Not physically. Vienna was never invaded during the war, nor shelled, as Paris had been. Not one stone was nicked. What the war had shattered was merely Vienna's soul and its place in the world.
In the spring of 1914, Vienna had been the sun around which revolved a galaxy of fifty million subjects speaking dozens of languages, all bound in fealty to Emperor Franz Josef and the House of Hapsburg. Vienna was rich, and its affairs mattered to the world. Five years later, it was a city of no consequence in a country of no consequence — starving, freezing, its factories shuttered, its emperor a fugitive, its empire abolished, its children deformed by years of malnutrition.
The result was a host of contradictory impressions for travelers arriving there in March of 1919. Riding their cab from the railway station — an elegant, two-horse, tandem carriage — Younger, Colette, and Luc saw under a rising sun a Vienna superficially every bit as grand as it had formerly been. The majestic Ringstrasse, that wide avenue parade of monumentality encircling the old inner city, presented the same invincible visage that it had before the war. The Ring borrowed liberally, and without nice regard for consistency, from the entire Western architectural canon. After trotting by an oversized blazing white Greek Parthenon, their carriage passed a darkly Gothic cathedral, and after that a many-winged neo-Renaissance palazzo. The first was the parliament, the second city hall, the third the world-famous university. Even the inferior buildings of the Ring would have been palaces elsewhere.
But the figures out for a morning stroll on the Ring, though fashionably dressed, did not display the same imperial bearing. Many of the men were maimed; crutches, dangling sleeves, and eye patches were ubiquitous. Even the able-bodied had a vacantness about them. Off the Ring, in smaller streets, children lined up by the hundreds for food packages. At one point Colette and Younger saw a clutch of these children break into a mad rush; the stampede was followed by angry shouting from adults, then by blows, then by trampling.
Colette wanted the cab to drop her off at Hans Gruber's address.
Younger pointed out that, because of the lateness of their train, which was supposed to have arrived the night before, they were in danger of missing their appointment with Freud.
'Can you ask the driver how far away the address is?' she replied. 'Perhaps it's close.'
It wasn't. Colette relented. After she had settled back, disappointed, their driver spoke to her in excellent French: 'Excuse me, Mademoiselle, but if I may: Does France's hatred of the Germans extend to the Viennese?'
'No,' she answered. 'We know you've suffered as much as the rest of us.'
'We do have our troubles,' agreed the driver. 'Have you noticed, sir, what is so disturbing about the dogs in Vienna?'
'I haven't seen any dogs,' replied Younger.
'That's what's so disturbing. The people are eating their dogs. And you must have heard of the sobbing sickness? People begin to sob for no explicable reason — men as well as women — and can't stop. They sob in their sleep; it goes on so long it ends in epileptic fits. When they wake, they have no memory of it. It's our nerves. We've always been nervous, we Viennese — gay but nervous.'
Colette complimented his French.
'Mademoiselle is as generous as she is charming,' replied the coachman. 'I had a Parisian governess as a boy. Here is my card. If you require a cab again, perhaps you will send for me.'
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
