Secret Dreams (4 page)

“Dah-dah-dah-
dah!”

She paused to regain herself. “We've all heard it, no?” A sly smile came into Madame's crinkled eyes, she ruffled her shoulders like a molting bird. “Tell me, what are Marie's favorite toys? Boats. Ships. Vessels. All touching upon her father. And lately she has even played at shipwreck. Is she sailing the sea in her own toy boat, I wonder? And if she finds the
Korkov
, on which her father served, how would she signal him?”

“By radio?” Max tried.

“But if the radio is broken. Or the ship is at war?”

“Then the ship is silent. Mute …,” Max answered. “Just like our little girl”

“Bravo!” Madame clapped her hands. “And when ships are silent, how do they signal each other?”

“Morse code!” Maximilian cried at once.

“Morse code,” Madame agreed. “Ships at sea flash silent signals across the waves with blinkers. In the chaos of a storm with the radio down, or in a state of war, ships flash signals to each other. Dah-dah-dah-
dah!
 In code that's Dot-dot-dot-
dash
. The sign for the letter

V … Breaking through the storm of Marie's chaotic, stop and go singing, it comes again and again. She is calling out the code sign

V … V … V!”

“Consider the many ways we can read the sign V,” Madame went on. “It is the Roman numeral for the number five. As in Beethoven's Fifth. It is the common abbreviation for the Latin word
versus
. As in ‘this against that.' It is the first letter in the name of the female love goddess, Venus. And to my mind, the symbol V is the most common pictogram of the female genitals —”

“Oh, really now!” Maximilian growled skeptically. “That's positively absurd…. What are you saying? That when Marie was five years old she heard Beethoven's Fifth and talked to her father in Morse code? Then had some mysterious experience with her vagina? Thought her parents were lost souls at sea or, worse, like ships at war? As in mother versus father?” Maximilian leaned back in his chair, slowly stroking the side of his face. “I forgot to include the volcano Vesuvius somewhere.”

Madame stared wide-eyed at the surgeon for a moment and then shook with laughter. “No, no, no, my dear Max, but that's a wonderful tale. Who knows? Maybe some of it is true. A mysterious experience with her vagina! I like that, coming from a man. Vaginas are mysterious things by and large. I daresay many men have found them so….Which is unfortunate. For the vaginas, that is. Of all mankind, only Tiresias the Seer was both male and female in his lifetime. And he said:

“The Seer was obviously a blind optimist,” — Madame sighed — “more than ready to believe in the best of all possible female worlds. His name in ancient Greek means ‘He Who Delights In Signs.' And his remark clearly indicates that at least one mysterious sign of V is more pleasing than others. In the case of vaginas, unquestionably true. But I'm afraid you've got me wrong, Max: what I meant to show was not coherency but coincidence.

“And here I have been a trifle unfair with all of you, for there is still one coincidence, one sign I have not shared. Our sweet chambermaid, Petra, found a clue in the pocket of Marie's jumper before it went into the wash. Good thorough girl, that Petra — always checks the children's pockets before she accidentally boils some precious artifact which might have been left there on purpose … Does anyone recall Marie's mother remarking she heard a waltz in the child's droning?”

Madame opened her cigarette case and took out a slip of worn, red-colored paper. “A concert ticket to the Rostov Orchestra. Notice the seat — one of those secluded boxes above the pit, number five. Notice the program printed on the ticket,- it is written in an abbreviated form to save space:

BTHVN V, SATIE VALSE “VEUX.”

“What a considerable wealth of information is crammed into that brief line. The first item on the program is clear enough — Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was to be played. But what of the second offering? Valse “Veux”? Easy if you know a little music. A short piano waltz by the composer Erik Satie, his most famous waltz
(valse
, if you will), entitled, ‘Je te veux' … I want you …”

“Je
te peux,''
Maximilian said softly, feeling the words on his tongue. “I want you.”

“As between intimates.” Madame's voice sank. “Lovers.” Her last word stood alone. “Yet how many more V's have appeared! One more in the word 'valse.' Another in the word 'veux', want. A hidden V in the ‘First Ring Box Number Five' … Artless, did we call the child's ranting?
How eloquent
, 1 say! Call it, rather, Variations on a Theme of V. Variations hidden from our eyes until we learned to see. From Beethoven's Fifth to the Morse code sign for V to a program of raises in a Rostov theater — the Black Water Theater, I think they call it. Ominous, no? Prophetic, even. Was this little red stub the last memento from a father and daughters final waltz?” She shrugged. “And was Petras finding the ticket simply an accident? Hardly!” she snorted. “No, Marie saw it as a kind of test. Of
us
, if you will. Would we throw away the ticket in our ignorance? Or discover the precious stub and decipher its message? Yet for its message to be heard, the ticket must pass from hand to hand until someone reads it who understands. The child is saying, ‘Petra, here is my ticket. Show it to your cousin Henrietta, who makes the beds,- show it to Kurt the orderly, and Hanna the nurse, and Freda the cook. Please, Petra, I want them all to see.'“ Madame's eyes went hard, cruel. Raising her voice as though speaking to the deaf and dumb, “Show it to them all! To you! And you! And we.” She slapped her chest, exploding into a fit of coughing. Then waved away Maximilian, who rose up in alarm. She lay back weakly in her chair, eyes half shut, pale and sick and altogether wasted. The silky cigarette croup rumbled in her throat. “
Je te veux
 … I want you. Her father, who else? But as for the child's recent lapse into silence and starvation? And why her fainting fit on the ferry, which started it all — this Î do not know,”

Sitting with her interns that evening, Frau Direktor could see the Black Water Theater in her mind. She knew it well. The wonderful old place had fallen into ruinous decay — like everything around them now. She'd seen the crossboards nailed to the doors and the broken windows staring down in wide-eyed blindness. The posters plastered around its huge front columns were peeling off like scabs. The management of the Black Water Theater had come under some kind of official cloud. Squatters lived within. They had torn up the seats and used the stuffing for their clothes and the wood for their fires. Now those first ring boxes were like little caves in the side of a cliff. With the electricity shut off, cook fires flickered in all the private boxes, tier after tier.

She remembered statues of gilded plasterwork. Gods and goddesses rising up in an arch over the proscenium, making love until they reached the top…. Now the gold paint flecked off in patches, showing them not as gods at all, but merely white plaster underneath. The cherubs nearest the stage had their noses broken. Time had been when people came by carriage, and footmen stood at the door to every box. When box seats in the first ring were lit by candles, and heavy burgundy curtains hung at the back. Sitting there, you were cozy and secluded, and when the orchestra played, the sound flowed everywhere, like the fragrance of roses in winter. Close your eyes, and it filled your head. The warm romance of father and daughter sitting up there alone. Listening as the music swirled into the padded little box. As the waves of sound surged over them like surf pounding a cliff, only to fly apart into a thousand silver drops, white pearls falling back into the seething black.

“In many ways Marie and her father were abnormally close,” Frau Direktor told her interns. “More and more so each time he came ashore. I believe the father had no other woman. And because Marie was a child, she had no other man. What veiled bonds held them, which no one saw or felt but them
alone?”

Frau Direktor watched Maximilian's face gradually darken, one particular V crawling into his mind again. Was all this just some lurid incest knot between a lonely evil man and a helpless love-starved girl? Frau Direktor nodded sadly to herself. It could be. Such dark things there were in the world. Hidden wishes. Secret loves. And people make up fairy tales — stories they want to see come true. Wounded children most especially.

Especially Marie.

“Madame's bit of evidence hit closest to the mark,” Frau Direktor said at last, “when she saw that V stood for Venus and versus. I now recall that Venus is one of the goddesses portrayed along the arch of the proscenium in the Black Water Theater — and also Neptune, god of the deep, water and seashells streaming from his hair. Father and daughter rising above the multitudes. Was it so hard for the child to see herself in the gold statue? Or see her father in the other, holding his golden hands above the world? If we had listened more closely to Marie, would we have heard Satie's love waltz ‘Je te veux' in the frayed snatches of the child's endless songs? The tune, itself is halting and slow, with more rests between the notes than notes themselves. A little like the girl herself, singing bits of broken songs, songs that always shift — and therefore never end … Unfinished. Unresolved. I hear the song of her stop-and-go. An endless repetition; Stop and go, stop and go.

“Didn't the mother tell us, Marie clamored to be taken for a ferry ride every chance she could? Marie adored the rides. Of course she did! With her father out to sea, she played Venus searching the waves for Neptune. Once on board the ferry, the girl actually traveled upon the water for the man she loved. Yes, a pathetic search, a hopeless search — but while her father lived, a search it was.

“Yet when her father died, do you imagine Marie no longer wished to find him?” Frau Direktors words rose and twisted into Madame's cigarette smoke. “Of course not! When Marie's father was lost at sea, the child wished to find him more than
ever!”

Then, in a hush, “But the father no longer sailed the ocean,- he had sunk below it… and to search for him in the cold black water, Marie must go below the waves herself. 'To find him, she must drown….'

“The father is lost. The mother adulterous. The family a failure. Marie had a bitter choice. To die, searching for her father beneath the waves — or give him up, losing him forever. Is it any wonder the girl had an insane fainting fit on the deck of the ferry? Any wonder she revived hours later unable to speak, ranting bits of V! V! V! Follow her father or lose him forever? When the mother denied the girl drinking water, Marie took starvation as her final path. This, then, is the last hard road to us.

“Strange fate. For in this place she can have as much water as she wants. Gallons and gallons. Endless baths where she can sing the stop-and-go to her heart's content. Indeed, with us Marie is able to
drown
 in water if she pleases. And so her search continues — soaking in the water and drinking from the tap. Hoping against hope that one day shell find her father's body; if not on the seabed, among the sunken wrecks of other families, then perhaps at the bottom of her own bathtub….

“So her fainting fit on the ferry and her current regression to silent starvation are tied together. Marie fears abandonment. Fears we will leave her. For if she gives up her most critical symptoms, silence and starvation, if she becomes better, if she is ‘cured,' then her time with us must come to an end. Back to her mother once more. Who took her toys away, who shuttled her off to any available ‘aunt.' Marie's current silent starvation is her life rope. While she clings to that, she will never leave. For we have become her family now. And so must never part.

“Never go away …”

A worn sigh escaped from them that bygone evening. Not the search and discovery but the final seeing of a thing tired them so. After the effort of holding out, resisting,
refusing
to see the answer for so long. More than enough for one end-of-day discussion. And why not? Only a short week ago, Frau Direktor and the others fully expected many, many more. Always another meeting, another moment for reflection, stretching out in an ocean stream of talk. Their own endless stop-and-go.

And what of this could Frau Direktor put in a cryptic letter to that eons-distant friend? The letter might get there, or it might not. A child might arrive safely with Max or Madame — or might not. For in a few short days their world had changed. Almost overnight, it seemed, the clinic staff had struck camp. No rattle of work in the kitchen or footsteps in the halls. Kurt, their silent giant of an orderly, who for years attended the children in every conceivable way — from discovering the whereabouts of a lost sock to fetching the special glue to mend the broken arm of a doll — simply stopped coming to work. Hanna, their hook-nosed nurse, who could coax a thermometer into a chattering, feverish mouth, cure a case of rampant diarrhea, or find the right salve for a bruised knee — now she was gone. Their cook, with the face of a boiled lobster, and her Serbian dishwasher, with arms mottled from the suds — one who prepared and cleaned up an endless cycle of despoiled meals and the other who always found the special treat each child secretly loved (from a mandarin orange to an anchovy) but never told anyone, placing the dainty on the tray with a wink and a nod — they too were gone.

And the clinic's giggling imp of a chambermaid — good, thorough Petra — who made sixteen beds a day, who washed the wetted sheets and soiled clothes, who swept the floors and straightened the rooms, putting a hundred tin soldiers back in their box without losing the one-legged infantryman under the dresser, and who always placed the stuffed tiger on the pillow just so …