He went to see his publisher in Berlin. Winter, early in the new year. That heavy overcoat of sky across the city. The cold coming up through the shoes. The streets were empty. The cafés were full. His suitcase was back in the same hotel by the train station, as close to the channels of departure as possible. His editor told him – Roth, you must become sadder. The sadder you are, the better you write.
All his sadness came from Frieda’s illness. The hotel bedroom was full of books and magazines on psychiatry. The frontiers of the mind. He read Freud, his fellow countryman. The subconscious. Psychoanalysis. Was that not the science of literature? A novel bursting its banks.
He read Joyce, the literary stream of consciousness. He dismissed that revolutionary device, not only because it inspired him and scared him like all great literature, but because he felt disbarred from doing anything similar in his own writing. It was too close. Too much like what was already happening to Frieda’s mind. Her thought progression sometimes came spilling out in a confession. She spoke like a clear-headed child, blunt and right, naive and insightful to the point of fortune-telling. She had the ability to see things back to front. She could take pleasure from life without thinking too much. Be head over heels in love. Be sad and happy in the same moment. Tear the stockings. Wake the neighbours. She could say what it was she wanted most in her life.
Then she would suddenly become silent. She would go from happiness to regret like a person crossing the street. The furniture in the room would begin to move with the sunlight coming in at new angles. The clothes she left on the chair would be misplaced. She would hear voices in the corridor. The rinse of water turning in a drain. She would speak of being homesick for places that were no longer home. Read letters that stopped carrying any news. She would break into a stream of sudden anger at the people who had let her down, at herself for not living up to what she had wanted most. She would speak with her hands. She would descend into a deep solitude that lay across the room like a million words unsaid.
How could he step inside her head and paraphrase those thoughts in fiction? It was not in his gift. He was too worried about that flow of unrestricted disclosure. He felt guilty for leaving her, for causing her condition, for all the unspoken things in her memory that could not be cured, for not having been there to protect her when she was a child.
He failed to see the warning signals. He continued to believe she could be remade like a new chapter, with new smiles drawn around her silent mouth. New gloves. New clothes. He wanted to believe the winter winds blowing through the Rhône Valley made her sick and the Côte d’Azur would make her better. The sun, the beaches, the seafood, the life in the cafés of Saint-Raphaël would keep her well while he was away.
She got dressed in her best clothes. She took her time getting ready. She packed no travelling case and left the hotel as though she was going for a walk, leaving the key at reception on her way out. She made her way through the streets. She found herself standing in the train station as if that was the only place her feet could take her. At the ticket counter she was forced to make up her mind where to go. Would she go back to Vienna to see her parents? Would she go back to Paris? Was there anyone else she could stay with?
For hours she sat on trains, waiting for connections on platforms in the cold. Late in the evening she finally made it to Frankfurt, arriving at an address she had for his newspaper editor. Benno Reifenberg and his wife, Maryla, answered the door to find her in such a distressed state they could hardly recognize her. This young woman who was normally so well dressed, they said, now looked like a human wreck. Her hair was dishevelled. Her clothes crumpled. Her posture was full of fear, as though she had been attacked. What had happened on that journey that made her look so distraught?
She spoke with her hands constantly moving.
In a deep panic, she told them how she had come from Saint-Raphaël. The room at the hotel there was right above the central heating system, she could hear the voices of ghosts coming up through the pipes. There were toxic vapours rising into her room. She could no longer stay on her own in a place where nobody spoke but the radiators.
I can see through them all, Frieda said.
All those writers and intellectuals in the cafés, that cosy literary community. I can see into their hearts, she said. They’re all so fake. All rotten with jealousy. They hate me and they hate my husband. They hate any sign of talent because they have none of their own. They only praise things to get the better of each other.
She mentioned them all by name.
Friends pretending to be friends.
They booked her a room in a hotel. They called her husband in Berlin to let him know what had happened. They stayed with her through the night, afraid she might harm herself or throw herself out the window. She could not sleep. She continued her deranged ranting until dawn, getting it all off her chest, those awful things she had been storing up for years.
She spoke out against her mother and father. She began disowning her own childhood. She finally calmed down when the sunlight came in and the night of fear came to an end, falling into a state of exhaustion and lethargy.
He came to collect her. It was just another episode of homesickness, he thought, now that she was smiling again. He took her to Paris and bought her some more clothes. He spent most of his time in her company, afraid to let her out of his sight. Whenever he had to go somewhere alone, he would lock her into the room.
A prisoner in her illness.
To a friend he wrote – she has contracted a chronic weakness, utterly defenceless. I know it must be my fault. Her condition is caused by so many unspeakable things I cannot begin to mention. Maybe in ten years I might be able to describe them, if I am still a writer then.
Did he poison her with his dystopian view? Did he make her ill with his dark vision of the world in ruins? His rage at the rise of Nazism? His unabridged forecast turning them both into lifelong fugitives in small hotel rooms with the sound of trains running through their sleep.
Only when she tried to take her own life did he finally come to realize that she could no longer be left alone. He sought professional help and the doctors diagnosed schizophrenia. The terror in that word struck him with a hollow feeling of guilt that would never leave him.
In desperation he turned to witchcraft. While they were staying with friends in Berlin, while she was in the constant care of a live-in nurse, he brought in a rabbi to exorcise her illness. After hours of torment and shouting in the room, she fell into a comatose state. When she awoke from that torpor, she broke out in further episodes of rage at everyone around her. She forgot who she was and where she was. He brought her back to her parents in Vienna, but that didn’t work out either because she continued vomiting, losing weight by the day.
To a friend he wrote in great distress – my wife is very ill, psychosis, hysteria, murderous thoughts, she is hardly alive – and me, surrounded by demons, headless, powerless, unable to lift a finger, utterly helpless with no sight of improvement.
There remained no other choice but to bring her to a sanatorium. An institution in the country, just outside Vienna. The day left him gutted. He was filled with unspeakable guilt, leading her by the arm up to the main door, speaking her name, handing her over like a prisoner to be incarcerated. Filling in the documents, writing his signature, taking possession of her jewellery in a small brown envelope with the name and address of the institution printed at the top. A small parcel containing her lovely clothes tied with twine. In the waiting room, he saw her staring at the floor in front of her without a word. He heard the sound of doors and keys. The sight of other patients in their blue gowns being led along the corridor. A kindness in the voice of a nurse that was more frightening than any brutality he could imagine.
Friedl – his great love. He was forced to let her go. Kissing her goodbye. Speaking to her one last time. Trying to let her know he would be back soon. She would get well and everything would be fine, he would come and collect her, they would be together again, he would take her back to Paris. What could he do but stand outside on the street in tears? What could he do but find a bar to stop himself from thinking about her as she turned away?