Secret Dreams
Authors: Keith Korman
Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Keith Korman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-614-1
By the same author
SWAN DIVE
ARCHANGEL
For Those Who Stood
With Me
Through the Coldest
Watches of the Night
Homo sum
Humani nihil a me alienum puto
I am a man.
Nothing human is alien to me.
âPublius Terentius
BOOK I
THE PATIENT DOES NOT EXIST
6 The Wise Man Dies in Childhood
12 Regression of the Laughing Horse
13 Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream
14 The Cave Where the World Was Born
1 Echoes in the Dungeon of Years
9 The Queen of Sparta with a Hot Rear End
THE PATIENT
DOES NOT EXIST
Frau Direktor
Frau Direktor put down her pen and turned away from the unfinished letter. Beyond her office window, new snow fell onto the street below, muffling the scrape of horse-drawn sledges and the rattle of carts on the icy cobblestones. The pen felt awkward in her hand,- her fingers had grown thick and clumsy, as though swollen from the effort of writingâ¦. Once more she stared at the stubborn page, damning herself to force a line or two from her tired brain. Just a little further. Anything. Just to finish and be done. Put the thing in an envelope and lick it closed. Find a stamp and take it to the cornerâ¦. God, how she hated to beg.
Herr C. G. Jung
Bollingen Tower
Bollingen Zee, Schweiz
January 10, 1933
Dear Beloved,
How many years since we have spoken? I've lost count. The time has passed so quickly. Though I never thought I would be able to live without you, I have thrived nonetheless. Now I must beg a favor. But first, rest easy,- all is well here at the Clinic. We recently received our quarterly payment from the Ministry of State Medicine, and so our near future is certainly assured. It is gratifying to know we enjoy the confidence and support of those aboveâ¦.
What lies! Nothing could be further from the truth. But how else could she get a letter out of the country without attracting attention? Rumor had it the authorities opened all the international mail. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn't â- how could one know? But if they
did
, they would find no complaint, no grumble of discontent, no hint of trouble in this awful, awful place. Ach, even to address him as her
beloved
. How obscene. Having loved did not make you beloved. No, the rose had died, no petals left upon the stem. He had seen to that. Her one and only â who found her lost in an asylum room, who unlocked the door and led her gently out. Who cast her away in the end ⦠So when he read her calculated lies, he'd know at once things had gone from bad to worse and the days of her clinic numbered by those who kept watch in far-off Moscow.
So what should she tell her precious Herr Doktor to make him do what she so needed? To accept one of her children into his care. The one child she would manage to spirit out of the city. The last survivor of all her hope and devotion. And if Herr Doktors ever watchful Frau Emma should come upon her letter first? Cold, spiteful Emma, keeping a man she never really wanted. Then all would be in vainâ¦.
The evening wind played havoc with the papers on Frau Direktors desk,- the unfinished plea turned over by itself. The sound of horses' hooves clattered through the frosted panes of glass. In the black years of her madness, the clippety-clop of hoofbeats would have set her teeth on edge, sent her cowering to some dark, safe place. But Herr Doktor had mended her of that. Or tried to. The window opened easily,- she forced herself to look below. Still battling the renegades of bedlam after all these years. Gritting her teeth against the innocent sound of horses' hooves upon a street of stones, simply because once upon a time it used to drive her mad.
Raving.
When other young women sat primly at garden parties, she ranted in empty rooms, shut up in the prison of her mind. But a Frog Prince had laid a kiss upon her brow, turning her into a butterfly that flew between the bars.
And now, incredibly, she stood in an office of her very own. Waste-basket overflowing. Pencil points broken. But hers. All hers ⦠Frau Direktor of the Rostov Children's Psychiatric Institute. Rostov-on-Don. U.S.S.R. The house of the last chance when all other doors had closed. The pompous lines she had written reproached her:
I must confess it still pleases my vanity to hear the Clinics two interns call me Frau Direktor, pronouncing that imperial title with your erect Germanic K â as I heard it so often in that place where we beganâ¦.
To one who knew her, that overbearing prose would only show how completely topsy-turvy matters had become. Why bring up “that place where we began” except to reveal her own fear? All the important words in the paragraph lay exposed for him to see like some word-association test they had done a thousand times. Confess. Vanity. Title. Direktor. As if to say: I confess, my title as director is all just vanity. I direct nothing. Not like That Place where we began.
No, not like that great European institution at the turn of the century. Where their exalted Herr Direktor ruled the lives of hundreds of patients and a phalanx of staff. Like a field marshal or a god,- where the professors and the doctors were his captains, the nurses and orderlies his soldiers. And the lowly interns, beholden pages, bowing and scraping for the merest nod from on high. The lot of them appearing the very model of proper Swiss behavior. All in the polished marble corridors of a Zurich sanatorium for the mentally diseased in the year 1905, the very walls exuding order and security. Respectability. And permanence.
Nothing like her own clinic. Nearly three decades later, the Rostov Children's Institute, despite its daunting name, was merely a rundown four-story town house in a damp part of town, where people threw stones at their windows just for the hell of it and bargemen stumbled down the street drunk, shouting abuse. Several of the clinic's windows had been broken and still needed mending. The hallways wanted paint too. Her âInstitute” had no grand staff â just one orderly, one nurse, two interns â- and only a dozen children. Nothing whatsoever like that place
where she began
⦠The pen came to her fingers and flowed across the page:
And it has always been my hope that what we once started would never really end. But that we would somehow pass on to others what we had learned. So in this way we may never die.
There! The key words. End. Die. Pass on. Hope. He'd have to be stone deaf or stupid not to perceive what had come to pass. For the Institute had been put on notice. Their pimply orderly had failed to report to work. Their dining room workers had gone as well, and with them the food deliveries. That meant someone had to spend long hours buying food piecemeal in the markets, a tiresome and consuming job. Yesterday a moving van had stopped at the Institute's front door,- the stout driver and a pair of porters in blue jumpers asked if the furniture and brass fixtures were ready to be removed. Frau Direktor sent them away, saying there must be some mistake. No, she knewâ¦. There was no mistake. Obviously the police were coming to get her.
The pen moved of its own accord,- the lines crawled across the pageâ¦.
That is why I am referring a colleague to you. One of my old Zurich patients is in need of therapy. The patient is suffering from a troubling relapse and has begun acting like a child again. You remember, the kind of behavior we all wish to escape.
What nonsense! She had no “Zurich patients” â when last in Switzerland,
she
had been the patient, no one else. And once more, the code words. Trouble. Child. Suffer. Escape. Colleague. Zurich. Therapy. What could be plainer than that? My colleague is escaping with a child in need of treatmentâ¦. But which intern should she send? And which child?
She addressed an envelope and found a stamp,- she took her coat from the stand and went outside. The snow had thinned,- tiny drifts shivered on the clinic's steps. The post box on the corner stood alone under a shaft of light. The metal grate squealed and snapped as the letter went inside. She scanned the blind windows in the buildings for any sign of life or watchful eyes, peering closely â but saw nothing. The lighted windows of her clinic's living room shone into the dark. Beyond the shabby curtains her interns, Maximilian and Madame, waited to begin their regular end-of-day discussion. Frau Direktor and her interns held their meetings in that old dilapidated living room when the children lay in their first lap of sleep. Later they might wake with night terrors and call the adults from their beds, but in the evening the staff seized this first sigh of slumber, when the house was quiet.
She took off her coat and hung it on the stand,- the light from the living room spilled redly across the floor. The walls were covered in pink satin wallpaper with a red rose motif, the budding flowers like drops of blood. The pink satin had curled, yellowing like an opium addict's skin. Frau Direktor had come to see her town house as the rotting husk of some mysterious plant, and her helpers as its complex living seeds, waiting only for the gentle rain and warmth to split their shells.