The six o’clock patient always came early—sometimes an hour before he was supposed to come. Papi sometimes had to hide him or tell him to go for a walk so he wouldn’t collide with the five o’clock patient. He was a real problem. It would take seven years, Papi explained, before the patient could understand the reason he did this. Papi knew, but he couldn’t tell him because the patient wasn’t ready to accept her father’s reasons. Telling him would only make him more difficult.
The last patient came after supper at nine, always on the dot. Never a half a minute late or early. When it was almost nine o’clock Papi pulled out his gold watch and they both watched the second hand make the circle. When it skipped past the half mark he raised his finger; at the three-quarter mark they both took a deep breath and when the doorbell rang, with the minute hand on twelve or just a little before or after, his finger came down and they went into stitches of suppressed laughter.
People coming daily for years and years, some of them would still be coming in seven years—how awful! These people who came to her father and told him everything, they didn’t know one’s secret is the most important thing. They didn’t have a secret, that’s why they were so miserable and had to come back to her father. Maybe they lost it with her father. She was afraid her father did something to them that made them so helpless and will-less that they had to come to him; their thoughts and lives were no longer their own. Sophie would rather be dead or any old thing, a worm or a pebble, than one of Papi’s patients.
She asked her father if he ever had a patient who tried to kill him. When he answered her at length, she wondered if he read her thought behind the question: she imagined that if she were his patient that’s what she’d do. His face and tone betrayed no suspicion of her motives, but perhaps he was feigning, concealing. She listened to her father explain that his patients discussed this with him—they talked about their thoughts and urges instead of doing it because they really wanted to be stopped; he told her of a patient who wanted to assassinate Admiral Horthy, and another who wanted to blow up the Parliament. He was a brilliant chemist who worked in a laboratory and had the explosives all ready. “But I stopped him,” her father said with pride. She was weighing the issue, deciding how to feel about her father’s power and triumph. He went on talking about Matushka, who for years blew up trains before they caught him. Papi would have liked to have a talk with him, but he never had a chance. She wanted to know more about Matushka: What did he look like? How many trains did he blow up or derail? How was he caught? Where did he come from? Did he have parents? What did he act like when he was taken prisoner? Her father answered too briefly; he didn’t satisfy her curiosity, instead he explained that the dynamite and blowing up was something else—he talked about penis and orgasm, if Matushka had been his patient...She knew it was horrible to blow up a train full of people, still she admired Matushka. He laughed when he was captured. He didn’t care. Someone noticed him watching from nearby with dynamite sticking out from his pocket. Matushka didn’t know he was doing something horrible, he didn’t know what suffering he caused, and he wasn’t afraid to die. That made him like God; she couldn’t help loving him, especially since she imagined him young with raven-black hair, the face of a scoundrel, wearing his hat crooked.
She didn’t like to listen to Papi talk about his patients, except for the woman who came only once. That she remembered and asked him to tell to her again.
There were two women in the waiting room, her father told her, and when he asked which was the patient, one of them said, pointing to the other, “My sister thinks I am the patient.” But she was quite willing to talk to him and went with him into his office.
“Why does your sister think you ought to see me?” he asked her.
“I don’t understand it at all,” she said. “I don’t understand what makes people behave the way they do.”
He asked her to talk about the sort of thing that bothered her.
“Well,” she said, “it’s the same every day. I get up in the morning, wash, dress, and so forth, I come into the living room, my sister says ‘Good morning’ and I say ‘Good morning.’ She asks me how I am and I say fine, and I ask her how she is and she says fine. And it goes on and on and something. I put on my coat, I go to work every day. ‘Good-bye,’ I say; ‘Good-bye,’ she says. If I meet someone I know on the street he says ‘How are you?’ and I say ‘How are you?’ and it goes on and on and something. I go into the building where I work, I meet people who work in the same office in the elevator, they greet me, I greet them and it goes on and on and something...”
Her father continued with the woman’s story. She was so right, Sophie thought. But what did she mean by the “and something”? “Ah!” he exclaimed; that was the crux of it. The secret, which it seems he couldn’t unravel. It was too complicated, he told Sophie. He couldn’t tell her the whole thing. The woman was incurable and he sent her home.
“And it goes on and on and something,” her father repeated the woman’s statement and for a while
