~ 3 ~

Arabesque

I was perplexed. After fifty years in practice I thought I had seen everything, but I had never before had a new patient enter my office offering me a photograph of herself in the bloom of youth. And I was even more unnerved when this patient, Natasha, a portly Russian woman of seventy or so, stared as intently at me as I stared at the photograph of a beautiful ballerina in arabesque pose, balanced majestically on one toe and stretching both arms gracefully upward. I turned my glance back to Natasha, who, though no longer slender, had coasted to her seat with a dancer’s grace. She must have sensed I was trying to locate the young dancer in her, for she raised her chin and turned her head just a bit to offer me a clear profile. Natasha’s facial features had been coarsened, perhaps by too many Russian winters and too much alcohol. Still, she was an attractive woman, though not as beautiful as before, I thought, as I glanced once again at the photograph of the young Natasha, a marvel of elegance.

“Was I not lovely?” she coyly asked. When I nodded, she continued. “I was a prima ballerina at La Scala.”

“Do you always think of yourself in the past tense?”

She drew herself back. “What a rude question, Dr. Yalom. Obviously you’ve taken the bad manners course that is required for all therapists. But,” she paused to consider the matter, “perhaps it is so. Perhaps you are right. But what is strange in the case of Natalya the ballerina is that I was finished as a dancer before I was thirty—forty years ago—and I’ve been happier, ever so much happier, since I stopped dancing.”

“You stopped dancing forty years ago and yet here, today, you enter my office offering me this picture of you as a young dancer. Surely you must feel that I would be uninterested in the Natasha of today?”

She blinked two or three times and then looked about for a minute, inspecting the décor of my office. “I had a dream about you last night,” she said. “If I close my eyes, I can still see it. I was coming to see you and entered a room. It wasn’t like this office. Perhaps it was your home, and there were a lot of people there, perhaps your wife and family, and I was carrying a big canvas bag full of rifles and cleaning equipment for them. I could see you surrounded by people in one corner, and I knew it was you from the picture on the cover of your Schopenhauer novel. I couldn’t make my way to you or even catch your eye. There was more, but that’s all I recall.”

“Ah, and do you see any link between your dream and your offering me this photograph?”

“Rifles mean penises. I know that from a long psychoanaly­sis. My analyst told me I used the penis as a weapon. When I had an argument with my boyfriend, Sergei, the lead dancer in the company and, later, my husband, I would go out, get drunk, find a penis, any penis—the particular owner was incidental—and have sex in order to wound Sergei and make me feel better. It always worked. But briefly. Very briefly.”

“And the link between the dream and the photograph?”

“The same question? You persist? Perhaps you’re insinuating that I am using this picture of my young self to interest you in me sexually? Not only is this insulting, but it makes no sense whatsoever.”

Her grand entrance holding the photograph was loaded with meaning. Of that I had no doubt, but I let it go for the moment and got down to business in a more direct fashion. “Please, let’s now consider your reasons for contacting me. From your email I know you will be in San Francisco for only a short time and that it was extraordinarily urgent I meet with you today and tomorrow because you felt you were ‘lost outside of your life and couldn’t find your way back.’ Please tell me about that. You wrote that it was a matter of life and death.”

“Yes, that’s what it feels like. It’s very hard to describe, but something serious is happening to me. I’ve come to visit California with my husband, Pavel, and we’ve done what we’ve always done on such visits. He met with some important clients; we’ve seen our Russian friends, driven to Napa Valley, gone to the San Francisco opera, and dined at fine restaurants. But somehow this time it’s not the same. How to put it? The Russian word is ostrannaya. I’m not truly here. Nothing that happens sinks in. I have insulation around me; I feel it is not me here, not me experiencing these things. I’m anxious, very distracted. And not sleeping well. I wish my English was better to describe things. Once I lived in the US for four years and took many lessons, but my English still feels clumsy.”

“Your English so far is excellent, and you’re doing a good job describing how you feel. Tell me, how do you explain it? What do you think is happening to you?”

“I’m bewildered. I mentioned I needed a four-year psychoanalysis long ago, when I was in terrible crisis. But even then I did not have this feeling. And since then life has been good. Until now I’ve been completely well for many years.”

“This state of not being in your life. Let’s try to trace it back. When do you think this feeling began? How long ago?”

“I can’t say. It’s such an odd feeling and a vague feeling that it’s hard to pinpoint it. I know we’ve been in California for about three days.”

“Your email to me was written a week ago; that was before you came to California. Where were you at that time?”

“We spent a week in New York, then a few days in Washington, and then flew here.”

“Anything unsettling happen in New York or Washington?”

“Nothing. Just the usual jet lag. Pavel had several business meetings, and I was alone to explore. Usually I love exploring cities.”

“And this time? Tell me exactly what you did while he was working.”

“In New York, I walked. I . . . how do you say it in English? . . . looked at people? People watched?”

“Yes, people watched.”

“So I people watched, and I shopped and spent days visiting the Met museum. Oh yes, I am certain I felt good in New York because I remember that, on one beautiful sunny day, Pavel and I took a boat trip excursion around Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and I remember we both felt so wonderful. So it was after New York that I started going downhill.”

“Try to recall the trip to Washington. What did you do?”

“I did what I always do. I followed my usual pattern. I visited Smithsonian museums every day: the Air and Space, Natural History, American History, and, oh yes, yes! There was one strong event when I visited the National Gallery.”

“What happened? Try to describe it.”

“I was so excited when I saw a huge outside banner announcing an exhibition on the history of ballet.”

“Yes, and what happened?”

“As soon as I saw that banner, I rushed inside the gallery, so excited that I pushed and forced my way to the front of the line. I was looking for something. I believe I was looking for Sergei.”

“Sergei? You mean your first husband?”

“Yes, my first husband. This won’t really make sense to you unless I tell you some things about my life. May I present some of my highlights? I’ve been rehearsing a speech for days.”

Concerned that she was about to go on stage and that her presentation might use up all our time, I responded, “Yes, a brief summary would be helpful.”

“To start, you must know I absolutely lacked mothering and my lifelong feeling of lack of mothering was the central focus of my analysis. I was born in Odessa, and my parents separated before I was born. I never knew my father, and my mother never spoke of him. My mother hardly spoke of anything. Poor woman, she was always ill and died from cancer just before I was ten. I remember at my tenth birthday party . . . ”

“Natasha, sorry to interrupt, but I have a dilemma. Believe me, I’m interested in all you have to say, but at the same time, I’ve got to be timekeeper here because we have only these two sessions, and I want, for your sake, to use our time efficiently.”

“You’re absolutely right. When I’m on stage, I forget the time. I’ll rush now and promise you to take no side excursions. At any rate, after my mother died, her twin sister, Aunt Olga, took me to St. Petersburg and raised me. Now Aunt Olga was a kind person, and she was always good to me, but she had to support herself—she was unmarried—and she worked hard and had little time for me. She was a very good violinist and traveled with the symphony orchestra much of the year. She knew I was a good dancer, and about a year after I arrived, she arranged for auditions, where I performed well enough for her to deposit me in the Vaganova Ballet Academy, where I spent the next eight years. I became such a good dancer that, at the age of eighteen, I received an offer from the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater, where I danced for a few years. That was where I met Sergei, one of the great dancers and egotists and philanderers of our time and who is also the great love of my life.”

“You use the present tense? Still the great love of your life?”

Bristling a bit at my interruption, she said, sharply, “Please let me continue. You asked me to rush, and I’m hurrying, and I want to relate this in my own way. Sergei and I married, and, almost miraculously, he and I managed to defect when he accepted an offer with La Scala in Italy. After all, tell me, who could live in Russia in those years? Now I must discuss Sergei—he had a leading role in my life. Less than a year after we married, I was crippled with pain, and the doctor told me I had gout. Tell me, can you imagine a more catastrophic illness for a ballerina? No, there is none! Gout ended my career before I was thirty. And, then, what did Sergei, the love of my life, do? He immediately left me for another dancer. And what did I do? I went quite crazy and almost killed myself with alcohol and almost killed him with a broken bottle and I slashed scars on his face to remember me by. My aunt Olga had to come to take me from the Milan psychiatric hospital and bring me back to Russia, and that’s when I started the psychoanalysis that saved my life. My aunt found one of the only psychoanalysts in all of Russia, and even he was practicing underground. Much of my analysis was about Sergei, about getting over the pain he gave me, about quitting alcohol forever, about ending my parade of shallow affairs. And maybe about learning how to love—love myself and love others.

“When I improved, I attended the university, and in music studies I soon found out, to my surprise, that I had talent for the cello, not enough to perform but enough to teach, and I have been a cello teacher ever since. Pavel, my husband, was one of my first students. The worst cellist I ever saw, but a wonderful man and, as it turned out later, a very smart and successful businessman. We fell in love, he divorced his wife for me, and we married and have had a long, marvelous life together.”

“Very succinct and wonderfully clear, Natasha. Thank you.”

“As I say, I’ve been rehearsing it in my mind many times. You see why I didn’t want any interruptions?”

“Yes, I understand. So now let’s return to the museum in Washington. By the way, if there are words I use you don’t understand, please stop me and tell me.”

“So far I understand everything. My vocabulary is good, and I read many American novels to keep up my English. Right now I read Henderson the Rain King.”

“You have good taste. That is one of my favorite books, and Bellow is one of our great writers, though he is no Dostoevsky. But to return to the exhibit, after what you’ve told me, I can appreciate how emotional it must have been for you. Tell me exactly what happened. You said you entered looking for Sergei, the man you said ‘is the love of your life’?”

“Yes, I’m quite sure now that Sergei was my agenda, my secret agenda when I entered the exhibition. And I mean secret even from myself. The love of my life doesn’t necessarily mean my conscious life. You, a famous psychiatrist, should appreciate that.”

“Mea culpa.” I found her soft jabs rather charming and enlivening.

“I forgive you—just this once. Now to my visit to the exhibit. They showed a lot of early Russian posters from the Bolshoi and the Kirov, and one of them, hanging near the entrance, was a stunning picture of Sergei flying like an angel through the air in Swan Lake. It was somewhat blurred, but I’m sure it was Sergei, even though his name was not given. I searched for hours through the entire exhibition, but there was no mention of his name, not one single time. Can you believe it? Sergei was like a god, and yet his name no longer exists. Now I remember . . . ”

“What? What do you remember?”

“You asked when I first began to lose myself. It happened then. I remember walking out of that exhibit as though I were in a trance, and I’ve not felt like myself since.”

“Do you recall searching also for yourself in the museum? For pictures or mentions of your name?”

“I don’t remember that day very well. So I have to rebuild it. Is that the right word?”

“I understand. You have to reconstruct it.”

“Yes, I must reconstruct the visit. I think that I was so shocked by Sergei not being included that I said to myself, ‘If he was not there, how could I possibly be included?’ But perhaps in a timid way I did look for myself. There were some undated photos of La Scala’s Giselle—for two seasons I played Myrtha—and I do remember peering so closely at one photo that my nose touched the photograph and the guard ran over, glowered at me, and pointed to an imaginary line on the floor and told me not to cross it.”

“It seems such a human thing to do, to look for yourself in those historical photos.”

“But what right did I have to look for myself? I repeat—I still don’t think you’ve registered it. You’re not listening. You’ve not grasped that Sergei was a god, that he soared above us in the clouds, and all of us, all the other dancers, gazed upon him as children upon a majestic airship.”

“I’m puzzled. Let me summarize what I know so far about Sergei. He was a great dancer, and the two of you performed together in Russia, and then, when he defected to dance in Italy, you chose to go with him and then married him. And then when you got gout, he promptly abandoned you and took up with another woman, at which point you became extremely disturbed and slashed him with a broken bottle. Right so far?”

Natasha nodded, “Right.”

“After you left Italy with your aunt, what further contact did you have with Sergei?”

“None. Nothing. I never saw him again. Never heard from him again. Not one word.”

“But you kept thinking about him?”

“Yes, at first when I heard his name mentioned, I’d obsess about him and had to bang my head to knock him out of my brain. But, eventually, I blotted him from my memory. I cut him out.”

“He did you great harm, and you cut him out of your memory, but last week you went into that National Gallery exhibit thinking of him as ‘the love of your life,’ searching for him, and then grew outraged that he had been overlooked and forgotten. You can see my confusion.”

“Yes, yes, I understand you. A big contradiction, I agree. Going to that museum show was like performing an excavation in my mind. It’s like I blindly struck a massive vein of energy that has now come spewing out. I speak in a clumsy way. Do you understand?”

When I nodded, Natasha continued, “Sergei was four years older than me, so he is now about seventy-three. That is, if he is alive. And yet I cannot imagine a seventy-three-year-old Sergei. It’s impossible. Believe me, if you knew him, you’d understand. In my mind I see only that young beautiful dancer in the poster sailing forever through the air. Have I heard from him? No, not one word from him since I slashed his face so long ago! I could find out. I could probably find him on the Internet, perhaps Facebook, but I’m afraid to search.”

“Afraid of?”

“Almost everything. That he’s dead. Or that he is still beautiful and wants me. That we’ll email and that the pain in my breast will be unbearable and that I’ll fall in love again. That I’ll leave Pavel and go to Sergei wherever he is.”

“You speak as though your life with Sergei is simply frozen in time and exists somewhere and that, if you revisit it, everything—the mutual love, the soaring passions, even the youthful beauty—will be exactly the same.”

“So true.”

“Whereas the truth, the real-life scenario, is that Sergei will either be dead or look like a seventy-three-year-old wrinkled man, most likely grey- or white-haired or bald, possibly a bit stooped, possibly feeling entirely differently from you about your time together, perhaps not thinking very kindly of you every time he looks at his scarred face in the mirror.”

“Talk that talk all you want, but at this very moment I’m not listening to what you are saying. Not one word.”

Time was up, and as she stepped toward the door, she noted her photograph on the table and started back for it. I picked it up and handed it to her. Putting it back into her purse, she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, but no more words about this picture. Basta!”

“I fly to Odessa tonight,” she said as we began the following day, “and I slept so poorly because of you that I’m not very sad this is our last meeting. Your words about Sergei were cruel, you know. Very cruel. Please answer this question: Do you speak like that to all your patients?”

“Please consider it a compliment to the strength I see in you.”

With a slightly quizzical expression she pursed her lips, started to answer, but then checked herself and instead took a long look at me. She exhaled and leaned back into her chair. Then she said, “All right, I hear you. I’m ready. Listening. Waiting.”

“Please begin by telling me more about the thoughts that kept you awake last night.”

“I slept only in short bursts because most of the night I was haunted by one dream which kept going on and on with one version after another. I am visiting the Congo with some delegation, and suddenly I can’t find any of the others, and I am alone. I realize I may be in the most dangerous spot on earth, and I get panicky. Then, in one version, I am walking in a deserted neighborhood knocking on doors and finding them all bolted and no one around. In another version, I enter a deserted house and hide in a closet as I hear loud pounding footsteps approaching outside. Or, in another version, I use my cell phone to call my delegation, but I do not know my location, and so I cannot tell them where I am. I suggest they bring lanterns and wave them, so I can see them from the window. But then I realize I am in a huge city, and that is a hopeless suggestion.

“And so it went all night long, waiting in terror for some horror to find and to take me.” She put her hand on her chest. “Even now my heart is pounding just telling you the dream.”

“A nightmare continuing all night long. How terrible! What hunches do you have about the dream? Think about it, and tell me whatever comes to mind.”

“I know I read something in the paper the other day about atrocities in Africa and the children’s army killing all in their path, but I stopped myself from reading too much. I always have a bad night after reading something like that. If I see a killing on TV, I turn it off, and I can’t count the many movies I’ve walked out of for the same reason.”

“Keep going. Tell me all you remember of that dream.”

“That’s all. I’m in a spot where, over and over, my life is in danger.”

“Think of that statement, ‘My life is in danger.’ Just free-­associate to it, by which I mean: you try to let your mind run free and just observe it as though from a distance and describe all the thoughts that run across it, almost as though you were watching a screen.”

After exhaling and flashing a look of exasperation, Natasha leaned her head against the back of her chair and whispered, “My life is in danger, my life is in danger,” and then grew silent.

After a minute or two, I prodded her, “A little louder, please.”

“I know what you want to hear.”

“And you don’t want to say it to me.”

She nodded.

“Try imagining this,” I continued. “You continue to be silent here today until our time is up. Imagine you are leaving my office. How then would you feel?”

“All right! I’ll say it! Of course my life is in danger! I’m sixty-­nine years old. How much life do I have ahead? My life was all back there. My real life!”

“Your real life? You mean on the stage, dancing with Sergei?”

“Did you ever dance?”

“Only tap dancing. I used to imitate all the Fred Astaire routines, sometimes at home, sometimes outside on the street.”

Natasha’s eyes popped open, and she stared at me in astonishment.

“I’m joking. I’m one of the world’s worst dancers, but I’m an avid watcher, and I can imagine how glorious it was for you to perform before those large applauding audiences.”

“You’re quite playful for a psychiatrist, you know. And a bit seductive.”

“How is that for you?”

“Just right.”

“Good. Then teach me about the real life back then.”

“Life was so exhilarating. The crowds, the photographers, the heavenly music, the costumes, and Sergei—believe me, one of the most beautiful men in the world—and the alcohol and the intoxication of the dance and, yes, the wild sex. Everything that has followed pales in comparison.” Natasha, who had been sitting on the edge of her chair as she spoke, now relaxed and leaned back.

“Where do your thoughts go now?”

“Here’s something I should tell you: lately I’ve been having a strange thought, that every day I live now, even a very good day, is also a day of sorrow because it takes me further and further from my real life. Is that not odd?”

“It’s as I said earlier. It’s as though that real life still exists in suspended animation. And if we had the right transportation, we could go to it, and you could show me around and point out all the familiar things. You know what I mean?”

When Natasha nodded, I went on. “And in a way that idea is the key to understanding your trip to the museum. You weren’t just looking for Sergei; you were looking for your lost life, even though the adult part of your mind knows that everything is transient, that the past exists only in the mind and your early world is now only a memory, an electric or chemical signal stored somewhere in your brain.

“Natasha,” I continued, “I understand your situation in life. I’m a lot older than you, and I am dealing with the same issues. For me one of the darkest things about death is that when I die, my whole world—that is, my world of memories, that rich world peopled by everyone I’ve ever known, that world that seems so rooted in granite—will vanish with me. Poof! Just like that. The last couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning out boxes of old papers and photos, and I look at them, perhaps a picture of some street in my childhood neighborhood or some friend or relative whom no one else alive ever knew, and I throw them away, and each time I do, something shudders inside as I see pieces of my old real world flaking away.”

Natasha drew a deep breath and in a softer voice said, “I understand everything you say. Thank you for telling me that. It means a lot when you speak personally like this. I know you speak the truth, but it is hard to absorb such truth. I tell you something: right now, at this very moment, I feel Sergei vibrating in my mind. I know he struggles to stay there, to stay in existence, dancing forever.”

“I want to say something more about Sergei,” I told her. “I know a lot of people who have gone back to high school reunions and immediately fell in love, sometimes with an old boyfriend, often with someone they did not know well. Many settled into a late-life marriage, some successful, but some disastrous. I believed many of them loved via association, that is they loved youthful joyousness, their early school days, and their dreamy anticipations of an exciting life, stretching out magically and immeasurably before them. But it wasn’t falling in love with someone in particular. It was making that person a symbol of all that joyousness of their youths. What I’m trying to say is that Sergei was part of that magical time of youth, and because he was there at that time you imbued him with love—that is, you put the love into him.”

Natasha remained silent. After a couple of minutes I asked, “What’s passing through your mind during this silence?”

“I was thinking about your book title, Love’s Executioner.”

“And you feel I’m being love’s executioner with you?”

“You cannot deny that?”

“Keep in mind that you told me you fell in love with Pavel and have had a marvelous life with him, and when you said that, I felt nothing but pleasure about you and him. So it’s not love I’m stalking. My prey is the mirage of love.”

Silence.

“A little louder.”

“I hear such a soft voice, a whisper, inside.”

“And it says? . . .”

“It says, ‘Damn you, I’m not giving Sergei up.’”

“It requires time, and you have to go about this at your own pace. Let me ask you a different question: I wonder if you’ve experienced any change since we started?”

“Change? What do you mean?”

“Yesterday you described that awful dizzying feeling of being outside of life, of not experiencing anything, of not being present. Is that symptom any different now? It seems to me you are very much here in our sessions.”

“I can’t deny that—you are right. I cannot be more ‘here’ than right now. Holding my feet in boiling oil does powerfully concentrate my mind.”

“You think me cruel?”

“Cruel? Not exactly cruel, but tough, real tough.”

I glanced at the clock. Only a few minutes remained. How to use them most effectively?

“I wonder, Natasha, if you have questions you want to ask me?”

“Hmm, that’s unusual. Yes, I have a question. How do you do it? How do you cope with being eighty and feeling the end approaching closer and closer?”

As I thought about my reply, she said, “No, I’m the cruel one. Forgive me, I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“There’s nothing cruel in your question. I like your asking it. I’m trying to formulate, to put together, an honest answer. There’s a Schopenhauer quote that compares love passion with the blinding sun. When it dims in later years, we suddenly become aware of the wondrous starry heavens that had been obscured, or hidden, by the sun. So for me the vanishing of youthful, sometimes tyrannical, passions has made me appreciate the starry skies more and all wonders of being alive, wonders that I had previously overlooked. I’m in my eighties, and I’ll tell you something unbelievable: I’ve never felt better or more at peace with myself. Yes, I know my existence is drawing to a close, but the end has been there since the beginning. What is different now is that I treasure the pleasures of sheer awareness, and I’m fortunate enough to share them with my wife, whom I’ve known almost all of my life.”

“Thank you. Once again, I tell you how important it is when you speak personally to me. It’s funny, but just as you were speaking, a dream that I had earlier this week sprang into my mind. I had forgotten it, but it’s just come back, and it’s very clear now. I was walking on a deserted road, and somehow I knew that the last one who used this road was my dog, Baloo. Then I saw Baloo by the side of the road and went to him, leaned over, and looked right into his eyes. And I thought, You and I are both living souls, and then I thought, I’m no better than him.”

“And the feelings that accompany this dream?”

“At first I was so glad to see my dog again. You see, Baloo died three weeks before we left for the US. He was my companion for sixteen years, and I’ve had a hard time getting over my sadness. In fact I welcomed my trip to the US because I thought it might help me get over my grief. Are you a dog owner? If not, you won’t understand.”

“No, I’m a cat lover, though, and I think I can appreciate the depth of your pain.”

She hesitated and nodded as though she were satisfied with my answer. “Yes, it was very deep. My husband says too deep. He thinks I was over-attached to Baloo and that he was a substitute child. I don’t think I told you that I have no children.”

“So, in the dream, you’re traveling on the same road that Baloo took weeks before, and then you looked deep into his eyes and said, ‘We’re both living souls, and I’m no better than you.’ What do you think the dream is trying to communicate?”

“I know what you’d think.”

“Tell me.”

“That I know I’m walking on the road to death like Baloo.”

“Like all living souls.”

“Yes, like all living souls.”

“And you, what do you think?”

“I think this whole conversation is making things worse for me.”

“In that you’re more uncomfortable.”

“A few more healing sessions like this, and I’ll need to go home by ambulance.”

“All the symptoms you described yesterday—being removed from life, being insulated, not being in your life—all served to anesthetize yourself from the pain inherent in being a living soul. Let’s look at how we began. You entered my office with your photograph—”

“Oh no, not that again!”

“I know you forbade me to discuss it, but I’m disobeying you because it’s too important. Please listen to what I’m going to say. You know all this already. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. It’s just easier to fend off something told to you from the outside than it is something rising from the depths of yourself. I believe that some part of you had already arrived at the same conclusion I’m suggesting to you. It’s all there in that dream about traveling the same road as Baloo. I’m struck that your dream, which offers the key to our puzzle, returned to you just as we prepared to stop. And the photograph you gave me at the beginning was a hint to me about what direction I should take with you.”

“You say I knew all this? You give me far, far too much credit.”

“I don’t think so. I’m just siding with the part of you where wisdom dwells.”

We both looked at the clock. We had run over several minutes. As Natasha rose and collected her things, she said, “May I get back to you by email or Skype if I have more questions?”

“Of course. But remember: I’m aging. So don’t wait too long.”