Clara by Kurt Palka

Author:Kurt Palka [Palka, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-7130-0
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2012-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

SHE SPENT the next few weeks at home, not only because her mother’s help with the baby was a comfort, but also because she did not like the idea of the empty house on the base. The terrors came back several more times, especially in the early hours of the morning. Dr. Mannheim spoke of post-partum phenomena as yet poorly understood; he was prepared to give her a low dose of bromides to calm her, but she was breastfeeding and did not want to take medication of any kind.

Instead she pumped and bottled breast milk, and the next day she left baby and milk with her mother, and she boarded the train to Zürich. There in the university library she looked up Dr. Freud and found his notes on panic attacks from an address he had given in 1936 in Sweden.

Premonitions of Death, he had called them. Essentially they had to do with loss of control over one’s life, not the actual loss, but a fear of it so real it became a kind of foretelling.

He said the attacks appeared to be coming out of nowhere, but they were always triggered by associations made in the unconscious; often they came in daydreams and in the small hours of the morning. The low threshold hours, the psychiatric profession called them, when in shallow sleep or in daydreams the intellectual defence mechanism was weak and fears washed like effluent over the depressed threshold into the safe-room of the psyche.

The bad news was, Dr. Freud said, that the fears were usually correct, and the panic attacks justified. The unconscious saw the signs of a darkness coming; it added them up, and emotional terror was the result.

Reading him in the profound stillness of the library, she could see Freud stepping about on the dais, waving his cold cigar and using his free hand for motions to indicate the heart, the stomach, the forehead. Angstzustände, she heard him say. Rapid pulse, difficulty breathing, heat rising, a faintness like a profound emptying-out. She could see his lips nearly blue within the precisely carved beard pronouncing the diagnosis of justified premonitions of death not necessarily of the body but certainly of the soul. He would pause, listen for the trailing-out of that sentence as if he might want to reel it back in and edit it. But he let it stand, and the cigar would stab the air for emphasis and a period.

By the time she sat reading his Stockholm transcript in Zürich, in the nearest university where his publications had not been destroyed, Dr. Freud had already turned his back on Vienna, had rejected what it had become and was safe in England.

THE KRISTALLNACHT POGROM at the end of November changed everything. It made it impossible to go on hoping and pretending. She was back on the Landshut military base by then, and the base was much quieter with half the battalion moved east to an undisclosed location. She was alone in the house with baby Willa, struggling to make a home of the place with curtains and fresh paint.

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