.” “Did I speak aloud?” Breuer rubbed his eyes, still trying to rouse himself.

“Rarely. Your lips moved a great deal, so I guessed you were imagining conversations. I could make out only a few words. Several times you called for Mathilde, and I also heard the name Bertha. Were you speaking of your daughter?”

Breuer hesitated. How to answer? He was tempted to tell Sig everything, yet his intuition warned him not to. After all, Sig was only twenty-six, and regarded him as a father or an older brother. Both were accustomed to that relationship, and Breuer was not prepared for the discomfort of abruptly altering it.

Furthermore, Breuer knew how inexperienced and narrow-minded his young friend was in matters involving love or carnality. He recalled how he had embarrassed and puzzled him recently by pronouncing that all neuroses begin in the marital bed! And just a few days ago, Sig had indignantly condemned the young Schnitzler for his erotic affairs. How much understanding, then, could Sig be expected to have for a forty-year-old husband infatuated with a twenty-one-year-old patient? Especially when Sig absolutely worshiped Mathilde! No, confiding in him would be an error. Better to talk to Max or Friedrich!

“My daughter? I’m not sure, Sig. I can’t remember. But my mother’s name also was Bertha, did you know that?”

“Oh yes, I forgot! But she died when you were very young, Josef. Why would you be saying goodbye to her now?”

“Perhaps I never really let her go before. I think some adult figures enter a child’s mind and refuse to leave. Maybe one has to force them out before one can be master of one’s own thoughts!”

“Hmm—interesting. Let’s see, what else did you say? I heard, ‘No more doctoring,’ and then, just before I woke you, you said, ‘Too old to start over!’ Josef, I’m burning with curiosity. What does all this mean?”

Breuer chose his words carefully. “Here’s what I can tell you, Sig. It’s all related to that Professor Müller, Sig. He forced me to think about my life, and I realized I’ve reached a point where most of my choices are behind me. Yet I wondered what it would have been like to have chosen differently—to have lived another life without medicine, family, Viennese culture. So I tried a thought experiment to have the experience of freeing myself from these arbitrary constructs—to face formlessness, even to enter some alternative life.” “And what did you learn?”

“I’m still dazed. I’ll need time to sort everything out. One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret. It’s important for you, too. Everyone who knows you well, Sig, realizes that you have extraordinary gifts. You have a burden: the richer the soil, the more unforgivable the failure to cultivate it.” “You are different, Josef. Maybe the trance changed you. You never talked to me like this before. Thank you, your faith inspires me—but perhaps it burdens me, too.”

“And I also learned,” Breuer said, “—or maybe it’s the same thing, I’m not sure—that we must live as though we were free. Even though we can’t escape fate, we must still butt our heads against it—we must will our destiny to happen. We must love our fate. It’s as though——” There was a knock on the door.

“Are you two still in there?” asked Mathilde. “Can I come in?”

Breuer went quickly to open the door, and Mathilde entered with a plate of steaming, tiny wursts, each wrapped in flaky filo dough. “Your favorite, Josef. I realized this morning that I haven’t made these for you in a long time. Dinner’s ready. Max and Rachel are here, and the others are on the way. And Sigi, you’re staying. I’ve already set your place. Your patients will wait another hour.” Taking his cue from Breuer’s nod to him, Freud left the room. Breuer put his arm around Mathilde. “You know, my dear, it’s strange you asked if we were still in the room. I’ll tell you about our talk later, but it was like taking a distant journey. I feel I’ve been away for a very long time. And now I’ve come back.” “That’s good, Josef.” She put her hand on his cheek and rubbed his beard affectionately. “I am glad to welcome you back. I’ve missed you.”

Dinner, by the Breuer family standards, was a small affair, with only nine adults at the table: Mathilde’s parents; Ruth, another of Mathilde’s sisters, and her husband, Meyer; Rachel and Max; and Freud. The eight children sat at a separate table in the foyer.

“Why are you looking at me?” Mathilde murmured to Breuer, as she carried out a large tureen of potato-carrot soup. “You’re embarrassing me, Josef,” she whispered later, as she set down the large platter of braised veal tongue and raisins. “Stop it, Josef, stop staring!” she said again, as she helped to clear the table before bringing in dessert.

But Josef didn’t stop. As if for the first time, he scrutinized his wife’s face. It wrenched him to realize that she, too, was a combatant in the war against time. Her cheeks had no crevices—she had refused to permit that—but she could not defend all fronts, and a fine crinkling flared out from the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her hair, stretched up and back and swirled into a gleaming bun, had been heavily infiltrated by columns of gray. When had that happened? Was he partly to blame? United, he and she might have suffered less damage.

“Why should I stop?” Josef put his arm lightly around her waist, as she reached to take his plate. Later, he followed her into the kitchen. “Why shouldn’t I look at you? I—but, Mathilde, I’ve made you cry!”

“A good cry, Josef. But sad, too, when I think of how long it’s been. This whole day is strange. What did you and Sigi talk about, anyway? Do you know what he told me at dinner? That he’s going to name his first daughter after me! He says he wants to have two Mathildes in his life.” “We’ve always suspected Sig was clever, and now we are certain. It is a strange day. But an important one—I’ve decided to marry you.”

Mathilde set down her tray of coffee cups, put her hands on his head, and drew him to her, kissing his forehead. “Did you drink schnapps, Josef? You’re talking nonsense.” She picked up the tray again. “But I like it.” Just before pushing open the swinging door into the dining room, she turned. “I thought you decided to marry me fourteen years ago.” “What’s important is that I choose to do it today, Mathilde. And every day.”

After coffee and Mathilde’s Linzertorte, Freud hurried off to the hospital. Breuer and Max each took a glass of slivovitz into the library and sat down to chess. After a mercifully short game—Max quickly crushing a French defense with a withering queen’s side attack—Breuer stayed Max’s hand as he started to set up the next game. “I need to talk,” he told his brother-in-law. Max quickly overcame his disappointment, put away the chess pieces, lit another cigar, blew out a long fume of smoke, and waited.

Since their brief contretemps a couple of weeks before, when Breuer had first told Max about Nietzsche, the two men had grown much closer. Now a patient and sympathetic listener, Max had over the past two weeks followed Breuer’s accounts of his meetings with Eckart Müller with great interest. Today he seemed transfixed by Breuer’s detailed description of yesterday’s cemetery discussion and this morning’s extraordinary trance session.

“So, in your trance you first thought I’d try to block the door to stop you from leaving? I probably would have. Who else would I, have to beat at chess? But seriously, Josef, you look different. You really think you’ve gotten Bertha out of your mind?” “It’s amazing, Max. Now I can think about her as I think of anyone else. It’s as though I’ve had surgery to separate Bertha’s image from all the emotion that used to adhere to it! And I’m absolutely certain that this surgery occurred the moment I observed her in the garden with her new doctor!” “I don’t understand.” Max shook his head. “Or is it best not to understand?”

“We have to try. Maybe it’s wrong to say that my infatuation with Bertha died the moment I observed her with Doctor Durkin—I mean my fantasy of her with Doctor Durkin, which is so vivid I regard it still as a real event. I’m sure the infatuation had already been weakened by Müller, especially by his making me understand how I had given her such enormous power. The trance fantasy of Bertha and Doctor Durkin came along at the opportune time to dislodge it completely. All her power disappeared when I saw her repeating those familiar scenes with him, as if by rote. Suddenly I realized she has no power. She can’t control her own actions—in fact, she’s just as helpless and driven as I was. We were both just fill-in performers in each other’s obsessive drama, Max.” Breuer grinned. “But, you know, something even more important is happening to me, and that’s my change in feelings for Mathilde. I felt it a little during the trance, but it’s settling in even more strongly now. All during dinner I looked at her and kept feeling this surge of warmth toward her.” “Yes,” Max smiled, “I saw you looking at her. It was fun to see Mathilde flustered. It was like the old days to see some play between the two of you. Maybe it’s very simple: you appreciate her now because you got close to experiencing what it would be like to lose her.” “Yes, that’s part of it, but there are other parts, too. You know, for years, I’ve bridled at the bit I thought Mathilde had placed in my mouth. I felt imprisoned by her and longed for my freedom—to experience other women, to have another, entirely different life.

“Yet when I did what Müller asked me to do, when I grasped my freedom, I panicked. In the trance, I tried to give freedom away. I held out the bit, first to Bertha and then to Eva. I opened my mouth and said, ‘Please, please, bridle me. Jam this into my mouth. I don’t want to be free.’ The truth is, I was terrified of freedom.” Max nodded gravely.

“Remember,” Breuer continued, “what I told you of my trance visit to Venice—the barbershop where I discovered my aging face? The street of clothing stores where I found myself the oldest person? Something Müller said comes back right now: ‘Choose the right enemy.’ I think that’s the key! All these years I’ve been fighting the wrong enemy. The real enemy was, all along, not Mathilde, but destiny. The real enemy was aging, death, and my own terror of freedom. I blamed Mathilde for not allowing me to face what I was really unwilling to face! I wonder how many other husbands do that to their wives?” “I expect I’m one of them,” Max said. “You know, I often daydream about our childhood together, our days at the university. ‘Ah, what a loss!’ I say to myself. ‘How did I ever let those times slip away?’ And then secretly I blame Rachel—as if it were her fault that childhood ends, her fault that I grow old!” “Yes, Müller said that the real enemy is ‘time’s devouring jaws.’ But somehow now I don’t feel so helpless before those jaws. Today, perhaps for the first time, I feel like I’m willing my life. I accept the life I’ve chosen. Right now, Max, I don’t wish I had done anything differently.” “As clever as your professor is, Josef, it seems to me that in designing this trance experiment you outwitted him. You found a way to experience an irreversible decision without making it irreversible. But there’s something I still don’t understand. Where was the part of you that designed the trance experiment during the trance? While you were in the trance, some part of you must have been aware of what was really happening.” “You’re right, Max. Where was the witness, the ‘I’ that was tricking the rest of my ‘me’? I get dizzy thinking about it. Someday someone far brighter than I will come along to unravel that conundrum. But, no, I don’t think I have outwitted Müller. In fact, I feel something quite different: I feel I’ve let him down. I’ve refused to follow his prescription. Or perhaps, simply, I’ve acknowledged my limitations. He often says, ‘Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.’ I guess I’ve chosen. And, Max, I’ve also let him down as a physician. I’ve given him nothing. In fact, I no longer even think of helping him.” “Don’t knock yourself, Josef. You’re always so hard on yourself. You’re different from him. Do you remember that course we took together on religious thinkers—Professor Jodl, wasn’t it?—and the term he had for them—’visionaries.’ That’s what your Müller is—a visionary! I’ve long lost sight of who’s the physician and who’s the patient, but if you were his physician, and even if you could change him—and you can’t—would you want to change him? Have you ever heard of a married or domesticated visionary? No, it would ruin him. I think his destiny is to be a lonely seer.

“You know what I think?” Max opened the box of chess pieces. “I think there’s been enough treatment. Maybe it’s over. Maybe a little more of this treatment would kill both the patient and the doctor!”