The Masochist E-Book

Katja Perat

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Why would people trouble themselves with the facts, when fiction is so much more enticing? Designed as a historical novel, The Masochist forges an intimate portrait of a young, tenacious woman who, in uncertain times at the end of the 19th century, chose an uncertain path – the only path that could lead her to freedom. On Christmas Eve 1874, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whom history would remember as the most famous masochist, left his home in Bruck an der Mur in Austria for the unknown. The novel surmises he didn't come back alone, but brought with him a new family member: a tiny red-haired girl he found in the forests around Lemberg/ Lviv. The Masochist is the memoir of Nadezhda Moser, the woman this little girl becomes, a fictional character who forces her way among the historical figures of the time. This is a pseudo-autobiographical novel that returns post-postmodernism to modernism and offers an intimate portrayal of the limits of women's desire and freedom against the backdrop of ethnic, class and gender tensions of an empire that hasn't yet perceived its decline had already begun.

Leseprobe

Katja Perat

THE MASOCHIST

Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins

First published in 2020 by Istros Books (in collaboration with Beletrina Academic Press)London, United Kingdom | www.istrosbooks.com

Originally published in Slovene in 2018 as Mazohistka by Beletrina Academic Press, 2007

© Katja Perat, 2018

The right of Katja Perat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Translation © Michael Biggins, 2020

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

ISBN: 978-1­912545-30-8

This Book is part of the EU co-funded project “Reading the Heart of Europe” in partnership with Beletrina Academic Press | www.beletrina.si

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

If the facts indicate otherwise, then too bad for the facts.

1

“You don’t look anything like him,” the innkeeper said, his eyes narrowing in disbelief. His German was harsh, but impeccable. He tried his utmost to keep others from accusing him of not trying his utmost. Even his lodgings, circumstances aside, testified to his pedantry. It was a hole in the wall three doors down from the Armenian Orthodox church, in the centre of town (although, truth to tell, was anything in Lemberg really downtown), squeezed in between the neighbouring buildings and the street, upholstered with drunks, and yet every tablecloth, every drinking glass was neatly arranged in its place, as if in a showroom. He had to be trying his utmost – the innkeeper – to keep order in this place, with nobody looking, with everything constantly straining towards chaos.

“You don’t look a thing like him.” And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t. I looked much more like this stranger of an innkeeper, if only with respect to our hair colour, than I looked like Leo­pold. It would have been quite the comedy if it actually turned out that this man was my father.

His tone of voice hinted that I should take the emphasis on the difference as a compliment, although there was no warmth to accompany it. The determination with which he sustained the conversation surprised me a bit; particularly because it was obvious it gave him no pleasure. He asked his questions – where I was from, where I was going – questions that, asked in a different way, might have seemed frivolous, but which his inborn sense of annoyance made seem like an interrogation. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call the salt of the earth, this innkeeper. He was cold and practical, not effusive. At the mention of my surname he immediately recalled the old chief of police, a good man, he said, and only then recollected that the police chief had a son, who apparently had become a writer, he said.

“With quite a vivid imagination, I’ve heard tell,” he said as he wiped a glass dry. “Imagining that you’re being whipped by women in furs, that’s a fantasy that only somebody who’s never been whipped can indulge. You don’t look a thing like him.”

What he really meant to say was that Leo­pold von Sacher-­Masoch was a disgusting human being, but you somehow seem likeable. “Are you sure you’re his daughter?”

Although, strictly speaking, it wasn’t the truth, Leo­pold would gladly tell anyone who had a moment to spare the story of hiswild child.

“This is Nada, my wild child,” he would say and repeat until it finally stuck and everyone who knew him also knew that he had adopted and was raising a wild child. Considering the fact that he found me when I was barely a day old, there hadn’t been even the slightest chance that I’d grown up in a cage kept by some madman or been raised by Carpathian mountain men, or by wolves, but why bother with facts when fiction is so much more useful?

Judging from the way Leo­pold peddled the story of my birth, you could tell that it would have best served his interests if I’d had no human parents at all. He also liked to emphasize that, no, he really wasn’t my father, as though he couldn’t imagine that the girl who placed all her trust and all the love of her childhood in him would ever take that as the most fundamental, the most unconditional rejection of all. Yes, I suppose he loved me, but his love could really be useless.

How unfair, I often thought after Anna died, that the woman for whom my birth and the pregnancy preceding it, and possibly even the love that preceded the pregnancy had been real concerns – that that woman never found her way into Leo­pold’s stories, despite the fact that Leo­pold always liked to say that women, not men, were the ones who should be entrusted with history.

I know. No child witnesses her own birth, but there was something about the way Leo­pold cast the story of my birth as a mystery that made me feel from early on that I knew less about myself than others did. He had two contradictory theories, both of them fantastic, both of them beautiful, but neither of them true. According to the first theory I’d grown up out of the earth. According to the second I’d been dropped from the sky.

The first went something like this: on Christmas Day 1874 Leo­pold disappeared without a trace. Later it turned out that after a years-­long absence he paid a short visit to Lemberg. As befits a deep thinker and cosmopolitan who wants to contemplate life, one afternoon he set out on a walk through the woods, where atop a heap of broken branches and new-fallen snow he discovered a basket. And wherever there’s a basket, so the fairy tales go, there must be a child. Alive, by some miracle.

It was so easy to share in his joy. Leo­pold was too much of an enthusiast and his sense of reality too weak for him to pause to entertain second thoughts. He removed the cloth that covered the basket (in his telling the cloth was chequered, as per tradition) and beheld my eyes (in his telling as traditionally dark as the night sky over the Carpathians – Leo­pold was so fond of exaggerating). As far as Leo­pold was concerned, there wasn’t a doubt. And thus his wild child project was born scarcely a day later, I’d wager, than me. It was clear to him: the girl that he’d found in the forest was no mere girl. She was the essence of the Slavonic soul, and how could she not be, when, like every idea worth its name, she’d sprouted straight out of the earth of her homeland. Perhaps that’s why he was fond of repeating that, no, he wasn’t my father (but that’s incredible, she’s the spitting image of you, someone would invariably say, even though it wasn’t true), because he bore the mark of guilt. His blood was the blood of the oppressor, while I had to remain pure. I had to at least retain the potential, if only I chose (and oh, how he tried to get me to choose), to play my historical role. It was never a hundred per cent clear what that role was supposed to be, what were its practical aspects, or with what political means I was supposed to perform it, but the goal, as hazy as it was, was clear from the start: I’d been born to wipe out inequities and set wrongs to right. Although he was generally fond of singing paeans of praise to his homeland’s ethnic diversity, he often hinted that I could become the Liberté of the Slavs. Though if I insisted, I could of course make do with less, but what a shame, what a terrible shame that would be, considering everything that had been vouchsafed me as a birthright.

The second story began like the first, but instead of historical it assumed metaphysical dimensions. Leo­pold had vanished in the dead of night, stumbling off in a delirium to discover his roots. Lemberg, the forest and the child in the basket were unchanging props. But this time the child, a red-haired girl, didn’t sprout from the earth, but fell to earth like a shooting star in the frigid winter night, like a fallen angel sent to enchant all the mortals it might encounter and rule over their hearts. As I’ve mentioned, Leo­pold loved extremes.

I realized that my birth was a kind of literature for him. I was like Athena, born straight out of his head. Like other mythological creatures, I’d been created to presage something more significant than myself. But the child refuses to presage anything. The child wants to be significant in its own right.

You have to know this: Leo­pold adored cats. Wherever he went, he always brought a cat back with him that was at least as cute as it was abandoned – and each time it was impossible to say which quality weighed more for him, the cuteness or the abandonment. It wasn’t long before I realized that I occupied a similar niche in his life. I was a stray orange tabby that drew his attention and got itself taken home, so that he could distract himself with it for a minute or two when he didn’t have anything more important to do.

So in short, no, I wasn’t really Leo­pold’s daughter. Despite that, I wanted to protect him from the avalanche of scorn that the innkeeper’s heedless mention of Leo­pold’s masochism threatened, the thoughtless cruelty of the little people whose cause he took up so often, but who saw in him little more than an unctuous aristocrat who could afford the luxury of a perverse imagination, because reality treated him with kid gloves and spared him any real concerns. It was all too easy for me to imagine my mother, a peasant, an actress, a Gypsy, or whatever she was, a pissed-off woman shoving her way through the saloon door and sitting down at the bar, ordering, tossing her drink back, and seeing me the way that innkeeper saw Leo­pold. As though everything that haunts me is meaningless, hollow, made up. If I knew how to say something to protect Leo­pold from ridicule, I’d be protecting myself, too, in a way. But I couldn’t. He was too angry, the innkeeper was, to leave any room for compassion. It was small comfort to me that I wasn’t the object of his rage. If not physically, then at least spiritually Leo­pold and I were too much alike for me not to feel personally offended by anyone who offended him.

I disappeared from Vienna with the same melodramatic flair that he did. As if to say, “There, now that I’m gone, I dare you to fathom the extent of your loss.” And, like him, I also couldn’t quite figure out how to soften the disappointment brought about by the chasm separating my expectations from reality. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping for from Lemberg when I got on the train. That it would reveal itself to me as the home I’d never had? Offer me answers to the questions I’d never been able to ask those nearest to me without making them fidget? A fairy tale in which crystalline snow crunches under the runners of a sleigh festooned with bells? Inner tranquillity? Whatever I’d hoped for, what I got were the innkeeper’s sneering face, some overcooked dumplings, and the gaunt reality of a province where from behind their shutters the people kept zealous watch on each other, but especially on me, who had no business being there, anyway.

Leo­pold had to work very hard to attribute everything he adored, but refused to be responsible for, to this land. And if it had only been a matter of the land, which, sworn to silence, was by definition incapable of defending itself, things might have worked out. But with the land came people. And those people would have preferred to be able to speak for themselves than have a man speak for them who had squandered his whole fortune buying countless fur coats for his many lovers.

As the innkeeper might have said, you know, I think I prefer the monarchy as it is to pan-Slavism with an Austrian face. I mean, come on, what does that even mean?

It was amusing to watch him speak with great passion and at length about Leo­pold, despite the fact that he must have been constitutionally predisposed to feel nothing but revulsion for him, because here at least was someone whose flaws could be the measure of his own infallibility. Leo­pold’s political philosophy was sheer twaddle, an invention of his perverted mind, a game that rich people play when they’re bored. His, however, was born of necessity, which lent it power and gravitas. Justified by the life he’d been forced to live. His faith in himself made me uncomfortable, but, to be perfectly honest, more than anything else I envied him. His certainty, solidity, linearity. His groundedness. No wonder, then, that he took to me, considering that my whole being affirmed his personal choices.

It was obvious: if I had travelled to the edge of the world to witness a revelation, I’d travelled in vain. But we all know I wasn’t after a revelation. Like Leo­pold, I’d also come here to escape responsibility.

“Absolutely positive,” I said to the innkeeper. “I swear I’m his daughter.”

He squinted and nodded sceptically.

“That’s strange,” he said. “You don’t look a thing like him.”

“My husband recently shot and killed my lover,” I said. Let me repeat: it was personality, not facial features, that made me Leo­pold’s daughter.

“I’m listening,” he said, and set down a glass of vodka in front of me.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe, in spite of everything, he still had some room for compassion. Or maybe it was just curiosity. Sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart.

2

It would be wrong to say that Maxi­milian was ugly. Whenever I looked at him from a distance, whenever he was shuffling his papers or reading the newspaper with just enough light, I could sometimes convince myself that all the people who insisted he really was handsome were right. And yet later, when I was reading Anna Karenina, I knew that Tolstoy had made a mistake. It wasn’t possible for Anna to notice only later how big her husband’s ears were. She had to have known that from the very start, and it just took her that long to admit it. Like me when Maximilian slurped his food, she must have looked away and tried to convince herself that whatever was bothering her was inconsequential and would, with time, dissipate all by itself.

It would also be wrong to say that he didn’t love me. Like Leo­pold, he also adored the story of the wild child. And my red hair. And my stupid name. Nadezhda, “Hope”, what a mean joke. Hope, Leopold liked to say, there’s hope hidden in your name. And, funny as it may seem, he was right in a way. Hope was hidden in my name – hope that one day somebody would know how to pronounce it correctly. That one day somebody wouldn’t have to ask me what it was twice, only to fall politely silent after asking the third time. Hope that one day it would just slide past unnoticed, without some society lady remarking with feigned insouciance that that was her maidservant’s name. Maximilian liked anything that seemed exotic, especially if it wasn’t really foreign and didn’t needlessly vex him with some enigma, which made me, with my name, red hair and pedigree a natural choice for him. Without any doubt, that was itself a form of love in its own right. And, of course, it’s entirely possible that each time I fixated on my sense of anxiety that he didn’t love me or, at least, didn’t love me enough, I was trying to avoid dealing with the fact that it was actually me who was coming up short on the love.

I met him in Lindheim, the town where I learned to hate Leopold, and I don’t exclude the possibility that that hatred was precisely the thing that forced me to redirect what I had once felt for Leopold onto some other person.

We moved to Lindheim, the dullest of all dull German towns, because Leopold decided that in his old age he was going to see yet again if love didn’t exist after all, and after divorcing Wanda, with whom he had lived until then, he got remarried to Hulda, his secretary and translator.

Overnight one life replaced the other and then settled in with us for a while. Hulda’s house became our home, as did Lindheim, even though everything about it was repulsive. Though this wasn’t my first time living in a small town, in Lindheim I lived a small-town life for the first time, governed as it was by the passage from meal to meal, with brief intervals for study, errands and the occasional walk. My hatred was unfair to Lindheim, no doubt, but even so the injustice of it didn’t diminish its force. I hated it because I hated Hulda and because it had been forced on me as a result of Leopold’s rashness.

To this day I don’t know whether Leopold left Wanda or if it was really the other way around and Wanda left Leopold, but even then I knew that their divorce wasn’t going to amount to anything more than a minor edit to his biography, while it could deprive her of any chance of a normal life. Even though she was probably never truly happy with Leopold and she devoted most of her energy to keeping him financially and emotionally above water, as though her own well-being was a matter of secondary importance to her, she was settled with him, and without him the world had no fixed point of reference.

Poor Wanda, I thought as I watched her efforts to carve out a right to her own account of their divorce. And how little good it did her – with what cruel spontaneity everyone showed their preference for Leopold. With what cruel spontaneity even I showed my preference for him, fully aware of how unjust that was, even when I hated him most. How greedily I sought his attention and recognition, how happy I was when he decided after the divorce to take me with him to Lindheim. Leopold was crazy, of course: maniacal, neurasthenic, overwrought. Everyone agreed about that. But he was like a child who simply can’t be called to account. Wanda, on the other hand, now she was calculating, chasing after him on account of his title, a slut, a furious bitch who couldn’t muster enough humility and grace to endure her lot as a divorced woman in silence. Even in my childish compassion there was something shallow, like an inchoate fear that if I didn’t grow up right, there might be something like that in store for me, a sense of unease at the thought that while love might still be there in the morning, when you tried to reach for it in the evening, there would be nothing but lifeless indifference left on your bedside table. My compassion was so shallow that you could scarcely call it compassion. I felt as though everything that was happening was happening first and foremost to me. And just as though I’d been abandoned myself, the thought of how quickly Wanda had been replaced and how vulgar her successor was plunged me into despair.

Although Hulda was my parent about as much as Wanda had been, I always thought of her as a stepmother and suspiciously waited for the day when she was going to offer me a poisoned apple or hire some hunter to track me down and serve up my lungs and liver as edible proof of my demise. While it was no surprise that she couldn’t look on the remains of Leopold’s former life with anything approaching compassion, what was striking was that any understanding of it at all seemed to be beyond her grasp, and the fact that amongst the remains there were children who bore no responsibility, much less guilt for all that wasn’t the least bit an obstacle to her in exercising her spite. She was cold and cruel with a coldness and cruelty that were no masquerade, no disguise that a person can put on and take off, as if putting on and taking off a fur coat. They were real, profane, and trite. When Sasha died of typhus, she play-acted the obligatory expressions of sympathy, but the swiftness with which she then dropped them was evidence that she was more relieved than saddened. Now all she had left to do was get rid of me and Leopold’s entire, undivided future would belong to her. Her stultifying earnestness, her barren lack of humour, and her house furnished without the least bit of taste ran riot inside me like symbols of her being from another planet, and Leopold, in choosing all that, was not just betraying Wanda, he betrayed me. The man who could love such crass mundanity couldn’t possibly be the same man who had taught me to love the grandeur of everything that resists mundanity.

Growing up with Leopold meant growing up on the run. Following the money, following the intrigues, moving back and forth all over Austria in search of cheaper lodgings, hiding out in Hungary, and finally fleeing to Germany, so he wouldn’t have to serve the four days in jail to which the emperor had sentenced him for insulting some count. It meant wishing for the endless mobility finally to end, for the merry-go-round to come to a stop before the force with which it was spinning threw us out of the established orbit of the rest of mankind. It meant being exhausted and out of breath, gasping for air, and making only the most tentative of connections in every new town where we stayed, in order to keep it from hurting too much when we inevitably had to break them again. Growing up with Leopold meant dreaming of a home. And when those dreams finally came true, I learned to realize that dreams that come true are called disappointments. That wishes are rooted in particulars, and that when they’re realized wholesale, they mean less, even quite a bit less than nothing.

When I was dreaming of a home, I certainly wasn’t dreaming of Hulda Meister and her tackily furnished house out on a desolate plain where you could spot the guest you’d be entertaining in the evening as a dot on the horizon that morning. I dreamed of the home that I already had, only more solid, more certain and convincing. Of our home in Bruck, where heavy Oriental curtains took the place of doors, of that house wedged between mountains and forest, where Leopold recklessly decorated the parlour with portraits of his past lovers, deliberately arranged on the wall from least consequential to most unforgettable. Of that house, just as it was, provided we would never have to leave it. Or of our apartment in Graz, our tiny apartment in Rosenberg, where we never had anyone over, so they wouldn’t suspect that Leopold’s old debts were eating up any new income; of our apartment, which was too small for a family of five, and to which Leopold, who was never able to resist flattery, invited his sycophant secretary Herr Kapf, from whom he never got anything useful, Herr Kapf with the red carnation in his lapel, Herr Kapf, who could never be bothered to bathe, but who wore his hair long like a dandy, Herr Kapf, who, like Kant, took the same walk around town every day carrying his ridiculous little parasol. So many homes, so many decent homes have slipped between my fingers. Why did Lindheim, of all places, have to be the one that stuck?

There was just one thing connected to Lindheim that managed to evade my revulsion, and miraculously it was neither human, animal, nor vegetable – it was a building.

The Witch’s Tower in Lindheim wasn’t exactly a ruin. Quite the opposite, it seemed almost untouched, as if – like me – temporality felt some kind of restrained respect for it. In a town of trivial people and their trivial homes it was the only building that had managed to retain at least some dignity. I homed in on it as though it was a monument to everything that had vanished from my life with Wanda, and a reminder that maybe the loss was just temporary. Testimony that in this town of trivial people and their trivial homes there was nevertheless something whose measure you had to take with a much larger yardstick. Every time I left the apartment, sooner or later I would wind up standing at its base. And of course that’s where I met Maximilian.

Although I had seen him approaching, when he – a complete stranger to me at that point – sat down next to me, I flinched as though he’d interrupted something.

“Have I interrupted something?” he asked.

“No, you just startled me,” I said, looking him straight in the face. I recall that he struck me as handsome at the time. He was smartly dressed and his accent announced that he wasn’t from around there. If only he would wave his hands a bit less when he spoke, I recall thinking.

“May I sit with you here for a bit?” he asked after he was already sitting.

“Of course,” I said, “go ahead.”

“Do you come here often?”

“As often as I can.”

“Do you know the story behind it?” he asked, as if only the fact that I didn’t know it could explain why I enjoyed spending time in this place.

Of course I knew the story of the Witch’s Tower. Leopold was obsessed with it. In 1663 and 1664 the local bailiff and executioner decided that Martha Schüler, the wife of a local bigwig, had killed her own child and cooked him up into some sort of infernal brew. The story was all the more nightmarish for their having locked both her and her husband up, and while the husband managed to escape, he left her behind in the tower to be burned alive without a trial. Leopold always told this story as though it were the hagiography of that wretched,suffering woman, who had forfeited her life for nothing other than the fact that the men who surrounded her couldn’t stand her greatness. What hypocrisy, I thought at the point when I hated Leopold most of all, what a devoted feminist he could be when others were involved, whereas he showed no signs of a bad conscience about dropping Wanda and letting her wander the world with no visible means of support.

“No,” I replied to Maximilian, “I don’t know the story.”

I wanted to hear how he’d tell it. I wanted him to prove himself to me, that young man with the thick head of brown hair, with the gentle brown eyes and yesterday’s beard, that phenomenon, that rift in the gaunt boredom of Hulda’s Lindheim. I wanted to give him a chance.

Maximilian was a Viennese born and bred. He spent the summers in Lindheim, because his aunt – his father’s sister – had married a count from there. At first he visited reluctantly, an abandoned child whose parents dropped him off here in the middle of nowhere like some object they no longer needed, because they liked to vacation in the south of Italy and they liked to vacation alone. At first he visited reluctantly, but then he learned that Sacher-Masoch had moved to Lindheim, and Maximilian worshipped Sacher-Masoch. The greatest writer after Goethe, as he was fond of saying. What a strange comparison, I recall thinking, particularly considering the fact that Leopold privately, sometimes even publicly opined that Germans were short on intellect and it would have pained him no end if he’d ever heard himself being compared to one of them, even if it was their greatest .

And yet, soon Leopold and Maximilian worshipped each other. They were just enough alike to be able to understand one another, and yet just different enough that they could exalt the things that set them apart. Leopold was reckless, which on his better days could come across as free-spiritedness, while Maximilian was painfully pedantic, which more lenient observers could interpret as a sign of reliability. At the time both still viewed themselves as philosophers, aesthetes and atheists, identities that filled them with pride. Maximilian was just then developing into a passionate reader of Rousseau, and Leopold, a veteran in that respect, took a delight in treating him to insights from his own readings of Rousseau long past. Although I still resented and was hostile towards Leopold, their unforced affinity for each other lifted my spirits. If Leopold saw something in this man who had taken to visiting our house, I thought, then perhaps I was right in deciding to give him a chance.

Hulda, too – even she worshipped Maximilian, although it would have been impossible to say if she didn’t really just cherish the prospect of getting rid of my presence with the least possible effort. Hold onto that man, she liked to say, and just be grateful that there’s somebody willing to love you as beautiful in spite of those mannish Slavic cheekbones of yours.

What Hulda took for love was his alacrity in adjusting his schedule so there was always time left for me, as well as the fact that he never stinted in lavishing praise on me in public. I had to admit that Maximilian always showed a keen sense for the public image of love, and yet – whether because of his natural reserve, or because he was simply, constitutionally incapable of any more genuine feeling, I never got any real sense that he loved me. I only ever got the sense that he had decided to be in love.

Maximilian, as I concluded much later, had decided that he needed to love me, because he had imagined the kind of wife for himself that other husbands lacked. A wife whose role as a painstakingly selected fashion accessory would unmistakeably attest to his rare taste, his originality and broadmindedness. A woman not just with an unpronounceable name and impossible hair, but who was the intellectual heiress of Sacher-Moser into the bargain.

But while I learned early on to doubt that his love was directed at me, as opposed to something I was supposed to represent, it would be unfair to say that doubt was all that I felt. In spite of it all, in that town of dead things, Maximilian seemed to be the only living reality. Wasn’t it possible that the qualms I felt as he sat at the table, graciously chatting with my new family, were just an extension of my distrust of Leopold? Maybe those doubts weren’t the kind of thing a person ought to pursue, I forced myself to believe, so instead, I decided to pursue hope. Besides which, maybe there really wasn’t anyone else who would be prepared to love me.

But to return just for a moment to that first encounter of ours, let’s also recall that despite my decision to concede the narrative space and let him present the story of the Witch’s Tower on his own terms, I couldn’t keep the promise that I’d made to myself.

“Once, a long time ago,” Maximilian began the story as though he were narrating a fairy tale.

In 1664, I almost added, but then remembered that I had already decided to lie, and that now I was going to have abide by my decision.

Still, it wasn’t just that 1664 didn’t come under the category of “once, a long time ago” to my way of thinking, it was also the fact that Maximilian’s facile appropriation of a story that was so intimately connected to the life and death of a real, historical woman as though she were a fairy tale figure infuriated me so much that I couldn’t coherently play the role that I’d decided to take on. Listening to Maximilian tell the story of the Witch’s Tower, it was as though I were listening to Leopold regale an audience with stories about me as the wild child, and the flash of anger that I would have felt towards Leopold suddenly flared, grazing him, too. Maybe it would have singed any man sitting in his place at that moment, maybe at that point Maximilian wasn’t yet guilty of anything at all. Maybe he was just trying to impress me. Maybe he was just yielding to something over which he had no control. I don’t know which it was, but it had to come to a stop as long as I was still breathing.

“I lied,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Of course I know the story of the Witch’s Tower. And it didn’t take place ‘once, a long time ago,’ it began in 1664. Surely you don’t think I’m completely ignorant?”

“Please don’t be angry,” Maximilian said.

“How could I not be angry when you were about to take the story of a woman whose life was cut short by hatefulness and stupidity and serve it up to me as some fairy tale?”

And it was then I learned something I’d known nothing about until then. I learned that you can use kindness to wriggle your way out of an unpleasant situation.

“You’re so pretty,” Maximilian said, as his right hand needlessly smoothed back a strand of my hair.

I could feel the tall flame of my fury getting shorter.

Hulda had made it so nose-on-my-face clear there was nothing about me that anyone could interpret as pretty, that Maximilian’s gesture took me completely by surprise.

And thus, amid the dense German fog, the Witch’s Tower in Lindheim was transformed into a place of memory where my life broke into a before and an after.

“And now,” Freud said to me after I first told him my story about Lindheim, “instead of focusing on the conclusions that you’ve formed as an adult about your process of growing up, why don’t you try to remember what it was you really experienced then?”

I heaved a deep sigh.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“This is not going to be easy,” Freud replied.

3

If I try to think back on whether our relationship had anything to do with love, I can’t really say that we never loved each other, although that might be the easiest response. We were in love, but our love was a matter of solitude. Each of us experienced it separately, only for it to vanish on the day when we took up with each other again.

It even started out unfortunately. Maximilian said that he loved me, his hands flitting around a bit more than I would have preferred. I said I agreed with that, and then he went off to do his military service and I promised to wait for him.

That was the year when Leopold completely withdrew. The year when, without even trying to conceal the fact, he began to lock himself away in his study with Hulda’s maid Bertha, a forty-year-old Bavarian woman with broad shoulders and palms like a farmhand’s. The year when we only ever heard his voice in the sequences of screams that coincided with the lashes of the whip behind closed doors. The only living being he showed any kindness to was Mimi, a grey tabby cat that let nobody near her except him. Whenever he would sit in his armchair of an evening, smoking in silence, she would sit in his lap and purr. Sometimes I watched them through the crack in the door as I tried to guess what had triggered Leopold’s regression. If he hadn’t gone mad at the death of his heir, his beloved son Sasha, why now? Was it possible his madness was the result of my upcoming departure, or was I assuming too large a role for myself?

Even if it wasn’t possible to determine the cause of Leopold’s insanity, it was all too easy to measure its impact. It had become the nucleus of Hulda’s household and it was clear from the look in his eyes as they refused to engage you, or from his sparse sentences that now only communicated what there was no denying, that his decision to go public with his need for pain was no sign of trust. It was a betrayal, plain and simple. Old and exhausted, Leopold could no longer muster the energy to impersonate a husband, a father, a friend engaging you in conversation, a human being. He became one with his illness. To this day I’m convinced it was catastrophic for Hulda, but if I’m to be perfectly honest, I don’t recall mourning for him. I suppose I’ve deliberately forgotten. But you need to know that at that time I was probably the only person (with the possible exception of Bertha – but then, who really knows what servants feel, anyway?) who had the means to protect herself from being overwhelmed by the atmosphere of despondency that Leopold was dictating.