The name engraved on the card was Oktavian Ferdinand Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau.
'You're a nobleman,' said Younger. The word Graf is a title of nobility in German; the von in his last name carried a similar meaning.
'A count, yes, and a most fortunate count at that. I held on to my very last carriage, and it has given me a living. A baron friend of mine sweeps floors in a restaurant. And consider my livery.'
Younger for the first time noticed the driver's once-dignified but now-threadbare uniform.
'It belonged to one of my servants. I was lucky there too: I had a man as short and round as his master. Here we are – the Hotel Bristol.'
'But this – this is much too grand,' said Colette when she saw her room. Luc's eyes fixed on a table dressed in white linen, where a silver tray was piled high with pastries along with two steaming pots – one of coffee, the other of hot chocolate. He wasn't starving like some of Vienna's children, but he wasn't too far from that condition either. His sister added, 'I've never been in a room like this in all my life.'
'And they dare to charge three English pennies for it,' replied Younger. 'Robbery.'
Less than an hour later, in a small but comfortably middle-class apartment house on Berggasse – a narrow, cobbled lane gently sloping down to the Danube canal – a maid let Younger and Colette into Sigmund Freud's empty consultation room. 'I'm so nervous,' Colette whispered.
Younger nodded. Well she might be, he thought: Colette would be both worried and excited about the prospect that Dr Freud might actually be able to help her brother; and she would be eager to make a good impression on the world-famous Viennese physician. But she, Younger reflected, was not the one who had disappointed him.
Freud's consulting room was like a bath into which civilization itself had been poured. Leather-bound volumes lined the walls, and every inch not occupied by books was filled with antiquities and miniature statuary: Greek vases intermixed with Chinese terracottas, Roman intagli with South American figurines and Egyptian bronzes. The room pulsed with a rich fume of cigar and the deep crimson of Oriental carpets, which not only lay thick on the parquet floor, but also draped the end tables and even covered a long couch.
A door opened. A dog, a miniature chow, trotted through it, yapping. The animal was followed by Freud himself, who paused in the doorway ordering the dog away from Younger's and Colette's shoes. The chow obeyed.
'So my boy,' said Sigmund Freud to Younger without introduction, 'you are no longer a psychoanalyst?'
Freud wore a suit and necktie and vest. In his left hand, half-raised, was a cigar between two fingers. He had grown older since Younger last saw him. His gray hair had thinned and receded; his short, pointed beard was now starkly white. Nevertheless, for a man of sixty-three, he remained handsome, fit and robust, with eyes exactly as Younger remembered them – both piercing and sympathetic, scowling and amused.
'Miss Rousseau,' said Younger, 'may I present to you Dr Sigmund Freud? Dr Freud, I thought you might wish to speak with Miss Rousseau before meeting her brother.'
'Delighted, Fraulein,' said Freud. He turned back to Younger: 'But you didn't answer my question.'
'I no longer practice psychology at all, sir.'
'You were a psychoanalyst?' Colette asked Younger.
'Didn't I mention it?' he replied.
'He never told you he was once my most promising follower in America?' asked Freud.
'No,' said Colette.
'Certainly,' said Freud. 'The first time we met, Younger conducted an analysis under my supervision – of the girl who became his wife.'
'Oh yes,' said Colette. 'Of course.'
Younger said nothing.
'He didn't tell you he was married?' asked Freud.
Colette colored. 'He doesn't tell me anything about himself.'
'I see. Well, he isn't married anymore, in case the subject is of interest. But he's told you what analysis consists of, surely?'
'No, not that either.'
'I'd better explain then – take a seat, please,' said Freud, glancing at Younger. Then he called out to his maid, instructed her to bring tea, and eased himself into a comfortable chair. 'You're a scientist, Miss Rousseau?'
'I'm studying to be one. A radiochemist. I'll be working in Madame Curie's institute. My post begins next week.'
'I see. Good. As a scientist, you will easily follow what I'm about to say. When a child is to be analyzed, we've found it necessary for the parent – or guardian, in your case – to be informed in advance of what we analysts do. That's why Younger has given me an opportunity to speak with you first.'
Younger and Colette had left Luc at the hotel. Paula, the Freuds' maid, came in with a tea service.
'All neuroses,' Freud went on as the maid poured tea, 'are caused by memories, typically a memory from long ago, involving a forbidden wish. The wishes from which neurotics suffer are not unique to them. We all had them in our childhood, but with neurotics, something prevents these recollections from being forgotten and disposed of in the ordinary way. They linger in the recesses of the individual's mind – so well hidden that my patients initially are not even conscious of them. The aim of analysis is to make the patient conscious of these repressed memories.'
'In order to forget them?' asked Colette.
'In order to be free of them,' replied Freud. 'But the process is seldom an easy one, because the truth can be difficult to accept. Invariably the patient – and the patient's family – will resist our interpretations, resist them quite forcefully. There can be good reason. Once the truth is out, the family may be changed unalterably.'
Colette frowned. 'The family?'
'Yes. In fact that's often how we know we've arrived at the truth: the patient's family suddenly demands that the analysis come to an end. Although occasionally there are other, stronger proofs. I'll give you an example. I have a patient – like you, French by birth – from a family of considerable rank and wealth. Her complaint is frigidity.'
Younger shifted. The carnal explicitness of psychoanalysis was chief among the reasons Younger didn't like discussing it with Colette.
'In one of her first sessions,' Freud continued, 'this patient, an attractive woman of about forty, described a dream she'd had the night before. She was in the Bois de Boulogne. A couple she knew lay down on a double bed right there in the park, on the green grass by a lake. That was all – nothing more. What would you say that dream meant, Miss Rousseau?'
'I don't know,' answered Colette. 'Do dreams have meaning?'
'Most assuredly. I informed her that she had witnessed a scene of sexual intercourse that she was not supposed to have seen – perhaps more than one – when she was a small child, probably between the ages of three and five. She replied that such a thing was impossible, because she grew up with no mother. But of course she'd had nurses. Suddenly she remembered that her first nurse had left the family abruptly when she was five. She had never known why. I said it was likely this nurse was involved in her dream. So she made inquiries back home.
'She asked everyone, including the longtime servants. They all denied anything untoward in the nurse's departure, and she reported back to me that I must be mistaken. Then she had another dream, in which this very nurse appeared, but with a horse-like face. I told her that this represented – but, Younger, perhaps you know what the second dream represented?'
'No,' answered Younger.
'No? In that case,' replied Freud, 'why don't you tell Miss Rousseau what I said it meant?'
'I'm not sure the subject matter is appropriate.'
'For me?' asked Colette sharply.
'If Miss Rousseau is going to consent to her brother's treatment,' said Freud, 'don't you think she should know what she's consenting to?'
'Very well,' said Younger. 'To begin with, Dr Freud would probably have said that the nurse's horse-like face was an example of condensation: it represented both the nurse herself and the man she slept with.'