I see now why Jung was reluctant to prolong our session. It is only four in the afternoon and I am already conscious of fatigue. The drink helps at first. It makes me feel relaxed, open and agreeable; but it also loosens my controls and makes me vulnerable to any sudden pressure from outside or stress from within. I know I have been talking very freely, and I am surprised how much forgotten material has been revealed by Jung’s curious inquisition. I have not thought of Sister Damiana or Alma de Angelis in years. As for Lily’s affair with Sir Richard Burton, I thought that was consigned to the attic decades ago!
Jung tells me that he still wants me to follow the chronology of my life, but not to linger too long on tenuous or unimportant recollections. He says, quite rightly, that the landmarks are usually visible from a long way off. I tell him that the two years after university were very important in my personal development, and it is essential to spend some time on them.
I say this not entirely without guile. I know my history. He doesn’t. I need time and a new infusion of courage to get me to the moment of truth and past it. Jung understands, I think. For all his burly frame and his very obvious reactions to my female presence, there is a lot of the female in him. There are moments when he stops reasoning and guesses – and the guess is generally right. I can sense, too, when he is indulging me and when he is moving to block me. This happens always at moments when I am trying to play a confidence trick on myself.
However, I think I have convinced him that I do have a mind, that I read more than fashion magazines, and that I can spell all the words in the medical dictionary. So, he asks, are we ready? I assure him we are. He opens with a simple affirmation.
“You left Padua with a medical degree.”
“A very good one, in fact.”
“What plans did you have for a future career?”
“They were still vague, because I hadn’t yet finished my training. Papa had procured me an internship at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna. Your colleague Freud worked there too, if I remember rightly. After that I wanted to do post-graduate study in Edinburgh or London; but Papa, for obvious reasons, wasn’t too happy about that. Afterwards? Well, I had a vague idea that I would like to design my life as Papa had done: keep Silbersee and practise in Salzburg or Innsbruck. But first there was the grand ocean voyage which Papa had promised me as a reward for my graduation.
“I was ready for change. We all were. Papa was in his fifties now, still chasing the girls, but beginning to wonder whether he shouldn’t find some comfortable, titled widow with a competence of her own and settle down! Lily, beginning to be middle-aged, was more possessive and occasionally rasping. Me? I was tired. The final year had been brutally hard: long hours at the hospital, late nights with my texts, very little diversion – and, to cap it all, a bout of bronchitis in the winter that I simply couldn’t shake off. I had no regular lover and little inclination to go chasing one. All I wanted was to get through the year and earn a freedom I had never enjoyed.”
Jung looks at me with a mischievous grin and says:
“That’s an odd thing to say. I should have thought you were the freest of mortal women, with your own establishment, plenty of money, a complaisant chaperone, and even more complaisant parent.”
“You don’t understand. What I wanted most to be free of was my past – all the things that seemed to set me apart from other people. The voyage that Papa had planned would, I hoped, be a punctuation point from which I could begin a new chapter.”
“Did it turn out so?”
“Yes, it did. Though not quite as I expected. The voyage itself was a wonderful experience. We embarked at Rotterdam in first class accommodations on the flagship of the Royal Dutch Line: separate cabins for each of us because, as Papa put it, ‘We’re all old enough to need privacy!’ My God! I thought, so late in the day! Our outward route lay through the Suez Canal to Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Surabaja, Saigon, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Our fellow passengers were a mixed bunch of merchants, officials of the Dutch colonial service, British traders, and an assortment of wives and children. Don’t worry! I’m not going to give you the whole Baedeker tour; but I loved every day and every night of it. I did feel free. I did feel a woman in my own right.
“I made friends with the ship’s doctor, who, once he got over his astonishment at finding a colleague in skirts, became a comfortable if somewhat persistent escort. I was, however, much more interested in a man who joined us at Aden. The moment she saw him Lily clutched my arm and said, That’s what Dick Burton must have looked like when he was a young man!’ He had the same arrogant bearing, the same hawk face and piercing eyes and cynical mouth. But his manners were ten times better than Ruffian Dick’s. He spoke softly, drank little and was full of small, unobtrusive courtesies. His name was Avram Kostykian, which caused Papa to dismiss him with a shrug: ‘Armenian Jew! You find ‘em everywhere there’s trade. I wouldn’t spend much time on him if I were you.’ I didn’t like Papa’s tone and I told him so. I also told him I would keep what company I chose. He shrugged and walked away. It was the first time I had realised how deep his prejudice was. When I told Lily, she laughed and said I didn’t know the half of it. No Jew in Austria could ever hope for promotion in the army or in the civil service. Even an army surgeon rarely got above the rank of captain.”
I am surprised to see Jung blushing and fidgeting with his pen. I ask him pointblank:
“Don’t you like Jews either?”
“Not very much.” At least he has the grace to be frank. He also feels the need to explain himself further. “My colleague Freud is of course a Jew; but even with him I run up against certain limitations which are peculiarly Semitic. The Aryan heritage, the Aryan unconscious, is much richer in potential than the Jewish.” He grins and shrugs in deprecation. “I’m probably just as prejudiced as your father. None of my affairs with Jewish women has ever turned out very well!”
I try not to show it, but he has disappointed me. I ask myself: if he is prejudiced against a whole race, how will he be when he knows my very special category? Also, his confession of other affairs sounds more like a boast in bad taste than a slip of the tongue. He knows I have met his wife. I would rather he kept his affairs to himself. And if they haven’t turned out well, must it be the woman who is to blame? I find a perverse satisfaction in extending the story of my encounter with Kostykian.
“He was, as Papa had surmised, a trader, but a very special one. He dealt in precious stones: rubies, emeralds, sapphires, but especially in pearls. He travelled all over the East, wherever the pearl divers worked, to bid for their stocks. When he found I was interested, he would sit for hours showing me his treasures, telling me tales of the divers and the captains who drove them until they collapsed with the bends, and the Chinese and Indian and Malay merchants, who sat around for hours betting on the value of a pearl, as the ‘peeler’ worked on it. Do you know what a peeler is?”
“I confess I do not, Madame. But I’m sure you will tell me.”
For some reason Jung is huffy and a little impatient. I tell him he should be interested because the peeler does exactly what he, the analyst, is trying to do with me.
“A pearl is made up of many layers of nacre deposited by the oyster over the original irritant in the shell. Sometimes even a fine pearl has defects in the outer skin: pinhole pittings, tiny indented marks. These greatly reduce the value of the jewel. However, if they are not too deep, they may be removed by peeling off layers of nacre until you reach a perfect, unblemished skin. It’s delicate, finical work and a mistake can be very costly. So you can imagine the scene in a Malay kampong or a Chinese godown: all those impassive faces watching as flake after flake of skin is removed, no one knowing whether the whole pearl will be pared away or whether a priceless beauty will be revealed. It takes a lot of nerve to bid blind on the ultimate value.
“Kostykian told the story wonderfully. He had a poet’s feel for places and people. And, best of all, he taught me how to do the peeling! He challenged me, saying, ‘You’re a surgeon. You’ve got a scalpel and a pair of tongs. Here! I’ll show you.’ He handed me a pink pearl, nearly a centimetre across. It was badly pitted and probably worthless. He showed me how to start the operation and continue it with tiny, patient strokes. At the end of two hours I had a perfect pink pearl about a third of a centimetre in diameter. Kostykian gave it to me as a present. I had it mounted in a pendant; but I mislaid it somewhere, after I was married.”
“A very charming story.” Jung makes a dry comment. “But can you tell me what it has to do with our concerns?”
His manner irritates me as much as his slighting attitude to Jews. I give him a testy answer.
“Yes I can. Kostykian was one man who gave me a lot and never asked anything of me. He took me ashore with him. He walked me round the jewel marts in Colombo and Bangkok. He showed me how to read a stone; the silk in an emerald, the distribution of colour in a sapphire, the difference between a Siam ruby and the rich pigeon blood of Burma. He was so attentive and yet so apparently passionless that I wondered whether he was like Gianni di Malvasia and preferred the love of men. The night before we parted in Singapore, he told me the reason: ‘I’m married. I have a wife and four little boys in Alexandria. They are the centre of my life. Although I am home only four months of the year, they are with me, every day and every night. I live a strange existence, as you see. I meet strange people in wild places. Life is cheap, women are cheaper. I am often offered a girl, just for the first option on a big pearl. I am a man of strong passions. I have to keep them very much under control, even in trade. Jewels are eerie things. One can lust after them just as one lusts after a woman. I know that once I slip, once I let down my defences, I am lost. I shall become like a spinning top whirling from port to port, arriving nowhere. You, my Magda, are the biggest and the sweetest temptation I have ever had! Now, let’s kiss good night and goodbye. I’ll be off the ship before you’re awake in the morning.’
“When I went back to my cabin I found a package on the pillow. Inside it was a small but very pure sapphire, rich blue and quite brilliant. There was a note too. I remember it word for word. ‘The weight is two carats. There is a small inclusion at the apex, but it will take an expert to spot it. Nothing is perfect in this world. For the first time in my life, I’m regretting something I haven’t done. Thank you for the great, great pleasure of your company. Avram.’”
“I wonder.” Jung laces his hands together, makes a church steeple of his fingertips and peers at me over the top of it. “I wonder why you tell that story with so much satisfaction.”
“Because after all my other affairs, from Papa and Lily onwards, I have always felt used, deprived of some special freedom that should have been mine by right. I was never quite sure what it was – even a whore’s wage on the mantelpiece might have helped! But with Avram Kostykian, the Armenian Jew, everything was a free act between friends. When I said as much to Papa he just grunted and said grudgingly, ‘Well, it’s always a mistake to generalise.’ Lily gave me a surreptitious kick under the table and a terse reminder. ‘Never say I told you so. It’s the height of bad manners!’”
“Perhaps that’s the answer to your problem.” Jung leans back in his chair and chuckles mischievously. “Find yourself a virtuous married Jew who brings you sapphires and doesn’t want to sleep with you!”
“Don’t think I haven’t considered it!”
I laugh in spite of myself. Jung presses on impatiently.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me about the voyage?”
I mention the Malay who ran amok in Surabaja and was shot in front of our eyes. I speak of the similarity between my own violent fugues and his demented, murderous dash through the streets. Jung writes copious notes at this point and then poses an unexpected question.
“The end for the man amok is a bullet in the head. Are you saying death is the only solution for you too?”
“It may be. I have to face it, don’t I? If you can’t do anything for me . . .”
He slams his hand on the table and launches into a tirade.
“I told you at the beginning! Don’t blackmail me with your life! I didn’t give it to you. I can’t take it away. I’m not a miracle worker either. I don’t cast out devils – though I know some Gadarene swine I’d like to send them into! Analysis isn’t surgery. You don’t chop out the diseased organ, sew up the patient and send her home to tea and sandwiches. This is a mutual effort to define the cause of a psychosis and, if possible, eliminate it, or at least make it possible for you to live with it. Live, you understand! Live! Of course, if you want, you can think yourself into dying, like the native under the witch doctor’s curse. If that’s what you want, I can’t help you!”
This time his anger is not an act. I realise that he, like me, is getting tired. I must not tease him any more. I must not let him tease me either. I apologise. I tell him that I understand we are both under stress, that I really am trying to cooperate. He is quickly mollified and smiles at me again.
“At least you know now that analysis is not a game for children. When you start rummaging about in the unconscious, you never know what strange animals will pop out. Try to sum it up for me. Was the voyage a success or not?”
“For me a total success. I saw a world I had never expected – a beautiful, cruel, indifferent world in which an individual existence meant nothing. In China girl babies were exposed on rubbish heaps. In Japan fathers sold their girls into prostitution. Through all of Asia, millions died in floods, famines and epidemics. In India the British despised the off-whites they fathered. In Java the Dutch married them. In Siam the king dispensed death at every meeting of his ministers. In Borneo the Dyaks hunted human heads for trophies. These experiences put me in my place – my small obscure place – and I was grateful.
“Even so, it was good to be back at Silbersee, with three months still in hand before I had to take up my appointment at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna. The estate had aged like all of us. Coming home for vacations I hadn’t noticed the change so much; but now it was clear that everything was running down. The Schloss and the tenant houses needed paint and plaster, our furniture needed recovering, the gardens were scraggy, the accounts untidy, the staff indolent and offhand. Papa was away so much that when he came home he wanted simply to relax and play the country gentleman.
“For the first time I understood how much a son would have meant to him at this period of his life. For the first time too, I understood how spoiled and self-centred a creature I was. I knew that I could run Silbersee. With Lily as my lieutenant, I could run it and still do my internship in Vienna. The problem would be to get Papa to agree. I had no idea of the disposition of his will. I knew very well the disposition of his mind: that women were made for bed but not for business. A frontal attack on his prejudices would get me nowhere.
“My opportunity came when, a couple of weeks after our return, he fell ill with pneumonia. It was a bad siege and it left him very weak and more dependent than I had ever seen him. He was quite childish at times, querulous and demanding. Finally, after a long talk with Lily, I decided to face matters out with him. I was amazed at my own vehemence. I told him nobody could play as he played, run a busy consulting practice, keep a steady hand in the operating theatre and manage a country estate the size of Silbersee. I couldn’t run his practice and I certainly wasn’t going to orchestrate his love life; but I could and would take on Silbersee, on two conditions: that I knew it was deeded to me and everyone else knew I was the Chief, the Boss, the Arbeitgeberin!
“Papa tried to waltz me round the linden tree to the tune of Tomorrow, someday, very soon’. I told him plainly that if he didn’t like the deal, I was leaving and setting myself up in Vienna. I mightn’t make a fortune; but at least I would eat and stay out of the rain. Finally, male pride being satisfied, he consented. Papers were drawn deeding Silbersee to me with an entail that would stop my husband from taking possession if I married. During Papa’s lifetime we would share the income equally. After his death, I would undertake to pension Lily. Whatever other commitments Papa had – to women or children I didn’t know about – he could provide out of his personal funds, which I knew were substantial. So, finally, I was a landowner, with my feet firmly planted on my own soil.”
“From which,” Jung reminds me coolly, “you are now in exile. Have you thought where you are going to go, what you are going to do?”
“Silbersee is up for sale. I’ll probably do very well out of it. War in Europe seems inevitable. The armies are paying high prices for brood stock and stud farms.”
“At this moment I don’t even know where I shall go when I leave Zurich.”
“Perhaps we may induce you to stay in Switzerland.”
“If you can help me, my dear doctor, I’ll be happy to take up residence next door!”
“My wife might object to that; but I’m sure we could find you something quite beautiful round the lakeshore.”
It is one of these light-headed exchanges which carry a whole gamut of sexual overtones. I am still happy to respond; but after his comments on Kostykian and on his own affairs with Jewish women, I am wary. He adds an unexpected afterthought:
“Joking aside, if you are to continue in analysis with me, we will need to be reasonably close to each other and to establish a routine of conference and communication. Occasionally I find it helps to visit a patient, though I do not make a practice of it. However, we can discuss that later. To get back to your life story. You were the mistress of Silbersee, you were a trained physician with a bright career ahead of you. You had learned that in the cosmic scheme, your unconventional past was of little consequence. In short, all the odds were in your favour. What happened next?”
“I took control of Silbersee, with Lily as my faithful adjutant. I scoured every corner of the estate, went over every detail of the accounts. I promoted Hans Hemeling from head groom to studmaster and began selling off the scrubby breeders that had been our stock-in-trade for too long. I made Lily chatelaine of the Schloss. She could storm like a fury over dusty furniture and wasted food and the next minute have the whole staff in fits of laughter with her bawdy jokes in dialect. We were being cheated in the Stüberl and the guest house and grossly underpaid on the timber contracts. Our cattle were sold through a local auctioneer, who played games with a bidding ring of butchers from Salzburg and Innsbruck.
“I went around swinging right and left, not caring whom I hit. At the end of the first month we almost had a new peasants’ revolt. I was nicknamed Zickzackblitz, forked lightning, because nobody knew where I was going to strike next. But when painters and carpenters began to work on the Schloss and afterwards on the houses of the estate, when the gardens began to look tidy and we got better prices in the market, and Hans and I came home with our first good Arab stallion and a dam to breed with him, then the atmosphere changed. Fräulein Zickzackblitz became the Meisterin, and word of our reformation began to spread around the countryside.
“Then Lily suggested that we set up a local hunt club on the English model, with some fashionable trimmings that we had learned in Lombardy. It would give us a market for our horses. We would make the Stüberl the assembly point for the meet. We would import English and German hounds and breed them for the pack. Papa loved this idea. It gave a whole new dimension to his rather faded social life. After the first meet, he remarked happily, ‘Marvellous. I never knew there were so many good-looking women still hiding in the woodwork!’
“By the time I left for Vienna, the place was a going concern again. I could trust Lily and Hemeling. I myself would be back every two or three weeks to check the operation and enjoy my own domain. The night before I left, Papa asked me to join him for brandy in his study. This was a rare event. He was never one for face-to-face confidences. He liked to float through our domestic life like a philosopher in residence, bestowing words of wisdom, an offhand caress to me or Lily, an enthusiastic pat on the bottoms of the servant girls – and only the illusion of intimacy. This time, however, he had obviously taken a great deal of trouble to prepare a special speech for me.
“‘We’ve had a funny life, Liebchen, all three of us; but we seem to have survived it pretty well. You’ve done better than I ever dreamed. I’m very proud of you, even if I’m not very proud of myself. I wish there were some way I could pass my title on to you, but there isn’t. Even if you have a son, there’s nothing I can do except petition the Emperor to grant him a patent of nobility. One of my girl friends at court might just manage to slip it under his nose. There’d be a bar sinister in the coat of arms, but that wouldn’t matter. The point is that I can’t make a petition until there is a grandson. So, that’s the question: what are your thoughts about getting married? I know you’ve got a year to do in Vienna. There’s a year in England, which I’m not happy about; but you can do it if you want. After that, you’re about as ripe as any girl can risk being for a decent marriage. You’ve got a handsome estate in your own right. You’re damned good looking and although I know you don’t live like a nun, you’ve got to settle down some time. Question is, with whom? I don’t want to see you picked up by some shabby merchant with lots of money and no breeding. On the other hand, if we’re talking of breeding it means someone who’s coming into the marriage market second-time around – a widower in his forties perhaps, with a young family or, better still, without. The problem is that all the young bloods are already pre-empted for girls just coming out at court. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. You’re ten times the woman they are; but your birth certificate betrays you. At least you haven’t had to become a dancer or a chorus singer! You do have a profession and money in your own right. So, what are we going to do about it, eh? I can have Louisa von Grabitz scout the market if you like. She charges a fee, of course; but she’s the least gossipy of all these matchmaking dowagers.’
“The longer he talked, the angrier I became. I kept thinking: the gall of the man! I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be Papa’s child bride! And if I was damaged goods in the marriage market, pray tell, whose fault was that? Finally I burst out: The fact is, Papa dear, I don’t want to get married yet; and when I do, I’ll choose my own husband, even if I have to make another trip to Hong Kong to find him!’”
“And how did your father take that announcement?”
“With relief I think. He didn’t really want to be bothered. He’d done his duty. If I wanted to skip to the moon on a wooden leg, that was my affair. Whatever his shortcomings, he had kept me out of the music halls and off the streets. In his curious, elitist ethos that was more than most bastards had any right to expect from their progenitors.”
“So, when you went off to Vienna, you parted friends?”
“Only just. That night when Papa and Lily were getting ready for bed, Papa asked me to join them – ‘Just a cuddle, Liebchen, for old times’ sake!’ I was about to tell him the old times were long gone and I never wanted to hear of them again, when Lily – God love her! – saved us from another nasty scene. She laughed and said: ‘Listen, you old goat! Don’t waste yourself on the overture. Save yourself for the big aria!’ Then she dragged him off to the bedroom singing ‘La ci darem la mano’.
“That night I dreamed of my mother. It was midwinter. I was waiting in the snow outside the gates of Schloss Silbersee. Mother came driving by, in a sleigh drawn by white horses with silver bells. She was wrapped in white ermine. I knew it was she from a long way off. I stood out in the middle of the road and waved to the driver to stop. Instead he whipped up his horses and drove right past me, while Mamma sat there, with the cold, cruel smile of the Snow Queen.”
Jung ponders this piece of information for a while then turns back through his notes. He marks several passages and remarks:
“Here’s something else I find curious. Why, in all these years, did you never press for information about your mother – if not from your father, then from Lily? Why didn’t you just go to London or to your birthplace and find out what you wanted to know? It would have been a very simple piece of detective work. Another thing I can’t understand is Lily’s reticence about the matter, especially when you were older and capable of understanding.”
“The answers, my dear doctor, are so simple that they’re pathetic. Why didn’t I press for information? Because I’d been conditioned all my life not to do it. Why didn’t I go to England and ferret out the truth? Because I was afraid of exactly what happened in the dream: that my mother would cut me dead in the street. Why didn’t Lily tell me the truth? Because, as I’ve only recently discovered, Lily was the reason for the break-up. Lily was sleeping with Papa during my mother’s pregnancy. Lily was conspiring in my seduction to hold on to Papa. Lily was the perfect opportunist. She loved me, yes! No question, no doubt! But Papa paid her wages and what Papa demanded, Papa got. What he needed most of all was silence. Until the day she left to go home to England, what Lily told me about my mother tallied exactly with what my father told. My life, my happiness depended on them both. Why should I risk them for the cold, disdainful smile of the Snow Queen? That’s why I’ve never tried to intrude on my daughter’s life. She probably feels the same way about me.”
“Have you never written to your daughter?”
“Several times, in the early days. I never got an answer.”
“For God’s sake! She was only a child!”
“I know. But after a while, you yourself can’t find the words. What do you say? ‘I’m not a witch, I’m your mother and I love you. I want to hold you and kiss you and make up to you for all the lost years?’ It’s beautiful! But if you shout it or write it or sing it long enough in an empty room, it will drive you mad. You’ve talked of your own love affairs, doctor. Have you ever wanted to unsay something and found no one’s there to listen? Have you never wanted to say tender things only to hear them echo back from a wall of stone!”