The Children's Book

helping out, in exchange for psychiatric or medical help. Florence’s doctor had asked if she felt she would be helped by psychiatry, and she had, more robustly than she felt, rejected the offer. Her autonomy was dreadfully threatened—by Methley, by the thing growing inside her, by her dependence. She didn’t want to talk or be talked to. She was a soldier’s daughter. She stiffened her shoulders. She felt she was dissolving into jelly, but did not mean anyone to see.

One of the helpers had a huge mop of tangled golden hair, like a lion or a dandelion, a reasonable beard he trimmed from time to time, and a mild, blue-eyed, slightly vacant expression. He wore a kind of white clinical gown, and sandals. He arranged cushions to prop Florence’s back, and got them in the right place. He noticed when she needed to vomit, and he noticed when her stomach was settled, and brought her vegetable soup, which could have done with some butter and salt, but was palatable.

“Not so sick this week,” he pronounced, in English. “It will be better from now on.”

Another day, he said to her, “You are lonely.” If he had asked, she would have denied it. But he stated. “You need bread,” he said. “You are hungry.”

He was always right. His name, he told her, was Gabriel Goldwasser. He was Austrian. “I was training to be a psychoanalyst,” he said. “And now?”

A smile lurked in his beard.

“I am recovering from training to be a psychoanalyst.”

They became friends. Cautiously, courteously, they became friends. “Here, you should be honoured,” he said to her. “The sun-worshippers in the village, they want to return to an ancient matriarchy. Away with the bearded Fathers who are the root of all evil.”

“I do not belong here,” said Florence. “My mother was Italian, but she died, when I was born.”

She was briefly silent, thinking of death in childbirth. Gabriel Gold-wasser answered the unspoken thought.

“The doctors here are good doctors,” he said. “It is a good clinic. You are in good hands. Where, then, do you belong?”

“In a museum.”

“You are young, not old.”

“No, I mean it literally. I grew up in a museum. My father is a Keeper. He knows about gold and silver.”

“An alchemist,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “So you will go back there?”

“I don’t know,” said Florence, and faltered. Prosper’s strategic planning had not yet extended beyond the birth. “I don’t know,” she said again, turned her face away, and began to cry. “I think I can’t,” she said.

Gabriel Goldwasser looked into the distance. Florence lay with her face in her pillow. He put a light hand, lightly, on her shoulder, and said nothing.

She asked him, once, when they had been talking about the study of history, what he had meant, when he said he was recovering from training to be a psychoanalyst. He hesitated. He said

“You must understand. I need not to think, not to talk, about myself.”

“Have you done something dreadful?” asked Florence, lightly, but with a genuine apprehension.

“I have done nothing, that is my problem.” He smiled, mildly. “My parents were—are—psychoanalysts. In Vienna. They sent me to the Burgholzli in Switzerland, to talk to Herr Dr. Jung. They thought it was an essential part of living, to be psychoanalysed. I earned my bread there, as I do here, helping. I was telling my dreams to Dr. Jung and also to Dr. Otto Gross, who was telling his dreams to Dr. Jung and hearing Dr. Jung’s dreams in return. They were angels wrestling, you must understand.” He paused.

“I dreamed the wrong dreams.”

“Wrong in what way?”

“I think they were—timid dreams, is that a word?”

“It is a good word.”

“Quiet dreams, like a cow dreaming of grass, or a squirrel of nuts. They were judged as inadequate dreams. And by listening to my silly dreams, bit by bit, those two changed my dreams. I dreamed I was stepping down stone tunnels to hidden caves, full of dragons and lions and snakes. I dreamed of the seven-branched candle—which I also did in my timid dreams, I am a Jew, the candle to me means a meal with my family—though my family had been dreamed into flesh-eating monsters and petrified women to please those two.”

“You are making me laugh, but it isn’t funny.”

“No man has a right to dictate another man’s inner life—the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte—you say acolyte?—good—of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross.

“They had invented me, do you see?”

“I do.”

“They had made me into a—into an unpleasant sculpture, or painting. I was trapped in my artificial dreams, and couldn’t get out. And then, I got out. I have to admit—you must not mock me, Frau Colombino—it was a dream which showed me the way out.”

“What did you dream?”

Florence turned her body, and its burden, on one side, and gave him her whole attention.

“I dreamed I was in a studio full of light. I was surrounded by canvases perfectly painted. They were all very pale. White on white, with minimal shadows, in full light. Vast paintings, of a cup with its saucer and a silver spoon, on an endless white starched cloth, with folds in it. Or white flowers in a white jar on a white ground—in a white window with white curtains—”

“As though you were dead and had gone to heaven.”