Freud's Mistress by Karen Mack

Author:Karen Mack
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

19

As the train approached Hamburg, Minna could see the river Elbe, now covered with ice, and the sweeping skyline marked by the familiar spires of St. Nicholas, St. Michaelis, and St. Peter’s. But she wasn’t inclined to admire the view. After all, despite the thousands of bridges and canals crisscrossing the city, this certainly wasn’t Venice. And this time of year was particularly harsh and forbidding. The temperatures were close to freezing and the winds, blowing from the North Sea to the west and the Baltic to the east, cut right through to the bone, no matter how many layers of clothing one wore.

She gathered her belongings, put on her coat, and stepped off the train. The platform was lined with a thin sheet of ice and she could already smell the smoke from the factories that lined the southern shores of the river. A few years before, the city had been gripped with the worst cholera epidemic in Europe. Luckily, her mother had been traveling at the time, but the death toll was staggering.

She took a cab from the train station to the rural outskirts of the city, where the roads were increasingly treacherous and difficult to pass. At one point, the driver got stuck in a patch of cracked black ice and had to dig them out of a deep rut.

“This will cost you extra,” he said in his Low German dialect.

“Just carry on,” she replied, her breath trailing visible puffs of steam. Normally she would have argued with him but now it seemed hardly worth the effort.

They arrived at her mother’s house, Hamburger Strasse 38, in the late afternoon. It was a modest, two-story redbrick with a gabled roof and a large yard. Minna climbed the steps and knocked lightly on the front door, but there was no answer, so she walked around the house past some overgrown shrubbery to the service door and let herself in. Her mother never locked that door, one of her lifelong peculiarities. At one point, Minna had asked why she insisted on leaving it open.

“Then, if I’m locked out, I can always get in the back door,” her mother had replied matter-of-factly.

Minna entered through a narrow corridor that led to the kitchen. The hearth was cold, and there was a single plate on the unpainted wooden table with a half-eaten piece of streusel and a pot of tea that had gone cold. Her mother was probably out shopping. There had been no time to get word to her that she had decided to come home.

Everything about this place seemed austere to Minna, drab and frugal except the smell of pine, which she always associated with home. She walked up the stairs in silence, demoralized, and entered her old bedroom. There was the carpet she had always hated, a threadbare mess of indeterminate color with stains still there from her childhood. It seemed her mother had taken over the room. Well-worn shawls and sweaters hung from pegs by the door, and a sewing kit was open on the small table near the bed, with swatches of fabric lined up in a row.

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