Read Online Dreaming for Freud by Sheila Kohler - Free Book Online

sound of the rushing water.
    “They told me the air up there was clearer, purer, and would be good for Father’s bad lungs, but I felt I could hardly breathe,” she says and feels again that breathlessness in this small dark room. “I wondered how anything could flourish up there: flowers or trees. It seemed so airless and quiet.” The cluttered space in the room, too, is silent, apart from the sounds from the courtyard: the raucous cry of a crow. The ceiling seems low and the clutter makes her feel hemmed in as the mountains had done.
    But she tries to go on with her tale at his urging: “The air was too thin, and all the lights faintly glimmering in the small windows looked like trapped stars. It seemed such a grim place to me from the start, and I began coughing immediately as we entered the dark rooms of the old hotel with all the heavy furniture, the curtains drawn, the doilies on the arms of the heavy chairs with claws for feet, the big fires blazing in the fireplaces, though it seemed so warm to me.
    “I was so frightened by the strange medicinal smells and the sight of so many sick people, many of them elderly, being pushed around in wicker bath chairs with blankets over their knees or walking around with the help of canes.”
    She sat staring in silence through what seemed to her endless dull meals—she ate now with her parents in the silent, vast dining rooms of the hotel, the staff coming and going noiselessly in soft shoes and white gloves, serving course after course, all in rich sauces she didn’t like. She listened to the scrape of silver on porcelain, the murmur of soft voices. There were so few children her age, and those who were there, she did not know. Some of them were foreigners: Russians, Poles—people came from all over, her father told her, because of the mild climate and the curative powers of the grapes and whey. Many spoke in strange tongues. There was no one there she loved, except for her father and her brother, but he was soon sent away to school and her father had to lie in a dark room. She was bored and lonely. She was taught at home by the fancy new fräulein, who was engaged for her, though there was a Catholic school for girls, run by the nuns.
    “Father didn’t want me to go there, because he said they would want me to convert, so that I wouldn’t be damned and have to go to hell and be consumed eternally in the fire,” she says. Catholics always did, according to her father, as they thought you went to hell and were eternally burned in the fire if you were a Jew or even a Protestant and did not believe in their Savior, which always seemed odd to her as the Savior, Jesus of Nazareth, was himself, after all, a Jew and presumably was not consumed in any fire.
    She met no one outside the house that they moved to eventually, spending all her free time in the dark room beside her father, whom she loved so much and whose illness worried her terribly. She shared a nursery with her brother and the fräulein for a while, but mostly she was in her father’s dark, close room. The worst moments were when he lay very still on his bed, helpless—he could hardly move his limbs at all—and seemed to have lost his mind.
    “You must know how ill father has been on and off, ever since I was six years old. He often called on me to nurse him, and I went gladly, hoping to help him in some way. When he had to lie flat on his back in the dark after the operation on his one good eye, I sat beside him and whispered to him. I recited his favorite poems.
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluehn? Im dunklen Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel whet, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeen steht.”
As she recites the lovely words by Goethe, lying on the doctor’s soft carpet, her voice trembles with emotion, tears coming into her eyes as she remembers those moments in the half dark with the odors of illness in the airless room, her father’s hand in hers, the fear that he