The Death Instinct

'Three,' said Younger.

'I beg your pardon?' asked Freud.

'I killed three men.'

'I see,' said Freud. 'Miss Rousseau, tell me Younger didn't kill your fiancé in a fit of jealous rage.'

'He wasn't my fiancé,' said Colette.

Freud raised both eyebrows: 'Younger killed the wrong men?'

'No,' she answered. 'He killed the right men.'

'I see,' said Freud again.

'Dr Freud,' said Younger, 'I should warn you it may not be wise to let us in. I don't know how things are here, but in America it's a crime to take a murderer into your house.'

'Did you commit murder?' asked Freud.

'I may have,' said Younger. 'I believe I did.'

'It wasn't murder,' Colette replied sharply. 'And if it was, I only wish you could have murdered him a thousand more times.'

'Ah,' said Freud. 'Well, don't just stand there. Come in.'

A fire crackled in an old-fashioned porcelain stove in the Freuds' sitting room. Younger and Freud were drinking brandy. Tea had been served to Colette, but she ended up taking brandy as well, out of Younger's snifter. They had told Freud the entire story, and silence had fallen.

'What a lovely tablecloth,' said Colette.

'Is it?' asked Freud.

'The lace,' she answered. 'It's lovely.'

'I'll tell Minna you said so; she sewed it,' replied Freud. 'Would you like a blanket, my dear?'

Colette was holding herself as if outside on a chill night. 'Why didn't I kill him?' she asked with sudden animation. 'Why was I such a weakling?'

'You don't know?' said Freud.

'No.'

Freud began trimming a cigar, watching Colette out of the corner of his eye. He offered one to Younger, who declined. 'The conventional answer,' said Freud, 'would be that your conscience rebelled at the last moment, convincing you that revenge is a sin.'

'Revenge is a sin,' she said.

'Everyone wants revenge,' answered Freud. 'The problem is that we usually seek it against the wrong person. At least you sought it against the right one. But your religious compunctions – they're not the reason you didn't kill him.'

'I know,' she agreed. 'I believed it was the right thing to do – with all my heart. I still do. I shouldn't, but I do. But then why couldn't I pull the trigger?'

'For the same reason, I suspect, your brother doesn't talk.'

Colette looked at Freud, perplexed.

'Do you have something else to tell us, my dear?' asked Freud.

'What do you mean?'

'Your brother has something to say,' said Freud. 'As a result of which he says nothing.'

'I – you know what's wrong with my brother?' asked Colette.

'I know exactly what's wrong with him,' said Freud, drawing on his cigar. 'But first things first. You have only two options, as I see it. Turn yourselves in or leave the country.'

'We can't turn ourselves in,' said Younger. 'We'd be handed over to the police in Prague and jailed for who knows how long. Eventually they'll find Gruber's mother, so they'll learn we were looking for him. They'd ask us why. If we told them the truth, they'd conclude that Colette was bent on a revenge killing, which would be true – and which would be murder, even if we could prove what Gruber did in the war, which we can't. If we refused to tell them why we were looking for him, they'd know we were hiding something, and then they probably wouldn't believe anything else we said. Either way, we might end up convicted.'

'Then you have to get out,' said Freud. At that moment, the lamps in the room flickered. 'Blast it – we're going to lose power again. It happens at least once a week.'

Freud waited, cigar poised in the air. The flickering abated; the lights stayed on.

'Perhaps we'll be all right,' he resumed.

'Please, Dr Freud,' said Colette. 'Can you explain what's the matter with my brother?'

'I'll tell you what I know, Fraulein, but the concepts will be new to you and strange. Brandy?' Taking his time, Freud refilled his own and Younger's glasses.

'Well, where to begin?' said Freud. He was seated again, his legs crossed, in one hand a cigar, in the other his brandy. 'Twenty-five years ago, I discovered a path to unseen provinces of our mental life, which I may have been the first mortal ever to enter. There I found a hell of inexpressible fears and longings, for which men and women might have burned in earlier eras. A man cannot expect such insight more than once in a lifetime. But last year, I made a new discovery that, in my more vainglorious moments, I think might even surpass the first. No one will believe it, but that will be nothing new. It came to me from studying the war neuroses – indeed in part from studying your brother, Miss Rousseau. Not that your brother has a neurosis, strictly speaking, but his condition is similar. I want to be clear about one thing: he requires treatment. Wherever you go next, you should not simply leave him as he is. His case is straightforward enough. I could cure him myself, I expect, in – I don't know – eight weeks.'

'Cure him?' repeated Colette. 'Completely?'

'I should think so.'

Colette didn't know how to respond.

'You sent us to Jauregg,' said Younger. 'Why?'

'Many choose to treat their psychological disorders mechanistically. Miss Rousseau has to decide if she really wants her brother analyzed. I'm not sure she does. Twice now, she has brought her brother to Vienna but refused to commit herself to the time an analysis would require. And perhaps she's right: after all, it may not be pleasant for her.'

'For me?' asked Colette. 'Why?'

'I told you last year,' said Freud. 'The truths that psychoanalysis unearths are never irrelevant to other family members. Fraulein, you know what it is to yearn for revenge. Your brother is taking revenge too – by not speaking.'

'On whom?' asked Colette.

'Perhaps on you.'

'Whatever for?'

'You can't tell us?' asked Freud.

'I can't imagine what you're talking about,' answered Colette.

'It's just speculation, my dear. I don't know the answer.'

'But you said you knew what was wrong with him,' said Colette.

'I do. I understood it last summer, two months after you left. It was child's play, as a matter of fact. Younger, what is the boy's most revealing symptom?'

'I have no idea,' said Younger.

'Come – I just gave it away.'

Younger chafed at Freud's habit of luring him with analytic conundrums, particularly under the present circumstances, but all the same, the lure took. Child's play? 'His game,' said Younger. 'Something to do with his fishing reel game.'

'Exactly,' said Freud. 'Miss Rousseau told me that her grandmother played a German hide-and-seek game with her brother when he was little. He is saying fort and da when he unspools and rewinds his reel – gone and there. What does it mean?'

Younger thought about it: 'When did he start?'

'In 1914,' said Freud.

'He's reliving the death of his parents,' said Younger.

'Obviously. Over and over. But why?'

'To undo the feeling of loss?'

'No. He isn't undoing anything. He's making himself experience the single worst moment of his life again and again.'

Cigar smoke had filled the candlelit room with its heavy, heady odor.

'It's the key to the riddle,' said Freud. 'All the war neurotics repeat. They have a kind of compulsion – a repetition compulsion – a need to reenact or reexperience the trauma that has given rise to their condition. And they're all repeating the same thing: death, or the moment when they came closest to it. Normally, we have defenses – fortifications, physiological and psychological – that keep our mortality away from us, out of our consciousness. If these fortifications are breached, if in a moment of unexpected trauma, mortality punctures these defenses, its terror rushes in and starts a kind of mental conflagration – a fire very difficult to extinguish – but a fire to which a man wants to return again and again. The shell-shocked man will relive his trauma when asleep; or in broad daylight, he will conjure a bomb going off in the noise of a door slamming; he may even reenact the episode through bodily symptoms.'