He goes on, “You were born in Bethlehem? It is inevitable that the Christian myth —” He paused. “This does not offend you?” “Offend me?” “My speaking of your religion in terms of myth,” he said. I said, “How could I be offended?” “Bethlehem is the town of Mary,” he said.
3
March 4
I was cold and I found difficulty in starting. I went on talking about the Doré pictures, the dead baby in the Judgment of Solomon. I told him of the graves of my two sisters. I had never known these sisters; one was a half-sister and really belonged to the two grown half-brothers, Eric and Alfred. Their mother was there too. We went on with the lily-fantasy. The old man was obviously, he said, God.
The lily was the Annunciation-lily. I said it was the ivory Vishnu that had prompted me to tell the anecdote. He asked me about my early religious background. I said it was not that they were strict, we were not often punished. I remembered, however, terrible compulsions or premonitions of punishment. Hell from the Bible stories seemed a real place. But I did not speak of this. I went on to tell him of our Christmas candles.
“An atmosphere. .” he said.
He said, “There is no more significant symbol than a lighted candle. You say you remember your grandfather’s Christmas-Eve service? The girls as well as the boys had candles?” It seemed odd that he should ask this.
Sigmund Freud got up from his chair at the back of the couch, and came and stood beside me. He said, “If every child had a lighted candle given, as you say they were given at your grandfather’s Christmas Eve service, by the grace of God, we would have no more problems. . That is the true heart of all religion.”
Later at home, in bed, I was stricken and frightened, thinking of all the things that I wanted or rather felt impelled to tell him. I think of Sigmund Freud as this little-papa, Papalie, the grandfather. Talking half-asleep to myself, or rather to the Professor, I realize I am using the rhythm or language I use only for cats and children. There is my daughter’s cat, Peter, that, she tells me, “I have left to you in my will.”
“It’s an old, old cat,” I say, talking to the Professor, and then it occurs to me that the jerk of his elbow as he orders or summons me from his waiting room to the consulting room is like the angular flap of a bird-wing. I have lately been watching these great crows or rooks here in the gardens off the Ringstrasse.
Yes, there is a singular finality about his least remark, his most insignificant gesture. There is the Pallas Athené on his desk, beyond the double door, leading from the consulting room to the inner sanctum. Just above my chamber door — that was a bust of Pallas, if I am not mistaken, from Poe’s Raven. There is a quoth-the-Raven mystery about his every utterance, though he seems to huddle rather than to perch, more like an old owl, hibou sacré in the corner back of the couch.
I remember a special gift from my father: this time the gift is not from little-papa, Papalie. The wretched and fascinating creature stared and stared at me, from the top of his bookshelf. The bookshelf ran the length of the wall opposite his table, or rather there were bookcases along all the walls that were not broken by windows. I must have been indeed the child of heroes and a hero from Geburt des Helden, for I asked him, “May I have that white owl?”
It was an extremely large owl. It was very white. It lived under a bell-jar, it had large unblinking gold or amber eyes. I was suddenly reminded of the golden fur of the little Yofi lioness. If my grandfather gave me a lighted candle, my father gave me a snow-owl.
True, there was a qualification about this miracle, as there so often is in a true fairy tale. Yes, the owl was mine; it was mine for ever, he would not ask me to give it back to him. He had reproved one of us one day for being an “Indian-giver.” Someone rashly gave away a bag of marbles, a cock-a-doodle-do trumpet (a rooster of papier mâché whose head was like a Halloween false-face), or Joey from the Punch and Judy. Though individually the dolls were divided, the “show” was common property. There was a snag about some gift. “What is an Indian-giver?” “It is someone who gives something and asks for it back again.” But he wasn’t an Indian-giver. I could keep the snow-owl.
There was, however, this condition. I had told the Professor of the snow-owl. I told him there was one condition, and paused as if to emphasize the drama.
But perhaps it is an old trick.
The Professor said before I had time to tell him, “Ah — yes — he gave the owl to you, on the condition that it stayed where it was.”
But as I lie here, in my comfortable bed, in the Hotel Regina, I go on with my reverie. I am not preparing for tomorrow’s session, I am simply going on with today’s. By some curious freak of luck, a gardener brought me the tip of a cactus plant, to plant in a flower pot, in pebbles and sand. “Do not water it, it will grow best, right out in the sun; I have a huge plant, a tree really,” he told me. The gardener explained that he had grown his cactus tree from a slip just like the one he brought me. I was proud of my cactus plant and moved it about in the sun. It would grow into a tree.
It really wasn’t fair.
My three-inch strip of tough cactus fiber began to glow, it did not grow, it simply burst into a huge flower. It was like a red water-lily. Its petals were smooth and cold, though they should have been blazing. Well, perhaps they were. I thought the gardener would be so pleased. He said, “I have had my plant now for years and not a sign of a blossom.”
It wasn’t fair.
There was no rivalry about the butterfly, but that wasn’t fair either. For some reason, this giant worm had chosen a rather fragile stalk from my garden plot to build on. It may have been that the packets of our “cheap seeds” had been badly sifted or assorted and that some strange exotic had got in among them. But how did the worm get there? There was only one of the nicotiana plants. I broke off the stem and put it with what tobacco-flower leaves were left and placed the cocoon where I felt it would be safest, on the top of my father’s bookcase. The owl was one end, the other end was the Indian skull, at least we called it an Indian skull. It had been dug up or plowed up by him or by his father when our father was a boy in Indiana.
I know that I am in bed in the Regina Hotel, Freiheitsplatz, Vienna. I know that it is March 4, 1933. I am not sure but I think that this is my father’s birthday. He never wanted a “birthday” in our house, that seemed every other week to mark some festivity in mama’s or Mamalie’s Birthday Book or Text Book. I think this is my father’s birthday. He was younger than the Professor when he died, so perhaps it is natural, one way and another, to give the Professor the role of grand- or great-father, for all he is little-father or Papalie.
If I tell the Professor about the cactus and the butterfly, he will think I have made up one or the other, or both.
As I say, it was not quite fair, for I had had some slight converse with amateur experts, though I myself knew the name of not one butterfly. The thing that hatched out was a moth. It was exotic and enormous. It was literally the size of a not-so-small bird. It crawled or fluttered the length of the top shelf and settled on the Indian skull that my father or my grandfather had dug or plowed up when my father was a boy in Indiana.
My father and I agreed there was nothing to be done about it but to open the window and hope that it would fly out.
There is a bed-lamp, on the stand at my elbow. There is, I remember, a flattering soft-rose lamp-shade. If I switch on the light, I will see the length of green curtains, the comfortable green-upholstered arm-chair, glass-topped dressing-table, and the ordinary table with my books and papers.