Read Online Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett - Free Book Online Page A

your problems.’
    â€˜Are you deaf? I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted and I’m depressed.’
    â€˜These are symptoms –’ I started to say.
    â€˜Enough! Enough!’
    His eyes were raging and red, veins throbbed at his temple.For a moment I think he considered hitting me. Whenever I saw Petrov, I had the sense of wrestling with a violent man made all the more aggressive by his shame at finding himself in a psychoanalyst’s office. He was a leader of men, he was openly contemptuous of the very science he hoped would relieve his suffering. Men who have grappled with extreme hardship from their earliest youth – as Petrov had – often armour themselves against the unhappiness that is their lot by developing an omnipotent sense of their own invulnerability. He had always battled his way out of trouble, fighting enemies tooth and nail; but the greatest enemy was in his own subconscious and the battle he had now to fight was with himself.
    I stared at him fixedly; with Petrov I had to be firmer than with most of my other patients. He heaved a weary sigh and collapsed again on the couch.
    â€˜If …,’ he began, ‘if … let us say … a man is married and has children. If that man loves his wife, is devoted to her and to their children. And it is a pure love, one built on excitement and enchantment but also on years of shared experience and mutual respect. Yet that same man conceives a similar pure love for another woman. It would be difficult for him, yes? You agree?’
    â€˜Go on.’
    â€˜He would be torn. Confused. Depressed. Would he not?’
    â€˜Are you in such a situation?’
    â€˜I feel as if I am.’
    â€˜You are married and you have children.’
    â€˜So what?’
    â€˜Do you have a mistress?’
    â€˜I have many women friends.’
    â€˜Do you have sexual relations with your women friends?’
    â€˜It’s no secret,’ he said defiantly. ‘So what?’
    â€˜Is it a secret you keep from your wife?’
    â€˜She doesn’t ask and I don’t tell her.’
    â€˜How do you think she would feel were she to know?’
    â€˜How do you think?’
    â€˜You imply she would be upset.’
    â€˜To put it mildly.’
    â€˜How do you feel about that?’
    He sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. ‘My dream is to have a little house out in the country,’ he said, ‘by a lake or a river, where I could fish, and the sun would be shining and the children would play and in the evenings we would sit down together for dinner and there would only be us, the family – my family. Nothing else, no one else. A simple meal, a light breeze, deer and rabbits running over the fields. And I would sleep for ten hours and wake refreshed and content, and the day would start all over again, the sun shining and the children playing.’
    â€˜What you are describing is an impossible idyll.’
    â€˜I said it was a dream, didn’t I?’ he answered sharply. ‘It’s never going to happen. My life is not like that. It never will be like that. But what’s wrong with having a harmless little dream?’
    â€˜Does it help you solve the fundamental problem of your life?’
    â€˜Which is what?’
    â€˜I don’t know. You won’t tell me.’
    He stared at me belligerently. ‘You have no answers, do you? You can’t help me.’
    â€˜I can’t help you until you trust me.’
    â€˜How can I trust you? I can’t trust anyone.’
    â€˜What about your comrades? Don’t you trust them?’
    He grunted. ‘Are you joking? The Party is a snake pit. Comrades stab each other in the back, they complain, they spread rumours, they manoeuvre against each other. You’ve heard of “King”, I take it?’
    â€˜The spy?’
    â€˜That’s what the meeting in Krakow was all about – who’s the traitor, who is King? God