'Well, that was very foolish of you.'
'Really? If women want their men never to have been attracted to another girl in all their lives, it's not the men who are being foolish.'
'What did you say to Nora?' asked Colette.
'I chided her for having read my notes, which were confidential. That was an error. She charged me with trying to hide my 'romances' from her. She developed an elaborate theory according to which the entire notion of confidentiality in psychoanalysis was designed to allow doctors to have affairs with their female patients. A point came when not an evening would go by without some reference to my 'romances.' She said that I disgusted her. That I was unfeeling. That I was weak. She began to throw things. First at the walls, then at me.'
'And you were like a stone — impassive.'
'More or less.'
'That must have made her even angrier,' said Colette.
'Yes. She started to hit me. And kick me. At least she tried to.'
'What did you do?'
'Well, she was very young, and she'd been through some nightmarish events. On top of which she was very slight. I found it almost endearing when she tried to hit me. So I took it, suppressing my temper. Actually, I don't think I knew the extent to which my temper required suppression.
'One evening,' Younger went on, 'I came home to find a cheval glass of ours, an antique, a wedding present from my aunt, lying in pieces on the parlor floor. It turned out that Nora had deliberately broken it. That night she fought more furiously than ever. One of her blows landed, and I finally struck her — with the back of my hand, against her cheek. The force of it was stronger than I intended. She fell to the floor. To my astonishment, she apologized. It was the first time she'd ever apologized. She railed at her own folly, praised me for my kindness, and protested her undying love for me. She threw her arms around me and begged my forgiveness. She began to cry. I thought we had finally come to the end of it.
'Instead a pattern had begun. Our quarreling would start again, swell to its old proportions, and then we'd come to blows. Or rather, she would try to land blows until at last I struck her, at which point she would soften and beg to be forgiven. But the strangest thing of all was that I discovered that I could forestall the worst of our quarreling by — a — by cutting straight to the end of the pattern, in our intimate life.'
'I don't understand,' said Colette.
'No, and I'm not going to explain it,' said Younger. 'But it worked. For a while at least; not for long. When we were out in public — on a street, in a theater, anywhere — Nora began flying into rages, accusing me of being attracted to other women. Which I was, naturally, if they were attractive. At first I didn't deny her accusations, but in the end just to quiet her down, I told her she was imagining it — that it was all in her head. She knew I was lying, but she seemed to prefer the lie to the truth.
'Then the young wife of a rich old patient asked me to make a house call. Her husband was dying. I was there a long while. Very sad. When I got home that night, I found myself concealing it from Nora. There was nothing to conceal, but the wife was famously charming — she'd been an actress — and I knew if I told Nora, there would have been an endless night of pointless recriminations. It had all become so boring, so monotonous. So I told her a different story; she believed me. At that moment, I realized I no longer loved my wife.
'About two months later, the same woman called me again. Her husband was dead, and she was resuming her career on Broadway. She said she had a painfulness in her lower back from rehearsals. She asked me to come to her house and have a look at it. I did. After that she asked me to make house calls several times a week. I lied about it recklessly to Nora.
'One day a note from the actress came to our apartment, requesting my presence as soon as possible. Of course Nora saw the note, and of course she understood at once all the lies I'd been telling her. She accused me of the affair; I confessed it. We divorced, scandalously, having been married little more than a year — and the most comic fact was that I hadn't had an affair at all. At least it would have been comic if Nora hadn't died shortly afterward. They wired me the news in Boston. She had fallen from a subway platform into a train. They called it an accident, but I doubt it. The one thing they did discover was that she was with child when she died. Freud says I feel responsible for her death.'
'Do you?' asked Colette.
'It's worse than that. I was happy she was dead. I'm still happy about it, to this day.'
Hutteldorf Station was the end of the line. In the town center of an otherwise bucolic and thickly wooded district stood a few low apartment houses. One of these was Gruber s address, but no one by that name lived there now. Younger discovered nothing useful until he approached a matronly woman sweeping the courtyard.
'Hans Gruber?' she said. 'Who all the girls were mad about? The tall young man with the blond hair and beautiful blue eyes?'
Younger translated this description without comment. Precisely by not reacting to it, Colette acknowledged its accuracy. He thought he saw color rising to her face.
'Of course I remember,' said the woman. 'What a lazy, haughty one he was. He had a stipend — his father had died, maybe? — so he didn't have to work. Wouldn't lift a finger. Just took long walks in the woods, playing his violin any old place. And what a temper. Ordered us around when he was sober, and insulted us when he was drunk.'
'It seems you're devoting a lot of effort,' said Younger to Colette after translating these comments, 'to someone who doesn't much deserve it.'
Colette frowned and shook her head, but didn't answer.
Younger explained their errand to the charwoman and asked if any of the Grubers still lived nearby
'So he's dead,' replied the woman. 'Well, that's another one. No, the family I never knew. He came from one of those river towns in the west, near Bavaria. I don't know where. Ask at the Three Hussars near St. Stephen's. That's where he ate all his dinners. Maybe someone there will know.'
The sun had set when they arrived back in central Vienna. In the taxi Younger asked the driver if he knew a restaurant called the Three Hussars. The driver said the restaurant was closed, but would be open again Thursday.
'It's just as well,' said Colette to Younger. 'I don't want you to come with me. I've taken up too much of your time already.'
'There's a game your brother plays, Fraulein,' Freud said to Colette that evening, 'with a fishing reel and string. He makes sounds when he plays. A sort of ohh and ahh. Do you know what he's saying?'
'Just nonsense,' answered Colette. 'Does the game mean something?'
'It means, for one thing, that there's nothing wrong with his vocal cords,' said Freud.
'To play the same game over and over,' asked Colette, 'is it very bad?'
'It's interesting,' said Freud.
Treating his dog to its walk the next morning, as the early sunshine shimmered off damp cobblestones, Sigmund Freud held the hand of a little French boy. Their conversation was distinctly one-sided. Freud chatted amiably, in French, recounting to Luc tales from Greek and Egyptian mythology. The boy was absorbed, but did not respond.
In a small triangular park, they came on a crowd encircling a man convulsing on the grass. His workingman's clothes were clean, if patched and fraying. His cap, evidently thrown to the ground when the fit began, lay next to his writhing body.
'If you were out with my wife and her sister,' Freud said quietly to the boy, 'they would undoubtedly cover your eyes at this point. Shall I cover your eyes?'
Luc shook his head. He exhibited none of the horror that children typically display in the presence of illness. Some in the crowd, taking pity on an epileptic, dropped coins into the man's cap. Eventually Freud led the boy away.
Luc wore a thoughtful expression. Then he tugged at Freud's hand and looked up at him, a question having formed in his eyes.
'What is it?' asked Freud.
The boy tugged again.
'That won't do, little fellow,' said Freud. 'I can't explain anything if I don't know what's troubling you.'
Luc stared, looked away, stared up at Freud again. Then he began pulling his pockets inside out.
