Secret Dreams (3 page)

By allowing the young man to go on talking and talking, Madame picked at the scabs of his troubles, forever opening his sores so as never to let them heal. Of course the story of the wicked old art dealer was true! Of course she should have turned him over to the police. Was she
crazy?
No, she was exacting justice of her own making: for when the young Narcissus gazed deeper and deeper into the fetid pool, he saw at last his own dark reflection in its loathsome depths. In the end he saved Madame herself from the Prefecture of Police,-he took his own life. They found a note implicating the art dealer. Madame Le Boyau's name did not come up. She was safe.

In a roundabout way Madame Le Boyau had avenged the little possessed poppets, while revenging herself on the hollowness of her own practice. But she had failed miserably in losing the one patient with serious enough troubles to be worth caring about. And she had doubtless added to the crime: the respectable art dealer went on with his perversions as the young man had talked and talked — how many more children had there been? Was not their fate her fault too?

This, then, became her disaster.

She had taken a police matter into her own hands for her own ends and caused more harm than good. In failing to unmask the deepest source of the young man's troubles, she had merely led him to a sour backwater of his mind and left him there to die. But she had unmasked herself as a fraud: so weary of her own life that she thought nothing of watching another destroy his. And just as guilty as the art dealer. Worse, in fact, because all along she knew better.

With the last few shreds of common sense and common decency, Madame Le Boyau took steps to close her practice of thirty years and refer her few remaining patients to the other analysts of Paris. She had some funds, more than she could spend, and cared little for comforts. She wandered across Europe on a slow sightseeing tour to nowhere. Along the way she conceived the idea of writing a monograph on the psychiatric institutions of the Continent. And so she visited place after place, talking with doctors and their staffs and making her notes. In reality she was searching for a place from which to start afresh. A place where she could find once more those qualities she had banished to the attic of her self. And since her chance arrival at the Rostov Institute, Madame had indeed begun to lower again, as though healed by her work with the clinic's children. She had even mentioned her desire to undergo yet another analysis this late in life,-perhaps with Maximilian. For his fragile looks appealed to her, strangely reminiscent of that other
fleur
, lying in the ground a continent away. Madame had found her home at last. She deserved another chance.

But in all frankness Frau Direktor had no illusions about these people. One too inexperienced, the other too old to see the process through. The young man a kind of cripple, with the scar of an old wound that could never really heal. And the old woman a kind of dangerous charlatan, whose tricks had nearly done her in…. Yet both had shown that one quality essential to their work by amputating their sickly parts — cauterizing their frailties and turning them to strengths. Disarming their follies and taking charge of their fate. Perhaps each could take a child to her precious Herr Doktor in Switzerland?

Ach, Madame would be lucky just to save herself….

No child baffled them more than their Marie.

The clinic's most puzzling charge had come up for discussion nearly every day for countless weeks past. Marie … the “promising child” now crippled by an unforeseen madness. Once she had been a bright, intelligent girl of nine, kindly and cheerful. The child's mother told Frau Direktor how Marie had long studied the piano, taken to music as children sometimes do, learning whole pieces at a time. Every day without fail, mother and daughter sat for an hour as Marie practiced her scales or tried to master new phrases. Then one afternoon, while taking the ferry across the Don, she was struck down by an inexplicable fainting fit. When the child revived, she no longer spoke.

Instead she began mindlessly repeating snatches of tunes. She hummed or sang bits for a few bars and then abruptly changed to something else. A few more irritating bars off-key, then off again to a new piece. À chaotic jangle of broken melodies, never singing one long enough to bring out its form, but enough to make one want to hear the rest. Infuriating the way a dripping faucet inevitably drives you mad. Yet occasionally her mother thought she detected snatches of familiar melodies. Was that the first three bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Or something else, in three-quarter time — a waltz, perhaps?

State physicians hinted darkly at some kind of mental, emotional cause. They prescribed medication, which either put Marie to sleep or made her sing all the more stridently. Travel abroad to seek medical help was out of the question. Though if Marie's father had been alive, he might have had some influence. As a merchant ship's captain, he traveled half the year, but had been lost at sea some months before the child's fit.

The mother was a pretty, pinched woman — prone to melancholy airs. À wan, pale spirit who could go for days without speaking a word. She frankly told Frau Direktor her marriage with the girl's father had been in name only. In the months he sailed the Indian Ocean or the China Sea, she shunted Marie from neighbor to neighbor and back again (staying with her “aunts,” they called it), the child spending nights away from home while her mother sought a furtive kind of satisfaction with the men she entertained: men, Marie soon knew, who were not her “uncles.”

An unbridgeable chasm grew between husband and wife, yawning wider with each voyage. While Marie's father was away, he was away. And when he returned, well … he slept in the house and ate in the house and went about with his daughter. Alone. The marriage became a noose, slowly strangling both parents with each passing year. Still, they made no break, waiting as couples often do. They were still waiting when his ship went down at sea.

After the child's fit, the mother tried to take her daughter in hand. But dealing with a brat who squalls random snatches of melodies went far beyond the mother's powers. Shouting and threats had no effect; they merely changed the frequency and tone of Marie's idiotic rant-ings: from La-la-la to Li-li-li, from Na-na-na to Ni-ni-ni. Marie's mother was reduced to brute force,- she hit on the idea of rationing the amount of water the child drank. Little by little she allowed Marie less and less. No water with meals, no water before bed — just half a glass in the morning. After ten days, Marie drank only the barest minimum required for life. The result: the little girl sang herself hoarse after her half glass in the morning and then went quiet as a church mouse for the rest of the day. At first her mother thought she had succeeded in some way. But soon Marie began starving herself. Her hair fell out, sores appeared on her mouth, her skin went gray. The girl's clothes hung like limp rags. Marie was dying….

The mother grew terrified, seeing her mistake. She tried letting the girl have water again, tried coaxing her to eat — but to no avail. Marie kept on as before, drinking little, eating almost nothing. In desperation her mother cornered the state doctor in his office, screaming shrilly at him, “Cure my baby! Cure her, damn you! Do something!”

The doctor was exhausted from an endless day. Whose crazy mother was this? He had treated dozens of little girls that week already: Marys, Maries, Marinas —-
which
little girl? The tirade grew worse, ranting now — they were all witch doctors, ghouls,- it was the pills they gave her. “Poison! Filth!”

“Get out of my office,” he shouted at her. In moments a pair of meaty orderlies forcibly ejected Marie's mother from the building. But even as she brawled in the street, with her dress ripped, and one orderly clutching a kicked shin, the state doctor remembered
this
Marie and dashed downstairs. He sent the orderlies off and calmed the mother. She must forgive him, he was not such a bad man, “but in our place we see so many children, please understand.” He sighed, then in low tones he told her about the Rostov clinic, “I know the di^ rector—-you can have a letter of introduction….” State doctors weren't encouraged to refer large numbers of cases there, but in view of how badly the girl's condition had deteriorated, perhaps the Children's Psychiatric Institute might do some good.

When Marie first arrived, the staff thought she was mute. Now free of her mother's deprivations, nothing changed immediately. But after a week or so she began to eat a little more. And drink. As for her apparent muteness, they all soon learned better.

Marie was dying of thirst!

The little girl liked nothing better than sitting in a warm tub half the day, drinking the bathwater as she let it soak into her. Drink the bath and pee in the bath. And then drink some more. After an hour Marie's skin was puckered and the water smelled a trifle cloying. But Madame, who supervised the child's bathtimes, solved the problem by opening the drain a crack and letting the tap water flow half a turn. Soon Marie drank from the tap exclusively, the water from her body passing harmlessly into the warm tub and down the drain.

As soon as her parched vocal cords drank their fill, the inane toneless singing began once more. Clearly Marie sang some kind of mu= sical notes, but no one could place them, they were so garbled, so atonal…. Max alone thought he detected the first few bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

And then one night, as Madame tucked the little girl into bed, Marie finally spoke two words, whispering them into an empty corner of the room.

“Go away,” she said.

At first Madame thought the child had cruelly dismissed her. But when she withdrew, the girl's off-pitch bleating became frantic,- she hacked on till she nearly choked. No, Madame realized … Marie didn't want
her
to go away. For when the old woman returned to the child's bedside her frantic stutterings subsided and she let Madame stroke her hair. Snuggling sideways under the covers as she always did when calming down, letting Madame pet her until the toneless singing lapsed into silence and Marie fell into a restless sleep.

The little girl now ate regularly. Her hair no longer fell out but grew in dark and glossy. And Max had become a favorite of hers, reading to her at bedtime. As he read, her toneless singing dropped to a dull hum. She even played with toys: a doll in a periwinkle-blue cotton dress and a small model tugboat that she took into the bath and sometimes even to bed. At the time she spoke those first words, Go away, they all felt the child had
indeed
come a long way…. When Frau Direktor went back over her case notes, she saw Marie had been with them a year.

Typically, no one was ready for the child's lapse when it came a month ago…. One day Marie reverted to silence. All the old troubles reappeared,- she refused water and no longer wanted to bathe. Her eating fell off. Max made the clever suggestion that Marie's silence was in fact a demand for the opposite — that is, noise, sound. Music.

Frau Direktor managed to borrow an old phonograph and a slightly scratched recording of Beethoven's Fifth. Alas, though Maximilian swore he saw a glimmer of pleasure in the girl's eyes — no real response. A clever idea, but wrong. And Marie worsened…. But when the girl's case arose for the umpteenth time at yet another end-of-day discussion, it seemed that Madame had finally latched onto something. The old woman had the annoying habit of staring out the window as she talked. Plucking an endless chain of cigarettes from a platinum case and smoking them in a stout, businesslike holder, which she clenched between her teeth, she glanced outside with watery eyes as her words floated across the room on a wretched cloud of Balkan tobacco smoke….

“Let us recall Marie's only words to date. A command; ‘Go away.‘“ Her cigarette glowed as she inhaled. “But is this really a command? What else do we know about Marie? That she was a fine young pianist. That her mother entertained men. That before her father went down with his ship he brought his daughter presents and gifts from foreign lands, lavishing all kinds of attention on her. So much attention the mother admitted growing spiteful and angry. And lastly, that when Maries father went off to sea, the mother took many of the gifts away — only to return them for show when the father came home again. Given and taken away …,” Madame mused to herself. “Given and taken away …” Suddenly her eyes narrowed, “Marie's words are not a command but a description, ‘Go away describes the unhappy state of her home life, in which the father was always going off. Yet they also apply to the hard evidence of his affections, the toys and gifts — which vanished and returned…. And finally the words ‘Go away' apply to her mother, whose secret sexual life entailed that the girl be sent off to strangers, so the woman might be free. In fact, Marie may have wished that all the inconveniences of her life had simply ‘gone away.' And now it appears the words also describe what the child managed to accomplish. Like her father before her, she too has gone away from home. Gone away and come to us,”

Max sat up sharply, struck. “But in your case, she didn't want to be left alone in bed. She didn't want you to go away!”

Madame Le Boyau opened her hands in agreement, allowing yet a new twist on the child's words. “Ah, well, there now, so you see … old Madame has detected a method to the madness.” She discarded the stub of a cigarette in an ashtray by her elbow, then coughed gently into a pretty Swiss handkerchief, She glanced into the hankie, but whatever she saw did not surprise her, and she put the frilly thing away,

“Let us consider the child's most striking symptom. The muddled droning. What a stunning signal of her unhappiness. Marie stutters music because she used to
study
it. And as for Beethoven's Fifth, well, it's a very famous piece of music….” Madame touched her throat, massaging it. “Pardon my singing.” Then she belted out a fairly credible pounding of the Fifth Symphony's opening bar: