Anything can happen in the dark and sometimes it does. On the night of December 3rd last year, I fell asleep wearing my contact lenses, and dreamed I was sitting across from Sigmund Freud, the Viennese witch-doctor as Vladimir Nabokov called him, in his consulting room at Berggasse 19. It was covered with books, pottery, sculptures, paintings and throws, none of which I could identify, apart from a little black statue of Anubis, which was standing on a coffee table next to a mug of tea. There were piles of cardboard boxes everywhere.
The doctor, that charlatan or madman as Borges called him, was sitting in a leather armchair, rambling away in a raspy voice, presumably in German, or a nightmare dialect of German (maybe close to Swiss). I had no idea what he was saying. After a while he stopped talking, and started trying to pack the various heirlooms scattered across the room into the boxes. I told him to sit back down. ‘Take it easy,’ I said, not wanting to be the guy to kill Freud, or who let Freud kill Freud. He ignored me, but was more receptive to the woman who was now behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. He embraced her: ‘Ah, Anna.’ Anna shouted at me (which I enjoyed), took an Athenian vase from my hands and guided the doctor back to his chair.
Just then there was a knock at the door. Two men, who looked more like children disguised as men, both wearing ridiculous moustaches (I assumed they were a kind of double-act), came in. One of them lay down on the carpet and started muttering at the ceiling: ‘I knew him quite well,’ he said, ‘I think he’d have liked what I said at his funeral…’ The other had a bag with him, and took out several scrunched-up pieces of paper, which he handed to the doctor. The man with the bag smoothed one out on his knee, and I saw it was a drawing of his own head in profile, with a small drawer pulled out of the forehead. The doctor nodded: ‘danke schön.’ The man on the carpet broke into laughter, jumped to his feet and hurried out of the door. The other followed, though not in a hurry, and as he passed me, he paused, leaned down and whispered, nodding at the doctor: ‘The only thing I know for sure about that man is that there’s a snail in his cranium.’
We took a flight to Heathrow, followed by a taxi to Hampstead, where it became clear, if it wasn’t already, that I was the doctor’s assistant, or more accurately, Anna’s assistant. When we arrived at the house, which was already a museum, I helped her put the doctor to bed, and to pretend that he was more lucid than he was. I went to sleep too, I fell into an anaesthetic sleep, and woke up the next morning in Anna’s bed, drenched in sweat, next to another woman I didn’t recognise. She told me that she was also from Vienna, but that it was better if I didn’t know her name. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘do you live here?’ She ignored me, got dressed, crept downstairs and left through a gap in the garden fence. Over the fence, I saw a photographer, who I presumed was snooping around, hoping to catch sight of the doctor, that screwed up, shrunken, very old man as Virginia Woolf described him.
I went to the doctor’s room, where Anna was already dabbing his forehead with a cold towel, as well as applying what looked like foundation. She was feeding him muesli. I noticed the doctor’s glasses on the bedside cabinet. When Anna caught me staring at them, I blushed, and left the room in a panic, making a show of being furious with the photographer.
The weather was pleasant, and we propped up the doctor in the garden, with a rug over his knees and a few of the smaller antiquities arranged round his chair. After a while, the doctor, that defunct and still walking ghost of a customs inspector as Carl Jung called him, started coughing. ‘I had a good dream,’ he said in English. ‘And I have a headache.’ Anna didn’t seem interested, and as I waited to hear more, she started walking around the garden, pouring salt over the grass; I followed, occasionally stooping down to pull weeds out of the gravel. ‘For now we’re in a museum,’ she said, ‘but in time we’ll make it a home.’ She went inside, and I followed her up to a different bedroom on the top floor of the museum. Anna sat on a wicker chair, I got into bed, and she read me a boring story, or possibly an essay, none of which I understood.
At some point the room began to shake. At first I assumed it was mortar shells: we were under attack, they’d found us, everything was over. But then I heard a horrid cough from the next room, followed by a rattle, as the antiquities began to tremble. Anna yanked me out of bed and we ran to the doctor’s room. He wasn’t there. We hurried through the museum, knocking over the boxes that were strewn throughout the place, until we eventually found him, lying in the bath, cloaked in a cloud of steam. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him. Anna jabbed a sharp finger in my back. ‘I’m a conquistador,’ I heard the doctor murmur, ‘not a comedian.’ I tried to look him in the eyes. ‘The trouble is that no one understands my accent.’
Anna glanced at me and I left the bathroom. I left the museum itself, and wandered the streets for several days. But I had nowhere to go, and ended up going back. The whole building was deserted; there were just a few empty boxes piled up in the hallway. The floor was slippery, the walls looked wet, and I had to grip on to the bannister to get myself upstairs.
While I waited for the bath to run, I noticed a little pair of glasses perched on the taps. I put them on and lay down. Through the fog, I could just about see a thin, silvery trail that ran across the ceiling and stopped directly above the doorway. And even though I continued lying in that bath for several more years, until the water turned grey and eventually dark brown, Anna never came back, and I never saw the doctor, or my dear Papa as she called him, again.
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